Call for Papers - Research Track

The 16th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT 2018) will be held in New Orleans, Louisiana, June 1 to June 6, 2018. NAACL HLT 2018 invites the submission of long and short papers on substantial, original, and unpublished research in all aspects of computational linguistics.

NAACL HLT 2018 has a goal of a broad technical program. Relevant topics for the conference include, but are not limited to, the following areas (in alphabetical order):

• Cognitive modeling / Psycholinguistics
• Dialog and interactive systems
• Discourse and pragmatics
• Generation
• Information Extraction
• Machine Learning for NLP
• Machine Translation
• NLP Applications
• Phonology, Morphology and word segmentation
• Question Answering
• Resources and evaluation
• Semantics
• Sentiment Analysis
• Social Media
• Speech
• Summarization
• Tagging, chunking, syntax and parsing
• Text Mining
• Theory and Formalisms
• Vision, robots, and other grounding

As in recent years, some of the presentations at the conference will be of papers accepted by the Transactions of the ACL. Also, separate CFPs will be forthcoming for demo papers and for submissions to the industry track.

Submissions

Long Papers

Long paper submissions must describe substantial, original, completed and unpublished work. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation and analysis should be included.

Long paper submissions may consist of up to eight (8) pages of content, plus unlimited references; final camera-ready versions of accepted long papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 9 pages) so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account.

Long papers will be presented orally or as posters as determined by the program committee. The decisions as to which papers will be presented orally and which as poster presentations will be based on the nature rather than the quality of the work. There will be no distinction in the proceedings between long papers presented orally and as posters.

Short Papers

Short paper submissions must describe original and unpublished work. Please note that a short paper is not a shortened long paper. Instead short papers should have a point that can be made in a few pages. Some kinds of short papers are:

• A small, focused contribution
• Work in progress
• A negative result
• An opinion piece
• An interesting application nugget

Short paper submissions may consist of up to four (4) pages of content, plus unlimited references. Upon acceptance, short papers will be given five (5) content pages in the proceedings. Authors are encouraged to use this additional page to address reviewers’ comments in their final versions.

Short papers will be presented in one or more oral or poster sessions. While short papers will be distinguished from long papers in the proceedings, there will be no distinction in the proceedings between short papers presented orally and as posters.

Author Guidelines

The ACL has released policies for submission, review and citation. Accompanying these are guidelines for authors. NAACL HLT 2018 will adhere to these policies and guidelines.

Submissions should:

Be relevant

Submissions to NAACL HLT 2018 should be relevant to the audience.

Be original

The content of submissions to NAACL HLT 2018 (the ideas, the findings, the results and the words) should be original; that is, should not have been published (or be accepted for publication) in another refereed, archival form (such as a book, a journal, or a conference proceedings). Authors are referred to the ACL author guidelines for additional information on what constitutes existing publication.

Authors may present preliminary versions of their work in other venues that are not refereed and/or not archival (e.g. course reports, theses, non-archival workshops, or on preprint servers such as arXiv.org). Authors should list all such previous presentations in the submission form. This will help the area chairs if questions of originality arise.

Papers that have been or will be submitted to other venues must indicate this at submission time, and must be withdrawn from the other venues if accepted to NAACL HLT 2018.

Authors submitting more than one paper to NAACL HLT 2018 must ensure that the submissions do not overlap significantly (>25%) with each other.

Facilitate double blind review

Double blind review is a form of peer review in which the identities of authors are not provided to reviewers, and the identities of reviewers are not provided to authors. To facilitate double blind review, submissions should not identify authors or their affiliations. For example, self-references that reveal the author's identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ..." must be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...".

Any preliminary non-archival versions of submitted papers should be listed in the submission form but not in the review version of the paper. NAACL HLT 2018 reviewers are generally aware that authors may present preliminary versions of their work in other venues, but will not be provided the list of previous presentations from the submission form.

Authors are referred to the ACL author guidelines for additional information on how to facilitate double blind review.

Accurately represent contributors

The author list for submissions should include all (and only) individuals who made substantial contributions to the work presented. Each author listed on a submission to NAACL HLT 2018 will be notified of submissions, revisions and the final decision. No authors may be added to or removed from submissions to NAACL HLT 2018 after the submission deadline.

Describe research review and data management

If a submission describes work with a data set previously released by an organization or group (e.g. the LDC, ELRA, Kaggle), the source of the data should be appropriately referenced.

If a submission describes work with "found" data (e.g. data sampled from social media or the web), the source(s) of the data should be appropriately referenced, the method for sampling the data should be described, and any necessary permissions to use and/or release the data should be documented. In addition, the submission should document institutional review of the work as appropriate.

If a submission describes work involving human participants or personally identifiable information (including crowdsourced work), the submission should document institutional review of the work as well as informed consent and compensation procedures for participants, and anonymization procedures for the data.

Accurately reference prior and related work

Submissions should accurately reference prior and related work, including code and data. If a piece of prior work appeared in multiple venues, the version that appeared in a refereed, archival venue should be referenced. If multiple versions of a piece of prior work exist, the one used by the authors should be referenced. Authors should not rely on automated citation indices to provide accurate references for prior and related work.

