General Invitation for Submission

The Student Research Workshop (SRW) provides a venue for student researchers to present their work in computational linguistics and natural language processing. Students receive feedback from the general conference audience as well as from mentors specifically assigned according to the topic of their work.

We invite papers in two different categories:

• 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.

• 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 NAACL main conference. See the list of topics here.

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.

• All accepted papers will be published in the NAACL 2018 SRW Proceedings.

• 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.

Important Dates

• Submission for mentoring deadline: January 15 January 22, 2018

• Papers submission deadline: March 02, 2018

• Acceptance notification deadline: April 02, 2018.

• Camera-ready papers due: April 16, 2018.

All deadlines are calculated at 11:59 pm (PST/GMT -8 hours)

Submission Requirements

UPDATE ACL has recently adopted new policies including very specific requirements for anonymizing submissions regarding posting preprints to online, such as arXiv or blogs. Here is the relevant section. But we encourage authors to consult to the new policies before submitting papers.

ACL conferences and TACL require that submissions be anonymized. A submission will not be considered anonymized if the authors post (or update) a non-anonymized preprint version within an anonymity period lasting from 1 month before the submission deadline until the time of notification (or withdrawal). Submissions will be rejected if not properly anonymized.

• Anonymized preprints within the anonymity period are allowed. This is currently only possible on certain platforms but ACL may consider using such a platform for all submissions in the future.
• Non-anonymized preprints before the anonymity period are allowed, although we encourage authors to wait to post them until after the anonymity period.
• If a non-anonymized preprint version exists, authors must declare its existence at submission time but should not cite it and are asked not to publicize it further during the anonymity period – the submitted paper should be as anonymous as possible.

The notion of preprint is understood broadly to refer to any non-refereed paper posted online, including but not limited to preprint servers such as arXiv. Note that the rule applies only to preprints that authors post themselves, so it does not apply to (say) non-refereed proceedings volumes. The restriction on updating is to prevent authors from circumventing these rules by “flag planting” with a placeholder version over 1 month in advance.

All papers should follow the two-column format of the NAACL HLT 2018 proceedings (see below). All papers will have a maximum limit of 6 pages for content, with unlimited additional pages for references. Papers which do not conform to these specifications will be rejected without review. Submissions must conform to the specifications of NAACL HLT 2018 call for papers regarding multiple submissions and preparing papers for the double-blind review process.

Use the Softconf link below for submission: https://www.softconf.com/naacl2018/naacl2018-SRW

Style and Format

Submissions should follow the NAACL HLT 2018 style guidelines:

• LaTeX
• Microsoft Word
• Overleaf

All submissions must in PDF format.

Facilitate double blind review

Double blind review is a form of peer review in which the identities of authors are not provided to reviewers, and the identities of reviewers are not provided to authors. To facilitate double blind review, submissions should not identify authors or their affiliations. For example, self-references that reveal the author’s identity, e.g., “We previously showed (Smith, 1991) …” must be avoided. Instead, use citations such as “Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) …”.

Any preliminary non-archival versions of submitted papers should be listed in the submission form but not in the review version of the paper. NAACL HLT 2018 reviewers are generally aware that authors may present preliminary versions of their work in other venues, but will not be provided the list of previous presentations from the submission form.

Authors are referred to the ACL author guidelines for additional information on how to facilitate double blind review.

Submissions that do not adhere to the above author guidelines may be rejected without review.

Grants

We expect to have grants to offset some portion of the students’ conference registration, travel and accommodation expenses. Further details will be posted in the SRW website.

Contact Information

The co-chairs of the workshop can be contacted by email at: naacl2018-srw@googlegroups.com.