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2025Q3 Reports: SIGNLL

2025-07-21T15:22:41Z

Oabend: /* SIGNLL Annual Report (2024-25) */

= SIGNLL Annual Report (2024-25) =

The main goal of SIGNLL, ACL's special interest group on natural language learning, is to promote and inform about research on computational modeling of learning in natural languages. This is served by (i) the maintenance of an informative and up-to-date website and associated mailing list, and (ii) the organization of annual events (the CoNLL conference and the CoNLL shared tasks), and support of other related activities.

Our websites, located at URL http://www.signll.org for SIGNLL and at http://www.conll.org for CoNLL were maintained by SIGNLL's information officer Pieter Fivez until March 2021, and is now maintained by Jens Lemmens (also at U Antwerpen). This is complemented by an email list for announcements for SIGNLL-related events.

The current SIGNLL president is Omri Abend (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and the current SIGNLL secretary is Antske Fokkens (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam).

Apart from the officers, SIGNLL also has two consultative committees. The SIGNLL Steering Committee, composed by all past SIGNLL officers: Antal van den Bosch, Claire Cardie, Xavier Carreras, Alexander Clark, Walter Daelemans, Lluis Marquez, Hwee Tou Ng, Joakim Nivre, David Powers, Dan Roth, Julia Hockemaier, and Afra Alishahi; and the larger SIGNLL International Advisory Board (see http://www.signll.org/officers for a complete description of SIGNLL officers and boards). As of July 1, SIGNLL has 430 registered members.

== CoNLL 2024 ==

Starting in 2020, to differentiate itself from other NLP conferences, CoNLL adopted a focus on theoretically, cognitively and scientifically motivated approaches to computational linguistics, rather than on work driven by particular engineering applications.

The CoNLL conference 2024 was collocated with EMNLP 2024 in Miami. The program chairs were Malihe Alikhani (Northeastern University) and Libby Barak (Montclair State university). The publication chairs were Mert Inan (Northeastern University) and Julia Watson (University of Toronto). CoNLL 2024 ended up hosting the 2nd edition of the BabyLM challenge.

== CoNLL 2025 ==

CoNLL 2025 will take place on July 31st and August 1st in Vienna, Austria, and will be collocated with ACL 2025. The program chairs are Gemma Boleda (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) and Michael Roth (University of Technology Nuremberg). The publicity chairs are Snigdha Chaturvedi (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and Anvesh Rao Vijini (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). The publication chairs will be Emily Cheng (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) and Selina Meyer (University of Technology Nuremberg).

The conference got 218 archival and 20 non-archival submissions, which was a significant increase relative to the 97 submissions received in 2024.

The conference was also supposed to host a shared task, titled “Robust Word Sense Induction” (organizers: Ondřej Herman and Miloš Jakubíček and Pavel Rychlý and Vojtěch Kovář / Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic). The shared task was selected in a competitive process, following an open call. Nevertheless, the shared task was ultimately cancelled, due to a small number of submissions.

2025Q3 Reports: SIGNLL

2025-07-21T15:19:32Z

Oabend: Created page with "= SIGNLL Annual Report (2024-25) = The main goal of SIGNLL, ACL's special interest group on natural language learning, is to promote and inform about research on computationa..."

= SIGNLL Annual Report (2024-25) =

The main goal of SIGNLL, ACL's special interest group on natural language learning, is to promote and inform about research on computational modeling of learning in natural languages. This is served by (i) the maintenance of an informative and up-to-date website and associated mailing list, and (ii) the organization of annual events (the CoNLL conference and the CoNLL shared tasks), and support of other related activities.

Our websites, located at URL http://www.signll.org for SIGNLL and at www.conll.org for CoNLL were maintained by SIGNLL's information officer Pieter Fivez until March 2021, and is now maintained by Jens Lemmens (also at U Antwerpen). This is complemented by an email list for announcements for SIGNLL-related events.

The current SIGNLL president is Omri Abend (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and the current SIGNLL secretary is Antske Fokkens (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam).

Apart from the officers, SIGNLL also has two consultative committees. The SIGNLL Steering Committee, composed by all past SIGNLL officers: Antal van den Bosch, Claire Cardie, Xavier Carreras, Alexander Clark, Walter Daelemans, Lluis Marquez, Hwee Tou Ng, Joakim Nivre, David Powers, Dan Roth, Julia Hockemaier, and Afra Alishahi; and the larger SIGNLL International Advisory Board (see http://www.signll.org/officers for a complete description of SIGNLL officers and boards). As of July 1, SIGNLL has 430 registered members.

== CoNLL 2024 ==

Starting in 2020, to differentiate itself from other NLP conferences, CoNLL adopted a focus on theoretically, cognitively and scientifically motivated approaches to computational linguistics, rather than on work driven by particular engineering applications.

The CoNLL conference 2024 was collocated with EMNLP 2024 in Miami. The program chairs were Malihe Alikhani (Northeastern University) and Libby Barak (Montclair State university). The publication chairs were Mert Inan (Northeastern University) and Julia Watson (University of Toronto). CoNLL 2024 ended up hosting the 2nd edition of the BabyLM challenge.

== CoNLL 2025 ==

CoNLL 2025 will take place on July 31st and August 1st in Vienna, Austria, and will be collocated with ACL 2025. The program chairs are Gemma Boleda (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) and Michael Roth (University of Technology Nuremberg). The publicity chairs are Snigdha Chaturvedi (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and Anvesh Rao Vijini (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). The publication chairs will be Emily Cheng (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) and Selina Meyer (University of Technology Nuremberg).

The conference got 218 archival and 20 non-archival submissions, which was a significant increase relative to the 97 submissions received in 2024.

The conference was also supposed to host a shared task, titled “Robust Word Sense Induction” (organizers: Ondřej Herman and Miloš Jakubíček and Pavel Rychlý and Vojtěch Kovář / Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic). The shared task was selected in a competitive process, following an open call. Nevertheless, the shared task was ultimately cancelled, due to a small number of submissions.

SIG Compliance

2024-06-19T07:07:46Z

Oabend: /* List of SIGs */

== Guidelines ==

[http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=SIG_Creation_Guidelines ACL SIG Creation Guidelines]

== List of SIGs ==

=== SIGARAB: SIG on Arabic Natural Language Processing ===

'''web page''': http://www.sigarab.org/
'''contacts''': president Nizar Habash (nizar.habash@nyu.edu), secretary Wassim El-Hajj (we07@aub.edu.lb), Mona Diab treasurer (mdiab@andrew.cmu.edu)
'''members''': 841
'''elections (last,next)''': December 2022, December 2024
'''events''': [https://arabicnlp2024.sigarab.org/ ArabicNLP 2024], [https://arabicnlp2023.sigarab.org/ ArabicNLP 2023], [http://wanlp2022.arabic-nlp.net WANLP 2022], [https://osact5-lrec.github.io/ OSACT 2024], [https://osact-lrec.github.io/ OSACT 2022], [https://sites.google.com/view/arabicbigdata/home IWABigDAI 2022]; [https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=LGzh8jYAAAAJ ArabicNLP Scholar], [https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=YmKaJR4AAAAJ OSACT Scholar], [https://www.sigarab.org/arabic-nlp-archives Arabic NLP Archives]

=== SIGANN: SIG on annotation ===

'''web page''': https://sigann.github.io/
'''contacts''': president Amir Zeldes (amir.zeldes@georgetown.edu), secretary Ines Rehbein (rehbein@uni-mannheim.de)
'''members''': 150
'''elections (last,next)''': Oct. 2021, 2024
'''events''': LAW X at ACL 2016; LAW XI at EACL 2017; Joint Workshop on Linguistic Annotation, Multiword Expressions and Constructions (LAW-MWE-CxG-2018) at Coling; LAW XIII at ACL 2019;, LAW XIV at Coling 2020, LAW XV-DMR III at EMNLP 2021, LAW XVI at LREC 2022

=== SIGBioMed: SIG on biomedical natural language processing ===

'''web page''': http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/SIGBIOMED
'''contacts''': chair Dina Demner-Fushman (ddemner@gmail.com),
secretary Kevin Bretonnel Cohen (Kevin.Cohen@gmail.com)
'''members''': 224
'''elections (last, next)''': June 2022, June 2025
'''events''': Yearly BioNLP workshops

=== SIGDAT: SIG on linguistic data and corpus-based approaches to NLP ===

'''web page''': http://emnlp.org/
'''contacts''': president Mona Diab; Vice President: Isabelle Augenstein; Secretary: Chin-Yew Lin
'''members''': approx. 1200
'''elections (last, next)''': December 2023, December 2024
'''events''': EMNLP every year

=== SIGDIAL: SIG on discourse and dialogue ===

'''web page''': http://www.sigdial.org
'''contacts''': president Gabriel Skantze (skantze@kth.se),
secretary Vikram Ramanarayanan (vramanarayanan@ets.org)
'''members''': 581
'''elections (last, next)''': March 2021, 2023
'''events''': annual conference SIGDIAL; Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems (YRRSDS) annual event co-located with SIGDIAL

=== SIGEDU: SIG on building educational applications ===

'''web page''': https://sig-edu.org/
'''contacts''': president Jill Burstein (jill.burstein@ets.org), secretary Ekaterina Kochmar (Ekaterina.Kochmar@cl.cam.ac.uk)
'''members''': 240
'''elections (last,next)''': March 2021, March 2024
'''events''': Annual Workshops on Innovative Uses of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA)

=== SIGEL: SIG on endangered languages ===

'''web page''': https://acl-sigel.github.io/
'''contacts''': president Sarah Moeller (smoeller@ufl.edu), secretary Aditi Chaudhary (aditi138831@gmail.com)
'''members''': 116
'''elections (first,next)''': January 2021, January 2025
'''events''': ComputEL

=== SIGFSM: SIG on ﬁnite state methods and models in natural language processing ===

'''web page''': http://www.aclweb.org/aclwiki/SIGFSM
'''contacts''': president Andreas Maletti (andreas.maletti@uni-leipzig.de),
secretary Bruce Watson (bruce@bruce-watson.com)
'''members''': 131
'''elections (last, next)''': Summer 2020, Summer 2023
'''events''': FSMNLP 2021 (Stellenbosch, South Africa, canceled), FSMNLP 2023 (Stellenbosch, South Africa, canceled)

