2025Q3 Reports: Diversity and Inclusion Chairs

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Chairs

  • Shane Storks - University of Michigan
  • Maria Ryskina - MIT / Vector Institute
  • Senja Pollak - Jožef Stefan Institute
  • Hwaran Lee - NAVER / Sogang University

Communication

  • For internal communication and organization, we mainly used Slack. We communicated via emails (acl2025diversity[at]googlegroups.com) and via the acl25-diversity Slack channel in the ACL Slack Workspace. For communication with previous D&I chairs and other ACL organizers, we also used the Mattermost server.

D&I Budget

  • We worked with the ACL Sponsorship Director, Chris Callison-Birch, to update the D&I information in the *CL sponsorship brochure. We introduced a new scholarship option to support individual attendees, although no sponsors took advantage of it.

D&I sponsorships support subsidies and services that alleviate barriers to conference attendance for researchers (especially from underrepresented communities and regions), such as travel and registration grants, childcare, disability assistance, VPN for virtual participants, and networking opportunities for affinity groups.

D&I Ally Benefits: <…>

D&I Scholarships: For $500 each, you can sponsor students, first-time and underprivileged attendees to help broaden participation <…>

  • We reached out to potential sponsors by relying on our connections, reusing and expanding the template borrowed from previous D&I chairs:

The goal of our committee is to make the conference more accessible to people from underrepresented groups and geographic regions, provide accommodations to researchers with disabilities, and make the conference more welcoming to newcomers. As the registration fees can be 2 to 10 times the minimum wage in many parts of the world, the D&I committee reaches out to NLP researchers from underrepresented groups and offers registration fee waivers, travel grants, caregiving subsidies, etc. We also organize theme-based academic mentoring sessions and affinity group socials/workshops to help newcomers and early-career researchers.

Our D&I initiatives would not be successful without the help of sponsors. <…> We are attaching the sponsorship brochure for this year's conferences, which includes the available options and types of acknowledgement we give to sponsors for our D&I efforts. Besides a dedicated tier for D&I sponsorship (D&I Ally), we have also enabled sponsoring individual student awardees: for $500 each, you can sponsor students, first-time and underprivileged attendees to help broaden participation. There is also a discount for sponsors who want to commit to sponsoring more than one event.

  • Our attempts to reach out to sponsors using our personal connections were unsuccessful. However, Apple responded to Chris’ *CL sponsorship request and committed to the D&I Ally sponsorship package.
  • We were able to secure a total of $24,000 USD for D&I subsidies:
    • $20,000 from ACL
    • $4,000 from Apple

Subsidies

  • We advertised D&I subsidies (funded by our committee’s budget) and virtual registration subsidies (funded by the ACL) in blog posts on the ACL website, social media (Twitter/X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn), ACL mailing list, and corpora-list. We shared and sent regular reminders through the Publicity Chairs, and advised applicants to apply for volunteering opportunities as well.
  • For the main D&I subsidies, we received 334 applications and offered:
    • 12 in-person registration fee waivers
    • 4 full or partial virtual registration fee waivers
    • 6 ACL memberships
    • 7 paper presenter fees
    • 12 full or partial travel grants
    • 1 childcare subsidy
    • Most awardees were based in lower-income countries (primarily South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Africa) and/or were junior students, first-time *CL attendees, members of affinity groups or underrepresented communities. All awardees are presenting their papers at the main conference or at a workshop.
  • For the virtual registration subsidies, we received 46 applications and offered:
    • 11 full virtual registration waivers
    • 12 partial virtual registration waivers
    • Most awardees were based in Mexico, South America, and lower-income Asian and Middle-Eastern countries.
    • 3 awardees with partial waivers declined the award, citing financial constraints. 5 more awardees did not respond or take advantage of the waiver.
  • The selection criteria for subsidies included:
    • Financial issues (detailed description);
    • Career stage;
    • Whether the applicant is a workshop/conference/affinity group organizer;
    • Whether the applicant is from an under-represented group, based on affinity group membership, gender, geographic region (we prioritized applicants from low-income countries), and institution;
    • Whether the applicant is presenting a paper at the main conference or at a workshop;
    • Whether the applicant is a first-time *CL conference presenter/attendee;
    • Whether the applicant provides valid and reasonably detailed information and respects the ACL code of conduct (no false information).
  • After the awardees were selected, we reached out to the Student Volunteer Chairs to readjust the allocation: the awardees on our list who were also selected for volunteering had their registration covered by the ACL. This allowed us to provide more registration waivers to other participants on our shortlist. The volunteering decisions were not used for the original shortlist selection.
  • Some in-person awardees (who had accepted the award) experienced difficulties obtaining visas, so at the time of writing their ability to attend is still not confirmed.

