2019Q3 Reports: Workshop Chairs

Workshop co-chairs:

• Barbara Plank (IT University of Copenhagen)
• Sebastian Riedel (Facebook AI Research & University College London)

We accepted 59 workshops out of 84 workshop proposal submission through the process of a joint cross-conference NLP workshops call, which for 2019 was shared between ACL, NAACL and EMNLP ([Link to CFP email announcement](https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/first-joint-call-workshop-proposals-acl-emnlp-ijcnlp-naacl-2019)). Workshop proposals were accompanied with the organizers' top two venue preferences. Submissions and reviews were coordinated through START, and reviewed and discussed by a joint cross-conference committee including the workshop chairs of all three conferences, including the two of us, plus Smaranda Muresan, Swapna Somasundaran and Elena Volodina (NAACL), Vera Demberg and Naoaki Okazaki (EMNLP). We largely followed the COLING model, for which there is [a blog post](https://coling2018.org/workshop-review-process-for-acl-coling-emnlp-and-naacl-2018/) describing more of this process (except that the reviewer load was higher due to the larger number of submissions, roughly 24 proposals/reviewer). During the joint selection process, we tried to allocate accepted workshops to their first or second choice of venue, however, this was impossible due to the overwhelming preference for ACL this year. Of the 84 submissions, 74% had ACL as their first choice, and 14% as second choice. 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, WMT, CoNLL, *SEM, SemEval and Widening NLP were "pre-admitted" workshops (or co-located events in case of WMT) which submitted a proposal, but were not reviewed through any of this process. In general for the organization and coordination process, we followed the excellent [workshop chairs duties guide](https://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Workshop_chair_duties). We would like to emphasize that we followed earlier recommendations and underline 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.

The workshops and co-located events at ACL 2019 are:

• Joint Workshop on Multiword Expressions and WordNet (MWE-WN 2019)
• BioNLP 2019
• TyP-NLP: The Workshop on Typology for Polyglot NLP
• The Second BlackboxNLP Workshop on Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP at ACL 2019
• 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change
• The Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop
• 6th Workshop on Argument Mining
• The 14th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA)
• 4th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP-2019)
• The Sixteenth SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology
• NLP for Conversational AI
• The Thirteenth Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW XIII)
• Deep Learning & Formal Languages: Building Bridges
• Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing
• The 7th Workshop on Balto-Slavic Natural Language Processing
• Widening NLP 2019
• The Third Workshop on Abusive Language Online
• Second Workshop on Storytelling (StoryNLP)
• The First International Workshop on Designing Meaning Representations (DMR)
• 4th Workshop on Social Media Mining for Health (#SMM4H) Research and Applications
• Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (WMT19)