=== SIGGEN: SIG on natural language generation ===

'''web page''': https://aclweb.org/aclwiki/SIGGEN
'''contacts''': Emiel van Miltenburg (c.w.j.vanmiltenburg@tilburguniversity.edu),
secretary Chenghua Lin (c.lin@sheffield.ac.uk),
'''members''': 490
'''elections (last, next)''': December 2022, December 2024
'''events''': WebNLG 2016 (endorsed); CC-NLG 2016 (endorsed); INLG 2016; CC-NLG 2017 (endorsed); LiRA 2017 (endorsed); RST 2017 (endorsed); XCI 2017 (endorsed); INLG 2017; CC-NLG2018 (endorsed); 2IS&NLG 2018 (endorsed); NLG4HRI 2018 (endorsed); ATA 2018 (endorsed); INLG2018; INLG2019; INLG2020; INLG2021; GEM 2022 workshop (endorsed); NLG4Health 2022 (supported); INLG2022

=== SIGHAN: SIG on Chinese language ===

'''web page''': http://sighan.ling.washington.edu
'''contacts''': chair Nianwen Xue (xuen@brandeis.edu),
secretary Gina-Anne Levow (levow@u.washington.edu)
'''members''': 210
'''elections (last, next)''': December 2022, December 2024
'''events''': CIPS-SIGHAN 2014; SIGHAN Workshop 2015; SIGHAN Workshop 2017 at IJCNLP 2017

=== SIGHUM: SIG on language technologies for the socio-economic sciences and the humanities ===

'''web page''': https://sighum.wordpress.com/
'''contacts''': president Barbara McGillivray (barbara.mcgillivray@kcl.ac.uk), secretary Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb (s.degaetano@mx.uni-saarland.de), liaison representative Sara Tonelli (satonelli@fbk.eu)
'''members''': 168
'''elections (last, next)''': July 2022, July 2024
'''events''': LaTeCH at ACL 2016; LaTeCH-CLfL at ACL 2017; KnowRSH workshop at RANLP 2017; LaTeCH-CLfL at Coling 2018; Shared tasks in the Digital Humanities (https://sharedtasksinthedh.github.io/); 3rd Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature at NAACL 2019, LaTeCH-CLfL 2020, LaTeCH-CLfL 2021, LaTeCH-CLfL 2022, LaTeCH-CLfL 2023.

=== SIGLEX: SIG on the lexicon ===

'''web page''': http://www.siglex.org
'''contacts''': president Steven Bethard (bethard@arizona.edu), secretary Ekaterina Shutova (shutova.e@gmail.com)
'''members''': 485
'''elections (last, next)''': September 2022, August 2024
'''events''': Annual *SEM conference at NAACL 2024; Annual SemEval workshop at NAACL 2024; Annual MWE workshop at LREC-COLING 2024; Additional past sponsored and endorsed events are listed on the [https://aclanthology.org/sigs/siglex/ SIGLEX page of the ACL Anthology]

=== SIGMOL: SIG on mathematics of language ===

'''web page''': http://www.molweb.org
'''contacts''': president Henrik Björklund (henrikb@cs.umu.se), vice president Thomas Graf (mail@thomasgraf.net),
'''members''': 333
'''elections (last, next)''': May 2024, mid 2025
'''events''': MOL 2017, July 13–14, 2017 at Queen Mary University of London; MOL 2019, July 18-19, 2017 at Toronto University; MOL 2021, December 2021 as part of Mathematical Linguistics (MALIN 2021, December 10–17, 2021) at University of Montpellier (online)

=== SIGMORPHON: SIG for computational morphology, phonology, and phonetics ===

'''web page''': https://sigmorphon.github.io/
'''contacts''': president Garett Nicolai (garrett.nicolai@ubc.ca), secretary Miikka Silvferberg (Miikka.Silfverberg@helsinki.fi)
'''members''': 175
'''elections (last, next)''': Feb 2023, Feb 2025
'''events''': SIGMORPHON workshop at ACL 2016 including first shared task (Morphological Reinflection); the CoNLL-SIGMORPHON 2017 shared task (Universal Morphological Reinflection) at ACL 2017; SIGMORPHON at EMNLP 2018; the CoNLL-SIGMORPHON 2018 shared task at EMNLP 2018; SIGMORPHON at ACL 2019 including Crosslinguality and Context in Morphology shared task, SIGMORPHON 2020, SIGMORPHON 2021, SIGMORPHON 2022, SIGMORPHON 2023, SIGMORPHON 2024

=== SIGMT: SIG on machine translation ===

'''web page''': https://www.sigmt.org
'''contacts''': president Alexandra Birch (a.birch@ed.ac.uk), Secretary: Antonis Anastasopoulos, North America: Marine Carpuat, Europe: Ondrej Bojar, Asia: Masao Utiyama
'''members''': 180
'''elections (last)''': September 2021
'''events''': WMT conference and SSST workshop each year

=== SIGNLL: SIG on natural language learning ===

'''web page''': http://www.signll.org
'''contacts''': president Omri Abend (omri.abend@mail.huji.ac.il), secretary Antske Fokkens (antske.fokkens@vu.nl)
'''members''': 380
'''elections (last, next)''': August 2018, August 2021
'''events''': CoNLL every year; CoNLL-2017 co-located with ACL; CONLL-2018 co-located with EMNLP 2018; CONLL-2019 co-located with EMNLP 2019, CoNLL-2020 co-located with EMNLP 2020, CoNLL 2021 co-located with EMNLP 2021, CoNLL 2022 co-located with EMNLP 2022, CoNLL 2023 co-located with EMNLP 2023, CoNLL 2024 co-located with EMNLP 2024

=== SIGPARSE: SIG on parsing ===

'''web page''': https://www.sigparse.org
'''contacts''': president Stephan Oepen (oe@ifi.uio.no), secretary Kenji Sagae (sagae@ucdavis.edu),
'''members''': 266
'''elections (last, next)''': April 2019, April 2022
'''events''':IWPT 2015; SPMRL 2015 (endorsed) co-located with IWPT 2015; IWPT 2017 co-located with DepLing; Shared Task on Extrinsic Parser Evaluation (EPE) at IWPT/DepLing 2017; SyntaxFest 2019 (endorsed), IWPT 2020, IWPT 2021

=== SIGREP: SIG on representation learning ===

'''web page''': http://www.sigrep.org
'''contacts''': president Elena Voita (lena-voita@hotmail.com),
secretary Nora Kassner (kassner.nora@gmail.com)
'''members''': 2000
'''elections (last, next)''': October 2022, October 2024
'''events''': Repl4NLP at ACL 2016, ACL 2017, ACL 2018, ACL 2019, ACL 2020, ACL 2021, ACL 2022, ACL 2023

=== SIGSEC: SIG on NLP security ===

'''web page''': https://sig.llmsecurity.net
'''contacts''': President: Leon Derczynski ld@itu.dk, Secretary: Muhao Chen, Jekaterina Novikova
'''members''': 124
'''elections (last,next)''': -, 2024
'''events''': fortnightly talks - https://sig.llmsecurity.net/talks/

=== SIGSEM: SIG on computational semantics ===

'''web page''': http://www.sigsem.org
'''contacts''': president Sina Zarrieß (Sina.zarriess@uni-bielefeld.de),
secretary Stergios Chatzikyriakidis (stergios.chatzikyriakidis@uoc.gr)
'''members''': 880
'''elections (last,next)''': summer 2021, 2025
'''events''': IWCS 2015, IWCS 2017, ICWS 2019; Annual *SEM conference (jointly with SIGLEX) at ACL 2016, ACL 2017, NAACL 2018, NAACL 2019, virtual events 2020 and 2021

=== SIGSLAV: SIG on Slavic natural language processing ===

'''web page''': http://sigslav.cs.helsinki.fi/index.html
'''contacts''': chair Tomaz Erjavec (tomaz.erjavec@ijs.si)
secretary Preslav Nakov (pnakov@qf.org.qa)
'''members''': 110
'''elections (first,last)''': Winter 2020, winter 2023
'''events''': BSNLP at RANLP 2015; BSNLP at EACL 2017; Shared Task on Multilingual Named-entity Recognition and Cross-language Name Matching (loosely linked to BSNLP 2017); RUSSE 2018 Shared Task on Word Sense Induction and Disambiguation for the Russian Language; BSNLP at ACL 2019 including Shared Task on Multilingual NER for Slavic languages, BSNLP 2020

=== SIGSLPAT: SIG on speech and language processing for assistive technologies ===

'''web page''': http://www.slpat.org
'''contacts''': president Sarah Ebling (ebling@cl.uzh.ch), vice president Preethi Vaidyanathan (preethi@eyegaze.com), secretary-treasurer Emily Prud'hommeaux (prudhome@bc.edu), student member Zhengjun Yue (z.yue@sheffield.ac.uk)
'''elections (last, next)''': Fall 2020, Fall 2022
'''members''': 160
'''events''': SLPAT16 at Interspeech 2016; RaPID at LREC 2016; SLPAT19 at NAACL 2019; SPAT22 at ACL 2022

=== SIGSLT: SIG on Spoken Language Translation ===

'''web page''': http://www.iwslt.org
'''contacts''': president Marcello Federico (mrcfdr@gmail.com), secretary Sebastian Stüker (sebastian.stueker@kit.edu)
'''members''': 144
'''elections (first,next)''': First Oct 2022, every 2 years
'''events''': IWSLT 2004-2023;

=== SIGSUMM: SIG on Summarization ===

'''web page''': https://www.sigsumm.org/
'''contacts''': Liaison representative Yue Dong yue.dong@ucr.edu
'''members''': 52
'''elections (first,next)''': first Dec. 2023; every 2 years
'''events''': NewSumm EMNLP Workshop 2023

=== SIGTURK: SIG on Turkic Languages ===

'''web page''': https://sigturk.github.io/
'''contacts''': president Duygu Ataman (ataman@nyu.edu), secretary Sardana Ivanova (sardana.ivanova@helsinki.fi)
'''members''': 95
'''elections (first,next)''': Founded in 2022, elections every year
'''events''': TBA;

=== SIGTYP: SIG on Linguistic Typology ===

'''web page''': https://sigtyp.github.io/
'''contacts''': president Ekaterina Vylomova (ekaterina.vylomova@unimelb.edu.au), secretary Ryan Cotterell (ryan.cotterell@gmail.com)
'''members''': 420
'''elections (first,next)''': tbc
'''events''': First workshop on Typology for Polyglot Natural Language Processing at ACL 2019; Second workshop on Computational Research in Linguistic Typology at EMNLP 2020; Third workshop on Computational Typology and Multilingual NLP at NAACL 2021, SIGTYP 2022 (NAACL 2022), SIGTYP 2023 (EACL 2023), SIGTYP 2024 (EACL 2024)

