2018Q3 Reports: Workshop Chairs

ACL 2018 Workshops chair report

Workshop co-chairs:

• Eva Maria Vecchi (University of Cambridge)
• Brendan O'Connor (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

We accepted 15 workshops through the process of a joint cross-conference NLP workshops call, which for 2018 was shared between ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, and COLING. (Link to CFP email announcement.) Workshop proposals were accompanied with the organizers' top two venue preferences. Submissions and review were coordinated through START, and reviewed and discussed by a joint cross-conference committee including the workshop chairs of all four conferences, including the two of us, plus Tim Baldwin, Yoav Goldberg, Jing Jiang (COLING), Marie Meteer, Jason Williams (NAACL), Marieke van Erp, Vincent Ng (EMNLP). The COLING website has a post describing more of this process. Of the 58 submissions, 18 had ACL as their first choice, and 14 as second choice; all 15 ACL-accepted workshops had ACL as their first choice. (In the joint process, all accepted workshops received either their first or second choice of venue.) The ACL workshops were assigned to the two days based on room availability, projected registrations, and in limited cases to maintain topical balance.

The Student Research Workshop was a "pre-admitted" workshop and was not organized through any of this process.

In general for the organization and coordination process, we followed the excellent workshop chairs duties guide. For future iterations, we would like to emphasize the importance of a "master file" shared coordination spreadsheet with up-to-date information about all the workshops, including organizers' email address, workshop URLs, and later in the process, proceedings URLs, ISBNs, poster scheduling and layout details, and possibly other one-off information such as organizers' requests for name changes, adding new organizer contacts, and other matters. We made one fairly late in the process (when dealing with publication and scheduling issues), but it would have been helpful had we made it earlier in the process right after workshop acceptances had been decided.

The workshops were:

• Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning and Processing
• Workshop on Relevance of Linguistic Structure in Neural Architectures for NLP
• Deep Learning Approaches for Low Resource Natural Language Processing (DeepLo)
• Workshop on Machine Reading for Question Answering (MRQA)
• Third Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Code-Switching (CALCS)
• Multilingual Surface Realization: Shared Task and Beyond
• BioNLP 2018
• The 5th Workshop on Natural Language Processing Techniques for Educational Applications (NLPTEA 2018)
• The Sixth Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media (SocialNLP 2018)
• Workshop for NLP Open Source Software (NLP-OSS)
• 3rd Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP-2018)
• The 2nd Workshop on Neural Machine Translation and Generation (NMT2018)
• ECONLP 2018: 1st Workshop on Economics and Natural Language Processing
• NEWS 2018: The Seventh Named Entities Workshop
• Grand Challenge and Workshop on Human Multimodal Language (Challenge-HML)