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2020Q3 Reports: Student Research Workshop Chairs

2020-10-01T15:17:38Z

Shrutirijhwani: /* Reviewing */

The Student Research Workshop was held in conjunction with ACL 2020. The SRW gives student researchers in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing the opportunity to present their work and receive constructive feedback and mentorship by experienced members of the ACL community.

This report discusses the various aspects of organizing the SRW at ACL 2020, including:
* Website
* Mentoring Programs
* Submissions and Reviews
* Virtual Conference
* Funding
* Recommendations

== Organizers ==

The student co-chairs were:
* Shruti Rijhwani (Carnegie Mellon University)
* Jiangming Liu (The University of Edinburgh)
* Yizhong Wang (University of Washington)
* Rotem Dror (Israel Institute of Technology)

The faculty advisors were:
* Omri Abend (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
* Sujian Li (Peking University)
* Zhou Yu (University of California, Davis)

== Website ==

We created a website, which was the primary source of information about the SRW: https://sites.google.com/view/acl20studentresearchworkshop/.

Additionally, we managed a Twitter account for posting updates to social media: (@acl_srw).

The call for papers was publicized through the ACL mailing list as well as the ACL 2020 Twitter account (@acl_meeting).

== Mentoring Programs ==

We offered two mentoring programs this year. Pre-submission mentoring was available to all authors who wanted feedback before submitting their papers to the SRW. Post-acceptance mentoring program was available to authors of accepted papers, to get feedback on their camera-ready drafts and their conference presentations.

=== Pre-submission mentoring ===

We followed last year’s SRW in offering an optional round of pre-submission mentoring. This was designed to give students an opportunity to improve their submission, particularly the writing and presentation of the paper, before submitting their papers to the workshop for review.

Authors who submitted their papers in time for the pre-submission deadline received feedback from their assigned mentors before the final submission deadline, giving them time to integrate the mentor’s feedback into their final submission. A total of 57 papers participated in the pre-submission mentoring program. We recruited 30 mentors, all of whom are well-experienced researchers in the field, for the pre-submission program.

Papers were matched to mentors based on research areas. The mentoring feedback was sent to authors anonymously through the SRW organizers. Additionally, the majority of mentors also offered to participate in follow-up discussions with the authors directly via email until the main submission deadline.

=== Post-acceptance mentoring ===

Each accepted paper was assigned a post-acceptance mentor, to provide feedback to the authors about their camera-ready drafts and conference presentations (which were pre-recorded this year). 49 mentors were recruited, i.e., one for each accepted paper.

=== Grammarly Premium ===

During both the pre-submission and post-acceptance mentoring programs, writing assistance in the form of vouchers for one month's free use of Grammarly Premium was sent to all participating authors. These were provided by the ACL 2020 Diversity and Inclusion Committee.

== Submission and Reviewing ==

=== Timeline ===

* Pre-submission mentoring deadline: January 17, 2020
* Pre-submission mentoring feedback: February 16, 2020
* Paper submission deadline: March 6, 2020
* Acceptance notification: April 17, 2020
* Camera-ready deadline: May 15, 2020

=== Submission procedure ===

The SRW consisted of two submission tracks: research papers and thesis proposals. Research papers were intended to encompass completed work, as well as works-in-progress from graduate students, masters students, and advanced undergraduates. Thesis proposals were intended to be a venue for senior graduate students to get feedback on their thesis proposal and the broader ideas surrounding the appropriateness and impact of their chosen topic. The page limit for both types of submissions was 5 pages of content, with unlimited pages for references. For the camera-ready drafts of accepted papers, one additional page was permitted.

Multiple submissions had to be declared at submission time, and double submission to the ACL SRW and the main ACL conference/other ACL workshops was not allowed. Submissions (in either track) could be archival or non-archival.

Submissions were managed through the START conference system.

=== Number of submissions ===

We received 137 submissions in total: 10 thesis proposals and 127 research papers. Among these, 12 research papers were non-archival.

The SRW received submissions from students in 28 countries, with the majority of submissions coming from the United States, China, India, and Japan.

We accepted 49 papers, with an acceptance rate of 36%. After withdrawals and excluding non-archival papers, 42 papers appear in the SRW proceedings, including 6 thesis proposals and 36 research papers.

Because of changes in conference deadlines resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, several authors requested a change from the non-archival to archival track. The SRW does not have a specific distribution requirement with respect to each track, and given the unprecedented circumstances, these changes were permitted.

All accepted papers (archival and non-archival) were presented at the conference.

=== Program committee ===

We were fortunate to recruit 262 members for the SRW Program Committee. Each paper was assigned 3 reviewers. No reviewer was assigned more than 2 papers.

=== Reviewing ===

We used the “keyword bidding” capability on the START system, where reviewers could indicate their research areas of expertise. Submissions were then automatically assigned to reviewers based on these bids. All assignments were manually verified (and modified if needed) by the SRW co-chairs.

We based the review form on the ACL 2020 format, removing the questions about presentation type and best paper award: https://acl2020.org/_pages/docs/ACL_2020_Submission_Form.pdf

== Virtual Conference ==

The SRW papers are presented in conjunction with other ACL main conference papers from July 6 to July 8. All the papers accepted to the SRW i.e., research papers and thesis proposals in both the archival and non-archival tracks, were presented at the conference.

For the virtual presentations, we adopted the same format as the main conference, which featured pre-recorded talks, live Q&A sessions, and online messaging channels.

The SRW is traditionally held as a poster session at the same time and venue as that of the main conference. We tried to emulate this setting in order to allow the student authors of the SRW to receive similar exposure and feedback as they would during an in-person conference.
In coordination with the ACL Program Chairs, the Virtual Infrastructure Chairs, and the Publication Chairs, the SRW was conducted as a track within the main virtual conference:
* The virtual ACL website had the SRW papers in a separate track, listed alongside those of the main conference and system demonstrations.
* The live Q&A sessions for SRW papers were in the same time slots as the papers of the main conference.
* The schedule for the main conference included the SRW papers.

SlidesLive was used to host the pre-recorded presentations. Authors were required to record a 12 minute video for each paper.

Each paper was assigned two one-hour live Q&A sessions during the conference. Since the authors are located in different time zones, we conducted a survey about their available time slots, and tried to schedule the Q&A sessions according to their preferences.

Additionally, during the conference, each paper had its own RocketChat channel, for asynchronous Q&A and messages between authors and conference attendees.

== Funding ==

The SRW received $15,000 USD in funding from the National Science Foundation and $10,000 USD from the Don and Betty Walker Scholarship Fund.

We worked together with the Student Volunteer Coordinator to ensure that we financially support as many students as possible. We encouraged all SRW authors to apply for the volunteer program, and receive free ACL membership and conference registration.

We also coordinated with the Diversity and Inclusion Committee, which had its own financial assistance program, to ensure that available funds are optimally distributed.

Since the conference was completely virtual, the only expenses for students were the ACL membership fee and the conference registration fee. We waived the conference registration fee for all SRW authors who applied for financial assistance. Additionally, the membership fee was waived for all authors who volunteered at the conference.

== Recommendations ==

* As in previous years, we managed the pre-submission mentoring program via email and online forms. However, we found the process of keeping track of emails and downloads quite tedious. We recommend that future SRWs use the START system (or equivalent) for pre-submission mentoring feedback, while giving mentors the option to offer additional feedback to the authors directly via email.
* Post-acceptance mentoring was conducted by connecting the authors with the mentors via email, with encouragement to the authors to send their camera-ready drafts and presentations. While we received feedback from multiple authors that this program was very useful to them, some mentors informed us that the authors never communicated with them. Future SRWs can consider a more formal system of sending camera-ready drafts to the mentors and facilitating discussions between mentors and authors.
* We conducted separate recruiting processes for each of the mentoring programs and the program committee. However, several researchers participated in all three groups, which leads us to believe that a single recruitment process will likely be more efficient in future SRWs.

Additional recommendations are in the [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Faculty_Advisors_to_the_SRW report from the faculty advisors to the SRW].

2020Q3 Reports: Student Research Workshop Chairs

2020-08-13T00:12:30Z

Shrutirijhwani:

The Student Research Workshop was held in conjunction with ACL 2020. The SRW gives student researchers in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing the opportunity to present their work and receive constructive feedback and mentorship by experienced members of the ACL community.

This report discusses the various aspects of organizing the SRW at ACL 2020, including:
* Website
* Mentoring Programs
* Submissions and Reviews
* Virtual Conference
* Funding
* Recommendations

== Organizers ==

The student co-chairs were:
* Shruti Rijhwani (Carnegie Mellon University)
* Jiangming Liu (The University of Edinburgh)
* Yizhong Wang (University of Washington)
* Rotem Dror (Israel Institute of Technology)

The faculty advisors were:
* Omri Abend (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
* Sujian Li (Peking University)
* Zhou Yu (University of California, Davis)

== Website ==

We created a website, which was the primary source of information about the SRW: https://sites.google.com/view/acl20studentresearchworkshop/.

Additionally, we managed a Twitter account for posting updates to social media: (@acl_srw).

The call for papers was publicized through the ACL mailing list as well as the ACL 2020 Twitter account (@acl_meeting).

== Mentoring Programs ==

We offered two mentoring programs this year. Pre-submission mentoring was available to all authors who wanted feedback before submitting their papers to the SRW. Post-acceptance mentoring program was available to authors of accepted papers, to get feedback on their camera-ready drafts and their conference presentations.

