AACL IJCNLP 2022 - Call for Student Research Workshop Papers

The AACL-IJCNLP 2022 Student Research Workshop (SRW) provides a forum for student researchers who are investigating various areas related to Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing. The workshop provides an excellent opportunity for student participants to present their work and receive valuable feedback from the international research community as well as from selected panelists - experienced researchers, specifically assigned according to the topic of their work, who will prepare in-depth comments and questions in advance of the presentation.

The workshop’s goal is to aid students at multiple stages of their education: including undergraduate, masters, junior and senior PhD students.

We invite papers in three different categories:

• General Research Papers: Papers in this category can describe completed work, or work in progress with preliminary results. For these papers, the first author must be a current graduate or undergraduate student. Topics of interest for the SRW are the same as the AACL-IJCNLP 2022 main conference. See the list of topics here.

• Thesis Proposals: This category is appropriate for advanced students who have decided on a thesis topic and wish to get feedback on their proposal and broader ideas for their continuing work.

• Human-centred NLP: The rising prevalence of living along with artificial intelligence has brought lots of benefits to people's daily life. However, it also poses a challenge of building reliable, explainable, and empathic tools to provide better service, from essential natural language applications to mental support. Especially during the current pandemic, people are more likely to feel alone and rely upon technology. This, together with the advances in the field of Natural Language processing, has motivated the exploration of human-centred technology. In this special theme, we invite submissions that address diverse human-centred questions, particularly encouraging bringing together perspectives and methods from NLP and affective computing to improve individuals' lives physically and mentally.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

(1) affective systems to understand human emotion and respond to their emotional feedback

(2) sentiment analysis in social media, e-commerce data, etc.

(3) human factors in the NLP evaluation system

(4) reliable and explainable NLP models

(5) privacy and personal data protection

(6) ethics in NLP, including debiasing, detoxification, etc.

Benefits of participation

All accepted papers will be presented in the main conference poster session, giving students an opportunity to interact with and present their work to a large and diverse audience, including top researchers in the field.
All accepted thesis proposals will be presented during a session at the main conference, giving students an opportunity to receive feedback from assigned mentors and other researchers.
Submissions (in both categories) may either be archival or non-archival, based on the wishes of the authors. All archival papers will be published in the AACL-IJCNLP 2022 SRW Proceedings. All non-archival papers may be submitted to any venue in the future except another SRW.
Each participant is also assigned a mentor - an experienced researcher - who can provide valuable advice on the submission during the pre-submission period and mentoring during the conference.
We are also planning on having an invited speaker who will share his/her perspectives on NLP research.

Important Dates

Pre-submission mentoring deadline: Aug 12, 2022
Pre-submission feedback: Sep 2, 2022
Paper submission deadline: Sep 9, 2022
Acceptance notifications: Oct 7, 2022
Camera-ready deadline: Oct 21, 2022

All deadlines are calculated at 11:59 pm (UTC-12 hours)

Author Guidelines

The ACL has released policies for submission, review and citation. Accompanying these are guidelines for authors. AACL-IJCNLP SRW 2022 will adhere to these policies and guidelines. Submissions should:

• Be relevant: Submissions to AACL-IJCNLP SRW 2022 should be relevant to the audience.

• Be original: The content of submissions to AACL-IJCNLP SRW 2022 (the ideas, the findings, the results and the words) should be original; that is, should not have been published (or be accepted for publication) in another refereed, archival form (such as a book, a journal, or a conference proceedings). Authors are referred to the ACL author guidelines for additional information on what constitutes existing publication.

Anonymity Period

Authors may present preliminary versions of their work in other venues that are not refereed and/or not archival (e.g., course reports, theses, non-archival workshops, or on preprint servers such as arXiv.org). Note, however, that the ACL policies define an anonymity period, which starts on Aug 9, 2022 (11:59pm PDT) and ends on Oct 21, 2022, meaning that any non-anonymized version of the paper that is posted online during the non-anonymity period cannot be submitted to the workshop.

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 workshop. The submitted version must not refer to the non-anonymized version, and you must indicate on the online submission form that a non-anonymized version exists. During the anonymity period, you may not update a non-anonymized version, advertise an anonymized or non-anonymized version on social media, or take any other action that would compromise double-blind reviewing during the anonymity period.

Pre-submission Mentoring Procedure

Paper drafts for pre-submission mentoring should be sent in the PDF format before Aug 12, 2022.

Pre-submission mentoring is not anonymous. The mentor will not review the final submission. Papers sent for pre-submission mentoring but not submitted via the electronic system (see the instructions below) by Sep 9, 2022, will not be reviewed.

Submission Procedure

All papers consist of up to five (5) pages of content, plus unlimited references. Supplementary materials are not allowed. Upon acceptance, papers will be given six (6) content pages in the proceedings. Authors are encouraged to use this additional page to address reviewer’s comments in their final versions. Submissions must conform to the specifications of AACL-IJCNLP 2022 call for papers regarding multiple submissions and preparing papers for the double-blind review process.

Paper submissions must use the official AACL-IJCNLP 2022 style templates: See the ARR CFP guidelines.

Please submit using the START conference system: https://softconf.com/aacl2022/SRW/

Multiple Submission Policy

Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must indicate this at submission time. Authors of papers accepted for presentation at AACL-IJCNLP SRW 2022 must notify the program chairs whether the paper will be presented.

All accepted papers must be presented at the workshop in order for them to appear in the proceedings. We will not accept publication or presentation papers that overlap significantly in content or results with papers that will be (or have been) published elsewhere.

Double submission to the AACL-IJCNLP SRW and other AACL-IJCNLP workshops is prohibited.

In the case of two different submissions, the authors must ensure that these submissions do not overlap significantly (> 75%) with each other in content or results.

Contact Information

Student Workshop co-chairs:

Hanqi Yan, University of Warwick, UK
Zonghan Yang, Tsinghua University

Student Workshop faculty advisors:

Sebastian Ruder, DeepMind
Xiaojun Wan, Peking University

Email: aacl-srw22@googlegroups.com