=== SIGUR: SIG on Uralic languages ===

'''web page''': https://acl-sigur.github.io/
'''contacts''': chair Mika Hämäläinen (mika.hamalainen@metropolia.fi),
secretary Francis Tyers (ftyers@prompsit.com)
'''members''': 60
'''elections (last, next)''': 2023, 2025
'''events''': IWCLUL 2017, IWCLUL 2021, IWCLUL 2023

=== SIGWAC: SIG on web as corpus ===

'''web page''': http://www.sigwac.org.uk
'''contacts''': presidents: Nikola Ljubešić (nljubesi@gmail.com, Jožef Stefan Institute) and Benoît Sagot (benoit.sagot@inria.fr, INRIA); secretaries: Veronika Laippala (mavela@utu.fi, University of Turku) and Pedro Ortiz Suarez (pedro.ortiz@uni-mannheim.de, Mannheim University)
'''members''': 178
'''elections (last, next)''': January 2022, 2024
'''events''': WAC-X at ACL 2016; WAC-XI at Corpus Linguistics Conference 2017, WAC-XII 2020

=== SIGWrit: SIG on writing systems and written language ===

'''web page''':
'''contacts''': president (pro-temp): Richard Sproat (rws@xoba.com); vice-president (pro-temp): Emily Prud’hommeaux (emilytucker@gmail.com); Secretary-Treasurer (pro-temp): Kyle Gorman (kylebgorman@gmail.com); Student-member (pro-temp): Noah Hermalin (nmhermalin@berkeley.edu)
'''members''': 44 (indicated interest)
'''elections (last, next)''': -, January 2025
'''events''': CAWL at ACL 2023

SIG Compliance

2024-06-19T07:03:26Z

Oabend: /* List of SIGs */

== Guidelines ==

[http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=SIG_Creation_Guidelines ACL SIG Creation Guidelines]

== List of SIGs ==

=== SIGARAB: SIG on Arabic Natural Language Processing ===

'''web page''': http://www.sigarab.org/
'''contacts''': president Nizar Habash (nizar.habash@nyu.edu), secretary Wassim El-Hajj (we07@aub.edu.lb), Mona Diab treasurer (mdiab@andrew.cmu.edu)
'''members''': 841
'''elections (last,next)''': December 2022, December 2024
'''events''': [https://arabicnlp2024.sigarab.org/ ArabicNLP 2024], [https://arabicnlp2023.sigarab.org/ ArabicNLP 2023], [http://wanlp2022.arabic-nlp.net WANLP 2022], [https://osact5-lrec.github.io/ OSACT 2024], [https://osact-lrec.github.io/ OSACT 2022], [https://sites.google.com/view/arabicbigdata/home IWABigDAI 2022]; [https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=LGzh8jYAAAAJ ArabicNLP Scholar], [https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=YmKaJR4AAAAJ OSACT Scholar], [https://www.sigarab.org/arabic-nlp-archives Arabic NLP Archives]

=== SIGANN: SIG on annotation ===

'''web page''': https://sigann.github.io/
'''contacts''': president Amir Zeldes (amir.zeldes@georgetown.edu), secretary Ines Rehbein (rehbein@uni-mannheim.de)
'''members''': 150
'''elections (last,next)''': Oct. 2021, 2024
'''events''': LAW X at ACL 2016; LAW XI at EACL 2017; Joint Workshop on Linguistic Annotation, Multiword Expressions and Constructions (LAW-MWE-CxG-2018) at Coling; LAW XIII at ACL 2019;, LAW XIV at Coling 2020, LAW XV-DMR III at EMNLP 2021, LAW XVI at LREC 2022

=== SIGBioMed: SIG on biomedical natural language processing ===

'''web page''': http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/SIGBIOMED
'''contacts''': chair Dina Demner-Fushman (ddemner@gmail.com),
secretary Kevin Bretonnel Cohen (Kevin.Cohen@gmail.com)
'''members''': 224
'''elections (last, next)''': June 2022, June 2025
'''events''': Yearly BioNLP workshops

=== SIGDAT: SIG on linguistic data and corpus-based approaches to NLP ===

'''web page''': http://emnlp.org/
'''contacts''': president Mona Diab; Vice President: Isabelle Augenstein; Secretary: Chin-Yew Lin
'''members''': approx. 1200
'''elections (last, next)''': December 2023, December 2024
'''events''': EMNLP every year

=== SIGDIAL: SIG on discourse and dialogue ===

'''web page''': http://www.sigdial.org
'''contacts''': president Gabriel Skantze (skantze@kth.se),
secretary Vikram Ramanarayanan (vramanarayanan@ets.org)
'''members''': 581
'''elections (last, next)''': March 2021, 2023
'''events''': annual conference SIGDIAL; Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems (YRRSDS) annual event co-located with SIGDIAL

=== SIGEDU: SIG on building educational applications ===

'''web page''': https://sig-edu.org/
'''contacts''': president Jill Burstein (jill.burstein@ets.org), secretary Ekaterina Kochmar (Ekaterina.Kochmar@cl.cam.ac.uk)
'''members''': 240
'''elections (last,next)''': March 2021, March 2024
'''events''': Annual Workshops on Innovative Uses of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA)

=== SIGEL: SIG on endangered languages ===

'''web page''': https://acl-sigel.github.io/
'''contacts''': president Sarah Moeller (smoeller@ufl.edu), secretary Aditi Chaudhary (aditi138831@gmail.com)
'''members''': 116
'''elections (first,next)''': January 2021, January 2025
'''events''': ComputEL

=== SIGFSM: SIG on ﬁnite state methods and models in natural language processing ===

'''web page''': http://www.aclweb.org/aclwiki/SIGFSM
'''contacts''': president Andreas Maletti (andreas.maletti@uni-leipzig.de),
secretary Bruce Watson (bruce@bruce-watson.com)
'''members''': 131
'''elections (last, next)''': Summer 2020, Summer 2023
'''events''': FSMNLP 2021 (Stellenbosch, South Africa, canceled), FSMNLP 2023 (Stellenbosch, South Africa, canceled)

=== SIGGEN: SIG on natural language generation ===

'''web page''': https://aclweb.org/aclwiki/SIGGEN
'''contacts''': Emiel van Miltenburg (c.w.j.vanmiltenburg@tilburguniversity.edu),
secretary Chenghua Lin (c.lin@sheffield.ac.uk),
'''members''': 490
'''elections (last, next)''': December 2022, December 2024
'''events''': WebNLG 2016 (endorsed); CC-NLG 2016 (endorsed); INLG 2016; CC-NLG 2017 (endorsed); LiRA 2017 (endorsed); RST 2017 (endorsed); XCI 2017 (endorsed); INLG 2017; CC-NLG2018 (endorsed); 2IS&NLG 2018 (endorsed); NLG4HRI 2018 (endorsed); ATA 2018 (endorsed); INLG2018; INLG2019; INLG2020; INLG2021; GEM 2022 workshop (endorsed); NLG4Health 2022 (supported); INLG2022

=== SIGHAN: SIG on Chinese language ===

'''web page''': http://sighan.ling.washington.edu
'''contacts''': chair Nianwen Xue (xuen@brandeis.edu),
secretary Gina-Anne Levow (levow@u.washington.edu)
'''members''': 210
'''elections (last, next)''': December 2022, December 2024
'''events''': CIPS-SIGHAN 2014; SIGHAN Workshop 2015; SIGHAN Workshop 2017 at IJCNLP 2017

=== SIGHUM: SIG on language technologies for the socio-economic sciences and the humanities ===

'''web page''': https://sighum.wordpress.com/
'''contacts''': president Barbara McGillivray (barbara.mcgillivray@kcl.ac.uk), secretary Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb (s.degaetano@mx.uni-saarland.de), liaison representative Sara Tonelli (satonelli@fbk.eu)
'''members''': 168
'''elections (last, next)''': July 2022, July 2024
'''events''': LaTeCH at ACL 2016; LaTeCH-CLfL at ACL 2017; KnowRSH workshop at RANLP 2017; LaTeCH-CLfL at Coling 2018; Shared tasks in the Digital Humanities (https://sharedtasksinthedh.github.io/); 3rd Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature at NAACL 2019, LaTeCH-CLfL 2020, LaTeCH-CLfL 2021, LaTeCH-CLfL 2022, LaTeCH-CLfL 2023.

=== SIGLEX: SIG on the lexicon ===

'''web page''': http://www.siglex.org
'''contacts''': president Steven Bethard (bethard@arizona.edu), secretary Ekaterina Shutova (shutova.e@gmail.com)
'''members''': 485
'''elections (last, next)''': September 2022, August 2024
'''events''': Annual *SEM conference at NAACL 2024; Annual SemEval workshop at NAACL 2024; Annual MWE workshop at LREC-COLING 2024; Additional past sponsored and endorsed events are listed on the [https://aclanthology.org/sigs/siglex/ SIGLEX page of the ACL Anthology]

=== SIGMOL: SIG on mathematics of language ===

'''web page''': http://www.molweb.org
'''contacts''': president Henrik Björklund (henrikb@cs.umu.se), vice president Thomas Graf (mail@thomasgraf.net),
'''members''': 333
'''elections (last, next)''': May 2024, mid 2025
'''events''': MOL 2017, July 13–14, 2017 at Queen Mary University of London; MOL 2019, July 18-19, 2017 at Toronto University; MOL 2021, December 2021 as part of Mathematical Linguistics (MALIN 2021, December 10–17, 2021) at University of Montpellier (online)

=== SIGMORPHON: SIG for computational morphology, phonology, and phonetics ===

'''web page''': https://sigmorphon.github.io/
'''contacts''': president Garett Nicolai (garrett.nicolai@ubc.ca), secretary Miikka Silvferberg (Miikka.Silfverberg@helsinki.fi)
'''members''': 175
'''elections (last, next)''': Feb 2023, Feb 2025
'''events''': SIGMORPHON workshop at ACL 2016 including first shared task (Morphological Reinflection); the CoNLL-SIGMORPHON 2017 shared task (Universal Morphological Reinflection) at ACL 2017; SIGMORPHON at EMNLP 2018; the CoNLL-SIGMORPHON 2018 shared task at EMNLP 2018; SIGMORPHON at ACL 2019 including Crosslinguality and Context in Morphology shared task, SIGMORPHON 2020, SIGMORPHON 2021, SIGMORPHON 2022, SIGMORPHON 2023, SIGMORPHON 2024

=== SIGMT: SIG on machine translation ===

'''web page''': https://www.sigmt.org
'''contacts''': president Alexandra Birch (a.birch@ed.ac.uk), Secretary: Antonis Anastasopoulos, North America: Marine Carpuat, Europe: Ondrej Bojar, Asia: Masao Utiyama
'''members''': 180
'''elections (last)''': September 2021
'''events''': WMT conference and SSST workshop each year

=== SIGNLL: SIG on natural language learning ===

'''web page''': http://www.signll.org
'''contacts''': president Omri Abend (omri.abend@mail.huji.ac.il), secretary Antske Fokkens (antske.fokkens@vu.nl)
'''members''': 380
'''elections (last, next)''': August 2018, August 2021
'''events''': CoNLL every year; CoNLL-2017 co-located with ACL; CONLL-2018 co-located with EMNLP 2018; CONLL-2019 co-located with EMNLP 2019, CoNLL-2020 co-located with EMNLP 2020, CoNLL 2021 co-located with EMNLP 2021

=== SIGPARSE: SIG on parsing ===

'''web page''': https://www.sigparse.org
'''contacts''': president Stephan Oepen (oe@ifi.uio.no), secretary Kenji Sagae (sagae@ucdavis.edu),
'''members''': 266
'''elections (last, next)''': April 2019, April 2022
'''events''':IWPT 2015; SPMRL 2015 (endorsed) co-located with IWPT 2015; IWPT 2017 co-located with DepLing; Shared Task on Extrinsic Parser Evaluation (EPE) at IWPT/DepLing 2017; SyntaxFest 2019 (endorsed), IWPT 2020, IWPT 2021

=== SIGREP: SIG on representation learning ===

'''web page''': http://www.sigrep.org
'''contacts''': president Elena Voita (lena-voita@hotmail.com),
secretary Nora Kassner (kassner.nora@gmail.com)
'''members''': 2000
'''elections (last, next)''': October 2022, October 2024
'''events''': Repl4NLP at ACL 2016, ACL 2017, ACL 2018, ACL 2019, ACL 2020, ACL 2021, ACL 2022, ACL 2023

=== SIGSEC: SIG on NLP security ===

'''web page''': https://sig.llmsecurity.net
'''contacts''': President: Leon Derczynski ld@itu.dk, Secretary: Muhao Chen, Jekaterina Novikova
'''members''': 124
'''elections (last,next)''': -, 2024
'''events''': fortnightly talks - https://sig.llmsecurity.net/talks/

=== SIGSEM: SIG on computational semantics ===

'''web page''': http://www.sigsem.org
'''contacts''': president Sina Zarrieß (Sina.zarriess@uni-bielefeld.de),
secretary Stergios Chatzikyriakidis (stergios.chatzikyriakidis@uoc.gr)
'''members''': 880
'''elections (last,next)''': summer 2021, 2025
'''events''': IWCS 2015, IWCS 2017, ICWS 2019; Annual *SEM conference (jointly with SIGLEX) at ACL 2016, ACL 2017, NAACL 2018, NAACL 2019, virtual events 2020 and 2021

=== SIGSLAV: SIG on Slavic natural language processing ===

'''web page''': http://sigslav.cs.helsinki.fi/index.html
'''contacts''': chair Tomaz Erjavec (tomaz.erjavec@ijs.si)
secretary Preslav Nakov (pnakov@qf.org.qa)
'''members''': 110
'''elections (first,last)''': Winter 2020, winter 2023
'''events''': BSNLP at RANLP 2015; BSNLP at EACL 2017; Shared Task on Multilingual Named-entity Recognition and Cross-language Name Matching (loosely linked to BSNLP 2017); RUSSE 2018 Shared Task on Word Sense Induction and Disambiguation for the Russian Language; BSNLP at ACL 2019 including Shared Task on Multilingual NER for Slavic languages, BSNLP 2020

=== SIGSLPAT: SIG on speech and language processing for assistive technologies ===

'''web page''': http://www.slpat.org
'''contacts''': president Sarah Ebling (ebling@cl.uzh.ch), vice president Preethi Vaidyanathan (preethi@eyegaze.com), secretary-treasurer Emily Prud'hommeaux (prudhome@bc.edu), student member Zhengjun Yue (z.yue@sheffield.ac.uk)
'''elections (last, next)''': Fall 2020, Fall 2022
'''members''': 160
'''events''': SLPAT16 at Interspeech 2016; RaPID at LREC 2016; SLPAT19 at NAACL 2019; SPAT22 at ACL 2022

=== SIGSLT: SIG on Spoken Language Translation ===

'''web page''': http://www.iwslt.org
'''contacts''': president Marcello Federico (mrcfdr@gmail.com), secretary Sebastian Stüker (sebastian.stueker@kit.edu)
'''members''': 144
'''elections (first,next)''': First Oct 2022, every 2 years
'''events''': IWSLT 2004-2023;

=== SIGSUMM: SIG on Summarization ===

'''web page''': https://www.sigsumm.org/
'''contacts''': Liaison representative Yue Dong yue.dong@ucr.edu
'''members''': 52
'''elections (first,next)''': first Dec. 2023; every 2 years
'''events''': NewSumm EMNLP Workshop 2023

=== SIGTURK: SIG on Turkic Languages ===

'''web page''': https://sigturk.github.io/
'''contacts''': president Duygu Ataman (ataman@nyu.edu), secretary Sardana Ivanova (sardana.ivanova@helsinki.fi)
'''members''': 95
'''elections (first,next)''': Founded in 2022, elections every year
'''events''': TBA;

=== SIGTYP: SIG on Linguistic Typology ===

'''web page''': https://sigtyp.github.io/
'''contacts''': president Ekaterina Vylomova (ekaterina.vylomova@unimelb.edu.au), secretary Ryan Cotterell (ryan.cotterell@gmail.com)
'''members''': 420
'''elections (first,next)''': tbc
'''events''': First workshop on Typology for Polyglot Natural Language Processing at ACL 2019; Second workshop on Computational Research in Linguistic Typology at EMNLP 2020; Third workshop on Computational Typology and Multilingual NLP at NAACL 2021, SIGTYP 2022 (NAACL 2022), SIGTYP 2023 (EACL 2023), SIGTYP 2024 (EACL 2024)

=== SIGUR: SIG on Uralic languages ===

'''web page''': https://acl-sigur.github.io/
'''contacts''': chair Mika Hämäläinen (mika.hamalainen@metropolia.fi),
secretary Francis Tyers (ftyers@prompsit.com)
'''members''': 60
'''elections (last, next)''': 2023, 2025
'''events''': IWCLUL 2017, IWCLUL 2021, IWCLUL 2023

=== SIGWAC: SIG on web as corpus ===

'''web page''': http://www.sigwac.org.uk
'''contacts''': presidents: Nikola Ljubešić (nljubesi@gmail.com, Jožef Stefan Institute) and Benoît Sagot (benoit.sagot@inria.fr, INRIA); secretaries: Veronika Laippala (mavela@utu.fi, University of Turku) and Pedro Ortiz Suarez (pedro.ortiz@uni-mannheim.de, Mannheim University)
'''members''': 178
'''elections (last, next)''': January 2022, 2024
'''events''': WAC-X at ACL 2016; WAC-XI at Corpus Linguistics Conference 2017, WAC-XII 2020

=== SIGWrit: SIG on writing systems and written language ===

'''web page''':
'''contacts''': president (pro-temp): Richard Sproat (rws@xoba.com); vice-president (pro-temp): Emily Prud’hommeaux (emilytucker@gmail.com); Secretary-Treasurer (pro-temp): Kyle Gorman (kylebgorman@gmail.com); Student-member (pro-temp): Noah Hermalin (nmhermalin@berkeley.edu)
'''members''': 44 (indicated interest)
'''elections (last, next)''': -, January 2025
'''events''': CAWL at ACL 2023

2020Q3 Reports: Faculty Advisors to the SRW

2020-07-21T15:05:49Z

Oabend: Created page with "Most of the details about the SRW can be found in the student chair’s report [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Student_Research_Workshop_Chai..."

Most of the details about the SRW can be found in the student chair’s report [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Student_Research_Workshop_Chairs]. The report below is meant to give an overview of the faculty advisors’ roles and responsibilities.

=== SRW faculty Advisors ===
Omri Abend (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Sujian Li (Peking University), Zhou Yu (University of California)

=== Appointing SRW Student Chairs ===
Rotem Dror (Israel Institute of Technology), Jiangming Liu (The University of Edinburgh), Shruti Rijhwani (Carnegie Mellon University), Yizhong Wang(University of Washington)

Four student co-chairs are selected with consideration of gender, ethnicity and geolocation. Student co-chairs should be appointed as soon as possible and they will take most of the responsibilities of the student workshop. For ACL SRW 2020, the student chairs were selected in May, 2019, except for Yizhong, who joined the team later on.

=== Funding ===
Funding was used to support the registration and membership fees for attendees of the SRW. In order to encourage students to volunteer to the student volunteer program, we covered the registration fee for all attendees, while volunteers were refunded their membership fee as well.

* Applying to the NSF fund: We planned the NSF proposal in November 2019. We received 15K USD from the program, which were partially used. The rest will be rolled over for next year.

* Search for other external funding possibilities: We attempted to form industry partnerships (by ourselves, and also by contacting the sponsorship chairs), but did not manage to recruit funding this way.

* Don and Betty Walker International Student Fund: Kindly supported the SRW as well.

=== Collaborating with Student Co-chairs ===
These are the main topics on which we advised and collaborated with the student co-chairs:

* Infrastructure: website, email and Twitter accounts.

* Deciding on the schedule.

* Selecting mentors and reviewers: mentors were recruited both for the pre-submission phase as well as for the post-submission phase (for helping with the presentations and with the camera-ready). The pre-mentoring phase further included supplying the participants with licenses for Grammarly (generously donated by Grammarly itself).

* Deciding on the review form, paper submission and paper reviewing process.

* Deciding on the SRW budget and student travel award support: we issued a joint call for student scholarships and for the student volunteer program. We also coordinated this effort with the D&I chairs.

* Feedback on the proceedings.

* About converting to an online format: notifying authors to select time zones and deciding the SRW sessions.