=== Pre-submission mentoring ===

We followed last year’s SRW in offering an optional round of pre-submission mentoring. This was designed to give students an opportunity to improve their submission, particularly the writing and presentation of the paper, before submitting their papers to the workshop for review.

Authors who submitted their papers in time for the pre-submission deadline received feedback from their assigned mentors before the final submission deadline, giving them time to integrate the mentor’s feedback into their final submission. A total of 57 papers participated in the pre-submission mentoring program. We recruited 30 mentors, all of whom are well-experienced researchers in the field, for the pre-submission program.

Papers were matched to mentors based on research areas. The mentoring feedback was sent to authors anonymously through the SRW organizers. Additionally, the majority of mentors also offered to participate in follow-up discussions with the authors directly via email until the main submission deadline.

=== Post-acceptance mentoring ===

Each accepted paper was assigned a post-acceptance mentor, to provide feedback to the authors about their camera-ready drafts and conference presentations (which were pre-recorded this year). 49 mentors were recruited, i.e., one for each accepted paper.

=== Grammarly Premium ===

During both the pre-submission and post-acceptance mentoring programs, writing assistance in the form of vouchers for one month's free use of Grammarly Premium was sent to all participating authors. These were provided by the ACL 2020 Diversity and Inclusion Committee.

== Submission and Reviewing ==

=== Timeline ===

* Pre-submission mentoring deadline: January 17, 2020
* Pre-submission mentoring feedback: February 16, 2020
* Paper submission deadline: March 6, 2020
* Acceptance notification: April 17, 2020
* Camera-ready deadline: May 15, 2020

=== Submission procedure ===

The SRW consisted of two submission tracks: research papers and thesis proposals. Research papers were intended to encompass completed work, as well as works-in-progress from graduate students, masters students, and advanced undergraduates. Thesis proposals were intended to be a venue for senior graduate students to get feedback on their thesis proposal and the broader ideas surrounding the appropriateness and impact of their chosen topic. The page limit for both types of submissions was 5 pages of content, with unlimited pages for references. For the camera-ready drafts of accepted papers, one additional page was permitted.

Multiple submissions had to be declared at submission time, and double submission to the ACL SRW and the main ACL conference/other ACL workshops was not allowed. Submissions (in either track) could be archival or non-archival.

Submissions were managed through the START conference system.

=== Number of submissions ===

We received 137 submissions in total: 10 thesis proposals and 127 research papers. Among these, 12 research papers were non-archival.

The SRW received submissions from students in 28 countries, with the majority of submissions coming from the United States, China, India, and Japan.

We accepted 49 papers, with an acceptance rate of 36%. After withdrawals and excluding non-archival papers, 42 papers appear in the SRW proceedings, including 6 thesis proposals and 36 research papers.

Because of changes in conference deadlines resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, several authors requested a change from the non-archival to archival track. The SRW does not have a specific distribution requirement with respect to each track, and given the unprecedented circumstances, these changes were permitted.

All accepted papers (archival and non-archival) were presented at the conference.

=== Program committee ===

We were fortunate to recruit 262 members for the SRW Program Committee. Each paper was assigned 3 reviewers. No reviewer was assigned more than 2 papers.

=== Reviewing ===

We used the “keyword bidding” capability on the START system, where reviewers could indicate their research areas of expertise. Submissions were then automatically assigned to reviewers based on these bids. All assignments were manually verified (and modified if needed) by the SRW co-chairs.

== Virtual Conference ==

The SRW papers are presented in conjunction with other ACL main conference papers from July 6 to July 8. All the papers accepted to the SRW i.e., research papers and thesis proposals in both the archival and non-archival tracks, were presented at the conference.

For the virtual presentations, we adopted the same format as the main conference, which featured pre-recorded talks, live Q&A sessions, and online messaging channels.

The SRW is traditionally held as a poster session at the same time and venue as that of the main conference. We tried to emulate this setting in order to allow the student authors of the SRW to receive similar exposure and feedback as they would during an in-person conference.
In coordination with the ACL Program Chairs, the Virtual Infrastructure Chairs, and the Publication Chairs, the SRW was conducted as a track within the main virtual conference:
* The virtual ACL website had the SRW papers in a separate track, listed alongside those of the main conference and system demonstrations.
* The live Q&A sessions for SRW papers were in the same time slots as the papers of the main conference.
* The schedule for the main conference included the SRW papers.

SlidesLive was used to host the pre-recorded presentations. Authors were required to record a 12 minute video for each paper.

Each paper was assigned two one-hour live Q&A sessions during the conference. Since the authors are located in different time zones, we conducted a survey about their available time slots, and tried to schedule the Q&A sessions according to their preferences.

Additionally, during the conference, each paper had its own RocketChat channel, for asynchronous Q&A and messages between authors and conference attendees.

== Funding ==

The SRW received $15,000 USD in funding from the National Science Foundation and $10,000 USD from the Don and Betty Walker Scholarship Fund.

We worked together with the Student Volunteer Coordinator to ensure that we financially support as many students as possible. We encouraged all SRW authors to apply for the volunteer program, and receive free ACL membership and conference registration.

We also coordinated with the Diversity and Inclusion Committee, which had its own financial assistance program, to ensure that available funds are optimally distributed.

Since the conference was completely virtual, the only expenses for students were the ACL membership fee and the conference registration fee. We waived the conference registration fee for all SRW authors who applied for financial assistance. Additionally, the membership fee was waived for all authors who volunteered at the conference.

== Recommendations ==

* As in previous years, we managed the pre-submission mentoring program via email and online forms. However, we found the process of keeping track of emails and downloads quite tedious. We recommend that future SRWs use the START system (or equivalent) for pre-submission mentoring feedback, while giving mentors the option to offer additional feedback to the authors directly via email.
* Post-acceptance mentoring was conducted by connecting the authors with the mentors via email, with encouragement to the authors to send their camera-ready drafts and presentations. While we received feedback from multiple authors that this program was very useful to them, some mentors informed us that the authors never communicated with them. Future SRWs can consider a more formal system of sending camera-ready drafts to the mentors and facilitating discussions between mentors and authors.
* We conducted separate recruiting processes for each of the mentoring programs and the program committee. However, several researchers participated in all three groups, which leads us to believe that a single recruitment process will likely be more efficient in future SRWs.

Additional recommendations are in the [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Faculty_Advisors_to_the_SRW report from the faculty advisors to the SRW].

2020Q3 Reports: Student Research Workshop Chairs

2020-07-21T17:11:37Z

Shrutirijhwani: /* Submission and Reviewing */

The Student Research Workshop was held in conjunction with ACL 2020. The SRW gives student researchers in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing the opportunity to present their work and receive constructive feedback and mentorship by experienced members of the ACL community.

This report discusses the various aspects of organizing the SRW at ACL 2020, including:
* Website
* Mentoring Programs
* Submissions and Reviews
* Virtual Conference
* Funding
* Recommendations

== Organizers ==

The student co-chairs were:
* Shruti Rijhwani (Carnegie Mellon University)
* Jiangming Liu (The University of Edinburgh)
* Yizhong Wang (University of Washington)
* Rotem Dror (Israel Institute of Technology)

The faculty advisors were:
* Omri Abend (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
* Sujian Li (Peking University)
* Zhou Yu (University of California, Davis)

== Website ==

We created a website, which was the primary source of information about the SRW: https://sites.google.com/view/acl20studentresearchworkshop/.

Additionally, we managed a Twitter account for posting updates to social media: (@acl_srw).

The call for papers was publicized through the ACL mailing list as well as the ACL 2020 Twitter account (@acl_meeting).

== Mentoring Programs ==

We offered two mentoring programs this year. Pre-submission mentoring was available to all authors who wanted feedback before submitting their papers to the SRW. Post-acceptance mentoring program was available to authors of accepted papers, to get feedback on their camera-ready drafts and their conference presentations.

=== Pre-submission mentoring ===

We followed last year’s SRW in offering an optional round of pre-submission mentoring. This was designed to give students an opportunity to improve their submission, particularly the writing and presentation of the paper, before submitting their papers to the workshop for review.

Authors who submitted their papers in time for the pre-submission deadline received feedback from their assigned mentors before the final submission deadline, giving them time to integrate the mentor’s feedback into their final submission. A total of 57 papers participated in the pre-submission mentoring program. We recruited 30 mentors, all of whom are well-experienced researchers in the field, for the pre-submission program.

Papers were matched to mentors based on research areas. The mentoring feedback was also sent to authors anonymously through the SRW organizers. Additionally, the majority of mentors also offered to participate in follow-up discussions with the authors directly via email until the main submission deadline.

=== Post-acceptance mentoring ===

Each accepted paper was assigned a post-acceptance mentor, to provide feedback to the authors about their camera-ready drafts and conference presentations (which were pre-recorded this year). 49 mentors were recruited, i.e., one for each accepted paper.

=== Grammarly Premium ===

During both the pre-submission and post-acceptance mentoring programs, writing assistance in the form of vouchers for one month's free use of Grammarly Premium was sent to all participating authors. These were provided by the ACL 2020 Diversity and Inclusion Committee.

== Submission and Reviewing ==

=== Timeline ===

* Pre-submission mentoring deadline: January 17, 2020
* Pre-submission mentoring feedback: February 16, 2020
* Paper submission deadline: March 6, 2020
* Acceptance notification: April 17, 2020
* Camera-ready deadline: May 15, 2020

=== Submission procedure ===

The SRW consisted of two submission tracks: research papers and thesis proposals. Research papers were intended to encompass completed work, as well as works-in-progress from graduate students, masters students, and advanced undergraduates. Thesis proposals were intended to be a venue for senior graduate students to get feedback on their thesis proposal and the broader ideas surrounding the appropriateness and impact of their chosen topic. The page limit for both types of submissions was 5 pages of content, with unlimited pages for references. For the camera-ready drafts of accepted papers, one additional page was permitted.

