Ahakim: New page: Report on EMNLP 2011 EMNLP 2011 --- the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, a conference organised annually by SIGDAT, the Association for Computational Lingui...

2012-06-07T22:06:30Z

New page: Report on EMNLP 2011 EMNLP 2011 --- the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, a conference organised annually by SIGDAT, the Association for Computational Lingui...

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Report on EMNLP 2011

EMNLP 2011 --- the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language
Processing, a conference organised annually by SIGDAT, the Association
for Computational Linguistics' special interest group on linguistic
data and corpus-based approaches to NLP --- took place from
July 27th to 29th 2011 at the John McIntyre Conference Centre, Edinburgh,
UK. This EMNLP was, for the first time, not only a stand alone
conference, but also an anchor conference to several workshops, that
were held on July 30th and July 31st at the Informatics Forum,
Edinburgh. This year's conference continued the successful growing
trend of previous years, attracting the largest number of papers to
date for EMNLP and requiring a large organisational effort. The
conference was preceded by a very interesting colocated event
sponsored by Google and the Scottish and Informatics Computer Science
Alliance: an Intense Summer School on Hadoop and Natural Language
Processing.

http://conferences.inf.ed.ac.uk/emnlp2011/

This was the first time EMNLP had a general chair, Paola Merlo,
Geneva, Switzerland. The scientific programme chairs were Regina
Barzilay, MIT, US, and Mark Johnson, Macquarie University, Australia.
Publication chair was Wanxiang Che, Harbin Institute of Technology,
China. Workshop chair was Marie Candito, Paris 7, France. Local
arrangements were being organised by Bonnie Webber and Miles Osborne,
University of Edinburgh.

The list of 20 area chairs can be found at
http://conferences.inf.ed.ac.uk/emnlp2011/area-chairs.html

EMNLP received 628 submissions (not counting papers that were
withdrawn or rejected without review). We were able to accept 95
papers as talks and an additional 54 submissions as posters. The
reviewing process was a two-round review with author response period.

This conference was innovative in several ways. All three morning in
the conference were devoted to plenary sessions; these were used to
highlight a diverse set of papers of interest to the entire EMNLP
audience. We hope this will help counter the disciplinary
fragmentation that some of us feel the standard multi-track conference
structure encourages and were in general appreciated by the
participants.

For the first time, submitted papers could be optionally accompanied
by up to 10MB of supplementary material, which could consist of data,
code, and text. Papers could reference the supplementary material in
much the same way a paper might refer to software or a tech report
available from the authors' web site (albeit without revealing the
authors' identities). Reviewers were encouraged but not required to
view the supplementary material. We did include these unreviewed
materials in the proceedings. Roughly 20% of the papers took advantage
of this option.

A major challenge this year concerned undisclosed double submissions
and plagiarism (especially self-plagiarism) involving papers accepted
at other international conferences. We believe this is an issue that
must addressed by the broader research community.

The conference attendance largely exceeded the 400 people, and the
weather was uncharacteristically dry and sunny.

Paola Merlo
General Chair for EMNLP 2011

2012Q3 Reports: EMNLP 2011 - Revision history

Ahakim: New page: Report on EMNLP 2011 EMNLP 2011 --- the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, a conference organised annually by SIGDAT, the Association for Computational Lingui...