FIRST JOINT CALL for Workshop Proposals: EACL/ NAACL/ ACL-IJCNLP / EMNLP 2021
Proposal Submission Deadline: October 6, 2020
Notification of Acceptance: November 6, 2020
The Association for Computational Linguistics invites proposals for workshops to be
held in conjunction with ACL-IJCNLP 2021, EACL 2021, EMNLP 2021, or
NAACL 2021. We solicit proposals in all areas of computational
linguistics, broadly conceived to include related disciplines such as
linguistics, speech, information retrieval and multimodal processing.
Workshops will be held at one of the following conference venues:
* ACL-IJCNLP 2021 (The Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing) will be held in Bangkok, Thailand from August 1 through 6, 2021, with workshops to be held on August 5 and 6 2021:
https://2021.aclweb.org/ [2]
* EACL 2021 (The 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics) will be held in Kyiv, Ukraine from April 19 through
23, 2021, with workshops to be held on April 19 and 20 2021:
https://2021.eacl.org/ [3]
* EMNLP 2021 (the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language
Processing 2020) will be held in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic in 2021 (October or November). from 7 November through 11 2021, with workshops to be held on November 10 and 11 2021.
* NAACL 2021 (The 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies) will be
held in Mexico City, Mexico from June 6 through 11, 2021, with workshops to be held on June 10-11 2021:
https://2021.naacl.org/[4]
The workshop co-chairs will work together to assign workshops to the
four conferences, taking into account the location preferences and
technical constraints provided by the workshop proposers.
SUBMISSION INFORMATION
Proposals should be submitted as PDF documents. Note that submissions
should essentially be ready to be turned into a Call for Workshop Papers
within one week of notification (see Timelines below).
The proposals should be at most two pages for the main proposal + at
most two additional pages for information about organizers, program
committee, and references. Thus the whole proposal should not be more
than FOUR pages long.
The two pages for the main proposal must include:
- A title and brief description of the workshop topic and content.
- A list of invited speakers, if applicable, with an indication of which
ones have already agreed and which are indicative, and sources of
funding for the speakers.
- An account of the efforts made to ensure demographic diversity of the
organisers and speakers (WiNLP’s BIG Directory may be a useful
resource). Also an account of any efforts to include diverse
participants (e.g., via mentoring, subsidies, or the wording and topics
in the CFP).
- An estimate of the number of attendees.
- Depending on the global situation of COVID-19, some conferences might take place only virtually. We request submissions to contain a brief discussion on measures planned to make sure a workshop is successful and productive in case of a virtual-only attendance.
- A description of any shared tasks associated with the workshop, and
estimate of the number of participants.
- A description of special requirements and technical needs.
- The preferred venue(s) (ACL-IJCNLP / EACL / EMNLP / NAACL), if any, and
description of any constraints (e.g., if the workshop is compatible with
only one of these events, logistically, thematically or otherwise)
- If the workshop has been held before, a note specifying where previous
workshops were held, how many submissions the workshop received, how
many papers were accepted (also specify if they were not regular papers,
e.g. shared task system description papers), and how many attendees the
workshop attracted.
Note that the only financial support available to workshops is a single
free workshop registration for an invited speaker; all other costs must
be borne independently by the workshop organizers.
The two pages for information about organizers, program committee, and
references must include:
- The names, affiliations, and email addresses of the organizers, with
one-paragraph statements of their research interests, areas of
expertise, and experience in organising workshops and related events.
- A list of Programme Committee members, with an indication of which
members have already agreed. Organizers should do their best to estimate the
number of submissions (especially for recurring workshops) in order to
(a) ensure a sufficient number of reviewers so that each paper receives
3 reviews, and (b) anticipate that no one is committed to reviewing more
than 3 papers. This practice is likely to ensure on-time, and more
thorough and thoughtful reviews.
- References
In addition, you will need to specify the following information when you
submit via the START System (not in the PDF proposal):
- A very brief advertisement or tagline for the workshop, up to 140
characters, that highlights any key information you wish prospective
attendees to know, and which would be suitable to be put onto a
web-based survey (see below).
- A URL for the workshop website which will be shown in the web-based
survey.
- A list of organizers’ names which will be shown in the web-based
survey.
