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2020Q3 Reports: Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs

2020-07-17T18:11:02Z

Vinodkpg:

== Prelude ==

Prepared by Cissi Ovesdotter Alm, RIT, and Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Google, Inc.

==== D&I team members ====
Sushant Kafle (Google, Inc), Masoud Rouhizadeh (JHU), Naomi Saphra (U. Edinburgh), Aakanksha Naik (CMU), Khyathi Chandu (CMU), Emily Prud’hommeaux (BC), Alla Rozovskaya (CUNY), Allyson Ettinger (UChicago), Ryan Georgi (KPMG), Tirthankar Ghosal (IIT Patna), Shruti Palaskar (CMU), Maarten Sap (UW), and Stephen Mayhew (Duolingo).

==== D&I sponsors ====
The D&I Champion sponsors were [https://deepmind.com/ DeepMind] and [https://www.microsoft.com/ Microsoft] and the D&I In-Kind sponsor was [https://www.grammarly.com/ Grammarly].

Shift to the virtual setting: With the move to the virtual conference, original plans such as the childcare-related initiatives (provision of onsite childcare, a statement welcoming babywearing, welcome item for kids, Kidz Corner at the welcome reception, family accommodation and lending of noise-canceling baby/toddler earmuffs at the social event, etc.), as well as efforts limited to a physical venue (designated D&I spaces, inclusive food options, improving non-alcoholic drink options at events, etc.) were abandoned. The other D&I efforts, involving four subcommittees--Accessibility (Kafle, Rouhizadeh, Saphra), Academic Inclusion (Chandu, Naik, Prud’hommeaux, Rozovskaya) Financial Access (Ettinger, Georgi, Ghosal), and Socio-cultural Inclusion (Palaskar, Sap)--were adapted to the virtual setting or new ones emerged.

This report focuses on the efforts that continued or were introduced under the virtual format.

== D&I questions in the registration form ==

We updated the D&I questions in the registration form. These D&I questions included:

* What career stage do you identify with? (Undergraduate student; Graduate student; Early-career academic researcher; Early-career industry researcher; Senior academic researcher; Senior industry researcher)
* Would you be interested in receiving mentorship at the conference through a virtual platform? (Yes, I would like to attend a group mentoring session for students; Yes, I would like to attend a group mentoring session for early-career researchers; No, does not apply [radio buttons])
* Would you be interested in providing mentorship at the conference through a virtual platform? (Yes, I would be happy to provide mentorship advice to students; Yes, I would be happy to provide mentorship advice to early-career researchers [check boxes])
* Will you need any access services such as sign language interpreting? If so, please describe your needs.
* If you are a presenter and have a hard scheduling constraint (due to caregiving, religious holidays, etc.), please explain.

We considered a question on pronouns however decided against it due to the potential privacy concerns around protecting such sensitive data, once collected. Instead, participants could communicate their pronouns through their RocketChat (or Zoom) profile names, directions for which were included in the instructions to log into the virtual website shared in the Welcome email.

The D&I questions above allowed us to collect information and plan ahead based on data from early registration, which we processed in batches, given that the early registration deadline had to be set later than usual this year.

=== Registration form recommendations ===

* We suggest revising the third question above, which aimed to elicit interest in providing mentorship but caused confusion among some registrants who selected “Yes” to both the second and third questions for similar career stages, requiring extra effort for organizers to identify mentors. (Also, the term “early-career researchers” caused confusion, with answers from undergraduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and associate professors). An alternative wording could be:
** If you are a (post-PhD) junior or senior researcher, would you be interested in providing mentorship at the conference through a virtual platform? (Yes, I am a junior or senior researcher, and would be happy to provide mentorship advice to students; Yes, I am a senior researcher and would be happy to provide mentorship advice to (post-PhD) early-career researchers [check boxes])
** Alternatively, consider breaking career stages into more fine-grained options and asking for highest degree completed and years of experience after completing highest degree.

== Accessibility ==

ACL as a community has room to improve on how accessible conferences and the materials they produce are to colleagues with disabilities. We took the following steps in an effort to begin to address some of these issues for ACL 2020.
* A blog post informing authors how to prepare [https://acl2020.org/blog/accessibility-for-camera-ready/ accessible camera-ready papers] (led by Sushant Kafle) was published on April 2, 2020; in advance of the camera-ready paper deadline.
* A blog post encouraging authors to prepare [https://acl2020.org/blog/Accessible-Presentations-at-ACL-2020/ accessible presentations] (led by Naomi Saphra) was published on May 30, 202; in advance of the deadline for uploading pre-recorded videos to SlidesLive. Both blog posts were appreciated on social media.
* Through regular updates from Priscilla on accessibility requests made during registration, we learned that researchers who used a screen-reader or captioning would attend the conference. (There were also some other requests which were not in the scope of accessibility, e.g., spoken language interpreting). All such requests generally involved individual follow-up to clarify actual needs.
* Sushant Kafle reviewed the virtual website to produce an [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xxMKznHVYYM2bq-WRTObWaKS5rTqyCAzbPoSutg5etk/edit?usp=sharing Accessibility Report for ACL Virtual Conference website], with attention to how well it functioned with screen-reader software. These issues were shared with the infrastructure committee via email and as Github issue tickets.
* Sushant Kafle further compiled a list of [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lNNgRAInSgelp-8WHXddmFbiLiSeH5A6K-GmnhcFYOw/edit?usp=sharing Accessibility Issues with Rocket Chat] which might need to be taken up with RocketChat for future conferences.
* The originally intended real-time captions (facilitated by Masoud Rouhizadeh) did not apply in the virtual setting. Instead, we advocated for the need for captioning of pre-recorded and live video materials, and continued to provide input to the new captioning chairs, Ananya and Klaus ([https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Captioning_and_Sustainability_Co-Chairs link to their report]). For the virtual conference, CART captioning for live plenaries ensured access for the hard-of-hearing, anyone who could not listen to the audio, and anyone who may have been at a disadvantage due to a language barrier. Authors of pre-recorded talks were also encouraged to correct captions for their talk, which will move into and become part of the ACL Anthology.

=== Accessibility recommendations ===

* Continue advocacy for accessible materials (papers, slides, videos, and websites).
* Ensure that a committee member is involved in assessing and providing input about the accessibility of the main conference website from the start (alternative texts for images, color selection, etc.), including for non-virtual conferences.
* Ensure quality captions for both live sessions and pre-recorded videos at virtual and non-virtual conferences. The social media activity on issues with auto-generated captions indicate this is a critical priority for authors generally.
* Elicit requests for access services in registration and ensure accessible websites.
* Ensure accessibility issues in the virtual conference website are fixed (detailed [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xxMKznHVYYM2bq-WRTObWaKS5rTqyCAzbPoSutg5etk/edit?usp=sharing here]), if the same codebase from ACL will be used in a future conference.
* Contact RocketChat to resolve the accessibility issues with their platform (detailed [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lNNgRAInSgelp-8WHXddmFbiLiSeH5A6K-GmnhcFYOw/edit?usp=sharing here]), if their service will be used for future conferences.

== Academic inclusion ==

The academic inclusion mentoring efforts involved four types of events (led by Aakanksha Naik and Khyathi Chandu):
* Panel for undergraduate students (new): This panel, which attracted around 90 participants, discussed topics such as graduate school and degrees, career path options, and also aimed to help undergraduate students navigate the NLP research landscape and the field’s future. Preferences on topics, panelists, and questions were elicited with a survey sent to undergraduate students. The panel was held on June 5th and was moderated by Aakanksha Naik and Khyathi Chandu (Academic Inclusion leads). There were 7 panelists, including faculty, industry researchers, and graduate students. The structure included panelist introductions by moderators, reflections from each panelist on three questions (below), and moderated Q&A with the panelists based on a curated set of [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ln6dr1XZtQYph6ip-d-_oPX0eNGDKeaF1dbk1XEgZok/edit 15 questions] (from around 75 questions elicited from students):
** What about NLP/computational linguistics excites you the most? How did you get interested in NLP/computational linguistics and how has that interest (and your career) evolved over the years?
** What factors guided you in making important career decisions: graduate school, industry vs. academia, etc.
** What is one thing that you know now that you wish you knew as an undergraduate student?
* Small group mentoring sessions: We organized 82 sessions of pre-assigned small group mentoring sessions for students or early-career researchers (ECR). These sessions were held on July 6, 7, and 8 in the same two time slots: midnight-1am PDT and 9am-10am PDT, aiming for a broad coverage of timezones. There were 944 mentees (571 students and 373 ECRs), 202 mentors (136 mentors for students and 66 mentors for ECRs), of which 34 mentors were ECRs mentees themselves. The session assignments were made using an automated matching process based on time and topic preferences collected through a survey. Each session had 1-3 mentors and approximately 5-13 mentees. The sessions were intentionally kept small in order to encourage more personal interactions that we believe is important to help the mentees, especially the newcomers. These sessions were also supported by 20 volunteer moderators who helped resolve challenges for mentors.
* Birds of a Feather meetups: We organized 29 open sessions over July 6 and 7, led by around 35 senior researchers. These sessions were centered on 23 themes listed in the ACL 2020 call for papers and did not require pre-registration.
* Open group mentoring sessions: Based on the popularity of the small group mentoring sessions (second item above), we organized 9 additional open group mentoring sessions on July 8. These sessions covered 10 popular topics from previous days. 24 mentors quickly signed up in response to an emergency call for mentors that went out on July 7 (PDT). This time, there was no matching process and the sessions could accommodate groups of any size, including attendees joining in late registration. For example, the session on the topic Long-term career planning + Becoming a research leader: building your professional identity attracted over 100 participants.
* Throughout the conference, mentoring events were broadcast in the Socials tab and the #announcement channel (over 20 such announcements) and often also announced by the mentors themselves. We also scheduled social media announcements via publicity chairs for messages to be sent out prior to the Birds of a Feather meetups, etc. We also sent an email to mentors clarifying about not sharing the small group mentoring links (e.g., on RocketChat) given the intended small-group format for those sessions.
* In general, social media activity revealed that the mentoring activities were popular among many attendees

=== Academic inclusion recommendations ===

* For a virtual conference with individual Zoom rooms/accounts, shared accounts must be avoided and new links be provided for each mentoring session. When mentors forgot to log out from ACL-provided accounts after their sessions ended, this caused an access issue for other mentors who tried to use those accounts for a later session.
* Provide guidelines to mentors about recommended communication practices for participants’ interactions, including tools that are accessible across countries (Google applications are not) if mentors wish to pass on materials or connect participants in collaborative writing, to further improve inclusivity. Additionally, consider how ACL can provide such online interaction spaces directly to mentors and participants. (This point is based on social media comments; thanks to Emily Bender for pointing this out.)
* If feasible, use the same infrastructure for paper live Q&A sessions for group mentoring sessions. This would ensure unique accounts and links for each mentoring group, along with dedicated RocketChat channels, which could be a medium for mentors who want to share materials or surveys with their mentees before or after their session.
* Attendees were not used to 24-hour schedules for virtual conferences, resulting in confusion about the early morning PDT time slots. For instance, many mentors mistakenly signed up for sessions in the 1am - 5am window, since they were not expecting sessions to be held at that hour. This necessitated dealing with a large number of rescheduling requests, adding pressure on coordinators.
* Make efforts to reach students early in their careers, including by scheduling one or more undergraduate student-focused events early in the conference, but also by considering non-conference efforts. Early exposure to research can help widening participation in the field.
* Add group mentoring themes and BoF themes at future conferences that respond to D&I in our community, e.g., Low-resource CL/NLP as a BoF, and Advice on navigating academia as a member of an underrepresented group as a group mentoring theme.
* Recommendations for improved communication with attendees:
** Release a blog post explaining various types of mentoring events (purpose, logistics, sign-up process, etc.) prior to the start of EMNLP registrations, so that mentors and mentees have more clarity about these events upfront.
** Ensure the sign-up deadlines for all events that require registration are clearly highlighted in the conference registration form.
** Use an ACL-supported mechanism for mass emailing mentoring surveys or group assignments to ensure these emails are not spam-filtered or blocked.
* Exploratory suggestion: It might be helpful to explore a tiered mentorship program. For example, late-stage PhD students acting as mentors to undergraduate and Master’s students, post-PhD junior researchers as mentors to PhD students, and so on. This may strategically increase the number of mentors to satisfy the mentoring demand.

== Financial access ==

* For the various efforts under the financial access subcommittee, a summary is in the blog post titled [https://acl2020.org/blog/increasing-financial-accessibility “Increasing financial accessibility of ACL 2020”] (Tirthankar Ghosal, Allyson Ettinger, Ryan Georgi). published on July 4. The blog post was well-received on social media.
* The virtual conference presented an opportunity to cost-effectively support more people to attend the conference, and to coordinate across support initiatives,
* We issued a [https://twitter.com/aclmeeting/status/1266532726628184065 call for application] for D&I subsidies, which was open from May 29 to June 7. We reached out to [https://blackinai.github.io/ Black in AI], [https://www.latinxinai.org/ LatinX in AI], [https://africanlp-workshop.github.io/ AfricaNLP], and [https://deeplearningindaba.com/ Deep Learning Indaba] about the call.
* There were 123 applications submitted. Sub-Saharan Africa (22%), South Asia (20%), US and Canada (18%), and Europe and UK (17%) were most represented, with fewer applications from Middle East and North Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and East Asia.
* Overall, 83 applicants from 29 countries received subsidies for a combination of the conference registration fee, ACL membership fee, and internet bandwidth. We awarded $8750 for registration and membership fees, and another $250 (excluding fund-transfer fees) for internet bandwidth subsidies. Subsidy offers for Sub-Saharan Africa made up around a quarter. Less represented regions included Middle East and North Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, East Asia.
* To simplify reimbursement, the registration and membership waivers were provided through the registration form. Priscilla received a list of D&I subsidy recipients.
* The internet bandwidth funds processing (led by Ryan Georgi) used a form to elicit information on how to transfer funds, since options differ by country of residence.
* Additionally, Tirthankar Ghosal led the effort to distribute 1131 access codes provided by [https://www.grammarly.com/ Grammarly] to the corresponding authors of accepted papers for the main conference, including ACL-Demos, SRW pre-submission phase, the WiNLP workshop, and a subset of other workshops.

=== Financial access recommendations ===
* Continue prioritizing outreach to researchers from underrepresented regions and groups.
* Consider new ways for integrating virtual access into our conferences as it has immense potential for broadening participation to diverse audiences.

== Socio-cultural inclusion ==

* The efforts focused on contacting affinity groups in the AI community and offering to facilitate social events, organized by the affinity groups, at the conference (arranging Zoom links, publicizing socials, etc.).
* Two different affinity groups organized and announced events in the Socials tab, etc.:
** The Queer in AI social was scheduled in two time slots on July 8 (outreach by Maarten Sap), featuring mini-speeches by Elin McCready (Social A), Robyn Speer (Social B) and Alex Hanna (both). There were 44 and 96 registrations for socials A and B, respectively.
** The Black in AI socials included a Fireside Chat with Donia Scott on July 9 and a social with a presentation by Kianté Brantley on July 10 (outreach by Shruthi Palaskar).
* In addition, we posted a message on #announcements encouraging attendees from various affinity groups to create or join RocketChat channels.
* RocketChat censors words that are on a blocklist, replacing them with ***. We asked the infrastructure chairs (specifically, Hao Fang) to disable this option which seems to be [https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/blob/b64fb67263e053d8ec8c8d561e02baf020ec370c/app/lib/server/startup/settings.js#L1035 enabled by default]. Not disabling this would have been a significant barrier to diversity, due to the blocklist containing identity mentions (e.g., "queer", "lesbian") which made affinity groups (e.g., "Queer in AI") hard to discuss.

=== Socio-cultural inclusion recommendations ===

* Since the field involves multiple disciplines, seek to expand outreach through additional affinity groups in relevant disciplines, including for reaching out about financial access subsidies.
* Facilitate that session chairs/moderators have information on names and their pronunciation and, if speakers choose to provide them, the pronouns of people they introduce.
* Disable RocketChat's blocklist “BadWordsFilter” to keep the conference inclusive to marginalized identities (either in [https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/blob/b64fb67263e053d8ec8c8d561e02baf020ec370c/app/lib/server/startup/settings.js#L1035 the code] or in the RocketChat admin under “Message” -> “Allow Message bad words filtering”).

== Concluding additional recommendations ==
* The ACL2020 D&I chairs can be contacted for additional resources that may support planning of D&I activities future virtual or nonvirtual ACL* conferences. Also see the [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q1_Reports:_ACL_2020#Diversity_.26_Inclusion_.28D.26I.29_Chairs 2020Q1 report].
* Use Microsoft Forms for all surveys to ensure access across countries.
* Return to childcare initiatives when applicable in the future (see outlined list in above and items 10-11 in the [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q1_Reports:_ACL_2020#Diversity_.26_Inclusion_.28D.26I.29_Chairs 2020Q1 report]).
* Make an approved D&I budget part of the basic conference infrastructure. We spent a considerable amount of time iteratively building a D&I budget for standard efforts involving accessibility (backstop items), childcare, and financial access subsidies, etc.

2020Q3 Reports: Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs

2020-07-17T18:09:28Z

Vinodkpg:

== Prelude ==

Prepared by Cissi Ovesdotter Alm, RIT, and Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Google, Inc.

==== D&I team members ====
Sushant Kafle (Google, Inc), Masoud Rouhizadeh (JHU), Naomi Saphra (U. Edinburgh), Aakanksha Naik (CMU), Khyathi Chandu (CMU), Emily Prud’hommeaux (BC), Alla Rozovskaya (CUNY), Allyson Ettinger (UChicago), Ryan Georgi (KPMG), Tirthankar Ghosal (IIT Patna), Shruti Palaskar (CMU), Maarten Sap (UW), and Stephen Mayhew (Duolingo).

==== D&I sponsors ====
The D&I Champion sponsors were [https://deepmind.com/ DeepMind] and [https://www.microsoft.com/ Microsoft] and the D&I In-Kind sponsor was [https://www.grammarly.com/ Grammarly].

Shift to the virtual setting: With the move to the virtual conference, original plans such as the childcare-related initiatives (provision of onsite childcare, a statement welcoming babywearing, welcome item for kids, Kidz Corner at the welcome reception, family accommodation and lending of noise-canceling baby/toddler earmuffs at the social event, etc.), as well as efforts limited to a physical venue (designated D&I spaces, inclusive food options, improving non-alcoholic drink options at events, etc.) were abandoned. The other D&I efforts, involving four subcommittees--Accessibility (Kafle, Rouhizadeh, Saphra), Academic Inclusion (Chandu, Naik, Prud’hommeaux, Rozovskaya) Financial Access (Ettinger, Georgi, Ghosal), and Socio-cultural Inclusion (Palaskar, Sap)--were adapted to the virtual setting or new ones emerged.

This report focuses on the efforts that continued or were introduced under the virtual format.

== D&I questions in the registration form ==

We updated the D&I questions in the registration form. These D&I questions included:

* What career stage do you identify with? (Undergraduate student; Graduate student; Early-career academic researcher; Early-career industry researcher; Senior academic researcher; Senior industry researcher)
* Would you be interested in receiving mentorship at the conference through a virtual platform? (Yes, I would like to attend a group mentoring session for students; Yes, I would like to attend a group mentoring session for early-career researchers; No, does not apply [radio buttons])
* Would you be interested in providing mentorship at the conference through a virtual platform? (Yes, I would be happy to provide mentorship advice to students; Yes, I would be happy to provide mentorship advice to early-career researchers [check boxes])
* Will you need any access services such as sign language interpreting? If so, please describe your needs.
* If you are a presenter and have a hard scheduling constraint (due to caregiving, religious holidays, etc.), please explain.

We considered a question on pronouns however decided against it due to the potential privacy concerns around protecting such sensitive data, once collected. Instead, participants could communicate their pronouns through their RocketChat (or Zoom) profile names, directions for which were included in the instructions to log into the virtual website shared in the Welcome email.

The D&I questions above allowed us to collect information and plan ahead based on data from early registration, which we processed in batches, given that the early registration deadline had to be set later than usual this year.

=== Registration form recommendations ===

* We suggest revising the third question above, which aimed to elicit interest in providing mentorship but caused confusion among some registrants who selected “Yes” to both the second and third questions for similar career stages, requiring extra effort for organizers to identify mentors. (Also, the term “early-career researchers” caused confusion, with answers from undergraduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and associate professors). An alternative wording could be:
** If you are a (post-PhD) junior or senior researcher, would you be interested in providing mentorship at the conference through a virtual platform? (Yes, I am a junior or senior researcher, and would be happy to provide mentorship advice to students; Yes, I am a senior researcher and would be happy to provide mentorship advice to (post-PhD) early-career researchers [check boxes])
** Alternatively, consider breaking career stages into more fine-grained options and asking for highest degree completed and years of experience after completing highest degree.

== Accessibility ==

ACL as a community has room to improve on how accessible conferences and the materials they produce are to colleagues with disabilities. We took the following steps in an effort to begin to address some of these issues for ACL 2020.
* A blog post informing authors how to prepare [https://acl2020.org/blog/accessibility-for-camera-ready/ accessible camera-ready papers] (led by Sushant Kafle) was published on April 2, 2020; in advance of the camera-ready paper deadline.
* A blog post encouraging authors to prepare [https://acl2020.org/blog/Accessible-Presentations-at-ACL-2020/ accessible presentations] (led by Naomi Saphra) was published on May 30, 202; in advance of the deadline for uploading pre-recorded videos to SlidesLive. Both blog posts were appreciated on social media.
* Through regular updates from Priscilla on accessibility requests made during registration, we learned that researchers who used a screen-reader or captioning would attend the conference. (There were also some other requests which were not in the scope of accessibility, e.g., spoken language interpreting). All such requests generally involved individual follow-up to clarify actual needs.
* Sushant Kafle reviewed the virtual website to produce an [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xxMKznHVYYM2bq-WRTObWaKS5rTqyCAzbPoSutg5etk/edit?usp=sharing Accessibility Report for ACL Virtual Conference website], with attention to how well it functioned with screen-reader software. These issues were shared with the infrastructure committee via email and as Github issue tickets.
* Sushant Kafle further compiled a list of [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lNNgRAInSgelp-8WHXddmFbiLiSeH5A6K-GmnhcFYOw/edit?usp=sharing Accessibility Issues with Rocket Chat] which might need to be taken up with RocketChat for future conferences.
* The originally intended real-time captions (facilitated by Masoud Rouhizadeh) did not apply in the virtual setting. Instead, we advocated for the need for captioning of pre-recorded and live video materials, and continued to provide input to the new captioning chairs, Ananya and Klaus ([https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Captioning_and_Sustainability_Co-Chairs link to their report]). For the virtual conference, CART captioning for live plenaries ensured access for the hard-of-hearing, anyone who could not listen to the audio, and anyone who may have been at a disadvantage due to a language barrier. Authors of pre-recorded talks were also encouraged to correct captions for their talk, which will move into and become part of the ACL Anthology.

=== Accessibility recommendations ===
* Continue advocacy for accessible materials (papers, slides, videos, and websites).
* Ensure that a committee member is involved in assessing and providing input about the accessibility of the main conference website from the start (alternative texts for images, color selection, etc.), including for non-virtual conferences.
* Ensure quality captions for both live sessions and pre-recorded videos at virtual and non-virtual conferences. The social media activity on issues with auto-generated captions indicate this is a critical priority for authors generally.
* Elicit requests for access services in registration and ensure accessible websites.
* Ensure accessibility issues in the virtual conference website are fixed (detailed [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xxMKznHVYYM2bq-WRTObWaKS5rTqyCAzbPoSutg5etk/edit?usp=sharing here]), if the same codebase from ACL will be used in a future conference.
* Contact RocketChat to resolve the accessibility issues with their platform (detailed [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lNNgRAInSgelp-8WHXddmFbiLiSeH5A6K-GmnhcFYOw/edit?usp=sharing here]), if their service will be used for future conferences.

== Academic inclusion ==

The academic inclusion mentoring efforts involved four types of events (led by Aakanksha Naik and Khyathi Chandu):

* Panel for undergraduate students (new): This panel, which attracted around 90 participants, discussed topics such as graduate school and degrees, career path options, and also aimed to help undergraduate students navigate the NLP research landscape and the field’s future. Preferences on topics, panelists, and questions were elicited with a survey sent to undergraduate students. The panel was held on June 5th and was moderated by Aakanksha Naik and Khyathi Chandu (Academic Inclusion leads). There were 7 panelists, including faculty, industry researchers, and graduate students. The structure included panelist introductions by moderators, reflections from each panelist on three questions (below), and moderated Q&A with the panelists based on a curated set of [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ln6dr1XZtQYph6ip-d-_oPX0eNGDKeaF1dbk1XEgZok/edit 15 questions] (from around 75 questions elicited from students):
** What about NLP/computational linguistics excites you the most? How did you get interested in NLP/computational linguistics and how has that interest (and your career) evolved over the years?
** What factors guided you in making important career decisions: graduate school, industry vs. academia, etc.
** What is one thing that you know now that you wish you knew as an undergraduate student?

* Small group mentoring sessions: We organized 82 sessions of pre-assigned small group mentoring sessions for students or early-career researchers (ECR). These sessions were held on July 6, 7, and 8 in the same two time slots: midnight-1am PDT and 9am-10am PDT, aiming for a broad coverage of timezones. There were 944 mentees (571 students and 373 ECRs), 202 mentors (136 mentors for students and 66 mentors for ECRs), of which 34 mentors were ECRs mentees themselves. The session assignments were made using an automated matching process based on time and topic preferences collected through a survey. Each session had 1-3 mentors and approximately 5-13 mentees. The sessions were intentionally kept small in order to encourage more personal interactions that we believe is important to help the mentees, especially the newcomers. These sessions were also supported by 20 volunteer moderators who helped resolve challenges for mentors.
* Birds of a Feather meetups: We organized 29 open sessions over July 6 and 7, led by around 35 senior researchers. These sessions were centered on 23 themes listed in the ACL 2020 call for papers and did not require pre-registration.
* Open group mentoring sessions: Based on the popularity of the small group mentoring sessions (second item above), we organized 9 additional open group mentoring sessions on July 8. These sessions covered 10 popular topics from previous days. 24 mentors quickly signed up in response to an emergency call for mentors that went out on July 7 (PDT). This time, there was no matching process and the sessions could accommodate groups of any size, including attendees joining in late registration. For example, the session on the topic Long-term career planning + Becoming a research leader: building your professional identity attracted over 100 participants.
* Throughout the conference, mentoring events were broadcast in the Socials tab and the #announcement channel (over 20 such announcements) and often also announced by the mentors themselves. We also scheduled social media announcements via publicity chairs for messages to be sent out prior to the Birds of a Feather meetups, etc. We also sent an email to mentors clarifying about not sharing the small group mentoring links (e.g., on RocketChat) given the intended small-group format for those sessions.
* In general, social media activity revealed that the mentoring activities were popular among many attendees

=== Academic inclusion recommendations ===

* For a virtual conference with individual Zoom rooms/accounts, shared accounts must be avoided and new links be provided for each mentoring session. When mentors forgot to log out from ACL-provided accounts after their sessions ended, this caused an access issue for other mentors who tried to use those accounts for a later session.
* Provide guidelines to mentors about recommended communication practices for participants’ interactions, including tools that are accessible across countries (Google applications are not) if mentors wish to pass on materials or connect participants in collaborative writing, to further improve inclusivity. Additionally, consider how ACL can provide such online interaction spaces directly to mentors and participants. (This point is based on social media comments; thanks to Emily Bender for pointing this out.)
* If feasible, use the same infrastructure for paper live Q&A sessions for group mentoring sessions. This would ensure unique accounts and links for each mentoring group, along with dedicated RocketChat channels, which could be a medium for mentors who want to share materials or surveys with their mentees before or after their session.
* Attendees were not used to 24-hour schedules for virtual conferences, resulting in confusion about the early morning PDT time slots. For instance, many mentors mistakenly signed up for sessions in the 1am - 5am window, since they were not expecting sessions to be held at that hour. This necessitated dealing with a large number of rescheduling requests, adding pressure on coordinators.
* Make efforts to reach students early in their careers, including by scheduling one or more undergraduate student-focused events early in the conference, but also by considering non-conference efforts. Early exposure to research can help widening participation in the field.
* Add group mentoring themes and BoF themes at future conferences that respond to D&I in our community, e.g., Low-resource CL/NLP as a BoF, and Advice on navigating academia as a member of an underrepresented group as a group mentoring theme.
* Recommendations for improved communication with attendees:
** Release a blog post explaining various types of mentoring events (purpose, logistics, sign-up process, etc.) prior to the start of EMNLP registrations, so that mentors and mentees have more clarity about these events upfront.
** Ensure the sign-up deadlines for all events that require registration are clearly highlighted in the conference registration form.
** Use an ACL-supported mechanism for mass emailing mentoring surveys or group assignments to ensure these emails are not spam-filtered or blocked.
* Exploratory suggestion: It might be helpful to explore a tiered mentorship program. For example, late-stage PhD students acting as mentors to undergraduate and Master’s students, post-PhD junior researchers as mentors to PhD students, and so on. This may strategically increase the number of mentors to satisfy the mentoring demand.

== Financial access ==

* For the various efforts under the financial access subcommittee, a summary is in the blog post titled [https://acl2020.org/blog/increasing-financial-accessibility “Increasing financial accessibility of ACL 2020”] (Tirthankar Ghosal, Allyson Ettinger, Ryan Georgi). published on July 4. The blog post was well-received on social media.
* The virtual conference presented an opportunity to cost-effectively support more people to attend the conference, and to coordinate across support initiatives,
* We issued a [https://twitter.com/aclmeeting/status/1266532726628184065 call for application] for D&I subsidies, which was open from May 29 to June 7. We reached out to [https://blackinai.github.io/ Black in AI], [https://www.latinxinai.org/ LatinX in AI], [https://africanlp-workshop.github.io/ AfricaNLP], and [https://deeplearningindaba.com/ Deep Learning Indaba] about the call.
* There were 123 applications submitted. Sub-Saharan Africa (22%), South Asia (20%), US and Canada (18%), and Europe and UK (17%) were most represented, with fewer applications from Middle East and North Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and East Asia.
* Overall, 83 applicants from 29 countries received subsidies for a combination of the conference registration fee, ACL membership fee, and internet bandwidth. We awarded $8750 for registration and membership fees, and another $250 (excluding fund-transfer fees) for internet bandwidth subsidies. Subsidy offers for Sub-Saharan Africa made up around a quarter. Less represented regions included Middle East and North Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, East Asia.
* To simplify reimbursement, the registration and membership waivers were provided through the registration form. Priscilla received a list of D&I subsidy recipients.
* The internet bandwidth funds processing (led by Ryan Georgi) used a form to elicit information on how to transfer funds, since options differ by country of residence.
* Additionally, Tirthankar Ghosal led the effort to distribute 1131 access codes provided by [https://www.grammarly.com/ Grammarly] to the corresponding authors of accepted papers for the main conference, including ACL-Demos, SRW pre-submission phase, the WiNLP workshop, and a subset of other workshops.

=== Financial access recommendations ===
* Continue prioritizing outreach to researchers from underrepresented regions and groups.
* Consider new ways for integrating virtual access into our conferences as it has immense potential for broadening participation to diverse audiences.

== Socio-cultural inclusion ==

* The efforts focused on contacting affinity groups in the AI community and offering to facilitate social events, organized by the affinity groups, at the conference (arranging Zoom links, publicizing socials, etc.).
* Two different affinity groups organized and announced events in the Socials tab, etc.:
** The Queer in AI social was scheduled in two time slots on July 8 (outreach by Maarten Sap), featuring mini-speeches by Elin McCready (Social A), Robyn Speer (Social B) and Alex Hanna (both). There were 44 and 96 registrations for socials A and B, respectively.
** The Black in AI socials included a Fireside Chat with Donia Scott on July 9 and a social with a presentation by Kianté Brantley on July 10 (outreach by Shruthi Palaskar).
* In addition, we posted a message on #announcements encouraging attendees from various affinity groups to create or join RocketChat channels.
* RocketChat censors words that are on a blocklist, replacing them with ***. We asked the infrastructure chairs (specifically, Hao Fang) to disable this option which seems to be [https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/blob/b64fb67263e053d8ec8c8d561e02baf020ec370c/app/lib/server/startup/settings.js#L1035 enabled by default]. Not disabling this would have been a significant barrier to diversity, due to the blocklist containing identity mentions (e.g., "queer", "lesbian") which made affinity groups (e.g., "Queer in AI") hard to discuss.

=== Socio-cultural inclusion recommendations ===

* Since the field involves multiple disciplines, seek to expand outreach through additional affinity groups in relevant disciplines, including for reaching out about financial access subsidies.
* Facilitate that session chairs/moderators have information on names and their pronunciation and, if speakers choose to provide them, the pronouns of people they introduce.
* Disable RocketChat's blocklist “BadWordsFilter” to keep the conference inclusive to marginalized identities (either in [https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/blob/b64fb67263e053d8ec8c8d561e02baf020ec370c/app/lib/server/startup/settings.js#L1035 the code] or in the RocketChat admin under “Message” -> “Allow Message bad words filtering”).

== Concluding additional recommendations ==
* The ACL2020 D&I chairs can be contacted for additional resources that may support planning of D&I activities future virtual or nonvirtual ACL* conferences. Also see the [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q1_Reports:_ACL_2020#Diversity_.26_Inclusion_.28D.26I.29_Chairs 2020Q1 report].
* Use Microsoft Forms for all surveys to ensure access across countries.
* Return to childcare initiatives when applicable in the future (see outlined list in above and items 10-11 in the [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q1_Reports:_ACL_2020#Diversity_.26_Inclusion_.28D.26I.29_Chairs 2020Q1 report]).
* Make an approved D&I budget part of the basic conference infrastructure. We spent a considerable amount of time iteratively building a D&I budget for standard efforts involving accessibility (backstop items), childcare, and financial access subsidies, etc.

2020Q3 Reports: Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs

2020-07-17T18:01:27Z

Vinodkpg:

== Prelude ==

Prepared by Cissi Ovesdotter Alm, RIT, and Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Google, Inc.

==== D&I team members ====
Sushant Kafle (Google, Inc), Masoud Rouhizadeh (JHU), Naomi Saphra (U. Edinburgh), Aakanksha Naik (CMU), Khyathi Chandu (CMU), Emily Prud’hommeaux (BC), Alla Rozovskaya (CUNY), Allyson Ettinger (UChicago), Ryan Georgi (KPMG), Tirthankar Ghosal (IIT Patna), Shruti Palaskar (CMU), Maarten Sap (UW), and Stephen Mayhew (Duolingo).

==== D&I sponsors ====
The D&I Champion sponsors were [https://deepmind.com/ DeepMind] and [https://www.microsoft.com/ Microsoft] and the D&I In-Kind sponsor was [https://www.grammarly.com/ Grammarly].

Shift to the virtual setting: With the move to the virtual conference, original plans such as the childcare-related initiatives (provision of onsite childcare, a statement welcoming babywearing, welcome item for kids, Kidz Corner at the welcome reception, family accommodation and lending of noise-canceling baby/toddler earmuffs at the social event, etc.), as well as efforts limited to a physical venue (designated D&I spaces, inclusive food options, improving non-alcoholic drink options at events, etc.) were abandoned. The other D&I efforts, involving four subcommittees--Accessibility (Kafle, Rouhizadeh, Saphra), Academic Inclusion (Chandu, Naik, Prud’hommeaux, Rozovskaya) Financial Access (Ettinger, Georgi, Ghosal), and Socio-cultural Inclusion (Palaskar, Sap)--were adapted to the virtual setting or new ones emerged.

This report focuses on the efforts that continued or were introduced under the virtual format.

== D&I questions in the registration form ==

We updated the D&I questions in the registration form. These D&I questions included:

* What career stage do you identify with? (Undergraduate student; Graduate student; Early-career academic researcher; Early-career industry researcher; Senior academic researcher; Senior industry researcher)
* Would you be interested in receiving mentorship at the conference through a virtual platform? (Yes, I would like to attend a group mentoring session for students; Yes, I would like to attend a group mentoring session for early-career researchers; No, does not apply [radio buttons])
* Would you be interested in providing mentorship at the conference through a virtual platform? (Yes, I would be happy to provide mentorship advice to students; Yes, I would be happy to provide mentorship advice to early-career researchers [check boxes])
* Will you need any access services such as sign language interpreting? If so, please describe your needs.
* If you are a presenter and have a hard scheduling constraint (due to caregiving, religious holidays, etc.), please explain.

We considered a question on pronouns however decided against it due to the potential privacy concerns around protecting such sensitive data, once collected. Instead, participants could communicate their pronouns through their RocketChat (or Zoom) profile names, directions for which were included in the instructions to log into the virtual website shared in the Welcome email.

The D&I questions above allowed us to collect information and plan ahead based on data from early registration, which we processed in batches, given that the early registration deadline had to be set later than usual this year.

=== Registration form recommendations ===

* We suggest revising the third question above, which aimed to elicit interest in providing mentorship but caused confusion among some registrants who selected “Yes” to both the second and third questions for similar career stages, requiring extra effort for organizers to identify mentors. (Also, the term “early-career researchers” caused confusion, with answers from undergraduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and associate professors). An alternative wording could be:
** If you are a (post-PhD) junior or senior researcher, would you be interested in providing mentorship at the conference through a virtual platform? (Yes, I am a junior or senior researcher, and would be happy to provide mentorship advice to students; Yes, I am a senior researcher and would be happy to provide mentorship advice to (post-PhD) early-career researchers [check boxes])
** Alternatively, consider breaking career stages into more fine-grained options and asking for highest degree completed and years of experience after completing highest degree.

== Accessibility ==

ACL as a community has room to improve on how accessible conferences and the materials they produce are to colleagues with disabilities. We took the following steps in an effort to begin to address some of these issues for ACL 2020.
* A blog post informing authors how to prepare accessible camera-ready papers (led by Sushant Kafle) was published on April 2, 2020; in advance of the camera-ready paper deadline.
* A blog post encouraging authors to prepare accessible presentations (led by Naomi Saphra) was published on May 30, 202; in advance of the deadline for uploading pre-recorded videos to SlidesLive. Both blog posts were appreciated on social media.
* Through regular updates from Priscilla on accessibility requests made during registration, we learned that researchers who used a screen-reader or captioning would attend the conference. (There were also some other requests which were not in the scope of accessibility, e.g., spoken language interpreting). All such requests generally involved individual follow-up to clarify actual needs.
* Sushant Kafle reviewed the virtual website to produce an Accessibility Report for ACL Virtual Conference website, with attention to how well it functioned with screen-reader software. These issues were shared with the infrastructure committee via email and as Github issue tickets.
* Sushant Kafle further compiled a list of Accessibility Issues with Rocket Chat which might need to be taken up with RocketChat for future conferences.
* The originally intended real-time captions (facilitated by Masoud Rouhizadeh) did not apply in the virtual setting. Instead, we advocated for the need for captioning of pre-recorded and live video materials, and continued to provide input to the new captioning chairs, Ananya and Klaus <LINK TO THEIR REPORT SECTION>. For the virtual conference, CART captioning for live plenaries ensured access for the hard-of-hearing, anyone who could not listen to the audio, and anyone who may have been at a disadvantage due to a language barrier. Authors of pre-recorded talks were also encouraged to correct captions for their talk, which will move into and become part of the ACL Anthology.

=== Accessibility recommendations ===
* Continue advocacy for accessible materials (papers, slides, videos, and websites).
* Ensure that a committee member is involved in assessing and providing input about the accessibility of the main conference website from the start (alternative texts for images, color selection, etc.), including for non-virtual conferences.
* Ensure quality captions for both live sessions and pre-recorded videos at virtual and non-virtual conferences. The social media activity on issues with auto-generated captions indicate this is a critical priority for authors generally.
* Elicit requests for access services in registration and ensure accessible websites.
* Ensure accessibility issues in the virtual conference website are fixed (detailed here), if the same codebase from ACL will be used in a future conference.
* Contact RocketChat to resolve the accessibility issues with their platform (detailed here), if their service will be used for future conferences.

== Academic inclusion ==

The academic inclusion mentoring efforts involved four types of events (led by Aakanksha Naik and Khyathi Chandu):

* Panel for undergraduate students (new): This panel, which attracted around 90 participants, discussed topics such as graduate school and degrees, career path options, and also aimed to help undergraduate students navigate the NLP research landscape and the field’s future. Preferences on topics, panelists, and questions were elicited with a survey sent to undergraduate students. The panel was held on June 5th and was moderated by Aakanksha Naik and Khyathi Chandu (Academic Inclusion leads). There were 7 panelists, including faculty, industry researchers, and graduate students. The structure included panelist introductions by moderators, reflections from each panelist on three questions (below), and moderated Q&A with the panelists based on a curated set of 15 questions (from around 75 questions elicited from students):
** What about NLP/computational linguistics excites you the most? How did you get interested in NLP/computational linguistics and how has that interest (and your career) evolved over the years?
** What factors guided you in making important career decisions: graduate school, industry vs. academia, etc.
** What is one thing that you know now that you wish you knew as an undergraduate student?

* Small group mentoring sessions: We organized 82 sessions of pre-assigned small group mentoring sessions for students or early-career researchers (ECR). These sessions were held on July 6, 7, and 8 in the same two time slots: midnight-1am PDT and 9am-10am PDT, aiming for a broad coverage of timezones. There were 944 mentees (571 students and 373 ECRs), 202 mentors (136 mentors for students and 66 mentors for ECRs), of which 34 mentors were ECRs mentees themselves. The session assignments were made using an automated matching process based on time and topic preferences collected through a survey. Each session had 1-3 mentors and approximately 5-13 mentees. The sessions were intentionally kept small in order to encourage more personal interactions that we believe is important to help the mentees, especially the newcomers. These sessions were also supported by 20 volunteer moderators who helped resolve challenges for mentors.
* Birds of a Feather meetups: We organized 29 open sessions over July 6 and 7, led by around 35 senior researchers. These sessions were centered on 23 themes listed in the ACL 2020 call for papers and did not require pre-registration.
* Open group mentoring sessions: Based on the popularity of the small group mentoring sessions (second item above), we organized 9 additional open group mentoring sessions on July 8. These sessions covered 10 popular topics from previous days. 24 mentors quickly signed up in response to an emergency call for mentors that went out on July 7 (PDT). This time, there was no matching process and the sessions could accommodate groups of any size, including attendees joining in late registration. For example, the session on the topic Long-term career planning + Becoming a research leader: building your professional identity attracted over 100 participants.
* Throughout the conference, mentoring events were broadcast in the Socials tab and the #announcement channel (over 20 such announcements) and often also announced by the mentors themselves. We also scheduled social media announcements via publicity chairs for messages to be sent out prior to the Birds of a Feather meetups, etc. We also sent an email to mentors clarifying about not sharing the small group mentoring links (e.g., on RocketChat) given the intended small-group format for those sessions.
* In general, social media activity revealed that the mentoring activities were popular among many attendees

=== Academic inclusion recommendations ===

* For a virtual conference with individual Zoom rooms/accounts, shared accounts must be avoided and new links be provided for each mentoring session. When mentors forgot to log out from ACL-provided accounts after their sessions ended, this caused an access issue for other mentors who tried to use those accounts for a later session.
* Provide guidelines to mentors about recommended communication practices for participants’ interactions, including tools that are accessible across countries (Google applications are not) if mentors wish to pass on materials or connect participants in collaborative writing, to further improve inclusivity. Additionally, consider how ACL can provide such online interaction spaces directly to mentors and participants. (This point is based on social media comments; thanks to Emily Bender for pointing this out.)
* If feasible, use the same infrastructure for paper live Q&A sessions for group mentoring sessions. This would ensure unique accounts and links for each mentoring group, along with dedicated RocketChat channels, which could be a medium for mentors who want to share materials or surveys with their mentees before or after their session.
* Attendees were not used to 24-hour schedules for virtual conferences, resulting in confusion about the early morning PDT time slots. For instance, many mentors mistakenly signed up for sessions in the 1am - 5am window, since they were not expecting sessions to be held at that hour. This necessitated dealing with a large number of rescheduling requests, adding pressure on coordinators.
* Make efforts to reach students early in their careers, including by scheduling one or more undergraduate student-focused events early in the conference, but also by considering non-conference efforts. Early exposure to research can help widening participation in the field.
* Add group mentoring themes and BoF themes at future conferences that respond to D&I in our community, e.g., Low-resource CL/NLP as a BoF, and Advice on navigating academia as a member of an underrepresented group as a group mentoring theme.
* Recommendations for improved communication with attendees:
** Release a blog post explaining various types of mentoring events (purpose, logistics, sign-up process, etc.) prior to the start of EMNLP registrations, so that mentors and mentees have more clarity about these events upfront.
** Ensure the sign-up deadlines for all events that require registration are clearly highlighted in the conference registration form.
** Use an ACL-supported mechanism for mass emailing mentoring surveys or group assignments to ensure these emails are not spam-filtered or blocked.
* Exploratory suggestion: It might be helpful to explore a tiered mentorship program. For example, late-stage PhD students acting as mentors to undergraduate and Master’s students, post-PhD junior researchers as mentors to PhD students, and so on. This may strategically increase the number of mentors to satisfy the mentoring demand.

== Financial access ==

* For the various efforts under the financial access subcommittee, a summary is in the blog post titled “Increasing financial accessibility of ACL 2020” (Tirthankar Ghosal, Allyson Ettinger, Ryan Georgi). published on July 4. The blog post was well-received on social media.
* The virtual conference presented an opportunity to cost-effectively support more people to attend the conference, and to coordinate across support initiatives,
* We issued a call for application for D&I subsidies, which was open from May 29 to June 7. We reached out to Black in AI, LatinX in AI, AfricaNLP, and Deep Learning Indaba about the call.
* There were 123 applications submitted. Sub-Saharan Africa (22%), South Asia (20%), US and Canada (18%), and Europe and UK (17%) were most represented, with fewer applications from Middle East and North Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and East Asia.
* Overall, 83 applicants from 29 countries received subsidies for a combination of the conference registration fee, ACL membership fee, and internet bandwidth. We awarded $8750 for registration and membership fees, and another $250 (excluding fund-transfer fees) for internet bandwidth subsidies. Subsidy offers for Sub-Saharan Africa made up around a quarter. Less represented regions included Middle East and North Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, East Asia.
* To simplify reimbursement, the registration and membership waivers were provided through the registration form. Priscilla received a list of D&I subsidy recipients.
* The internet bandwidth funds processing (led by Ryan Georgi) used a form to elicit information on how to transfer funds, since options differ by country of residence.
* Additionally, Tirthankar Ghosal led the effort to distribute 1131 access codes provided by Grammarly to the corresponding authors of accepted papers for the main conference, including ACL-Demos, SRW pre-submission phase, the WiNLP workshop, and a subset of other workshops.

=== Financial access recommendations ===
* Continue prioritizing outreach to researchers from underrepresented regions and groups.
* Consider new ways for integrating virtual access into our conferences as it has immense potential for broadening participation to diverse audiences.

== Socio-cultural inclusion ==

* The efforts focused on contacting affinity groups in the AI community and offering to facilitate social events, organized by the affinity groups, at the conference (arranging Zoom links, publicizing socials, etc.).
* Two different affinity groups organized and announced events in the Socials tab, etc.:
** The Queer in AI social was scheduled in two time slots on July 8 (outreach by Maarten Sap), featuring mini-speeches by Elin McCready (Social A), Robyn Speer (Social B) and Alex Hanna (both). There were 44 and 96 registrations for socials A and B, respectively.
** The Black in AI socials included a Fireside Chat with Donia Scott on July 9 and a social with a presentation by Kianté Brantley on July 10 (outreach by Shruthi Palaskar).
* In addition, we posted a message on #announcements encouraging attendees from various affinity groups to create or join RocketChat channels.
* RocketChat censors words that are on a blocklist, replacing them with ***. We asked the infrastructure chairs (specifically, Hao Fang) to disable this option which seems to be enabled by default. Not disabling this would have been a significant barrier to diversity, due to the blocklist containing identity mentions (e.g., "queer", "lesbian") which made affinity groups (e.g., "Queer in AI") hard to discuss.

=== Socio-cultural inclusion recommendations ===

* Since the field involves multiple disciplines, seek to expand outreach through additional affinity groups in relevant disciplines, including for reaching out about financial access subsidies.
* Facilitate that session chairs/moderators have information on names and their pronunciation and, if speakers choose to provide them, the pronouns of people they introduce.
* Disable RocketChat's blocklist “BadWordsFilter” to keep the conference inclusive to marginalized identities (either in the code or in the RocketChat admin under “Message” -> “Allow Message bad words filtering”).

== Concluding additional recommendations ==
* The ACL2020 D&I chairs can be contacted for additional resources that may support planning of D&I activities future virtual or nonvirtual ACL* conferences. Also see the 2020Q1 report.
* Use Microsoft Forms for all surveys to ensure access across countries.
* Return to childcare initiatives when applicable in the future (see outlined list in above and items 10-11 in the 2020Q1 report).
* Make an approved D&I budget part of the basic conference infrastructure. We spent a considerable amount of time iteratively building a D&I budget for standard efforts involving accessibility (backstop items), childcare, and financial access subsidies, etc.

2020Q3 Reports: Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs

2020-07-17T17:58:29Z

Vinodkpg:

== Prelude ==

Prepared by Cissi Ovesdotter Alm, RIT, and Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Google, Inc.

==== D&I team members ====
Sushant Kafle (Google, Inc), Masoud Rouhizadeh (JHU), Naomi Saphra (U. Edinburgh), Aakanksha Naik (CMU), Khyathi Chandu (CMU), Emily Prud’hommeaux (BC), Alla Rozovskaya (CUNY), Allyson Ettinger (UChicago), Ryan Georgi (KPMG), Tirthankar Ghosal (IIT Patna), Shruti Palaskar (CMU), Maarten Sap (UW), and Stephen Mayhew (Duolingo).

==== D&I sponsors ====
The D&I Champion sponsors were [https://deepmind.com/ DeepMind] and [https://www.microsoft.com/ Microsoft] and the D&I In-Kind sponsor was [https://www.grammarly.com/ Grammarly].

Shift to the virtual setting: With the move to the virtual conference, original plans such as the childcare-related initiatives (provision of onsite childcare, a statement welcoming babywearing, welcome item for kids, Kidz Corner at the welcome reception, family accommodation and lending of noise-canceling baby/toddler earmuffs at the social event, etc.), as well as efforts limited to a physical venue (designated D&I spaces, inclusive food options, improving non-alcoholic drink options at events, etc.) were abandoned. The other D&I efforts, involving four subcommittees--Accessibility (Kafle, Rouhizadeh, Saphra), Academic Inclusion (Chandu, Naik, Prud’hommeaux, Rozovskaya) Financial Access (Ettinger, Georgi, Ghosal), and Socio-cultural Inclusion (Palaskar, Sap)--were adapted to the virtual setting or new ones emerged.

This report focuses on the efforts that continued or were introduced under the virtual format.

== D&I questions in the registration form ==

We updated the D&I questions in the registration form. These D&I questions included:

* What career stage do you identify with? (Undergraduate student; Graduate student; Early-career academic researcher; Early-career industry researcher; Senior academic researcher; Senior industry researcher)
* Would you be interested in receiving mentorship at the conference through a virtual platform? (Yes, I would like to attend a group mentoring session for students; Yes, I would like to attend a group mentoring session for early-career researchers; No, does not apply [radio buttons])
* Would you be interested in providing mentorship at the conference through a virtual platform? (Yes, I would be happy to provide mentorship advice to students; Yes, I would be happy to provide mentorship advice to early-career researchers [check boxes])
* Will you need any access services such as sign language interpreting? If so, please describe your needs.
* If you are a presenter and have a hard scheduling constraint (due to caregiving, religious holidays, etc.), please explain.

We considered a question on pronouns however decided against it due to the potential privacy concerns around protecting such sensitive data, once collected. Instead, participants could communicate their pronouns through their RocketChat (or Zoom) profile names, directions for which were included in the instructions to log into the virtual website shared in the Welcome email.

The D&I questions above allowed us to collect information and plan ahead based on data from early registration, which we processed in batches, given that the early registration deadline had to be set later than usual this year.

=== Registration form recommendations ===

* We suggest revising the third question above, which aimed to elicit interest in providing mentorship but caused confusion among some registrants who selected “Yes” to both the second and third questions for similar career stages, requiring extra effort for organizers to identify mentors. (Also, the term “early-career researchers” caused confusion, with answers from undergraduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and associate professors). An alternative wording could be:
** If you are a (post-PhD) junior or senior researcher, would you be interested in providing mentorship at the conference through a virtual platform? (Yes, I am a junior or senior researcher, and would be happy to provide mentorship advice to students; Yes, I am a senior researcher and would be happy to provide mentorship advice to (post-PhD) early-career researchers [check boxes])
** Alternatively, consider breaking career stages into more fine-grained options and asking for highest degree completed and years of experience after completing highest degree.

== Accessibility ==

ACL as a community has room to improve on how accessible conferences and the materials they produce are to colleagues with disabilities. We took the following steps in an effort to begin to address some of these issues for ACL 2020.
* A blog post informing authors how to prepare accessible camera-ready papers (led by Sushant Kafle) was published on April 2, 2020; in advance of the camera-ready paper deadline.
* A blog post encouraging authors to prepare accessible presentations (led by Naomi Saphra) was published on May 30, 202; in advance of the deadline for uploading pre-recorded videos to SlidesLive. Both blog posts were appreciated on social media.
* Through regular updates from Priscilla on accessibility requests made during registration, we learned that researchers who used a screen-reader or captioning would attend the conference. (There were also some other requests which were not in the scope of accessibility, e.g., spoken language interpreting). All such requests generally involved individual follow-up to clarify actual needs.
* Sushant Kafle reviewed the virtual website to produce an Accessibility Report for ACL Virtual Conference website, with attention to how well it functioned with screen-reader software. These issues were shared with the infrastructure committee via email and as Github issue tickets.
* Sushant Kafle further compiled a list of Accessibility Issues with Rocket Chat which might need to be taken up with RocketChat for future conferences.
* The originally intended real-time captions (facilitated by Masoud Rouhizadeh) did not apply in the virtual setting. Instead, we advocated for the need for captioning of pre-recorded and live video materials, and continued to provide input to the new captioning chairs, Ananya and Klaus <LINK TO THEIR REPORT SECTION>. For the virtual conference, CART captioning for live plenaries ensured access for the hard-of-hearing, anyone who could not listen to the audio, and anyone who may have been at a disadvantage due to a language barrier. Authors of pre-recorded talks were also encouraged to correct captions for their talk, which will move into and become part of the ACL Anthology.

=== Accessibility recommendations ===
* Continue advocacy for accessible materials (papers, slides, videos, and websites).
* Ensure that a committee member is involved in assessing and providing input about the accessibility of the main conference website from the start (alternative texts for images, color selection, etc.), including for non-virtual conferences.
* Ensure quality captions for both live sessions and pre-recorded videos at virtual and non-virtual conferences. The social media activity on issues with auto-generated captions indicate this is a critical priority for authors generally.
* Elicit requests for access services in registration and ensure accessible websites.
* Ensure accessibility issues in the virtual conference website are fixed (detailed here), if the same codebase from ACL will be used in a future conference.
* Contact RocketChat to resolve the accessibility issues with their platform (detailed here), if their service will be used for future conferences.

== Academic inclusion ==

The academic inclusion mentoring efforts involved four types of events (led by Aakanksha Naik and Khyathi Chandu):

* Panel for undergraduate students (new): This panel, which attracted around 90 participants, discussed topics such as graduate school and degrees, career path options, and also aimed to help undergraduate students navigate the NLP research landscape and the field’s future. Preferences on topics, panelists, and questions were elicited with a survey sent to undergraduate students. The panel was held on June 5th and was moderated by Aakanksha Naik and Khyathi Chandu (Academic Inclusion leads). There were 7 panelists, including faculty, industry researchers, and graduate students. The structure included panelist introductions by moderators, reflections from each panelist on three questions (below), and moderated Q&A with the panelists based on a curated set of 15 questions (from around 75 questions elicited from students):
** What about NLP/computational linguistics excites you the most? How did you get interested in NLP/computational linguistics and how has that interest (and your career) evolved over the years?
** What factors guided you in making important career decisions: graduate school, industry vs. academia, etc.
** What is one thing that you know now that you wish you knew as an undergraduate student?

* Small group mentoring sessions: We organized 82 sessions of pre-assigned small group mentoring sessions for students or early-career researchers (ECR). These sessions were held on July 6, 7, and 8 in the same two time slots: midnight-1am PDT and 9am-10am PDT, aiming for a broad coverage of timezones. There were 944 mentees (571 students and 373 ECRs), 202 mentors (136 mentors for students and 66 mentors for ECRs), of which 34 mentors were ECRs mentees themselves. The session assignments were made using an automated matching process based on time and topic preferences collected through a survey. Each session had 1-3 mentors and approximately 5-13 mentees. The sessions were intentionally kept small in order to encourage more personal interactions that we believe is important to help the mentees, especially the newcomers. These sessions were also supported by 20 volunteer moderators who helped resolve challenges for mentors.
* Birds of a Feather meetups: We organized 29 open sessions over July 6 and 7, led by around 35 senior researchers. These sessions were centered on 23 themes listed in the ACL 2020 call for papers and did not require pre-registration.
* Open group mentoring sessions: Based on the popularity of the small group mentoring sessions (second item above), we organized 9 additional open group mentoring sessions on July 8. These sessions covered 10 popular topics from previous days. 24 mentors quickly signed up in response to an emergency call for mentors that went out on July 7 (PDT). This time, there was no matching process and the sessions could accommodate groups of any size, including attendees joining in late registration. For example, the session on the topic Long-term career planning + Becoming a research leader: building your professional identity attracted over 100 participants.
* Throughout the conference, mentoring events were broadcast in the Socials tab and the #announcement channel (over 20 such announcements) and often also announced by the mentors themselves. We also scheduled social media announcements via publicity chairs for messages to be sent out prior to the Birds of a Feather meetups, etc. We also sent an email to mentors clarifying about not sharing the small group mentoring links (e.g., on RocketChat) given the intended small-group format for those sessions.
* In general, social media activity revealed that the mentoring activities were popular among many attendees

=== Academic inclusion recommendations ===

* For a virtual conference with individual Zoom rooms/accounts, shared accounts must be avoided and new links be provided for each mentoring session. When mentors forgot to log out from ACL-provided accounts after their sessions ended, this caused an access issue for other mentors who tried to use those accounts for a later session.
* Provide guidelines to mentors about recommended communication practices for participants’ interactions, including tools that are accessible across countries (Google applications are not) if mentors wish to pass on materials or connect participants in collaborative writing, to further improve inclusivity. Additionally, consider how ACL can provide such online interaction spaces directly to mentors and participants. (This point is based on social media comments; thanks to Emily Bender for pointing this out.)
* If feasible, use the same infrastructure for paper live Q&A sessions for group mentoring sessions. This would ensure unique accounts and links for each mentoring group, along with dedicated RocketChat channels, which could be a medium for mentors who want to share materials or surveys with their mentees before or after their session.
* Attendees were not used to 24-hour schedules for virtual conferences, resulting in confusion about the early morning PDT time slots. For instance, many mentors mistakenly signed up for sessions in the 1am - 5am window, since they were not expecting sessions to be held at that hour. This necessitated dealing with a large number of rescheduling requests, adding pressure on coordinators.
* Make efforts to reach students early in their careers, including by scheduling one or more undergraduate student-focused events early in the conference, but also by considering non-conference efforts. Early exposure to research can help widening participation in the field.
* Add group mentoring themes and BoF themes at future conferences that respond to D&I in our community, e.g., Low-resource CL/NLP as a BoF, and Advice on navigating academia as a member of an underrepresented group as a group mentoring theme.
* Recommendations for improved communication with attendees:
** Release a blog post explaining various types of mentoring events (purpose, logistics, sign-up process, etc.) prior to the start of EMNLP registrations, so that mentors and mentees have more clarity about these events upfront.
** Ensure the sign-up deadlines for all events that require registration are clearly highlighted in the conference registration form.
** Use an ACL-supported mechanism for mass emailing mentoring surveys or group assignments to ensure these emails are not spam-filtered or blocked.
* Exploratory suggestion: It might be helpful to explore a tiered mentorship program. For example, late-stage PhD students acting as mentors to undergraduate and Master’s students, post-PhD junior researchers as mentors to PhD students, and so on. This may strategically increase the number of mentors to satisfy the mentoring demand.

== Financial access ==

* For the various efforts under the financial access subcommittee, a summary is in the blog post titled “Increasing financial accessibility of ACL 2020” (Tirthankar Ghosal, Allyson Ettinger, Ryan Georgi). published on July 4. The blog post was well-received on social media.
* The virtual conference presented an opportunity to cost-effectively support more people to attend the conference, and to coordinate across support initiatives,
* We issued a call for application for D&I subsidies, which was open from May 29 to June 7. We reached out to Black in AI, LatinX in AI, AfricaNLP, and Deep Learning Indaba about the call.
* There were 123 applications submitted. Sub-Saharan Africa (22%), South Asia (20%), US and Canada (18%), and Europe and UK (17%) were most represented, with fewer applications from Middle East and North Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and East Asia.
* Overall, 83 applicants from 29 countries received subsidies for a combination of the conference registration fee, ACL membership fee, and internet bandwidth. We awarded $8750 for registration and membership fees, and another $250 (excluding fund-transfer fees) for internet bandwidth subsidies. Subsidy offers for Sub-Saharan Africa made up around a quarter. Less represented regions included Middle East and North Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, East Asia.
* To simplify reimbursement, the registration and membership waivers were provided through the registration form. Priscilla received a list of D&I subsidy recipients.
* The internet bandwidth funds processing (led by Ryan Georgi) used a form to elicit information on how to transfer funds, since options differ by country of residence.
* Additionally, Tirthankar Ghosal led the effort to distribute 1131 access codes provided by Grammarly to the corresponding authors of accepted papers for the main conference, including ACL-Demos, SRW pre-submission phase, the WiNLP workshop, and a subset of other workshops.

=== Financial access recommendations ===
* Continue prioritizing outreach to researchers from underrepresented regions and groups.
* Consider new ways for integrating virtual access into our conferences as it has immense potential for broadening participation to diverse audiences.

== Socio-cultural inclusion ==

* The efforts focused on contacting affinity groups in the AI community and offering to facilitate social events, organized by the affinity groups, at the conference (arranging Zoom links, publicizing socials, etc.).
* Two different affinity groups organized and announced events in the Socials tab, etc.:
** The Queer in AI social was scheduled in two time slots on July 8 (outreach by Maarten Sap), featuring mini-speeches by Elin McCready (Social A), Robyn Speer (Social B) and Alex Hanna (both). There were 44 and 96 registrations for socials A and B, respectively.
** The Black in AI socials included a Fireside Chat with Donia Scott on July 9 and a social with a presentation by Kianté Brantley on July 10 (outreach by Shruthi Palaskar).
* In addition, we posted a message on #announcements encouraging attendees from various affinity groups to create or join RocketChat channels.
* RocketChat censors words that are on a blocklist, replacing them with ***. We asked the infrastructure chairs (specifically, Hao Fang) to disable this option which seems to be enabled by default. Not disabling this would have been a significant barrier to diversity, due to the blocklist containing identity mentions (e.g., "queer", "lesbian") which made affinity groups (e.g., "Queer in AI") hard to discuss.

=== Socio-cultural inclusion recommendations ===

* Since the field involves multiple disciplines, seek to expand outreach through additional affinity groups in relevant disciplines, including for reaching out about financial access subsidies.
* Facilitate that session chairs/moderators have information on names and their pronunciation and, if speakers choose to provide them, the pronouns of people they introduce.
* Disable RocketChat's blocklist “BadWordsFilter” to keep the conference inclusive to marginalized identities (either in the code or in the RocketChat admin under “Message” -> “Allow Message bad words filtering”).

== Concluding additional recommendations ==
* The ACL2020 D&I chairs can be contacted for additional resources that may support planning of D&I activities future virtual or nonvirtual ACL* conferences. Also see the 2020Q1 report.
* Use Microsoft Forms for all surveys to ensure access across countries.
* Return to childcare initiatives when applicable in the future (see outlined list in above and items 10-11 in the 2020Q1 report).
* Make an approved D&I budget part of the basic conference infrastructure. We spent a considerable amount of time iteratively building a D&I budget for standard efforts involving accessibility (backstop items), childcare, and financial access subsidies, etc.

2020Q3 Reports: Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs

2020-07-17T02:12:02Z

Vinodkpg:

== Prelude ==

Prepared by Cissi Ovesdotter Alm, RIT, and Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Google, Inc.

==== D&I team members ====
Sushant Kafle (Google, Inc), Masoud Rouhizadeh (JHU), Naomi Saphra (U. Edinburgh), Aakanksha Naik (CMU), Khyathi Chandu (CMU), Emily Prud’hommeaux (BC), Alla Rozovskaya (CUNY), Allyson Ettinger (UChicago), Ryan Georgi (KPMG), Tirthankar Ghosal (IIT Patna), Shruti Palaskar (CMU), Maarten Sap (UW), and Stephen Mayhew (Duolingo).

==== D&I sponsors ====
The D&I Champion sponsors were DeepMind and Microsoft and the D&I In-Kind sponsor was Grammarly.

Shift to the virtual setting: With the move to the virtual conference, original plans such as the childcare-related initiatives (provision of onsite childcare, a statement welcoming babywearing, welcome item for kids, Kidz Corner at the welcome reception, family accommodation and lending of noise-canceling baby/toddler earmuffs at the social event, etc.), as well as efforts limited to a physical venue (designated D&I spaces, inclusive food options, improving non-alcoholic drink options at events, etc.) were abandoned. The other D&I efforts, involving four subcommittees--Accessibility (Kafle, Rouhizadeh, Saphra), Academic Inclusion (Chandu, Naik, Prud’hommeaux, Rozovskaya) Financial Access (Ettinger, Georgi, Ghosal), and Socio-cultural Inclusion (Palaskar, Sap)--were adapted to the virtual setting or new ones emerged.

This report focuses on the efforts that continued or were introduced under the virtual format.

== D&I questions in the registration form ==

We updated the D&I questions in the registration form. These D&I questions included:

* What career stage do you identify with? (Undergraduate student; Graduate student; Early-career academic researcher; Early-career industry researcher; Senior academic researcher; Senior industry researcher)
* Would you be interested in receiving mentorship at the conference through a virtual platform? (Yes, I would like to attend a group mentoring session for students; Yes, I would like to attend a group mentoring session for early-career researchers; No, does not apply [radio buttons])
* Would you be interested in providing mentorship at the conference through a virtual platform? (Yes, I would be happy to provide mentorship advice to students; Yes, I would be happy to provide mentorship advice to early-career researchers [check boxes])
* Will you need any access services such as sign language interpreting? If so, please describe your needs.
* If you are a presenter and have a hard scheduling constraint (due to caregiving, religious holidays, etc.), please explain.

We considered a question on pronouns however decided against it due to the potential privacy concerns around protecting such sensitive data, once collected. Instead, participants could communicate their pronouns through their RocketChat (or Zoom) profile names, directions for which were included in the instructions to log into the virtual website shared in the Welcome email.

The D&I questions above allowed us to collect information and plan ahead based on data from early registration, which we processed in batches, given that the early registration deadline had to be set later than usual this year.

=== Registration form recommendations ===

* We suggest revising the third question above, which aimed to elicit interest in providing mentorship but caused confusion among some registrants who selected “Yes” to both the second and third questions for similar career stages, requiring extra effort for organizers to identify mentors. (Also, the term “early-career researchers” caused confusion, with answers from undergraduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and associate professors). An alternative wording could be:
** If you are a (post-PhD) junior or senior researcher, would you be interested in providing mentorship at the conference through a virtual platform? (Yes, I am a junior or senior researcher, and would be happy to provide mentorship advice to students; Yes, I am a senior researcher and would be happy to provide mentorship advice to (post-PhD) early-career researchers [check boxes])
** Alternatively, consider breaking career stages into more fine-grained options and asking for highest degree completed and years of experience after completing highest degree.

== Accessibility ==

ACL as a community has room to improve on how accessible conferences and the materials they produce are to colleagues with disabilities. We took the following steps in an effort to begin to address some of these issues for ACL 2020.
* A blog post informing authors how to prepare accessible camera-ready papers (led by Sushant Kafle) was published on April 2, 2020; in advance of the camera-ready paper deadline.
* A blog post encouraging authors to prepare accessible presentations (led by Naomi Saphra) was published on May 30, 202; in advance of the deadline for uploading pre-recorded videos to SlidesLive. Both blog posts were appreciated on social media.
* Through regular updates from Priscilla on accessibility requests made during registration, we learned that researchers who used a screen-reader or captioning would attend the conference. (There were also some other requests which were not in the scope of accessibility, e.g., spoken language interpreting). All such requests generally involved individual follow-up to clarify actual needs.
* Sushant Kafle reviewed the virtual website to produce an Accessibility Report for ACL Virtual Conference website, with attention to how well it functioned with screen-reader software. These issues were shared with the infrastructure committee via email and as Github issue tickets.
* Sushant Kafle further compiled a list of Accessibility Issues with Rocket Chat which might need to be taken up with RocketChat for future conferences.
* The originally intended real-time captions (facilitated by Masoud Rouhizadeh) did not apply in the virtual setting. Instead, we advocated for the need for captioning of pre-recorded and live video materials, and continued to provide input to the new captioning chairs, Ananya and Klaus <LINK TO THEIR REPORT SECTION>. For the virtual conference, CART captioning for live plenaries ensured access for the hard-of-hearing, anyone who could not listen to the audio, and anyone who may have been at a disadvantage due to a language barrier. Authors of pre-recorded talks were also encouraged to correct captions for their talk, which will move into and become part of the ACL Anthology.

