Natural language processing (NLP) now shapes many aspects of our world, yet its potential for positive social impact is underexplored. This paper surveys work in “NLP for Social Good" (NLP4SG) across nine domains relevant to global development and risk agendas, summarizing principal tasks and challenges. We analyze ACL Anthology trends, finding that inclusion and AI harms attract the most research, while domains such as poverty, peacebuilding, and environmental protection remain underexplored. Guided by our review, we outline opportunities for responsible and equitable NLP and conclude with a call for cross-disciplinary partnerships and human-centered approaches to ensure that future NLP technologies advance the public good.

This study presents a teacher-centered evaluation of an AI-powered reading comprehension tool, developed to support learners with language-based difficulties. Drawing on the Social Acceptance of Technology (SAT) framework, we investigate not only technical usability but also the pedagogical, ethical, and contextual dimensions of AI integration in classrooms. We explore how teachers perceive the platform’s alignment with inclusive pedagogies, instructional workflows, and professional values through a mixed-methods approach, including questionnaires and focus groups with educators. Findings a shift from initial curiosity to critical, practice-informed reflection, with trust, transparency, and adaptability emerging as central concerns. The study contributes a replicable evaluation framework and highlights the importance of engaging teachers as co-designers in the development of educational technologies.

Keyword Extraction (KE) is essential in Natural Language Processing (NLP) for identifying key terms that represent the main themes of a text, and it is vital for applications such as information retrieval, text summarisation, and document classification. Despite the development of various KE methods — including statistical approaches and advanced deep learning models — evaluating their effectiveness remains challenging. Current evaluation metrics focus on keyword quality, balance, and overlap with annotations from authors and professional indexers, but neglect real-world information retrieval needs. This paper introduces a novel evaluation method designed to overcome this limitation by using real query data from Google Trends and can be used with both supervised and unsupervised KE approaches. We applied this method to three popular KE approaches (YAKE, RAKE and KeyBERT) and found that KeyBERT was the most effective in capturing users’ top queries, with RAKE also showing surprisingly good performance. The code is open-access and publicly available.

Concept Maps are semantic graph summary representations of relations between concepts in text. They are particularly beneficial for students with difficulty in reading comprehension, such as those with special educational needs and disabilities. Currently, the field of concept map extraction from text is outdated, relying on old baselines, limited datasets, and limited performances with F1 scores below 20%. We propose a novel neuro-symbolic pipeline and a GPT3.5-based method for automated concept map extraction from text evaluated over the WIKI dataset. The pipeline is a robust, modularized, and open-source architecture, the first to use semantic and neural techniques for automatic concept map extraction while also using a preliminary summarization component to reduce processing time and optimize computational resources. Furthermore, we investigate the large language model in zero-shot, one-shot, and decomposed prompting for concept map generation. Our approaches achieve state-of-the-art results in METEOR metrics, with F1 scores of 25.7 and 28.5, respectively, and in ROUGE-2 recall, with respective scores of 24.3 and 24.3. This contribution advances the task of automated concept map extraction from text, opening doors to wider applications such as education and speech-language therapy. The code is openly available.