Difference between revisions of "2019Q3 Reports: Program Chairs"

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Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL
 
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL
  
= Area Chairs =
+
== Area Chairs ==
== FORMATTING TBD ==
+
 
Biomedical NLP & Clinical Text Processing
+
=== Biomedical NLP & Clinical Text Processing ===
 
Bridget McInnes, Virginia Commonwealth University, USA
 
Bridget McInnes, Virginia Commonwealth University, USA
 
Byron C. Wallace, Northeastern University, USA
 
Byron C. Wallace, Northeastern University, USA
Cognitive Modeling – Psycholinguistics
+
=== Cognitive Modeling – Psycholinguistics ===
 
Serguei Pakhomov, University of Minnesota, USA
 
Serguei Pakhomov, University of Minnesota, USA
 
Emily Prud’hommeaux, Boston College, USA
 
Emily Prud’hommeaux, Boston College, USA
Dialog and Interactive systems
+
=== Dialog and Interactive systems ===
 
Nobuhiro Kaji, Yahoo Japan Corporation, Japan
 
Nobuhiro Kaji, Yahoo Japan Corporation, Japan
 
Zornitsa Kozareva, Google, USA
 
Zornitsa Kozareva, Google, USA
 
Sujith Ravi, Google, USA
 
Sujith Ravi, Google, USA
 
Michael White, Ohio State University, USA
 
Michael White, Ohio State University, USA
Discourse and Pragmatics
+
=== Discourse and Pragmatics ===
 
Ruihong Huang, Texas A&M University, USA
 
Ruihong Huang, Texas A&M University, USA
 
Vincent Ng, University of Texas at Dallas, USA
 
Vincent Ng, University of Texas at Dallas, USA
Ethics, Bias and Fairness
+
=== Ethics, Bias and Fairness ===
 
Saif Mohammad, National Research Council Canada, Canada
 
Saif Mohammad, National Research Council Canada, Canada
 
Mark Yatskar, University of Washington, USA
 
Mark Yatskar, University of Washington, USA
Generation
+
=== Generation ===
 
He He, Amazon Web Services, USA
 
He He, Amazon Web Services, USA
 
Wei Xu, Ohio State University, USA
 
Wei Xu, Ohio State University, USA
 
Yue Zhang, Westlake University, China
 
Yue Zhang, Westlake University, China
Information Extraction
+
=== Information Extraction ===
 
Heng Ji, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA
 
Heng Ji, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA
 
David McClosky, Google, USA
 
David McClosky, Google, USA
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Timothy Miller, Boston Children’s Hospital, USA
 
Timothy Miller, Boston Children’s Hospital, USA
 
Mo Yu, IBM Research, USA
 
Mo Yu, IBM Research, USA
Information Retrieval
+
=== Information Retrieval ===
 
Sumit Bhatia, IBM’s India Research Laboratory, India
 
Sumit Bhatia, IBM’s India Research Laboratory, India
 
Dina Demner-Fushman, US National Library of Medicine, USA
 
Dina Demner-Fushman, US National Library of Medicine, USA
Machine Learning for NLP
+
=== Machine Learning for NLP ===
 
Ryan Cotterell, Johns Hopkins University, USA
 
Ryan Cotterell, Johns Hopkins University, USA
 
Daichi Mochihashi, The Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Japan
 
Daichi Mochihashi, The Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Japan
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Anna Rumshisky, University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA
 
Anna Rumshisky, University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA
 
Natalie Schluter, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
 
Natalie Schluter, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Machine Translation
+
=== Machine Translation ===
 
Rafael E. Banchs, HLT Institute for Infocomm Research A*Star, Singapore
 
Rafael E. Banchs, HLT Institute for Infocomm Research A*Star, Singapore
 
Daniel Cer, Google Research, USA
 
Daniel Cer, Google Research, USA
Line 116: Line 116:
 