Multiple submissions had to be declared at submission time, and double submission to the ACL SRW and the main ACL conference/other ACL workshops was not allowed. Submissions (in either track) could be archival or non-archival.

Submissions were managed through the START conference system.

=== Number of submissions ===

We received 137 submissions in total: 10 thesis proposals and 127 research papers. Among these, 12 research papers were non-archival.

The SRW received submissions from students in 28 countries, with the majority of submissions coming from the United States, China, India, and Japan.

We accepted 49 papers, with an acceptance rate of 36%. After withdrawals and excluding non-archival papers, 42 papers appear in the SRW proceedings, including 6 thesis proposals and 36 research papers.

Because of changes in conference deadlines resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, several authors requested a change from the non-archival to archival track. The SRW does not have a specific distribution requirement with respect to each track, and given the unprecedented circumstances, these changes were permitted.

All accepted papers (archival and non-archival) were presented at the conference.

=== Program committee ===

We were fortunate to recruit 262 members for the SRW Program Committee. Each paper was assigned 3 reviewers. No reviewer was assigned more than 2 papers.

=== Reviewing ===

We used the “keyword bidding” capability on the START system, where reviewers could indicate their research areas of expertise. Submissions were then automatically assigned to reviewers based on these bids. All assignments were manually verified (and modified if needed) by the SRW co-chairs.

== Virtual Conference ==

The SRW papers are presented in conjunction with other ACL main conference papers from July 6 to July 8. All the papers accepted to the SRW i.e., research papers and thesis proposals in both the archival and non-archival tracks, were presented at the conference.

For the virtual presentations, we adopted the same format as the main conference, which featured pre-recorded talks, live Q&A sessions, and online messaging channels.

The SRW is traditionally held as a poster session at the same time and venue as that of the main conference. We tried to emulate this setting in order to allow the student authors of the SRW to receive similar exposure and feedback as they would during an in-person conference.
In coordination with the ACL Program Chairs, the Virtual Infrastructure Chairs, and the Publication Chairs, the SRW was conducted as a track within the main virtual conference:
* The virtual ACL website had the SRW papers in a separate track, listed alongside those of the main conference and system demonstrations.
* The live Q&A sessions for SRW papers were in the same time slots as the papers of the main conference.
* The schedule for the main conference included the SRW papers.

SlidesLive was used to host the pre-recorded presentations. Authors were required to record a 12 minute video for each paper.

Each paper was assigned two one-hour live Q&A sessions during the conference. Since the authors are located in different time zones, we conducted a survey about their available time slots, and tried to schedule the Q&A sessions according to their preferences.

Additionally, during the conference, each paper had its own RocketChat channel, for asynchronous Q&A and messages between authors and conference attendees.

== Funding ==

The SRW received $15,000 USD in funding from the National Science Foundation and $10,000 USD from the Don and Betty Walker Scholarship Fund.

We worked together with the Student Volunteer Coordinator to ensure that we financially support as many students as possible. We encouraged all SRW authors to apply for the volunteer program, and receive free ACL membership and conference registration.

We also coordinated with the Diversity and Inclusion Committee, which had its own financial assistance program, to ensure that available funds are optimally distributed.

Since the conference was completely virtual, the only expenses for students were the ACL membership fee and the conference registration fee. We waived the conference registration fee for all SRW authors who applied for financial assistance. Additionally, the membership fee was waived for all authors who volunteered at the conference.

== Recommendations ==

* As in previous years, we managed the pre-submission mentoring program via email and online forms. However, we found the process of keeping track of emails and downloads quite tedious. We recommend that future SRWs use the START system (or equivalent) for pre-submission mentoring feedback, while giving mentors the option to offer additional feedback to the authors directly via email.
* Post-acceptance mentoring was conducted by connecting the authors with the mentors via email, with encouragement to the authors to send their camera-ready drafts and presentations. While we received feedback from multiple authors that this program was very useful to them, some mentors informed us that the authors never communicated with them. Future SRWs can consider a more formal system of sending camera-ready drafts to the mentors and facilitating discussions between mentors and authors.
* We conducted separate recruiting processes for each of the mentoring programs and the program committee. However, several researchers participated in all three groups, which leads us to believe that a single recruitment process will likely be more efficient in future SRWs.

Additional recommendations are in the [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Faculty_Advisors_to_the_SRW report from the faculty advisors to the SRW].

2020Q3 Reports: Student Research Workshop Chairs

2020-07-21T17:09:31Z

Shrutirijhwani: /* Number of submissions */

The Student Research Workshop was held in conjunction with ACL 2020. The SRW gives student researchers in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing the opportunity to present their work and receive constructive feedback and mentorship by experienced members of the ACL community.

This report discusses the various aspects of organizing the SRW at ACL 2020, including:
* Website
* Mentoring Programs
* Submissions and Reviews
* Virtual Conference
* Funding
* Recommendations

== Organizers ==

The student co-chairs were:
* Shruti Rijhwani (Carnegie Mellon University)
* Jiangming Liu (The University of Edinburgh)
* Yizhong Wang (University of Washington)
* Rotem Dror (Israel Institute of Technology)

The faculty advisors were:
* Omri Abend (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
* Sujian Li (Peking University)
* Zhou Yu (University of California, Davis)

== Website ==

We created a website, which was the primary source of information about the SRW: https://sites.google.com/view/acl20studentresearchworkshop/.

Additionally, we managed a Twitter account for posting updates to social media: (@acl_srw).

The call for papers was publicized through the ACL mailing list as well as the ACL 2020 Twitter account (@acl_meeting).

== Mentoring Programs ==

We offered two mentoring programs this year. Pre-submission mentoring was available to all authors who wanted feedback before submitting their papers to the SRW. Post-acceptance mentoring program was available to authors of accepted papers, to get feedback on their camera-ready drafts and their conference presentations.

=== Pre-submission mentoring ===

We followed last year’s SRW in offering an optional round of pre-submission mentoring. This was designed to give students an opportunity to improve their submission, particularly the writing and presentation of the paper, before submitting their papers to the workshop for review.

Authors who submitted their papers in time for the pre-submission deadline received feedback from their assigned mentors before the final submission deadline, giving them time to integrate the mentor’s feedback into their final submission. A total of 57 papers participated in the pre-submission mentoring program. We recruited 30 mentors, all of whom are well-experienced researchers in the field, for the pre-submission program.

Papers were matched to mentors based on research areas. The mentoring feedback was also sent to authors anonymously through the SRW organizers. Additionally, the majority of mentors also offered to participate in follow-up discussions with the authors directly via email until the main submission deadline.

=== Post-acceptance mentoring ===

Each accepted paper was assigned a post-acceptance mentor, to provide feedback to the authors about their camera-ready drafts and conference presentations (which were pre-recorded this year). 49 mentors were recruited, i.e., one for each accepted paper.

=== Grammarly Premium ===

During both the pre-submission and post-acceptance mentoring programs, writing assistance in the form of vouchers for one month's free use of Grammarly Premium was sent to all participating authors. These were provided by the ACL 2020 Diversity and Inclusion Committee.

== Submission and Reviewing ==

=== Timeline ===

* Pre-submission mentoring deadline: January 17, 2020
* Pre-submission mentoring feedback: February 16, 2020
* Paper submission deadline: March 6, 2020
* Acceptance notification: April 17, 2020
* Camera-ready deadline: May 15, 2020

=== Submission procedure ===

The SRW consisted of two submission tracks: research papers and thesis proposals. Research papers were intended to encompass completed work, as well as works-in-progress from graduate students, masters students, and advanced undergraduates. Thesis proposals were intended to be a venue for senior graduate students to get feedback on their thesis proposal and the broader ideas surrounding the appropriateness and impact of their chosen topic. The page limit for both types of submissions was 5 pages of content, with unlimited pages for references.

Multiple submissions had to be declared at submission time, and double submission to the ACL SRW and the main ACL conference/other ACL workshops was not allowed. Submissions (in either track) could be archival or non-archival.

Submissions were managed through the START conference system.

=== Number of submissions ===

We received 137 submissions in total: 10 thesis proposals and 127 research papers. Among these, 12 research papers were non-archival.

The SRW received submissions from students in 28 countries, with the majority of submissions coming from the United States, China, India, and Japan.

We accepted 49 papers, with an acceptance rate of 36%. After withdrawals and excluding non-archival papers, 42 papers appear in the SRW proceedings, including 6 thesis proposals and 36 research papers.

Because of changes in conference deadlines resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, several authors requested a change from the non-archival to archival track. The SRW does not have a specific distribution requirement with respect to each track, and given the unprecedented circumstances, these changes were permitted.

All accepted papers (archival and non-archival) were presented at the conference.

=== Program committee ===

We were fortunate to recruit 262 members for the SRW Program Committee. Each paper was assigned 3 reviewers. No reviewer was assigned more than 2 papers.

=== Reviewing ===

We used the “keyword bidding” capability on the START system, where reviewers could indicate their research areas of expertise. Submissions were then automatically assigned to reviewers based on these bids. All assignments were manually verified (and modified if needed) by the SRW co-chairs.

== Virtual Conference ==

The SRW papers are presented in conjunction with other ACL main conference papers from July 6 to July 8. All the papers accepted to the SRW i.e., research papers and thesis proposals in both the archival and non-archival tracks, were presented at the conference.

