2014Q3 Reports: Student Research Workshop Chairs
Submission tracks:
Following the previous years’ ACL Student Research Workshops, this year we had two different kinds of papers: research papers and thesis proposals. Thesis proposals are intended for advanced students who have decided on a thesis topic and wish to get feedback on their proposal and broader ideas for their continuing work, while research papers can describe completed work or work in progress with preliminary results.
Submission policy:
The limit for both types of papers was 6 pages of content and any number of pages for references. Submissions had to be anonymous.
Proposals may have only one author, who must be a student. Research papers could have multiple authors, however the first author must be a student, additional co-authors need not be students.
Research papers were eligible for the workshop only if they have not been presented at any other meeting with publicly available published proceedings. Students who have already presented a research paper at a previous ACL/EACL/NAACL SRW may not submit to the research paper track as a first author. They could still submit to the Thesis proposal track.
Organizers:
The student co-organizers were Ekaterina Kochmar (University of Cambridge, UK), Annie Louis (University of Edinburgh, UK) and Svitlana Volkova (Johns Hopkins University, USA).
The faculty advisors were Jordan Boyd-Graber (University of Maryland, USA) and Bill Byrne (University of Cambridge, UK).
Program committee:
Our committee comprised of 49 reviewers, 21 of whom were students, 15 academic faculty and 13 industry researchers.
Timeline:
We posted three Calls For Papers. The first Call For Papers was posted in November 2013. The pre-submission mentoring deadline was on January 21th 2014, and the feedback was sent to students on February 4th 2014. The paper submission form was closed on March 7th 2014, and we started the bidding process shortly thereafter. The notification of acceptance and rejection was sent to the students on April 4th 2014. We followed the previous years’ scheduling and set the SRW paper submission deadline after the main conference long paper deadline and before the short paper deadline to make it easier for those reviewing for both the main conference and the SRW.
Pre-submission mentoring:
This year’s workshop also offered pre-submission mentoring for student authors wishing to improve the presentation of their papers prior to submission of the paper for the reviewing process. 6 students participated in this pre-submission mentoring program this year.
Accepted papers:
We received 7 thesis proposals and 19 research papers this year. Out of these, we accepted 5 thesis proposals and 8 research papers leading to an acceptance rate of 71% for thesis proposals and 42% for research papers. The general acceptance rate was 50%.
Format of the workshop:
This year’s SRW offers multiple avenues for the student authors to receive feedback at the conference.
The workshop features three sessions of student paper presentations. All the papers will be presented at the main conference poster session, giving the opportunity for students to interact and present their work to a large and diverse audience. We also have a separate oral presentation session for thesis proposal papers on the first day of the main conference. The third session is another oral presentation venue where student authors of the research papers briefly advertise their posters. This year, 15 students whose papers were accepted to the ACL main conference were chosen to also present their work at and be partially funded by SRW. These students’ posters are also advertised during the poster highlight session.
Mentor programme:
In addition to oral presentation and poster sessions, each SRW paper and the 15 papers sponsored by the SRW is assigned a dedicated mentor. The mentor is an experienced researcher from academia or industry who will prepare in-depth comments and questions in advance of the presentation or poster session and will provide feedback to the student author.
Funding:
Thanks to our funding sources, this year’s SRW covers registration expenses and provides travel and lodging support to all student authors of the SRW papers. We gratefully acknowledge the support from the NSF, Google, Yahoo! and Baidu. In addition to the SRW papers, the NSF supports travel and registration for another 15 student authors of ACL main conference papers. The details of funding and constraints are below.
- NSF 2014: 12 grants of $1125 to be awarded to students from US universities
- Google: $4500 to be given as 6 grants of $750 to European students
- Baidu: $3000 no restrictions
- Yahoo: $2400 one student must be a woman
- NSF 2013 leftover: $7000
We used Baidu and Yahoo! funds for non-US and non-European students. We had only one US student author at the SRW. Hence the rest of the NSF grant this year and the leftover from 2013 were used to support 15 student authors of ACL main conference papers. The selection was done from student applications to the ACL committee for student travel grant and volunteer program.
The allocations to European students was $750 each, students from Asian universities received $950, UK and Mexico $800, Europe $750. Funding for students from the US varied between $395 to $1125 taking into account their location. In all cases, the grant is sufficient to cover student registration and part of travel/lodging costs.
Suggestions for next years’ organizers:
Format of the workshop:
The workshop has been presented in different formats over the years--oral presentations only, posters only or a mix of the two. This year we chose to have the thesis proposals as oral presentations and both thesis and research papers as posters. In later years it may be possible to explore other ways in which the students can gain exposure for their work, for example by having very short presentations for all papers followed by a dinner, networking session with students and mentors.
Target audience of the SRW:
It will be a good idea to rethink the target student authors for whom the SRW will be useful. A potential audience is undergraduate students interested in NLP research. At the moment, the SRW is not advertised to such students but doing so may increase the visibility and number of submissions to the SRW. Attending a top conference such as ACL could be very beneficial to such students.
Applicability of NSF Funds / Submission Pool:
Our review process did not include tracking of whether students were eligible for NSF funds. This led to us accepting papers we could not support with NSF funds (this seems to have also been a problem in previous years, as there was leftover funding this year). Thus, the reviewing process should specifically ask the necessary questions to determine whether they are eligible to receive NSF funds. This should not be a post hoc analysis.
If there are too few eligible students in the submission pool or too few eligible students are in the SRW, the organizers should work very hard to rebalance. If we continue underspending NSF money, this resource will dry up.
Include Residual Funds in the Budget:
This year, we only learned too late about the leftover funds from last year and did not use them up, so we effectively carry over that money again.