2025Q3 Reports: Workshop Chairs

This year, as in previous years, the call for submissions, reviewing, and allocation of workshops to venues were coordinated jointly for multiple conferences:

• NAACL-HLT 2025 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA in April
• ACL 2025 in Vienna, Austria in July
• EMNLP 2025 in Suzhou, China in November

Along with the ACL workshop officer (Zeerak Talat), the following workshop chairs oversaw the call and review of proposals:

• NAACL-HLT: Alexis Palmer, Kenton Murray, and Saab Mansour
• ACL: Terra Blevins and Christophe Gravier
• EMNLP: The tutorial chairs were not determined prior to the workshop solicitation process.

The deadline for the joint call for workshops was October 1st. We collected workshop proposals through START and conducted the review and decision process in October, notifying the workshops on November 5th, which was slightly later than the stated deadline in the call. We found that there was a large increase in workshop proposals, which made the decision process more difficult than in previous years (see the 2025 Q3 Workshop Officer report for more information on these challenges). In total, we received 139 workshop proposals, and based on the space available at the conference venues this cycle, we accepted 74 workshops, including the 29 workshops co-located with ACL.

The full duties executed after the workshops selection process are detailed in the documentation chair’s spreadsheet; the process roughly falls into the three categories of (1) Set Up, where we collect initial workshop information and help organizers begin their process, including releasing their call for papers and facilitating setting up the review consoles on OpenReview or SoftConf (both were supported); (2) Organizer Support, where we field questions as the arise during the workshop review process; and (3) Conference Logistics, where we collect the final information needed from the organizers to provide the needed space and support at the venue. While the publication chairs primarily run the proceedings process, we also supported the workshop organizers during that process, which occurred in May and June, along with step (3) this cycle.

We note that while the process proceeded smoothly for the most part, there are a few issues that arose during the workshop organization process that we’d like to note for future organizers:

• Requests to switch venues: As with every year, there were numerous requests to switch workshop venues (primarily to ACL, in our case). Due to space limitations, in one this was necessary to rent out an additional room for a workshop: SemEval, which is grandfathered in to always be co-located with ACL, was placed at EMNLP due to their stated preference for it as a second choice in the proposal.
• Unresponsive organizers: In some cases, we encountered issues with unresponsive organizers or missed deadlines due to missing information from our end. In particular, this most often occurred for organizers who, either because they missed the invitation or elected not to join the organizing Google group, were not on the mailing list until it was caught late in the planning cycle. We recommend ensuring that all organizers are on the mailing list by more carefully checking this next year and reminding organizers that they all are expected to be on this list for workshop information, not just a single point of contact. (That being said, we think that this issue has been reduced from previous years due to the use of a mailing list, which worked as intended for the most part, and we recommend continuing to use one moving forward.)
• Copyright forms: Some workshops did not know how to collect the copyright release forms with their camera-ready materials, which means they had to reach out at the last minute to the authors. This was not a problem for workshops using START (which has an accepted, built-in release process), but as more workshops move to OpenReview, reminding organizers prior to their camera-ready process to collect these releases next year would make the process smoother.
• Double-submissions of workshops: As more ML venues incorporate NLP research into their purview, more workshops that would normally be hosted at *CL venues are also being submitted to other external venues. To this point, we ran into an issue where one workshop that was accepted to ACL had also applied to, and was accepted at, a venue occurring only a few months prior to ACL. This meant that their calls and review cycles would be overlapping. We asked the workshop to choose one venue, given that they were limiting space for workshops that could not take place otherwise, and they chose to withdraw from ACL. However, we recommend establishing a standard policy to handle cases like these, similar to the one we have in place for paper submissions.