=== Accessibility recommendations ===
* Continue advocacy for accessible materials (papers, slides, videos, and websites).
* Ensure that a committee member is involved in assessing and providing input about the accessibility of the main conference website from the start (alternative texts for images, color selection, etc.), including for non-virtual conferences.
* Ensure quality captions for both live sessions and pre-recorded videos at virtual and non-virtual conferences. The social media activity on issues with auto-generated captions indicate this is a critical priority for authors generally.
* Elicit requests for access services in registration and ensure accessible websites.
* Ensure accessibility issues in the virtual conference website are fixed (detailed here), if the same codebase from ACL will be used in a future conference.
* Contact RocketChat to resolve the accessibility issues with their platform (detailed here), if their service will be used for future conferences.

== Academic inclusion ==

The academic inclusion mentoring efforts involved four types of events (led by Aakanksha Naik and Khyathi Chandu):

* Panel for undergraduate students (new): This panel, which attracted around 90 participants, discussed topics such as graduate school and degrees, career path options, and also aimed to help undergraduate students navigate the NLP research landscape and the field’s future. Preferences on topics, panelists, and questions were elicited with a survey sent to undergraduate students. The panel was held on June 5th and was moderated by Aakanksha Naik and Khyathi Chandu (Academic Inclusion leads). There were 7 panelists, including faculty, industry researchers, and graduate students. The structure included panelist introductions by moderators, reflections from each panelist on three questions (below), and moderated Q&A with the panelists based on a curated set of 15 questions (from around 75 questions elicited from students):
** What about NLP/computational linguistics excites you the most? How did you get interested in NLP/computational linguistics and how has that interest (and your career) evolved over the years?
** What factors guided you in making important career decisions: graduate school, industry vs. academia, etc.
** What is one thing that you know now that you wish you knew as an undergraduate student?

* Small group mentoring sessions: We organized 82 sessions of pre-assigned small group mentoring sessions for students or early-career researchers (ECR). These sessions were held on July 6, 7, and 8 in the same two time slots: midnight-1am PDT and 9am-10am PDT, aiming for a broad coverage of timezones. There were 944 mentees (571 students and 373 ECRs), 202 mentors (136 mentors for students and 66 mentors for ECRs), of which 34 mentors were ECRs mentees themselves. The session assignments were made using an automated matching process based on time and topic preferences collected through a survey. Each session had 1-3 mentors and approximately 5-13 mentees. The sessions were intentionally kept small in order to encourage more personal interactions that we believe is important to help the mentees, especially the newcomers. These sessions were also supported by 20 volunteer moderators who helped resolve challenges for mentors.
* Birds of a Feather meetups: We organized 29 open sessions over July 6 and 7, led by around 35 senior researchers. These sessions were centered on 23 themes listed in the ACL 2020 call for papers and did not require pre-registration.
* Open group mentoring sessions: Based on the popularity of the small group mentoring sessions (second item above), we organized 9 additional open group mentoring sessions on July 8. These sessions covered 10 popular topics from previous days. 24 mentors quickly signed up in response to an emergency call for mentors that went out on July 7 (PDT). This time, there was no matching process and the sessions could accommodate groups of any size, including attendees joining in late registration. For example, the session on the topic Long-term career planning + Becoming a research leader: building your professional identity attracted over 100 participants.
* Throughout the conference, mentoring events were broadcast in the Socials tab and the #announcement channel (over 20 such announcements) and often also announced by the mentors themselves. We also scheduled social media announcements via publicity chairs for messages to be sent out prior to the Birds of a Feather meetups, etc. We also sent an email to mentors clarifying about not sharing the small group mentoring links (e.g., on RocketChat) given the intended small-group format for those sessions.
* In general, social media activity revealed that the mentoring activities were popular among many attendees

=== Academic inclusion recommendations ===

* For a virtual conference with individual Zoom rooms/accounts, shared accounts must be avoided and new links be provided for each mentoring session. When mentors forgot to log out from ACL-provided accounts after their sessions ended, this caused an access issue for other mentors who tried to use those accounts for a later session.
* Provide guidelines to mentors about recommended communication practices for participants’ interactions, including tools that are accessible across countries (Google applications are not) if mentors wish to pass on materials or connect participants in collaborative writing, to further improve inclusivity. Additionally, consider how ACL can provide such online interaction spaces directly to mentors and participants. (This point is based on social media comments; thanks to Emily Bender for pointing this out.)
* If feasible, use the same infrastructure for paper live Q&A sessions for group mentoring sessions. This would ensure unique accounts and links for each mentoring group, along with dedicated RocketChat channels, which could be a medium for mentors who want to share materials or surveys with their mentees before or after their session.
* Attendees were not used to 24-hour schedules for virtual conferences, resulting in confusion about the early morning PDT time slots. For instance, many mentors mistakenly signed up for sessions in the 1am - 5am window, since they were not expecting sessions to be held at that hour. This necessitated dealing with a large number of rescheduling requests, adding pressure on coordinators.
* Make efforts to reach students early in their careers, including by scheduling one or more undergraduate student-focused events early in the conference, but also by considering non-conference efforts. Early exposure to research can help widening participation in the field.
* Add group mentoring themes and BoF themes at future conferences that respond to D&I in our community, e.g., Low-resource CL/NLP as a BoF, and Advice on navigating academia as a member of an underrepresented group as a group mentoring theme.
* Recommendations for improved communication with attendees:
** Release a blog post explaining various types of mentoring events (purpose, logistics, sign-up process, etc.) prior to the start of EMNLP registrations, so that mentors and mentees have more clarity about these events upfront.
** Ensure the sign-up deadlines for all events that require registration are clearly highlighted in the conference registration form.
** Use an ACL-supported mechanism for mass emailing mentoring surveys or group assignments to ensure these emails are not spam-filtered or blocked.
* Exploratory suggestion: It might be helpful to explore a tiered mentorship program. For example, late-stage PhD students acting as mentors to undergraduate and Master’s students, post-PhD junior researchers as mentors to PhD students, and so on. This may strategically increase the number of mentors to satisfy the mentoring demand.

== Financial access ==

* For the various efforts under the financial access subcommittee, a summary is in the blog post titled “Increasing financial accessibility of ACL 2020” (Tirthankar Ghosal, Allyson Ettinger, Ryan Georgi). published on July 4. The blog post was well-received on social media.
* The virtual conference presented an opportunity to cost-effectively support more people to attend the conference, and to coordinate across support initiatives,
* We issued a call for application for D&I subsidies, which was open from May 29 to June 7. We reached out to Black in AI, LatinX in AI, AfricaNLP, and Deep Learning Indaba about the call.
* There were 123 applications submitted. Sub-Saharan Africa (22%), South Asia (20%), US and Canada (18%), and Europe and UK (17%) were most represented, with fewer applications from Middle East and North Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and East Asia.
* Overall, 83 applicants from 29 countries received subsidies for a combination of the conference registration fee, ACL membership fee, and internet bandwidth. We awarded $8750 for registration and membership fees, and another $250 (excluding fund-transfer fees) for internet bandwidth subsidies. Subsidy offers for Sub-Saharan Africa made up around a quarter. Less represented regions included Middle East and North Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, East Asia.
* To simplify reimbursement, the registration and membership waivers were provided through the registration form. Priscilla received a list of D&I subsidy recipients.
* The internet bandwidth funds processing (led by Ryan Georgi) used a form to elicit information on how to transfer funds, since options differ by country of residence.
* Additionally, Tirthankar Ghosal led the effort to distribute 1131 access codes provided by Grammarly to the corresponding authors of accepted papers for the main conference, including ACL-Demos, SRW pre-submission phase, the WiNLP workshop, and a subset of other workshops.

=== Financial access recommendations ===
* Continue prioritizing outreach to researchers from underrepresented regions and groups.
* Consider new ways for integrating virtual access into our conferences as it has immense potential for broadening participation to diverse audiences.

== Socio-cultural inclusion ==

* The efforts focused on contacting affinity groups in the AI community and offering to facilitate social events, organized by the affinity groups, at the conference (arranging Zoom links, publicizing socials, etc.).
* Two different affinity groups organized and announced events in the Socials tab, etc.:
** The Queer in AI social was scheduled in two time slots on July 8 (outreach by Maarten Sap), featuring mini-speeches by Elin McCready (Social A), Robyn Speer (Social B) and Alex Hanna (both). There were 44 and 96 registrations for socials A and B, respectively.
** The Black in AI socials included a Fireside Chat with Donia Scott on July 9 and a social with a presentation by Kianté Brantley on July 10 (outreach by Shruthi Palaskar).
* In addition, we posted a message on #announcements encouraging attendees from various affinity groups to create or join RocketChat channels.
* RocketChat censors words that are on a blocklist, replacing them with ***. We asked the infrastructure chairs (specifically, Hao Fang) to disable this option which seems to be enabled by default. Not disabling this would have been a significant barrier to diversity, due to the blocklist containing identity mentions (e.g., "queer", "lesbian") which made affinity groups (e.g., "Queer in AI") hard to discuss.

=== Socio-cultural inclusion recommendations ===

* Since the field involves multiple disciplines, seek to expand outreach through additional affinity groups in relevant disciplines, including for reaching out about financial access subsidies.
* Facilitate that session chairs/moderators have information on names and their pronunciation and, if speakers choose to provide them, the pronouns of people they introduce.
* Disable RocketChat's blocklist “BadWordsFilter” to keep the conference inclusive to marginalized identities (either in the code or in the RocketChat admin under “Message” -> “Allow Message bad words filtering”).

== Concluding additional recommendations ==
* The ACL2020 D&I chairs can be contacted for additional resources that may support planning of D&I activities future virtual or nonvirtual ACL* conferences. Also see the 2020Q1 report.
* Use Microsoft Forms for all surveys to ensure access across countries.
* Return to childcare initiatives when applicable in the future (see outlined list in above and items 10-11 in the 2020Q1 report).
* Make an approved D&I budget part of the basic conference infrastructure. We spent a considerable amount of time iteratively building a D&I budget for standard efforts involving accessibility (backstop items), childcare, and financial access subsidies, etc.

2020Q3 Reports: Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs

2020-07-17T02:02:26Z

Vinodkpg:

== Prelude ==

=== D&I Chairs’ Report ===
Prepared by Cissi Ovesdotter Alm, RIT, and Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Google, Inc.

== D&I team members ==
Sushant Kafle (Google, Inc), Masoud Rouhizadeh (JHU), Naomi Saphra (U. Edinburgh), Aakanksha Naik (CMU), Khyathi Chandu (CMU), Emily Prud’hommeaux (BC), Alla Rozovskaya (CUNY), Allyson Ettinger (UChicago), Ryan Georgi (KPMG), Tirthankar Ghosal (IIT Patna), Shruti Palaskar (CMU), Maarten Sap (UW), and Stephen Mayhew (Duolingo).

== D&I sponsors ==
The D&I Champion sponsors were DeepMind and Microsoft and the D&I In-Kind sponsor was Grammarly.

Shift to the virtual setting: With the move to the virtual conference, original plans such as the childcare-related initiatives (provision of onsite childcare, a statement welcoming babywearing, welcome item for kids, Kidz Corner at the welcome reception, family accommodation and lending of noise-canceling baby/toddler earmuffs at the social event, etc.), as well as efforts limited to a physical venue (designated D&I spaces, inclusive food options, improving non-alcoholic drink options at events, etc.) were abandoned. The other D&I efforts, involving four subcommittees--Accessibility (Kafle, Rouhizadeh, Saphra), Academic Inclusion (Chandu, Naik, Prud’hommeaux, Rozovskaya) Financial Access (Ettinger, Georgi, Ghosal), and Socio-cultural Inclusion (Palaskar, Sap)--were adapted to the virtual setting or new ones emerged.

This report focuses on the efforts that continued or were introduced under the virtual format.

== D&I questions in the registration form ==

We updated the D&I questions in the registration form. These D&I questions included:

What career stage do you identify with? (Undergraduate student; Graduate student; Early-career academic researcher; Early-career industry researcher; Senior academic researcher; Senior industry researcher)
Would you be interested in receiving mentorship at the conference through a virtual platform? (Yes, I would like to attend a group mentoring session for students; Yes, I would like to attend a group mentoring session for early-career researchers; No, does not apply [radio buttons])
Would you be interested in providing mentorship at the conference through a virtual platform? (Yes, I would be happy to provide mentorship advice to students; Yes, I would be happy to provide mentorship advice to early-career researchers [check boxes])
Will you need any access services such as sign language interpreting? If so, please describe your needs.
If you are a presenter and have a hard scheduling constraint (due to caregiving, religious holidays, etc.), please explain.

We considered a question on pronouns however decided against it due to the potential privacy concerns around protecting such sensitive data, once collected. Instead, participants could communicate their pronouns through their RocketChat (or Zoom) profile names, directions for which were included in the instructions to log into the virtual website shared in the Welcome email.

The D&I questions above allowed us to collect information and plan ahead based on data from early registration, which we processed in batches, given that the early registration deadline had to be set later than usual this year.

Registration form recommendations:
Suggest revising the third question above, which aimed to elicit interest in providing mentorship but caused confusion among some registrants who selected “Yes” to both the second and third questions for similar career stages, requiring extra effort for organizers to identify mentors. (Also, the term “early-career researchers” caused confusion, with answers from undergraduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and associate professors). An alternative wording could be:
If you are a (post-PhD) junior or senior researcher, would you be interested in providing mentorship at the conference through a virtual platform? (Yes, I am a junior or senior researcher, and would be happy to provide mentorship advice to students; Yes, I am a senior researcher and would be happy to provide mentorship advice to (post-PhD) early-career researchers [check boxes])
Alternatively, consider breaking career stages into more fine-grained options and asking for highest degree completed and years of experience after completing highest degree.

== Accessibility ==

ACL as a community has room to improve on how accessible conferences and the materials they produce are to colleagues with disabilities. We took the following steps in an effort to begin to address some of these issues for ACL 2020.
A blog post informing authors how to prepare accessible camera-ready papers (led by Sushant Kafle) was published on April 2, 2020; in advance of the camera-ready paper deadline.
A blog post encouraging authors to prepare accessible presentations (led by Naomi Saphra) was published on May 30, 202; in advance of the deadline for uploading pre-recorded videos to SlidesLive. Both blog posts were appreciated on social media.
Through regular updates from Priscilla on accessibility requests made during registration, we learned that researchers who used a screen-reader or captioning would attend the conference. (There were also some other requests which were not in the scope of accessibility, e.g., spoken language interpreting). All such requests generally involved individual follow-up to clarify actual needs.
Sushant Kafle reviewed the virtual website to produce an Accessibility Report for ACL Virtual Conference website, with attention to how well it functioned with screen-reader software. These issues were shared with the infrastructure committee via email and as Github issue tickets.
Sushant Kafle further compiled a list of Accessibility Issues with Rocket Chat which might need to be taken up with RocketChat for future conferences.
The originally intended real-time captions (facilitated by Masoud Rouhizadeh) did not apply in the virtual setting. Instead, we advocated for the need for captioning of pre-recorded and live video materials, and continued to provide input to the new captioning chairs, Ananya and Klaus <LINK TO THEIR REPORT SECTION>. For the virtual conference, CART captioning for live plenaries ensured access for the hard-of-hearing, anyone who could not listen to the audio, and anyone who may have been at a disadvantage due to a language barrier. Authors of pre-recorded talks were also encouraged to correct captions for their talk, which will move into and become part of the ACL Anthology.

Accessibility recommendations:
Continue advocacy for accessible materials (papers, slides, videos, and websites).
Ensure that a committee member is involved in assessing and providing input about the accessibility of the main conference website from the start (alternative texts for images, color selection, etc.), including for non-virtual conferences.
Ensure quality captions for both live sessions and pre-recorded videos at virtual and non-virtual conferences. The social media activity on issues with auto-generated captions indicate this is a critical priority for authors generally.
Elicit requests for access services in registration and ensure accessible websites.
Ensure accessibility issues in the virtual conference website are fixed (detailed here), if the same codebase from ACL will be used in a future conference.
Contact RocketChat to resolve the accessibility issues with their platform (detailed here), if their service will be used for future conferences.

== Academic inclusion ==
The academic inclusion mentoring efforts involved four types of events (led by Aakanksha Naik and Khyathi Chandu):

Panel for undergraduate students (new): This panel, which attracted around 90 participants, discussed topics such as graduate school and degrees, career path options, and also aimed to help undergraduate students navigate the NLP research landscape and the field’s future. Preferences on topics, panelists, and questions were elicited with a survey sent to undergraduate students. The panel was held on June 5th and was moderated by Aakanksha Naik and Khyathi Chandu (Academic Inclusion leads). There were 7 panelists, including faculty, industry researchers, and graduate students. The structure included panelist introductions by moderators, reflections from each panelist on three questions (below), and moderated Q&A with the panelists based on a curated set of 15 questions (from around 75 questions elicited from students):
What about NLP/computational linguistics excites you the most? How did you get interested in NLP/computational linguistics and how has that interest (and your career) evolved over the years?
What factors guided you in making important career decisions: graduate school, industry vs. academia, etc.
What is one thing that you know now that you wish you knew as an undergraduate student?

Small group mentoring sessions: We organized 82 sessions of pre-assigned small group mentoring sessions for students or early-career researchers (ECR). These sessions were held on July 6, 7, and 8 in the same two time slots: midnight-1am PDT and 9am-10am PDT, aiming for a broad coverage of timezones. There were 944 mentees (571 students and 373 ECRs), 202 mentors (136 mentors for students and 66 mentors for ECRs), of which 34 mentors were ECRs mentees themselves. The session assignments were made using an automated matching process based on time and topic preferences collected through a survey. Each session had 1-3 mentors and approximately 5-13 mentees. The sessions were intentionally kept small in order to encourage more personal interactions that we believe is important to help the mentees, especially the newcomers. These sessions were also supported by 20 volunteer moderators who helped resolve challenges for mentors.
Birds of a Feather meetups: We organized 29 open sessions over July 6 and 7, led by around 35 senior researchers. These sessions were centered on 23 themes listed in the ACL 2020 call for papers and did not require pre-registration.
Open group mentoring sessions: Based on the popularity of the small group mentoring sessions (second item above), we organized 9 additional open group mentoring sessions on July 8. These sessions covered 10 popular topics from previous days. 24 mentors quickly signed up in response to an emergency call for mentors that went out on July 7 (PDT). This time, there was no matching process and the sessions could accommodate groups of any size, including attendees joining in late registration. For example, the session on the topic Long-term career planning + Becoming a research leader: building your professional identity attracted over 100 participants.
Throughout the conference, mentoring events were broadcast in the Socials tab and the #announcement channel (over 20 such announcements) and often also announced by the mentors themselves. We also scheduled social media announcements via publicity chairs for messages to be sent out prior to the Birds of a Feather meetups, etc. We also sent an email to mentors clarifying about not sharing the small group mentoring links (e.g., on RocketChat) given the intended small-group format for those sessions.
In general, social media activity revealed that the mentoring activities were popular among many attendees

Academic inclusion recommendations:
For a virtual conference with individual Zoom rooms/accounts, shared accounts must be avoided and new links be provided for each mentoring session. When mentors forgot to log out from ACL-provided accounts after their sessions ended, this caused an access issue for other mentors who tried to use those accounts for a later session.
Provide guidelines to mentors about recommended communication practices for participants’ interactions, including tools that are accessible across countries (Google applications are not) if mentors wish to pass on materials or connect participants in collaborative writing, to further improve inclusivity. Additionally, consider how ACL can provide such online interaction spaces directly to mentors and participants. (This point is based on social media comments; thanks to Emily Bender for pointing this out.)
If feasible, use the same infrastructure for paper live Q&A sessions for group mentoring sessions. This would ensure unique accounts and links for each mentoring group, along with dedicated RocketChat channels, which could be a medium for mentors who want to share materials or surveys with their mentees before or after their session.
Attendees were not used to 24-hour schedules for virtual conferences, resulting in confusion about the early morning PDT time slots. For instance, many mentors mistakenly signed up for sessions in the 1am - 5am window, since they were not expecting sessions to be held at that hour. This necessitated dealing with a large number of rescheduling requests, adding pressure on coordinators.
Make efforts to reach students early in their careers, including by scheduling one or more undergraduate student-focused events early in the conference, but also by considering non-conference efforts. Early exposure to research can help widening participation in the field.
Add group mentoring themes and BoF themes at future conferences that respond to D&I in our community, e.g., Low-resource CL/NLP as a BoF, and Advice on navigating academia as a member of an underrepresented group as a group mentoring theme.
Recommendations for improved communication with attendees:
Release a blog post explaining various types of mentoring events (purpose, logistics, sign-up process, etc.) prior to the start of EMNLP registrations, so that mentors and mentees have more clarity about these events upfront.
Ensure the sign-up deadlines for all events that require registration are clearly highlighted in the conference registration form.
Use an ACL-supported mechanism for mass emailing mentoring surveys or group assignments to ensure these emails are not spam-filtered or blocked.
Exploratory suggestion: It might be helpful to explore a tiered mentorship program. For example, late-stage PhD students acting as mentors to undergraduate and Master’s students, post-PhD junior researchers as mentors to PhD students, and so on. This may strategically increase the number of mentors to satisfy the mentoring demand.

== Financial access ==
For the various efforts under the financial access subcommittee, a summary is in the blog post titled “Increasing financial accessibility of ACL 2020” (Tirthankar Ghosal, Allyson Ettinger, Ryan Georgi). published on July 4. The blog post was well-received on social media.
The virtual conference presented an opportunity to cost-effectively support more people to attend the conference, and to coordinate across support initiatives,
We issued a call for application for D&I subsidies, which was open from May 29 to June 7. We reached out to Black in AI, LatinX in AI, AfricaNLP, and Deep Learning Indaba about the call.
There were 123 applications submitted. Sub-Saharan Africa (22%), South Asia (20%), US and Canada (18%), and Europe and UK (17%) were most represented, with fewer applications from Middle East and North Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and East Asia.
Overall, 83 applicants from 29 countries received subsidies for a combination of the conference registration fee, ACL membership fee, and internet bandwidth. We awarded $8750 for registration and membership fees, and another $250 (excluding fund-transfer fees) for internet bandwidth subsidies. Subsidy offers for Sub-Saharan Africa made up around a quarter. Less represented regions included Middle East and North Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, East Asia.
To simplify reimbursement, the registration and membership waivers were provided through the registration form. Priscilla received a list of D&I subsidy recipients.
The internet bandwidth funds processing (led by Ryan Georgi) used a form to elicit information on how to transfer funds, since options differ by country of residence.
Additionally, Tirthankar Ghosal led the effort to distribute 1131 access codes provided by Grammarly to the corresponding authors of accepted papers for the main conference, including ACL-Demos, SRW pre-submission phase, the WiNLP workshop, and a subset of other workshops.

Financial access recommendations:
Continue prioritizing outreach to researchers from underrepresented regions and groups.
Consider new ways for integrating virtual access into our conferences as it has immense potential for broadening participation to diverse audiences.

