**OVERVIEW**
Machine Reading for Question Answering (MRQA) is a dedicated workshop for research on machine reading systems that answer questions by understanding context documents. This year, we seek submissions on broad, recent research on MRQA in addition to two special tracks: interpretability and multilinguality.
**CALL FOR PAPERS**
We seek regular paper submissions on various aspects of machine reading systems for question answering, including but not limited to: accuracy, speed, scalability, robustness, dataset creation, dataset analysis, and error analysis. General MRQA submissions should be submitted to our research track.
Submissions related to MRQA 2021’s special themes of interpretability and multilinguality will be featured in two separate tracks. The interpretability track seeks submissions related to QA model introspection and explainability, including, but not limited to, topics such as rationales, attention, and model analysis. Our multilinguality track seeks submissions including, but not limited to, topics such as cross-lingual generalization, language transfer, datasets, and language-robust evaluation metrics.
** SUBMISSION GUIDELINES **
Submissions should be at least 4 and at most 8 pages, not including citations; final versions of papers will be given one additional page (up to 9 pages). All submissions will be reviewed according to the same standards, regardless of length (i.e., there are no separate short and long paper tracks). Submissions may optionally include an appendix with no length restriction. The main paper must remain fully self-contained, as reviewers will not be asked to review appendices. Please format your papers using the standard style files for EMNLP 2021.
We accept submissions of both previously unpublished work and work recently published elsewhere. Previously unpublished work must be anonymized, as it will go through a double-blind review process, and will be included in the workshop proceedings if accepted. Recently published work does not need to be anonymized and will not go through the review process. The submission should clearly indicate the original venue and will be accepted if the organizers think the work will benefit from exposure to the audience of this workshop. Work published elsewhere will not be included in the workshop proceedings. This year, we are using a hybrid submission system: papers may be submitted either via the Softconf START system or the ACL Rolling Review system.
Call for Papers: https://mrqa.github.io/cfp
Submission link: https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2021/MRQA
ACL rolling review: https://aclrollingreview.org/
Submission deadline: August 5th
Submission deadline *with* reviews (from ACL Rolling Review): August 27th
Notification of acceptance: September 5th
Camera-ready deadline: September 15th
All submission deadlines are 11:59 PM GMT -12 (anywhere in the world).
Note that to receive reviews from ACL Rolling Review by the August 27 deadline, submissions should be made to ARR by July 15th.
**ORGANIZING COMMITTEE**
Adam Fisch, MIT
Alon Talmor, Tel Aviv University
Danqi Chen, Princeton University
Eunsol Choi, The University of Texas at Austin
Minjoon Seo, NAVER & KAIST
Patrick Lewis, Facebook AI Research & University College London
Robin Jia, Facebook AI Research & The University of Southern California
Sewon Min, The University of Washington