The proposals should be submitted no later than October 6, 2020,
11:59 PM Samoa Standard Time (SST) (UTC/GMT-11). Submission is
electronic, using the Softconf START conference management system at
https://www.softconf.com/l/acl-workshops2021/ [5]
The workshop proposals will be evaluated according to their originality
and impact, as well as the quality of the organizing team and Programme
Committee. In addition, to estimate the attendance of the different
workshops, a survey mechanism will be implemented, where attendees of
ACL- and EMNLP events from the past 3-5 years will be able to
indicate which workshops they would like to attend in 2021.
WORKSHOPS ON COVID-19
We explicitly encourage the submissions of workshops on the topic of research around COVID-19.
DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION
Following the WiNLP (http://www.winlp.org/winlp-2020-workshop/ [6])
initiative, we recognize the current problems of demographic imbalance
in the field. Therefore, we particularly encourage submissions including
members of under-represented groups in computational linguistics, i.e.
from researchers self-identifying within any underrepresented
demographic (gender, ethnicity, nationality, etc.). The overall
diversity of the workshops, especially of the suggested invited speakers
and of the organizers, will be taken into account to ensure that
the conference program is varied and balanced.
WORKSHOP ORGANIZER RESPONSIBILITIES
The organizers of the accepted proposals will be responsible for
publicizing and running the workshop, including reviewing submissions,
producing the camera-ready workshop proceedings, organizing the meeting
days, and playing their part to ensure that all participants are aware
of ACL’s anti-harassment policy.
It is crucial that organizers commit to all deadlines. In particular,
failure to produce the camera-ready proceedings on time will lead to the
exclusion of the workshop from the unified proceedings and author
indexes. Workshop organizers cannot accept submissions for publication
that will be (or have been) published elsewhere, although they are free
to set their own policies on simultaneous submission and review. Since
the conferences will occur at different times, the timelines for the
submission and reviewing of workshop papers, and the preparation of
camera-ready copies, will be different for each conference. Suggested
timelines for each of the conferences are given below. The workshop
organizers should not deviate from this schedule unless absolutely
necessary, and with explicit agreement from the relevant Workshop
Chairs.
The ACL has a set of policies on workshops. You can find the ACL’s
general policies on workshops, the financial policy for workshops, and
the financial policy for SIG workshops at:
http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Conference_Handbook [7]
TIMELINE FOR THE 2021 WORKSHOPS
October 6, 2020: Proposal Submission Deadline
November 6, 2020: Notification of Acceptance
* EACL:
TBA: First Call for Workshop Papers
TBA: Second Call for Workshop Papers
TBA: Workshop Paper Due Date
TBA: Notification of Acceptance
TBA: Camera-ready papers due
TBA: Workshop Dates
* NAACL:
December 6, 2020: First Call for Workshop Papers
March 1, 2021: Second Call for Workshop Papers
March 15, 2021: Workshop Paper Due Date
April 15, 2021: Notification of Acceptance
April 30, 2021: Camera-ready papers due
June 10-11, 2021: Workshop Dates
* ACL-IJCNLP:
TBA: First Call for Workshop Papers
TBA: Second Call for Workshop Papers
TBA: Workshop Paper Due Date
TBA: Notification of Acceptance
TBA: Camera-ready papers due
TBA: Workshop Dates
* EMNLP:
TBA: First Call for Workshop Papers
TBA: Second Call for Workshop Papers
TBA: Workshop Paper Due Date
TBA: Notification of Acceptance
TBA: Camera-ready papers due
TBA: Workshop Dates
WORKSHOP CO-CHAIRS
* ACL-IJCNLP:
Kentaro Inui, Tohoku University
Michael Strube, Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies
* EACL:
Jonathan Berant, Tel-Aviv University and The Allen Institute for AI
Angeliki Lazaridou, DeepMind
* EMNLP:
Minlie Huang, Tsinghua University
Parisa Kordjamshidi, Michigan State University,
* NAACL:
Bhavana Dalvi, Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Michel Galley, Microsoft Research
Mamoru Komachi, Tokyo Metropolitan University
For inquiries, send an email to the workshop co-chairs at:
workshops-all-2021@googlegroups.com [8]
[1] mailto: workshops-all-2021@googlegroups.com
[2] https://2021.aclweb.org/
[3] https://2021.eacl.org/
[4] https://2021.naacl.org/
[5] https://www.softconf.com/l/acl-workshops2021/
[6] http://www.winlp.org/winlp-2020-workshop/
[7] http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Conference_Handbook
[8] mailto:workshops-all-2021@googlegroups.com