2015Q3 Reports: Workshop Chairs

ACL 2015 Report: Workshop Organization

Hang Li and Sebastian Riedel; Contact info: hangli.hl@huawei.com and s.riedel@ucl.ac.uk

Organization and Schedule

The ACL Workshop Chairs (Hang Li and Sebastian Riedel) worked together with the NAACL and EMNLP Workshop Chairs (Cornelia Caragea and Bing Liu for NAACL, and Jörg Tiedemann and Zornitsa Kozareva for EMNLP) to jointly organize the selection of workshops for ACL, NAACL and EMNLP. As in the previous year, we initially coordinated with Lluis Marquez, the EMNLP General chair, because workshop chairs were not decided until late June 2014.

We roughly followed the schedule of the previous year:

Shared ACL , NAACL, and EMNLP dates:

• Initial Joint Call for Workshops: 3 Aug 2014
• First Joint Call for Workshops: 21 July 2014
• Second Call for Workshops: 27 September 2014
• Deadline for Proposals: 18 October 2014
• Notification of Acceptance: 2 November 2014

ACL-specific dates (followed by workshop organizers)

• First Call for Workshop Papers: 18 January 2015
• Workshop Paper Due Date: 21 May 2015 (suggested to ensure at least a 3-week review period)
• Notification of Acceptance: 11 June 2015
• Camera-ready papers due: 28 June 2015 (firm deadline; fixed in coordination with the Publications Chairs)
• Workshop Dates: July 30-31, 2015

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 2015

There were a total of 42 workshop proposals submitted to the Joint Call, the same number as last year. 15 workshops expressed first preference for ACL, 15 for NAACL, and 12 for EMNLP. We followed last year’s procedure in that all workshop co-chairs reviewed all proposals and 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 (July 30 and 31)

• SIGHAN, Eighth SIGHAN Workshop on Chinese Language Processing

Single-day Workshops (July 30)

• ArabicNLP, Arabic Natural Language Processing
• GEAF, Grammar Engineering Across Frameworks (GEAF 2015)
• BUCC, Eighth Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora
• S2MT, Semantics-Driven Statistical Machine Translation: Theory and Practice
• Keyphrase, Novel Computational Approaches to Keyphrase Extraction
• SIGHUM LaTeCH, SIGHUM Workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities
• BioNLP, BioNLP 2015

Single-day Workshops (July 31)

• NEWS, Named Entities Workshop (NEWS 2015)
• CVSC, Third Workshop on Continuous Vector Space Models and their Compositionality
• HyTra, Fourth Workshop on Hybrid Approaches to Translation
• LDL, Fourth Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics: Resources and Applications
• WNUT, Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT 2015)
• NLP-TEA, The 2nd Workshop on Natural Language Processing Techniques for Educational Applications
• NewsStory, The First Workshop on Computing News Storylines