2016Q3 Reports: Workshop Chairs

ACL 2016 Report: Workshop Organization

Sabine Schulte and Jun Zhao; Contact info: schulte@ims.uni-stuttgart.de and jzhao@nlpr.ia.ac.cn.

Organization and Schedule

The ACL Workshop Chairs (Sabine Schulte and Jun Zhao) worked together with the NAACL and EMNLP Workshop Chairs (Adrià de Gispert and Radu Soricut for NAACL, and Greg Kondrak and Annie Louis for EMNLP) to jointly organize the selection of workshops for ACL, NAACL and EMNLP.

We roughly followed the schedule of the previous year:

Shared ACL , NAACL, and EMNLP dates:

• First Joint Call for Workshops Proposals: 31 August 2015
• Final JOINT CALL for Workshops Proposals: 09 October 2015
• Deadline for Proposals: 1 November 2015
• Notification of Acceptance: 15 November 2015

ACL-specific dates (followed by workshop organizers)

• First Call for Workshop Papers: 10 January 2016
• Workshop Paper Due Date: 8 May 2016
• Notification of Acceptance: 5 June 2016
• Camera-ready papers due: 22 June 2016
• Workshop Dates: 11-12 August 2016

We reused materials from the previous editions to produce the Joint Call for workshops. Proposers were asked to indicate their preferences regarding the venue (e.g., ACL, NAACL, EMNLP), the duration of the workshop and expected attendance, among others. Calls for workshop proposals were sent out through the standard listservs, e.g., corpora, ACL portal, etc. Calls were also posted on the NAACL and ACL websites. Postings were coordinated with NAACL and EMNLP co-chairs to avoid multiple postings. A workshop gmail account was also established for communication and submissions.

Acceptance process and workshops for ACL 2016

There were a total of 60 workshop proposals submitted to the Joint Call, 18 more than in the previous year. 44 workshops expressed first preference for ACL, 12 for NAACL, and 9 for EMNLP(there are multiple selections for first preference). Since the number of proposals is high, we limited the number of reviews to three per proposal; that is, one from each of the NAACL/ACL/EMNLP co-chair pairs. We filled in a fixed review form in a Google shared document. After discussions via email we had a Skype session to finalize the decisions.

List of Accepted Workshops

Two-day Workshops (August 11 and 12)

• WMT: First Conference on Machine Translation

Single-day Workshops (August 11)

• RepL4NLP: 1st Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP
• LAW X: SIGANN's Linguistic Annotation Workshop
• MWE: 12th Workshop on Multiword Expressions
• CogACLL: 7th Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning
• SIGMORPHON: 14th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology
• LaTeCH: 10th SIGHUM Workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities

Single-day Workshops (August 12)

• VL: 5th Workshop on Vision and Language
• BioNLP: 15th Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing
• StatFSM: SIGFSM Workshop on Statistical NLP and Weighted Automata
• RepEval: 1st Workshop on Evaluating Vector-Space Representations for NLP
• WAC: 10th Web as Corpus Workshop
• NEWS: 6th NEWS Named Entities Workshop
• ArgMining: 3rd Workshop on Argument Mining

Post-acceptance work

After notifications went out, the workshop chairs coordinated with the local chairs, program chairs, publication chairs, the ACL (and in particular Priscilla) and workshop organizers to

• help workshop organizers with
  • organizing the reviewing process on START
  • preparing the workshop proceedings
  • registering their invited speakers
• allocate rooms for workshops
• posting links to the workshops websites on the ACL webpage