=== Some suggestions for future SRWs ===

* With different time zones, it is difficult to find an appropriate time for all the members to talk. We mainly use emails instead, and had online meetings of part of the team where it seemed more effective.
* About ethics: we recommend adding to the checks applied to the submissions before handing over the camera ready to the publication chairs a verification that improper content was removed from the submission (where applicable and indicated so by one of the reviewers or chairs).
* About online meeting: It is not easy to create a more familiar atmosphere in an online conference. We attempted to do so through a designated channel for the SRW, publishing the SRW specifically on Twitter (in addition to the publicity of the main conference), and attending some of the presentations ourselves. The SRW was held in parallel to the main conference, which worked well. If the SRW is to be held virtually next year as well, it would be good to think about creative ways to enhance the sense of familiarity in this challenging format.
* About funding: We have contacted some industry partners which have sponsored the main conference and failed to obtain the industry sponsorship. We think that the difference between SRW sponsorship and main conference sponsorship should be clarified. One way to do so would perhaps be to have a designated sponsorship option for the SRW.

2020Q1 Reports: ACL 2020

2020-02-19T15:19:14Z

Oabend:

== General Chair ==
Dan Jurafsky, Stanford University

The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) will take place in Seattle, Washington at the Hyatt Regency Seattle in downtown Seattle from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.

We have a great set of chairs! We are continuing 2019's new roles (Diversity and Inclusion chairs, Remote Presentation Chairs, AV Chairs) and adding new ones: (Sustainability chair), and we are doing well in demographic representation among our chairs (gender and region).

Following advice from last year, we have been using Slack for most intra-committee communication (and we put the Slack channel into the ACL pro space, so it can be preserved for future years), and using email only when absolutely necessary.

As usual, the growing size of the conference (both in papers and attendees) is a challenge, but both in papers and space we have been doing well (see the individual chair summaries below).

[this summary in progress]

== Program Chairs ==
Joyce Chai, University of Michigan

Natalie Schluter, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Joel Tetreault, Dataminr, USA

== Local Organisation Chairs ==
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL

With advice from:

Jianfeng Gao, Microsoft Research

Luke Zettlemoyer, University of Washington

== Tutorial Chairs ==

Agata Savary, University of Tours, France

Yue Zhang, Westlake University, Hangzhou, China

The call, submission, reviewing and selection of tutorials was coordinated jointly for 4 conferences: ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP.

Before drafting the call, we collected lists of tutorials offered within the past 4 years. We analysed previous calls for tutorials and reports from tutorial chairs (from [https://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2016Q3_Reports:_Tutorial_Chairs 2016], [https://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2017Q3_Reports:_Tutorial_Chairs 2017], [https://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2018Q3_Reports:_Tutorial_Chairs 2018] and [http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2019Q1_Reports:_ACL_2019 2019]). We consulted previous tutorial chairs with a questionnaire including questions about: the number of submissions, encouraging submissions on specific topics or from specific lecturers, the review procedure, the evaluation criteria, the post-tutorial availability of the slides/codes, and lessons learned from tutorial coordination. We also discussed the publication of slides and video recordings from future tutorials with the persons in charge of the ACL Anthology. As a result of these steps, we created two new sections for the [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Conference_Handbook ACL Conference Handbook] (future chairs might consider updating these documents yearly):
* the list of [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Past_tutorials past tutorials] at ACL, COLING, EACL, EMNLP, and NAACL in 2016-2019
* a [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Tutorial_chair_handbook tutorial chair handbook]

The final [https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/joint-call-tutorial-proposals-aclaacl-ijcnlpemnlpcoling-2020 call] differs from previous calls in several aspects: (i) the expectations about tutorial proposals were made clearer, (ii) following the central ACL decision, the teachers' payment policy was replaced by a fee-waiving policy, (iii) the required submission details include two new items: diversity considerations and agreement for open access publication of slides, codes, data and video recordings, (iv) the evaluation criteria (see below) are announced.

We recruited a review committee of 19 members, including the 8 tutorial chairs and 11 external members selected for their large understanding of the NLP domain and a good experience in reviewing and/or tutorial teaching:

'''Review Committee'''
* Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne, Australia) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Daniel Beck (University of Melbourne, Australia) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair
* Emily M. Bender (University of Washington, WA, USA)
* Erik Cambria (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
* Gaël Dias (University of Caen Normandie, France)
* Stefan Evert (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)
* Yang Liu (Tsinghua University, Beijing, China)
* Agata Savary (University of Tours, France) - ACL 2020 tutorial chair
* João Sedoc (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA)
* Lucia Specia (Sheffield University, UK) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair
* Xu SUN (Peking University, China)
* Yulia Tsvetkov (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA)
* Benjamin Van Durme (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Aline Villavicencio (University of Sheffield, UK and Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Taro Watanabe (Google, Inc., Tokyo, Japan)
* Aaron Steven White (University of Rochester, NY, USA)
* Fei Xia (University of Washington, WA, USA) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Yue Zhang (Westlake University, Hangzhou, China) - ACL 2020 tutorial chair
* Meishan Zhang (Tianjin University, China)

In total, we received 43 submissions for the 4 conferences. Each reviewer was assigned 6-7 proposals and each proposal received 3 reviews. The selection criteria included: clarity and preparedness, novelty or timely character of the topic, lecturers' experience, likely audience interest, open access of the teaching material, diversity aspects (multilingualism, gender, age and country of the lecturers), and compatibility with the preferred venues.
We accepted 31 proposals, 2 proposals were further withdrawn by the authors.

The decision making was handled via an online meeting of the 8 tutorial chairs. In particular, the selection of tutorials for each conference was done via the expression of interest of the tutorial chairs on a round-robin basis. Some slight adjustments were also performed after the meeting to better fit the authors' preferences. In total, 8, 8, 8 and 7 proposals were selected for ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP, respectively. Upon the announcement the results, 2 of the proposals accepted for AACL-IJCNLP were withdrawn.

The submission, review, selection and collection of final material for all tutorials was handled via a dedicated SoftConf space, shared by the 4 coordinating conferences. After the selection of proposals, a separate track was created on SoftConf for each conference. The final submission page (one per conference) was set up so as to collect all the necessary data including notably: the tutorial slides, URLs for course material (if any), printable material (if any) and agreement for open access publication.

The final selection for ACL 2020 consists of the following 8 tutorials of 3 hours each (each of them had ACL as the preferred or the second preferred venue):

'''Morning Tutorials'''

'''T1: Interpretability and Analysis in Neural NLP''' (cutting-edge) 
Yonatan Belinkov, Sebastian Gehrmann and Ellie Pavlick 
While deep learning has transformed the NLP field and impacted the larger computational linguistics community, the rise of neural networks is stained by their opaque nature: It is challenging to interpret the inner workings of neural network models, and explicate their behavior. Therefore, in the last few years, an increasingly large body of work has been devoted to the analysis and interpretation of neural network models in NLP. 
This body of work is so far lacking a common framework and methodology. Moreover, approaching the analysis of modern neural networks can be difficult for newcomers to the field. This tutorial aims to fill this gap and introduce the nascent field of interpretability and analysis of neural networks in NLP. 
The tutorial covers the main lines of analysis work, such as probing classifier, behavior studies and test suites, psycholinguistic methods, visualizations, adversarial examples, and other methods. We highlight not only the most commonly applied analysis methods, but also the specific limitations and shortcomings of current approaches, in order to inform participants where to focus future efforts.

'''T2: Multi-modal Information Extraction from Text, Semi-structured, and Tabular Data on the Web''' (cutting-edge) 
Xin Luna Dong, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Colin Lockard and Prashant Shiralkar 
The World Wide Web contains vast quantities of textual information in several forms: unstructured text, template-based semi-structured webpages (which present data in key-value pairs and lists), and tables. Methods for extracting information from these sources and converting it to a structured form have been a target of research from the natural language processing (NLP), data mining, and database communities. While these researchers have largely separated extraction from web data into different problems based on the modality of the data, they have faced similar problems such as learning with limited labeled data, defining (or avoiding defining) ontologies, making use of prior knowledge, and scaling solutions to deal with the size of the Web. 
In this tutorial we take a holistic view toward information extraction, exploring the commonalities in the challenges and solutions developed to address these different forms of text. We will explore the approaches targeted at unstructured text that largely rely on learning syntactic or semantic textual patterns, approaches targeted at semi-structured documents that learn to identify structural patterns in the template, and approaches targeting web tables which rely heavily on entity linking and type information. 
While these different data modalities have largely been considered separately in the past, recent research has started taking a more inclusive approach toward textual extraction, in which the multiple signals offered by textual, layout, and visual clues are combined into a single extraction model made possible by new deep learning approaches. At the same time, trends within purely textual extraction have shifted toward full-document understanding rather than considering sentences as independent units. With this in mind, it is worth considering the information extraction problem as a whole to motivate solutions that harness textual semantics along with visual and semi-structured layout information. We will discuss these approaches and suggest avenues for future work.

'''T3: Reviewing Natural Language Processing Research''' (introductory) 
Kevin Cohen, Karën Fort, Margot Mieskes and Aurélie Névéol 
As the demand for reviewing grows, so must the pool of reviewers. As the [http://www.livecongress.it/aol/indexSA.php?id=E2EAED7D&ticket= survey] presented by Graham Neubig at the 2019 ACL showed, a considerable number of reviewers are junior researchers, who might lack the experience and expertise necessary for high-quality reviews. Some of them might not have the environment or lack opportunities that allow them to learn the skills necessary. A tutorial on reviewing for the NLP community might increase reviewers’ confidence, as well as the quality of the reviews. This introductory tutorial will cover the goals, processes, and evaluation of reviewing research papers in natural language processing.

'''T4: Stylized Text Generation: Approaches and Applications''' (cutting-edge) 
Lili Mou and Olga Vechtomova 
Text generation has played an important role in various applications of natural language processing (NLP), and kn recent studies, researchers are paying increasing attention to modeling and manipulating the style of the generation text, which we call stylized text generation. In this tutorial, we will provide a comprehensive literature review in this direction. We start from the definition of style and different settings of stylized text generation, illustrated with various applications. Then, we present different settings of stylized generation, such as parallel supervised, style label-supervised, and unsupervised. In each setting, we delve deep into machine learning methods, including embedding learning techniques to represent style}, adversarial learning and reinforcement learning with cycle consistency to match content but to distinguish different styles. We also introduce current approaches of evaluating stylized text generation systems. We conclude our tutorial by presenting the challenges of stylized text generation and discussing future directions, such as small-data training, non-categorical style modeling, and a generalized scope of style transfer (e.g., controlling the syntax as a style).

'''Afternoon Tutorials'''

'''T5: Achieving Common Ground in Multi-modal Dialogue''' (cutting-edge) 
Malihe Alikhani and Matthew Stone 
All communication aims at achieving common ground (grounding): interlocutors can work together effectively only with mutual beliefs about what the state of the world is, about what their goals are, and about how they plan to make their goals a reality. Computational dialogue research offers some classic results on grouding, which unfortunately offer scant guidance to the design of grounding modules and behaviors in cutting-edge systems. In this tutorial, we focus on three main topic areas: 1) grounding in human-human communication; 2) grounding in dialogue systems; and 3) grounding in multi-modal interactive systems, including image-oriented conversations and human-robot interactions. We highlight a number of achievements of recent computational research in coordinating complex content, show how these results lead to rich and challenging opportunities for doing grounding in more flexible and powerful ways, and canvass relevant insights from the literature on human--human conversation. We expect that the tutorial will be of interest to researchers in dialogue systems, computational semantics and cognitive modeling, and hope that it will catalyze research and system building that more directly explores the creative, strategic ways conversational agents might be able to seek and offer evidence about their understanding of their interlocutors.

'''T6: Commonsense Reasoning for Natural Language Processing''' (introductory) 
Maarten Sap, Vered Shwartz, Antoine Bosselut, Dan Roth and Yejin Choi 
In our tutorial, we (1) outline the various types of commonsense (e.g., physical, social), and (2) discuss techniques to gather and represent commonsense knowledge, while highlighting the challenges specific to this type of knowledge (e.g., reporting bias). We will then (3) discuss the types of commonsense knowledge captured by modern NLP systems (e.g., large pretrained language models), and (4) present ways to measure systems' commonsense reasoning abilities. We finish with (5) a discussion of various ways in which commonsense reasoning can be used to improve performance on NLP tasks, exemplified by an (6) interactive session on integrating commonsense into a downstream task.

'''T7: Integrating Ethics into the NLP Curriculum''' (introductory) 
Emily M. Bender, Dirk Hovy and Alexandra Schofield 
Our goal in this tutorial is to empower NLP researchers and practitioners with tools and resources to teach others about how to ethically apply NLP techniques. Our tutorial will present both high-level strategies for developing an ethics-oriented curriculum, based on experience and best practices, as well as specific sample exercises that can be brought to a classroom. We plan to make this a highly interactive work session culminating in a shared online resource page that pools lesson plans, assignments, exercise ideas, reading suggestions, and ideas from the attendees. We consider three primary topics with our session that frequently underlie ethical issues in NLP research: Dual use, bias and privacy. 
In this setting, a key lesson is that there is no single approach to ethical NLP: each project requires thoughtful consideration about what steps can be taken to best support people affected by that project. However, we can learn (and teach) what kinds of issues to be aware of and what kinds of strategies are available for mitigating harm. To teach this process, we apply and promote interactive exercises that provide an opportunity to ideate, discuss, and reflect. We plan to facilitate this in a way that encourages positive discussion, emphasizing the creation of ideas for the future instead of negative opinions of previous work.

'''T8: Recent Advances in Open-Domain Question Answering''' (cutting-edge) 
Danqi Chen and Scott Wen-tau Yih 
Open-domain (textual) question answering (QA), the task of finding answers to open-domain questions by searching a large collection of documents, has been a long-standing problem in NLP, information retrieval (IR) and related fields (Voorhees et al., 1999; Moldovan et al., 2000; Brill et al.,2002; Ferrucci et al., 2010). Traditional QA systems were usually constructed as a pipeline, consisting of many different components such as question processing, document/passage retrieval and answer processing. With the rapid development of neural reading comprehension (Chen, 2018), modern open-domain QA systems have been restructured by combining traditional IR techniques and neural reading comprehension models (Chen et al., 2017; Yang et al., 2019) or even implemented in a fully end-to-end fashion (Lee et al., 2019; Seo et al., 2019). While the system architecture has been drastically simplified, two technical challenges remain critical:(1) “Retriever”: finding documents that (might)contain an answer from a large collection of documents; (2) “Reader”: finding the answer in a given paragraph or a document. 
In this tutorial, we aim to provide a comprehensive and coherent overview of recent advances in this line of research. We will start by first giving a brief historical background of open-domain question answering, discussing the basic setup and core technical challenges of the research problem.The focus will then shift to modern techniques and resources proposed for open-domain QA, including the basics of latest neural reading comprehension systems, new datasets and models. The scope will also be broadened to cover the information retrieval component on how to effectively identify passages relevant to the questions. Moreover, in-depth discussions will be given on the use of traditional / neural IR modules, as well as the trade-offs between modular design and end-to-end training. If time permits, we also plan to discuss some hybrid approaches for answering questions using both text and large knowledge bases (e.g. (Sun et al., 2018)) and give a critical review on how structured data complements the information from unstructured text. 
At the end of our tutorial, we will discuss some important questions, including (1) How much progress have we made compared to the QA systems developed in the last decade?(2) What are the main challenges and limitations of cur-rent approaches? (3) How to trade off the efficiency (computational time and memory requirements) and accuracy in the deep learning era? We hope that our tutorial will not only serve as a useful resource for the audience to efficiently acquire the up-to-date knowledge, but also provide new perspectives to stimulate the advances of open-domain QA research in the next phase.

== Workshop Chairs ==

Milica Gašić, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf

Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Amazon Alexa AI

Saif M. Mohammad, National Research Council Canada

Ves Stoyanov, Facebook AI

== Student Research Workshop Chairs and Faculty Advisors==

Rotem Dror, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

Jiangming Liu, The University of Edinburgh

Shruti Rijhwani, Carnegie Mellon University

Omri Abend, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Sujian Li, Peking University

Zhou Yu, University of California, Davis

Information about the Student Research Workshop (SRW) has posted on the workshop's website: https://sites.google.com/view/acl20studentresearchworkshop/. The SRW Call for Papers has been distributed to ACL mailing lists, as well as on our official Twitter account (@acl_srw) and the ACL meeting's Twitter account (@acl_meeting).

'''Pre-submission Mentoring Phase (completed mid-February 2020)'''

Before submission to the main deadline, the SRW offered pre-submission mentoring by experienced researchers of the ACL community. The pre-submission mentoring primarily serves to provide feedback on the writing style, readability and presentation of the paper.

We recruited 30 mentors for providing pre-submission feedback. The deadline for the pre-submission phase was January 17, 2020. We had 57 pre-submissions in total.

Mentors were matched to pre-submissions according to their research areas. All mentors have already provided feedback for the submissions and it was sent to the authors mid-February 2020. The majority of mentors have also offered to participate in follow-up discussions with the authors via email until the main submission deadline.

Vouchers for one month's free use of Grammarly Premium have been sent to all the pre-submission authors. These were provided by the ACL 2020 Diversity and Inclusion Committee.

'''Main submission'''

For the main submission, the START (softconf) submission page has been set up. Currently, we have recruited 200 Program Committee members for reviewing submissions. We plan on inviting more PC members, as the number of submissions is likely to be larger than originally estimated.

Submission deadlines for the SRW are as follows:

* Paper submission deadline: March 6, 2020

* Review deadline: April 10, 2020

* Acceptance notification: April 15, 2020

* Camera-ready deadline: May 6, 2020

* Travel grant application deadline: to be decided.

* Travel grant notification: to be decided.

We also plan to have a post-acceptance mentoring process, for all papers accepted to the SRW.

'''Funding'''

The SRW has applied for an NSF grant of $18,000. The Don and Betty Walker international fund will also be able to provide student support. The SRW organizers have made contact with a number of industry companies to obtain sponsorship, but not yet secured additional funding. Contact has been made with the ACL 2020 sponsorship chairs and with Priscilla to investigate other funding opportunities, as well as the Student Volunteer Program, which helps students cover registration fee to the main conference.

== Audio-Video Chairs ==

Hamid Palangi, Microsoft Research, Redmond

Lianhui Qin, University of Washington

== Conference Handbook Chair ==

Nanyun Peng, University of Southern California

== Demo Chairs ==

Asli Celikyilmaz, Microsoft Research, Redmond

Shawn Wen, PolyAI

== Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs ==

Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Rochester Institute of Technology

Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Google

== Local Sponsorship Chairs ==

Hoifung Poon, Microsoft

Kristina Toutanova, Google

== Publication Chairs ==

Steven Bethard, University of Arizona

Ryan Cotterrell, University of Cambridge

Rui Yan, Peking University

Starting from the style files from ACL 2019, we have produced new LaTeX style files for ACL 2020. Most of the description was retained, but the order of sections was overhauled to make sure that important information wasn't scattered so haphazardly across the document. Other improvements were also made, like using the recommended citation style consistently throughout the LaTeX source, and separating out all the LaTeX-specific stuff into clearly marked sections. The MS Word version was derived from these LaTeX versions to match as closely as possible. The LaTeX version was also posted to the Overleaf gallery. The most recent .bib file for the entire ACL Anthology was included in the style file distribution to encourage authors to use the official citations for ACL Anthology publications. All style file changes were merged into https://github.com/acl-org/acl-pub/tree/gh-pages/paper_styles.

== Publicity Chair ==

Emily M. Bender, University of Washington

=== Dissemination ===

Durable accounts for the ACL meeting on Twitter and Facebook have been created:
* https://twitter.com/aclmeeting
* https://www.facebook.com/aclmeeting/

These will be passed along to the ACL 2021 publicity chair(s) so that they don't have to build up followers separately. As of Feb 4, 2020 the Twitter account has 4,061 followers and the Facebook account has 181. We have not yet been making use of the Instagram account, but we have been using the Twitter and Facebook accounts to publicize important dates as well as blog posts. The Twitter account especially has been useful for fielding questions from the community. Calls for papers have also gone out over the ACL member portal and several mailing lists, as well as websites such as WikiCFP. (These are maintained in a spreadsheet which can be handed off to the ACL 2021 publicity chair(s)).

=== Next Steps ===

* Recruit co-chairs, especially to coordinate live-tweeting of the conference
* Contact local media for coverage
* Develop land acknowledgement in consultation with the Duwamish Tribe (on whose land the meeting will take place). The Duwamish publish this information about land acknowledgments: https://www.duwamishtribe.org/land-acknowledgement

== Remote Presentation Chairs ==

Hao Fang, Microsoft Semantic Machines

Yi Luan, Google AI Language

== Sustainability Chairs ==

Ananya Ganesh, Educational Testing Service

Klaus Zechner, Educational Testing Service

Our main goal for this new focus area is to engage the ACL community in discussions about how best to reduce the carbon footprint of future ACL conferences in order to contribute to sustainable and livable conditions on this planet.
One of the main directions we are currently envisioning is to encourage and support conference attendees in virtual participation using live streaming of conference events as air travel is the main contributor to the carbon footprint of international conferences.

