2016Q3 Reports: Student Research Workshop Chairs
2016Q3 Reports: Student Research Workshop Chairs
Website
https://sites.google.com/site/aclsrw2016/
Organizers
The student co-organizers were He He (University of Maryland), Tao Lei (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Will Roberts (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin).
The faculty advisors were Chris Biemann (Technische Universität Darmstadt), Gosse Bouma (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen), and Yang Liu (Tsinghua University).
Mentoring programs
We offered two mentoring programs this year. Pre-submission mentoring was available to all authors who wanted feedback before submitting their papers. The standard 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 19 papers submitted to the pre-submission mentoring program, up from 14 submitted to last year’s workshop. We had seven volunteers (from the Program Committee) to be pre-submission mentors. We manually assigned two or three papers to each mentor. Mentoring was not anonymous. Mentors were given the email address of the corresponding authors for the paper, and instructed to communicate with the author directly. The feedback we have had on the pre-submission mentoring program has been positive.
Regular (post-submission) mentoring
Each accepted paper was assigned a mentor. Mentors are experienced researchers (faculty and postdocs) who were asked to read the papers in advance of the workshop, and to help students in presenting their ideas at the workshop. Mentors who cannot attend the conference in person may provide advice and help by email or Skype. 20 members of the Program Committee agreed to mentor accepted papers; with 22 accepted papers, we were able to assign most mentors a single paper.
Submissions
Submission procedure
As in the 2015 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 for 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. Thesis proposals had to be submitted along with an up-to-date CV; this CV was removed from softconf prior to reviewing to preserve anonymity.
Number of submissions
We received 59 submissions for review (60 submissions initially, one of which was withdrawn). 14 of the submissions were thesis proposals and 45 were research papers.
Accepted papers
We accepted 4 thesis proposals (27%) and 18 research papers (40%) leading to an acceptance rate of 37% overall.
Reviewing
Since the pre-submission mentors and post-submission mentors were also members of the Program Committee, we were careful to make sure that there were no overlaps in assigning papers to reviewers and mentors.
Program committee
We were fortunate to recruit 55 members for the SRW Program Committee. Each paper was assigned 3 reviewers. No reviewer was assigned more than 4 papers.
Format
Timeline
Our timeline was as follows: 2016-01-19: First CFP sent out 2016-02-22: Submission deadline for pre-submission mentoring 2016-03-07: Authors receive feedback from pre-submission mentors 2016-04-18: Second and final CFP sent out 2016-04-26: Final submission deadline 2016-04-28: Bidding begins 2016-05-02: Bidding ends 2016-05-04: Reviewing begins 2016-05-21: Reviews due 2016-05-26: Notification of acceptance 2016-06-10: Camera ready deadline 2016-06-26: Travel grant application deadline 2016-07-01: Travel grant acceptance notification
Format of the workshop
The SRW this year will be conducted as a 3 hour poster session (no oral presentations), to be held concurrently with one of the main ACL poster sessions (SRW posters will be intermixed with other posters).
Funding
We solicited a donation of $1000 USD from the Google Research Programs Team. Together with the Don and Betty Walker International Student Fund, this resulted in $11000 USD, allowing us to partially fund travel costs for 12 students (SRW authors, as well as a handful of other ACL attendees). In addition, authors accepted to the SRW will not pay for registration to the conference.