2018Q3 Reports: NAACL 2018

Report by Marilyn Walker, General Chair of NAACL 2018

NAACL 2018 took place on June 1st - June 6th, 2018 in New Orleans, LA. Statistics and highlights of the conference:

• NAACL 2018 was the largest NAACL ever with 1322 registrations for the main conference, and an additional 115 tutorial/workshop registrations without the main conference.
• The program co-chairs, Amanda Stent and Heng Ji implemented several innovations with the goal of improving the quality of reviews and accept/reject decisions. They developed a new review form and a way to use TPMS for matching reviewers and papers with area chairs. The PC, with 72 area chairs and 1372 reviewers, was the largest ever for a NAACL. The program co-chairs aimed at broad participation for the area chairs with ⅔ male and ⅓ female and the majority from North America. The program chairs ensured that each area chair was assigned no more than 30 papers. They also recruited the 1372 reviewers and made sure that each reviewer was assigned no more than 3 papers. The final program had 195 long papers and 133 short papers as well as 16 demos during the poster sessions. 3 papers were recognized as outstanding papers and presented in the closing plenary session of the conference. The conference featured constantly running parallel poster session organized to be on the same topics as the oral sessions.
• We introduced an industry track to NAACL for the first time with the aim of attracting papers that focus on scalable, interpretable, reliable and customer facing methods for industrial applications of NLP. Yunyao Li, Jennifer Chu-Carroll and Srinivas Bangalore served as industry track chairs. The industry track accepted 28 papers of which 20 were presented orally and 8 as posters.
• The NAACL 2018 website featured a Blog from the organizers. There were 42 chairs posts and 11 invited guest posts. The aim was to make each stage of the process transparent to the community. Blogs included guidelines for the area chairs, reviewers and session chairs and suggestions on writing, presenting and reviewing.
• The conference featured a new Test-of-Time paper award. Papers were nominated by two different committees: a small expert committee and a larger committee drawn from the most published ACL members in the ACL anthology. Three papers were selected and presented in a special plenary session.
• The research track featured invited morning keynotes by Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Charles Yang, and Kevin Knight. The industry track featured invited afternoon keynotes by Mari Ostendorf on the UW Teams experience with the Alexa Prize, and from Daniel Marcu. Participants commented in the post-conference survey that they enjoyed having a larger number of keynotes and having afternoon keynotes.
• There were fourteen 1-day workshops and two 2-day workshops. Total workshop registrations were 982. The workshops covered a wide variety of topics, with many of them ongoing workshops such as Sem-Eval and Educational Applications that have been running for more than 10 years. Workshop topics covered a wide range of NLP areas, ranging from figurative language and stylistic variation to reference and subword and character models.
• The tutorials were held on the 1st day of the conference, June 1st. There were 6 well-attended tutorials for a total of 620 tutorial registrations. The largest tutorial had 205 attendees and the smallest had 27 attendees.
• We hosted the second instance of the WiNLP workshop with a name change from “Women in NLP” to “Widening NLP” the same day as the tutorials to allow participants to make contact with one another on the first day of the conference. Registration statistics for the main conference suggest that NAACL 18 XXXX
• Taking inspiration from ACL 17, we aimed to make NAACL 18 family friendly, by providing childcare at the conference. We established the role of Family-Friendly co-chairs as part of the organization committee and broadly advertised the availability of childcare from early in our timeline. Unfortunately the childcare was undersubscribed, although it was a good vehicle for fundraising so that we did not lose money.
• The conference also featured a very successful student research workshop with both an oral presentation slot and with posters coordinated by topic and presented in the same sessions with posters for the main conference. There were 16 research papers and 4 thesis proposals accepted and the SRW team carried out a very successful pre-conference and onsite mentoring for 16 student/mentor pairs.
• The program chairs also will release several new corpora in the coming months of papers with ground-truth annotations. First, If the authors of a NAACL HLT 2018 submission and the author of a review for that submission both consented, then the review will be included in a new review corpus. Also jointly with ACL program co-chairs, we asked authors of accepted papers to upload the source code for their papers

The main conference papers, keynotes, panel discussions were recorded by Weyond.com and the videos are available at https://vimeo.com. They will also be linked into the ACL anthology.

NAACL 2018 was made possible by the hard work of many dedicated people: Amanda Stent and Heng Ji (program chairs); Jennifer Chu-Carroll, Yunyao Li and Srinivas Bangalore (industrial track chairs); Ying Lin (website chair); Marie Meteer and Jason Williams (workshop co-chairs); Mohit Bansal and Rebecca Passonneau (tutorial co-chairs); Yang Liu, Tim Paek, and Manasi Patwardhan (demo co-chairs); Chris Callison-Burch and Beth Hockey (Family-Friendly Program Co-Chairs Stephanie Lukin and Meg Mitchell (publication co-chairs); Jonathan May (handbook chair); Silvio Ricardo Cordeiro, Shereen Oraby, Umashanthi Pavalanathan, and Kyeongmin Rim (student cochairs) along with Swapna Somasundaran and Sam Bowman (Faculty Advisors) for the student research workshop; Lena Reed (student volunteer coordinator); Kristy Hollingshead, Kristen Johnson, and Parisa Kordjamshidi (local sponsorships and exhibits cochairs); Yonatan Bisk and Wei Xu (publicity and social media chairs); David Yarowsky and Joel Tetreault (treasurers) and Alexis Palmer and Jason Baldridge (the NAACL international Sponsorship Team). Also thanks to Rich at SoftConf for his speedy response to questions and his willingness to help us innovate with our new review form. And thanks to Julia Hockenmaier and the whole NAACL Executive Board for always being willing to consult on any issue.

The event was sponsored by several generous contributors. Our Diamond sponsor were Bloomberg, Google, ByteDance and TouTiao AI Lab. The Platinum sponsors were Amazon and Facebook. The gold sponsors were Capital One, Ebay, Grammarly, IBM Research, KPMG, Oracle, Poly AI, Two Sigma and Tulane University. The Silver sponsors were Nuance and Figure Eight. The Bronze sponsors are iMerit and ISI-NLP group, and NSF and CCC sponsored the student research workshop.