2020Q3 Reports: EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019
EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 was held in Hong Kong, November 3-7, 2019.The conference included 3 keynote speeches, 17 workshops, 7 tutorials, 11 TACL presentations, 683 reviewed papers presented as both oral talks and posters with 44 demos.
The three Program Co-Chairs, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, and Xiaojun Wan, did a fantastic job managing a total of 2,914 submissions, which is a 37% increase over EMNLP 2018. Adopting a 4-layered PC structure similar to that of ACL 2019, they invited 18 Senior Area Chairs, 152 Area Chairs, and 1,721 reviewers. Unlike EMNLP 2018, where a submission was reviewed in one of eight mega-areas, they organized the submissions into 18 areas so that each area can be more focused and manageable. The acceptance rates were 25.6% for long papers (25.5% at EMNLP 2018) and 20.5% for short papers (23.2%). The final program consisted of 220 oral presentations (including 8 TACL papers) and 474 poster presentations (including 3 TACL papers). We received 110 demo submissions, and the Demo Co-Chairs recruited an additional 130+ to manage the demo submission reviewing, accepting 29 demos (40% acceptance rate). The invited speakers were Meeyoung Cha, Kyunghyun Cho, and Noam Slonim.
The program was organized as 5 parallel sessions: 4 oral presentation sessions and 1 poster/demo session, with the posters/demos spanning multiple areas. All of the posters and demos were presented in a single large room, which worked well. The conference had 23 sponsors: 5 Diamond, 4 Platinum, 7 Gold, 5 Silver, 1 Bronze, and 1 Supporter Tier.
To make the conference a venue that is as welcoming and inclusive as possible to all, we worked on continuing and expanding the diversity and inclusion (D&I) efforts initiated in recent NLP conferences and also the Widening NLP workshop. We newly appointed two D&I Co-chairs, who organized the D&I committee, coordinating with the Childcare Policy and Grant Coordinators and the Student Volunteer Coordinator and Student Scholarship Chairs. The D&I committee focused on several initiatives involving mentoring, both for first-time conference attendees and otherwise, providing accommodations and improving accessibility for participants if necessary, and generally making the conference experience a broadly comfortable one.
EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 attracted over 1900 attendees. With the number of submissions growing significantly in recent years, the number of attendees is becoming increasingly difficult to predict. At this conference, the prediction being even more difficult due to the unrest in Hong Kong, we ended up with substantially more online registrations than we initially predicted. That forced us to entirely reallocate the rooms for both the workshops/tutorials and the main conference. Future conferences may need to have a "Plan B" for floor arrangement from the early stage of the planning process.
The workload for publishing the proceedings is also increasing. For example, the Publication Co-chairs received over 60 requests of updating the camera-ready after the deadline. They also needed to contact as many as 20% of the authors to address all sorts of editing issues (format errors, etc.). Our community may also have to find some more sustainable way of keeping our conference proceedings culture as well as appreciating the tremendous efforts made by organizing committee members.
Under the unexpected circumstances in Hong Kong, we anticipated that we might receive a substantial number of requests for remote presentation. To address this issue, we announced that we would accept applications for remote presentations but also tried to discourage non-essential requests by adding on the website the statement as follow: “Excessive remote presentations change the character of the conference. Please refrain from requesting remote presenting for personal reasons or for reasons regarding the demonstrations in Hong Kong.” Consequently, we received only a very limited number of applications (9 oral, 13 poster, 2 demo, and 7 workshop presentations) and accepted all of them. Toward the post-corona era, however, the community may also need to reconsider the best practices of conference presentation.
Kentaro Inui, EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 General Chair