2021Q3 Reports: Student Research Workshop Chairs

The Student Research Workshop was held in conjunction with ACL 2021. The SRW gives student researchers in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing the opportunity to present their work and receive constructive feedback and mentorship by experienced members of the ACL community.

This report discusses the various aspects of organizing the SRW at ACL 2021, including:

• Website & Communications
• Mentoring Program
• Submissions and Reviews
• Virtual Conference
• Anniversary Special Event
• Funding
• Recommendations

Organizers

Student Research Workshop Co-chairs

• Amandalynne Paullada, University of Washington
• Haitao Lin, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences
• Jannis Vamvas, University of Zürich
• Jad Kabbara, McGill University and the Montréal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA)

Student Research Workshop Faculty Advisors

• Rico Sennrich, University of Edinburgh
• Nianwen Xue, Brandeis University
• Jing Jiang, Singapore Management University
• Derek F. Wong, University of Macau

Website & Communications

We created a website, which was the primary source of information about the SRW: https://sites.google.com/view/acl-ijcnlp-2021-srw/ Additionally, we managed a Twitter account for posting updates to social media: https://twitter.com/acl_srw. This account is shared by ACL SRW chairs from year to year. We shared a Gmail account <acl.ijcnlp.2021.srw@gmail.com> for communications with authors and organizers, and a Slack channel for the student chairs to communicate with each other.

Mentoring Programs

We followed last year’s SRW in offering an optional round of pre-submission mentoring. This was designed to give students an opportunity to improve their submission, particularly the writing and presentation of the paper, before submitting their papers to the workshop for review. Authors who submitted their papers in time for the pre-submission deadline received feedback from their assigned mentors before the final submission deadline, giving them time to integrate the mentor’s feedback into their final submission. A total of 34 papers participated in the pre-submission mentoring program. We recruited 34 mentors, all of whom are well-experienced researchers in the field, for the pre-submission program. Papers were randomly matched to mentors based on research areas. We took note of the recommendation by the previous year’s Chairs that pre-submission mentoring be organized via the START Conference Management system. Thus, we collected pre-submissions and organized the mentoring committee using an internal pre-submission track on START. We then manually emailed pairs of author & mentor to introduce them and provide suggestions for the mentorship process.

Submission and Reviewing

Timeline

• Pre-submission mentoring deadline: March 1, 2021
• Pre-submission feedback: March 19, 2021
• Paper submission deadline: April 2, 2021
• Review deadline: May 7, 2021
• Acceptance notifications: May 14, 2021
• Camera-ready deadline: June 1, 2021

Submission procedure

The SRW consisted of two submission tracks: research papers and thesis proposals. Research papers were intended to encompass completed work, as well as works-in-progress from graduate students, masters students, and advanced undergraduates. Thesis proposals were intended to be a venue for senior graduate students to get feedback on their thesis proposal and the broader ideas surrounding the appropriateness and impact of their chosen topic. We allowed both long paper and short paper for the two tracks. The page limit was 8 pages of content for long paper and 4 pages for short paper, with unlimited pages for references. For the camera-ready drafts of accepted papers, one additional page was permitted. Double submission to the ACL SRW and the main ACL conference/other ACL workshops was not allowed. Submissions (in either track) could be archival or non-archival. Submissions were managed through the START conference system.

Number of submissions

We received 114 submissions including 109 research papers and 5 thesis proposals. The submissions included 68 long papers and 46 short papers. Following withdrawals and desk rejects, 45 were accepted for an acceptance rate of 39 %. Excluding non-archival papers, 36 papers appear in the proceedings. Several authors requested a change from the non-archival to archival track. The SRW does not have a specific distribution requirement with respect to each track, and given the unprecedented circumstances, these changes were permitted. All accepted papers (archival and non-archival) were presented at the conference.

Program committee

We were fortunate to recruit 213 members for the SRW Program Committee. Each paper was assigned 2 or 3 reviewers. No reviewer was assigned more than 2 papers.

Reviewing

We used the “explicit bidding” capability on the START system, where reviewers could set for their preference on each paper according to the paper title and abstract. Submissions were then automatically assigned to reviewers based on these bids. All assignments were manually verified (and modified if needed) by the SRW co-chairs. We created a new review form, similar to the one used in AACL SRW 2020. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uDH9OQwO0Qi1tyzYW6rRYPDvzUeh55pA/view

Virtual Conference

The SRW papers are presented in conjunction with other ACL main conference papers on August 3rd. All the papers accepted to the SRW, i.e., research papers and thesis proposals in both the archival and non-archival tracks, wilö be presented at the conference. For the virtual presentations, we adopted the same format as the main conference, which featured pre-recorded talks (up to 12 minutes for long paper and 7 minutes for short), live Q&A sessions, and online messaging channels. The SRW has three poster sessions to accommodate different timezones. In coordination with the ACL Program Chairs, the Virtual Infrastructure Chairs, and the Publication Chairs, the SRW will be conducted as a track within the main virtual conference:

• The virtual ACL website lists the SRW papers in a separate track, listed alongside those of the main conference and system demonstrations.
• The live Q&A sessions for SRW papers are in the same time slots as the papers of the main conference.
• The schedule for the main conference includes the SRW papers.

Each paper is assigned one two-hour live Q&A sessions during the conference. Since the authors are located in different time zones, we conducted a survey about their available time slots, and tried to schedule the Q&A sessions according to their preferences. Additionally, during the conference, each paper has its own channel, for asynchronous Q&A and messages between authors and conference attendees.

Anniversary Special Event

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the ACL SRW, as pointed out to us by Prof. Philip Resnik. It was suggested that we do something to celebrate this. We have contacted alums of the SRW and former faculty advisors for the event to conduct short interviews to collect perspectives on the experience of SRW over the years, and are preparing a video of clips from these interviews.

Funding

Since the conference was completely virtual, the only expenses for students were the ACL membership fee and the conference registration fee. The workshop has received support from the Swiss National Science Foundation for the award of grants. This allowed us to waive the ACL membership fee and conference registration fee for a total of 13 SRW authors who applied for financial assistance.

Recommendations

Pre-submission mentoring was again used by many authors, and we are grateful that so many volunteers offered their time for mentoring. Like in the previous year, a small number of mentors never communicated with the authors. We recommend that future SRWs ask for feedback about the mentoring activity at an early stage so that another mentor can be assigned, if necessary.