Call for Papers

The 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2019)

Florence, Italy
July 28 - August 2, 2019
http://acl2019.org

Update, 25th May 2019: Authors of accepted papers should read the instructions for camera-ready submissions.

CALL FOR PAPERS - MAIN CONFERENCE

The ACL 2019 conference invites the submission of long and short papers on substantial, original, and unpublished research in all aspects of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing. As in recent years, some of the presentations at the conference will be of papers accepted by the Transactions of the ACL (TACL) journal.

IMPORTANT DATES

  • Submission deadline (long & short papers): March 4
  • Notification of acceptance: May 13
  • Camera-ready due: June 3
  • Tutorials: July 28, 2019
  • Conference: July 29-31, 2019
  • Workshops and Co-located conferences: August 1-2, 2019

Note: All deadlines are 11:59PM UTC-12:00 ("anywhere on Earth").

SUBMISSIONS

ACL 2019 has the goal of a broad technical program. Relevant topics for the conference include, but are not limited to, the following areas (in alphabetical order):

  • Applications
  • Dialogue and Interactive Systems
  • Discourse and Pragmatics
  • Document Analysis
  • Generation
  • Information Extraction and Text Mining
  • Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics
  • Machine Learning
  • Machine Translation
  • Multidisciplinary
  • Multilinguality
  • Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation
  • Question Answering
  • Resources and Evaluation
  • Sentence-level semantics
  • Sentiment Analysis and Argument Mining
  • Social Media
  • Summarization
  • Tagging, Chunking, Syntax and Parsing
  • Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics
  • Vision, Robotics, Multimodal, Grounding and Speech
  • Word-level Semantics

Long Papers

Long ACL 2019 submissions must describe substantial, original, completed and unpublished work. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation and analysis should be included. Review forms will be made available prior to the deadlines.

Long papers may consist of up to eight (8) pages of content, plus unlimited references; final versions of long papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 9 pages) so that reviewers' comments can be taken into account.

Long papers will be presented orally or as posters as determined by the program committee. The decisions as to which papers will be presented orally and which as poster presentations will be based on the nature rather than the quality of the work. There will be no distinction in the proceedings between long papers presented orally and as posters.

Short Papers

ACL 2019 also solicits short papers. Short paper submissions must describe original and unpublished work. Please note that a short paper is not a shortened long paper. Instead short papers should have a point that can be made in a few pages. Some kinds of short papers are:

  • A small, focused contribution
  • Work in progress
  • A negative result
  • An opinion piece
  • An interesting application nugget

Short papers may consist of up to four (4) pages of content, plus unlimited references. Upon acceptance, short papers will be given five (5) content pages in the proceedings. Authors are encouraged to use this additional page to address reviewers' comments in their final versions.

Short papers will be presented in one or more oral or poster sessions. While short papers will be distinguished from long papers in the proceedings, there will be no distinction in the proceedings between short papers presented orally and as posters.

ANONYMITY AND SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

As the reviewing will be blind, papers must not include authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, 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) ..." Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review.

Papers should not refer, for further detail, to documents that are not available to the reviewers. For example, do not omit or redact important citation information to preserve anonymity. Instead, use third person or named reference to this work, as described above (“Smith showed” rather than “we showed”).

Papers may be accompanied by a resource (software and/or data) described in the paper. Papers that are submitted with accompanying software/data may receive additional credit toward the overall evaluation, and the potential impact of the software and data will be taken into account when making the acceptance/rejection decisions.

ACL 2019 also encourages the submission of supplementary material to report preprocessing decisions, model parameters, and other details necessary for the replication of the experiments reported in the paper. Seemingly small preprocessing decisions can sometimes make a large difference in performance, so it is crucial to record such decisions to precisely characterize state-of-the-art methods.

Nonetheless, supplementary material should be supplementary (rather than central) to the paper. It may include explanations or details of proofs or derivations that do not fit into the paper, lists of features or feature templates, sample inputs and outputs for a system, pseudo-code or source code, and data. The paper should not rely on the supplementary material: while the paper may refer to and cite the supplementary material and the supplementary material will be available to reviewers, they will not be asked to review or even download the supplementary material. Authors should refer to the contents of the supplementary material in the paper submission, so that reviewers interested in these supplementary details will know where to look.

