SECOND JOINT CALL for Workshop Proposals: ACL / COLING / EMNLP / AACL-IJCNLP 2020

Event Notification Type: Call for Proposals
Contact Email: workshops-all-2020@googlegroups.com
Contact: Workshop Co-Chairs
Submission Deadline: September 23, 2019

SECOND JOINT CALL for Workshop Proposals: ACL / COLING / EMNLP / AACL-IJCNLP 2020

Proposal Submission Deadline: September 23, 2019

Notification of Acceptance: October 20, 2019

Changes (from first call): Please note the updated details about proposal length in the SUBMISSION INFORMATION section below.

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the ACL, the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), and the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL) invite proposals for workshops to be held in conjunction with ACL 2020, AACL-IJCNLP 2020, EMNLP 2020, or COLING 2020. We solicit proposals in all areas of computational linguistics, broadly conceived to include related disciplines such as linguistics, speech, information retrieval and multimodal processing. Workshops will be held at one of the following conference venues:

  • ACL 2020: The 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics will be held in Seattle, Washington, USA from July 5 through 10, 2020, with workshops to be held on July 9 and 10, 2020.

  • COLING 2020: The 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics will be held in Barcelona, Spain from September 13 through 18, 2020, with workshops to be held on September 13 and 14, 2020.

  • EMNLP 2020: The Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing 2020 will be held in Barceló Bávaro Convention Centre, Dominican Republic from November
 8 through 12, 2020, with workshops to be held on November 11 and 12.

  • AACL/IJCNLP 2020: The 1st Annual Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing will be held in Suzhou, China from December 4 through 7, 2020.

The workshop co-chairs will work together to assign workshops to the four conferences, taking into account the location preferences and technical constraints provided by the workshop proposers.

SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Proposals should be submitted as PDF documents. Note that submissions should essentially be ready to be turned into a Call for Workshop Papers within one week of notification (see Timelines below).

The proposals should be at most two pages for the main proposal + at most two additional pages for information about organizers, program committee, and references. Thus the whole proposal should not be more than FOUR pages long.

The two pages for the main proposal must include:

  • A title and brief description of the workshop topic and content.

  • A list of invited speakers, if applicable, with an indication of which ones have already agreed and which are indicative, and sources of funding for the speakers.

  • An account of the efforts made to ensure demographic diversity of the organisers and speakers (WiNLP’s BIG Directory may be a useful resource). Also an account of any efforts to include diverse participants (e.g., via mentoring, subsidies, or the wording and topics in the CFP).

  • An estimate of the number of attendees.

  • A description of any shared tasks associated with the workshop, and estimate of the number of participants.

  • A description of special requirements and technical needs.

  • The preferred venue(s) (ACL/COLING/EMNLP/AACL-IJCNLP), if any, and description of any constraints (e.g., if the workshop is compatible with only one of these events, logistically, thematically or otherwise)
  • If the workshop has been held before, a note specifying where previous workshops were held, how many submissions the workshop received, how many papers were accepted (also specify if they were not regular papers, e.g. shared task system description papers), and how many attendees the workshop attracted. Note that the only financial support available to workshops is a single free workshop registration for an invited speaker; all other costs must be borne independently by the workshop organizers.

Note that the only financial support available to workshops is a single free workshop registration for an invited speaker; all other costs must be borne independently by the workshop organizers.

The two pages for information about organizers, program committee, and references must include:

  • The names, affiliations, and email addresses of the organizers, with one-paragraph statements of their research interests, areas of expertise, and experience in organising workshops and related events.

  • A list of Programme Committee members, with an indication of which members have already agreed. It is highly desirable for proposals to have at least 75% of the Programme Committee reviewers confirmed at the time of the submission. Organizers should do their best to estimate the number of submissions (especially for recurring workshops) in order to (a) ensure a sufficient number of reviewers so that each paper receives 3 reviews, and (b) anticipate that no one is committed to reviewing more than 3 papers. This practice is likely to ensure on-time, and more thorough and thoughtful reviews.

  • References

In addition, you will need to specify the following information when you submit via the START System (not in the PDF proposal):

  • A very brief advertisement or tagline for the workshop, up to 140 characters, that highlights any key information you wish prospective attendees to know, and which would be suitable to be put onto a web-based survey (see below).

  • A URL for the workshop website which will be shown in the web-based survey.

  • A list of organizers’ names which will be shown in the web-based survey.

The proposals should be submitted no later than September 23, 2019, 11:59 PM Samoa Standard Time (SST) (UTC/GMT-11). Submission is electronic, using the Softconf START conference management system at https://www.softconf.com/j/acl-workshops2020

The workshop proposals will be evaluated according to their originality and impact, as well as the quality of the organizing team and Programme Committee. In addition, to estimate the attendance of the different workshops, a survey mechanism will be implemented, where attendees of ACL- and ICCL-affiliated events from the past 3-5 years will be able to indicate which workshops they would like to attend in 2020.

DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION

Following the WiNLP([6]) initiative, we recognize the current problems of demographic imbalance in the field. Therefore, we particularly encourage submissions including members of under-represented groups in computational linguistics, i.e. from researchers self-identifying within any underrepresented demographic (gender, ethnicity, nationality, etc.). The overall diversity of the workshops, especially of the suggested invited speakers and of the organizers, will be taken into account to ensure the conference program is varied and balanced.

WORKSHOP ORGANIZER RESPONSIBILITIES

The organizers of the accepted proposals will be responsible for publicizing and running the workshop, including reviewing submissions, producing the camera-ready workshop proceedings, organizing the meeting days, and playing their part to ensure that all participants are aware of ACL’s anti-harassment policy.

It is crucial that organizers commit to all deadlines. In particular, failure to produce the camera-ready proceedings on time will lead to the exclusion of the workshop from the unified proceedings and author indexes. Workshop organizers cannot accept submissions for publication that will be (or have been) published elsewhere, although they are free to set their own policies on simultaneous submission and review. Since the conferences will occur at different times, the timelines for the submission and reviewing of workshop papers, and the preparation of camera-ready copies, will be different for each conference. Suggested timelines for each of the conferences are given below. The workshop organizers should not deviate from this schedule unless absolutely necessary, and with explicit agreement from the relevant Workshop Chairs.

The ACL has a set of policies on workshops. You can find the ACL’s general policies on workshops, the financial policy for workshops, and the financial policy for SIG workshops at: http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Conference_Handbook

TIMELINE FOR THE 2020 WORKSHOPS

  • Proposal Submission Deadline: September 23, 2019
  • Notification of Acceptance: October 20, 2019

The tentative individual dates for 2019 workshops is as follows:

ACL

First call for workshop papers Nov 20, 2019
Second call for workshop papers Jan 20, 2020
Third (Final) Call for Workshop Papers Mar 20, 2020
Workshop Paper Due Date April 6, 2020
Notification of acceptance May 4, 2020
Camera-ready papers due May 18, 2020
Workshop dates July 9–10, 2020

COLING

First call for workshop papers Dec 1, 2019
Second call for workshop papers Mar 18, 2020
Workshop papers due May 20, 2020
Notification of acceptance Jun 24, 2020
Camera-ready papers due Jul 11, 2020
Workshop dates Sep 13–14, 2020

EMNLP

First call for workshop papers Feb 15, 2020
Second call for workshop papers May 15, 2020
Workshop papers due July 15, 2020
Notification of acceptance Aug 17, 2020
Camera-ready papers due Aug 31, 2020
Workshop dates Nov 11–12, 2020

AACL-IJCNLP

First call for workshop papers TBA
Second call for workshop papers TBA
Workshop papers due TBA
Notification of acceptance TBA
Camera-ready papers due TBA
Workshop dates TBA

Workshop Co-Chairs

ACL
Milica Gašić, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf
Saif M. Mohammad, National Research Council Canada
Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Amazon Alexa AI
Ves Stoyanov, Facebook AI

COLING
Preslav Nakov, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU
Zhao Jun, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Xiaodan Zhu, Queen’s University

EMNLP
Jackie Chi Kit Cheung, Mila / McGill University, Canada
Lonneke van der Plas, University of Malta

AACL-IJCNLP
Wei Gao, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Lu Wang, Northeastern University, United States

Contact

For inquiries, send an email to the workshop co-chairs at: workshops-all-2020@googlegroups.com