2021Q3 Reports: Workshop Chairs

Workshop co-chairs:

Kentaro Inui (Tohuko University, Japan)

Michael Strube (Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies gGmbH, Germany)

With the decision to move from a physical/real conference to a virtual conference for ACL-IJCNLP 2021, COVID-19 had a big effect on the workshop organization. We have a lot of experience in organizing physical conferences, but almost no experience in organizing virtual ones. This led to many last-minute decisions, quite a few concepts new to the workshop chairs and to the workshop organizers, and a large number of emails going back and forth. In particular, the decision to go with Underline came too late, which caused a few of the workshop organizers to be upset with us and go their own route with pre-recording videos and such. Unfortunately, because of timezone issues, neither of the workshop chairs could attend the meeting with Underline in early June which may have caused a slight delay in Underline realizing what kind of beast workshops are. Nevertheless, it was a pleasure to work with Sol Rosenberg from Underline, who did a very professional job (as of July 15th, 2021).

Since the workshops have very different sizes and structures, we gave the organizers freedom with regard to the format -- pre-recorded videos and poster presentations, parallel live sessions, live Q&A sessions, length of the presentations, a continuous slot vs. multiple time slots to accommodate different time zones of the participants, etc.

Our recommendation was to not do pre-recordings (no one watches all these workshop videos anyway), do 5 minute live presentations followed by a Q&A session, and use Gathertown for poster sessions.

Because of the virtual setting we were able to fulfill a few last-minute requests for extending a one-day workshop to a two-day one (because of timezone reasons) or to move a workshop from one workshop day to the other (because of the limited availability of an invited speaker). After the registration had opened we declined such requests.

We created a mailing list (based on a Google group) to efficiently communicate with all workshop organizers. But sometimes this list was used by organizers to ask very specific things which in turn caused complaints by other organizers about the amount of emails they received. In retrospect, we probably should have created a FAQ page to keep important information, as suggested by the workshop chairs of ACL 2020. However, we missed the timing to take such an action partly because there was only a short time period when communication on the mailing list increased too much.

We worked together with the main conference's PC chairs to make it possible to have some Findings papers presented at workshops. The PC chairs created a Microsoft form with a list of all Findings papers. In this form Findings authors could specify up to three workshops where they want to present. Workshop organizers could pick which Findings papers they wanted to have. Eventually more than one hundred papers will be presented at workshops. We promoted this concept because we believe that it benefits Findings authors by having their papers discussed by a knowledgeable audience, and because it benefits workshop attendees by good papers being presented. This model should be continued in the future.