2024Q3 Reports: Workshop Officers

Workshop officers’ report

In the 2025 workshop cycle, 139 unique workshops were submitted (not counting duplicates or withdrawn submissions)–this is up from 99 the previous year. 29 workshops have been allocated to ACL, two of which have been combined into a single workshop; 25 workshops allocated to NAACL; and 20 allocated to EMNLP, including two workshops combined into a single workshop. This means that of 139 workshop proposals, 74 (55%) were accepted in some form. The scale of proposals is quickly becoming an issue. Below, we outline the issues that are emerging and potential resolutions.

Workshop colocation preferences

Almost all workshops prefer to be colocated with any conference but the earliest conference due to the very limited preparation time. Given this and the early proposed conference dates for EACL next year, we are attempting to have two workshop proposal deadlines for 2026. However, we are running into several issues due to a shorter planning timeframe for conferences earlier in the cycle. The primary bottleneck currently is EACL planning: even though the call for workshop proposals for EACL should go out soon, it is still unclear when or in which country EACL will be held. Consequently, the Workshop Chairs have not been identified. This presents obvious issues with soliciting and reviewing workshop proposals, buy-in from the local organisers, and so forth. A reasonable approach to handling this is for the ACL to have conferences planned out at least 12 months in advance.

Ethical considerations around workshop proposals

In the 2025 cycle, three workshop proposals caused ethical concerns. Specifically, two workshop proposals included an organiser at a university in a settler colony in the occupied West Bank, and another workshop proposal was for military and defense purposes. While only the latter was rejected, ethical concerns such as working at a university that actively displaces a native population and in a state which solicits NLP systems for military purposes should be considered as violations of the ACL’s code of ethics (1.1; 1.2; and 1.4).

Desk Rejection Policy

Given the increased demand for workshop slots, we would advocate for making the desk rejection policy more clear. This includes, but is not limited to rejecting workshop proposals that:

• Do not adhere to the submission template (e.g., page limit).
• Do not provide information on all required aspects of the proposal
• Do not provide Information for all workshop organisers on the submission site and in the submission itself
• Do not provide accommodation for virtual participation without appropriate justification.
• Do not comply with the ACL code of ethics.

Such desk rejection criteria should hold for all workshops, including longstanding workshops such as CoNLL.

Long-standing workshops

While longstanding workshops such as SemEval and CoNLL continue to be organised, the default inclusion of longstanding workshops raises an important question of the future of workshops. As more workshop series have now been running for 10 years or longer, the question of their continued relevance becomes increasingly important. Workshops have traditionally held a dual role of (1) providing a space for publishing research in a subfield and for (2) providing a meeting space for researchers. This has been particularly important for new fields as they emerge, as they may be undervalued by the majority of the field. However, many such workshops are beginning to lose their relevance with regard to the need for a separate publishing space (e.g., Blackbox NLP, CoNLL, and *SEM) as work in the fields are in the mainstream of the *CL conferences. This increase in long-running workshops exacerbates the space limitations we have on workshops, further limiting the availability of slots for workshops on new areas. The expectation that long-running workshops will be automatically accepted to a venue has also meant that in some cases, these workshops put little effort into their proposal, particularly with respect to updating the topic and focus to remain relevant to the overall field.

While the going order has been a de-facto agreement that longstanding workshops are accepted and placed at the conference of their choice, we would argue that there is a need for overhauling the workshop structure to disentangle the first and second purpose of workshops. Several different avenues could be sought to address these issues, among these are:

• Half day community meetings; similar to a workshop however without proceedings. The primary purpose is to facilitate a discussion space between researchers in the same field, including having invited talks.
• Shifting from workshop to journal after a set amount of time: One potential is to facilitate workshops becoming journals for a continued cohesive space for a research field.
• Tracks in the main conference organised by workshop organisers.
• Workshops are spun into entirely third party events (no longer co-located with *ACL conferences)
• Enforcing that all workshops compete on even ground, i.e., no preference is given to workshops due to their histories (this will add pressure on general chairs and the exec as longstanding workshops are much more likely to complain about rejection and forcefully try to get their way than young workshops)

While there is a need to address issues of growth in the field, we do not believe that all workshops should necessarily disappear as workshops. For example, the Linguistic Annotation Workshop has been running for almost 20 years, but it remains a clearly relevant space for continuing to have a meeting space. The decision to turn a workshop into another form will itself require a process to ensure a fair and equal treatment. One such method would be to implement term limits (e.g., 10 editions) for workshops, along with an easy-to-access process for obtaining an exception for extending for a set number of (e.g., 3) years.

Virtual-only workshops?

There has been a marked increase in the number of workshop proposals received, the challenge is the lack of physical space for holding workshops. The proposals set out above would help remedy that need for physical space. In addition, it might be worth considering whether we make space for virtual-only workshops, to be able to allow more workshops. However, this could only be a stop-gap measure while we address the issue of workshops.

The Workshop Reviewing Process

Given the increase in workshop submissions (and decrease in workshop acceptance rates), another concern raised by workshop organizers is the opaque workshop review process. Previously, the reviews were performed by workshop chairs and provided little feedback on the proposal. While this has worked well when there is adequate room at conference venues, this past cycle we needed to reject many otherwise qualified workshops due to space limitations. This has led to complaints about the review process and being unfairly rejected with good reviews.

One measure we have taken to increase transparency is a blog post outlining the review process and challenges during the past cycle (here). However, moving forward, more stringent reviewing (including desk rejections and feedback on why a workshop was not chosen) is likely necessary to ensure a fair workshop selection process.