2023Q3 Reports: Diversity and Inclusion Chairs

Chairs

• Daniel Beck - The University of Melbourne
• Maryam Fazel-Zarandi - Meta
• Nedjma Ousidhoum - Cardiff University / University of Cambridge

Communication

• For internal communication and organization, we mainly used Slack. We communicated via emails (acl2023dei[at]googlegroups) and via a “diversity” Slack channel on the ACL Slack Workspace.
• We created a form using our Microsoft account (acl2023-dei[at]outlook.com) and shared other materials using Google Drive.
• People could reach out to us on googlegroups and we also created a group for the participants to facilitate general announcements (e.g., in case someone needed a roommate, to share FQA, etc).

D&I Budget

• We reached out to many potential sponsors by relying on our connections. As our attempts were unsuccessful, we contacted the ACL 2023 general Chair, ACL 2023 sponsorship Chairs and ACL general sponsorship Chair to reach out to other potential sponsors and promote the D&I package.

• We share in the following the note that we had to write for sponsorship Chairs in order to promote the D&I package. We highly recommend future D&I chairs to share it early on in order to secure more money for D&I initiatives. Note that the NAACL 2022 example should be updated.

"The goal of the DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) committee at ACL is to make the conference more accessible to people from underrepresented groups and geographic regions, provide accommodations to researchers with disabilities, and make the conference more welcoming to newcomers. As the registration fees can be 2 to 10 times the minimum wage in many parts of the world, the D&I committee reaches out to NLP researchers from underrepresented groups and offers registration fee waivers, travel grants, caregiving subsidies, etc. We also organise theme-based academic mentoring sessions and affinity group socials/workshops to help newcomers and early-career researchers.

Our D&I initiatives would not be successful without the help of sponsors. In previous conferences, we have been able to reach out to hundreds of NLP researchers around the world (e.g., more than 350 applied for D&I subsidies at NAACL 2022). At NAACL 2022, we managed our sponsorship money to help as many researchers as possible. However, we could only offer a limited amount of waivers (7 full travel grants, 7 partial travel grants, 21 in-person registration fee waivers, 37 virtual waivers and 44 ACL membership waivers).

To support bright researchers around the world participating in the conference, we would need more sponsors and would be thrilled to have you as a sponsor. You will be acknowledged as a D&I ally/champion on the website as well as in the activities that you will help us organise. For more details, please check <link to sponsorship brochure>."

• We were able to secure a total of $45,000 USD for D&I subsidies:
  • $20,000 from ACL
  • $5,000 from Amazon
  • $10,000 from DeepMind
  • $10,000 from Liveperson

Subsidies

• We advertised the D&I subsidies on a blogpost on the ACL website, social media (Twitter and LinkedIn), corpora-list, affinity group Slack channels and by sending emails to affinity groups. We shared and sent regular reminders and advised applicants to apply for volunteering opportunities as well. Our promotional blogpost can be found here: https://2023.aclweb.org/calls/subsidies/

• We received 166 applications and offered:
  • 46 virtual registration fee waivers (with most awardees based in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Iran, India, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Zambia)
  • 43 ACL memberships
  • 10 travel grants (awardees from India, Chile, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Iran and a high school student from the US)
  • 7 in-person registration fee waivers (awardees from Mexico, Brazil, Iran, Chile and Thailand)
  • 1 childcare subsidy

• The selection criteria for subsidies included:
  • Financial issues (detailed description).
  • Whether the applicant is a workshop/conference/affinity group organiser.
  • Whether the applicant is from an under-represented group (based on the geographic region and the institution). We prioritised applicants from low-income countries.
  • Whether the applicant is presenting a paper at the (1) main conference, 2) workshop/affinity group workshop.
  • Whether the applicant is a first-time *CL conference presenter/attendee.
  • Whether the applicant provides valid information and respects the ACL code of conduct (no false information).
  • Whether the applicant provided a detailed application (i.e., effort spent on it.)

• We also had to verify the Visa status of the different potential in-person registration fee waiver and travel grant awardees given the delays in the Visa processing time and the unfortunate Visa application rejections.

Childcare

• We offered one Childcare subsidy. The hotel provides a nursing room and a kids’ room for parents and children to meet between sessions.
• As we had a limited budget, we did not offer onsite childcare. However, Jennifer Rachford kindly helped us reach out to the Westin hotel concierge who recommended a reliable childcare option.

Coordination with the Exec

• Thanks to the support we received from Luciana Benotti, the Exec provided additional discounted registration fee waivers for non-authors. We received 100 applications.

Academic Inclusion

• We had one full-day workshop from an affinity group: Queer in AI
• We advertised the BoF sessions and socials on a blogpost on the ACL website, social media (Twitter and LinkedIn), corpora-list, affinity group Slack channels and by sending emails to affinity group members. Our promotional blogpost can be found here:

https://2023.aclweb.org/calls/bof/.

• The theme-based birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions at ACL are the following. Each of these sessions lasts for 90 minutes:
  • ACL Mentorship
  • Low-Resource Languages
  • NLP for Social Good
  • Biomedical and Clinical NLP and healthcare data
  • Interpretability and Fairness in Large Language Models
  • Reinforcement Learning for Language Models
  • How to know your true market value as an AI researcher?
  • A stand-up comedy BoF
  • Mindfulness meditation in a time of NLP hyperactivity
  • Mentoring early-career students

• The ACL 2023 socials are the following:
  • D&I Lunch (Monday)
  • D&I Lunch (Tuesday)
  • LatinX social
  • Queer in AI Lunch and affinity group workshop.
  • Women in NLP social: advancing our careers

Acknowledgements

• We thank Luciana Benotti and the EMNLP 2022 D&I Chairs (Thamar Solorio, Andreas Vlachos and Meriem Beloucif) for sharing their insights, Jennifer Rachford and Megan Haddad for their help.