---Apologies for cross-posting!---

First Call for Abstracts for a Special Issue Preserving the Privacy of Language 
Data: Emerging Technologies, Evolving Standards and Beyond at the Language 
Resources and Evaluation Journal

Guest editors and contact information:

  *   Elena Volodina<https://spraakbanken.gu.se/en/about/staff/elena>, 
University of Gothenburg, Sweden, < elena dot volodina at svenska dot gu dot se 
>
  *   Maria Irena 
Szawerna<https://spraakbanken.gu.se/en/about/staff/maria-szawerna>, University 
of Gothenburg, Sweden, < maria dot szawerna at gu dot se >

Call for submissions

In the age of GDPR and heightened awareness about data privacy, incorporating 
de-identification techniques when working with language data has become 
increasingly important. In academic contexts, de-identification is employed 
e.g. when using examples in publications (Heaton, 2022; Wang et al., 2024) or 
in dataset collection and sharing (Megyesi et al., 2018; Eder et al., 2019). It 
is also relevant for public uses, such as redacting legal documents 
(Cabrera-Diego and Gheewala, 2024) or varied industry applications (Gardiner et 
al., 2024; Hou et al., 2025). Manual de-identification is a costly and 
time-consuming process, which is why various automatic methods for detecting 
and replacing personal information, ranging from rule-based systems to Large 
Language Model (LLM) approaches, have been developed in recent years (Deußer et 
al., 2025). While rule-based approaches allow for processing the data locally, 
reducing the risk of the data falling into the wrong hands, they lack the 
ability to take semantic context and world knowledge into account; LLMs, on the 
other hand, can handle these challenges to a certain degree, but present 
ethical concerns when it comes to data leakage, environmental costs, or 
over-relying on encoded social and gender biases (Bender et al., 2021; Volodina 
et al. 2025, Szawerna and Suchardt, 2026).
This special issue will cover several aspects related to the problem of using 
technology for effective and ethical de-identification of linguistic data, 
including (but not limited to) the following topics:


  *
Detection and classification of personal information (PI): Automatic 
identification of PI in text, speech, and multimodal data; context-dependent 
and indirect indicators of identity. Which information you are replacing, 
including how and why this is done.
  *
Replacement and transformation of PI: Context-sensitive pseudonymization and 
anonymization methods; substitution, masking, obfuscation; maintaining 
coherence across discourse and modalities.
  *
Utility and bias after de-identification: Effects of de-identification on 
downstream task performance, linguistic research validity, readability, and 
bias amplification or reduction.
  *
Approaches to evaluation and adversarial testing: Metrics and frameworks for 
assessing de-identification quality; adversarial re-identification attempts; 
robustness and failure-mode analysis.
  *
Dataset creation for de-identification research: Methodological, ethical, and 
annotation-related considerations in building corpora for training or 
evaluating de-identification systems.
  *
Low-resource scenarios: Techniques for de-identification in settings with 
limited data, scarce annotations, or underrepresented languages; transfer and 
multilingual approaches.
  *
Speech-specific challenges: Removing speaker identity cues in audio; voice 
anonymization; cross-modal leakage between text, transcripts, and acoustic 
features.
  *
Cross-disciplinary applications and challenges: Integrating de-identification 
techniques into real-world workflows in areas such as linguistics, social 
sciences, digital humanities, healthcare, and other private- or public-sector 
data environments.


Submission information

  *   Abstracts should be around 500 words excluding references and statements. 
The submission link can be found 
here<https://forms.cloud.microsoft/e/gBuU6Wih9Z>. Authors of accepted abstracts 
will be notified by the end of November and invited to submit a full article by 
1st March 2027.
  *
Full Articles should follow the LRE journal 
guidelines<https://link.springer.com/journal/10579/submission-guidelines>. Each 
submission should include an AI disclosure 
statement<https://mormor-karl.github.io/events/LREJ-special-issue/ai-disclosure-statement>.
 The submission link will be shared later.

The full call can be found 
here<https://mormor-karl.github.io/events/LREJ-special-issue/>.
Best regards,

Maria Irena Szawerna

____________________
PhD student
Språkbanken<https://spraakbanken.gu.se/>
Institutionen för svenska, flerspråkighet och 
språkteknologi<https://www.gu.se/svenska-spraket>
UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG<https://www.gu.se/>
https://spraakbanken.gu.se/om/personal/maria-szawerna
ORCID: 0009-0005-1426-0318<https://orcid.org/0009-0005-1426-0318>

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