2017Q3 Reports: Workshop Chairs

Workshop Chairs

Wei Xu, Ohio State University
Jonathan Berant, Tel Aviv University

The workshop chairs selected 14 workshops to be held immediately following the ACL 2017 conference. There will be two additional workshops - the Student Research Workshop (SRW) which will be held during one of the evening poster sessions during the main conference, and the Women in NLP workshop which will be held before the conference on the tutorial day.

The workshop chairs used a new procedure for selecting workshops:

• Each of the workshop proposals were reviewed by two workshop chairs in the SoftConf systems, with numerical scores and textual comments, similar to ACL paper reviews. The evaluation were primarily based on the proposals, and sometimes the web survey results are consulted (below).
• We also conducted a web-based survey to around 3000 past ACL conference/workshop registrants and received more than 700 responses and overwhelmingly positive feedbacks from survey participants. We used survey results to compare the popularity of workshops on similar topics and first-time workshops, as well as the past attendance numbers if available.

We successfully encouraged LaTech and CLfL for a merge and allocated both to ACL to help this subfield to gain more tractions. After much discussion, we also accepted the NMT workshop’s request to change their location from EACL to ACL. We did not receive any complaints from rejected workshop organizers this year.

The workshop chairs wrote a step-by-step-guide that aims to chronologically describe the duties and responsibilities of the workshop chairs. This is designed to be a detailed and practical aid on top of the ACL handbook.

Additional information:

• All workshops waived registration fee for one invited speaker
• 12/14 workshops are holding poster sessions

Here are the 14 selected workshops / collocated conferences:

2 Day Workshops (Aug 3-4)

Abbreviation	Title	Organizers	Website
*Sem	The Sixth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics	Aurelie Herbel and Lluis Marquez	https://sites.google.com/site/starsem2017/
CoNLL	The SIGNLL Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning	Lucia Specia and Roger Levy	http://www.conll.org/
SemEval	11th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluations	Steven Bethard, Marine Carpuat, Marianna Apidianaki and Saif Mohammad	http://alt.qcri.org/semeval2017/

1 day workshops on August 3:

Abbreviation	Workshop title	Workshop organizers	Website
TextGraphs-11	TextGraphs-11: Graph-based Methods for Natural Language Processing	Martin Riedl, Swapna Somasundaran, Goran Glavaš and Eduard Hovy	http://textgraphs.org/ws17
BUCC	10th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora	Serge Sharoff, Pierre Zweigenbaum and Reinhard Rapp	https://comparable.limsi.fr/
RepL4NLP	2nd Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP	Phil Blunsom, Antoine Bordes, Shay B. Cohen, Kyunghyun Cho, Chris Dyer, Edward Grefenstette, Karl Moritz Hermann, Laura Rimell, Jason Weston and Wen-tau Yih	https://sites.google.com/site/repl4nlp2017
RoboNLP	1st Workshop on Language Grounding for Robotics	Mohit Bansal, Cynthia Matuszek, Jacob Andreas, Yoav Artzi and Yonatan Bisk	https://robonlp2017.github.io/
NLP+CSS	2nd workshop on NLP and Computational Social Science	Dirk Hovy, A. Seza Doğruöz, Oren Tsur, David Bamman, David Jurgens and Brendan O'Connor	https://sites.google.com/site/nlpandcss/nlp-css-at-acl-2017
CLPsych	4th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology - From Linguistic Signal to Clinical Reality	Kristy Hollingshead, Molly Ireland and Kate Loveys	http://clpsych.org/

1 day workshops on August 4

Abbreviation	Workshop title	Workshop organizers	Website
LaTeCH-CLfL	Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature	Beatrice Alex, Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Anna Feldman, Anna Kazantseva, Nils Reiter and Stan Szpakowicz	https://sighum.wordpress.com/events/latech-clfl-2017/
BioNLP17	BioNLP 2017	Dina Demner-Fushman, Kevin Cohen, Sophia Ananiadou and Jun'ichi Tsujii	https://www.aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=BioNLP_Workshop
EventStory	Events and Stories in the News	Tommaso Caselli, Ben Miller, Marieke van Erp, Piek Vossen, Martha Palmer, Eduard Hovy, Teruko Mitamura and David Caswell	https://sites.google.com/site/eventsandstoriesinthenews/
Abusive	1st Workshop on Abusive Language Online	Zeerak Waseem, Dirk Hovy, Joel Tetreault and Wendy Chun	https://sites.google.com/site/abusivelanguageworkshop2017/
NMT	1st Workshop on Neural Machine Translation	Minh-Thang Luong, Graham Neubig, Alexandra Birch and Andrew Finch	https://sites.google.com/site/acl17nmt