PAPER SUBMISSION AND TEMPLATES

Submission is electronic, using the Softconf START conference management system. The submission site is now available at https://www.softconf.com/acl2019/papers/

Long/short paper submissions must use the official ACL 2019 style templates. Long papers must not exceed eight (8) pages of content. Short papers must not exceed four (4) pages of content. References do not count against these limits.

Note: The supplementary material does not count towards page limit and should not be included in paper, but should be submitted separately using the appropriate field on the submission website.

All submissions must be in PDF format and must conform to the official style guidelines, which are contained in the template files that will become available on the conference website shortly.

MULTIPLE SUBMISSION POLICY

Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must indicate this at submission time in the START submission form, and must be withdrawn from the other venues if accepted by ACL 2019. Authors of papers accepted for presentation at ACL 2019 must notify the program chairs by the camera-ready deadline as to whether the paper will be presented. We will not accept for publication or presentation the papers that overlap significantly in content or results with papers that will be (or have been) published elsewhere.

Authors submitting more than one paper to ACL 2019 must ensure that submissions do not overlap significantly (>25%) with each other in content or results.

ACL AUTHOR GUIDELINES

ACL 2019 adopts the following ACL guidelines for submission and citation. Submissions that do not conform to these guidelines will be rejected without review.

Preserving Double Blind Review

The following rules and guidelines are meant to protect the integrity of double-blind review and ensure that submissions are reviewed fairly. The rules make reference to the anonymity period, which runs from 1 month before the submission deadline up (starting February 4, 2019) to the date when your paper is either accepted, rejected, or withdrawn.

  • You may not make a non-anonymized version of your paper available online to the general community (for example, via a preprint server) during the anonymity period. By a version of a paper we understand another paper having essentially the same scientific content but possibly differing in minor details (including title and structure) and/or in length (e.g., an abstract is a version of the paper that it summarizes).
  • 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 conference. The submitted version must not refer to the non-anonymized version, and you must inform the program chair(s) that a non-anonymized version exists. You may not update the non-anonymized version during the anonymity period, and we ask you not to advertise it on social media or take other actions that would further compromise double-blind reviewing during the anonymity period.
  • Note that, while you are not prohibited from making a non-anonymous version available online before the start of the anonymity period, this does make double-blind reviewing more difficult to maintain, and we therefore encourage you to wait until the end of the anonymity period if possible. Alternatively, you may consider submitting your work to the Computational Linguistics journal, which does not require anonymization and has a track for "short" (i.e., conference-length) papers.

Citation and Comparison

If you are aware of previous research that appears sound and is relevant to your work, you should cite it even if it has not been peer-reviewed, and certainly if it influenced your own work. However, refereed publications take priority over unpublished work reported in preprints. Specifically:

  • You are expected to cite all refereed publications relevant to your submission, but you may be excused for not knowing about all unpublished work (especially work that has been recently posted and/or is not widely cited).
  • In cases where a preprint has been superseded by a refereed publication, the refereed publication should be cited in addition to or instead of the preprint version.

Papers (whether refereed or not) appearing less than 3 months before the submission deadline are considered contemporaneous to your submission, and you are therefore not obliged to make detailed comparisons that require additional experimentation and/or in-depth analysis.

For more information, see the ACL Policies for Submission, Review, and Citation: https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/new-policies-submission-review-and-citation

PRESENTATION REQUIREMENT

All accepted papers must be presented at the conference to appear in the proceedings. At least one author of each accepted paper must register for ACL 2019 by the early registration deadline.

CONTACT INFORMATION

[General chair]
Lluís Màrquez - Amazon

[Program co-chairs]
Anna Korhonen - University of Cambridge
David Traum - University of Southern California

[Programme co-chairs email]
acl2019pc@gmail.com

[Area chairs]

ACL 2019 has 22 areas. Each area is headed by two Senior Area Chairs (SACs) who have the overall responsibility of all the submissions in the area. They are assisted by Area Chairs (ACs) who handle the review process for a subset of papers in each area.

More information on the areas can be found here.

