Preliminary Call for Papers
The Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the flagship conference for research on language and computation. The 48th Annual Meeting of the ACL (ACL 2010) seeks submission of papers on original and unpublished research in all areas of computational linguistics, broadly conceived to include areas such as psycholinguistics, speech, information retrieval, multimodal language processing, and language issues in emerging domains such as bioinformatics. In addition, we want to stress that both theoretical, as well as practical and empirical papers, are sought for the conference.
ACL 2010 has the goal of a broad technical program. Thus, ACL 2010 invites papers in the following categories:
Research papers
- theoretical computational linguistics
- empirical/data-driven approaches
- paradigms/techniques/strategies
- resources and evaluation
- applications/systems
- negative result (report of a sensible experiment or approach that failed to achieve the desired results)
Survey papers (new emerging area, field relevant to computational linguistics, etc.)
Position papers (we are particularly soliciting papers co-authored by two individuals with opposing positions, though single-authored papers are welcome)
Challenge papers (a challenge to the field in terms of setting out a goal for the next 5/10/20 years)
The above categories include types of papers that have not typically been part of the ACL conference program. Since the appropriate criteria for evaluating papers is not identical for the above categories (and subcategories), ACL 2010 will use a different review form for each category of paper, with the review form tailored to the type of submission. For example, the review criteria for an applications/systems research paper will include whether a substantive evaluation or user experiments are reported and whether a demo will be available at the conference, whereas the review form for a theoretical computational linguistics research paper will include a different set of review criteria. The review forms will be available on the conference web site at least 3 months prior to the submission deadline. At the time of submission, authors will be asked to designate the category under which they believe that their paper should be evaluated. However, the program committee chairs reserve the right to change the selected category if they feel that the submission falls into a different category of paper.
If you are unsure about whether your submission is appropriate for ACL 2010 please email the program chairs at program@acl2010.org.
LONG VERSUS SHORT PAPERS:
The submission deadlines for long and for short papers are identical. Long papers are appropriate for:
- reporting substantial, completed, and previously unpublished research;
- presenting a survey of a subfield that would be of interest to computational linguists;
- a two-author position paper in which the co-authors take opposing positions.
Short papers typically constitute more focused contributions. Thus they are appropriate for:
- reporting smaller experiments;
- describing work-in-progress;
- single-author position papers;
- challenge papers;
- descriptions of new language resources or evaluation methodologies (although these could be long papers);
- presenting negative results.
Long papers will be allocated 8 pages of content in the conference proceedings, and short papers will be allocated 4 pages of content. Both long and short papers may have any number of pages consisting solely of references. Long papers will generally be presented as 20-minute talks plus questions (although authors will be given the option of instead selecting a poster presentation or a 10-minute oral presentation followed by a poster); short papers will be presented either as a poster or as a 10-minute talk followed by a poster session. There will be no distinction in the conference proceedings between papers that are assigned different presentation modes (such as oral versus poster).
IMPORTANT DATES:
Feb 15, 2010 - Paper submissions due (both long and short papers);
July 11-16, 2010 - ACL 2010
TOPICS OF INTEREST:
- Topics include, but are not limited to:
- Discourse, dialogue, and pragmatics
- Grammar engineering
- Information extraction
- Information retrieval
- Knowledge acquisition
- Large scale language processing
- Language generation
- Language processing in domains such as bioinformatics, legal, medical, etc.
- Language resources, evaluation methods and metrics, science of annotation
- Lexical/ontological/formal semantics
- Machine translation
- Mathematical linguistics, grammatical formalisms
- Mining from textual and spoken language data
- Multilingual language processing
- Multimodal language processing (including speech, gestures, and other communication media)
- NLP applications and systems
- NLP on noisy unstructured text, such as emails, blogs, sms
- Phonology/morphology, tagging and chunking, word segmentation
- Psycholinguistics
- Question answering
- Semantic role labeling
- Sentiment analysis and opinion mining
- Spoken language processing
- Statistical and machine learning methods
- Summarization
- Syntax, parsing, grammar induction
- Text mining
- Textual entailment and paraphrasing
- Topic and text classification
- Word sense disambiguation
SUBMISSIONS:
The deadline for both long and short papers is February 15, 2010. Submission will be electronic in PDF format through the conference website.
Long papers may consist of up to 8 pages of content (excluding references), and short papers may consist of up to 4 pages of content (excluding references). Both long and short papers may include any additional number of pages consisting solely of references. Both long and short paper submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL 2010 proceedings. We strongly recommend the use of ACL LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word Style files tailored for this year's conference, which will be available on the conference website. All submissions must conform to the official ACL 2010 style guidelines to be announced on the conference website.
Reviewing of papers will be double-blind. Therefore, the paper must not include the authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...", must be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith (1991) previously showed ...". Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review.
MULTIPLE SUBMISSION POLICY:
ACL 2010 will not accept for publication or presentation work that will be (or has been) published at other meetings or in other publications. However, papers that have been or will be submitted elsewhere may be submitted to ACL 2010 provided that this fact is stated at the time of submission. If the paper is accepted by both ACL 2010 and another meeting or publication, it must be withdrawn from one of them; furthermore, its authors must notify the program chairs, within two days of receiving the ACL acceptance notification, indicating which meeting or publication they choose for presentation of their work.
MENTORING SERVICE: ACL is providing a mentoring (coaching) service for authors from regions of the world where English is less emphasized as a language of scientific exchange. Many authors from these regions, although able to read the scientific literature in English, have little or no experience in writing papers in English for conferences such as the ACL meetings. If you would like to take advantage of the service, please upload your paper in PDF format by January 1, 2010 using the paper submission software for the mentoring service which will be available at the conference website.
PROGRAM COMMITTEE CO-CHAIRS:
Sandra Carberry, University of Delaware, USA
Stephen Clark, University of Cambridge, UK
E-mail program@acl2010.org