Authors are referred to the ACL author guidelines for additional information on how to appropriately cite prior work.

Include supplementary resources and material as appropriate

Submissions may include resources (software and/or data) used in in the work and described in the paper. Papers that are submitted with accompanying software and/or data may receive additional credit toward the overall evaluation score, and the potential impact of the software and data will be taken into account when making the acceptance/rejection decisions. Any accompanying software and/or data should include licenses and documentation of research review as appropriate (see "Describe research review and data handling", above).

NAACL HLT 2018 also encourages the submission of supplementary material to report preprocessing decisions, model parameters, and other details necessary for the replication of the experiments reported in the paper. Seemingly small preprocessing decisions can sometimes make a large difference in performance, so it is crucial to record such decisions to precisely characterize state-of-the-art methods. Nonetheless, supplementary material should be supplementary (rather than central) to the paper. It may include explanations or details of proofs or derivations that do not fit into the paper, lists of features or feature templates, sample inputs and outputs for a system, pseudo-code or source code, and data. The paper should not rely on the supplementary material: while the paper may refer to and cite the supplementary material and the supplementary material will be available to reviewers, they will not be asked to review or even download the supplementary material. Authors should refer to the contents of the supplementary material in the paper submission, so that reviewers interested in these supplementary details will know where to look. Supplementary materials should be submitted separately. They should not be included as part of the paper submission file.

Papers should not refer, for further detail, to documents that are not available to the reviewers.

Follow style and format guidelines

Submissions should follow the NAACL HLT 2018 style guidelines. Long paper submissions must follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings without exceeding eight (8) pages of content. Short paper submissions must also follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings, and must not exceed four (4) pages. References do not count against these limits. We strongly recommend the use of the official NAACL HLT 2018 style templates:

• LaTeX
• Microsoft Word
• Overleaf

All submissions must in PDF format.

Submissions that do not adhere to the above author guidelines may be rejected without review.

Paper Submission and Templates

Submission is electronic, using the Softconf START conference management system at:

• https://www.softconf.com/naacl2018/papers – for both long and short papers

Presentation Requirement

All accepted papers must be presented at the conference to appear in the proceedings. Authors of papers accepted for presentation at NAACL HLT 2018 must notify the program chairs by the camera-ready deadline as to whether the paper will be presented.

Previous presentations of the work (e.g. preprints on arXiv.org) should be indicated in a footnote that should be excluded from the review submission, but included in the final version of papers appearing in the NAACL HLT 2018 proceedings.

At least one author of each accepted paper must register for NAACL HLT 2018 by the early registration deadline.

Contact Information

General chair: Marilyn Walker (University of California Santa Cruz)

Program co-chairs: Heng Ji (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) and Amanda Stent (Bloomberg)

Email: naacl2018-program@googlegroups.com

Area Chairs

• Cognitive Modeling / Psycholinguistics: Morteza Dehghani, Kristy Hollingshead Seitz
• Dialogue and Interactive Systems: Yun-Nung (Vivian) Chen, Gabriel Skantze
• Discourse and Pragmatics: Jacob Eisenstein, Junyi (Jessy) Li, Annie Louis, Yi Yang
• Generation: Dimitra Gkatzia, Shashi Narayan, Michael White
• Information Extraction: Mausam, Dan Bikel, Chia-Hui Chang, Bonan Min, Aurélie Névéol, Marius Pasca, Hinrich Schütze, Avirup Sil, Michael Strube
• Machine Learning for NLP: Chris Dyer, Ozan Irsoy, Tie-Yan Liu, Raymond Mooney
• Machine Translation: Marine Carpuat, Kyunghyun Cho, Daniel Marcu, Taro Watanabe, Deyi Xiong
• NLP Applications: Jinho Choi, Joel Tetreault
• Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation: Jennifer Foster, Barbara Plank
• Question Answering: Eugene Agichtein, Hannaneh Hajishirzi,Idan Szpektor
• Semantics: Yoav Artzi, Mona Diab, Kevin Duh, Jonathan May, Preslav Nakov, Roi Reichart, Dan Roth, Scott Wen-tau Yih
• Sentiment Analysis: Smaranda Muresan, Swapna Somasundaran
• Social Media Analysis and Computational Social Science: Mark Dredze, Miles Osborne, Alan Ritter, Sara Rosenthal, William Yang Wang
• Speech: Eric Fosler-Lussier, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Mari Ostendorf
• Summarization: George Giannakopoulos, Xiaojun Wan, Lu Wang
• Tagging, Chunking, Syntax and Parsing: Michael Collins, Yoav Goldberg, Daisuke Kawahara, Emily Pitler, Anders Søgaard, Aline Villavicencio
• Text Mining: Kai-wei Chang, Jing Jiang, Zornitsa Kozareva, Chin-Yew Lin
• Theory and Formalisms: David Chiang, Daniel Gildea, Giorgio Satta
• Vision, Robotics and Other Grounding: Joyce Chai, Vicente Ordonez