Dialogue and Interactive Systems:
SACs: Kallirroi Georgila, Ryuichiro Higashinaka,
ACs: Michel Galley, Zhou Yu, Milica Gasic, Rebecca J. Passonneau, Gabriel Skantze, Matthew Marge, Helen Hastie, Kazunori Komatani, Yun-Nung Chen, Pascale Fung

Discourse and Pragmatics:
SACs: Annie Louis, Andrew Kehler
ACs: Benamara Farah, Giuseppe Carenini, Michael Strube, Bonnie Webber, Smaranda Muresan, Manfred Stede

Document Analysis:
SACs: Bracha Shapira, Eugene Agichtein
ACs: Michael Bendersky, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Anton Leuski, Andrei Popescu-Belis, Peng Zhang, Xiang Ren, Sujian Li

Generation:
SACs: Cecile Paris, Kees van Deemter
ACs: Leo Wanner, Anya Belz, Leila Kosseim, Advaith Siddarthan, Nadjet Bouayad, Kathy McCoy, Stephanie M. Lukin, Matthew Stone, Nina Dethlefs, John Kelleher, Paul Piwek, Yoav Goldberg

Information Extraction and Text Mining:
SACs: Alessandro Moschitti, Heng Ji, Mausam, Hannaneh Hajishirzi
ACs: Isabelle Augenstein, Nazli Goharian, Ruihong Huang, Kevin Cohen, Siddharth Patwardhan, Sumithra Velupillai, Yunyao Li, Gerard de Melo, Mark Stevenson, Avi Sil, Aurélie Névéol, Kenneth Church, Alan Ritter, Hoifung Poon, Nut Limsopatham

Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics:
SACs: Frank Keller, Aline Villavicencio
ACs: Afra Alishahi, Yevgeni Berzak, Shuly Wintner, Vera Demberg, Emily Prud'hommeaux

Machine Learning:
SACs: Chris Dyer, Ariadna Quattoni
ACs: Ashish Vaswani, Kai-Wei Chang, Fei Sha, Barbara Plank, William Yang, Tim Rocktäschel, Le Sun, Jason Naradowsky, Alice Oh, Amir Globerson, Pontus Stenetorp, Andreas Vlachos

Machine Translation:
SACs: Trevor Cohn, Yang Liu
ACs: Dekai Wu, Kevin Duh, Jörg Tiedemann, Deyi Xiong, Taro Watanabe, Philipp Koehn, Marine Carpuat, Arianna Bisazza, Alexander Fraser, Zhaopeng Tu, Qun Liu, Yvette Graham, Daniel Cer, Minh-Thang Luong

Multidisciplinary (also for AC COI):
SACs: Patrick Pantel, Julia Hockenmaier
ACs: Yoav Artzi, Bowen Zhou, Grzegorz Chrupała, Dong Nguyen, Simone Paolo, Sara Rosenthal

Multilinguality:
SACs: Joakim Nivre, Timothy Baldwin
ACs: Anders Søgaard, Jonathan May, Christian Hardmeier

Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation:
SACs: Graham Neubig, Hinrich Schütze
ACs: Ryan Cotterell, Manaal Faruqui, Hai Zhao, Kemal Oflazer, Miikka Silfverberg

Question Answering:
SACs: Sanda Harabagiu, Zornitsa Kozareva
ACs: Kang Liu, Yansong Feng, Shafiq Joty, Eric Nyberg, Preslav Nakov, Giovanni Da San Martino, Jennifer Chu-Carroll, Idan Szpektor

Resources and Evaluation:
SACs: Sara Tonelli, Ron Artstein
ACs: Gina-Anne Levow, Thierry Declerck, Nancy Ide, Kenji Sagae, Udo Kruschwitz, Beata Megyesi, Roberto Navigli, Owen Rambow

Sentence-level Semantics:
SACs: Mona Diab, Ivan Titov
ACs: Wei Xu, Siva Reddy, Steven Bethard, Eduardo Blanco, Wenpeng Yin, Liang Huang, Edward Grefenstette, Michael Roth, Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Anette Frank

Sentiment Analysis and Argument Mining:
SACs: Marie-Francine Moens, Bing Liu
ACs: Saif Mohammad, Els Lefever, Liang-Chih Yu, Yulan He, Oren Tsur, Claire Cardie, Yue Zhang, Swapna Somasundaran, Jinho D. Choi

