EACL 2021
Online
https://2021.eacl.org/

The 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics invites the submission of long and short papers on substantial, original, and unpublished research in all aspects of natural language processing, including but not limited to the following areas:

  • Computational Social Science and Social Media
  • Dialog and Interactive Systems
  • Discourse and Pragmatics
  • Information Extraction and Text Mining
  • Information Retrieval, Search and Question Answering
  • Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP
  • Generation and Summarization
  • Green and Sustainable NLP
  • Language Resources and Evaluation
  • Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond
  • Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics
  • Machine Learning for NLP
  • Machine Translation
  • Multilinguality
  • NLP Applications for Emergency Situations and Crisis Management
  • Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation
  • Semantics: Lexical Semantics
  • Semantics: Sentence-level Semantics, Textual Entailments and Other areas
  • Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
  • Speech
  • Syntax: Tagging, Chunking, and Parsing

To reflect recent growing areas of interest, this year we will hold additional tracks:

  • Green and Sustainable NLP
  • NLP and Crisis Management

Furthermore, we also welcome position papers reflecting on the current state-of-the-art in relation to prior research and future directions.

Papers accepted to TACL by 14 December 2020 will also be eligible for presentation at EACL 2021; please see the TACL website for details.

Important Dates

Long and Short papers:

Submissions due Wednesday 7 October 2020
Author Response Sunday- Wednesday 22-25 November 2020
Acceptance notification Monday 11 January 2021
Camera-ready due Tuesday 26 January 2021
EACL conference Monday - Friday 19-23 April 2021

Paper Submission Information

Long Papers

Long paper submissions must describe substantial, original, completed and unpublished work. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation and analysis should be included. Review forms will be made available prior to the deadlines.

Long papers may consist of up to 8 pages of content, plus unlimited references; final versions of 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
  • A negative result
  • An opinion piece
  • An interesting application nugget

Short papers will be presented orally or as posters as determined by the program committee. 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.

Short papers may consist of up to 4 pages of content, plus unlimited references; final versions of long papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 5 pages) so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account

Anonymity Period

The following rules and guidelines are meant to protect the integrity of double-blind review and ensure that submissions are reviewed fairly. The rules make reference to the anonymity period, which runs from 1 month before the submission deadline (starting September 7, 2020 11:59PM UTC-12:00) up to the date when your paper is either accepted, rejected, or withdrawn (January 11, 2021).

  • You may not make a non-anonymized version of your paper available online to the general community (for example, via a preprint server) during the anonymity period. By a version of a paper we understand another paper having essentially the same scientific content but possibly differing in minor details (including title and structure) and/or in length (e.g., an abstract is a version of the paper that it summarizes).
  • If you have posted a non-anonymized version of your paper online before the start of the anonymity period, you may submit an anonymized version to the conference. The submitted version must not refer to the non-anonymized version, and you must inform the program chair(s) that a non-anonymized version exists.
  • You may not update the non-anonymized version during the anonymity period, and we ask you not to advertise it on social media or take other actions that would further compromise double-blind reviewing during the anonymity period.
  • Note that, while you are not prohibited from making a non-anonymous version available online before the start of the anonymity period, this does make double-blind reviewing more difficult to maintain, and we therefore encourage you to wait until the end of the anonymity period if possible. Alternatively, you may consider submitting your work to the Computational Linguistics journal, which does not require anonymization and has a track for “short” (i.e., conference-length) papers.

Instructions for Double-Blind Review

As reviewing will be double-blind, papers must not include authors’ names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references or links (such as github) 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) …” Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review.

Papers should not refer, for further detail, to documents that are not available to the reviewers. For example, do not omit or redact important citation information to preserve anonymity. Instead, use third person or named reference to this work, as described above (“Smith showed” rather than “we showed”). Papers may be accompanied by a resource (software and/or data) described in the paper, but these resources should be anonymized as well. Authorship

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 EACL 2021 will be notified of submissions, revisions and the final decision. No changes to the order or composition of authorship may be made to submissions to EACL 2021 after the paper submission deadline.

Citation and Comparison

You are expected to cite all refereed publications relevant to your submission, but you may be excused for not knowing about all unpublished work (especially work that has been recently posted and/or is not widely cited). In cases where a preprint has been superseded by a refereed publication, the refereed publication should be cited instead of the preprint version. Papers (whether refereed or not) appearing less than 3 months before the submission deadline are considered contemporaneous to your submission, and you are therefore not obliged to make detailed comparisons that require additional experimentation and/or in-depth analysis.

For more information, see the ACL Policies for Submission, Review, and Citation

Multiple Submission Policy

Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must indicate this at submission time in the START submission form and must be withdrawn from the other venues if accepted by EACL 2021. Authors of papers accepted for presentation at EACL 2021 must notify the program chairs by the camera-ready deadline as to whether the paper will be presented. We will not accept for publication or presentation the papers that overlap significantly in content or results with papers that will be (or have been) published elsewhere. Authors submitting more than one paper to EACL 2021 must ensure that submissions do not overlap significantly (>25%) with each other in content or results.

Submission Instructions

The deadline for submission of both long and short papers is Wednesday, 7 October 2020, 23:59 Anywhere on Earth.

For electronic submission of all papers, please use: https://www.softconf.com/eacl2021/papers.

You can find the EACL-2021 LaTeX template here or download the zip file.

Submission Format

Submissions must be in PDF, and must conform to the official style guidelines for EACL 2021. We ask you to use the EACL-2021 LaTeX template. These are available on the conference website. We reserve the right to reject submissions if the paper does not conform to these styles, including letter size and font size restrictions. We have made the decision to enforce latex style files and submission of both latex source and PDF for final papers for the following reasons: Latex ensures a uniform machine readable format for the ACL Anthology, which also benefits the use of the anthology as a corpus; most formatting issues in previous conferences were caused by papers that did not conform to the latex style files; Latex supports uniform and consistent references, authors are encouraged to use the bibtex entries provided by the ACL anthology. To facilitate collaboration and ease the burden on authors not familiar with latex, we have made available a template on Overleaf that you and your colleagues can use to author the paper, produce the corresponding latex source files and convert the paper to pdf. To be included in the final proceedings, accepted papers for the main conference and the workshops have to be made available both as latex sources and PDF.

Contact Information

General Chair: Paola Merlo (University of Geneva, Switzerland)

Program Co-chairs:

  • Reut Tsarfaty (Bar Ilan University, Israel)
  • Jorg Tiedemann (University of Helsinki, Finland)

Email: eacl2021programchairs@gmail.com