First Call for Tutorial Proposals:
EACL/NAACL-HLT/ACL-IJCNLP/EMNLP 2021

Event Notification Type: Call for Proposals
Contact Email: cl21-tutorial-chairs@googlegroups.com
Contact: Tutorial Organizers
Extended Submission Deadline: Wednesday 4 November 2020

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP), the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), and the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) invite proposals for tutorials to be held in conjunction with EACL 2021, NAACL-HLT 2021, ACL-IJCNLP 2021, or EMNLP 2021. We seek proposals in all areas of computational linguistics, broadly conceived to include related disciplines.

We invite proposals for two types of tutorials:

  1. Cutting-edge: tutorials that cover advances in newly emerging areas not previously covered in any ACL/EMNLP/NAACL/EACL/COLING related tutorial (see the list of tutorials in the past 4 years).
  2. Introductory: tutorials that provide introductions to related fields that are potentially relevant for the computational linguistics community (e.g., linguistics, bioinformatics, social media, machine learning techniques).

In both cases, the aim of a tutorial is primarily to help understand a scientific problem, its tractability, and its theoretical and practical implications. Presentations of particular technological solutions or systems are welcome, provided that they serve as illustration of broader scientific considerations.

Tutorials will be held at one of the following conference venues:

  • EACL 2021, which will be tentatively held in Kyiv, Ukraine from 19-23 April 2021. The tutorials will be held on 19 April.
  • NAACL-HLT 2021, to be held in Mexico CIty in June 2021.
  • ACL-IJCNLP 2021, which will be tentatively held in Bangkok, Thailand, from 1–6 August 2021.
  • EMNLP 2021, which will be tentatively held in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic in the fall of 2021 (October or November).

Fee Waiving

In a change from previous years, tutorial instructors will receive no payment. However, up to 3 instructors per tutorial can have their registration fees waived for the main conference and any subset of co-located tutorials and workshops.

Diversity And Inclusion

We recognize the current problems of demographic imbalance in the field. Therefore, we particularly encourage submissions from members of under-represented groups in computational linguistics, i.e. from researchers self-identifying within any underrepresented demographic (gender, ethnicity, nationality, etc.).

Submission Details

Proposals should follow the EACL 2021 paper submission format (https://2021.eacl.org/calls/papers/), should not exceed 6 pages, should be submitted as PDF documents and should contain the following:

  • A title, authors and a brief description of the tutorial content and its relevance to the computational linguistics community (no more than 2 pages).
  • Type of the tutorial: introductory vs. cutting-edge
  • A brief outline of the tutorial structure. It should notably show that the core content can be covered in a three-hour slot. In exceptional cases six-hour tutorial slots are available as well. These time limits do not include coffee breaks, e.g., a three-hour tutorial in fact occupies a 3.5-hour slot, and a six-hour tutorial occupies a 7-hour slot.
  • Breadth: include an estimate of what % of the tutorial covers work by the tutorial presenters vs. work by other researchers. We ask for a coverage of at least 50% corresponding to other people’s work, in order to avoid having tutorials that are “self-invited talks”.
  • Diversity considerations (if any), e.g. use of multilingual data, indications of how the described methods scale up to various languages or domains, participation of both senior and junior instructors, possibly affiliated in different countries, gender balance of the instructors, etc.
  • Specification of any prerequisites for the attendees. Here are some examples:
    • Math: e.g., “Understand derivatives and integrals as found in introductory Calculus”
    • Linguistics: e.g., “Be able to parse and generate text with Context Free Grammars”
    • Machine Learning: e.g., “Understand ‘classical’ supervised methods such as decision trees and Naive Bayes”
    • Other areas: e.g., “Familiarity with WordNet”
    • Programming or other tools: e.g., “Knowledge of Python and Unix command line tools”
  • Small reading list. Its size should be such that it is reasonable to expect a trainee to read most of the recommended references before the tutorial (depending on their length, 4-10 seems a reasonable number). Preferably, at least 50% of the recommended papers should not be co-authored by the tutorial presenters.
  • The names, affiliations, email addresses and websites of the tutorial presenters, including a one-paragraph statement of their research interests, areas of expertise and experience in teaching for an international audience.
  • An estimate of the audience size for the tutorial. If the same or a similar tutorial has been given before, include a note specifying where previous versions of the tutorial were given, how many attendees were at the main venue, and how many attendees the tutorial attracted.
  • A note specifying which venue(s) (EACL/NAACL-HLT/ACL-IJCNLP/EMNLP) would be acceptable and/or preferable. Include a description of any constraints that might make the tutorial compatible with only one of these events, logistically, thematically, or otherwise.
  • A description of special requirements for technical equipment (e.g., Internet access).
  • Open access. Do you agree to allow the publication of your slides and video recording of your tutorial in the ACL Anthology? Will other teaching material (data, software, etc., if any) be openly available?

Tutorial proposals should be submitted online using the START system: https://www.softconf.com/l/acl-tutorials2021

Proposals will be reviewed jointly by the Tutorial Co-Chairs of the four conferences and by a group of external experts.

Evaluation Criteria

Each tutorial proposal will be evaluated according to its clarity and preparedness, novelty or timely character of the topic, instructors’ experience, likely audience interest, open access of the teaching material, and diversity aspects (see point 5 above).

Tutorial Instructor Responsibilities

Accepted tutorial presenters will be notified by 2 December 2020. They must then provide abstracts of their tutorials for inclusion in the conference registration material by the specific conference deadlines. The description should be in two formats: (a) an ASCII version that can be included in email announcements and published on the conference website, and (b) a PDF version for inclusion in the electronic proceedings (detailed instructions will be provided). Tutorial speakers must provide tutorial materials by the deadline specified for the conference, with course slides submitted at least one month prior to the date of the tutorial (conditioned on the final venue). The final submitted tutorial materials must minimally include copies of the course slides and a bibliography for the material covered in the tutorial. After the conference, the presenters will be invited to update their slides in the ACL Anthology (if needed).

Important Dates

EACL/NAACL-HLT/ACL-IJCNLP/EMNLP 2021 shared dates for tutorial proposal:

  • Extended submission deadline for tutorial proposals: Wednesday 4 November 2020
  • Notification of acceptance: Wednesday 2 December 2020
  • Tutorial slides + abstract + bibliography: one month prior to the date of the tutorial

Tutorial Chairs

EACL

  • Isabelle Augenstein, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
  • Ivan Habernal, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany

NAACL-HLT

  • Greg Kondrak, University of Alberta, Canada
  • Kalina Bontcheva, University of Sheffield, UK

ACL-IJCNLP

  • David Chiang, University of Notre Dame, USA
  • Min Zhang, Soochow University, China

EMNLP

  • Jing Jiang, Singapore Management University, Singapore
  • Ivan Vulić, University of Cambridge & PolyAI, UK

Contact

Please send enquiries concerning EACL/NAACL-HLT/ACL-IJCNLP/EMNLP 2021 tutorials to cl21-tutorial-chairs@googlegroups.com.