Joint Call for Workshop Proposals: ACL/EMNLP-IJCNLP/NAACL 2019

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), the Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT), and the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing & International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) invite proposals for workshops to be held in conjunction with ACL 2019, NAACL HLT 2019, or EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019.

We solicit proposals on any topic of interest to the ACL communities. Workshops will be held at one of the following conference venues:

  • ACL 2019: The 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics will be held in Florence, Italy, July 28–August 2, 2019, with workshops to be held on August 1–2, 2019.

  • NAACL HLT 2019: The 17th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies will be held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, June 2–June 7, 2019 with workshops to be held on June 6–7, 2019.

  • EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 (the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing & International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing 2019) will be held in will be held in Asia World Expo, Hong Kong, November 3–November 7, 2019 with workshops to be held on November 3–November 4, 2019.

Submit a Proposal

Submission

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 contain:

  • A title and brief (2-page max) description of the workshop topic and content.

  • 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. It is highly desirable for proposals to have at least 75% of the Programme Committee reviewers confirmed at the time of the submission. 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.

  • 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.

  • 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/EMNLP-IJCNLP/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: 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.

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 November 6, 2018, 11:59 PM Samoa Standard Time (UTC/GMT-11). Submission is electronic, using the Softconf START conference management system.

Review Criteria

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-affiliated events from the past 3-5 years will be able to indicate which workshops they would like to attend in 2019. (A representative prototype of the survey is shown here, but is subject to change).

The overall diversity of the workshops will also be taken into account to ensure the conference program is varied and balanced. The workshop co-chairs will work together to assign workshops to the three conferences, taking into account the location preferences and technical constraints provided by the workshop proposers.

Organizers of 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. 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 workshop policies available on their website: general policies on workshops, financial policies for conference workshops, and the policies for SIG workshops.

Important dates

  • Proposal Submission Deadline: November 6, 2018
  • Notification of Acceptance: November 29, 2018

Timeline

The tentative individual dates for 2019 workshops is as follows:

ACL

First call for workshop papers Thursday December 20, 2018
Second call for workshop papers Thursday February 14, 2019
Workshop papers due Friday April 26, 2019
Notification of acceptance Friday May 24, 2019
Camera-ready papers due Monday June 3, 2019
Workshop dates Thursday–Friday August 1–2, 2019

NAACL

First call for workshop papers Tuesday December 11, 2018
Second call for workshop papers Tuesday January 15, 2019
Workshop papers due Wednesday March 6, 2019
Notification of acceptance Wednesday March 27, 2019
Camera-ready papers due (firm deadline) Friday April 5, 2019
Workshop dates Thursday–Friday June 6–7, 2019

EMNLP-IJCNLP

First call for workshop papers Friday May 10, 2019
Second call for workshop papers Friday June 14, 2019
Workshop papers due Friday July 19, 2019
Notification of acceptance Friday August 16, 2019
Camera-ready papers due Friday September 6, 2019
Workshop dates Sunday–Monday November 3–4, 2019

Workshop Co-Chairs

ACL
Barbara Plank, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Sebastian Riedel, University College London, UK

NAACL
Smaranda Muresan, Columbia University, USA
Swapna Somasundaran, Educational Testing Service (ETS), Princeton, USA
Elena Volodina, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

EMNLP-IJCNLP
Vera Demberg, Saarland University, Germany
Naoaki Okazaki, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan

Contact

For inquiries, send an email to the workshop co-chairs at: workshops-all-2019@googlegroups.com