ACL 2022 | Call for Workshops

Call for Workshops

First Joint Call for Workshop Proposals:

ACL/NAACL-HLT/COLING/EMNLP 2022

Event Notification Type: Call for Proposals
Contact Email: workshops-all-2022@googlegroups.com
Contact: Workshop Co-Chairs
Submission Deadline: Wednesday, 20 October 2021

Proposal Submission Deadline: October 20, 2021

Notification of Acceptance: November 20, 2021

*Apologies for the confusion in the Call For Joint Workshop Proposals. This year we are only using email (to workshops-all-2022@googlegroups.com) for workshop proposal submissions. The now-deleted mention of submitting to the START system / softconf on the workshops CFP was accidental.

The Association for Computational Linguistics invites proposals for workshops to be held in conjunction with ACL 2022, NAACL-HLT 2022, COLING 2022 or EMNLP 2022. 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 2022 (The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics) will be held in Dublin, Ireland from May 22 through 27, 2022, with workshops to be held on May 26 and 27 2022:

https://2022.aclweb.org/

* NAACL-HLT 2022 (The 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Human Language Technologies) will be held in Seattle, Washington from July 10 through July 15, 2022, with workshops to be held on July 14-15 2022:

https://2022.naacl.org/

* COLING 2022 (The 2022 International Conference on Computational Linguistics) will be held in Gyeongju, Republic of Korea from October 12 through October 17, 2022, with workshops to be held on October 16-17 2022:

http://coling2022.org/

* EMNLP 2022 (The 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing) TBA

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 a 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 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 estimate of the number of participants.

- A description of special requirements and technical needs.

- The preferred venue(s) (ACL / NAACL-HLT / COLING / EMNLP), 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 organising 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.

- An indication whether the workshop will consider papers submitted through ACL Rolling Review (ARR); an indication whether the workshop will use OpenReview as a platform (both to take papers from ARR and for their own review); whether the workshop will only use START as a platform, and will not use ARR. In making this choice, please pay careful attention to the ARR deadlines and conference notifications.

- References
In addition, please include the following information in your 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 20, 2021, 11:59 PM Samoa Standard Time (SST) (UTC/GMT-11).

Submission is electronic. You can send the application proposals to the Email workshops-all-2022@googlegroups.com with title giving the preferred venue and "workshop proposals".

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, NAACL, COLING and EMNLP events from the past 3-5 years will be able to indicate which workshops they would like to attend in 2022.

WORKSHOPS ON COVID-19

We explicitly encourage the submissions of workshops on the topic of research around COVID-19.

DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION

The proposals should describe the ways in which the workshop will support diversity in NLP. We suggest organizers consider the following points, while developing the proposal:

- Contribution to academic diversity: The proposals could explain how the subject matter of the workshop will contribute to the diversity of the field, e.g. use of multilingual data, indications of how the described methods scale up to various languages or domains, accessibility of resources, supporting underrepresented communities of NLP and so on.

- Diversifying representation: 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. The proposals should describe how their selection of invited speakers, panelists, organizers, and program committee promotes diverse representation (for example, considering underrepresented demographic based on gender, ethnicity, nationality, and so on). We also suggest including speakers and panelists, who have not appeared as a keynote speaker or panelist in recent conferences.

- Diversifying participation: The proposals could describe how the call-for-papers and outreach will encourage people from marginalized groups to attend and submit to the workshop, e.g. providing mentoring, subsidies, coordinating with affinity groups, diversifying the selection of papers and so on.

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 cameraready 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 20, 2021: Proposal Submission Deadline

November 20, 2021: Notification of Acceptance

* ACL:

December 20, 2021: First Call for Workshop Papers

Feb. 6, 2022: Second Call for Workshop Papers

Feb. 28, 2022: Workshop Paper Due Date

March 26, 2022: Notification of Acceptance

April 10, 2022: Camera-ready papers due

May 26-28, 2022: Workshop Dates

* NAACL:

[tentative!!]

Feb 11, 2022: First Call for Workshop Papers

Mar 11, 2022: Second Call for Workshop Papers

Apr 8, 2022: Workshop Paper Due Date

May 6, 2022: Notification of Acceptance

May 20, 2022: Camera-ready papers due

July 14-15, 2022: Workshop Dates

* COLING:

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

October 16-17, 2022: 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:

Elena Cabrio, Uni. Côte d'Azur, France
Sujian Li, Peking University, China
Mausam, IIT Delhi, India