For the virtual presentations, we adopted the same format as the main conference, which featured pre-recorded talks, live Q&A sessions, and online messaging channels.

The SRW is traditionally held as a poster session at the same time and venue as that of the main conference. We tried to emulate this setting in order to allow the student authors of the SRW to receive similar exposure and feedback as they would during an in-person conference.
In coordination with the ACL Program Chairs, the Virtual Infrastructure Chairs, and the Publication Chairs, the SRW was conducted as a track within the main virtual conference:
* The virtual ACL website had the SRW papers in a separate track, listed alongside those of the main conference and system demonstrations.
* The live Q&A sessions for SRW papers were in the same time slots as the papers of the main conference.
* The schedule for the main conference included the SRW papers.

SlidesLive was used to host the pre-recorded presentations. Authors were required to record a 12 minute video for each paper.

Each paper was assigned two one-hour live Q&A sessions during the conference. Since the authors are located in different time zones, we conducted a survey about their available time slots, and tried to schedule the Q&A sessions according to their preferences.

Additionally, during the conference, each paper had its own RocketChat channel, for asynchronous Q&A and messages between authors and conference attendees.

== Funding ==

The SRW received $15,000 USD in funding from the National Science Foundation and $10,000 USD from the Don and Betty Walker Scholarship Fund.

We worked together with the Student Volunteer Coordinator to ensure that we financially support as many students as possible. We encouraged all SRW authors to apply for the volunteer program, and receive free ACL membership and conference registration.

We also coordinated with the Diversity and Inclusion Committee, which had its own financial assistance program, to ensure that available funds are optimally distributed.

Since the conference was completely virtual, the only expenses for students were the ACL membership fee and the conference registration fee. We waived the conference registration fee for all SRW authors who applied for financial assistance. Additionally, the membership fee was waived for all authors who volunteered at the conference.

== Recommendations ==

* As in previous years, we managed the pre-submission mentoring program via email and online forms. However, we found the process of keeping track of emails and downloads quite tedious. We recommend that future SRWs use the START system (or equivalent) for pre-submission mentoring feedback, while giving mentors the option to offer additional feedback to the authors directly via email.
* Post-acceptance mentoring was conducted by connecting the authors with the mentors via email, with encouragement to the authors to send their camera-ready drafts and presentations. While we received feedback from multiple authors that this program was very useful to them, some mentors informed us that the authors never communicated with them. Future SRWs can consider a more formal system of sending camera-ready drafts to the mentors and facilitating discussions between mentors and authors.
* We conducted separate recruiting processes for each of the mentoring programs and the program committee. However, several researchers participated in all three groups, which leads us to believe that a single recruitment process will likely be more efficient in future SRWs.

Additional recommendations are in the [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Faculty_Advisors_to_the_SRW report from the faculty advisors to the SRW].

2020Q3 Reports: Student Research Workshop Chairs

2020-07-21T17:08:30Z

Shrutirijhwani: /* Number of submissions */

The Student Research Workshop was held in conjunction with ACL 2020. The SRW gives student researchers in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing the opportunity to present their work and receive constructive feedback and mentorship by experienced members of the ACL community.

This report discusses the various aspects of organizing the SRW at ACL 2020, including:
* Website
* Mentoring Programs
* Submissions and Reviews
* Virtual Conference
* Funding
* Recommendations

== Organizers ==

The student co-chairs were:
* Shruti Rijhwani (Carnegie Mellon University)
* Jiangming Liu (The University of Edinburgh)
* Yizhong Wang (University of Washington)
* Rotem Dror (Israel Institute of Technology)

The faculty advisors were:
* Omri Abend (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
* Sujian Li (Peking University)
* Zhou Yu (University of California, Davis)

== Website ==

We created a website, which was the primary source of information about the SRW: https://sites.google.com/view/acl20studentresearchworkshop/.

Additionally, we managed a Twitter account for posting updates to social media: (@acl_srw).

The call for papers was publicized through the ACL mailing list as well as the ACL 2020 Twitter account (@acl_meeting).

== Mentoring Programs ==

We offered two mentoring programs this year. Pre-submission mentoring was available to all authors who wanted feedback before submitting their papers to the SRW. Post-acceptance mentoring program was available to authors of accepted papers, to get feedback on their camera-ready drafts and their conference presentations.

=== Pre-submission mentoring ===

We followed last year’s SRW in offering an optional round of pre-submission mentoring. This was designed to give students an opportunity to improve their submission, particularly the writing and presentation of the paper, before submitting their papers to the workshop for review.

Authors who submitted their papers in time for the pre-submission deadline received feedback from their assigned mentors before the final submission deadline, giving them time to integrate the mentor’s feedback into their final submission. A total of 57 papers participated in the pre-submission mentoring program. We recruited 30 mentors, all of whom are well-experienced researchers in the field, for the pre-submission program.

Papers were matched to mentors based on research areas. The mentoring feedback was also sent to authors anonymously through the SRW organizers. Additionally, the majority of mentors also offered to participate in follow-up discussions with the authors directly via email until the main submission deadline.

=== Post-acceptance mentoring ===

Each accepted paper was assigned a post-acceptance mentor, to provide feedback to the authors about their camera-ready drafts and conference presentations (which were pre-recorded this year). 49 mentors were recruited, i.e., one for each accepted paper.

=== Grammarly Premium ===

During both the pre-submission and post-acceptance mentoring programs, writing assistance in the form of vouchers for one month's free use of Grammarly Premium was sent to all participating authors. These were provided by the ACL 2020 Diversity and Inclusion Committee.

== Submission and Reviewing ==

=== Timeline ===

* Pre-submission mentoring deadline: January 17, 2020
* Pre-submission mentoring feedback: February 16, 2020
* Paper submission deadline: March 6, 2020
* Acceptance notification: April 17, 2020
* Camera-ready deadline: May 15, 2020

=== Submission procedure ===

The SRW consisted of two submission tracks: research papers and thesis proposals. Research papers were intended to encompass completed work, as well as works-in-progress from graduate students, masters students, and advanced undergraduates. Thesis proposals were intended to be a venue for senior graduate students to get feedback on their thesis proposal and the broader ideas surrounding the appropriateness and impact of their chosen topic. The page limit for both types of submissions was 5 pages of content, with unlimited pages for references.

Multiple submissions had to be declared at submission time, and double submission to the ACL SRW and the main ACL conference/other ACL workshops was not allowed. Submissions (in either track) could be archival or non-archival.

Submissions were managed through the START conference system.

=== Number of submissions ===

We received 137 submissions in total: 10 thesis proposals and 127 research papers. Among these, 12 research papers were non-archival.

The SRW received submissions from students in 28 countries, with the majority of submissions coming from the United States, China, India, and Japan.

We accepted 49 papers, with an acceptance rate of 36%. After withdrawals and excluding non-archival papers, 42 papers appear in the SRW proceedings, including 6 thesis proposals and 36 research papers.

Because of changes in conference deadlines resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, several authors requested a change from the non-archival to archival track. The SRW does not have a specific distribution with respect to each track, and given the unprecedented circumstances, these changes were permitted.

All accepted papers (archival and non-archival) were presented at the conference.

=== Program committee ===

We were fortunate to recruit 262 members for the SRW Program Committee. Each paper was assigned 3 reviewers. No reviewer was assigned more than 2 papers.

=== Reviewing ===

We used the “keyword bidding” capability on the START system, where reviewers could indicate their research areas of expertise. Submissions were then automatically assigned to reviewers based on these bids. All assignments were manually verified (and modified if needed) by the SRW co-chairs.

== Virtual Conference ==

The SRW papers are presented in conjunction with other ACL main conference papers from July 6 to July 8. All the papers accepted to the SRW i.e., research papers and thesis proposals in both the archival and non-archival tracks, were presented at the conference.

For the virtual presentations, we adopted the same format as the main conference, which featured pre-recorded talks, live Q&A sessions, and online messaging channels.

The SRW is traditionally held as a poster session at the same time and venue as that of the main conference. We tried to emulate this setting in order to allow the student authors of the SRW to receive similar exposure and feedback as they would during an in-person conference.
In coordination with the ACL Program Chairs, the Virtual Infrastructure Chairs, and the Publication Chairs, the SRW was conducted as a track within the main virtual conference:
* The virtual ACL website had the SRW papers in a separate track, listed alongside those of the main conference and system demonstrations.
* The live Q&A sessions for SRW papers were in the same time slots as the papers of the main conference.
* The schedule for the main conference included the SRW papers.

SlidesLive was used to host the pre-recorded presentations. Authors were required to record a 12 minute video for each paper.

Each paper was assigned two one-hour live Q&A sessions during the conference. Since the authors are located in different time zones, we conducted a survey about their available time slots, and tried to schedule the Q&A sessions according to their preferences.

Additionally, during the conference, each paper had its own RocketChat channel, for asynchronous Q&A and messages between authors and conference attendees.

== Funding ==

The SRW received $15,000 USD in funding from the National Science Foundation and $10,000 USD from the Don and Betty Walker Scholarship Fund.

We worked together with the Student Volunteer Coordinator to ensure that we financially support as many students as possible. We encouraged all SRW authors to apply for the volunteer program, and receive free ACL membership and conference registration.

We also coordinated with the Diversity and Inclusion Committee, which had its own financial assistance program, to ensure that available funds are optimally distributed.

Since the conference was completely virtual, the only expenses for students were the ACL membership fee and the conference registration fee. We waived the conference registration fee for all SRW authors who applied for financial assistance. Additionally, the membership fee was waived for all authors who volunteered at the conference.