Preslav Nakov, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar
 
Preslav Nakov, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar
 
Zhaopeng Tu, Tencent, China
 
Zhaopeng Tu, Tencent, China
Mixed Topics
+
=== Mixed Topics ===
 
Ion Androutsopoulos, Athens Univ. of Economics and Business, Greece
 
Ion Androutsopoulos, Athens Univ. of Economics and Business, Greece
 
Steven Bethard, University of Arizona, USA
 
Steven Bethard, University of Arizona, USA
Multilingualism, Cross lingual resources
+
=== Multilingualism, Cross lingual resources ===
 
Željko Agić, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
 
Željko Agić, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
 
Ekaterina Shutova, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
 
Ekaterina Shutova, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
 
Yulia Tsvetkov, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
 
Yulia Tsvetkov, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
 
Ivan Vulic, Cambridge University, UK
 
Ivan Vulic, Cambridge University, UK
NLP Applications
+
=== NLP Applications ===
 
T. J. Hazen, Microsoft, USA
 
T. J. Hazen, Microsoft, USA
 
Alessandro Moschitti, Amazon, USA
 
Alessandro Moschitti, Amazon, USA
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Wenpeng Yin, University of Pennsylvania, USA
 
Wenpeng Yin, University of Pennsylvania, USA
 
Su-Youn Yoon, Educational Testing Service, USA
 
Su-Youn Yoon, Educational Testing Service, USA
Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation
+
=== Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation ===
 
Ramy Eskander, Columbia University, USA
 
Ramy Eskander, Columbia University, USA
 
Grzegorz Kondrak, University of Alberta, Canada
 
Grzegorz Kondrak, University of Alberta, Canada
Question Answering
+
=== Question Answering ===
 
Eduardo Blanco, University of North Texas, USA
 
Eduardo Blanco, University of North Texas, USA
 
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Amazon, USA
 
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Amazon, USA
Line 140: Line 140:
 
Tim Rocktäschel, Facebook, USA
 
Tim Rocktäschel, Facebook, USA
 
Avi Sil, IBM Research, USA
 
Avi Sil, IBM Research, USA
Resources and Evaluation
+
=== Resources and Evaluation ===
 
Torsten Zesch, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
 
Torsten Zesch, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
 
Tristan Miller, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
 
Tristan Miller, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
Semantics
+
=== Semantics ===
 
Ebrahim Bagheri, Ryerson University, Canada
 
Ebrahim Bagheri, Ryerson University, Canada
 
Samuel Bowman, New York University, USA
 
Samuel Bowman, New York University, USA
Line 150: Line 150:
 
Daisuke Kawahara, Kyoto University, Japan
 
Daisuke Kawahara, Kyoto University, Japan
 
Carlos Ramisch, Aix Marseille University, France
 
Carlos Ramisch, Aix Marseille University, France
Sentiment Analysis
+
=== Sentiment Analysis ===
 
Isabelle Augenstein, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
 
Isabelle Augenstein, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
 
Wai Lam, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
 
Wai Lam, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
 
Soujanya Poria, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
 
Soujanya Poria, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
 
Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz, UNAM, Mexico
 
Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz, UNAM, Mexico
Social Media
+
=== Social Media ===
 
Dan Goldwasser, Purdue University, USA
 
Dan Goldwasser, Purdue University, USA
 
Michael J. Paul, University of Colorado Boulder, USA
 
Michael J. Paul, University of Colorado Boulder, USA
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Chenhao Tan, University of Colorado Boulder, USA
 
Chenhao Tan, University of Colorado Boulder, USA
 
Xiaodan Zhu, Queen’s University, Canada
 
Xiaodan Zhu, Queen’s University, Canada
Speech
+
=== Speech ===
 
Keelan Evanini, Educational Testing Service, USA
 
Keelan Evanini, Educational Testing Service, USA
 
Yang Liu, LAIX Inc, USA
 
Yang Liu, LAIX Inc, USA
Style
+
=== Style ===
 
Beata Beigman Klebanov, Educational Testing Service, USA
 
Beata Beigman Klebanov, Educational Testing Service, USA
 
Manuel Montes, Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica, Mexico
 
Manuel Montes, Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica, Mexico
 
Joel Tetreault, Grammarly, USA
 
Joel Tetreault, Grammarly, USA
Summarization
+
=== Summarization ===
 
Mohit Bansal, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, USA
 
Mohit Bansal, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, USA
 
Fei Liu, University of Central Florida, USA
 
Fei Liu, University of Central Florida, USA
 
Ani Nenkova, University of Pennsylvania, USA
 
Ani Nenkova, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Tagging, Chunking, Syntax and Parsing
+
=== Tagging, Chunking, Syntax and Parsing ===
 
Adam Lopez, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
 
Adam Lopez, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
 
Roi Reichart, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Israel
 
Roi Reichart, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Israel
 
Agata Savary, University of Tours, France
 
Agata Savary, University of Tours, France
 
Guillaume Wisniewski, Université Paris Sud, France
 
Guillaume Wisniewski, Université Paris Sud, France
Text Mining
+
=== Text Mining ===
 
Kai-Wei Chang, University of California Los Angeles, USA
 
Kai-Wei Chang, University of California Los Angeles, USA
 
Anna Feldman, Montclair State University, USA
 
Anna Feldman, Montclair State University, USA
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Kevin Small, Amazon, USA
 
Kevin Small, Amazon, USA
 
Diyi Yang, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
 
Diyi Yang, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Theory and Formalisms
+
=== Theory and Formalisms ===
 
Valia Kordoni, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany
 
Valia Kordoni, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany
 
Andreas Maletti, University of Stuttgart, Germany
 
Andreas Maletti, University of Stuttgart, Germany
Vision, Robotics and other grounding
+
=== Vision, Robotics and other grounding ===
 
Francis Ferraro, University of Maryland Baltimore County, USA
 
Francis Ferraro, University of Maryland Baltimore County, USA
 
Vicente Ordóñez, University of Virginia, USA
 
Vicente Ordóñez, University of Virginia, USA

Revision as of 12:49, 19 July 2019

Program Committee

Organising Committee

General Chair

Jill Burstein, Educational Testing Service, USA

Program Co-Chairs

Christy Doran, Interactions LLC, USA
Thamar Solorio, University of Houston, USA

Industry Track Co-chairs

Rohit Kumar
Anastassia Loukina, Educational Testing Service, USA
Michelle Morales, IBM, USA

Workshop Co-Chairs

Smaranda Muresan, Columbia University, USA
Swapna Somasundaran, Educational Testing Service, USA
Elena Volodina, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Tutorial Co-Chairs

Anoop Sarkar, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Michael Strube, Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, Germany

System Demonstration Co-Chairs

Waleed Ammar, Allen Institute for AI, USA
Annie Louis, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Nasrin Mostafazadeh, Elemental Cognition, USA

Publication Co-Chairs

Stephanie Lukin, U.S. Army Research Laboratory
Alla Roskovskaya, City University of New York, USA

Handbook Chair

Steve DeNeefe, SDL, USA

Student Research Workshop Co-Chairs & Faculty Advisors

Sudipta Kar, University of Houston, USA
Farah Nadeem, University of Washington, USA
Laura Wendlandt, University of Michigan, USA
Greg Durrett, University of Texas at Austin, USA
Na-Rae Han, University of Pittsburgh, USA

Diversity & Inclusion Co-Chairs

Jason Eisner, Johns Hopkins University, USA
Natalie Schluter, IT University, Copenhagen, Denmark

Publicity & Social Media Co-Chairs

Yuval Pinter, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Rachael Tatman, Kaggle, USA

Website & Conference App Chair

Nitin Madnani, Educational Testing Service, USA

Student Volunteer Coordinator

Lu Wang, Northeastern University, USA

Video Chair

Spencer Whitehead, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA

Remote Presentation Co-Chairs

Meg Mitchell, Google, USA
Abhinav Misra, Educational Testing Service, USA

Local Sponsorship Co-Chairs

Chris Callison-Burch, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Tonya Custis, Thomson Reuters, USA

Local Organization

Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL

Area Chairs

Biomedical NLP & Clinical Text Processing

Bridget McInnes, Virginia Commonwealth University, USA Byron C. Wallace, Northeastern University, USA

Cognitive Modeling – Psycholinguistics

Serguei Pakhomov, University of Minnesota, USA Emily Prud’hommeaux, Boston College, USA

Dialog and Interactive systems

Nobuhiro Kaji, Yahoo Japan Corporation, Japan Zornitsa Kozareva, Google, USA Sujith Ravi, Google, USA Michael White, Ohio State University, USA

Discourse and Pragmatics

Ruihong Huang, Texas A&M University, USA Vincent Ng, University of Texas at Dallas, USA

Ethics, Bias and Fairness

Saif Mohammad, National Research Council Canada, Canada Mark Yatskar, University of Washington, USA

Generation

He He, Amazon Web Services, USA Wei Xu, Ohio State University, USA Yue Zhang, Westlake University, China

Information Extraction

Heng Ji, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA David McClosky, Google, USA Gerard de Melo, Rutgers University, USA Timothy Miller, Boston Children’s Hospital, USA Mo Yu, IBM Research, USA

Information Retrieval

Sumit Bhatia, IBM’s India Research Laboratory, India Dina Demner-Fushman, US National Library of Medicine, USA

Machine Learning for NLP

Ryan Cotterell, Johns Hopkins University, USA Daichi Mochihashi, The Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Japan Marie-Francine Moens, KU Leuven, Belgium Vikram Ramanarayanan, Educational Testing Service, USA Anna Rumshisky, University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA Natalie Schluter, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Machine Translation

Rafael E. Banchs, HLT Institute for Infocomm Research A*Star, Singapore Daniel Cer, Google Research, USA Haitao Mi, Ant Financial US, USA Preslav Nakov, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar Zhaopeng Tu, Tencent, China

Mixed Topics

Ion Androutsopoulos, Athens Univ. of Economics and Business, Greece Steven Bethard, University of Arizona, USA

Multilingualism, Cross lingual resources

Željko Agić, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark Ekaterina Shutova, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands Yulia Tsvetkov, Carnegie Mellon University, USA Ivan Vulic, Cambridge University, UK

NLP Applications

T. J. Hazen, Microsoft, USA Alessandro Moschitti, Amazon, USA Shimei Pan, University of Maryland Baltimore County, USA Wenpeng Yin, University of Pennsylvania, USA Su-Youn Yoon, Educational Testing Service, USA

Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation

Ramy Eskander, Columbia University, USA Grzegorz Kondrak, University of Alberta, Canada

Question Answering

Eduardo Blanco, University of North Texas, USA Christos Christodoulopoulos, Amazon, USA Asif Ekbal, Indian Institute of Technology Patna, India Yansong Feng, Peking University, China Tim Rocktäschel, Facebook, USA Avi Sil, IBM Research, USA

Resources and Evaluation

Torsten Zesch, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany Tristan Miller, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany

Semantics

Ebrahim Bagheri, Ryerson University, Canada Samuel Bowman, New York University, USA Matt Gardner, Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, USA Kevin Gimpel, Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, USA Daisuke Kawahara, Kyoto University, Japan Carlos Ramisch, Aix Marseille University, France

Sentiment Analysis

Isabelle Augenstein, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Wai Lam, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Soujanya Poria, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz, UNAM, Mexico

Social Media

Dan Goldwasser, Purdue University, USA Michael J. Paul, University of Colorado Boulder, USA Sara Rosenthal, IBM Research, USA Paolo Rosso, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain Chenhao Tan, University of Colorado Boulder, USA Xiaodan Zhu, Queen’s University, Canada

Speech

Keelan Evanini, Educational Testing Service, USA Yang Liu, LAIX Inc, USA

Style

Beata Beigman Klebanov, Educational Testing Service, USA Manuel Montes, Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica, Mexico Joel Tetreault, Grammarly, USA

Summarization

Mohit Bansal, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, USA Fei Liu, University of Central Florida, USA Ani Nenkova, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Tagging, Chunking, Syntax and Parsing

Adam Lopez, University of Edinburgh, Scotland Roi Reichart, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Israel Agata Savary, University of Tours, France Guillaume Wisniewski, Université Paris Sud, France

Text Mining

Kai-Wei Chang, University of California Los Angeles, USA Anna Feldman, Montclair State University, USA Shervin Malmasi, Harvard Medical School, USA Verónica Pérez-Rosas, University of Michigan, USA Kevin Small, Amazon, USA Diyi Yang, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Theory and Formalisms

Valia Kordoni, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany Andreas Maletti, University of Stuttgart, Germany

Vision, Robotics and other grounding

Francis Ferraro, University of Maryland Baltimore County, USA Vicente Ordóñez, University of Virginia, USA William Yang Wang, University of California Santa Barbara, USA

Main Innovations

  • Conference theme

The CFP made a special request for papers addressing the tension between data privacy and model bias in NLP, including: using NLP for surveillance and profiling, balancing the need for broadly representative data sets with protections for individuals, understanding and addressing model bias, and where bias correction becomes censorship. The three invited speakers were all selected to tie into the theme, and a Best Thematic Paper was selected.

  • Land Acknowledgement

Similar to what has been done in recent *CL conferences, the opening session included a land acknowledgement to recognize and honor Indigeneous Peoples.

  • Video Poster Highlights

This year included one minute slides with pre recorded audio that showcase the posters to be presented that day. The goal was to provide more visibility to posters. These were shown during the welcome reception, breakfast and breaks.

  • Remote Presentations

Remote presentations were supported for both talks and posters, via an application form to the committee.

  • Diversity & Inclusion Organization

The new Diversity & Inclusion team piloted a number of new initiatives including:

    • additional questions on the registration form to identify any accommodations
    • preferred pronouns (optionally) added to badges
    • I’m hiring/I’m looking for a job/I’m new badge stickers

<bunch of others, pull from their report>?

  • Submissions

This year we followed a two-stage submission process, in which abstracts were due one week before full papers. Our goal was to get a head start on assigning papers to areas, and recruiting additional area chairs where submissions exceeded our predicted volume.

    • Pro: early response to areas with larger than predicted number of papers
    • Con: too much overhead for PCs, as authors repeatedly contacted chairs to request that papers be moved between long and short, or asked about changes to authorship, titles and abstracts.
  • Full papers available for bidding: reviewers loved it, authors did not

An overview of statistics

Authors were permitted to switch format (long/short) when they submitted the full papers, so the total in the chart below uses 2271 as the total number of submissions, discounting the 103 that never submitted a full paper in the second phase. Seventy nine papers were desk-rejected due to anonymity, formatting, or dual-submission violations; 456 papers withdrawn prior to acceptance decisions being sent, although some were withdrawn part way through the review process; and an additional 11 papers were withdrawn after acceptance notifications had been sent. Keeping the acceptance rate consistent with past years meant 5 parallel tracks were needed to fit more papers into 3 days--as the conference grows, decisions will have to be made about continuing to add more tracks, adding more days to the main conference, or lowering the acceptance rate. The overall technical program consisted of 423 main conference papers, plus 9 TACL papers, 23 SRW papers, 28 Industry papers, and 24 demos. The TACL and SRW papers were integrated into the program, and marked SRW or TACL accordingly.

NEED TO CONVERT LATEX

Acceptance break-down: \begin{table}[h] \centering \begin{tabular}{|l|l|l|l|l|} \hline

&\textbf{Long}& \textbf{Short} &\textbf{Total} & \textbf{TACL}\\ \hline

Reviewed & 1067 & 666 & 1733 & \\ Accepted as talk & 140 & 72 & 212 & 4\\ Accepted as poster & 141 & 70 & 211 & 5\\ Total Accepted & 281 (26.3\%) & 142 (21.3\%) & 423 (24.4\%) & 9\\ \hline \end{tabular} \end{table}

Detailed statistics by area

NEED TO FORMAT TABLE

Area Long (%) Short (%) Area Long (%) Short (%) Bio and clinical NLP 7 (57) 28 (17) Question Answering 73 (36) 41 (17) Cognitive modeling 24 (29) 14 (14) Resources and Evaluation 33 (27) 20 (20) Dialog and Interactive systems 64 (20) 18 (27) Semantics 80 (13) 42 (11) Discourse and Pragmatics 38 (21)

      11 (36)

Sentiment Analysis 32 (28) 40 (20) Ethics, Bias and Fairness 16 (25) 12 (50) Social Media 44 (18) 41 (36) Generation 46 (14) 19 (23) Speech 19 (31) 9 (33) Information Extraction 46 (28) 16 (12) Style 24 ( (25) 16 (25) Information Retrieval 22 (22) 13 (30) Summarization 22 (27) 28 (28) Machine Learning for NLP 100 (29) 22 (22) Syntax 36 (52) 54 (13) Machine Translation 49 (30) 53 (18) Text Mining 101 (18) 29 (24) Multilingual NLP 43 (25) 28 (10) Theory and Formalisms 12 (58) 12 (16) NLP Applications 60 (30) 41 (17) Vision & Robotics 41 (12) 22 (36) Phonology 24 (33)

      24 (25)


Conference tracks

The Industry Track, in its second year, had 28 accepted papers (10 oral and 18 posters, acceptance rate: ~28%), and ran a lunchtime Careers in Industry panel which was very well attended. Panelists were Judith Klavans, Yunyao Li, Owen Rambow, and Joel Tetreault and the moderator was Phil Resnik.

The Student Research Workshop had 23 accepted papers, distributed throughout the conference, and 19 submissions received pre-submission mentoring. For the first time, both archival and non-archival submissions were offered, meaning that authors who opted for the non-archival version will not have a paper available in the archive and are free to publish elsewhere.

There were 25 accepted Demos, which were spread across several of the poster sessions.

Reviewing

Recruiting ACs and Reviewers

Similar to what other PCs have done in the past, we distributed a wide call for volunteers to recruit the Area Chairs and Reviewers. All volunteers were scanned by PCs and assigned ACs/reviewer roles, and each area was seeded with a set of volunteer reviewers. Area Chairs then filled out the remainder of their respective committees. There were 25 specific areas + one for “Mixed Topics” and at least 2 ACs per topic area. After the abstract deadline, we added more ACs to teams with larger than predicted submissions . Our goal was to ensure greater diversity by including in each area some participants who may not have been previously involved, and therefore would not have been invited if the committees were built from lists of previous reviewers. 390 of 1321 reviewers were reviewing for NAACL for the first time.

Breakdown by gender for ACs and reviewers

Response Area Chair Reviewer
Female 24.4 25.2
Male 73 71.7
Prefer not to answer 2.6 3.1

Breakdown by employment category and country for ACs and reviewers

THERE IS ANOTHER GRAPHIC TO INSERT HERE

Abstract Submissions

This year we followed a two-stage submission process, in which abstracts were due one week before full papers. Our goal was to get a head start on assigning papers to areas, and recruiting additional area chairs where submissions exceeded our predicted volume. Relative to the projected numbers from NAACL-HLT 2018, several areas received a higher-than-predicted number of submissions: Biomedical/Clinical, Dialogue and Vision. Text Mining ended up with the overall largest number of submissions.

Deciding on the reject-without-review papers

Our process for identifying desk rejects has been very similar to what other PCs have done in the past. First, the area chairs check their batch of assigned papers and report any issues to us. As the reviewing begins, reviewers may also identify issues that were not caught by ACs, which they flag up to ACs or directly to PCs. We then review each of these issues and make a final decision, to ensure that papers are handled consistently. This means each paper is reviewed for non-content issues by at least three people. The major categories for desk rejects are:

  • Violations to the dual submission policy specified in the call for papers
  • Violations to the anonymity policy as specified in the call for papers
  • “Format cheating” submissions not following the clearly stated format and style guidelines either in LaTeX or Word (thanks to Emily and Leon for introducing the concept).

As of February 7th, out of 2378 submissions, there were 44 rejections for format issues, 24 for anonymity violations, and 11 for dual submissions. This means that a total of 3% of the submissions were desk-rejected.

Review process

Authors were permitted to switch format (long/short) when they submitted the full papers, so the total in the chart below uses 2271 as the total number of submissions, discounting the 103 that never submitted a full paper in the second phase. Seventy nine papers were desk-rejected due to anonymity, formatting, or dual-submission violations; 456 papers withdrawn prior to acceptance decisions being sent, although some were withdrawn part way through the review process; and an additional 11 papers were withdrawn after acceptance notifications had been sent. Keeping the acceptance rate consistent with past years meant we needed 5 parallel tracks to fit more papers into 3 days--as the conference grows, decisions will have to be made about continuing to add more tracks, adding more days to the main conference, or lowering the acceptance rate. The overall technical program consists of 423 main conference papers, plus 9 TACL papers, 23 SRW papers, 28 Industry papers, and 24 demos. The TACL and SRW papers are integrated into the program, and are marked SRW or TACL accordingly.

INSERT CHART

Assignment to areas used the initial START assignments, followed by load-rebalancing and conflict resolution using keywords and manual inspection of the paper. Authors were blind to Area Chairs

Review assignment

  • Criteria: Fairness, Expertise, Interest
  • Method: area chair expertise + Toronto Paper Matching System (TPMS) + reviewer bids + manual tweaking
  • Many reviewers did not have TPMS profiles

Goal was no more than 5 papers per reviewer, some reviewers agreed to handle more. First-round accept/reject suggestions were made by area chairs. Final decisions were made by the program chairs.

We used a hybrid reviewing form, combining elements of the EMNLP 2018, NAACL-HLT 2018 and ACL 2018, with a 6-point overall rating scale so there was no “easy out” mid-point, distinct sections of summary, strengths and weaknesses to make easy to scan and compare relevant sections, and the minimum length feature of START enabled to elicit more consistently substantive content for the authors. This received excellent feedback from authors but which some reviewers complained about and others outright circumvented via html tags or repeated filler content.

To be added : X reviews were received by the end of the review period, Y others within the next week.; Importance of double blind reviewing No author response: due to time constraints and finding from NAACL 2018 that it had little impact. Authors were unhappy about this, they really want to be able to respond to reviews. Video Poster highlights: instead of 1-minute madness, A/V failures have made it hard to assess effectiveness. SRW papers integrated into sessions: positive feedback from participants, better experience for students Did not repeat Test of Time awards from 2018--should this happen every N years to allow for sliding window?

Best paper awards

  • Best Thematic Paper:
What’s in a Name? Reducing Bias in Bios Without Access to Protected Attributes
Alexey Romanov, Maria De-Arteaga, Hanna Wallach, Jennifer Chayes, Christian Borgs, Alexandra Chouldechova, Sahin Geyik, Krishnaram Kenthapadi, Anna Rumshisky and Adam Kalai
  • Best Explainable NLP Paper:
CNM: An Interpretable Complex-valued Network for Matching
Qiuchi Li, Benyou Wang and Massimo Melucci
  • Best Long Paper
BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding
Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee and Kristina Toutanova
  • Best Short Paper
Probing the Need for Visual Context in Multimodal Machine Translation
Ozan Caglayan, Pranava Madhyastha, Lucia Specia and Loïc Barrault
  • Best Resource Paper
CommonsenseQA: A Question Answering Challenge Targeting Commonsense Knowledge
Alon Talmor, Jonathan Herzig, Nicholas Lourie and Jonathan Berant

Presentations

  • Long-paper presentations: 22 sessions in total (4 sessions in parallel), duration: 15 minutes for talk + 3 minutes for questions + 2 dedicated Industry Track sessions
  • Short-paper presentations: 12 sessions in total (4 sessions in parallel), duration: 12 minutes for talk + 3 minutes for questions
  • Best-paper presentation: 1 session at the end of the last day
  • Posters: 8 sessions in total (1 session in parallel with every non-plenary talk session) + 1 dedicated Industry Poster session

Timeline

TBD

Issues and recommendations

TBD