2023Q3 Reports: Diversity and Inclusion Chairs

2023Q3 Reports: Diversity and Inclusion Chairs

Co-chairs: Nedjma Ousidhoum Maryam Fazel-Zarandi Daniel Beck

Communication We used Slack for most of our communication. A general Slack workspace was created for ACL 2023: we had a channel dedicated to D&I but we were also aware of main developments through the general channel.

Materials (documents, spreadsheets, etc) were stored in a shared Google Drive.

A joint email was created for communication with the community and subsidy applicants.

Funding Efforts As in previous years, we did reach out to potential sponsors ourselves. However, this year a D&I sponsorship was part of the official ACL sponsor package. This raised a bit of confusion about if it was our role to obtain D&I funds, or if this was part of the sponsorship team. In the end, we worked together with the sponsorship chair, who also reached out to accepted ACL sponsors to ask if they wanted to top up D&I sponsorships as well.

For the future, it would be good to have the funding request process a bit clearer. We believe it is a great idea for ACL to include D&I as part of the sponsor package, but efforts should be coordinated so we don’t do repeated work (both sponsorship chairs and D&I chairs asking for funds to the same company, for instance). One possibility is for D&I chairs to start the process by sending the following information to the sponsorship chairs: 1) a “blurb” stating the goals of the D&I team and 2) a list of potential D&I-inclined sponsors.

Here is the blurb we used this year:

“The goal of the D&I (diversity, equity and inclusion) committee at ACL is to make the conference more accessible to people from underrepresented groups and geographic regions, provide accommodations to researchers with disabilities, and make the conference more welcoming to newcomers. As the registration fees can be 2 to 10 times the minimum wage in many parts of the world, the D&I committee reaches out to NLP researchers from underrepresented groups and offers registration fee waivers, travel grants, caregiving subsidies, etc. We also organise theme-based academic mentoring sessions and affinity group socials/workshops to help newcomers and early-career researchers.

Our D&I initiatives would not be successful without the help of sponsors. In previous conferences, we have been able to reach out to hundreds of NLP researchers around the world (e.g., more than 350 applied for D&I subsidies at NAACL 2022). At NAACL 2022, we managed our sponsorship money to help as many researchers as possible. However, we could only offer a limited amount of waivers (7 full travel grants, 7 partial travel grants, 21 in-person registration fee waivers, 37 virtual waivers and 44 ACL membership waivers). To support bright researchers around the world participating in the conference, we would need more sponsors and would be thrilled to have you as a sponsor. You will be acknowledged as a D&I ally/champion on the website as well as in the activities that you will help us organise. For more details, please check <link to sponsorship brochure>.”

We were able to secure a total of USD 45,000 for D&I subsidies: 20,000 from ACL. 5,000 from Amazon. 10,000 from DeepMind. 10,000 from Liveperson.

Most funds were dedicated to subsidies (see below) but we also put money apart for catering (for social D&I lunches) and an emergency buffer. Subsidies We split our funding into in-person subsidies (for registration, accommodation and travel costs) and virtual subsidies (for registration only). This year, there were major delays in visa processing times, which directly affected many scholars from underrepresented regions. Given this situation, we dedicated a substantial part of the funds for virtual subsidies, especially for applicants who had accepted papers. This would at least allow these applicants to have their papers published and presented, even if just in a virtual format.

Situations like this are outside of our control: our recommendation is for D&I chairs to monitor these when making decisions on how much money to dedicate to in-person subsidies vs. virtual subsidies (assuming hybrid conferences).

We had a total of 166 applications for D&I subsidies. The full application form and the selection criteria are available in our D&I materials (which can be obtained via request to us). Some of the criteria include: Country of residence Applicant has an accepted paper (conference or workshop) Applicant never attend an *ACL event before Applicant is a student Preference for in-person vs. virtual subsidy (for management purposes)

A first pass in the applications was done by each chair separately, reaching a shortlist. The final list was then consolidated in a video meeting with the three chairs. In total, we had the following numbers of successful applications: 18 in-person subsidies 27 virtual subsidies 1 childcare subsidy

We also had a substantial number of late inquiries. There unfortunately had to be rejected due to the sheer number of applications we had to process.

Childcare

Coordination with the Exec

Academic Inclusion We had one full day workshop from an affinity group: Queer in AI, on Sunday.

For Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions, we had the following, each session being 1:30h: ACL Mentorship Low-Resource Languages NLP for Social Good Biomedical and Clinical NLP and healthcare data Interpretability and Fairness in Large Language Models Reinforcement Learning for Language Models

Finally, we also had a range of social sessions with the following topics: D&I Lunch (Monday) D&I Lunch (Tuesday) Queer in AI Lunch (in addition to the workshop) How to know your true market value as an AI researcher Stand-up comedy Mindfulness meditation in a time of NLP hyperactivity Mentoring early-career students Women in NLP: advancing our careers