AI-Driven Natural Language Processing Applications

Dear Colleagues,

AI-powered natural language processing (NLP) is rapidly moving from laboratory demos to production systems across education, healthcare, finance, science and the public sector. This Special Issue seeks original research and practice-oriented reports that translate advances in large language models (LLMs) into reliable, efficient and responsible applications. We especially welcome work that grounds generation with external knowledge (e.g., retrieval-augmented systems), orchestrates tool use/agents for complex workflows, scales to multimodal inputs, and handles long documents common in enterprise settings. Submissions emphasizing reproducibility, real-world evaluation, and open resources are encouraged.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

• Retrieval-augmented and knowledge-grounded NLP applications.
• Agentic/Tool-using LLM systems for reasoning, planning, and UI/GUI operation.
• Multimodal NLP (text+vision/speech) for perception, understanding, and generation.
• Long-context processing; document understanding of PDFs, tables, and layouts.
• Low-resource and multilingual applications; domain adaptation and robust deployment.
• Privacy, security, and trustworthy AI in LLM applications (DP, FL, governance).
• Evaluation frameworks, human-in-the-loop metrics, and real-world benchmarks.
• Cost/latency optimization, compression/quantization, and on-device/edge inference.

We look forward to contributions that demonstrate measurable impact, report failure modes and social considerations, and provide insights that can be adopted by the broader community.

Dr. Shubin Cai
Guest Editor

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