Accessibility Accommodations

  • We offered a childcare subsidy to one attendee. At the venue, Jenn Rachford arranged to provide a lactation room and a family room for parents and children to meet between sessions.
  • The venue had an option to offer onsite childcare for a limited number of participants, but per internal discussion between the members of the ACL Executive team, the decision was made not to utilize this service.
  • During registration, attendees were asked whether they required any accessibility accommodations, and their responses were collected via LiveLink. At the time of writing, a total of 114 participants indicated that they had accessibility needs, with 25 specifically requesting services such as sign language support, translation (dubbing or closed captioning), or an advanced tour of the virtual space. We reached out to each of them individually to clarify their specific requirements, but received very few responses.
  • 21 people have requested translation or closed captioning in the registration form so far. We have partnered with White Coat Captioning to provide captions for the plenary sessions. The total cost was $2,380 for 4 sessions, totalling 8 hours.
  • We have confirmed that all the attendee spaces were wheelchair accessible.

Coordination with the Exec

  • We communicated with Lu Wang (ACL Equity Director) for information on the selection criteria and application questions for virtual registration subsidies.
  • Thanks to Lu’s support and coordination, the Executive Committee provided additional virtual registration fee waivers for non-authors (mentioned above).

Academic Inclusion

  • Our promotional blog post for organizing Birds of a Feather (BoF) and affinity group sessions can be found here: https://2025.aclweb.org/calls/bof_affinity_events/.
  • The theme-based Birds of a Feather (BoF) and affinity group sessions at ACL are listed below. Each of these sessions lasts for 90 minutes during the oral/poster and lunch break sessions on main conference days:
    • Activations & Embeddings: Cognitive-Neuroscience Methods for LLMs
    • Bridging Human Study and LLM Agents for Social Simulation
    • EquiCL Welcome Session
    • Ethical Considerations for NLP and CL
    • Humanists in NLP
    • Language Technology for Crisis Preparedness and Response (LT4CPR)
    • Learning and Reasoning for Structured Data
    • Mentorship on NLP Research
    • Mothering the Future — In Life and in AI: Challenges, Support, and the Path Forward for Mothers in Computing
    • Multilingualism: from data crawling to evaluation
    • Muslims in Machine Learning (MusIML)
    • Navigating Challenges in Building Industrial LLM Applications
    • NLP x Graphs: Where Structure Meets Language
    • Participatory Design for NLP
    • Queer in AI Meet-Up
    • SomosNLP: The Iberoamerican NLP Community
    • Southeast Asian NLP Community, Projects, and Beyond
    • Teaching NLP
  • We plan to advertise the BoF sessions and socials in a blog post on the ACL website, social media (X/Twitter, Bluesky, and LinkedIn), ACL mailing list, and corpora-list.

Other Issues

  • Other topics we have assisted attendees with include:
    • Confirming that Halal certified food options (and not simply Halal-suitable) will be provided;
    • Allocating a prayer room at the venue (secured by Jenn Rachford);
    • Concerns about biases in reviewing (involving the Ethics Chairs when needed).

Acknowledgements

  • We thank the following past D&I Co-Chairs for their insights:
    • Chi-Kiu “Jackie” Lo, Akiko Eriguchi, and the NAACL 2025 D&I Committee
    • Steven Wilson and the ACL 2024 D&I Committee
    • Maria Pacheco, Ziyu Yao, and the NAACL 2024 D&I Committee
    • Sabine Weber and the EACL 2024 D&I Committee
    • Pranav A and the NAACL 2022 D&I Committee
  • We also thank Jennifer Rachford and Megan Haddad for answering our many questions and providing logistic support in disbursing D&I subsidy funds.
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