== Socio-cultural inclusion ==

The efforts focused on contacting affinity groups in the AI community and offering to facilitate social events, organized by the affinity groups, at the conference (arranging Zoom links, publicizing socials, etc.).
Two different affinity groups organized and announced events in the Socials tab, etc.:
The Queer in AI social was scheduled in two time slots on July 8 (outreach by Maarten Sap), featuring mini-speeches by Elin McCready (Social A), Robyn Speer (Social B) and Alex Hanna (both). There were 44 and 96 registrations for socials A and B, respectively.
The Black in AI socials included a Fireside Chat with Donia Scott on July 9 and a social with a presentation by Kianté Brantley on July 10 (outreach by Shruthi Palaskar).
In addition, we posted a message on #announcements encouraging attendees from various affinity groups to create or join RocketChat channels.
RocketChat censors words that are on a blocklist, replacing them with ***. We asked the infrastructure chairs (specifically, Hao Fang) to disable this option which seems to be enabled by default. Not disabling this would have been a significant barrier to diversity, due to the blocklist containing identity mentions (e.g., "queer", "lesbian") which made affinity groups (e.g., "Queer in AI") hard to discuss.

Socio-cultural inclusion recommendations:
Since the field involves multiple disciplines, seek to expand outreach through additional affinity groups in relevant disciplines, including for reaching out about financial access subsidies.
Facilitate that session chairs/moderators have information on names and their pronunciation and, if speakers choose to provide them, the pronouns of people they introduce.
Disable RocketChat's blocklist “BadWordsFilter” to keep the conference inclusive to marginalized identities (either in the code or in the RocketChat admin under “Message” -> “Allow Message bad words filtering”).

== Concluding additional recommendations ==
The ACL2020 D&I chairs can be contacted for additional resources that may support planning of D&I activities future virtual or nonvirtual ACL* conferences. Also see the 2020Q1 report.
Use Microsoft Forms for all surveys to ensure access across countries.
Return to childcare initiatives when applicable in the future (see outlined list in above and items 10-11 in the 2020Q1 report).
Make an approved D&I budget part of the basic conference infrastructure. We spent a considerable amount of time iteratively building a D&I budget for standard efforts involving accessibility (backstop items), childcare, and financial access subsidies, etc.

2020Q3 Reports: Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs

2020-07-17T02:01:43Z

Vinodkpg: Created page with " == D&I Chairs’ Report == Prepared by Cissi Ovesdotter Alm, RIT, and Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Google, Inc. == D&I team members == Sushant Kafle (Google, Inc), Masoud Rouhiz..."

== D&I Chairs’ Report ==
Prepared by Cissi Ovesdotter Alm, RIT, and Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Google, Inc.

== D&I team members ==
Sushant Kafle (Google, Inc), Masoud Rouhizadeh (JHU), Naomi Saphra (U. Edinburgh), Aakanksha Naik (CMU), Khyathi Chandu (CMU), Emily Prud’hommeaux (BC), Alla Rozovskaya (CUNY), Allyson Ettinger (UChicago), Ryan Georgi (KPMG), Tirthankar Ghosal (IIT Patna), Shruti Palaskar (CMU), Maarten Sap (UW), and Stephen Mayhew (Duolingo).

== D&I sponsors ==
The D&I Champion sponsors were DeepMind and Microsoft and the D&I In-Kind sponsor was Grammarly.

== Prelude ==

Shift to the virtual setting: With the move to the virtual conference, original plans such as the childcare-related initiatives (provision of onsite childcare, a statement welcoming babywearing, welcome item for kids, Kidz Corner at the welcome reception, family accommodation and lending of noise-canceling baby/toddler earmuffs at the social event, etc.), as well as efforts limited to a physical venue (designated D&I spaces, inclusive food options, improving non-alcoholic drink options at events, etc.) were abandoned. The other D&I efforts, involving four subcommittees--Accessibility (Kafle, Rouhizadeh, Saphra), Academic Inclusion (Chandu, Naik, Prud’hommeaux, Rozovskaya) Financial Access (Ettinger, Georgi, Ghosal), and Socio-cultural Inclusion (Palaskar, Sap)--were adapted to the virtual setting or new ones emerged.

This report focuses on the efforts that continued or were introduced under the virtual format.

== D&I questions in the registration form ==

We updated the D&I questions in the registration form. These D&I questions included:

What career stage do you identify with? (Undergraduate student; Graduate student; Early-career academic researcher; Early-career industry researcher; Senior academic researcher; Senior industry researcher)
Would you be interested in receiving mentorship at the conference through a virtual platform? (Yes, I would like to attend a group mentoring session for students; Yes, I would like to attend a group mentoring session for early-career researchers; No, does not apply [radio buttons])
Would you be interested in providing mentorship at the conference through a virtual platform? (Yes, I would be happy to provide mentorship advice to students; Yes, I would be happy to provide mentorship advice to early-career researchers [check boxes])
Will you need any access services such as sign language interpreting? If so, please describe your needs.
If you are a presenter and have a hard scheduling constraint (due to caregiving, religious holidays, etc.), please explain.

We considered a question on pronouns however decided against it due to the potential privacy concerns around protecting such sensitive data, once collected. Instead, participants could communicate their pronouns through their RocketChat (or Zoom) profile names, directions for which were included in the instructions to log into the virtual website shared in the Welcome email.

The D&I questions above allowed us to collect information and plan ahead based on data from early registration, which we processed in batches, given that the early registration deadline had to be set later than usual this year.

Registration form recommendations:
Suggest revising the third question above, which aimed to elicit interest in providing mentorship but caused confusion among some registrants who selected “Yes” to both the second and third questions for similar career stages, requiring extra effort for organizers to identify mentors. (Also, the term “early-career researchers” caused confusion, with answers from undergraduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and associate professors). An alternative wording could be:
If you are a (post-PhD) junior or senior researcher, would you be interested in providing mentorship at the conference through a virtual platform? (Yes, I am a junior or senior researcher, and would be happy to provide mentorship advice to students; Yes, I am a senior researcher and would be happy to provide mentorship advice to (post-PhD) early-career researchers [check boxes])
Alternatively, consider breaking career stages into more fine-grained options and asking for highest degree completed and years of experience after completing highest degree.

== Accessibility ==

ACL as a community has room to improve on how accessible conferences and the materials they produce are to colleagues with disabilities. We took the following steps in an effort to begin to address some of these issues for ACL 2020.
A blog post informing authors how to prepare accessible camera-ready papers (led by Sushant Kafle) was published on April 2, 2020; in advance of the camera-ready paper deadline.
A blog post encouraging authors to prepare accessible presentations (led by Naomi Saphra) was published on May 30, 202; in advance of the deadline for uploading pre-recorded videos to SlidesLive. Both blog posts were appreciated on social media.
Through regular updates from Priscilla on accessibility requests made during registration, we learned that researchers who used a screen-reader or captioning would attend the conference. (There were also some other requests which were not in the scope of accessibility, e.g., spoken language interpreting). All such requests generally involved individual follow-up to clarify actual needs.
Sushant Kafle reviewed the virtual website to produce an Accessibility Report for ACL Virtual Conference website, with attention to how well it functioned with screen-reader software. These issues were shared with the infrastructure committee via email and as Github issue tickets.
Sushant Kafle further compiled a list of Accessibility Issues with Rocket Chat which might need to be taken up with RocketChat for future conferences.
The originally intended real-time captions (facilitated by Masoud Rouhizadeh) did not apply in the virtual setting. Instead, we advocated for the need for captioning of pre-recorded and live video materials, and continued to provide input to the new captioning chairs, Ananya and Klaus <LINK TO THEIR REPORT SECTION>. For the virtual conference, CART captioning for live plenaries ensured access for the hard-of-hearing, anyone who could not listen to the audio, and anyone who may have been at a disadvantage due to a language barrier. Authors of pre-recorded talks were also encouraged to correct captions for their talk, which will move into and become part of the ACL Anthology.

Accessibility recommendations:
Continue advocacy for accessible materials (papers, slides, videos, and websites).
Ensure that a committee member is involved in assessing and providing input about the accessibility of the main conference website from the start (alternative texts for images, color selection, etc.), including for non-virtual conferences.
Ensure quality captions for both live sessions and pre-recorded videos at virtual and non-virtual conferences. The social media activity on issues with auto-generated captions indicate this is a critical priority for authors generally.
Elicit requests for access services in registration and ensure accessible websites.
Ensure accessibility issues in the virtual conference website are fixed (detailed here), if the same codebase from ACL will be used in a future conference.
Contact RocketChat to resolve the accessibility issues with their platform (detailed here), if their service will be used for future conferences.

== Academic inclusion ==
The academic inclusion mentoring efforts involved four types of events (led by Aakanksha Naik and Khyathi Chandu):

Panel for undergraduate students (new): This panel, which attracted around 90 participants, discussed topics such as graduate school and degrees, career path options, and also aimed to help undergraduate students navigate the NLP research landscape and the field’s future. Preferences on topics, panelists, and questions were elicited with a survey sent to undergraduate students. The panel was held on June 5th and was moderated by Aakanksha Naik and Khyathi Chandu (Academic Inclusion leads). There were 7 panelists, including faculty, industry researchers, and graduate students. The structure included panelist introductions by moderators, reflections from each panelist on three questions (below), and moderated Q&A with the panelists based on a curated set of 15 questions (from around 75 questions elicited from students):
What about NLP/computational linguistics excites you the most? How did you get interested in NLP/computational linguistics and how has that interest (and your career) evolved over the years?
What factors guided you in making important career decisions: graduate school, industry vs. academia, etc.
What is one thing that you know now that you wish you knew as an undergraduate student?

Small group mentoring sessions: We organized 82 sessions of pre-assigned small group mentoring sessions for students or early-career researchers (ECR). These sessions were held on July 6, 7, and 8 in the same two time slots: midnight-1am PDT and 9am-10am PDT, aiming for a broad coverage of timezones. There were 944 mentees (571 students and 373 ECRs), 202 mentors (136 mentors for students and 66 mentors for ECRs), of which 34 mentors were ECRs mentees themselves. The session assignments were made using an automated matching process based on time and topic preferences collected through a survey. Each session had 1-3 mentors and approximately 5-13 mentees. The sessions were intentionally kept small in order to encourage more personal interactions that we believe is important to help the mentees, especially the newcomers. These sessions were also supported by 20 volunteer moderators who helped resolve challenges for mentors.
Birds of a Feather meetups: We organized 29 open sessions over July 6 and 7, led by around 35 senior researchers. These sessions were centered on 23 themes listed in the ACL 2020 call for papers and did not require pre-registration.
Open group mentoring sessions: Based on the popularity of the small group mentoring sessions (second item above), we organized 9 additional open group mentoring sessions on July 8. These sessions covered 10 popular topics from previous days. 24 mentors quickly signed up in response to an emergency call for mentors that went out on July 7 (PDT). This time, there was no matching process and the sessions could accommodate groups of any size, including attendees joining in late registration. For example, the session on the topic Long-term career planning + Becoming a research leader: building your professional identity attracted over 100 participants.
Throughout the conference, mentoring events were broadcast in the Socials tab and the #announcement channel (over 20 such announcements) and often also announced by the mentors themselves. We also scheduled social media announcements via publicity chairs for messages to be sent out prior to the Birds of a Feather meetups, etc. We also sent an email to mentors clarifying about not sharing the small group mentoring links (e.g., on RocketChat) given the intended small-group format for those sessions.
In general, social media activity revealed that the mentoring activities were popular among many attendees

Academic inclusion recommendations:
For a virtual conference with individual Zoom rooms/accounts, shared accounts must be avoided and new links be provided for each mentoring session. When mentors forgot to log out from ACL-provided accounts after their sessions ended, this caused an access issue for other mentors who tried to use those accounts for a later session.
Provide guidelines to mentors about recommended communication practices for participants’ interactions, including tools that are accessible across countries (Google applications are not) if mentors wish to pass on materials or connect participants in collaborative writing, to further improve inclusivity. Additionally, consider how ACL can provide such online interaction spaces directly to mentors and participants. (This point is based on social media comments; thanks to Emily Bender for pointing this out.)
If feasible, use the same infrastructure for paper live Q&A sessions for group mentoring sessions. This would ensure unique accounts and links for each mentoring group, along with dedicated RocketChat channels, which could be a medium for mentors who want to share materials or surveys with their mentees before or after their session.
Attendees were not used to 24-hour schedules for virtual conferences, resulting in confusion about the early morning PDT time slots. For instance, many mentors mistakenly signed up for sessions in the 1am - 5am window, since they were not expecting sessions to be held at that hour. This necessitated dealing with a large number of rescheduling requests, adding pressure on coordinators.
Make efforts to reach students early in their careers, including by scheduling one or more undergraduate student-focused events early in the conference, but also by considering non-conference efforts. Early exposure to research can help widening participation in the field.
Add group mentoring themes and BoF themes at future conferences that respond to D&I in our community, e.g., Low-resource CL/NLP as a BoF, and Advice on navigating academia as a member of an underrepresented group as a group mentoring theme.
Recommendations for improved communication with attendees:
Release a blog post explaining various types of mentoring events (purpose, logistics, sign-up process, etc.) prior to the start of EMNLP registrations, so that mentors and mentees have more clarity about these events upfront.
Ensure the sign-up deadlines for all events that require registration are clearly highlighted in the conference registration form.
Use an ACL-supported mechanism for mass emailing mentoring surveys or group assignments to ensure these emails are not spam-filtered or blocked.
Exploratory suggestion: It might be helpful to explore a tiered mentorship program. For example, late-stage PhD students acting as mentors to undergraduate and Master’s students, post-PhD junior researchers as mentors to PhD students, and so on. This may strategically increase the number of mentors to satisfy the mentoring demand.

== Financial access ==
For the various efforts under the financial access subcommittee, a summary is in the blog post titled “Increasing financial accessibility of ACL 2020” (Tirthankar Ghosal, Allyson Ettinger, Ryan Georgi). published on July 4. The blog post was well-received on social media.
The virtual conference presented an opportunity to cost-effectively support more people to attend the conference, and to coordinate across support initiatives,
We issued a call for application for D&I subsidies, which was open from May 29 to June 7. We reached out to Black in AI, LatinX in AI, AfricaNLP, and Deep Learning Indaba about the call.
There were 123 applications submitted. Sub-Saharan Africa (22%), South Asia (20%), US and Canada (18%), and Europe and UK (17%) were most represented, with fewer applications from Middle East and North Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and East Asia.
Overall, 83 applicants from 29 countries received subsidies for a combination of the conference registration fee, ACL membership fee, and internet bandwidth. We awarded $8750 for registration and membership fees, and another $250 (excluding fund-transfer fees) for internet bandwidth subsidies. Subsidy offers for Sub-Saharan Africa made up around a quarter. Less represented regions included Middle East and North Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, East Asia.
To simplify reimbursement, the registration and membership waivers were provided through the registration form. Priscilla received a list of D&I subsidy recipients.
The internet bandwidth funds processing (led by Ryan Georgi) used a form to elicit information on how to transfer funds, since options differ by country of residence.
Additionally, Tirthankar Ghosal led the effort to distribute 1131 access codes provided by Grammarly to the corresponding authors of accepted papers for the main conference, including ACL-Demos, SRW pre-submission phase, the WiNLP workshop, and a subset of other workshops.

Financial access recommendations:
Continue prioritizing outreach to researchers from underrepresented regions and groups.
Consider new ways for integrating virtual access into our conferences as it has immense potential for broadening participation to diverse audiences.

== Socio-cultural inclusion ==

The efforts focused on contacting affinity groups in the AI community and offering to facilitate social events, organized by the affinity groups, at the conference (arranging Zoom links, publicizing socials, etc.).
Two different affinity groups organized and announced events in the Socials tab, etc.:
The Queer in AI social was scheduled in two time slots on July 8 (outreach by Maarten Sap), featuring mini-speeches by Elin McCready (Social A), Robyn Speer (Social B) and Alex Hanna (both). There were 44 and 96 registrations for socials A and B, respectively.
The Black in AI socials included a Fireside Chat with Donia Scott on July 9 and a social with a presentation by Kianté Brantley on July 10 (outreach by Shruthi Palaskar).
In addition, we posted a message on #announcements encouraging attendees from various affinity groups to create or join RocketChat channels.
RocketChat censors words that are on a blocklist, replacing them with ***. We asked the infrastructure chairs (specifically, Hao Fang) to disable this option which seems to be enabled by default. Not disabling this would have been a significant barrier to diversity, due to the blocklist containing identity mentions (e.g., "queer", "lesbian") which made affinity groups (e.g., "Queer in AI") hard to discuss.

Socio-cultural inclusion recommendations:
Since the field involves multiple disciplines, seek to expand outreach through additional affinity groups in relevant disciplines, including for reaching out about financial access subsidies.
Facilitate that session chairs/moderators have information on names and their pronunciation and, if speakers choose to provide them, the pronouns of people they introduce.
Disable RocketChat's blocklist “BadWordsFilter” to keep the conference inclusive to marginalized identities (either in the code or in the RocketChat admin under “Message” -> “Allow Message bad words filtering”).

== Concluding additional recommendations ==
The ACL2020 D&I chairs can be contacted for additional resources that may support planning of D&I activities future virtual or nonvirtual ACL* conferences. Also see the 2020Q1 report.
Use Microsoft Forms for all surveys to ensure access across countries.
Return to childcare initiatives when applicable in the future (see outlined list in above and items 10-11 in the 2020Q1 report).
Make an approved D&I budget part of the basic conference infrastructure. We spent a considerable amount of time iteratively building a D&I budget for standard efforts involving accessibility (backstop items), childcare, and financial access subsidies, etc.

2020Q1 Reports: ACL 2020

2020-02-26T10:12:49Z

Vinodkpg: /* Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs */

== 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).

On Mar 11, we will have a site visit at the hotel in Seattle which besides Priscilla will include the General Chair, and representatives from the Program Chairs, the D&I chairs, and the AV chairs. We will also use that occasion to have a committee mtg including those folks plus the relatively large number of ACL2020 organizing committee members who are local to Seattle.

[some highlights from the below chair summaries to be added here]

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

Natalie Schluter, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Joel Tetreault, Dataminr, USA

---

'''New Initiatives This Year'''

'''''Earlier Submission Deadline and Notification'''''

To accommodate a more realistic workflow, given (1) the rapid growth in the number of submissions to ACL conferences, (2) together with avoiding the period for authors from Dec. 15-Jan. 15 while giving us more time to implement and test new implementations, we moved the submission deadline back to December 9. Specifically, previous PCs advised us to do this to set a precedent for future PCs, in accommodating a more realistic timeline. The timeline is still packed, but workable. We also plan notifications to be out earlier than normal, to provide an extra 1-2 weeks for visa applicants, as an inclusion measure.

'''''Four New Tracks'''''

ACL2020 introduced four new tracks:(1) Ethics and NLP. Ethical issues have become increasingly important as more advanced tools become available for NLP research and development. We dedicated a new track and explicitly invite contributions that study ethical issues and impact regarding NLP research and applications. (2) Interpretation and Analysis of Models for NLP. As the community strives for pushing performance boundaries, understanding behaviors of STOA models becomes critical. (3) Theory and Formalism. This track is designed to encourage submissions targeted to theoretical underpinning of NLP models which had little/small presence in the past ACL conferences. (4) Theme: Taking Stock of Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going. The last few years have witnessed an unprecedented growth in NLP since the field began over sixty years ago. This track is designed to invite submissions that can provide insight for the community to assess how much we have accomplished today with respect to the past and where the field should be heading to. The theme track is different from other tracks. We therefore made some modifications in the review form to reflect that.

'''''Extended Automatic COI Detection/Automatic Reviewer-Paper Assignment'''''

We carried out offline COI detection and automatic paper assignment for the first time for an *ACL conference. The code used were ACL2020-customised implementations of Amanda Stent’s COI detection software and Graham Neubig’s automatic reviewer-paper assignment software.

'''''Mandatory Reviewer Duty and Recruitment'''''

To meet the reviewer demands of a growing conference, we made reviewer volunteering mandatory for submission authors. This resulted in a record number of volunteer candidate reviewers (over 11K). We note that these volunteers were candidates and only a subset of them were actually given reviewing assignments.
Using a Microsoft Reviewer/Author form, we collected a variety of information on potential reviewers like ACL anthology page, website, self-declared reviewer experience, 1st & 2nd track preferences, etc. to (1) provide information sheets on reviewers to SACs and ACs, as a tool when manually correcting the automatic reviewer-paper assignments,
(2) to manually balance the reviewer pools among tracks, and (3) to filter the list of reviewers based on whether the reviewer (i) had superiority PhD-student or higher, (ii) had reviewed for at least 4 previous *ACL conference, and (iii) had a minimum number of ACL anthology publications.
To counterbalance (3ii), we provided SACs with a list of novice reviewers and introduced our a Reviewer Mentoring Program (see below).

'''''New Reviewer Mentoring Program'''''

Given the rapid growth of NLP in terms of number of papers and new students, it is very important for our community to mentor and train our new reviewers. ACL2020 has launched a pilot program which calls for each AC to mentor at least one novice reviewer. Ultimately, the goal is to provide long-needed mentoring to new reviewers. At the very least, this process will inform ACL on constructing a reviewer mentoring program that is more scalable in the future. For most tracks, each AC was paired with at least a mentee (often a Ph.D. student, or a junior researcher who has just graduated). The AC would work with the mentee, provide feedback and help the mentee to improve the quality of his/her reviews. Close to 300 junior researchers were selected to participate in this program. We will put together a detailed report on this program after the conference.

'''''Updated Review Form with New Rating Scale and Evaluation Item'''''

We have separate review forms for regular tracks and the theme track. Our review forms were built upon the form from EMNLP-IJCNLP2019 and ACL2019 with '''''two new extensions'''''.
(1) We have removed the rating 3 (ambivalent) from the overall recommendation as we would like reviewers to take a stand on whether the paper is above the borderline (3.5) or below the borderline (2.5). The reason for this change is that ambivalent cases often take a long time to discuss. By taking a stand, reviewers would provide more informative feedback for AC/SAC to make a recommendation. ICLR 2020 has adopted similar rating strategies (although with a different scale).
(2) As ethical concerns and societal impacts are an important consideration for NLP research, we have explicitly ask reviewers to evaluate ethical implications of each submission. On the review form, we ask reviewers whether there are any ethical concerns about a submission that the area chairs and program chairs should be aware of. We also encourage reviewers to flag such concerns to the authors.

'''Other Efforts'''

'''''Initial submission reviews and desk rejects'''''

We have received a record number of 3,429 submissions (approximately a 15% increase over ACL2019). All papers were carefully inspected to check for violations of ACL policies (ranging from formatting to anonymization to use of supplementary material). Similar to ACL2019, we used assistants to speed up an otherwise long process. All issues identified by assistants were cross-examined by two PCs. We noticed that many papers did not strictly follow the ACL style sheet. We have thus been lenient in terms of margin, line numbers, fonts, etc formatting issues. As a result 29 submissions were desk rejected for violating ACL policies on anonymity, page length, double blind review, etc.

'''''Manual adjustment of submission tracks'''''

Many papers were not submitted to the right track where they could receive reviews from most relevant reviewers. SACs were instructed to flag the papers that should be moved to a different track. We went through every single suggestion and moved papers around if warranted. This turned out to be a major effort. In total, 500-600 papers were moved across tracks as a result.

'''''Manual adjustment of AC and reviewer assignment'''''

As the automatic reviewer assignment is not perfect, SACs did much manual work adjusting AC assignments as well as reviewer assignments. This effort varied among tracks. Given the current set up in Softconf, ACs’ roles are pretty limited. ACs are essentially meta-reviewers who do not have access to the reviewer accounts, and therefore, cannot add reviewers, nor make reviewer assignments, nor contact reviewers directly. We have given this feedback to softconf and hopefully the system will be updated to support extended AC roles for future conferences.

