Call for papers - Meta Learning and Its Applications to Natural Language Processing Workshop@ ACL 2021
Website: https://meta-nlp-2021.github.io
Workshop Date: Between August 5th and August 6th, 2021
Submission Deadline: April 26th May 7th 2021 (Anywhere on Earth, AoE)
Submission website: https://www.softconf.com/acl2021/w16_metanlp21
Contact: meta.nlp.acl.2021 [at] gmail.com
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Description:
Meta-learning, or ‘Learning to Learn’, aims to learn better learning algorithms, including better parameter initialization, optimization strategy, network architecture, distance metrics, and beyond. Meta-learning has been shown to allow faster fine-tuning, converge to better performance, and achieve outstanding results for few-shot learning in many applications. Meta-learning is one of the most important new techniques in machine learning in recent years, but the method is mainly investigated with applications in computer vision. It is believed that meta-learning has excellent potential to be applied in NLP, and some works have been proposed with notable achievements in several relevant problems, e.g., relation extraction, machine translation, and dialogue generation and state tracking . However, it does not catch the same level of attention as in the image processing community.
This workshop (Meta Learning and Its Applications to Natural Language Processing Workshop, or MetaNLP) will bring concentrated discussions on meta-learning for the field of NLP via several invited talks by leading researchers from industry and academia, and oral and poster sessions with high-quality papers. Alongside research work on new meta-learning methods, data, applications, and results, this workshop will call for novel work on understanding, analyzing, and comparing different meta-learning approaches for NLP. The workshop aims to
review existing and inspire new meta-learning methods and results
motivate the application of meta-learning approaches to more NLP problems in academia and industry, and encourage discussion amongst experts and practitioners from the two realms
motivate works on comparing different meta-learning methods and comparing meta-learning to other transfer learning methods that have been long utilized for low-resource NLP
encourage communication within the field of NLP to share knowledge, ideas, and data for meta-learning, and encourage future collaboration to inspire innovation.
Submission:
MetaNLP workshop invites submissions that investigate the theoretical and experimental nature of meta learning methodologies and their applications to NLP. Relevant research directions include, but not limited to:
New meta-learning approaches
Application of meta-learning models to NLP tasks, such as parsing, dialog system, question answering, summarization, translation
Generalizability of meta-learned models across domains, tasks, or languages
Understanding of why do meta-learning methods work for NLP, for example:
o What does the model learn in meta-learning tasks?
o Are there some meta-learning approaches that are suitable for some NLP applications but not others?
Comparative study on meta-learning approaches.
Popular meta-learning topics include, but not limited to:
Learning optimizer
Learning model initialization
Learning metrics or distance measurement
Learning training algorithm
Few shot learning
Network architecture search
We welcome three categories of papers: regular workshop papers, cross-submissions, and extended abstracts. Only the regular workshop paper will be included in the proceedings. The extended Abstracts and cross-submissions will simply be hosted on our websites. Submissions should be made to https://www.softconf.com/acl2021/w16_metanlp21.
Regular Workshop Papers The submissions should be in ACL 2021 style (https://2021.aclweb.org/calls/papers/) between 4 and 8 pages, excluding the references. Authors can add supplementary material in addition to the 8 pages, but reviewers are not required to review the extra material. The papers should present novel research. The review will be double blind and thus all submissions should be anonymized. Double submission is allowed, but the paper accepted by another conference should be moved to cross-submissions.
Extended Abstracts Preliminary but interesting ideas that have not been published before can be submitted as extended abstracts. Ideas and works that would benefit from additional exposure and discussion but are not ready for publication are welcome to be submitted. The submissions should be up to 2 pages long including the references. The review will be double blind and thus all submissions should be anonymized.
Cross-Submissions We also invite works on relevant topics that have appeared in or submitted to alternative venues. Accepted cross-submissions will be presented as posters, with an indication of the original venue. Selection of cross-submissions will be determined solely by the organizing committee.
Important Dates:
Paper Submissions Due: April 26, May 7, 2021 (AoE)
Notification of Acceptance: May 28, May 31, 2021 (AoE)
Camera-ready Paper Due: June 7, 2021 (AoE)
Workshop Date: August 5 or 6, 2021
Invited speakers:
Andreas Vlachos (University of Cambridge)
Chelsea Finn (Stanford University)
Eric Xing (CMU)
Heng Ji (UIUC)
William Hamilton (McGill University)
Zhou Yu (Columbia University)
Organizers:
Hung-yi Lee (NTU)
Mitra Mohtarami (MIT)
Shang-Wen Daniel Li (Amazon)
Di Jin (Amazon)
Mandy Korpusik (Loyola Marymount University)
Annie Dong (Amazon)
Ngoc Thang Vu (University of Stuttgart)
Dilek Hakkani-Tur (Amazon)