Call for Birds-of-a-feather session hosts at COLING 2020 (December 8-11)

The COLING 2020 organizers invite submissions for “birds of a feather” (BoF) sessions during the main conference (December 8 through December 11, 2020). BoF sessions will take place in parallel to main conference sessions. They are meant to facilitate networking, discussions, and other informal interactions around topics related to computational linguistics and natural language processing. Each BoF session at COLING 2020 will be 30 minutes long, although rooms can stay open at the end if the participants wish to stay longer. BoF sessions are hosted on Underline, and BoF hosts will receive training on how to start and manage live sessions on that platform. Topic areas for potential BoF sessions include, but are not limited to:

  • Debiasing datasets and algorithms
  • Diversity in the NLP/CL community
  • Teaching NLP
  • Applications (including BioNLP and eHealth, NLP for legal purposes, NLP for Social Media and Journalism, - among others)
  • Dialogue and Interactive Systems
  • Discourse and Pragmatics
  • Document classification, topic modelling, information retrieval and crosslingual retrieval
  • Language Generation
  • Language Modelling
  • Information Extraction and Text Mining, and Knowledge Graph
  • Language Resources and Evaluation
  • CL/NLP and Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics
  • Machine Learning for CL/NLP
  • Multilingual processing, Machine Translation and translation aids
  • Morphology and Word Segmentation
  • Semantics (of words, sentences, ontologies and lexical semantics)
  • Sentiment Analysis, Opinion and Argument Mining
  • Speech recognition, text-to-speech and spoken language understanding
  • Summarization and Simplification
  • Tagging, Chunking, Syntax and Parsing
  • Textual Inference and Question Answering
  • Vision, Robotics, Multimodal and Grounded Language Acquisition

BOF sessions are a great way to bring together junior and senior members of the community. This is why we welcome submissions from potential BoF hosts of all career stages. Your main responsibility will be to open the live session on Underline, welcome attendees of the session, and get the conversation going.

We ask that BoF hosts register their sessions by November 29 (UTC-12, “anywhere on Earth”) by filling out this form. If you have any issues accessing the form, please contact Esther Seyffarth.

Optionally, we will offer one briefing session between November 30 and December 8 to answer any questions regarding BoF hosting or the Underline platform. Please indicate in the form whether you would be interested in such a session.

Depending on availability of hosts, we may assign more than one host to BoF sessions, provided they signed up for the same topic(s).

COLING 2020 virtual social chair: Esther Seyffarth (she/her), seyffarth@phil.hhu.de