== Recommendations ==

* As in previous years, we managed the pre-submission mentoring program via email and online forms. However, we found the process of keeping track of emails and downloads quite tedious. We recommend that future SRWs use the START system (or equivalent) for pre-submission mentoring feedback, while giving mentors the option to offer additional feedback to the authors directly via email.
* Post-acceptance mentoring was conducted by connecting the authors with the mentors via email, with encouragement to the authors to send their camera-ready drafts and presentations. While we received feedback from multiple authors that this program was very useful to them, some mentors informed us that the authors never communicated with them. Future SRWs can consider a more formal system of sending camera-ready drafts to the mentors and facilitating discussions between mentors and authors.
* We conducted separate recruiting processes for each of the mentoring programs and the program committee. However, several researchers participated in all three groups, which leads us to believe that a single recruitment process will likely be more efficient in future SRWs.

Additional recommendations are in the [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Faculty_Advisors_to_the_SRW report from the faculty advisors to the SRW].

2020Q3 Reports: Faculty Advisors to the SRW

2020-07-21T17:03:01Z

Shrutirijhwani:

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, Davis)

=== 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.

2020Q3 Reports: Student Research Workshop Chairs

2020-07-21T17:00:19Z

Shrutirijhwani: /* Number of submissions */

The Student Research Workshop was held in conjunction with ACL 2020. The SRW gives student researchers in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing the opportunity to present their work and receive constructive feedback and mentorship by experienced members of the ACL community.

This report discusses the various aspects of organizing the SRW at ACL 2020, including:
* Website
* Mentoring Programs
* Submissions and Reviews
* Virtual Conference
* Funding
* Recommendations

== Organizers ==

The student co-chairs were:
* Shruti Rijhwani (Carnegie Mellon University)
* Jiangming Liu (The University of Edinburgh)
* Yizhong Wang (University of Washington)
* Rotem Dror (Israel Institute of Technology)

The faculty advisors were:
* Omri Abend (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
* Sujian Li (Peking University)
* Zhou Yu (University of California, Davis)

== Website ==

We created a website, which was the primary source of information about the SRW: https://sites.google.com/view/acl20studentresearchworkshop/.

Additionally, we managed a Twitter account for posting updates to social media: (@acl_srw).

The call for papers was publicized through the ACL mailing list as well as the ACL 2020 Twitter account (@acl_meeting).

== Mentoring Programs ==

We offered two mentoring programs this year. Pre-submission mentoring was available to all authors who wanted feedback before submitting their papers to the SRW. Post-acceptance mentoring program was available to authors of accepted papers, to get feedback on their camera-ready drafts and their conference presentations.

=== Pre-submission mentoring ===

We followed last year’s SRW in offering an optional round of pre-submission mentoring. This was designed to give students an opportunity to improve their submission, particularly the writing and presentation of the paper, before submitting their papers to the workshop for review.

Authors who submitted their papers in time for the pre-submission deadline received feedback from their assigned mentors before the final submission deadline, giving them time to integrate the mentor’s feedback into their final submission. A total of 57 papers participated in the pre-submission mentoring program. We recruited 30 mentors, all of whom are well-experienced researchers in the field, for the pre-submission program.

Papers were matched to mentors based on research areas. The mentoring feedback was also sent to authors anonymously through the SRW organizers. Additionally, the majority of mentors also offered to participate in follow-up discussions with the authors directly via email until the main submission deadline.

=== Post-acceptance mentoring ===

Each accepted paper was assigned a post-acceptance mentor, to provide feedback to the authors about their camera-ready drafts and conference presentations (which were pre-recorded this year). 49 mentors were recruited, i.e., one for each accepted paper.

=== Grammarly Premium ===

During both the pre-submission and post-acceptance mentoring programs, writing assistance in the form of vouchers for one month's free use of Grammarly Premium was sent to all participating authors. These were provided by the ACL 2020 Diversity and Inclusion Committee.

== Submission and Reviewing ==

=== Timeline ===

* Pre-submission mentoring deadline: January 17, 2020
* Pre-submission mentoring feedback: February 16, 2020
* Paper submission deadline: March 6, 2020
* Acceptance notification: April 17, 2020
* Camera-ready deadline: May 15, 2020

=== Submission procedure ===

The SRW consisted of two submission tracks: research papers and thesis proposals. Research papers were intended to encompass completed work, as well as works-in-progress from graduate students, masters students, and advanced undergraduates. Thesis proposals were intended to be a venue for senior graduate students to get feedback on their thesis proposal and the broader ideas surrounding the appropriateness and impact of their chosen topic. The page limit for both types of submissions was 5 pages of content, with unlimited pages for references.

Multiple submissions had to be declared at submission time, and double submission to the ACL SRW and the main ACL conference/other ACL workshops was not allowed. Submissions (in either track) could be archival or non-archival.

Submissions were managed through the START conference system.

=== Number of submissions ===

We received 137 submissions in total: 10 thesis proposals and 127 research papers. Among these, 12 research papers were non-archival.

The SRW received submissions from students in 28 countries, with the majority of submissions coming from the United States, China, India, and Japan.

We accepted 49 papers, with an acceptance rate of 36%. After withdrawals and excluding non-archival papers, 42 papers appear in the SRW proceedings, including 6 thesis proposals and 36 research papers.

Because of changes in conference deadlines and schedules resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, several authors requested a change from the non-archival to archival track. The SRW does not have a specific distribution with respect to each track, and given the unprecedented circumstances, these changes were permitted.

All accepted papers (archival and non-archival) were presented at the conference.

=== Program committee ===

We were fortunate to recruit 262 members for the SRW Program Committee. Each paper was assigned 3 reviewers. No reviewer was assigned more than 2 papers.

=== Reviewing ===

We used the “keyword bidding” capability on the START system, where reviewers could indicate their research areas of expertise. Submissions were then automatically assigned to reviewers based on these bids. All assignments were manually verified (and modified if needed) by the SRW co-chairs.

== Virtual Conference ==

The SRW papers are presented in conjunction with other ACL main conference papers from July 6 to July 8. All the papers accepted to the SRW i.e., research papers and thesis proposals in both the archival and non-archival tracks, were presented at the conference.

For the virtual presentations, we adopted the same format as the main conference, which featured pre-recorded talks, live Q&A sessions, and online messaging channels.

The SRW is traditionally held as a poster session at the same time and venue as that of the main conference. We tried to emulate this setting in order to allow the student authors of the SRW to receive similar exposure and feedback as they would during an in-person conference.
In coordination with the ACL Program Chairs, the Virtual Infrastructure Chairs, and the Publication Chairs, the SRW was conducted as a track within the main virtual conference:
* The virtual ACL website had the SRW papers in a separate track, listed alongside those of the main conference and system demonstrations.
* The live Q&A sessions for SRW papers were in the same time slots as the papers of the main conference.
* The schedule for the main conference included the SRW papers.

SlidesLive was used to host the pre-recorded presentations. Authors were required to record a 12 minute video for each paper.

Each paper was assigned two one-hour live Q&A sessions during the conference. Since the authors are located in different time zones, we conducted a survey about their available time slots, and tried to schedule the Q&A sessions according to their preferences.

Additionally, during the conference, each paper had its own RocketChat channel, for asynchronous Q&A and messages between authors and conference attendees.

== Funding ==

The SRW received $15,000 USD in funding from the National Science Foundation and $10,000 USD from the Don and Betty Walker Scholarship Fund.

We worked together with the Student Volunteer Coordinator to ensure that we financially support as many students as possible. We encouraged all SRW authors to apply for the volunteer program, and receive free ACL membership and conference registration.

We also coordinated with the Diversity and Inclusion Committee, which had its own financial assistance program, to ensure that available funds are optimally distributed.

Since the conference was completely virtual, the only expenses for students were the ACL membership fee and the conference registration fee. We waived the conference registration fee for all SRW authors who applied for financial assistance. Additionally, the membership fee was waived for all authors who volunteered at the conference.

== Recommendations ==

* As in previous years, we managed the pre-submission mentoring program via email and online forms. However, we found the process of keeping track of emails and downloads quite tedious. We recommend that future SRWs use the START system (or equivalent) for pre-submission mentoring feedback, while giving mentors the option to offer additional feedback to the authors directly via email.
* Post-acceptance mentoring was conducted by connecting the authors with the mentors via email, with encouragement to the authors to send their camera-ready drafts and presentations. While we received feedback from multiple authors that this program was very useful to them, some mentors informed us that the authors never communicated with them. Future SRWs can consider a more formal system of sending camera-ready drafts to the mentors and facilitating discussions between mentors and authors.
* We conducted separate recruiting processes for each of the mentoring programs and the program committee. However, several researchers participated in all three groups, which leads us to believe that a single recruitment process will likely be more efficient in future SRWs.

Additional recommendations are in the [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Faculty_Advisors_to_the_SRW report from the faculty advisors to the SRW].

2020Q3 Reports: Student Research Workshop Chairs

2020-07-21T16:57:03Z

Shrutirijhwani:

The Student Research Workshop was held in conjunction with ACL 2020. The SRW gives student researchers in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing the opportunity to present their work and receive constructive feedback and mentorship by experienced members of the ACL community.

This report discusses the various aspects of organizing the SRW at ACL 2020, including:
* Website
* Mentoring Programs
* Submissions and Reviews
* Virtual Conference
* Funding
* Recommendations

== Organizers ==

The student co-chairs were:
* Shruti Rijhwani (Carnegie Mellon University)
* Jiangming Liu (The University of Edinburgh)
* Yizhong Wang (University of Washington)
* Rotem Dror (Israel Institute of Technology)

The faculty advisors were:
* Omri Abend (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
* Sujian Li (Peking University)
* Zhou Yu (University of California, Davis)

== Website ==

We created a website, which was the primary source of information about the SRW: https://sites.google.com/view/acl20studentresearchworkshop/.

Additionally, we managed a Twitter account for posting updates to social media: (@acl_srw).

The call for papers was publicized through the ACL mailing list as well as the ACL 2020 Twitter account (@acl_meeting).

== Mentoring Programs ==

We offered two mentoring programs this year. Pre-submission mentoring was available to all authors who wanted feedback before submitting their papers to the SRW. Post-acceptance mentoring program was available to authors of accepted papers, to get feedback on their camera-ready drafts and their conference presentations.

=== Pre-submission mentoring ===

We followed last year’s SRW in offering an optional round of pre-submission mentoring. This was designed to give students an opportunity to improve their submission, particularly the writing and presentation of the paper, before submitting their papers to the workshop for review.

Authors who submitted their papers in time for the pre-submission deadline received feedback from their assigned mentors before the final submission deadline, giving them time to integrate the mentor’s feedback into their final submission. A total of 57 papers participated in the pre-submission mentoring program. We recruited 30 mentors, all of whom are well-experienced researchers in the field, for the pre-submission program.

Papers were matched to mentors based on research areas. The mentoring feedback was also sent to authors anonymously through the SRW organizers. Additionally, the majority of mentors also offered to participate in follow-up discussions with the authors directly via email until the main submission deadline.

=== Post-acceptance mentoring ===

Each accepted paper was assigned a post-acceptance mentor, to provide feedback to the authors about their camera-ready drafts and conference presentations (which were pre-recorded this year). 49 mentors were recruited, i.e., one for each accepted paper.

=== Grammarly Premium ===

During both the pre-submission and post-acceptance mentoring programs, writing assistance in the form of vouchers for one month's free use of Grammarly Premium was sent to all participating authors. These were provided by the ACL 2020 Diversity and Inclusion Committee.

== Submission and Reviewing ==

=== Timeline ===

* Pre-submission mentoring deadline: January 17, 2020
* Pre-submission mentoring feedback: February 16, 2020
* Paper submission deadline: March 6, 2020
* Acceptance notification: April 17, 2020
* Camera-ready deadline: May 15, 2020

=== Submission procedure ===

The SRW consisted of two submission tracks: research papers and thesis proposals. Research papers were intended to encompass completed work, as well as works-in-progress from graduate students, masters students, and advanced undergraduates. Thesis proposals were intended to be a venue for senior graduate students to get feedback on their thesis proposal and the broader ideas surrounding the appropriateness and impact of their chosen topic. The page limit for both types of submissions was 5 pages of content, with unlimited pages for references.

Multiple submissions had to be declared at submission time, and double submission to the ACL SRW and the main ACL conference/other ACL workshops was not allowed. Submissions (in either track) could be archival or non-archival.

Submissions were managed through the START conference system.

=== Number of submissions ===

We received 137 submissions in total: 10 thesis proposals and 127 research papers. Among these, 12 research papers were non-archival.

The SRW received submissions from students in 28 countries, with the majority of submissions coming from the United States, China, India, and Japan.

We accepted 49 papers, with an acceptance rate of 36%. After withdrawals and excluding non-archival papers, 42 papers appear in the SRW proceedings, including 6 thesis proposals and 36 research papers.

Because of the changes in conference schedules resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, several authors requested a change from the non-archival to archival track. The SRW does not have a specific distribution with respect to each track, and given the unprecedented circumstances, these changes were permitted.

All accepted papers (archival and non-archival) were presented at the conference.

=== Program committee ===

We were fortunate to recruit 262 members for the SRW Program Committee. Each paper was assigned 3 reviewers. No reviewer was assigned more than 2 papers.

=== Reviewing ===

We used the “keyword bidding” capability on the START system, where reviewers could indicate their research areas of expertise. Submissions were then automatically assigned to reviewers based on these bids. All assignments were manually verified (and modified if needed) by the SRW co-chairs.

== Virtual Conference ==

The SRW papers are presented in conjunction with other ACL main conference papers from July 6 to July 8. All the papers accepted to the SRW i.e., research papers and thesis proposals in both the archival and non-archival tracks, were presented at the conference.

For the virtual presentations, we adopted the same format as the main conference, which featured pre-recorded talks, live Q&A sessions, and online messaging channels.

The SRW is traditionally held as a poster session at the same time and venue as that of the main conference. We tried to emulate this setting in order to allow the student authors of the SRW to receive similar exposure and feedback as they would during an in-person conference.
In coordination with the ACL Program Chairs, the Virtual Infrastructure Chairs, and the Publication Chairs, the SRW was conducted as a track within the main virtual conference:
* The virtual ACL website had the SRW papers in a separate track, listed alongside those of the main conference and system demonstrations.
* The live Q&A sessions for SRW papers were in the same time slots as the papers of the main conference.
* The schedule for the main conference included the SRW papers.

SlidesLive was used to host the pre-recorded presentations. Authors were required to record a 12 minute video for each paper.

Each paper was assigned two one-hour live Q&A sessions during the conference. Since the authors are located in different time zones, we conducted a survey about their available time slots, and tried to schedule the Q&A sessions according to their preferences.

Additionally, during the conference, each paper had its own RocketChat channel, for asynchronous Q&A and messages between authors and conference attendees.

== Funding ==

The SRW received $15,000 USD in funding from the National Science Foundation and $10,000 USD from the Don and Betty Walker Scholarship Fund.

We worked together with the Student Volunteer Coordinator to ensure that we financially support as many students as possible. We encouraged all SRW authors to apply for the volunteer program, and receive free ACL membership and conference registration.

We also coordinated with the Diversity and Inclusion Committee, which had its own financial assistance program, to ensure that available funds are optimally distributed.

Since the conference was completely virtual, the only expenses for students were the ACL membership fee and the conference registration fee. We waived the conference registration fee for all SRW authors who applied for financial assistance. Additionally, the membership fee was waived for all authors who volunteered at the conference.

== Recommendations ==

* As in previous years, we managed the pre-submission mentoring program via email and online forms. However, we found the process of keeping track of emails and downloads quite tedious. We recommend that future SRWs use the START system (or equivalent) for pre-submission mentoring feedback, while giving mentors the option to offer additional feedback to the authors directly via email.
* Post-acceptance mentoring was conducted by connecting the authors with the mentors via email, with encouragement to the authors to send their camera-ready drafts and presentations. While we received feedback from multiple authors that this program was very useful to them, some mentors informed us that the authors never communicated with them. Future SRWs can consider a more formal system of sending camera-ready drafts to the mentors and facilitating discussions between mentors and authors.
* We conducted separate recruiting processes for each of the mentoring programs and the program committee. However, several researchers participated in all three groups, which leads us to believe that a single recruitment process will likely be more efficient in future SRWs.

Additional recommendations are in the [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Faculty_Advisors_to_the_SRW report from the faculty advisors to the SRW].

2020Q3 Reports: Student Research Workshop Chairs

2020-07-21T16:53:45Z

Shrutirijhwani:

The Student Research Workshop was held in conjunction with ACL 2020. The SRW gives student researchers in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing the opportunity to present their work and receive constructive feedback and mentorship by experienced members of the ACL community.

This report discusses the various aspects of organizing the SRW at ACL 2020, including:
* Website
* Mentoring Programs
* Submissions and Reviews
* Virtual Conference
* Funding
* Recommendations

== Organizers ==

The student co-chairs were:
* Shruti Rijhwani (Carnegie Mellon University)
* Jiangming Liu (The University of Edinburgh)
* Yizhong Wang (University of Washington)
* Rotem Dror (Israel Institute of Technology)

The faculty advisors were:
* Omri Abend (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
* Sujian Li (Peking University)
* Zhou Yu (University of California, Davis)

== Website ==

We created a website, which was the primary source of information about the SRW: https://sites.google.com/view/acl20studentresearchworkshop/.

Additionally, we managed a Twitter account for posting updates to social media: (@acl_srw).

The call for papers was publicized through the ACL mailing list as well as the ACL 2020 Twitter account (@acl_meeting).

== Mentoring Programs ==

We offered two mentoring programs this year. Pre-submission mentoring was available to all authors who wanted feedback before submitting their papers to the SRW. Post-acceptance mentoring program was available to authors of accepted papers, to get feedback on their camera-ready drafts and their conference presentations.

=== Pre-submission mentoring ===

We followed last year’s SRW in offering an optional round of pre-submission mentoring. This was designed to give students an opportunity to improve their submission, particularly the writing and presentation of the paper, before submitting their papers to the workshop for review.

Authors who submitted their papers in time for the pre-submission deadline received feedback from their assigned mentors before the final submission deadline, giving them time to integrate the mentor’s feedback into their final submission. A total of 57 papers participated in the pre-submission mentoring program. We recruited 30 mentors, all of whom are well-experienced researchers in the field, for the pre-submission program.

Papers were matched to mentors based on research areas. The mentoring feedback was also sent to authors anonymously through the SRW organizers. Additionally, the majority of mentors also offered to participate in follow-up discussions with the authors directly via email until the main submission deadline.

=== Post-acceptance mentoring ===

Each accepted paper was assigned a post-acceptance mentor, to provide feedback to the authors about their camera-ready drafts and conference presentations (which were pre-recorded this year). 49 mentors were recruited, i.e., one for each accepted paper.

=== Grammarly Premium ===

During both the pre-submission and post-acceptance mentoring programs, writing assistance in the form of vouchers for one month's free use of Grammarly Premium was sent to all participating authors. These were provided by the ACL 2020 Diversity and Inclusion Committee.

== Submission and Reviewing ==

=== Timeline ===

* Pre-submission mentoring deadline: January 17, 2020
* Pre-submission mentoring feedback: February 16, 2020
* Paper submission deadline: March 6, 2020
* Acceptance notification: April 17, 2020
* Camera-ready deadline: May 15, 2020

=== Submission procedure ===

The SRW consisted of two submission tracks: research papers and thesis proposals. Research papers were intended to encompass completed work, as well as works-in-progress from graduate students, masters students, and advanced undergraduates. Thesis proposals were intended to be a venue for senior graduate students to get feedback on their thesis proposal and the broader ideas surrounding the appropriateness and impact of their chosen topic. The page limit for both types of submissions was 5 pages of content, with unlimited pages for references.

Multiple submissions had to be declared at submission time, and double submission to the ACL SRW and the main ACL conference/other ACL workshops was not allowed. Submissions (in either track) could be archival or non-archival.

Submissions were managed through the START conference system.

=== Number of submissions ===

We received 137 submissions in total: 10 thesis proposals and 127 research papers. Among these, 12 research papers were non-archival.

The SRW received submissions from students in 28 countries, with the majority of submissions coming from the United States, China, India, and Japan.

We accepted 49 papers, with an acceptance rate of 36%. After withdrawals and excluding non-archival papers, 42 papers appear in the SRW proceedings, including 6 thesis proposals and 36 research papers.

Because of the changes in conference schedules resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, several authors requested a change from the non-archival to archival track. The SRW does not have a specific distribution with respect to each track, and given the unprecedented circumstances, these changes were permitted.

All accepted papers (archival and non-archival) were presented at the conference.

=== Program committee ===

We were fortunate to recruit 262 members for the SRW Program Committee. Each paper was assigned 3 reviewers. No reviewer was assigned more than 2 papers.

=== Reviewing ===

We used the “keyword bidding” capability on the START system, where reviewers could indicate their research areas of expertise. Submissions were then automatically assigned to reviewers based on these bids. All assignments were manually verified (and modified if needed) by the SRW co-chairs.

== Virtual Conference ==

The SRW papers are presented in conjunction with other ACL main conference papers from July 6 to July 8. All the papers accepted to the SRW i.e., research papers and thesis proposals in both the archival and non-archival tracks, were presented at the conference.

For the virtual presentations, we adopted the same format as the main conference, which featured pre-recorded talks, live Q&A sessions, and online messaging channels.

The SRW is traditionally held as a poster session at the same time as that of the main conference, usually in the same room. We tried to emulate this setting in order to allow the student authors of the SRW to receive similar exposure and feedback as they would during an in-person conference.
In coordination with the ACL Program Chairs, the Virtual Infrastructure Chairs, and the Publication Chairs, the SRW was conducted as a track within the main virtual conference:
* The virtual ACL website had the SRW papers alongside those of the main conference and system demonstrations.
* The live Q&A sessions for SRW papers were in the same time slots as the papers of the main conference.
* The schedule for the main conference included the SRW papers.

SlidesLive was used to host the pre-recorded presentations. Authors were required to record a 12 minute video for each paper.

Each paper was assigned two one-hour live Q&A sessions during the conference. Since the authors are located in different time zones, we conducted a survey about their available time slots, and tried to schedule the Q&A sessions according to their preferences.

Additionally, during the conference, each paper had its own RocketChat channel, for asynchronous Q&A and messages between authors and conference attendees.

== Funding ==

The SRW received $15,000 USD in funding from the National Science Foundation and $10,000 USD from the Don and Betty Walker Scholarship Fund.

We worked together with the Student Volunteer Coordinator to ensure that we financially support as many students as possible. We encouraged all SRW authors to apply for the volunteer program, and receive free ACL membership and conference registration.

We also coordinated with the Diversity and Inclusion Committee, which had its own financial assistance program, to ensure that available funds are optimally distributed.

Since the conference was completely virtual, the only expenses for students were the ACL membership fee and the conference registration fee. We waived the conference registration fee for all SRW authors who applied for financial assistance. Additionally, the membership fee was waived for all authors who volunteered at the conference.

== Recommendations ==

* As in previous years, we managed the pre-submission mentoring program via email and online forms. However, we found the process of keeping track of emails and downloads quite tedious. We recommend that future SRWs use the START system (or equivalent) for pre-submission mentoring feedback, while giving mentors the option to offer additional feedback to the authors directly via email.
* Post-acceptance mentoring was conducted by connecting the authors with the mentors via email, with encouragement to the authors to send their camera-ready drafts and presentations. While we received feedback from multiple authors that this program was very useful to them, some mentors informed us that the authors never communicated with them. Future SRWs can consider a more formal system of sending camera-ready drafts to the mentors and facilitating discussions between mentors and authors.
* We conducted separate recruiting processes for each of the mentoring programs and the program committee. However, several researchers participated in all three groups, which leads us to believe that a single recruitment process will likely be more efficient in future SRWs.

Additional recommendations are in the [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Faculty_Advisors_to_the_SRW report from the faculty advisors to the SRW].

2020Q3 Reports: Student Research Workshop Chairs

2020-07-21T03:12:54Z

Shrutirijhwani:

The Student Research Workshop was held in conjunction with ACL 2020. The SRW gives student researchers in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing the opportunity to present their work and receive constructive feedback and mentorship by experienced members of the ACL community.

This report discusses the various aspects of organizing the SRW at ACL 2020, including:
* Website
* Mentoring Programs
* Submissions and Reviews
* Virtual Conference
* Funding
* Recommendations

== Organizers ==

The student co-chairs were:
* Shruti Rijhwani (Carnegie Mellon University)
* Jiangming Liu (The University of Edinburgh)
* Yizhong Wang (University of Washington)
* Rotem Dror (Israel Institute of Technology)

The faculty advisors were:
* Omri Abend (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
* Sujian Li (Peking University)
* Zhou Yu (University of California, Davis)

== Website ==

We created a website, which was the primary source of information about the SRW: https://sites.google.com/view/acl20studentresearchworkshop/.

Additionally, we managed a Twitter account for posting updates to social media: (@acl_srw).

The call for papers was publicized through the ACL mailing list as well as the ACL 2020 Twitter account (@acl_meeting).

== Mentoring Programs ==

We offered two mentoring programs this year. Pre-submission mentoring was available to all authors who wanted feedback before submitting their papers to the SRW. Post-acceptance mentoring program was available to authors of accepted papers, to get feedback on their camera-ready drafts and their conference presentations.

=== Pre-submission mentoring ===

We followed last year’s SRW in offering an optional round of pre-submission mentoring. This was designed to give students an opportunity to improve their submission, particularly the writing and presentation of the paper, before submitting their papers to the workshop for review.

Authors who submitted their papers in time for the pre-submission deadline received feedback from their assigned mentors before the final submission deadline, giving them time to integrate the mentor’s feedback into their final submission. A total of 57 papers participated in the pre-submission mentoring program. We recruited 30 mentors, all of whom are well-experienced researchers in the field, for the pre-submission program.

Papers were matched to mentors based on research areas. The mentoring feedback was also sent to authors anonymously through the SRW organizers. Additionally, the majority of mentors also offered to participate in follow-up discussions with the authors directly via email until the main submission deadline.

=== Post-acceptance mentoring ===

Each accepted paper was assigned a post-acceptance mentor, to provide feedback to the authors about their camera-ready drafts and conference presentations (which were pre-recorded this year). 49 mentors were recruited, i.e., one for each accepted paper.

=== Grammarly Premium ===

During both the pre-submission and post-acceptance mentoring programs, writing assistance in the form of vouchers for one month's free use of Grammarly Premium was sent to all participating authors. These were provided by the ACL 2020 Diversity and Inclusion Committee.

== Submission and Reviewing ==

=== Timeline ===

* Pre-submission mentoring deadline: January 17, 2020
* Pre-submission mentoring feedback: February 16, 2020
* Paper submission deadline: March 6, 2020
* Acceptance notification: April 17, 2020
* Camera-ready deadline: May 15, 2020

=== Submission procedure ===

The SRW consisted of two submission tracks: research papers and thesis proposals. Research papers were intended to encompass completed work, as well as works-in-progress from graduate students, masters students, and advanced undergraduates. Thesis proposals were intended to be a venue for senior graduate students to get feedback on their thesis proposal and the broader ideas surrounding the appropriateness and impact of their chosen topic. The page limit for both types of submissions was 5 pages of content, with unlimited pages for references.

Multiple submissions had to be declared at submission time, and double submission to the ACL SRW and the main ACL conference/other ACL workshops was not allowed. Submissions (in either track) could be archival or non-archival.

Submissions were managed through the START conference system.

=== Number of submissions ===

We received 137 submissions in total: 10 thesis proposals and 127 research papers. Among these, 12 research papers were non-archival.

The SRW received submissions from students in 28 countries, with the majority of submissions coming from the United States, China, India, and Japan.

We accepted 49 papers, with an acceptance rate of 36%. After withdrawals and excluding non-archival papers, 42 papers appear in the SRW proceedings, including 6 thesis proposals and 36 research papers.

Because of the changes in conference schedules resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, several authors requested a change from the non-archival to archival track. The SRW does not have a specific distribution with respect to each track, and given the unprecedented circumstances, these changes were permitted.

All accepted papers (archival and non-archival) were presented at the conference.

=== Program committee ===

We were fortunate to recruit 262 members for the SRW Program Committee. Each paper was assigned 3 reviewers. No reviewer was assigned more than 2 papers.

=== Reviewing ===

We used the “keyword bidding” capability on the START system, where reviewers could indicate their research areas of expertise. Submissions were then automatically assigned to reviewers based on these bids. All assignments were manually verified (and modified if needed) by the SRW co-chairs.

== Virtual Conference ==

TBD

== Funding ==

The SRW received $15,000 USD in funding from the National Science Foundation and $10,000 USD from the Don and Betty Walker Scholarship Fund.

We worked together with the Student Volunteer Coordinator to ensure that we financially support as many students as possible. We encouraged all SRW authors to apply for the volunteer program, and receive free ACL membership and conference registration.

Since the conference was completely virtual, the only expenses for students were the ACL membership fee and the conference registration fee. We waived the conference registration fee for all SRW authors that applied for financial assistance. Additionally, the membership fee was waived for all authors who volunteered at the conference.

== Recommendations ==

* As in previous years, we managed the pre-submission mentoring program via email and online forms. However, we found the process of keeping track of emails and downloads quite tedious. We recommend that future SRWs use the START system (or equivalent) for pre-submission mentoring feedback, while giving mentors the option to offer additional feedback to the authors directly via email.
* Post-acceptance mentoring was conducted by connecting the authors with the mentors via email, with encouragement to the authors to send their camera-ready drafts and presentations. While we received feedback from multiple authors that this program was very useful to them, some mentors informed us that the authors never communicated with them. Future SRWs can consider a more formal system of sending camera-ready drafts to the mentors and facilitating discussions between mentors and authors.
* We conducted separate recruiting processes for each of the mentoring programs and the program committee. However, several researchers participated in all three groups, which leads us to believe that a single recruitment process will likely be more efficient in future SRWs.

Additional recommendations are in the report from the faculty advisors: [TBD link].

2020Q3 Reports: Student Research Workshop Chairs

2020-07-21T03:12:24Z

Shrutirijhwani:

The Student Research Workshop was held in conjunction with ACL 2020. The SRW gives student researchers in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing the opportunity to present their work and receive constructive feedback and mentorship by experienced members of the ACL community.

This report discusses the various aspects of organizing the SRW at ACL 2020, including:
* Website
* Mentoring Programs
* Submissions and Reviews
* Virtual Conference
* Funding
* Recommendations

== Organizers ==

The student co-chairs were:
* Shruti Rijhwani (Carnegie Mellon University)
* Jiangming Liu (The University of Edinburgh)
* Yizhong Wang (University of Washington)
* Rotem Dror (Israel Institute of Technology)

The faculty advisors were:
* Omri Abend (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
* Sujian Li (Peking University)
* Zhou Yu (University of California, Davis)

== Website ==

We created a website, which was the primary source of information about the SRW: https://sites.google.com/view/acl20studentresearchworkshop/.

Additionally, we managed a Twitter account for posting updates to social media: (@acl_srw).

The call for papers was publicized through the ACL mailing list as well as the ACL 2020 Twitter account (@acl_meeting).

== Mentoring Programs ==

We offered two mentoring programs this year. Pre-submission mentoring was available to all authors who wanted feedback before submitting their papers to the SRW. Post-acceptance mentoring program was available to authors of accepted papers, to get feedback on their camera-ready drafts and their conference presentations.

=== Pre-submission mentoring ===

We followed last year’s SRW in offering an optional round of pre-submission mentoring. This was designed to give students an opportunity to improve their submission, particularly the writing and presentation of the paper, before submitting their papers to the workshop for review.

Authors who submitted their papers in time for the pre-submission deadline received feedback from their assigned mentors before the final submission deadline, giving them time to integrate the mentor’s feedback into their final submission. A total of 57 papers participated in the pre-submission mentoring program. We recruited 30 mentors, all of whom are well-experienced researchers in the field, for the pre-submission program.

Papers were matched to mentors based on research areas. The mentoring feedback was also sent to authors anonymously through the SRW organizers. Additionally, the majority of mentors also offered to participate in follow-up discussions with the authors directly via email until the main submission deadline.

=== Post-acceptance mentoring ===

Each accepted paper was assigned a post-acceptance mentor, to provide feedback to the authors about their camera-ready drafts and conference presentations (which were pre-recorded this year). 49 mentors were recruited, i.e., one for each accepted paper.

=== Grammarly Premium ===

During both the pre-submission and post-acceptance mentoring programs, writing assistance in the form of vouchers for one month's free use of Grammarly Premium was sent to all participating authors. These were provided by the ACL 2020 Diversity and Inclusion Committee.

== Submission and Reviewing ==

=== Timeline ===

* Pre-submission mentoring deadline: January 17, 2020
* Pre-submission mentoring feedback: February 16, 2020
* Paper submission deadline: March 6, 2020
* Acceptance notification: April 17, 2020
* Camera-ready deadline: May 15, 2020

=== Submission procedure ===

The SRW consisted of two submission tracks: research papers and thesis proposals. Research papers were intended to encompass completed work, as well as works-in-progress from graduate students, masters students, and advanced undergraduates. Thesis proposals were intended to be a venue for senior graduate students to get feedback on their thesis proposal and the broader ideas surrounding the appropriateness and impact of their chosen topic. The page limit for both types of submissions was 5 pages of content, with unlimited pages for references.

Multiple submissions had to be declared at submission time, and double submission to the ACL SRW and the main ACL conference/other ACL workshops was not allowed. Submissions (in either track) could be archival or non-archival.

Submissions were managed through the START conference system.

=== Number of submissions ===

We received 137 submissions in total: 10 thesis proposals and 127 research papers. Among these, 12 research papers were non-archival.

The SRW received submissions from students in 28 countries, with the majority of submissions coming from the United States, China, India, and Japan.

We accepted 49 papers, with an acceptance rate of 36%. After withdrawals and excluding non-archival papers, 42 papers appear in the SRW proceedings, including 6 thesis proposals and 36 research papers.

Because of the changes in conference schedules resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, several authors requested a change from the non-archival to archival track. The SRW does not have a specific distribution with respect to each track, and given the unprecedented circumstances, these changes were permitted.

All accepted papers (archival and non-archival) were presented at the conference.

=== Program committee ===

We were fortunate to recruit 262 members for the SRW Program Committee. Each paper was assigned 3 reviewers. No reviewer was assigned more than 2 papers.

=== Reviewing ===

We used the “keyword bidding” capability on the START system, where reviewers could indicate their research areas of expertise. Submissions were then automatically assigned to reviewers based on these bids. All assignments were manually verified (and modified if needed) by the SRW co-chairs.

== Virtual Conference ==

TBD

== Funding ==

The SRW received $15,000 USD in funding from the National Science Foundation and $10,000 USD from the Don and Betty Walker Scholarship Fund.

We worked together with the Student Volunteer Coordinator to ensure that we financially support as many students as possible. We encouraged all SRW authors to apply for the volunteer program, and receive free ACL membership and conference registration.

Since the conference was completely virtual, the only expenses for students were the ACL membership fee and the conference registration fee. We waived the conference registration fee for all SRW authors that applied for financial assistance. Additionally, the membership fee was waived for all authors who volunteered at the conference.

== Recommendations ==

* As in previous years, we managed the pre-submission mentoring program via email and online forms. However, we found the process of keeping track of emails and downloads quite tedious. We recommend that future SRWs use the START system (or equivalent) for pre-submission mentoring feedback, while giving mentors the option to offer additional feedback to the authors directly via email.
* Post-acceptance mentoring was conducted by connecting the authors with the mentors via email, with encouragement to the authors to send their camera-ready drafts and presentations. While we received feedback from multiple authors that this program was very useful to them, some mentors informed us that the authors never communicated with them. Future SRWs can consider a more formal system of sending camera-ready drafts to the mentors and facilitating discussions between mentors and authors.
* We conducted separate recruiting processes for each of the mentoring programs and the program committee. However, several researchers participated in all three groups, which leads us to believe that a single recruitment process will likely be more efficient in future SRWs.

Additional recommendations are in the report from the faculty advisors: [TBD link].

2020Q3 Reports: Student Research Workshop Chairs

2020-07-20T19:41:50Z

Shrutirijhwani: Created blank page

2020Q1 Reports: ACL 2020

2020-02-19T18:31:52Z

Shrutirijhwani: /* Student Research Workshop Chairs and Faculty Advisors */

== 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==

'''Student Research Workshop Co-chairs'''

Rotem Dror, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

Jiangming Liu, The University of Edinburgh

Shruti Rijhwani, Carnegie Mellon University

'''Student Research Workshop Faculty Advisors'''

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 members of the ACL community (both students and senior researchers) to serve as the Program Committee for reviewing submissions to the SRW. 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

2020-02-19T18:29:41Z

Shrutirijhwani: /* Student Research Workshop Chairs and Faculty Advisors */

== 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==

'''Student Research Workshop Co-chairs'''

Rotem Dror, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

Jiangming Liu, The University of Edinburgh

Shruti Rijhwani, Carnegie Mellon University

'''Student Research Workshop Faculty Advisors'''

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

2020-02-19T15:29:33Z

Shrutirijhwani: /* Student Research Workshop Chairs and Faculty Advisors */

== 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