2019Q3 Reports: Student Research Workshop Chairs
2019Q3 Reports: Student Research Workshop Chairs
Website
https://sites.google.com/view/acl19studentresearchworkshop/
Organizers
The student co-organizers were Eunsol Choi (University of Washington), Fernando Alva-Manchego (University of Sheffield), and Daniel Khashabi (University of Pennsylvania)
The faculty advisors were Hannaneh Hajishirzi (University of Washington), Aurelie Herbelot (University of Trento), Scott Wen-tau Yih (Facebook AI Research), and Yue Zhang (Westlake University)
Mentoring programs
We offered one mentoring program this year. Pre-submission mentoring was available to all authors who wanted feedback before submitting their papers. Post-acceptance mentoring (offered in previous editions, to give SRW participants feedback for their presentations/posters) was substituted by the conference mentoring program (where incoming student participants are matched with more senior members).
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. A total of 64 papers participated in pre-submission mentoring program, and we recruited 15 mentors (professors or well-experienced researchers.) Pre-submission mentoring was not anonymous.
Submissions
Submission procedure
Following the trends in previous 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 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.
We allowed multiple submissions to the SRW and to other workshops, as long as this was declared by the authors at submission time. In addition, submissions (in either track) could be archival or non-archival.
Number of submissions
We received 214 submissions in total (a 224% increase from last year’s 66 submissions): 27 research proposals and 147 research papers. Among these, 7 research proposals and 22 research papers were non-archival. We accepted 71 papers, for an acceptance rate of 33\%. After withdrawals and excluding non-archival papers, 61 papers are appearing in these proceedings, including 14 research proposals and 47 research papers.
Program committee
Due to the huge increase on last year's number of submissions, as well as the current high reviewing workload across the CL community, we were only able to recruit 102 reviewers, and thus could only provide 1-2 reviews per paper. The program committee consisted of both experienced members of the ACL community as well as students who presented their work last year in the SRW. When a paper got assigned only a single reviewer, the student organizers provided a meta review.
Review
We didn’t allow bidding for the papers, and the student organizers manually assigned papers to reviewers.
Format
Timeline
Our timeline was as follows:
- First Call for Papers: January 9, 2019
- Pre-submission mentoring deadline: March 5, 2019
- Pre-submission mentoring feedback: April 2, 2019
- Paper submission deadline: April 26, 2019
- Reviewing begins: April 30, 2019
- Review deadline: May 7, 2019
- Acceptance notification: May 24, 2019
- Camera-ready deadline: June 3 , 2019
- Travel grant application deadline: June 12, 2019
- Travel grant notification: July 7, 2019
Format of the workshop
All of the accepted papers will be presented as posters in late morning sessions as a part of the main conference, split across three days (July 29th-31th).
Travel Grant
The SRW was awarded a grant of: $18,000 by the National Science Foundation. $1500 from Facebook.
We received a 53 submissions for travel grants applications. It was also necessary to allocate funds such that NSF funds were awarded only to students based at US institutions.
Of all the students from US institutions 10 were awarded NSF grants. Two of the awardees declined the award (they had other sources of financing their trip) and the rest accepted it. Three other students were awarded with Facebook grant. For each awardee, we recommended enough to cover registration, and partial airfare.
A few of the students reported that they are unable to attend the conference. No co-author or colleague is attending either. As such, we are coordinating with the local co-chairs the possibility of a remote presentation. We told the students that their submission can still be included in the proceedings as long as at least one author is registered for the conference.
Below we provide links to forms that we used for funding applications and pre-submission mentor recruitment:
SRW travel grant application form
https://forms.gle/djgtYucMN85imDDk6
SRW Pre-submission Mentorship form: