ACL-2001 Student Research Workshop Eleni Miltsakaki, Christof Monz, and Antonio Ribeiro 1. Program Committee The co-chairs of the ACL-2001 Student Research Workshop, Eleni Miltsakaki (University of Pennsylvania), Christof Monz (University of Amsterdam), and Antonio Ribeiro (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) were nominated by this year's general chair Bonnie Webber, and approved by the ACL Executive Committee. Marilyn Walker was appointed by the ACL Executive Committee as Faculty Advisor. The program committee was initially formed from suggestions by Marilyn Walker and the co-chairs, and was later approved by the ACL Executive Committee. The final program committee consisted of 15 student members and 21 non-student members. Of the 36 reviewers, were 11 from Europe, 9 from North America, 6 from Asia, 5 from South America, and 5 from Oceania. 2. Submission 42 papers were submitted to the Student Research Workshop. The submission length was set to six (6) pages using the ACL style files. 35 papers were assigned two non-student and one student reviewer, 4 papers were assigned one non-student and one student reviewer, and 3 papers were assigned two non-student reviewers. Reviews were mostly done on-line. We accepted 12 of the papers. Some statistics for the submissions and acceptance are shown below (Tables 1-3). 3. Presentation Format The papers will be presented in half-hour slots (organized into three parallel sessions) allocated from the main conference. Continuing last year's format, for each accepted paper we have invited two senior researchers to act as panelists to give detailed feedback to the student author(s). Each slot would thus start with author presentation (18mins), followed by panelists feedback/discussion (7mins) and general Q&A (5mins). 4. Panelists Currently, we are in the process of recruiting 2 panelists for each presentation. 5. Problems The three co-chairs found the experience from organizing the workshop invaluable and rewarding. We would like to thank ACL for offering us this opportunity. 5.1. Format and Scheduling The format, i.e. whether it will be held during ACL or as a workshop before ACL, was not clear in the beginning. Due to this uncertainty we were not able to give the concrete date of the workshop before May 2001. 5.2. External Funding There have have been three applications for external funding: - Funding from the European Commission This proposal was turned down because it arrived one week after the deadline. - Funding from the Portuguese Foundation for Science & Technology This proposal was turned down because this type of events is not covered by this agency. - Funding from NSF This proposal is still pending 5.3. Student Status Although it was clearly stated in the call for papers that ``all authors must be students'', we have received a submission where one of the co-authors was a non-student. Since we have found out after accepting the paper, we had to withdraw it and instead accepted a submission which was held back in case of withdrawal. Given this experience we advise that each submission should be accompanied by a document confirming the student status of each author. (As it was recommended in the guidelines by the ACL Executive committee.) Table 1: Papers by country Country Submitted Accepted USA 8 (19.05%) 3 UK 7 (16.66%) 2 France 6 (14.29%) 0 Canada 3 ( 7.14%) 1 China 3 ( 7.14%) 0 Czech Republic 3 ( 7.14%) 1 Netherlands 2 ( 4.76%) 2 Portugal 2 ( 4.76%) 0 Spain 2 ( 4.76%) 0 Greece 1 ( 2.38%) 1 Israel 1 ( 2.38%) 0 Italy 1 ( 2.38%) 1 South Korea 1 ( 2.38%) 0 Poland 1 ( 2.38%) 0 Sweden 1 ( 2.38%) 1 Table 2: Papers by geographical area Area Submitted Accepted Acceptance rate North America 11 4 36.36% Europe 26 8 30.76% Asia 5 0 0.00% Table 3: Papers by topics Topic Submitted Accepted 1. Syntax and Parsing 5 (11.90%) 4 2. Knowledge acquisition/extraction 14 (33.33%) 4 3. Generation 1 ( 2.38%) 0 4. Statistical language processing 0 ( 0.00%) 0 5. Natural language systems 0 ( 0.00%) 0 6. Discourse and dialogue 2 ( 4.76%) 0 7. Grammar 0 ( 0.00%) 0 8. Semantics 8 (19.05%) 2 9. Corpus analysis 2 ( 4.76%) 0 10. Machine translation 2 ( 4.76%) 0 11. Speech 2 ( 4.76%) 0 12. Morphology 4 ( 9.52%) 2 13. Other 2 ( 4.76%) 0