2019Q3 Reports: EMNLP 2018

EMNLP 2018 was held in Brussels, Belgium at the SQUARE Convention Center from October 31 - November 4, 2018. EMNLP 2018 included 14 workshops, 6 tutorials, 3 invited speakers, 351 long paper presentations, 198 short paper presentations, 10 TACL paper presentations, and 29 demos. The Program Co-Chairs skillfully managed a record-breaking 2,137 valid submissions (a 46% increase over EMNLP 2017)! They recruited 60 Area Chairs and 1,436 reviewers to run the reviewing process. The Program Co-Chairs created hierarchy to help streamline communications. They defined eight broad areas with several Area Chairs assigned to each and one person designated as Senior Area Chair to oversee the other area chairs and be the primary communicator to the Program Co-Chairs. The acceptance rates were 25.5% for long papers and 23.2% for short papers. The final program consisted of 224 oral presentations (including 3 TACL papers) and 335 poster presentations (including 7 TACL papers). EMNLP 2018 received 72 valid demo submissions, and the Demo Co-Chairs recruited an additional 150+ to manage the demo submission reviewing. 29 demos were accepted for EMNLP 2018 (40% acceptance rate). The invited speakers were Johan Bos, Julia Hirschberg, and Gideon Mann. The videos from EMNLP 2018 can be found at https://vimeo.com/channels/1427394.

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. EMNLP 2018 had 32 sponsors: 6 Diamond, 9 Platinum, 8 Gold, 4 Silver, 3 Bronze, and 2 Supporter Tier.

The attendance for EMNLP 2018 totaled 2,453 people, which was far greater than anticipated. This caused massive problems for room scheduling -- we had to acquire substantially more space from the SQUARE on short notice. We ended up live-streaming into additional rooms for 2 of the parallel sessions of the main conference and a few workshops. Registrants were permitted to sign up for an unlimited number of tutorials and/or workshops, and people often signed up for more than they could possibly attend so we probably booked more space than was truly necessary. This issue also affected payment to the tutorial organizers. They would have been paid an exorbitant amount if we'd used the raw numbers as exact attendance, so we counted attendees fractionally when they clearly oversubscribed to minimize double-counting. We strongly suggest that future registration forms do not allow people to oversubscribe. Also regarding the social event, the caterer did not label the vegetarian/vegan foods which caused some confusion, so we suggest to future organizers that they specifically request the caterers to label the types of food options.

EMNLP 2018 created two new initiatives to provide financial support to conference participants. We introduced Childcare Grants that offer financial support for childcare expenses incurred to participate in the conference. The childcare grants gave families broad flexibility to utilize many different types of childcare services and arrangements. EMNLP 2018 also introduced Travel Scholarships for Non-Students to attend the conference. The non-student travel scholarships provided support to people with financial need who might otherwise not be able to participate in the conference. We created this initiative with an eye toward supporting researchers from historically under-representated regions and young researchers or others with limited financial means. We had a small but deserving set of recipients for both initiatives, and believe that they are worth continuing.

Ellen Riloff, EMNLP 2018 General Chair

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The Organizing Committee for EMNLP 2018 was:

General Chair

• Ellen Riloff, University of Utah, USA

Program Co-Chairs

• David Chiang, University of Notre Dame, USA
• Julia Hockenmaier, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA
• Junichi Tsujii, Artificial Intelligence Research Center, Japan

Local Organizing Committee

• Marie-Francine Moens, KU Leuven, Belgium (chair)
• Dominique De Brabanter, KU Leuven, Belgium
• Frieda Steurs, KU Leuven, Belgium
• Hugo Van hamme, KU Leuven, Belgium

Local Sponsorship Chair

• Katrien Beuls, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium

Workshop Chairs

• Marieke van Erp, KNAW Humanities Cluster, Netherlands
• Vincent Ng, University of Texas at Dallas, USA

Tutorial Chairs

• Mausam, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India
• Lu Wang, Northeastern University, USA

Publication Chairs

• Preethi Raghavan, IBM, USA (senior chair)
• Micha Elsner, Ohio State University, USA (junior chair)

Demonstration Chairs

• Eduardo Blanco, University of North Texas, USA
• Wei Lu, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore

Website & Conference App Chair

• Nitin Madnani, Educational Testing Service, USA

Publicity Chair

• Mohit Iyyer, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA

Conference Handbook Chair

• Kai-Wei Chang, University of California at Los Angeles, USA

Conference Handbook Advisor

• Joachim Bingel, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Conference Handbook Proofreader

• He He, Stanford University, USA

Video Chair

• Bonan Min, BBN Technologies, USA

Student Volunteer Coordinator & Student Scholarship Chair

• Anna Rumshisky, University of Massachusetts at Lowell, USA
• Hugo Van hamme, KU Leuven, Belgium

Childcare Policy & Grant Coordinator

• Swapna Somasundaran, Educational Testing Service, USA
• Aoife Cahill, Educational Testing Service, USA