Call for Tutorials announced!

Joint Call for Tutorial Proposals: COLING/ACL/AACL-IJCNLP/EMNLP 2020

Event Notification Type: Call for Proposals
Contact Email: acl-aacl-emnlp-coling-2020-tutorials@googlegroups.com
Contact: tutorial organizers
Submission Deadline: Monday, 23 September 2019
Joint Call for Tutorial Proposals: COLING/ACL/AACL-IJCNLP/EMNLP 2020

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the ACL, the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) and the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL) invite proposals for tutorials to be held in conjunction with COLING’2020, ACL 2020, AACL-IJCNLP 2020 or EMNLP 2020. We seek proposals in all areas of computational linguistics, broadly conceived to include related disciplines such as linguistics, speech, information retrieval and multimodal processing.

We invite proposals for two types of tutorials:

  • Cutting-edge: tutorials that cover advances in newly emerging areas not previously covered in any ACL/EMNLP/NAACL/EACL/COLING related tutorial (see the list of tutorials in the past 4 years at: https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Past_tutorials).
  • Introductory: tutorials that provide introductions to related fields that are potentially relevant for the computational linguistics community (e.g., linguistics, bioinformatics, social media, machine learning techniques).

Tutorials will be held at one of the following conference venues:

  • COLING’2020 (https://coling2020.org/) is the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. It will be held in Barcelona, Spain on September 13-18, 2020. The tutorials will be held on September 13-14, 2020.
  • ACL 2020 (https://acl2020.org/) is the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. It will be held in Seattle, Washington, USA on July 5-10, 2020. The tutorials will be held on July 5, 2020.
  • AACL 2020 is the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL, http://aaclweb.org/about/index.html). It will be held in Suzhou, China on December 4-7, 2020, jointly with the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP).
  • EMNLP 2020 is the SIGDAT (http://sigdat.org/) conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It will be held in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic on November 8-12, 2020.

FEE WAIVING

In a change from previous years, tutorial instructors will receive no payment. However, up to 3 instructors per tutorial can have their registration fees waived for the main conference and any subset of co-located tutorials and workshops.

DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION

Following the WiNLP (http://www.winlp.org/winlp-2019-workshop/2nd-call-for-papers/) initiative, we recognize the current problems of demographic imbalance in the field. Therefore, we particularly encourage submissions from members of under-represented groups in computational linguistics, i.e. from researchers self-identifying within any underrepresented demographic (gender, ethnicity, nationality, etc.).

SUBMISSION DETAILS

Proposals should follow the ACL 2019 paper submission format (for final submissions), should be submitted as PDF documents and should contain the following:

  • A title, authors and a brief description of the tutorial content and its relevance to the computational linguistics community (no more than 2 pages).
  • Type of the tutorial: introductory vs. cutting-edge
  • A brief outline of the tutorial structure. It should notably show that the core content can be covered in a three-hour slot. In exceptional cases six-hour tutorial slots are available as well. These time limits do not include coffee breaks, e.g., a three-hour tutorial in fact occupies a 3.5-hour slot, and a six-hour tutorial occupies a 7-hour slot.
  • Breadth: include an estimate of what % of the tutorial covers work by the tutorial presenters vs. work by other researchers. We ask for a coverage of at least 50% corresponding to other people’s work, in order to avoid having tutorials that are “self-invited talks”.
  • Diversity considerations (if any), e.g. use of multilingual data, indications of how the described methods scale up to various languages or domains, participation of both senior and junior instructors, possibly affiliated in different countries, gender balance of the instructors, etc.
  • Specification of any prerequisites for the attendees. Here are some examples:
  • Math: e.g., “Understand derivatives and integrals as found in introductory Calculus”
  • Linguistics: e.g., “Be able to parse and generate text with Context Free Grammars”
  • Machine Learning: e.g., “Understand ‘classical’ supervised methods such as decision trees and Naive Bayes”
  • Other areas: e.g., “Familiarity with WordNet”
  • Programming or other tools: e.g., “Knowledge of Python and Unix command line tools”
  • Small reading list. Preferably, at least 50% of the recommended papers should not be co-authored by the tutorial presenters.
  • The names, affiliations, email addresses and websites of the tutorial presenters, including a one-paragraph statement of their research interests, areas of expertise and experience in teaching for an international audience.
  • An estimate of the audience size for the tutorial. If the same or a similar tutorial has been given before, include a note specifying where previous versions of the tutorial were given, how many attendees were at the main venue, and how many attendees the tutorial attracted.
  • A description of special requirements for technical equipment (e.g., Internet access).
  • A note specifying which venue(s) (ACL/AACL-IJCNLP/EMNLP/COLING) would be acceptable and/or preferable. Include a description of any constraints that might make the tutorial compatible with only one of these events, logistically, thematically, or otherwise.
  • Open access. Do you agree to allow the publication of your slides and video recording of your tutorial in the ACL Anthology? Will other teaching material (data, software, etc., if any) be openly available?

Tutorial proposals for COLING/ACL/AACL-IJCNLP/EMNLP should be submitted online using the START system: https://www.softconf.com/j/acl-tutorials2020

Proposals will be reviewed jointly by the Tutorial Co-Chairs of the four conferences and by a group of external experts.

EVALUATION CRITERIA

Each tutorial proposal will be evaluated according to its clarity and preparedness, novelty or timely character of the topic, instructors’ experience, likely audience interest, open access of the teaching material, and diversity aspects (see point 5 above). Additionally, while selecting the final list of tutorials for the 3 conferences, the tutorial chairs will consider compatibility with the required/preferred venues.

TUTORIAL INSTRUCTOR RESPONSIBILITIES

Accepted tutorial presenters will be notified by October 20th, 2019. They must then provide abstracts of their tutorials for inclusion in the conference registration material by the specific conference deadlines. The description should be in two formats: (a) an ASCII version that can be included in email announcements and published on the conference website, and (b) a PDF version for inclusion in the electronic proceedings (detailed instructions will be provided). Tutorial speakers must provide tutorial materials by the deadlines specified for the three conferences (TBD), with course slides submitted at least one month prior to the date of the tutorial. The final submitted tutorial materials must minimally include copies of the course slides and a bibliography for the material covered in the tutorial. After the conference, the presenters will be invited to update their slides in the ACL Anthology (if needed).

IMPORTANT DATES

COLING/ACL/AACL-IJCNLP/EMNLP shared dates for tutorial proposals:

  • Submission deadline for tutorial proposals: September 23th, 2019
  • Notification of acceptance: October 20th, 2019
  • Tutorial slides + abstract + bibliography: one month prior to the date of the tutorial

TUTORIAL CHAIRS

ACL

  • Agata Savary, University of Tours, France
  • Yue Zhang, Westlake University, China

AACL-IJCNLP To be determined

EMNLP To be determined

COLING

  • Daniel Beck, University of Melbourne, Australia
  • Lucia Specia, Imperial College London and University of Sheffield, UK

Please send enquiries concerning ACL/AACL-IJCNLP/EMNLP/COLING 2020 tutorials to the tutorial organizers at acl-aacl-emnlp-coling-2020-tutorials@googlegroups.com.