Social Media:
SACs: Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Jacob Eisenstein
ACs: Kalina Bontcheva, Nigel Collier, Dirk Hovy, David Jurgens, Tim Finin, Diyi Yang, Wei Gao, Wei Wei

Summarization:
SACs: Mirella Lapata, Chin-Yew Lin
ACs: Wenjie Li, Xiaojun Wan, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung, Shashi Narayan, Xiaodan Zhu, Fei Liu

Tagging, Chunking, Syntax and Parsing:
SACs: Phil Blunsom, Noah A. Smith
ACs: Roi Reichart, Marek Rei, Daisuke Kawahara, Emily Pitler, Omri Abend, Weiwei Sun

Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics:
SACs: Sabine Schulte im Walde, Raffaella Bernardi
ACs: Omer Levy, Angeliki Lazaridou, Jonathan Berant, Vivek Srikumar, Dimitri Kartsaklis, Christopher Potts, Roy Schwartz

Vision, Robotics, Multimodal, Grounding and Speech:
SACs: Louis-Philippe Morency, Michael Johnston
ACs: Catharine Oertel, Matthias Scheutz, Sakriani Sakti, Elia Bruni, Manny Rayner, Douwe Kiela, Yonatan Bisk, Yale Song

Word-level Semantics:
SACs: Eneko Agirre, Diana McCarthy
ACs: Mohammad Taher Pilehvar, Ekaterina Shutova, Ivan Vulić, Laura Rimell, Paul Cook, Chris Biemann, Marianna Apidianaki, Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha, Jose Camacho-Collados, Aitor Soroa

Applications:
SACs: Joel Tetreault, Karin Verspoor
ACs: Ekaterina Kochmar, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Razvan Bunescu, Sarvnaz Karimi, Filip Ginter, Vincent Ng, Beth Ann, Jens Edlund, Maria Liakata

Student Research Workshop Collocated with ACL 2019 Florence, Italy

Main Conference: July 29 - 31st, 2019
Paper Submission Deadline: April 26, 2019
sites.google.com/view/acl19studentresearchworkshop/

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General Rule for Submission
=========================

The ACL 2019 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: from those in the final stages of undergraduate training to those active with graduate thesis research.

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Benefits of participation
=========================

All accepted research papers and research proposals 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.

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 ACL 2019 SRW Proceedings. All non-archival papers may be submitted to other 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.

The SRW invites two types of submissions:

  • Research Papers: completed work or work-in-progress along with preliminary results. We encourage submissions from Ph.D. students, as well as Masters or advanced undergraduate students.
  • Research Proposals: for advanced Masters and Ph.D. students who have decided on a thesis topic and are interested in feedback about their proposal and ideas about future directions for their work.

We provide two mentoring programs:

  • Pre-submission Mentoring: the goal is to improve presentation of the student's work, not to critique the work itself. Mentors will provide feedback in the format of guidelines and suggestions to improve the overall writing.
  • Mentoring for Accepted Papers: mentors will be responsible for providing feedback to students and preparing in-depth comments and questions prior to the workshop presentation.

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Important Dates
================

All deadlines are at 23:59 PST the specified dates.

  • Pre-submission mentoring deadline: March 5, 2019
  • Pre-submission mentoring feedback: April 2, 2019
  • Paper submission deadline: April 26, 2019
  • Review deadline: May 7, 2019
  • Acceptance notification: May 24, 2019
  • Camera-ready deadline: June 3 , 2019
  • Travel grant application deadline: June 12, 2019
  • Travel grant notification: June 15, 2019
  • ACL conference dates: July 28 - Aug 2, 2019

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Submission Requirement
=====================

We accept both archival submissions (i.e., the work can be included in the conference proceedings) and non-archival submissions (the work will be presented in the workshop, but won’t be part of the proceedings). The archival submissions should not previously been published in any peer-reviewed venues and can’t submitted to one in the future. If your work was previously published or is under submission elsewhere, please choose non-archival so you can still present a poster but we won't publish your paper in the ACL anthology.

All papers consist of up to five (5) pages of content, plus unlimited references. Upon acceptance, will be given six (6) content page. Authors are encouraged to use this additional page to address reviewers’ comments in their final versions.

Paper submissions must use the official ACL 2018 style templates. All submissions must be in PDF format and must conform to the official style guidelines, which are contained in these template files.

To submit your paper or proposal, please use the Softconf START conference management system at https://www.softconf.com/acl2019/SRW/

The deadline for submission is April 26, 2019.
The deadline pre-submission mentoring is March 5, 2019.

The SRW invites papers on topics related to computational linguistics, including but not limited to:

  • Cognitive modeling and psycholinguistics
  • Corpus development and evaluation
  • Dialog and interactive systems
  • Discourse and pragmatics
  • Document analysis including text categorization, topic models, and retrieval
  • Natural language generation
  • Information extraction, text mining, and question answering
  • Language-inclusive multimodal integration
  • Linguistic theories for NLP
  • Low-resource or endangered languages
  • Machine learning
  • Machine translation
  • Mathematical models of language
  • Multilinguality
  • Phonology, morphology, and word segmentation
  • Resources and evaluation
  • Semantics
  • Sentiment analysis and opinion mining
  • Social media: Twitter, blogs, discussion forums and other social media
  • Sociolinguistics
  • Speech, prosody and spoken dialog
  • Summarization
  • Tagging, chunking, syntax, and parsing
  • Vision, robots, and other grounding applications


Details of the submission guidelines are available here

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Student Chairs
==============

Fernando Alva Manchego - University of Sheffield
Eunsol Choi - University of Washington
Daniel Khashabi - University of Pennsylvania

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Faculty Advisors
==============

Hannaneh Hajishirzi - University of Washington
Aurelie Herbelot - University of Trento
Scott Yih - Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Youe Zhang - Westlake University

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Contact
=========

The organizers of the workshop can be contacted by email at: acl.srw@gmail.com

More details can be found at the SRW website

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Grants
=========

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

Call for System Demonstrations

The ACL 2019 System Demonstration Program Committee invites demo proposals.

Areas of interest include all topics related to theoretical and applied computational linguistics, such as (but not limited to) the topics listed on the main conference
website. Accepted submissions will be published in a companion volume of the ACL 2019 conference proceedings.

This call encourages open-source systems. Commercial sales and marketing activities are NOT appropriate and won’t be accepted in the demo program.

Best Demo Award

This year we will provide a Best Demo Award. We hope to encourage researchers to make their code publicly available and in the form of an easy-to-use, runnable system.

Important Dates

  • Paper submission deadline: April 11th, 2019
  • Notification of acceptance: May 17th, 2019
  • Camera-ready submission: June 10th, 2019

Note: All deadlines are 11:59PM UTC-12:00 ("anywhere on Earth").

Demo Details

Developers should outline the design of their system and provide sufficient details to allow the evaluation of its validity, quality, and relevance to computational linguistics.

Pointers to web sites running a demo preview will also be helpful. For non web-based demos, it is possible to submit a short (~2 minute) screencast video demonstrating the system. This screencast will be used to evaluate the paper, but won’t be published unless requested. We encourage the authors to include visual aids (e.g., screenshots, snapshots, or diagrams) in the paper. However, there will be place on the START website to upload additional material, if needed. If you choose to submit a screencast, please upload the video to some hosting site (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) and include the link in your submission.

Demo submissions should also clearly indicate if any computer equipment is expected to be provided by the local organizer. If so, please specify desired hardware platform, hard disk and memory capacity, operating system and other software needed in order to run the demo.

Demo Submission

Submission is electronic, using the Softconf START conference management system at https://www.softconf.com/acl2019/demos.

Style files should meet the requirements of the ACL main conference. Submissions may consist of up to 6 pages (including references). Submissions must conform to the ACL 2019 official style guidelines and they must be in PDF format. The submissions have to be original work (unpublished), as the publication in ACL will be archival.

Reviewing Policy

Reviewing will be single-blind, so authors do not need to conceal their identity. The paper should include the authors’ names and affiliations. Self-references are also allowed.

Demo co-chairs

Marta R. Costa-jussà - Technical University of Catalonia
Enrique Alfonseca - Google