'''''Communication'''''

Because of several new initiatives implemented this year, extensive efforts have been made to communicate these changes to SACs, ACs, reviewers, as well as authors. Besides direct emails, we have used blog postings as well as twitters as our additional communication channels assisted by the publicity chair and the web chairs.

'''Submission Status'''

We have received 3,429 papers (2244 long and 1185 short) have been submitted. Here is the distribution of long, short and total papers per track.
<ul>
<li> Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics: 49 39 88
<li> Computational Social Science and Social Media: 73 38 111
<li> Dialogue and Interactive Systems: 204 71 275
<li> Discourse and Pragmatics: 36 20 56
<li> Ethics and NLP: 30 22 52
<li> Generation: 142 71 213
<li> Information Extraction: 159 83 242
<li> Information Retrieval and Text Mining: 55 41 96
<li> Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP: 110 54 164
<li> Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond: 69 24 93
<li> Machine Learning for NLP: 186 109 295
<li> Machine Translation: 158 104 262
<li> NLP Applications: 169 99 268
<li> Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation: 38 15 53
<li> Question Answering: 109 63 172
<li> Resources and Evaluation: 88 48 136
<li> Semantics: Lexical: 57 37 94
<li> Semantics: Sentence Level: 66 29 95
<li> Semantics: Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics: 81 31 112
<li> Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining: 112 66 178
<li> Speech and Multimodality: 38 27 65
<li> Summarization: 90 37 127
<li> Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing: 47 28 75
<li> Theme: 67 26 93
<li> Theory and Formalism in NLP (Linguistic and Mathematical): 11 3 14
</ul>

'''Summary of Timelines'''

<ul>
<li>Oct 15 - Nov 30: SACs invite ACs and reviewers
<li>Nov 25: Reviewer profiles completed
<li>Dec 09: ACL Paper Submission Deadline (long and short papers)
<li>Dec 10 - Jan 14: initial submission reviews and desk rejects; automatic reviewer assignment and COI detection; manual adjustment of assignment;
<li>Jan 17 - Feb 07: Review Period
<li>Feb 08 - Feb 11: ACs chase late reviews
<li>Feb 12 - Feb 17: Author Response
<li>Feb 18 - Feb 25: Reviewer Discussion Period (ACs lead discussion), ACs provide feedback to mentees.
<li>Feb 25 - Mar 03: ACs produce meta-reviews
<li>Mar 03 - Mar 10: SACs rank papers based on meta-reviews and make recommendations to PC chairs
<li>Mar 11 - Apr 02: PC chairs make decisions (they may consult SACs during this time); SACs and ACs recommend best reviewers
<li>Apr 03 - Accept / Reject Notifications
<li>Apr 24: Camera ready
</ul>

'''List of SAC/ACs and recruitment'''

Following ACL2019, we have adopted a hierarchical structure where each area is chaired by one or two senior ACs, who are supported by a group of area chairs. We have a total of 40 Senior Area Chairs and 299 Area Chairs.
'''''Recruitment''''': We individually created preference lists for SACs, discussed these and made decisions. ACs were selected by SACs.

Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics
<ul>
<li>SACs: Emily Prud’hommeaux
<li>ACs: Cassandra L. Jacobs, Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Masoud Rouhizadeh, Serguei Pakhomov, Yevgeni Berzak
</ul>

Computational Social Science and Social Media
<ul>
<li>SACs: Tim Baldwin, Nikolaos Aletras
<li>ACs: A. Seza Dögruöz, Afshin Rahimi, Alice Oh, Brendan O'Connor, Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro, David Bamman, David Jurgens, David Mimno, Diana Inkpen, Diyi Yang, Eiji Aramaki, Jacob Eisenstein, Jonathan K. Kummerfeld, Kalina Bontcheva
</ul>

Dialogue and Interactive Systems
<ul>
<li>SACs: Jason Williams, Mari Ostendorf
<li>ACs: Alborz Geramifard, Amanda Stent, Asli Celikyilmaz, Casey Kennington, David Traum, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Gabriel Skantze, Helen Hastie, Heriberto Cuayahuitl, Kai Yu, Kallirroi Georgila, Luciana Benotti, Luis Fernando D'Haro, Nina Dethlefs, Ryuichiro Higashinaka, Stefan Ultes, Sungjin Lee, Tsung-Hsien Wen, Y-Lan Boureau, Yun-Nung Chen, Zhou Yu
</ul>

Discourse and Pragmatics
<ul>
<li>SACs: Annie Louis (taking over for Diane Litman)
<li>ACs: Chloé Braud, Junyi Jessy Li, Manfred Stede, Shafiq Joty, Sujian Li, Yangfeng Ji
</ul>

Ethics and NLP
<ul>
<li>SACs: Dirk Hovy
<li>ACs: Alan W Black, Emily M. Bender, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Yulia Tsvetkov
</ul>

Generation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Wei Xu, Alexander Rush
<li>ACs: John Wieting, Laura Perez-Beltrachini, Lu Wang, Miltiadis Allamanis, Mohit Iyyer, Nanyun Peng, Sam Wiseman, Shashi Narayan, Sudha Rao, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Xiaojun Wan, Xipeng Qiu
</ul>

Information Extraction
<ul>
<li>SACs: Doug Downey, Hoifun Poon
<li>ACs: Alan Ritter, Chandra Bhagavatula, Gerard de Melo, Kai-Wei Chang, Marius Pasca, Mo Yu, Radu Florian, Ruihong Huang, Sameer Singh, Satoshi Sekine, Snigdha Chaturvedi, Sumithra Velupillai, Timothy Miller, Vivek Srikumar, William Yang Wang, Yunyao Li
</ul>

Information Retrieval and Text Mining
<ul>
<li>SACs: Chin-Yew Lin, Nazli Goharian
<li>ACs: Andrew Yates, Arman Cohan, Bing Qin, Craig Macdonald, Danai Koutra, Elad Yom-Tov, Franco Maria Nardini, Kalliopi Zervanou, Luca Soldaini, Nicola Tonellotto, Pu-Jen Cheng, Seung-won Hwang, Yangqiu Song, Yansong Feng
</ul>

Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP
<ul>
<li>SACs: Yoav Goldberg
<li>ACs: Adina Williams, Afra Alishahi, Douwe Kiela, Grzegorz Chrupała, Marco Baroni, Yonatan Belinkov, Zachary C. Lipton
</ul>

Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond
<ul>
<li>SACs: Yoav Artzi
<li>ACs: Angeliki Lazaridou, Dan Goldwasser, Jason Baldridge, Jesse Thomason, Lisa Anne Hendricks, Parisa Kordjamshidi, Raffaella Bernardi, Vicente Ordonez, Yonatan Bisk
</ul>

Machine Learning for NLP
<ul>
<li>SACs: Andre Martins, Isabelle Augenstein
<li>ACs: Ankur Parikh, Anna Rumshisky, Bruno Martins, Caio Corro, Dani Yogatama, Daniel Beck, Dipanjan Das, Edouard Grave, Emma Strubell, Gholamreza Haffari, Ivan Titov, Joseph Le Roux, Jun Suzuki, Kevin Gimpel, Michael Auli, Ming-Wei Chang, Shay B. Cohen, Vlad Niculae, Waleed Ammar, Wilker Aziz, Yejin Choi, Zita Marinho, Zornitsa Kozareva
</ul>

Machine Translation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Marine Carpuat, Alexandra Birch
<li>ACs: Ann Clifton, Antonio Toral, Atsushi Fujita, Boxing Chen, Carolina Scarton, Chi-kiu Lo, Christian Hardmeier, Deyi Xiong, Franois Yvon, George Foster, Jiajun Zhang, Jrg Tiedemann, Maja Popovič, Marcello Federico, Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt, Marco Turchi, Marta R. Costa-jussà, Matt Post, Nadir Durrani, Qun Liu, Rico Sennrich, Taro Watanabe, Yuki Arase, Yvette Graham
</ul>

Multidisciplinary and Area Chair COI
<ul>
<li>SACs: Michael Strube
<li>ACs: Anders Søgaard, David Schlangen, Katrin Erk, Kentaro Inui, Kevin Duh, Massimo Poesio, Mausam, Pascal Denis
</ul>

NLP Applications
<ul>
<li>SACs: Preslav Nakov, Karin Verspoor
<li>ACs: Alexander Fraser, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Aoife Cahill, Daniel Cer, Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha, Giovanni Da San Martino, Hassan Sajjad, Kevin Cohen, Marcos Zampieri, Michel Galley, Min Zhang, Pierre Zweigenbaum, Razvan Bunescu, Sara Rosenthal, Tristan Naumann, Vincent Ng, Wei Gao, Wei Lu
</ul>

Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Kemal Oflazer
<li>ACs: Christo Kirov, David R. Mortensen, Kareem Darwish, Reut Tsarfaty, Yue Zhang, Özlem Çetinoğlu
</ul>

Question Answering
<ul>
<li>SACs: Eugene Agichtein, Alessandro Moschitti
<li>ACs: Avi Sil, Dina Demner-Fushman, Evangelos Kanoulas, Gerhard Weikum, Idan Szpektor, Jimmy Lin, Oleg Rokhlenko, Sanda Harabagiu, Wen-tau Yih, William Cohen
</ul>

Resources and Evaluation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Nathan Schneider, Barbara Plank
<li>ACs: Allyson Ettinger, Annemarie Friedrich, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Arianna Bisazza, Claire Bonial, Daniel Zeman, Emmanuele Chersoni, Ines Rehbein, Lonneke van der Plas, Maria Liakata, Sara Tonelli, Sarvnaz Karimi, Tim Van de Cruys, Vered Shwartz, Walid Magdy, Çağri Çöltekin
</ul>

Semantics: Lexical
<ul>
<li>SACs: Ekaterina Shutova, Aline Villavicencio
<li>ACs: Alessandro Lenci, Anna Feldman, Aurélie Herbelot, Beata Beigman Klebanov, Carlos Ramisch, Chris Biemann, Enrico Santus, Fabio Massimo Zanzotto, Helen Yannakoudakis, Ivan Vulič, Jose Camacho-Collados, Marianna Apidianaki, Paul Cook, Saif Mohammad
</ul>

Semantics: Sentence Level
<ul>
<li>SACs: Mohit Bansal
<li>ACs: Andreas Vlachos, Christopher Potts, Danqi Chen, Eunsol Choi, He He, Jonathan Berant, Kevin Small, Marek Rei, Sebastian Ruder, Siva Reddy, Swabha Swayamdipta, Thomas Wolf, Veselin Stoyanov
</ul>

Semantics: Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics
<ul>
<li>SACs: Sam Bowman
<li>ACs: Anette Frank, Eduardo Blanco, Edward Grefenstette, Jacob Andreas, Jonathan May, Kenton Lee, Lasha Abzianidze, Luheng He, Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Rachel Rudinger, Roy Schwartz, Valeria de Paiva
</ul>

Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
<ul>
<li>SACs: Smaranda Muresan, Swapna Somasundaran
<li>ACs: Bing Liu, Claire Cardie, Elena Musi, Iryna Gurevych, Julian Brooke, Lun-Wei Ku, Marie-Francine Moens, Minlie Huang, Paolo Rosso, Roman Klinger, Serena Villata, Soujanya Poria, Thamar Solorio, Yulan He
</ul>

Speech and Multimodality
<ul>
<li>SACs: Eric Fosler-Lussier
<li>ACs: Bhuvana Ramabhadran, Florian Metze, Gerasimos Potamianos, Hamid Palangi, Martha Larson
</ul>

Summarization
<ul>
<li>SACs: Fei Liu
<li>ACs: Caiming Xiong, Giuseppe Carenini, Katja Markert, Manabu Okumura, Michael Elhadad, Ramesh Nallapati, Sebastian Gehrmann, Wenjie Li, Xiaodan Zhu, Yang Gao
</ul>

Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing
<ul>
<li>SACs: David Chiang
<li>ACs: Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez, Emily Pitler, Liang Huang, Miguel Ballesteros, Miryam de Lhoneux, Slav Petrov, Stephan Oepen, Weiwei Sun
</ul>

THEME
<ul>
<li>SACs: Marilyn Walker (taking over for Ellen Riloff)
<li>ACs: Donia Scott, Johan Bos, Luke Zettlemoyer, Philipp Koehn, Raymond Mooney
</ul>

Theory and Formalism in NLP (Linguistic and Mathematical)
<ul>
<li>SACs: Daniel Gildea
<li>ACs: Alexander Koller, Laura Kallmeyer, Marco Kuhlmann
</ul>

== 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.

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

'''Details of Activities''':

The web site for ACL 2020 Demonstrations Track is: https://acl2020.org/calls/demos/[https://acl2020.org/calls/demos/], which includes details about submissions, deadlines, reviewing policy and important dates.

Compared to the last year, we have made a few changes to the track. Specifically, in the submission details, we encouraged the authors to include visual aids (e.g., screenshots, snapshots, or diagrams) in the paper. This year the submissions are single blind, in which the authors are allowed to disclose their names on their submitted manuscript. We kept the style files same as last year.

The deadline for submissions was January 31, 2020.

This year we have record number of demonstration paper submissions, over 130 submissions. After a few desk rejects, a total of 122 papers are reviewed. The technical Program Committee is in place. To accommodate minimum three reviewers for each paper, we have reached out close to 300 reviewers and 213 have accepted. We managed to assign 3 reviewers to all submitted papers, with no more than 3 papers per reviewer. Currently we have 152 technical program committee members. The program committee is scheduled to submit their reviews by March 10, 2020.

'''Important Dates'''

Paper submission deadline: Friday, January 31st, 2020

Notification of acceptance: Friday, April 3rd, 2020

Camera-ready submission: Friday, April 24th, 2020

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

Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Rochester Institute of Technology

Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Google

1. We created five different sub-committees (listed below) to address ACL D&I related activities. In the interest of transparency and institutional memory, we prepared a separate memorandum of understanding (MoU) for each sub-committee, which articulates a mission statement, five minimum tasks the sub-committee is responsible for (with the fifth task being a blog post), useful links, and detailed guidelines per task. In these guidelines, each task entry contains:
* Task title
* Interfaces (recommendations for whom to communicate with to address the task)
* Sub tasks (an enumerated list of sub task descriptions)
* Timeline (when to begin)
In designing the tasks, we expanded on NAACL 2019 D&I activities and lessons learned. We will hand over the MoUs for future conferences; we hope that this resource will facilitate future D&I committees’ planning activities.

2. For communication and teamwork, we set up:
* An ACL 2020 D&I slack channel, facilitating keeping records of interactions.
* A Google folder with designated subfolders for D&I subcommittees
* An ACL 2020 D&I chairs google groups email handle: <acl2020-diversity-inclusion-chairs@googlegroups.com>

3. We recruited 13 volunteers across the 5 subcommittees, constituting the ACL 2020 D&I Team, recognized on the conference website: https://acl2020.org/committees/diversity-inclusion.

'''Academic Inclusion Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure the venue is welcoming to researchers from diverse subdisciplines, conducive to building academic networks across disciplines and career stages.''
* Aakanksha Naik, Carnegie Mellon University
* Emily Prud’hommeaux, Boston College
* Alla Rozovskaya, Queens College (City University of New York)

'''Accessibility Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure the venue is accessible for researchers with any disability, including provision of requested access services.''
* Sushant Kafle, Google/Rochester Institute of Technology
* Masoud Rouhizadeh, Johns Hopkins University
* Naomi Saphra, University of Edinburgh

'''Childcare Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure adequate childcare provisions to help researchers who are caregivers of children to attend the conference.''
* Khyathi Chandu, Carnegie Mellon University
* Stephen Mayhew, Duolingo

'''Financial Access Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure provision of financial access to researchers from underrepresented demographics and geographies to attend the conference.''
* Allyson Ettinger, University of Chicago
* Ryan Georgi, KPMG
* Tirthankar Ghosal, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Patna

'''Socio-cultural Inclusion Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure a welcoming and inclusive environment for researchers from various socio-cultural subgroups, accommodate for diverse needs for food and drinks at the conference, as well as support initiatives for groups to socialize and network.''
* Shruti Palaskar, Carnegie Mellon University
* Maarten Sap, University of Washington

Kick-off meetings with all subcommittees took place in December before the winter holidays. Correspondence is mostly taking place on slack, alternatively by email.

4. A message distributed on ACL2020 social media on September 17 2019 invited community members to share comments and suggestions with the D&I chairs. We received some important feedback.

5. A blog post entitled The ACL 2020 Diversity and Inclusion Committee appeared on the ACL 2020 website and subsequently social media on February 4 2020. We received some important feedback as well as inquiries about D&I accommodations.

6. The sponsorship booklet has been updated for D&I sponsorships. In consultation with Priscilla we added a third sponsor-ship level category. The resulting levels are Champion, Ally, and Contributor. The list of benefits is now also up-to-date. We alerted that multipacks may result in lower cost than single conference sponsorship.

7. Grammarly has provided a generous in-kind donation in the form of writing support software licenses. Codes have been distributed to SRW and WiNLP for distribution among their authors, together with an outreach email template (adjusted from NAACL 2019). Joel Tetreault and Tirthankar Goshal (Financial Access subcommittee) were instrumental in this process. In this context, we also arrived at how to recognize in-kind sponsors by discussion and consensus.

8. We coordinated a room request across subcommittees, submitted to Priscilla as a spreadsheet, detailing space and furniture requirements for subcommittees’ activities.

9. We have submitted a request for a set of updates to D&I items in the registration form and are at work on updates to the D&I special request form.

10. We recommended offering onsite childcare at ACL 2020. We illustrated with ten examples that provision of childcare is a standard feature at comparable conference venues (e.g., AAAI 2020, NeurIPS 2019, Interspeech 2019, CHI 2019). Childcare service is missing at ACL conferences and may especially impact junior researchers. Data shared by two comparable AI conferences indicate that onsite childcare usage can increase substantially (roughly quadrupled) from one year to another, such that a multiyear commitment should be made for establishing a meaningful utility assessment of onsite childcare. Data on ACL 2019 usage was retrieved by Priscilla (around 14 children on average during main conference; 9 children on average during workshop/tutorial days, with a total of 357.8 hours attended by children), while we obtained proposals from 3 providers. Based on reviewing these proposals, we recommend KiddieCorp as the first-choice vendor for this service.

11. With help from the General Chair, we initiated a conversation about the need for a D&I budget. Subsequently, we prepared a detailed budget request, split into costs and back-stop costs (items that apply when there is a request), which was passed on to the ACL Exec. Sushant Kafle (Accessibility subcommittee) was instrumental in the process of obtaining proposals by vendors for access services. Our requested budget is detailed at the following link, which includes the onsite childcare cost estimates as well: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DaYX-MGHtd2CsezXNTkaPIXJ6lHewow1z08jQA2I-7E

In conclusion, the D&I activities are progressing and awaiting a decision on budget. In addition, several of the resources we have prepared or enhanced may facilitate future D&I committees’ planning activities, for instance the MOUs, the coordinated room request, the revised sponsorship booklet section, the detailed budget request summary, the process for distributing the writing support software in-kind donation, and the onsite childcare proposal summary.

== 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

We are hosting the conference website on GitHub using the easily adaptable website architecture built by Nitin Madnani for NAACL 2019: https://github.com/naacl-org/naacl-hlt-2019. 
We are using the Whova event app for hosting the conference app this year similar to NAACL 2019.

== Business Office ==

Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL

2020Q1 Reports: ACL 2020

2020-02-26T10:11:09Z

Vinodkpg: /* Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs */

== 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).

On Mar 11, we will have a site visit at the hotel in Seattle which besides Priscilla will include the General Chair, and representatives from the Program Chairs, the D&I chairs, and the AV chairs. We will also use that occasion to have a committee mtg including those folks plus the relatively large number of ACL2020 organizing committee members who are local to Seattle.

[some highlights from the below chair summaries to be added here]

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

Natalie Schluter, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Joel Tetreault, Dataminr, USA

---

'''New Initiatives This Year'''

'''''Earlier Submission Deadline and Notification'''''

To accommodate a more realistic workflow, given (1) the rapid growth in the number of submissions to ACL conferences, (2) together with avoiding the period for authors from Dec. 15-Jan. 15 while giving us more time to implement and test new implementations, we moved the submission deadline back to December 9. Specifically, previous PCs advised us to do this to set a precedent for future PCs, in accommodating a more realistic timeline. The timeline is still packed, but workable. We also plan notifications to be out earlier than normal, to provide an extra 1-2 weeks for visa applicants, as an inclusion measure.

'''''Four New Tracks'''''

ACL2020 introduced four new tracks:(1) Ethics and NLP. Ethical issues have become increasingly important as more advanced tools become available for NLP research and development. We dedicated a new track and explicitly invite contributions that study ethical issues and impact regarding NLP research and applications. (2) Interpretation and Analysis of Models for NLP. As the community strives for pushing performance boundaries, understanding behaviors of STOA models becomes critical. (3) Theory and Formalism. This track is designed to encourage submissions targeted to theoretical underpinning of NLP models which had little/small presence in the past ACL conferences. (4) Theme: Taking Stock of Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going. The last few years have witnessed an unprecedented growth in NLP since the field began over sixty years ago. This track is designed to invite submissions that can provide insight for the community to assess how much we have accomplished today with respect to the past and where the field should be heading to. The theme track is different from other tracks. We therefore made some modifications in the review form to reflect that.

'''''Extended Automatic COI Detection/Automatic Reviewer-Paper Assignment'''''

We carried out offline COI detection and automatic paper assignment for the first time for an *ACL conference. The code used were ACL2020-customised implementations of Amanda Stent’s COI detection software and Graham Neubig’s automatic reviewer-paper assignment software.

'''''Mandatory Reviewer Duty and Recruitment'''''

To meet the reviewer demands of a growing conference, we made reviewer volunteering mandatory for submission authors. This resulted in a record number of volunteer candidate reviewers (over 11K). We note that these volunteers were candidates and only a subset of them were actually given reviewing assignments.
Using a Microsoft Reviewer/Author form, we collected a variety of information on potential reviewers like ACL anthology page, website, self-declared reviewer experience, 1st & 2nd track preferences, etc. to (1) provide information sheets on reviewers to SACs and ACs, as a tool when manually correcting the automatic reviewer-paper assignments,
(2) to manually balance the reviewer pools among tracks, and (3) to filter the list of reviewers based on whether the reviewer (i) had superiority PhD-student or higher, (ii) had reviewed for at least 4 previous *ACL conference, and (iii) had a minimum number of ACL anthology publications.
To counterbalance (3ii), we provided SACs with a list of novice reviewers and introduced our a Reviewer Mentoring Program (see below).

'''''New Reviewer Mentoring Program'''''

Given the rapid growth of NLP in terms of number of papers and new students, it is very important for our community to mentor and train our new reviewers. ACL2020 has launched a pilot program which calls for each AC to mentor at least one novice reviewer. Ultimately, the goal is to provide long-needed mentoring to new reviewers. At the very least, this process will inform ACL on constructing a reviewer mentoring program that is more scalable in the future. For most tracks, each AC was paired with at least a mentee (often a Ph.D. student, or a junior researcher who has just graduated). The AC would work with the mentee, provide feedback and help the mentee to improve the quality of his/her reviews. Close to 300 junior researchers were selected to participate in this program. We will put together a detailed report on this program after the conference.

'''''Updated Review Form with New Rating Scale and Evaluation Item'''''

We have separate review forms for regular tracks and the theme track. Our review forms were built upon the form from EMNLP-IJCNLP2019 and ACL2019 with '''''two new extensions'''''.
(1) We have removed the rating 3 (ambivalent) from the overall recommendation as we would like reviewers to take a stand on whether the paper is above the borderline (3.5) or below the borderline (2.5). The reason for this change is that ambivalent cases often take a long time to discuss. By taking a stand, reviewers would provide more informative feedback for AC/SAC to make a recommendation. ICLR 2020 has adopted similar rating strategies (although with a different scale).
(2) As ethical concerns and societal impacts are an important consideration for NLP research, we have explicitly ask reviewers to evaluate ethical implications of each submission. On the review form, we ask reviewers whether there are any ethical concerns about a submission that the area chairs and program chairs should be aware of. We also encourage reviewers to flag such concerns to the authors.

'''Other Efforts'''

'''''Initial submission reviews and desk rejects'''''

We have received a record number of 3,429 submissions (approximately a 15% increase over ACL2019). All papers were carefully inspected to check for violations of ACL policies (ranging from formatting to anonymization to use of supplementary material). Similar to ACL2019, we used assistants to speed up an otherwise long process. All issues identified by assistants were cross-examined by two PCs. We noticed that many papers did not strictly follow the ACL style sheet. We have thus been lenient in terms of margin, line numbers, fonts, etc formatting issues. As a result 29 submissions were desk rejected for violating ACL policies on anonymity, page length, double blind review, etc.

'''''Manual adjustment of submission tracks'''''

Many papers were not submitted to the right track where they could receive reviews from most relevant reviewers. SACs were instructed to flag the papers that should be moved to a different track. We went through every single suggestion and moved papers around if warranted. This turned out to be a major effort. In total, 500-600 papers were moved across tracks as a result.

'''''Manual adjustment of AC and reviewer assignment'''''

As the automatic reviewer assignment is not perfect, SACs did much manual work adjusting AC assignments as well as reviewer assignments. This effort varied among tracks. Given the current set up in Softconf, ACs’ roles are pretty limited. ACs are essentially meta-reviewers who do not have access to the reviewer accounts, and therefore, cannot add reviewers, nor make reviewer assignments, nor contact reviewers directly. We have given this feedback to softconf and hopefully the system will be updated to support extended AC roles for future conferences.

'''''Communication'''''

Because of several new initiatives implemented this year, extensive efforts have been made to communicate these changes to SACs, ACs, reviewers, as well as authors. Besides direct emails, we have used blog postings as well as twitters as our additional communication channels assisted by the publicity chair and the web chairs.

'''Submission Status'''

We have received 3,429 papers (2244 long and 1185 short) have been submitted. Here is the distribution of long, short and total papers per track.
<ul>
<li> Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics: 49 39 88
<li> Computational Social Science and Social Media: 73 38 111
<li> Dialogue and Interactive Systems: 204 71 275
<li> Discourse and Pragmatics: 36 20 56
<li> Ethics and NLP: 30 22 52
<li> Generation: 142 71 213
<li> Information Extraction: 159 83 242
<li> Information Retrieval and Text Mining: 55 41 96
<li> Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP: 110 54 164
<li> Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond: 69 24 93
<li> Machine Learning for NLP: 186 109 295
<li> Machine Translation: 158 104 262
<li> NLP Applications: 169 99 268
<li> Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation: 38 15 53
<li> Question Answering: 109 63 172
<li> Resources and Evaluation: 88 48 136
<li> Semantics: Lexical: 57 37 94
<li> Semantics: Sentence Level: 66 29 95
<li> Semantics: Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics: 81 31 112
<li> Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining: 112 66 178
<li> Speech and Multimodality: 38 27 65
<li> Summarization: 90 37 127
<li> Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing: 47 28 75
<li> Theme: 67 26 93
<li> Theory and Formalism in NLP (Linguistic and Mathematical): 11 3 14
</ul>

'''Summary of Timelines'''

<ul>
<li>Oct 15 - Nov 30: SACs invite ACs and reviewers
<li>Nov 25: Reviewer profiles completed
<li>Dec 09: ACL Paper Submission Deadline (long and short papers)
<li>Dec 10 - Jan 14: initial submission reviews and desk rejects; automatic reviewer assignment and COI detection; manual adjustment of assignment;
<li>Jan 17 - Feb 07: Review Period
<li>Feb 08 - Feb 11: ACs chase late reviews
<li>Feb 12 - Feb 17: Author Response
<li>Feb 18 - Feb 25: Reviewer Discussion Period (ACs lead discussion), ACs provide feedback to mentees.
<li>Feb 25 - Mar 03: ACs produce meta-reviews
<li>Mar 03 - Mar 10: SACs rank papers based on meta-reviews and make recommendations to PC chairs
<li>Mar 11 - Apr 02: PC chairs make decisions (they may consult SACs during this time); SACs and ACs recommend best reviewers
<li>Apr 03 - Accept / Reject Notifications
<li>Apr 24: Camera ready
</ul>

'''List of SAC/ACs and recruitment'''

Following ACL2019, we have adopted a hierarchical structure where each area is chaired by one or two senior ACs, who are supported by a group of area chairs. We have a total of 40 Senior Area Chairs and 299 Area Chairs.
'''''Recruitment''''': We individually created preference lists for SACs, discussed these and made decisions. ACs were selected by SACs.

Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics
<ul>
<li>SACs: Emily Prud’hommeaux
<li>ACs: Cassandra L. Jacobs, Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Masoud Rouhizadeh, Serguei Pakhomov, Yevgeni Berzak
</ul>

Computational Social Science and Social Media
<ul>
<li>SACs: Tim Baldwin, Nikolaos Aletras
<li>ACs: A. Seza Dögruöz, Afshin Rahimi, Alice Oh, Brendan O'Connor, Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro, David Bamman, David Jurgens, David Mimno, Diana Inkpen, Diyi Yang, Eiji Aramaki, Jacob Eisenstein, Jonathan K. Kummerfeld, Kalina Bontcheva
</ul>

Dialogue and Interactive Systems
<ul>
<li>SACs: Jason Williams, Mari Ostendorf
<li>ACs: Alborz Geramifard, Amanda Stent, Asli Celikyilmaz, Casey Kennington, David Traum, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Gabriel Skantze, Helen Hastie, Heriberto Cuayahuitl, Kai Yu, Kallirroi Georgila, Luciana Benotti, Luis Fernando D'Haro, Nina Dethlefs, Ryuichiro Higashinaka, Stefan Ultes, Sungjin Lee, Tsung-Hsien Wen, Y-Lan Boureau, Yun-Nung Chen, Zhou Yu
</ul>

Discourse and Pragmatics
<ul>
<li>SACs: Annie Louis (taking over for Diane Litman)
<li>ACs: Chloé Braud, Junyi Jessy Li, Manfred Stede, Shafiq Joty, Sujian Li, Yangfeng Ji
</ul>

Ethics and NLP
<ul>
<li>SACs: Dirk Hovy
<li>ACs: Alan W Black, Emily M. Bender, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Yulia Tsvetkov
</ul>

Generation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Wei Xu, Alexander Rush
<li>ACs: John Wieting, Laura Perez-Beltrachini, Lu Wang, Miltiadis Allamanis, Mohit Iyyer, Nanyun Peng, Sam Wiseman, Shashi Narayan, Sudha Rao, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Xiaojun Wan, Xipeng Qiu
</ul>

Information Extraction
<ul>
<li>SACs: Doug Downey, Hoifun Poon
<li>ACs: Alan Ritter, Chandra Bhagavatula, Gerard de Melo, Kai-Wei Chang, Marius Pasca, Mo Yu, Radu Florian, Ruihong Huang, Sameer Singh, Satoshi Sekine, Snigdha Chaturvedi, Sumithra Velupillai, Timothy Miller, Vivek Srikumar, William Yang Wang, Yunyao Li
</ul>

Information Retrieval and Text Mining
<ul>
<li>SACs: Chin-Yew Lin, Nazli Goharian
<li>ACs: Andrew Yates, Arman Cohan, Bing Qin, Craig Macdonald, Danai Koutra, Elad Yom-Tov, Franco Maria Nardini, Kalliopi Zervanou, Luca Soldaini, Nicola Tonellotto, Pu-Jen Cheng, Seung-won Hwang, Yangqiu Song, Yansong Feng
</ul>

Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP
<ul>
<li>SACs: Yoav Goldberg
<li>ACs: Adina Williams, Afra Alishahi, Douwe Kiela, Grzegorz Chrupała, Marco Baroni, Yonatan Belinkov, Zachary C. Lipton
</ul>

Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond
<ul>
<li>SACs: Yoav Artzi
<li>ACs: Angeliki Lazaridou, Dan Goldwasser, Jason Baldridge, Jesse Thomason, Lisa Anne Hendricks, Parisa Kordjamshidi, Raffaella Bernardi, Vicente Ordonez, Yonatan Bisk
</ul>

Machine Learning for NLP
<ul>
<li>SACs: Andre Martins, Isabelle Augenstein
<li>ACs: Ankur Parikh, Anna Rumshisky, Bruno Martins, Caio Corro, Dani Yogatama, Daniel Beck, Dipanjan Das, Edouard Grave, Emma Strubell, Gholamreza Haffari, Ivan Titov, Joseph Le Roux, Jun Suzuki, Kevin Gimpel, Michael Auli, Ming-Wei Chang, Shay B. Cohen, Vlad Niculae, Waleed Ammar, Wilker Aziz, Yejin Choi, Zita Marinho, Zornitsa Kozareva
</ul>

Machine Translation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Marine Carpuat, Alexandra Birch
<li>ACs: Ann Clifton, Antonio Toral, Atsushi Fujita, Boxing Chen, Carolina Scarton, Chi-kiu Lo, Christian Hardmeier, Deyi Xiong, Franois Yvon, George Foster, Jiajun Zhang, Jrg Tiedemann, Maja Popovič, Marcello Federico, Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt, Marco Turchi, Marta R. Costa-jussà, Matt Post, Nadir Durrani, Qun Liu, Rico Sennrich, Taro Watanabe, Yuki Arase, Yvette Graham
</ul>

Multidisciplinary and Area Chair COI
<ul>
<li>SACs: Michael Strube
<li>ACs: Anders Søgaard, David Schlangen, Katrin Erk, Kentaro Inui, Kevin Duh, Massimo Poesio, Mausam, Pascal Denis
</ul>

NLP Applications
<ul>
<li>SACs: Preslav Nakov, Karin Verspoor
<li>ACs: Alexander Fraser, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Aoife Cahill, Daniel Cer, Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha, Giovanni Da San Martino, Hassan Sajjad, Kevin Cohen, Marcos Zampieri, Michel Galley, Min Zhang, Pierre Zweigenbaum, Razvan Bunescu, Sara Rosenthal, Tristan Naumann, Vincent Ng, Wei Gao, Wei Lu
</ul>

Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Kemal Oflazer
<li>ACs: Christo Kirov, David R. Mortensen, Kareem Darwish, Reut Tsarfaty, Yue Zhang, Özlem Çetinoğlu
</ul>

Question Answering
<ul>
<li>SACs: Eugene Agichtein, Alessandro Moschitti
<li>ACs: Avi Sil, Dina Demner-Fushman, Evangelos Kanoulas, Gerhard Weikum, Idan Szpektor, Jimmy Lin, Oleg Rokhlenko, Sanda Harabagiu, Wen-tau Yih, William Cohen
</ul>

Resources and Evaluation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Nathan Schneider, Barbara Plank
<li>ACs: Allyson Ettinger, Annemarie Friedrich, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Arianna Bisazza, Claire Bonial, Daniel Zeman, Emmanuele Chersoni, Ines Rehbein, Lonneke van der Plas, Maria Liakata, Sara Tonelli, Sarvnaz Karimi, Tim Van de Cruys, Vered Shwartz, Walid Magdy, Çağri Çöltekin
</ul>

Semantics: Lexical
<ul>
<li>SACs: Ekaterina Shutova, Aline Villavicencio
<li>ACs: Alessandro Lenci, Anna Feldman, Aurélie Herbelot, Beata Beigman Klebanov, Carlos Ramisch, Chris Biemann, Enrico Santus, Fabio Massimo Zanzotto, Helen Yannakoudakis, Ivan Vulič, Jose Camacho-Collados, Marianna Apidianaki, Paul Cook, Saif Mohammad
</ul>

Semantics: Sentence Level
<ul>
<li>SACs: Mohit Bansal
<li>ACs: Andreas Vlachos, Christopher Potts, Danqi Chen, Eunsol Choi, He He, Jonathan Berant, Kevin Small, Marek Rei, Sebastian Ruder, Siva Reddy, Swabha Swayamdipta, Thomas Wolf, Veselin Stoyanov
</ul>

Semantics: Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics
<ul>
<li>SACs: Sam Bowman
<li>ACs: Anette Frank, Eduardo Blanco, Edward Grefenstette, Jacob Andreas, Jonathan May, Kenton Lee, Lasha Abzianidze, Luheng He, Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Rachel Rudinger, Roy Schwartz, Valeria de Paiva
</ul>

Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
<ul>
<li>SACs: Smaranda Muresan, Swapna Somasundaran
<li>ACs: Bing Liu, Claire Cardie, Elena Musi, Iryna Gurevych, Julian Brooke, Lun-Wei Ku, Marie-Francine Moens, Minlie Huang, Paolo Rosso, Roman Klinger, Serena Villata, Soujanya Poria, Thamar Solorio, Yulan He
</ul>

Speech and Multimodality
<ul>
<li>SACs: Eric Fosler-Lussier
<li>ACs: Bhuvana Ramabhadran, Florian Metze, Gerasimos Potamianos, Hamid Palangi, Martha Larson
</ul>

Summarization
<ul>
<li>SACs: Fei Liu
<li>ACs: Caiming Xiong, Giuseppe Carenini, Katja Markert, Manabu Okumura, Michael Elhadad, Ramesh Nallapati, Sebastian Gehrmann, Wenjie Li, Xiaodan Zhu, Yang Gao
</ul>

Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing
<ul>
<li>SACs: David Chiang
<li>ACs: Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez, Emily Pitler, Liang Huang, Miguel Ballesteros, Miryam de Lhoneux, Slav Petrov, Stephan Oepen, Weiwei Sun
</ul>

THEME
<ul>
<li>SACs: Marilyn Walker (taking over for Ellen Riloff)
<li>ACs: Donia Scott, Johan Bos, Luke Zettlemoyer, Philipp Koehn, Raymond Mooney
</ul>

Theory and Formalism in NLP (Linguistic and Mathematical)
<ul>
<li>SACs: Daniel Gildea
<li>ACs: Alexander Koller, Laura Kallmeyer, Marco Kuhlmann
</ul>

== 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.

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

'''Details of Activities''':

The web site for ACL 2020 Demonstrations Track is: https://acl2020.org/calls/demos/[https://acl2020.org/calls/demos/], which includes details about submissions, deadlines, reviewing policy and important dates.

Compared to the last year, we have made a few changes to the track. Specifically, in the submission details, we encouraged the authors to include visual aids (e.g., screenshots, snapshots, or diagrams) in the paper. This year the submissions are single blind, in which the authors are allowed to disclose their names on their submitted manuscript. We kept the style files same as last year.

The deadline for submissions was January 31, 2020.

This year we have record number of demonstration paper submissions, over 130 submissions. After a few desk rejects, a total of 122 papers are reviewed. The technical Program Committee is in place. To accommodate minimum three reviewers for each paper, we have reached out close to 300 reviewers and 213 have accepted. We managed to assign 3 reviewers to all submitted papers, with no more than 3 papers per reviewer. Currently we have 152 technical program committee members. The program committee is scheduled to submit their reviews by March 10, 2020.

'''Important Dates'''

Paper submission deadline: Friday, January 31st, 2020

Notification of acceptance: Friday, April 3rd, 2020

Camera-ready submission: Friday, April 24th, 2020

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

Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Rochester Institute of Technology

Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Google

1. We created five different sub-committees (listed below) to address ACL D&I related activities. In the interest of transparency and institutional memory, we prepared a separate memorandum of understanding (MoU) for each sub-committee, which articulates a mission statement, five minimum tasks the sub-committee is responsible for (with the fifth task being a blog post), useful links, and detailed guidelines per task. In these guidelines, each task entry contains:
* Task title
* Interfaces (recommendations for whom to communicate with to address the task)
* Sub tasks (an enumerated list of sub task descriptions)
* Timeline (when to begin)
In designing the tasks, we expanded on NAACL 2019 D&I activities and lessons learned. We will hand over the MoUs for future conferences; we hope that this resource will facilitate future D&I committees’ planning activities.

2. For communication and teamwork, we set up:
* An ACL 2020 D&I slack channel, facilitating keeping records of interactions.
* A Google folder with designated subfolders for D&I subcommittees
* An ACL 2020 D&I chairs google groups email handle: <acl2020-diversity-inclusion-chairs@googlegroups.com>

3. We recruited 13 volunteers across the 5 subcommittees, constituting the ACL 2020 D&I Team, recognized on the conference website: https://acl2020.org/committees/diversity-inclusion.

'''Academic Inclusion Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure the venue is welcoming to researchers from diverse subdisciplines, conducive to building academic networks across disciplines and career stages.''
* Aakanksha Naik, Carnegie Mellon University
* Emily Prud’hommeaux, Boston College
* Alla Rozovskaya, Queens College (City University of New York)

'''Accessibility Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure the venue is accessible for researchers with any disability, including provision of requested access services.''
* Sushant Kafle, Google/Rochester Institute of Technology
* Masoud Rouhizadeh, Johns Hopkins University
* Naomi Saphra, University of Edinburgh

'''Childcare Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure adequate childcare provisions to help researchers who are caregivers of children to attend the conference.''
* Khyathi Chandu, Carnegie Mellon University
* Stephen Mayhew, Duolingo

'''Financial Access Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure provision of financial access to researchers from underrepresented demographics and geographies to attend the conference.''
* Allyson Ettinger, University of Chicago
* Ryan Georgi, KPMG
* Tirthankar Ghosal, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Patna

'''Socio-cultural Inclusion Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure a welcoming and inclusive environment for researchers from various socio-cultural subgroups, accommodate for diverse needs for food and drinks at the conference, as well as support initiatives for groups to socialize and network.''
* Shruti Palaskar, Carnegie Mellon University
* Maarten Sap, University of Washington

Kick-off meetings with all subcommittees took place in December before the winter holidays. Correspondence is mostly taking place on slack, alternatively by email.

4. A message distributed on ACL2020 social media on September 17 2019 invited community members to share comments and suggestions with the D&I chairs. We received some important feedback.

5. A blog post entitled The ACL 2020 Diversity and Inclusion Committee appeared on the ACL 2020 website and subsequently social media on February 4 2020. We received some important feedback as well as inquiries about D&I accommodations.

6. The sponsorship booklet has been updated for D&I sponsorships. In consultation with Priscilla we added a third sponsor-ship level category. The resulting levels are Champion, Ally, and Contributor. The list of benefits is now also up-to-date. We alerted that multipacks may result in lower cost than single conference sponsorship.

7. Grammarly has provided a generous in-kind donation in the form of writing support software licenses. Codes have been distributed to SRW and WiNLP for distribution among their authors, together with an outreach email template (adjusted from NAACL 2019). Joel Tetreault and Tirthankar Goshal (Financial Access subcommittee) were instrumental in this process. In this context, we also arrived at how to recognize in-kind sponsors by discussion and consensus.

8. We coordinated a room request across subcommittees, submitted to Priscilla as a spreadsheet, detailing space and furniture requirements for subcommittees’ activities.

9. We have submitted a request for a set of updates to D&I items in the registration form and are at work on updates to the D&I special request form.

10. We recommended offering onsite childcare at ACL 2020. We illustrated with ten examples that provision of childcare is a standard feature at comparable conference venues (e.g., AAAI 2020, NeurIPS 2019, Interspeech 2019, CHI 2019). Childcare service is missing at ACL conferences and may especially impact junior researchers. Data shared by two comparable AI conferences indicate that onsite childcare usage can increase substantially (roughly quadrupled) from one year to another, such that a multiyear commitment should be made for establishing a meaningful utility assessment of onsite childcare. Data on ACL 2019 usage was retrieved by Priscilla (around 14 children on average during main conference; 9 children on average during workshop/tutorial days, with a total of 357.8 hours attended by children), while we obtained proposals from 3 providers. Based on reviewing these proposals, we recommend KiddieCorp as the first-choice vendor for this service.

11. With help from the General Chair, we initiated a conversation about the need for a D&I budget. Subsequently, we prepared a detailed budget request, split into costs and back-stop costs (items that apply when there is a request), which was passed on to the ACL Exec. Sushant Kafle (Accessibility subcommittee) was instrumental in the process of obtaining proposals by vendors for access services. Our requested budget is detailed below, which includes the onsite childcare cost estimates as well.

In conclusion, the D&I activities are progressing and awaiting a decision on budget. In addition, several of the resources we have prepared or enhanced may facilitate future D&I committees’ planning activities, for instance the MOUs, the coordinated room request, the revised sponsorship booklet section, the detailed budget request summary, the process for distributing the writing support software in-kind donation, and the onsite childcare proposal summary.

== 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

We are hosting the conference website on GitHub using the easily adaptable website architecture built by Nitin Madnani for NAACL 2019: https://github.com/naacl-org/naacl-hlt-2019. 
We are using the Whova event app for hosting the conference app this year similar to NAACL 2019.

== Business Office ==

Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL

2020Q1 Reports: ACL 2020

2020-02-26T09:57:22Z

Vinodkpg: /* Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs */

== 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).

On Mar 11, we will have a site visit at the hotel in Seattle which besides Priscilla will include the General Chair, and representatives from the Program Chairs, the D&I chairs, and the AV chairs. We will also use that occasion to have a committee mtg including those folks plus the relatively large number of ACL2020 organizing committee members who are local to Seattle.

[some highlights from the below chair summaries to be added here]

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

Natalie Schluter, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Joel Tetreault, Dataminr, USA

---

'''New Initiatives This Year'''

'''''Earlier Submission Deadline and Notification'''''

To accommodate a more realistic workflow, given (1) the rapid growth in the number of submissions to ACL conferences, (2) together with avoiding the period for authors from Dec. 15-Jan. 15 while giving us more time to implement and test new implementations, we moved the submission deadline back to December 9. Specifically, previous PCs advised us to do this to set a precedent for future PCs, in accommodating a more realistic timeline. The timeline is still packed, but workable. We also plan notifications to be out earlier than normal, to provide an extra 1-2 weeks for visa applicants, as an inclusion measure.

'''''Four New Tracks'''''

ACL2020 introduced four new tracks:(1) Ethics and NLP. Ethical issues have become increasingly important as more advanced tools become available for NLP research and development. We dedicated a new track and explicitly invite contributions that study ethical issues and impact regarding NLP research and applications. (2) Interpretation and Analysis of Models for NLP. As the community strives for pushing performance boundaries, understanding behaviors of STOA models becomes critical. (3) Theory and Formalism. This track is designed to encourage submissions targeted to theoretical underpinning of NLP models which had little/small presence in the past ACL conferences. (4) Theme: Taking Stock of Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going. The last few years have witnessed an unprecedented growth in NLP since the field began over sixty years ago. This track is designed to invite submissions that can provide insight for the community to assess how much we have accomplished today with respect to the past and where the field should be heading to. The theme track is different from other tracks. We therefore made some modifications in the review form to reflect that.

