2021Q3 Reports: NAACL-HLT 2021

Conference summary

• We originally planned an in-person NAACL 2021 but switched to a fully virtual format (the decision was finalized less than three months before the conference).
• The NAACL virtual conference hosted 6 tutorials, 17 system demonstrations, 39 industry track papers, 499 main conference and CL/TACL papers, 6 plenary invited talks (4 main track and two industry), 2 panels (Startups in NLP and Careers in NLP), 22 workshops, and a large set of social and thematic gatherings. More details on the conference structure are at https://2021.naacl.org/blog/conference-structure/.
• 2,622 participants registered for NAACL. We reduced registration rates further compared to recent virtual conferences: student registration was $25 early/ $50 late, and regular registration was $125 early/ $175 late.
• We chose Underline (https://underline.io/events/122/reception) for our virtual infrastructure, following the experience of COLING 2020. We also used the Whova conference app for text-based chat and based the review process on START.

Main Innovations

• We followed a more well-defined process for ethics reviews, proposed by the ethics co-chairs Emily Bender and Karën Fort, and refined and implemented in coordination with the program co-chairs and the demo and industry track chairs. Key changes were allowing additional space in submissions to discuss ethical considerations and establishing a category of papers accepted conditionally on addressing ethical concerns together with a timeline and process for an additional stage of review of re-submissions. See the reports of the ethics chairs (https://2021.naacl.org/blog/ethics-review-process-report-back/) and the program co-chairs (https://2021.naacl.org/blog/ethics-review-process/) for more details.
• There was no distinction between oral and poster presentation at the main conference, and all papers were presented in both assigned video calls for groups of five-six papers, and in poster sessions in Gather.town.
• The D&I committee in collaboration with the NAACL Exec put together a D&I Grant Initiative (https://2021.naacl.org/blog/dei-grants/). A report by the D&I committee including ideas on how to improve financial accessibility further in the future is at https://2021.naacl.org/blog/dni-subsidies/. The full schedule of social events the committee organized can be seen at https://2021.naacl.org/program/social/; recordings of some of the discussions are available at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbdq7M48OgNoPIa9Uj_IBCw.
• The publication chairs developed new tools to automatically check and report formatting violations in an easy-to-understand way (https://github.com/yz-joey/ACLPUB/blob/master/aclpub_check/formatchecker.py).