ACL 2020 - 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2020)

The 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
(ACL 2020) invites the submission of long and short papers on
substantial, original, and unpublished research in all aspects of
Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing. As in recent
years, some of the presentations at the conference will be of papers
accepted by the Transactions of the ACL (TACL) journal. This year’s
conference will for the first time also feature presentations of papers
accepted by the Computational Linguistics (CL) journal.
IMPORTANT DATES
Submission deadline (long & short papers): December 9, 2019
Notification of acceptance: April 3, 2020
Camera-ready due: April 24, 2020
Tutorials: July 5, 2020
Conference: July 6-8, 2020
Workshops and Co-located conferences: July 9-10, 2020
Note: All deadlines are 11:59PM UTC-12:00 ("anywhere on Earth").
ACL 2020 THEME: TAKING STOCK OF WHERE WE'VE BEEN AND WHERE WE'RE GOING
The last few years have witnessed an unprecedented growth in NLP since
the field began over sixty years ago. The availability of large amounts
of data and computing resources have led to new models and
representations and exciting results on many NLP benchmark tasks. SOTA
systems have approached human performance on several benchmark tasks.
As we embrace these new exciting results and advances, ACL 2020 is
particularly interested in papers that can provide insights for the
community to assess how much we have accomplished in developing a
machine’s ability in understanding and generating human language and how
far we are pushing the boundaries as a field given the long history of
NLP research.
Potential submissions of interest include (but not limited to) position
papers, empirical/theoretical papers that:
* Reflect on the progress of the field or a sub-topic area from a larger
spectrum and make connections and/or comparisons between the past and
the present to provide a holistic view on where we stand today with
respect to the past;
* Examine, analyze, and interpret SOTA models and results to shed light
on limitations as well as key advances that may have lasting impact;
* Bring novel ideas for advancing the field, e.g., to enable and measure
machine’s ability in language processing beyond laboratory benchmarks;
We anticipate to have a special session for this theme at the conference
and a best Thematic Paper Award in addition to the traditional Best
Paper awards.
SUBMISSIONS
ACL 2020 has the goal of a broad technical program. Relevant topics for
the conference include, but are not limited to, the following areas (in
alphabetical order):
* Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics
* Computational Social Science and Social Media
* Dialogue and Interactive Systems
* Discourse and Pragmatics
* Ethics and NLP
* Generation
* Information Extraction
* Information Retrieval and Text Mining
* Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP
* Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond
* Theory and Formalism in NLP (Linguistic and Mathematical)
* Machine Learning for NLP
* Machine Translation
* NLP Applications
* Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation
* Resources and Evaluation
* Semantics: Lexical
* Semantics: Sentence Level
* Semantics: Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics
* Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
* Speech and Multimodality
* Summarization
* Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing
* Question Answering
PAPER SUBMISSION INFORMATION
A. 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.
B. 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
* Work in progress
* A negative result
* An opinion piece
* An interesting application nugget
Short papers may consist of up to 4 pages of content, plus unlimited
references. Upon acceptance, short papers will be given 5 content pages
in the proceedings. Authors are encouraged to use this additional page
to address reviewers' comments in their final versions.
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.
C. IMPORTANT: 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 November 9, 2019 11:59PM
UTC-12:00) up to the date when your paper is either accepted, rejected,
or withdrawn (April 3, 2020).
* 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.
D. 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.
E. 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 ACL 2020 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 ACL 2020
after the paper submission deadline.
F. 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:
https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/new-policies...
G. 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 ACL 2020. Authors of papers accepted for presentation at ACL 2020
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 ACL 2020 must ensure that
submissions do not overlap significantly (>25%) with each other in
content or results.
H. Formatting Requirements
Both long and short papers must follow the ACL Author Guidelines:
https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=A...
We will be releasing the style sheets (Latex, Word, Overleaf) shortly.
Please do not modify these style files, or use templates designed for
other conferences. Submissions that do not conform to the required
styles, including paper size, margin width, and font size restrictions,
will be rejected without review.
I. Optional Supplementary Materials: Appendices, Software and Data
Each ACL 2020 submission can be accompanied by a single PDF appendix,
one .tgz or .zip archive containing software, and one .tgz or .zip
archive containing data. ACL 2020 encourages the submission of these
supplementary materials to improve the reproducibility of results, and
to enable authors to provide additional information that does not fit in
the paper. For example, preprocessing decisions, model parameters,
feature templates, lengthy proofs or derivations, pseudocode, sample
system inputs/outputs, and other details that are necessary for the
exact replication of the work described in the paper can be put into the
appendix. However, the paper submissions need to remain fully
self-contained, as these supplementary materials are completely
optional, and reviewers are not even asked to review or download them.
If the pseudo-code or derivations or model specifications are an
important part of the contribution, or if they are important for the
reviewers to assess the technical correctness of the work, they should
be a part of the main paper, and not appear in the appendix.
Supplementary materials need to be fully anonymized to preserve the
double-blind reviewing policy.
PRESENTATION REQUIREMENT
All accepted papers must be presented at the conference to appear in the
proceedings. Authors of papers accepted for presentation at ACL 2020
must notify the program chairs by the camera-ready deadline if they wish
to withdraw the paper.
Previous presentations of the work (e.g. preprints on arXiv.org) should
be indicated in a footnote in the final version of papers appearing in
the ACL 2020 proceedings. Please note that this footnote should not be
in the submission version of the paper.
At least one author of each accepted paper must register for ACL 2020 by
the early registration deadline.
FURTHER INFORMATION
The conference website will be continually updated with information on
workshops, tutorials, venue, traveling, etc.
ORGANIZERS
General Chair
Dan Jurafsky (Stanford University, USA)
Program Co-Chairs
Joyce Chai (University of Michigan, USA)
Natalie Schluter (IT University, Copenhagen, Denmark)
Joel Tetreault (Dataminr, USA)
CONTACT
E-mail: ACL2020ProgramChairs-AT-gmail.com