Instructions for Authors

Thank you for publishing your work at EACL 2021!

This webpage specifies the details concerning your presentation at the conference. Please read carefully the below instructions, so that you know how to best prepare for the event and maximize the impact of your work.

All Accepted Papers

As you already know, each paper at EACL 2021 will have a pre-recorded talk, which will be made available to participants on the conference website, along with the camera-ready copy of the paper. Recently, you received specific instructions by the SlidesLive team concerning the technicalities of the recording. If you did not get them, please get in touch with the PC chairs ASAP. At the conference, you will be able to present your paper during one or more live sessions, and there will also be a chat facility for asynchronous interactions with the other participants. Detailed information is given below.

Papers Accepted as Oral

Presenters of oral papers will be assigned two presentation slots:

  1. A 1-hour Zoom Live Session: Each oral talk will be assigned to a live Zoom session. Each live Zoom session will consist of 3 papers from one track. Each session will have a dedicated session chair, to moderate the discussion, and each paper will be assigned a 20 minutes block including time for setting up and switching between speakers. You will be asked to give a quickfire presentation of 3-5 minutes, which will be followed by a moderated discussion. This live session is intended to mainly function as the discussion time of oral talks during in-person conferences.

    Action Items:

    For the Zoom Session we require an author to be available for the full hour. We also kindly ask that you prepare a 3-5 min quickfire presentation presenting the gist of your work. These quickfire presentations will be used to instigate the discussion of your paper during the live session. Bear in mind that interested participants may show up to your Zoom session whether or not they have had the time to read your paper or watch the pre-recorded talk. So, your quickfire presentation may very well set the tone for the discussion — be prepared and use it wisely!

    The due date for the presentation is the start day of the conference, as you will be sharing it from your own computer.

  2. A 2-hour Gather.town session. As a particular novelty of this conference, all talks, including oral ones, are assigned a poster slot at one of the virtual rooms we create. Each room will contain circa 20 papers from 3-4 tracks that will be jointly located. Participants can steer an avatar around a 2D environment, and engage in a video-chat with those nearby. Speakers may also share their screen if they want to enter a more in-depth discussion with the other participants. This interactive session is designed to mimic the discussion that happens during a poster session in physical conferences, but not only that. This setup also intends to support the kind of informal discussion that spontaneously takes place during the breaks, before and after the actual talks, during an in-person conference. Its primary intent is to create for you, the author, the space for both a wider exposure and deeper discussions.

    Action Items:

    For the Gather.town session we ask that an author will be online for the full 2 hour session. We also kindly ask that you prepare a poster pdf that will be uploaded at your virtual slot, which participants will be shown as they approach your virtual location. This poster may be a full-fledged scientific poster (recommended!) or a simple title slide. A full-fledged poster will allow the more “passive” passers-by to get the gist of your work while navigating through the space. For those participants who actively engage in the discussion, the poster will give you the opportunity to focus on and refer to key results and illuminating visuals during the discussion.

    The due date for preparing the pdf is April 9th, and you will soon receive an email from the gather.town infrastructure team on how and where to deliver the file.

Papers Accepted as Poster

Presenters of poster presentations will be assigned a slot in a dedicated poster session at Gather-town:

A 2-hour Gather.town session. Your paper will be assigned a dedicated slot at a virtual poster session. Each room used for those sessions will contain circa 20 papers from 3-4 tracks that will be jointly located. Participants can steer an avatar around a 2D environment, and engage in a video-chat with those nearby. Speakers may also share their screen if they want to enter a more in-depth discussion with the other participants. This interactive session is designed to mimic the discussion that happens during a poster session in physical conferences, but not only that. This setup also intends to support the kind of informal discussion that spontaneously takes place during the breaks at an in-person conference. Its primary intent is to create for you, the author, the space for both a wide exposure and deeper discussions.

Action Items:

For the Gather.town session we ask that an author will be online for the full 2 hour session. We also kindly ask that you prepare a poster pdf that will be uploaded at your virtual slot, which participants will be shown as they approach your virtual location. This poster may be a full-fledged scientific poster (recommended!) or a simple title slide. A full-fledged poster will allow the more “passive” passers-by to get the gist of your work while navigating through the space. For those participants who actively engage in the discussion, the poster will give you the opportunity to focus on and refer to key results and illuminating visuals during the discussion.

The due date for preparing the pdf is April 9th, and you will soon receive an email from the gather.town infrastructure team on how and where to deliver the file.

Both Zoom Q&A and Gather.town sessions will run with multiple parallel tracks.

Conference Schedule

In the following link you can find the full conference schedule, where you will find the specific slot assignments for your paper: EACL2021-programme

Here are some important notes concerning the conference schedule:

  1. The EACL event, being a European conference, is loosely based on a European time zone. However, we have allocated an extended range of hours, ranging from 9.00 to 22.00 CET (GMT+1), alternating live zoom/poster sessions and informal social events.
  2. For your Oral session, you have been assigned to a slot based on various factors including: the coherence of paper topics in a session, the diversity of topics, and timezone compatibility. We have used the contact author’s address in the softconf profile to compute timezone constraints, and where possible, also considered the timezones for co-authors. We apologize for any inconvenience the assignments may cause and hope that you understand the challenges that arise at a global on-line event such as this one.
  3. All Poster sessions are set to a time slot that should in principle be feasible for most participants from around the world, which is 15.00–17.00 CET. We hope that those sessions will provide the dynamic and interactive environment that is needed to connect all participants of EACL.

We understand that there may be time zones for which these live session hours are not optimal. However, this partial overlap between time zones serves an important role in our agenda concerning diversity and inclusion, allowing for planned and spontaneous interactions between researchers from non-compatible time zones. We sincerely hope that the interactive poster sessions, and the fact that all conference participants are allocated a slot there at the same time slot, will provide a fertile ground for discussions and a fruitful meeting point for researchers across the different communities, time zones, and disciplines.

Congratulations again on your fine work! If you have any additional questions, please feel free to get in touch with us via eacl2021@softconf.com

Jörg Tiedemann and Reut Tsarfaty
EACL 2021 PC Chairs