The 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing
(AACL-IJCNLP 2022)
https://www.aacl2022.org/
Date：Main Conference ：Nov. 21-23, 2022 Tutorial and Workshop：Nov. 24, 2022
Venue：Online
Call for Papers
Overview
AACL-IJCNLP 2022 invites the submission of long and short papers featuring substantial, original, and unpublished research in all aspects of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing. As in recent years, some of the presentations at the conference will be of papers accepted by the Transactions of the ACL (TACL) and by the Computational Linguistics (CL) journals.
Submission Topics
AACL-IJCNLP 2022 aims to have a broad technical program. Relevant topics for the conference include, but are not limited to, the following areas (in alphabetical order):
Theme: “Fairness in Natural Language Processing”
Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics
Dialogue and Interactive Systems
Discourse and Pragmatics
Generation
Information Extraction
Information Retrieval and Text Mining
Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP
Language Modeling
Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond
Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling, and Psycholinguistics
Machine Learning for NLP
Machine Translation and Multilinguality
NLP Applications
Phonology, Morphology, and Word Segmentation
Question Answering
Resources and Evaluation
Semantics
Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
Speech and Multimodality Processing
Summarization
Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing
Theme Track: “Fairness in Natural Language Processing”
The past decade has witnessed the rapid development of natural language processing, which has resulted in many use cases in the real life of people around the world. As a result, there is an increasing need for developing more socially responsible natural language processing techniques to protect fairness.
We are glad to announce that AACL-IJCNLP 2022 will have a theme track on promoting fairness in natural language processing. We invite researchers to submit position, opinion, modeling, and resource papers on the following topics:
Reflection on current progress on improving fairness in natural language processing and how to make meaningful advances in the future.
Discussions on how computational linguistic research could make (and has made) both positive and negative impact on fairness and novel approaches to fostering the positive while mitigating any negative impact.
Techniques for measuring fairness in natural language processing quantitatively and qualitatively.
Techniques for solving constrained optimization problems with fairness constraints for natural language processing.
Techniques for minimizing harmful effects of natural language processing applications against vulnerable populations.
Automatic evaluation methods to assess fairness in natural language processing.
Empirical investigations of fairness in natural language processing.
Datasets, resources and tools that focus on promoting fairness in natural language processing.
We anticipate having a special session for this theme at the conference and a best Thematic Paper Award in addition to the traditional Best Paper Awards.
Paper Submission Process
AACL-IJCNLP 2022 allow authors to submit papers via two systems:
ACL Rolling Review (ARR): ARR is a new initiative of ACL that aims to improve efficiency and turnaround of ACL reviewing while keeping the diversity and editorial freedom. Reviewing and acceptance of papers submitted to AACL-IJCNLP 2022 via ARR is done in a two-step process. The first step is centralized rolling review via ARR, where submissions receive reviews and meta-reviews from ARR reviewers and action editors. The second step is commitment to AACL-IJCNLP 2022. After authors submit their reviewed papers, reviews, and meta-reviews to AACL-IJCNLP 2022 and choose areas to which their papers belong, Senior Area Chairs and Program Chairs of AACL-IJCNLP 2022 will make acceptance decisions for a submission based on the ARR reviews and meta-reviews. Submission website: https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/AACL-IJCNLP/2022/Conference
Softconf: Authors can also directly submit papers to AACL-IJCNLP 2022 using the Softconf START conference management system in a traditional way. Submissions receive reviews and meta-reviews from reviewers and Area Chairs of AACL-IJCNLP 2022. Senior Area Chairs and Program Chairs of AACL-IJCNLP 2022 make acceptance decisions for a submission using the AACL-IJCNLP 2022 reviews and meta-reviews. Submission website: https://www.softconf.com/aacl2022/papers.
Note:
Although submissions from two systems are reviewed by different groups of reviewers, Senior Area Chairs and Program Chairs of AACL-IJCNLP 2022 will make consistent acceptance decisions based on the same criteria.
Authors are allowed to choose only one system, either ARR or Softconf, to submit their papers. To reduce reviewing workload, authors should avoid submitting the same paper to both ARR and Softconf. AACL-IJCNLP 2022 will not consider any paper that is reviewed by both ARR and Softconf. A paper may not be simultaneously under review through ARR and Softconf. A paper that has or will receive reviews through ARR may not be submitted for review to AACL-IJCNLP 2022 through Softconf.
Theme papers must be submitted via the Softconf system.
Important Dates for AACL-IJCNLP 2022
Anonymity period begins (Softconf)
June 15, 2022
Paper submission deadline (Softconf)
July 15, 2022
Author response period (Softconf)
August 15-21, 2022
Commitment deadline (ARR)
August 21, 2022
Notification of acceptance
September 20, 2022
Deadline for authors to withdraw papers from AACL-IJCNLP 2022 or Findings of AACL-IJCNLP 2022
September 26, 2022
Camera-ready version of papers due
October 10, 2022
Note: All deadlines are 11:59PM UTC-12:00 (“anywhere on Earth”).
Paper Submission Details
Long papers
Long papers must describe substantial, original, completed, and unpublished work. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation and analysis should be included.
Long papers may consist of up to eight (8) pages of content, plus unlimited pages of references. Final versions of long papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 9 pages), so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account.
Long papers will be presented orally or as posters as determined by the program committee. The decisions as to which papers will be presented orally and which as poster presentations will be based on the nature rather than the quality of the work. There will be no distinction in the proceedings between long papers presented orally and long papers presented as posters.