== Website & Conference App Chairs ==

Sudha Rao, Microsoft Research, Redmond

Yizhe Zhang, Microsoft Research, Redmond

== Business Office ==

Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL

2020Q1 Reports: ACL 2020

2020-02-18T22:00:09Z

Oabend:

== General Chair ==
Dan Jurafsky, Stanford University

The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) will take place in Seattle, Washington at the Hyatt Regency Seattle in downtown Seattle from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.

We have a great set of chairs! We are continuing 2019's new roles (Diversity and Inclusion chairs, Remote Presentation Chairs, AV Chairs) and adding new ones: (Sustainability chair), and we are doing well in demographic representation among our chairs (gender and region).

Following advice from last year, we have been using Slack for most intra-committee communication (and we put the Slack channel into the ACL pro space, so it can be preserved for future years), and using email only when absolutely necessary.

As usual, the growing size of the conference (both in papers and attendees) is a challenge, but both in papers and space we have been doing well (see the individual chair summaries below).

[this summary in progress]

== Program Chairs ==
Joyce Chai, University of Michigan

Natalie Schluter, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Joel Tetreault, Dataminr, USA

== Local Organisation Chairs ==
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL

With advice from:

Jianfeng Gao, Microsoft Research

Luke Zettlemoyer, University of Washington

== Tutorial Chairs ==

Agata Savary, University of Tours, France

Yue Zhang, Westlake University, Hangzhou, China

The call, submission, reviewing and selection of tutorials was coordinated jointly for 4 conferences: ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP.

Before drafting the call, we collected lists of tutorials offered within the past 4 years. We analysed previous calls for tutorials and reports from tutorial chairs (from [https://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2016Q3_Reports:_Tutorial_Chairs 2016], [https://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2017Q3_Reports:_Tutorial_Chairs 2017], [https://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2018Q3_Reports:_Tutorial_Chairs 2018] and [http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2019Q1_Reports:_ACL_2019 2019]). We consulted previous tutorial chairs with a questionnaire including questions about: the number of submissions, encouraging submissions on specific topics or from specific lecturers, the review procedure, the evaluation criteria, the post-tutorial availability of the slides/codes, and lessons learned from tutorial coordination. We also discussed the publication of slides and video recordings from future tutorials with the persons in charge of the ACL Anthology. As a result of these steps, we created two new sections for the [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Conference_Handbook ACL Conference Handbook] (future chairs might consider updating these documents yearly):
* the list of [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Past_tutorials past tutorials] at ACL, COLING, EACL, EMNLP, and NAACL in 2016-2019
* a [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Tutorial_chair_handbook tutorial chair handbook]

The final [https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/joint-call-tutorial-proposals-aclaacl-ijcnlpemnlpcoling-2020 call] differs from previous calls in several aspects: (i) the expectations about tutorial proposals were made clearer, (ii) following the central ACL decision, the teachers' payment policy was replaced by a fee-waiving policy, (iii) the required submission details include two new items: diversity considerations and agreement for open access publication of slides, codes, data and video recordings, (iv) the evaluation criteria (see below) are announced.

We recruited a review committee of 19 members, including the 8 tutorial chairs and 11 external members selected for their large understanding of the NLP domain and a good experience in reviewing and/or tutorial teaching:

'''Review Committee'''
* Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne, Australia) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Daniel Beck (University of Melbourne, Australia) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair
* Emily M. Bender (University of Washington, WA, USA)
* Erik Cambria (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
* Gaël Dias (University of Caen Normandie, France)
* Stefan Evert (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)
* Yang Liu (Tsinghua University, Beijing, China)
* Agata Savary (University of Tours, France) - ACL 2020 tutorial chair
* João Sedoc (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA)
* Lucia Specia (Sheffield University, UK) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair
* Xu SUN (Peking University, China)
* Yulia Tsvetkov (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA)
* Benjamin Van Durme (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Aline Villavicencio (University of Sheffield, UK and Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Taro Watanabe (Google, Inc., Tokyo, Japan)
* Aaron Steven White (University of Rochester, NY, USA)
* Fei Xia (University of Washington, WA, USA) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Yue Zhang (Westlake University, Hangzhou, China) - ACL 2020 tutorial chair
* Meishan Zhang (Tianjin University, China)

In total, we received 43 submissions for the 4 conferences. Each reviewer was assigned 6-7 proposals and each proposal received 3 reviews. The selection criteria included: clarity and preparedness, novelty or timely character of the topic, lecturers' experience, likely audience interest, open access of the teaching material, diversity aspects (multilingualism, gender, age and country of the lecturers), and compatibility with the preferred venues.
We accepted 31 proposals, 2 proposals were further withdrawn by the authors.

The decision making was handled via an online meeting of the 8 tutorial chairs. In particular, the selection of tutorials for each conference was done via the expression of interest of the tutorial chairs on a round-robin basis. Some slight adjustments were also performed after the meeting to better fit the authors' preferences. In total, 8, 8, 8 and 7 proposals were selected for ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP, respectively. Upon the announcement the results, 2 of the proposals accepted for AACL-IJCNLP were withdrawn.

The submission, review, selection and collection of final material for all tutorials was handled via a dedicated SoftConf space, shared by the 4 coordinating conferences. After the selection of proposals, a separate track was created on SoftConf for each conference. The final submission page (one per conference) was set up so as to collect all the necessary data including notably: the tutorial slides, URLs for course material (if any), printable material (if any) and agreement for open access publication.

The final selection for ACL 2020 consists of the following 8 tutorials of 3 hours each (each of them had ACL as the preferred or the second preferred venue):

'''Morning Tutorials'''

'''T1: Interpretability and Analysis in Neural NLP''' (cutting-edge) 
Yonatan Belinkov, Sebastian Gehrmann and Ellie Pavlick 
While deep learning has transformed the NLP field and impacted the larger computational linguistics community, the rise of neural networks is stained by their opaque nature: It is challenging to interpret the inner workings of neural network models, and explicate their behavior. Therefore, in the last few years, an increasingly large body of work has been devoted to the analysis and interpretation of neural network models in NLP. 
This body of work is so far lacking a common framework and methodology. Moreover, approaching the analysis of modern neural networks can be difficult for newcomers to the field. This tutorial aims to fill this gap and introduce the nascent field of interpretability and analysis of neural networks in NLP. 
The tutorial covers the main lines of analysis work, such as probing classifier, behavior studies and test suites, psycholinguistic methods, visualizations, adversarial examples, and other methods. We highlight not only the most commonly applied analysis methods, but also the specific limitations and shortcomings of current approaches, in order to inform participants where to focus future efforts.

'''T2: Multi-modal Information Extraction from Text, Semi-structured, and Tabular Data on the Web''' (cutting-edge) 
Xin Luna Dong, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Colin Lockard and Prashant Shiralkar 
The World Wide Web contains vast quantities of textual information in several forms: unstructured text, template-based semi-structured webpages (which present data in key-value pairs and lists), and tables. Methods for extracting information from these sources and converting it to a structured form have been a target of research from the natural language processing (NLP), data mining, and database communities. While these researchers have largely separated extraction from web data into different problems based on the modality of the data, they have faced similar problems such as learning with limited labeled data, defining (or avoiding defining) ontologies, making use of prior knowledge, and scaling solutions to deal with the size of the Web. 
In this tutorial we take a holistic view toward information extraction, exploring the commonalities in the challenges and solutions developed to address these different forms of text. We will explore the approaches targeted at unstructured text that largely rely on learning syntactic or semantic textual patterns, approaches targeted at semi-structured documents that learn to identify structural patterns in the template, and approaches targeting web tables which rely heavily on entity linking and type information. 
While these different data modalities have largely been considered separately in the past, recent research has started taking a more inclusive approach toward textual extraction, in which the multiple signals offered by textual, layout, and visual clues are combined into a single extraction model made possible by new deep learning approaches. At the same time, trends within purely textual extraction have shifted toward full-document understanding rather than considering sentences as independent units. With this in mind, it is worth considering the information extraction problem as a whole to motivate solutions that harness textual semantics along with visual and semi-structured layout information. We will discuss these approaches and suggest avenues for future work.

'''T3: Reviewing Natural Language Processing Research''' (introductory) 
Kevin Cohen, Karën Fort, Margot Mieskes and Aurélie Névéol 
As the demand for reviewing grows, so must the pool of reviewers. As the [http://www.livecongress.it/aol/indexSA.php?id=E2EAED7D&ticket= survey] presented by Graham Neubig at the 2019 ACL showed, a considerable number of reviewers are junior researchers, who might lack the experience and expertise necessary for high-quality reviews. Some of them might not have the environment or lack opportunities that allow them to learn the skills necessary. A tutorial on reviewing for the NLP community might increase reviewers’ confidence, as well as the quality of the reviews. This introductory tutorial will cover the goals, processes, and evaluation of reviewing research papers in natural language processing.

'''T4: Stylized Text Generation: Approaches and Applications''' (cutting-edge) 
Lili Mou and Olga Vechtomova 
Text generation has played an important role in various applications of natural language processing (NLP), and kn recent studies, researchers are paying increasing attention to modeling and manipulating the style of the generation text, which we call stylized text generation. In this tutorial, we will provide a comprehensive literature review in this direction. We start from the definition of style and different settings of stylized text generation, illustrated with various applications. Then, we present different settings of stylized generation, such as parallel supervised, style label-supervised, and unsupervised. In each setting, we delve deep into machine learning methods, including embedding learning techniques to represent style}, adversarial learning and reinforcement learning with cycle consistency to match content but to distinguish different styles. We also introduce current approaches of evaluating stylized text generation systems. We conclude our tutorial by presenting the challenges of stylized text generation and discussing future directions, such as small-data training, non-categorical style modeling, and a generalized scope of style transfer (e.g., controlling the syntax as a style).

'''Afternoon Tutorials'''

'''T5: Achieving Common Ground in Multi-modal Dialogue''' (cutting-edge) 
Malihe Alikhani and Matthew Stone 
All communication aims at achieving common ground (grounding): interlocutors can work together effectively only with mutual beliefs about what the state of the world is, about what their goals are, and about how they plan to make their goals a reality. Computational dialogue research offers some classic results on grouding, which unfortunately offer scant guidance to the design of grounding modules and behaviors in cutting-edge systems. In this tutorial, we focus on three main topic areas: 1) grounding in human-human communication; 2) grounding in dialogue systems; and 3) grounding in multi-modal interactive systems, including image-oriented conversations and human-robot interactions. We highlight a number of achievements of recent computational research in coordinating complex content, show how these results lead to rich and challenging opportunities for doing grounding in more flexible and powerful ways, and canvass relevant insights from the literature on human--human conversation. We expect that the tutorial will be of interest to researchers in dialogue systems, computational semantics and cognitive modeling, and hope that it will catalyze research and system building that more directly explores the creative, strategic ways conversational agents might be able to seek and offer evidence about their understanding of their interlocutors.

'''T6: Commonsense Reasoning for Natural Language Processing''' (introductory) 
Maarten Sap, Vered Shwartz, Antoine Bosselut, Dan Roth and Yejin Choi 
In our tutorial, we (1) outline the various types of commonsense (e.g., physical, social), and (2) discuss techniques to gather and represent commonsense knowledge, while highlighting the challenges specific to this type of knowledge (e.g., reporting bias). We will then (3) discuss the types of commonsense knowledge captured by modern NLP systems (e.g., large pretrained language models), and (4) present ways to measure systems' commonsense reasoning abilities. We finish with (5) a discussion of various ways in which commonsense reasoning can be used to improve performance on NLP tasks, exemplified by an (6) interactive session on integrating commonsense into a downstream task.

'''T7: Integrating Ethics into the NLP Curriculum''' (introductory) 
Emily M. Bender, Dirk Hovy and Alexandra Schofield 
Our goal in this tutorial is to empower NLP researchers and practitioners with tools and resources to teach others about how to ethically apply NLP techniques. Our tutorial will present both high-level strategies for developing an ethics-oriented curriculum, based on experience and best practices, as well as specific sample exercises that can be brought to a classroom. We plan to make this a highly interactive work session culminating in a shared online resource page that pools lesson plans, assignments, exercise ideas, reading suggestions, and ideas from the attendees. We consider three primary topics with our session that frequently underlie ethical issues in NLP research: Dual use, bias and privacy. 
In this setting, a key lesson is that there is no single approach to ethical NLP: each project requires thoughtful consideration about what steps can be taken to best support people affected by that project. However, we can learn (and teach) what kinds of issues to be aware of and what kinds of strategies are available for mitigating harm. To teach this process, we apply and promote interactive exercises that provide an opportunity to ideate, discuss, and reflect. We plan to facilitate this in a way that encourages positive discussion, emphasizing the creation of ideas for the future instead of negative opinions of previous work.

'''T8: Recent Advances in Open-Domain Question Answering''' (cutting-edge) 
Danqi Chen and Scott Wen-tau Yih 
Open-domain (textual) question answering (QA), the task of finding answers to open-domain questions by searching a large collection of documents, has been a long-standing problem in NLP, information retrieval (IR) and related fields (Voorhees et al., 1999; Moldovan et al., 2000; Brill et al.,2002; Ferrucci et al., 2010). Traditional QA systems were usually constructed as a pipeline, consisting of many different components such as question processing, document/passage retrieval and answer processing. With the rapid development of neural reading comprehension (Chen, 2018), modern open-domain QA systems have been restructured by combining traditional IR techniques and neural reading comprehension models (Chen et al., 2017; Yang et al., 2019) or even implemented in a fully end-to-end fashion (Lee et al., 2019; Seo et al., 2019). While the system architecture has been drastically simplified, two technical challenges remain critical:(1) “Retriever”: finding documents that (might)contain an answer from a large collection of documents; (2) “Reader”: finding the answer in a given paragraph or a document. 
In this tutorial, we aim to provide a comprehensive and coherent overview of recent advances in this line of research. We will start by first giving a brief historical background of open-domain question answering, discussing the basic setup and core technical challenges of the research problem.The focus will then shift to modern techniques and resources proposed for open-domain QA, including the basics of latest neural reading comprehension systems, new datasets and models. The scope will also be broadened to cover the information retrieval component on how to effectively identify passages relevant to the questions. Moreover, in-depth discussions will be given on the use of traditional / neural IR modules, as well as the trade-offs between modular design and end-to-end training. If time permits, we also plan to discuss some hybrid approaches for answering questions using both text and large knowledge bases (e.g. (Sun et al., 2018)) and give a critical review on how structured data complements the information from unstructured text. 
At the end of our tutorial, we will discuss some important questions, including (1) How much progress have we made compared to the QA systems developed in the last decade?(2) What are the main challenges and limitations of cur-rent approaches? (3) How to trade off the efficiency (computational time and memory requirements) and accuracy in the deep learning era? We hope that our tutorial will not only serve as a useful resource for the audience to efficiently acquire the up-to-date knowledge, but also provide new perspectives to stimulate the advances of open-domain QA research in the next phase.

== Workshop Chairs ==

Milica Gašić, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf

Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Amazon Alexa AI

Saif M. Mohammad, National Research Council Canada

Ves Stoyanov, Facebook AI

== Student Research Workshop Chairs and Faculty Advisors==

Rotem Dror, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

Jiangming Liu, The University of Edinburgh

Shruti Rijhwani, Carnegie Mellon University

Omri Abend, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Sujian Li, Peking University

Zhou Yu, University of California, Davis

Information about the Student Research Workshop (SRW) has posted on the workshop's website: https://sites.google.com/view/acl20studentresearchworkshop/. The SRW Call for Papers has been distributed to ACL mailing lists, as well as on our official Twitter account (@acl_srw) and the ACL meeting's Twitter account (@acl_meeting).

'''Pre-submission Mentoring Phase (completed mid-February 2020)'''

Before submission to the main deadline, the SRW offered pre-submission mentoring by experienced researchers of the ACL community. The pre-submission mentoring primarily serves to provide feedback on the writing style, readability and presentation of the paper.

We recruited 30 mentors for providing pre-submission feedback. The deadline for the pre-submission phase was January 17, 2020. We had 57 pre-submissions in total.

Mentors were matched to pre-submissions according to their research areas. All mentors have already provided feedback for the submissions and it was sent to the authors mid-February 2020. The majority of mentors have also offered to participate in follow-up discussions with the authors via email until the main submission deadline.

Vouchers for one month's free use of Grammarly Premium have been sent to all the pre-submission authors. These were provided by the ACL 2020 Diversity and Inclusion Committee.

'''Main submission'''

For the main submission, the START (softconf) submission page has been set up. Currently, we have recruited 150 Program Committee members for reviewing submissions. We plan on inviting more PC members, as the number of submissions is likely to be larger than originally estimated.

Submission deadlines for the SRW are as follows:

* Paper submission deadline: March 6, 2020

* Review deadline: April 10, 2020

* Acceptance notification: April 15, 2020

* Camera-ready deadline: May 6, 2020

* Travel grant application deadline: to be decided.

* Travel grant notification: to be decided.

We also plan to have a post-acceptance mentoring process, for all papers accepted to the SRW.

'''Funding'''

The SRW has applied for an NSF grant of $18,000. The Don and Betty Walker international fund will also be able to provide student support. The SRW organizers have made contact with a number of industry companies to obtain sponsorship, but not yet secured additional funding. Contact has been made with the ACL 2020 sponsorship chairs and with Priscilla to investigate other funding opportunities, as well as the Student Volunteer Program, which helps students cover registration fee to the main conference.

== Audio-Video Chairs ==

Hamid Palangi, Microsoft Research, Redmond

Lianhui Qin, University of Washington

== Conference Handbook Chair ==

Nanyun Peng, University of Southern California

== Demo Chairs ==

Asli Celikyilmaz, Microsoft Research, Redmond

Shawn Wen, PolyAI

== Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs ==

Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Rochester Institute of Technology

Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Google

== Local Sponsorship Chairs ==

Hoifung Poon, Microsoft

Kristina Toutanova, Google

== Publication Chairs ==

Steven Bethard, University of Arizona

Ryan Cotterrell, University of Cambridge

Rui Yan, Peking University

Starting from the style files from ACL 2019, we have produced new LaTeX style files for ACL 2020. Most of the description was retained, but the order of sections was overhauled to make sure that important information wasn't scattered so haphazardly across the document. Other improvements were also made, like using the recommended citation style consistently throughout the LaTeX source, and separating out all the LaTeX-specific stuff into clearly marked sections. The MS Word version was derived from these LaTeX versions to match as closely as possible. The LaTeX version was also posted to the Overleaf gallery. The most recent .bib file for the entire ACL Anthology was included in the style file distribution to encourage authors to use the official citations for ACL Anthology publications. All style file changes were merged into https://github.com/acl-org/acl-pub/tree/gh-pages/paper_styles.

== Publicity Chair ==

Emily M. Bender, University of Washington

=== Dissemination ===

Durable accounts for the ACL meeting on Twitter and Facebook have been created:
* https://twitter.com/aclmeeting
* https://www.facebook.com/aclmeeting/

These will be passed along to the ACL 2021 publicity chair(s) so that they don't have to build up followers separately. As of Feb 4, 2020 the Twitter account has 4,061 followers and the Facebook account has 181. We have not yet been making use of the Instagram account, but we have been using the Twitter and Facebook accounts to publicize important dates as well as blog posts. The Twitter account especially has been useful for fielding questions from the community. Calls for papers have also gone out over the ACL member portal and several mailing lists, as well as websites such as WikiCFP. (These are maintained in a spreadsheet which can be handed off to the ACL 2021 publicity chair(s)).

=== Next Steps ===

* Recruit co-chairs, especially to coordinate live-tweeting of the conference
* Contact local media for coverage
* Develop land acknowledgement in consultation with the Duwamish Tribe (on whose land the meeting will take place). The Duwamish publish this information about land acknowledgments: https://www.duwamishtribe.org/land-acknowledgement

== Remote Presentation Chairs ==

Hao Fang, Microsoft Semantic Machines

Yi Luan, Google AI Language

== Sustainability Chairs ==

Ananya Ganesh, Educational Testing Service

Klaus Zechner, Educational Testing Service

Our main goal for this new focus area is to engage the ACL community in discussions about how best to reduce the carbon footprint of future ACL conferences in order to contribute to sustainable and livable conditions on this planet.
One of the main directions we are currently envisioning is to encourage and support conference attendees in virtual participation using live streaming of conference events as air travel is the main contributor to the carbon footprint of international conferences.

== Website & Conference App Chairs ==

Sudha Rao, Microsoft Research, Redmond

Yizhe Zhang, Microsoft Research, Redmond

== Business Office ==

Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL