SECOND JOINT CALL for Workshop Proposals:
ACL-IJCNLP / EACL / EMNLP / NAACL 2021
Event Notification Type: Call for Proposals
Contact Email: workshops-all-2021@googlegroups.com
Contact: Workshop Co-Chairs
Submission Deadline: October 8, 2020
SECOND JOINT CALL for Workshop Proposals: ACL-IJCNLP / EACL / EMNLP / NAACL
2021
Proposal Submission Deadline: October 8, 2020
Notification of Acceptance: November 8, 2020
The Association for Computational Linguistics invites proposals for workshops to be held in conjunction with ACL-IJCNLP 2021, EACL 2021, EMNLP 2021, or NAACL 2021. We solicit proposals in all areas of computational linguistics, broadly conceived to include related disciplines such as linguistics, speech, information retrieval, and multimodal processing.
Workshops will be held at one of the following conference venues:
ACL-IJCNLP 2021 (The Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing) will be held in Bangkok, Thailand from August 1 through 6, 2021, with workshops to be held on August 5 and 6 2021:
EACL 2021 (The 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics) will be held online from April 19 through 23, 2021, with workshops to be held on April 19 and 20 2021:
EMNLP 2021 (the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing 2020) will be held in Punta Cana, the Dominican Republic in 2021 (October or November). from 7 November through 11 2021, with workshops to be held on November 10 and 11 2021.
NAACL 2021 (The 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies) will be held in Mexico City, Mexico from June 6 through 11, 2021, with workshops to be held on June 10-11 2021:
The workshop co-chairs will work together to assign workshops to the four conferences, taking into account the location preferences and technical constraints provided by the workshop proposers.
Submission Information
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 be at most two pages for the main proposal + at most two additional pages for information about organizers, program committee, and references. Thus the whole proposal should not be more than FOUR pages long.
The two pages for the main proposal must include:
- A title and brief description of the workshop topic and content.
- 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 the demographic diversity of the organizers 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.
- Depending on the global situation of COVID-19, some conferences might take place only virtually. We request submissions to contain a brief discussion on measures planned to make sure a workshop is successful and productive in case of a virtual-only attendance.
- A description of any shared tasks associated with the workshop, and an estimate of the number of participants.
- A description of special requirements and technical needs.
- The preferred venue(s) (ACL-IJCNLP / EACL / EMNLP / 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 that 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.
The two pages for information about organizers, program committee, and references must include:
- The names, affiliations, and email addresses of the organizers, with one-paragraph statements of their research interests, areas of expertise, and experience in organizing workshops and related events.
- A list of Programme Committee members, with an indication of which members have already agreed. 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.
- References 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 October 6, 2020, 11:59 PM Samoa Standard Time (SST) (UTC/GMT-11). Submission is electronic, using the Softconf START conference management system at https://www.softconf.com/l/acl-workshops2021/.
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- and EMNLP events from the past 3-5 years will be able to indicate which workshops they would like to attend in 2021.
Workshops on COVID-19
We explicitly encourage the submissions of workshops on the topic of research around COVID-19.
Diversity and inclusion
Following the WiNLP (http://www.winlp.org/winlp-2020-workshop/) initiative, we recognize the current problems of demographic imbalance in the field. Therefore, we particularly encourage submissions including members of under-represented groups in computational linguistics, i.e. from researchers self-identifying within any underrepresented demographic (gender, ethnicity, nationality, etc.). The overall diversity of the workshops, especially of the suggested invited speakers and of the organizers, will be taken into account to ensure that the conference program is varied and balanced.
Workshop organizer responsibilities
The organizers of the 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. The 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 policies on workshops. You can find the ACL’s general policies on workshops, the financial policy for workshops, and the financial policy for SIG workshops at: http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Conference_Handbook.
Timeline For The 2021 Workshops
October 8, 2020: Proposal Submission Deadline
November 8, 2020: Notification of Acceptance
EACL:
Nov 27: First Call for Workshop Papers
Dec 18: Second Call for Workshop Papers
Jan 18: Workshop Paper Due Date
Feb 18: Notification of Acceptance
Mar 1: Camera-ready papers due
April 19-20: Workshop Dates
NAACL:
December 6, 2020: First Call for Workshop Papers
March 1, 2021: Second Call for Workshop Papers
March 15, 2021: Workshop Paper Due Date
April 15, 2021: Notification of Acceptance
April 30, 2021: Camera-ready papers due
June 10-11, 2021: Workshop Dates
ACL-IJCNLP:
December 21, 2020: First Call for Workshop Papers
February 15, 2021: Second Call for Workshop Papers
April 26, 2021: Workshop Paper Due Date
May 28, 2021: Notification of Acceptance
June 7, 2021: Camera-ready papers due
August 5-6, 2021: Workshop Dates
EMNLP:
TBA: First Call for Workshop Papers
TBA: Second Call for Workshop Papers
TBA: Workshop Paper Due Date
TBA: Notification of Acceptance
TBA: Camera-ready papers due
TBA: Workshop Dates
Workshop co-chairs
ACL-IJCNLP:
Kentaro Inui, Tohoku University
Michael Strube, Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies
EACL:
Jonathan Berant, Tel-Aviv University and The Allen Institute for AI
Angeliki Lazaridou, DeepMind
EMNLP:
Minlie Huang, Tsinghua University
Parisa Kordjamshidi, Michigan State University
NAACL:
Bhavana Dalvi, Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Michel Galley, Microsoft Research
Mamoru Komachi, Tokyo Metropolitan University
For inquiries, send an email to the workshop co-chairs at: workshops-all-2021@googlegroups.com