Short papers
Short paper submissions must describe original and unpublished work. Please note that a short paper is not a shortened long paper. Instead, short papers should have a point that can be made in a few pages. Some kinds of short papers include:
A small, focused contribution
A negative result
An opinion piece
An interesting application nugget
Short papers may consist of up to four (4) pages of content, plus unlimited pages of references. Final versions of short papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 5 pages), so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account.
Short papers will be presented orally or as posters as determined by the program committee. While short papers will be distinguished from long papers in the proceedings, there will be no distinction in the proceedings between short papers presented orally and short papers presented as posters.
Theme Papers
The special theme track only accepts long paper submissions.
Paper Templates
See the ARR CFP guidelines on Paper Templates.
Anonymity Period
For submissions via Softconf, the following rules and guidelines are meant to protect the integrity of double-blind review and ensure that submissions are reviewed fairly. The rules make reference to the anonymity period, which runs from 1 month before the submission deadline (starting May 15, 2022) up to the date when your paper is accepted or rejected (September 20, 2022). Papers that are withdrawn during this period will no longer be subject to these rules.
You may not make a non-anonymized version of your paper available online to the general community (for example, via a preprint server) during the anonymity period. Versions of the paper include papers having essentially the same scientific content but possibly differing in minor details (including title and structure) and/or in length.
If you have posted a non-anonymized version of your paper online before the start of the anonymity period, you may submit an anonymized version to the conference. The submitted version must not refer to the non-anonymized version, and you must inform the programme chairs that a non-anonymized version exists.
You may not update the non-anonymized version during the anonymity period, and we ask you not to advertise it on social media or take other actions that would further compromise double-blind reviewing during the anonymity period.
You may make an anonymized version of your paper available (for example, on OpenReview), even during the anonymity period.
Note that, while you are not prohibited from making a non-anonymous version available online before the start of the anonymity period, this does make double-blind reviewing more difficult to maintain, and we therefore encourage you to wait until the end of the anonymity period.
For arXiv submissions, May 15 11:59pm UTC-12h (anywhere on earth) is the latest time the paper can be uploaded.
For submissions via ARR, see ARR CFP guidelines.
Instructions for Double-Blind Review
See ARR CFP guidelines on Double-Blind Review.
Authorship
See ARR CFP guidelines on Authorship.
Citation and Comparison
See ARR CFP guidelines on Citation and Comparison.
Multiple Submission Policy
We follow the ARR Multiple Submission Policy. See the ARR CFP guidelines on Multiple Submission Policy.
Ethics Policy
Authors are required to honor the ethical code set out in the ACL Code of Ethics. See the ARR Author Checklist on Ethics.
Reproducibility Criteria
See ARR Author Checklist.
Promoting Efficient NLP
The amount of computation put into training NLP models has grown tremendously in recent years. This trend raises the bar for participation in NLP research, excluding large parts of the community from experimenting with state-of-the-art models. It also creates environmental concerns since this computation uses increasing amounts of energy. An ACL working group on “Efficient NLP” appointed by the ACL Executive Committee has made recommendations that aim to reduce the computational costs of NLP and thereby mitigate some of these concerns, which will be implemented in AACL-IJCNLP 2022.
Connection between Research Claims and Experiments
The research claims of this paper should be clearly stated. There are many types of claims in NLP research, including claims like “[Model X] can be trained to higher accuracy on [task Y] than [model Z]”, “[Dataset X] contains [bias / toxic language / etc.]”, or “Encoding linguistic information into [model X] improves its performance on [task Y]”. This is not an exhaustive list, there are many other types of claims, including those found in papers introducing a new dataset, like “Our new dataset captures information about [X]”, or claims from papers on linguistics, theory papers, or meta-analysis papers. We encourage authors to add a designated paragraph in the paper carefully listing the paper’s research claims.
These claims would be used, among others, to evaluate the paper. E.g., how novel are these claims, and how much substance they contain. The paper will also be evaluated based on the connection between them and the results presented in this paper (whether empirical, theoretical or other): How are the results supporting the claims? What alternative explanations exist for the presented results, and how do the authors rule them out? Finally, if the authors work under a restricted computational budget for this paper, they should set the reader’s expectation by carefully articulating this budget, along with justifications for why that is sufficient to address the stated research claims.
Code, Models, and Data Release
We encourage authors to release code, data, trained models, and model outputs (e.g., model predictions). To facilitate this, the deadline for releasing the code will be one week after the conference deadline, which will allow authors to clean up / package the code in a time that does not conflict with writing the paper. Authors are encouraged to follow code writing policies (e.g., the NeurIPS guidelines). Importantly, code/data release is voluntary, and a submission without these is still a valid submission. Authors can choose whether to upload their code along with their submission, to promise to do so, or not to address this point at all. Reviewers in turn are encouraged (though not forced) to reward papers based on the artifacts they release.
Presentation Requirement
All accepted papers must be presented at the conference to appear in the proceedings. The authors of papers accepted for presentation at AACL-IJCNLP 2022 or at the Findings of AACL-IJCNLP 2022 must notify the program chairs by September 26, 2022 if they wish to withdraw their paper.
At least one author of each accepted paper must register for AACL-IJCNLP 2022 by the early registration deadline.
Contact Information
General chair:
Yulan He, University of Warwick, UK
Program co-chairs:
Heng Ji, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Sujian Li, Peking University
Yang Liu, Tsinghua University
Special Theme co-chairs:
Mona Diab, Facebook AI
Isabelle Augenstein, University of Copenhagen
Email: aacl.ijcnlp2022.pc [at] gmail.com