Overview

The Asia-pacific Association for Computational Linguistics invites proposals for workshops to be held in conjunction with AACL-IJCNLP 2022 We solicit proposals in all areas of computational linguistics, broadly conceived to include related disciplines such as linguistics, speech, information retrieval, and multimodal processing.

Workshops will be held at AACL-IJCNLP 2022 (The 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing), which will be held in Taipei, Taiwan from November 20 through 23, 2022.

SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Proposals should be submitted as PDF documents. Note that submissions should essentially be ready to be turned into a Call for Workshop Papers within four weeks of notification (see Timelines below).

The proposals should be at most two pages for the main proposal + at most two additional pages for information about organizers, program committee, and references. Thus the whole proposal should not be more than FOUR pages long.

The two pages for the main proposal must include:

• A title and a brief description of the workshop topic and content.

• A list of invited speakers, if applicable, with an indication of which ones have already agreed and which are indicative, and sources of funding for the speakers.

• An estimate of the number of attendees.

• Depending on the global situation of COVID-19, some conferences might take place only virtually. We request submissions to contain a brief discussion on measures planned to make sure a workshop is successful and productive in case of a virtual-only attendance.

• A description of any shared tasks associated with the workshop, and an estimate of the number of participants.

• A description of special requirements and technical needs.

• If the workshop has been held before, a note specifying where previous workshops were held, how many submissions the workshop received, how many papers were accepted (also specify if they were not regular papers, e.g. shared task system description papers), and how many attendees the workshop attracted.

Note that the only financial support available to workshops is a single free workshop registration for an invited speaker; all other costs must be borne independently by the workshop organizers.

The two pages for information about organizers, program committee, and references must include:

• The names, affiliations, and email addresses of the organizers, with one-paragraph statements of their research interests, areas of expertise, and experience in organising workshops and related events.

• A list of Programme Committee members, with an indication of which members have already agreed. Organizers should do their best to estimate the number of submissions (especially for recurring workshops) in order to (a) ensure a sufficient number of reviewers so that each paper receives 3 reviews, and (b) anticipate that no one is committed to reviewing more than 3 papers. This practice is likely to ensure on-time and more thorough and thoughtful reviews.

• An indication of whether the workshop will consider papers submitted through ACL Rolling Review (ARR); an indication of whether the workshop will use OpenReview as a platform (both to take papers from ARR and for their own review); whether the workshop will only use START as a platform, and will not use ARR. In making this choice, please pay careful attention to the ARR deadlines and conference notifications.

• References

Schedule

The proposals should be submitted no later than 20 March 2022, 11:59 PM UTC-12 (“anywhere on Earth”).

Submission is electronic. You can send the application proposals to the Email workshopchairs.aacl2022@gmail.com with the title “workshop proposals for AACL-2022”.

The workshop proposals will be evaluated according to their originality and impact, as well as the quality of the organizing team and Programme Committee.

WORKSHOPS ON COVID-19

We explicitly encourage the submissions of workshops on the topic of research around COVID-19.

DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION

The proposals should describe the ways in which the workshop will support diversity in NLP. We suggest organizers consider the following points while developing the proposal:

• Contribution to academic diversity: The proposals could explain how the subject matter of the workshop will contribute to the diversity of the field, e.g. use of multilingual data, indications of how the described methods scale up to various languages or domains, accessibility of resources, supporting underrepresented communities of NLP and so on.

• Diversifying representation: Following the WiNLP (http://www.winlp.org/winlp-2020-workshop/) initiative, we recognize the current problems of demographic imbalance in the field. Therefore, we particularly encourage submissions including members of under-represented groups in computational linguistics. The proposals should describe how their selection of invited speakers, panelists, organizers, and program committee promotes diverse representation (for example, considering underrepresented demographics based on gender, ethnicity, nationality, and so on). We also suggest including speakers and panelists, who have not appeared as keynote speakers or panelists in recent conferences.

• Diversifying participation: The proposals could describe how the call-for-papers and outreach will encourage people from marginalized groups to attend and submit to the workshop, e.g. providing mentoring, subsidies, coordinating with affinity groups, diversifying the selection of papers, and so on.

WORKSHOP ORGANIZER RESPONSIBILITIES

The organizers of the accepted proposals will be responsible for publicizing and running the workshop, including reviewing submissions, producing the camera-ready workshop proceedings, organizing the meeting days, and playing their part to ensure that all participants are aware of ACL’s anti-harassment policy. It is crucial that organizers commit to all deadlines. In particular, failure to produce the camera-ready proceedings on time will lead to the exclusion of the workshop from the unified proceedings and author indexes. Workshop organizers cannot accept submissions for publication that will be (or have been) published elsewhere, although they are free to set their own policies on simultaneous submission and review. Since the conferences will occur at different times, the timelines for the submission and reviewing of workshop papers, and the preparation of camera-ready copies, will be different for each conference. Suggested timelines for each of the conferences are given below. The workshop organizers should not deviate from this schedule unless absolutely necessary and with explicit agreement from the relevant Workshop Chairs.

The ACL has a set of policies on workshops. You can find the ACL’s general policies on workshops, the financial policy for workshops, and the financial policy for SIG workshops at:http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Conference_Handbook

TIMELINE FOR THE 2022 WORKSHOPS

• Proposal Submission Deadline

  • March 20, 2022

• Notification of Acceptance

  • April 10, 2022

• First Call for Workshop Papers

  • May 10, 2022

• Second Call for Workshop Papers

  • July 10, 2022

• Workshop Paper Due Date

  • August 25, 2022

• Notification of Acceptance

  • September 25, 2022

• Camera-ready papers due

  • October 10, 2022

For inquiries, send an email to the workshop co-chairs at: workshopchairs.aacl2022@gmail.com