2018Q3 Reports: SRW Faculty Advisor
2018Q3 Reports: Student Research Workshop Chairs
Website
https://sites.google.com/view/aclsrw2018/home
Organizers
The student co-organizers were Vered Shwartz (Bar-Ilan University), Jeniya Tabassum (Ohio State University), and Rob Voigt (Stanford University).
The faculty advisors were Wanxiang Che (Harbin Institute of Technology), Marie-Catherine de Marneffe (Ohio State University), and Malvina Nissim (University of Groningen).
Mentoring programs
We offered two mentoring programs this year. Pre-submission mentoring was available to all authors who wanted feedback before submitting their papers. Post-acceptance mentoring program was available to authors of accepted papers, to improve their presentation at the workshop.
Pre-submission mentoring
We followed last year’s SRW in offering an optional round of pre-submission mentoring. This was designed to give students an opportunity to improve their submission, particularly the writing and presentation of the paper, before submitting their papers to the workshop for review. Authors who submitted their papers in time for the pre-submission deadline received feedback from their assigned mentors before the final submission deadline, giving them time to integrate the mentor’s feedback into their final submission. We had 11 papers submitted to the pre-submission mentoring program, and 11 pre-submission mentors. We allowed mentors to bid on the papers and then manually assigned one paper to each mentor. Pre-submission mentoring was not anonymous.
Regular (post-acceptance) mentoring
Each accepted paper would be assigned a mentor. Mentors are experienced researchers (faculty and postdocs) who will attend the conference. They would be asked to read the papers before of the workshop, and then discuss the paper with the authors and suggest feedback during the workshop. Each mentor is assigned one paper.
Submissions
Submission procedure
Following the trends in previous ACL Student Research Workshop, this year’s SRW consisted of two submission tracks: research papers and thesis proposals. Research papers were intended to encompass completed work, as well as works-in-progress from junior graduate students, Masters students, and advanced undergraduates. Thesis proposals were intended to be a venue for senior graduate students to get feedback on their thesis proposal and the broader ideas surrounding the appropriateness and impact of their chosen topic. The limit for both types of papers was 6 pages of content plus any number of pages for references.
Research papers could contain any number of authors as long as the first author was a student, and had to be completely anonymised. Students who had already presented a research paper at a previous ACL/EACL/NAACL SRW were not allowed to first author another SRW research paper submission, but could still submit to the Thesis proposal track. Thesis proposals had to be single-authored by a student. We did not allow multiple submissions to the SRW and to other workshops.
Number of submissions
We received 66 submissions for review. 12 of the submissions were thesis proposals and 54 were research papers.
Accepted papers
We accepted 27 papers (40% acceptance rate). After withdrawals, we had 23 accepted papers, out of which 6 were thesis proposals (26%) and 17 were research papers (74%).
Reviewing
Since the pre-submission mentors and post-submission mentors were also members of the Program Committee and they were not assigned any reviewing duties.
Program committee
We were fortunate to recruit 96 members for the SRW Program Committee. The program committee consisted of both experienced members of the ACL community as well as students who presented their work last year in the SRW. Each paper was assigned 3 reviewers. We have made sure that each paper is assigned at least 2 experienced reviewers. The quota was as following:
- Pre-submission mentors: 0
- Reduced workload: 1
- Authors from last year: 1
- Post-acceptance mentors: 2
- Other reviewers: 3
Reject without Review
We rejected several submissions before review: 2 submissions with no PDF file, 4 submission that did not use the ACL style files, and 2 papers that exceeded the page limit. We did not reject 3 papers that were not anonymized as we assumed there had been a confusion following the non-anonymous mentoring phase.
Review
We allowed bidding for papers. We gave one day for bidding which showed to be not enough time. During the reviewing period, we sent out 2 reminders, but there were still many missing reviews after the reviewing deadline. Some were completed after contacting the reviewers, for others we had to recruit new PC members and assign additional submissions to other existing reviewers.
Format
Timeline
Our timeline was as follows:
- 2017-12-13: First CFP sent out
- 2018-02-26: Submission deadline for pre-submission mentoring
- 2018-03-04: Second and final CFP sent out
- 2018-03-19: Authors receive feedback from pre-submission mentors
- 2018-04-11: Final submission deadline (shifted back from 2018-04-08)
- 2018-04-12: Bidding begins
- 2018-04-13: Bidding ends
- 2018-04-13: Reviewing begins
- 2018-04-26: Reviews due
- 2018-05-02: Notification of acceptance
- 2018-05-21: Camera ready deadline
- 2018-05-23: Travel grant application deadline
- 2018-05-25: Travel grant acceptance notification
Format of the workshop
The SRW this year will be conducted as a poster session (no oral presentations), to be held concurrently with two of the main ACL poster sessions on July 17 and 18 (SRW posters will be intermixed with other posters).
Travel Grant
The SRW was awarded a grant of $18,000 by the National Science Foundation (NSF Award Number 1827830: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1827830&HistoricalAwards=false), $6,000 by Roam Analytics, $4,500 from Google Inc. and $3,000 from the Don and Betty Walker International Student Fund.
We received a 25 submissions for travel grants applications. 19 from the Student Research Workshop authors, and 6 from additional students seeking to attend the main conference and affiliated workshops. It was also necessary to allocate funds such that NSF funds were awarded only to students based at US institutions. For each awardee, we recommended enough to cover registration, and partial airfare. Among the awardees we recommended, 21 are participating in the SRW and 4 in the main conference. Funds were also awarded to 3 co-chairs, on the recommendation of the co-advisors. Seven of the SRW awardees will receive funds from the US National Science Foundation, while the others will receive their funding from Roam Analytics, Google Inc and Don and Betty Walker Scholarship.
One of the students from India have reported that they are unable to attend the conference because of inability to obtain a visa. We have given him the option of sending their printed posters to the conference venue for us to hang at the session on their behalf, and we are encouraging their mentors to provide feedback remotely. We are telling the student that their submissions can still be included in the proceedings as long as at least one author is registered for the conference (at the recommendation of the ACL General Chair).
Below we provide links to forms that we used for funding applications and mentor recruitment:
SRW travel grant application form
https://goo.gl/forms/o5dFaMfdsper8KXs2
SRW Pre-submission Mentorship form:
https://goo.gl/forms/Do8oSgejDioLTzkw1
SRW Post-acceptance Mentorship form: