2016Q3 Reports: EMNLP 2015

The 20th SIGDAT Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2015) was held on September 17-21 in the city of Lisboa, Portugal. The conference consisted of two initial days of workshops and tutorials and three days of full and short paper presentations.

The General Chair of the conference was Lluís Màrquez from Qatar Computing Research Institute. Jian Su (Institute for Infocomm Research) and Chris Callison-Burch (University of Pennsylvania) were the Program Chairs. The local organization team was lead by André Martins (Priberam) and João Graça (Unbabel Inc.). The entire organization committee can be found at the conference website (www.emnlp2015.org)

EMNLP 2015 experienced an unprecedented boost in submitted papers. There were 1,300 valid submissions: 600 long papers and 700 short papers, which were allocated to one of 15 areas. 312 papers were accepted for the final program (157 long and 155 short papers), representing a global acceptance rate of 24%. An additional 17 papers accepted by the TACL journal were presented at the conference as well. The program was complemented with very interesting keynote speakers, Yoshua Bengio (Université de Montréal) and Justin Grimmer (Stanford University), who talked about "Deep Learning of Semantic Representations" and "Measuring How Elected Officials and Constituents Communicate", respectively.

Some of the features introduced in EMNLP 2014 continued in 2015 (e.g., tutorials, posters as parallel sessions, flat rates and flexibility for tutorials and workshops, etc.). Some innovations were introduced as well: a revised selection process for which talks are presented as talks versus posters, and an extended number of awards for papers (honorable mentions) and the new best data/resource award.

For more details, see the conference website (www.emnlp2015.org) and also the results of an interesting after-conference survey (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1JbGFn3St60HGuPN_oSIjlH_fWWhGfyOKEZglRzRDfjw/viewanalytics).

Lluís Màrquez

EMNLP 2015 General Chair