'''''Extended Automatic COI Detection/Automatic Reviewer-Paper Assignment'''''

We carried out offline COI detection and automatic paper assignment for the first time for an *ACL conference. The code used were ACL2020-customised implementations of Amanda Stent’s COI detection software and Graham Neubig’s automatic reviewer-paper assignment software.

'''''Mandatory Reviewer Duty and Recruitment'''''

To meet the reviewer demands of a growing conference, we made reviewer volunteering mandatory for submission authors. This resulted in a record number of volunteer candidate reviewers (over 11K). We note that these volunteers were candidates and only a subset of them were actually given reviewing assignments.
Using a Microsoft Reviewer/Author form, we collected a variety of information on potential reviewers like ACL anthology page, website, self-declared reviewer experience, 1st & 2nd track preferences, etc. to (1) provide information sheets on reviewers to SACs and ACs, as a tool when manually correcting the automatic reviewer-paper assignments,
(2) to manually balance the reviewer pools among tracks, and (3) to filter the list of reviewers based on whether the reviewer (i) had superiority PhD-student or higher, (ii) had reviewed for at least 4 previous *ACL conference, and (iii) had a minimum number of ACL anthology publications.
To counterbalance (3ii), we provided SACs with a list of novice reviewers and introduced our a Reviewer Mentoring Program (see below).

'''''New Reviewer Mentoring Program'''''

Given the rapid growth of NLP in terms of number of papers and new students, it is very important for our community to mentor and train our new reviewers. ACL2020 has launched a pilot program which calls for each AC to mentor at least one novice reviewer. Ultimately, the goal is to provide long-needed mentoring to new reviewers. At the very least, this process will inform ACL on constructing a reviewer mentoring program that is more scalable in the future. For most tracks, each AC was paired with at least a mentee (often a Ph.D. student, or a junior researcher who has just graduated). The AC would work with the mentee, provide feedback and help the mentee to improve the quality of his/her reviews. Close to 300 junior researchers were selected to participate in this program. We will put together a detailed report on this program after the conference.

'''''Updated Review Form with New Rating Scale and Evaluation Item'''''

We have separate review forms for regular tracks and the theme track. Our review forms were built upon the form from EMNLP-IJCNLP2019 and ACL2019 with '''''two new extensions'''''.
(1) We have removed the rating 3 (ambivalent) from the overall recommendation as we would like reviewers to take a stand on whether the paper is above the borderline (3.5) or below the borderline (2.5). The reason for this change is that ambivalent cases often take a long time to discuss. By taking a stand, reviewers would provide more informative feedback for AC/SAC to make a recommendation. ICLR 2020 has adopted similar rating strategies (although with a different scale).
(2) As ethical concerns and societal impacts are an important consideration for NLP research, we have explicitly ask reviewers to evaluate ethical implications of each submission. On the review form, we ask reviewers whether there are any ethical concerns about a submission that the area chairs and program chairs should be aware of. We also encourage reviewers to flag such concerns to the authors.

'''Other Efforts'''

'''''Initial submission reviews and desk rejects'''''

We have received a record number of 3,429 submissions (approximately a 15% increase over ACL2019). All papers were carefully inspected to check for violations of ACL policies (ranging from formatting to anonymization to use of supplementary material). Similar to ACL2019, we used assistants to speed up an otherwise long process. All issues identified by assistants were cross-examined by two PCs. We noticed that many papers did not strictly follow the ACL style sheet. We have thus been lenient in terms of margin, line numbers, fonts, etc formatting issues. As a result 29 submissions were desk rejected for violating ACL policies on anonymity, page length, double blind review, etc.

'''''Manual adjustment of submission tracks'''''

Many papers were not submitted to the right track where they could receive reviews from most relevant reviewers. SACs were instructed to flag the papers that should be moved to a different track. We went through every single suggestion and moved papers around if warranted. This turned out to be a major effort. In total, 500-600 papers were moved across tracks as a result.

'''''Manual adjustment of AC and reviewer assignment'''''

As the automatic reviewer assignment is not perfect, SACs did much manual work adjusting AC assignments as well as reviewer assignments. This effort varied among tracks. Given the current set up in Softconf, ACs’ roles are pretty limited. ACs are essentially meta-reviewers who do not have access to the reviewer accounts, and therefore, cannot add reviewers, nor make reviewer assignments, nor contact reviewers directly. We have given this feedback to softconf and hopefully the system will be updated to support extended AC roles for future conferences.

'''''Communication'''''

Because of several new initiatives implemented this year, extensive efforts have been made to communicate these changes to SACs, ACs, reviewers, as well as authors. Besides direct emails, we have used blog postings as well as twitters as our additional communication channels assisted by the publicity chair and the web chairs.

'''Submission Status'''

We have received 3,429 papers (2244 long and 1185 short) have been submitted. Here is the distribution of long, short and total papers per track.
<ul>
<li> Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics: 49 39 88
<li> Computational Social Science and Social Media: 73 38 111
<li> Dialogue and Interactive Systems: 204 71 275
<li> Discourse and Pragmatics: 36 20 56
<li> Ethics and NLP: 30 22 52
<li> Generation: 142 71 213
<li> Information Extraction: 159 83 242
<li> Information Retrieval and Text Mining: 55 41 96
<li> Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP: 110 54 164
<li> Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond: 69 24 93
<li> Machine Learning for NLP: 186 109 295
<li> Machine Translation: 158 104 262
<li> NLP Applications: 169 99 268
<li> Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation: 38 15 53
<li> Question Answering: 109 63 172
<li> Resources and Evaluation: 88 48 136
<li> Semantics: Lexical: 57 37 94
<li> Semantics: Sentence Level: 66 29 95
<li> Semantics: Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics: 81 31 112
<li> Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining: 112 66 178
<li> Speech and Multimodality: 38 27 65
<li> Summarization: 90 37 127
<li> Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing: 47 28 75
<li> Theme: 67 26 93
<li> Theory and Formalism in NLP (Linguistic and Mathematical): 11 3 14
</ul>

'''Summary of Timelines'''

<ul>
<li>Oct 15 - Nov 30: SACs invite ACs and reviewers
<li>Nov 25: Reviewer profiles completed
<li>Dec 09: ACL Paper Submission Deadline (long and short papers)
<li>Dec 10 - Jan 14: initial submission reviews and desk rejects; automatic reviewer assignment and COI detection; manual adjustment of assignment;
<li>Jan 17 - Feb 07: Review Period
<li>Feb 08 - Feb 11: ACs chase late reviews
<li>Feb 12 - Feb 17: Author Response
<li>Feb 18 - Feb 25: Reviewer Discussion Period (ACs lead discussion), ACs provide feedback to mentees.
<li>Feb 25 - Mar 03: ACs produce meta-reviews
<li>Mar 03 - Mar 10: SACs rank papers based on meta-reviews and make recommendations to PC chairs
<li>Mar 11 - Apr 02: PC chairs make decisions (they may consult SACs during this time); SACs and ACs recommend best reviewers
<li>Apr 03 - Accept / Reject Notifications
<li>Apr 24: Camera ready
</ul>

'''List of SAC/ACs and recruitment'''

Following ACL2019, we have adopted a hierarchical structure where each area is chaired by one or two senior ACs, who are supported by a group of area chairs. We have a total of 40 Senior Area Chairs and 299 Area Chairs.
'''''Recruitment''''': We individually created preference lists for SACs, discussed these and made decisions. ACs were selected by SACs.

Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics
<ul>
<li>SACs: Emily Prud’hommeaux
<li>ACs: Cassandra L. Jacobs, Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Masoud Rouhizadeh, Serguei Pakhomov, Yevgeni Berzak
</ul>

Computational Social Science and Social Media
<ul>
<li>SACs: Tim Baldwin, Nikolaos Aletras
<li>ACs: A. Seza Dögruöz, Afshin Rahimi, Alice Oh, Brendan O'Connor, Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro, David Bamman, David Jurgens, David Mimno, Diana Inkpen, Diyi Yang, Eiji Aramaki, Jacob Eisenstein, Jonathan K. Kummerfeld, Kalina Bontcheva
</ul>

Dialogue and Interactive Systems
<ul>
<li>SACs: Jason Williams, Mari Ostendorf
<li>ACs: Alborz Geramifard, Amanda Stent, Asli Celikyilmaz, Casey Kennington, David Traum, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Gabriel Skantze, Helen Hastie, Heriberto Cuayahuitl, Kai Yu, Kallirroi Georgila, Luciana Benotti, Luis Fernando D'Haro, Nina Dethlefs, Ryuichiro Higashinaka, Stefan Ultes, Sungjin Lee, Tsung-Hsien Wen, Y-Lan Boureau, Yun-Nung Chen, Zhou Yu
</ul>

Discourse and Pragmatics
<ul>
<li>SACs: Annie Louis (taking over for Diane Litman)
<li>ACs: Chloé Braud, Junyi Jessy Li, Manfred Stede, Shafiq Joty, Sujian Li, Yangfeng Ji
</ul>

Ethics and NLP
<ul>
<li>SACs: Dirk Hovy
<li>ACs: Alan W Black, Emily M. Bender, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Yulia Tsvetkov
</ul>

Generation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Wei Xu, Alexander Rush
<li>ACs: John Wieting, Laura Perez-Beltrachini, Lu Wang, Miltiadis Allamanis, Mohit Iyyer, Nanyun Peng, Sam Wiseman, Shashi Narayan, Sudha Rao, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Xiaojun Wan, Xipeng Qiu
</ul>

Information Extraction
<ul>
<li>SACs: Doug Downey, Hoifun Poon
<li>ACs: Alan Ritter, Chandra Bhagavatula, Gerard de Melo, Kai-Wei Chang, Marius Pasca, Mo Yu, Radu Florian, Ruihong Huang, Sameer Singh, Satoshi Sekine, Snigdha Chaturvedi, Sumithra Velupillai, Timothy Miller, Vivek Srikumar, William Yang Wang, Yunyao Li
</ul>

Information Retrieval and Text Mining
<ul>
<li>SACs: Chin-Yew Lin, Nazli Goharian
<li>ACs: Andrew Yates, Arman Cohan, Bing Qin, Craig Macdonald, Danai Koutra, Elad Yom-Tov, Franco Maria Nardini, Kalliopi Zervanou, Luca Soldaini, Nicola Tonellotto, Pu-Jen Cheng, Seung-won Hwang, Yangqiu Song, Yansong Feng
</ul>

Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP
<ul>
<li>SACs: Yoav Goldberg
<li>ACs: Adina Williams, Afra Alishahi, Douwe Kiela, Grzegorz Chrupała, Marco Baroni, Yonatan Belinkov, Zachary C. Lipton
</ul>

Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond
<ul>
<li>SACs: Yoav Artzi
<li>ACs: Angeliki Lazaridou, Dan Goldwasser, Jason Baldridge, Jesse Thomason, Lisa Anne Hendricks, Parisa Kordjamshidi, Raffaella Bernardi, Vicente Ordonez, Yonatan Bisk
</ul>

Machine Learning for NLP
<ul>
<li>SACs: Andre Martins, Isabelle Augenstein
<li>ACs: Ankur Parikh, Anna Rumshisky, Bruno Martins, Caio Corro, Dani Yogatama, Daniel Beck, Dipanjan Das, Edouard Grave, Emma Strubell, Gholamreza Haffari, Ivan Titov, Joseph Le Roux, Jun Suzuki, Kevin Gimpel, Michael Auli, Ming-Wei Chang, Shay B. Cohen, Vlad Niculae, Waleed Ammar, Wilker Aziz, Yejin Choi, Zita Marinho, Zornitsa Kozareva
</ul>

Machine Translation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Marine Carpuat, Alexandra Birch
<li>ACs: Ann Clifton, Antonio Toral, Atsushi Fujita, Boxing Chen, Carolina Scarton, Chi-kiu Lo, Christian Hardmeier, Deyi Xiong, Franois Yvon, George Foster, Jiajun Zhang, Jrg Tiedemann, Maja Popovič, Marcello Federico, Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt, Marco Turchi, Marta R. Costa-jussà, Matt Post, Nadir Durrani, Qun Liu, Rico Sennrich, Taro Watanabe, Yuki Arase, Yvette Graham
</ul>

Multidisciplinary and Area Chair COI
<ul>
<li>SACs: Michael Strube
<li>ACs: Anders Søgaard, David Schlangen, Katrin Erk, Kentaro Inui, Kevin Duh, Massimo Poesio, Mausam, Pascal Denis
</ul>

NLP Applications
<ul>
<li>SACs: Preslav Nakov, Karin Verspoor
<li>ACs: Alexander Fraser, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Aoife Cahill, Daniel Cer, Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha, Giovanni Da San Martino, Hassan Sajjad, Kevin Cohen, Marcos Zampieri, Michel Galley, Min Zhang, Pierre Zweigenbaum, Razvan Bunescu, Sara Rosenthal, Tristan Naumann, Vincent Ng, Wei Gao, Wei Lu
</ul>

Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Kemal Oflazer
<li>ACs: Christo Kirov, David R. Mortensen, Kareem Darwish, Reut Tsarfaty, Yue Zhang, Özlem Çetinoğlu
</ul>

Question Answering
<ul>
<li>SACs: Eugene Agichtein, Alessandro Moschitti
<li>ACs: Avi Sil, Dina Demner-Fushman, Evangelos Kanoulas, Gerhard Weikum, Idan Szpektor, Jimmy Lin, Oleg Rokhlenko, Sanda Harabagiu, Wen-tau Yih, William Cohen
</ul>

Resources and Evaluation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Nathan Schneider, Barbara Plank
<li>ACs: Allyson Ettinger, Annemarie Friedrich, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Arianna Bisazza, Claire Bonial, Daniel Zeman, Emmanuele Chersoni, Ines Rehbein, Lonneke van der Plas, Maria Liakata, Sara Tonelli, Sarvnaz Karimi, Tim Van de Cruys, Vered Shwartz, Walid Magdy, Çağri Çöltekin
</ul>

Semantics: Lexical
<ul>
<li>SACs: Ekaterina Shutova, Aline Villavicencio
<li>ACs: Alessandro Lenci, Anna Feldman, Aurélie Herbelot, Beata Beigman Klebanov, Carlos Ramisch, Chris Biemann, Enrico Santus, Fabio Massimo Zanzotto, Helen Yannakoudakis, Ivan Vulič, Jose Camacho-Collados, Marianna Apidianaki, Paul Cook, Saif Mohammad
</ul>

Semantics: Sentence Level
<ul>
<li>SACs: Mohit Bansal
<li>ACs: Andreas Vlachos, Christopher Potts, Danqi Chen, Eunsol Choi, He He, Jonathan Berant, Kevin Small, Marek Rei, Sebastian Ruder, Siva Reddy, Swabha Swayamdipta, Thomas Wolf, Veselin Stoyanov
</ul>

Semantics: Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics
<ul>
<li>SACs: Sam Bowman
<li>ACs: Anette Frank, Eduardo Blanco, Edward Grefenstette, Jacob Andreas, Jonathan May, Kenton Lee, Lasha Abzianidze, Luheng He, Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Rachel Rudinger, Roy Schwartz, Valeria de Paiva
</ul>

Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
<ul>
<li>SACs: Smaranda Muresan, Swapna Somasundaran
<li>ACs: Bing Liu, Claire Cardie, Elena Musi, Iryna Gurevych, Julian Brooke, Lun-Wei Ku, Marie-Francine Moens, Minlie Huang, Paolo Rosso, Roman Klinger, Serena Villata, Soujanya Poria, Thamar Solorio, Yulan He
</ul>

Speech and Multimodality
<ul>
<li>SACs: Eric Fosler-Lussier
<li>ACs: Bhuvana Ramabhadran, Florian Metze, Gerasimos Potamianos, Hamid Palangi, Martha Larson
</ul>

Summarization
<ul>
<li>SACs: Fei Liu
<li>ACs: Caiming Xiong, Giuseppe Carenini, Katja Markert, Manabu Okumura, Michael Elhadad, Ramesh Nallapati, Sebastian Gehrmann, Wenjie Li, Xiaodan Zhu, Yang Gao
</ul>

Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing
<ul>
<li>SACs: David Chiang
<li>ACs: Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez, Emily Pitler, Liang Huang, Miguel Ballesteros, Miryam de Lhoneux, Slav Petrov, Stephan Oepen, Weiwei Sun
</ul>

THEME
<ul>
<li>SACs: Marilyn Walker (taking over for Ellen Riloff)
<li>ACs: Donia Scott, Johan Bos, Luke Zettlemoyer, Philipp Koehn, Raymond Mooney
</ul>

Theory and Formalism in NLP (Linguistic and Mathematical)
<ul>
<li>SACs: Daniel Gildea
<li>ACs: Alexander Koller, Laura Kallmeyer, Marco Kuhlmann
</ul>

== 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.

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

'''Details of Activities''':

The web site for ACL 2020 Demonstrations Track is: https://acl2020.org/calls/demos/[https://acl2020.org/calls/demos/], which includes details about submissions, deadlines, reviewing policy and important dates.

Compared to the last year, we have made a few changes to the track. Specifically, in the submission details, we encouraged the authors to include visual aids (e.g., screenshots, snapshots, or diagrams) in the paper. This year the submissions are single blind, in which the authors are allowed to disclose their names on their submitted manuscript. We kept the style files same as last year.

The deadline for submissions was January 31, 2020.

This year we have record number of demonstration paper submissions, over 130 submissions. After a few desk rejects, a total of 122 papers are reviewed. The technical Program Committee is in place. To accommodate minimum three reviewers for each paper, we have reached out close to 300 reviewers and 213 have accepted. We managed to assign 3 reviewers to all submitted papers, with no more than 3 papers per reviewer. Currently we have 152 technical program committee members. The program committee is scheduled to submit their reviews by March 10, 2020.

'''Important Dates'''

Paper submission deadline: Friday, January 31st, 2020

Notification of acceptance: Friday, April 3rd, 2020

Camera-ready submission: Friday, April 24th, 2020

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

Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Rochester Institute of Technology

Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Google

1. We created five different sub-committees (listed below) to address ACL D&I related activities. In the interest of transparency and institutional memory, we prepared a separate memorandum of understanding (MoU) for each sub-committee, which articulates a mission statement, five minimum tasks the sub-committee is responsible for (with the fifth task being a blog post), useful links, and detailed guidelines per task. In these guidelines, each task entry contains:
* Task title
* Interfaces (recommendations for whom to communicate with to address the task)
* Sub tasks (an enumerated list of sub task descriptions)
* Timeline (when to begin)
In designing the tasks, we expanded on NAACL 2019 D&I activities and lessons learned. We will hand over the MoUs for future conferences; we hope that this resource will facilitate future D&I committees’ planning activities.

2. For communication and teamwork, we set up:
* An ACL 2020 D&I slack channel, facilitating keeping records of interactions.
* A Google folder with designated subfolders for D&I subcommittees
* An ACL 2020 D&I chairs google groups email handle: <acl2020-diversity-inclusion-chairs@googlegroups.com>

3. We recruited 13 volunteers across the 5 subcommittees, constituting the ACL 2020 D&I Team, recognized on the conference website: https://acl2020.org/committees/diversity-inclusion.

'''Academic Inclusion Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure the venue is welcoming to researchers from diverse subdisciplines, conducive to building academic networks across disciplines and career stages.''
* Aakanksha Naik, Carnegie Mellon University
* Emily Prud’hommeaux, Boston College
* Alla Rozovskaya, Queens College (City University of New York)

'''Accessibility Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure the venue is accessible for researchers with any disability, including provision of requested access services.''
* Sushant Kafle, Google/Rochester Institute of Technology
* Masoud Rouhizadeh, Johns Hopkins University
* Naomi Saphra, University of Edinburgh

'''Childcare Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure adequate childcare provisions to help researchers who are caregivers of children to attend the conference.''
* Khyathi Chandu, Carnegie Mellon University
* Stephen Mayhew, Duolingo

'''Financial Access Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure provision of financial access to researchers from underrepresented demographics and geographies to attend the conference.''
* Allyson Ettinger, University of Chicago
* Ryan Georgi, KPMG
* Tirthankar Ghosal, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Patna

'''Socio-cultural Inclusion Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure a welcoming and inclusive environment for researchers from various socio-cultural subgroups, accommodate for diverse needs for food and drinks at the conference, as well as support initiatives for groups to socialize and network.''
* Shruti Palaskar, Carnegie Mellon University
* Maarten Sap, University of Washington

Kick-off meetings with all subcommittees took place in December before the winter holidays. Correspondence is mostly taking place on slack, alternatively by email.

4. A message distributed on ACL2020 social media on September 17 2019 invited community members to share comments and suggestions with the D&I chairs. We received some important feedback.

5. A blog post entitled The ACL 2020 Diversity and Inclusion Committee appeared on the ACL 2020 website and subsequently social media on February 4 2020. We received some important feedback as well as inquiries about D&I accommodations.

6. The sponsorship booklet has been updated for D&I sponsorships. In consultation with Priscilla we added a third sponsor-ship level category. The resulting levels are Champion, Ally, and Contributor. The list of benefits is now also up-to-date. We alerted that multipacks may result in lower cost than single conference sponsorship.

7. Grammarly has provided a generous in-kind donation in the form of writing support software licenses. Codes have been distributed to SRW and WiNLP for distribution among their authors, together with an outreach email template (adjusted from NAACL 2019). Joel Tetreault and Tirthankar Goshal (Financial Access subcommittee) were instrumental in this process. In this context, we also arrived at how to recognize in-kind sponsors by discussion and consensus.

8. We coordinated a room request across subcommittees, submitted to Priscilla as a spreadsheet, detailing space and furniture requirements for subcommittees’ activities.

9. We have submitted a request for a set of updates to D&I items in the registration form and are at work on updates to the D&I special request form.

10. We recommended offering onsite childcare at ACL 2020. We illustrated with ten examples that provision of childcare is a standard feature at comparable conference venues (e.g., AAAI 2020, NeurIPS 2019, Interspeech 2019, CHI 2019). Childcare service is missing at ACL conferences and may especially impact junior researchers. Data shared by two comparable AI conferences indicate that onsite childcare usage can increase substantially (roughly quadrupled) from one year to another, such that a multiyear commitment should be made for establishing a meaningful utility assessment of onsite childcare. Data on ACL 2019 usage was retrieved by Priscilla (around 14 kids on average during main conference; 9 kids on average during workshop/tutorial days), while we obtained proposals from 3 providers. Based on reviewing these proposals, we recommend KiddieCorp as the first-choice vendor for this service.

11. With help from the General Chair, we initiated a conversation about the need for a D&I budget. Subsequently, we prepared a detailed budget request, split into costs and back-stop costs (items that apply when there is a request), which was passed on to the ACL Exec. Sushant Kafle (Accessibility subcommittee) was instrumental in the process of obtaining proposals by vendors for access services. Our requested budget is detailed below, which includes the onsite childcare cost estimates as well.

In conclusion, the D&I activities are progressing and awaiting a decision on budget. In addition, several of the resources we have prepared or enhanced may facilitate future D&I committees’ planning activities, for instance the MOUs, the coordinated room request, the revised sponsorship booklet section, the detailed budget request summary, the process for distributing the writing support software in-kind donation, and the onsite childcare proposal summary.

== 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

We are hosting the conference website on GitHub using the easily adaptable website architecture built by Nitin Madnani for NAACL 2019: https://github.com/naacl-org/naacl-hlt-2019. 
We are using the Whova event app for hosting the conference app this year similar to NAACL 2019.

== Business Office ==

Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL

2020Q1 Reports: ACL 2020

2020-02-25T00:48:26Z

Vinodkpg: /* Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs */