ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Due to the continued down of softconf, we decided to extend the ACL-IJCNLP deadline by 1 full day (i.e. February 2nd 11:59PM UTC-12 (“anywhere on Earth”))

We have received a lot of questions about papers submitted to NAACL 2021 and ICLR 2021:
(1) If you plan to re-submit your NAACL 2021 submission to ACL-IJCNLP 2021, you must submit to ACL-IJCNLP 2021 an abstract by Jan 25 and the full paper by Feb 1, AND withdraw your paper from NAACL 2021 by Feb 1, 2021.
(2) If your paper has been rejected by ICLR 2021, you cannot resubmit it to ACL-IJCNLP 2021 because ICLR 2021 will post the rejected paper list after Jan 1 (the start of the anonymity period for ACL-IJCNLP 2021). However, if you withdrew your submission from ICLR 2021 on or before Jan 1, 2021, you can resubmit it to ACL-IJCNLP 2021, assuming you do not post the paper online after Jan 1. 2021.
For more detail, see the Paper Submission FAQ at https://2021.aclweb.org/blog/paper-submission-faqs/

The submission site is now available at https://www.softconf.com/acl2021/papers/. Please be aware of the abstract submission deadline on January 25, 2021, which is a week ahead of the full paper submission deadline on February 1, 2021. Here are the abstract submission form and the full paper submission form for your reference.

Final CFP: ACL-IJCNLP 2021, Bangkok, Thailand

The Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing
The Berkeley Hotel, Bangkok, Thailand
August 1-6, 2021
https://2021.aclweb.org/

The Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2021) is currently scheduled to take place in Bangkok, Thailand, during August 1-6, 2021. We are monitoring the ongoing global pandemic and will update the conference plans (e.g., moving to a virtual or hybrid format) as needed closer to the conference dates.

CALL FOR PAPERS - MAIN CONFERENCE

ACL-IJCNLP 2021 invites the submission of long and short papers on substantial, original, and unpublished research in all aspects of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing.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) and Computational Linguistics (CL) journals.

Important Dates

Anonymity period begins:	January 1, 2021
Abstract submission deadline (long & short papers):	January 25, 2021
Full paper submission deadline (long & short papers):	~~February 1, 2021~~ February 2, 2021
Author global profile and author form deadline:	February 1, 2021
Desk reject notification:	February 28, 2021
Author response period:	March 25-31, 2021
Notification of acceptance:	May 5, 2021
Camera-ready due:	June 1, 2021

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

Mandatory abstract submission: The paper title, author names, contact details, and a brief abstract must be submitted electronically through the ACL-IJCNLP 2021 paper submission site by the abstract submission deadline. It will be possible to make minor edits to the title and abstract until the full paper submission deadline but you cannot change authors and subject areas. Submissions with "placeholder" abstracts will be removed without consideration. Notice that if you miss the abstract submission deadline, then you cannot submit the full paper.

SUBMISSIONS

ACL-IJCNLP 2021 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):

Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics
Dialogue and Interactive Systems
Discourse and Pragmatics
Ethics and NLP
Information Extraction
Information Retrieval and Text Mining
Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP
Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond
Linguistic theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics
Machine Learning for NLP
Machine Translation and Multilinguality
NLP Applications
Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation
Question Answering
Resources and Evaluation
Semantics: Lexical
Semantics: Sentence-level Semantics, Textual Inference and Other areas
Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
Speech and Multimodality
Summarization
Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing
Theme: NLP for Social Good

Following the success of the ACL 2020 Theme track, we are happy to announce that ACL-IJCNLP 2021 will have a new theme, with the goal of stimulating discussion about the role of NLP in the society.

The application of Artificial Intelligence to provide positive social impact has been an important topic in recent years. However, to date, this has not been a topic highlighted at the ACL main conference. For ACL-IJCNLP 2021, we seek to reverse this by putting a spotlight on papers which discuss and reflect on the topic of NLP for Social Good as well as how NLP could potentially cause or be used for social harm. We invite researchers to submit position, opinion, modeling, and resource papers on the following topics:

Defining “NLP for Social Good” and in which ways NLP can improve people’s lives in various dimensions
Known issues, unaddressed harms, and potential damages that NLP can cause on society (e.g., political polarization, privacy issues)
Discussions of how NLP research can make both positive and negative impacts and novel approaches to foster the former while mitigating the latter
Quantitative and qualitative methods to assess the social impact of NLP research
Ways in which NLP practitioners can partner with practitioners from other fields to develop socially impactful research and applications
Applications of NLP for addressing socially relevant problems such as health, education, and other areas covered by (and not limited to) the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Please note that the paper should provide evidence of the methodology applied to a real-world setting. At the least, one should simulate the real-world setting that the system is meant to improve.
Reflecting on the NLP community’s current progress for solving real-world, socially impactful problems and how to make meaningful changes toward that goal over the foreseeable future
Discussions of how heavily aligned NLP research should be with real-world topics regarding social good.
You can find details here

PAPER SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Long Papers

Long papers must describe substantial, original, completed and unpublished work. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation and analysis should be included.

Long papers may consist of up to eight (8) pages of content, plus unlimited pages of 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

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
A negative result
An opinion piece
An interesting application nugget

Short papers may consist of up to four (4) pages of content, plus unlimited pages of references. Final versions of short papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 5 pages) so that reviewers' comments can be taken into account.

Short papers will be presented orally or as posters as determined by the program committee. 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.

Theme Papers

Submission requirements for theme papers are the same as long papers.

IMPORTANT: Anonymity Period

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 (starting January 1, 2021 11:59PM UTC-12:00) up to the date when your paper is either accepted, rejected, or withdrawn (May 5, 2021). Papers that are withdrawn during this period will no longer be subject to these rules.

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.
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-nonymized 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.

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, but these resources should be anonymized as well.

Authorship

The author list for submissions should include all (and only) individuals who made substantial contributions to the work presented. Each author listed on a submission to ACL-IJCNLP 2021 will be notified of submissions, revisions and the final decision. No changes to the order or composition of authorship may be made to submissions to ACL-IJCNLP 2021 after the abstract submission deadline, which is January 25, 2011.

Citation and Comparison

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.

Multiple Submission Policy

ACL-IJCNLP 2021 will not consider any paper that is under review in a journal or another conference at the time of submission, and submitted papers must not be submitted elsewhere during the ACL-IJCNLP 2021 review period. This policy covers all refereed and archival conferences and workshops (e.g., IJCAI, SIGIR, NAACL). The only exception is that a paper can be dual-submitted to the ACL-IJCNLP 2021 main conference and an ACL-IJCNLP 2021 workshop.

In addition, we will not consider any paper that overlaps significantly in content or results with papers that will be (or have been) published elsewhere. Authors submitting more than one paper to ACL-IJCNLP 2021 must ensure that submissions do not overlap significantly (>25%) with each other in content or results.

Ethics Policy

Authors are required to honour the ethical code set out in the ACL Code of Ethics.

The consideration of the ethical impact of our research, use of data, and potential applications of our work has always been an important consideration, and as artificial intelligence is becoming more mainstream, these issues are increasingly pertinent. We ask that all authors read the code, and ensure that their work is conformant to this code. Where a paper may raise ethical issues, we ask that you include in the paper an explicit discussion of these issues, which will be taken into account in the review process. We reserve the right to reject papers on ethical grounds, where the authors are judged to have operated counter to the code of ethics, or have inadequately addressed legitimate ethical concerns with their work. Indeed, the ACL-IJCNLP 2021 review form includes a section addressing these issues and papers flagged for ethical concerns by reviewers or ACs will be further reviewed by the Ethic Advisory Committee (EAC).

Read the FAQ for ethical discussion standards adopted by the conference and the questions in the ethics section of the review form. If any of these questions apply to your work or you anticipate other ethical concerns, please make sure to include an ethical statement in your paper that addresses those questions. Authors will be allowed extra space after the 8th page (4th for short papers) for a broader impact statement or other discussion of ethics. Note that though the ethical consideration paragraph is not mandatory, authors of papers working with sensitive data or on sensitive tasks that do not sufficiently discuss these issues may receive a conditional acceptance recommendation. Camera-ready versions of papers designated as conditional accept will be re-reviewed by the ethics committee to determine whether the concerns have been adequately addressed.

Reproducibility Criteria

Similar to NAACL 2021, we will provide a reproducibility checklist that authors will be asked to answer during paper submission. The checklist is intended as a reminder to help authors improve reproducibility of their papers. The papers are not required to meet all reproducibility criteria listed. The author instruction on reproducibility criteria and checklist will be available here.
The reproducibility checklist is based on previous versions in Dodge et al, 2019 and Joelle Pineau’s reproducibility checklist.

Paper Submission and Templates

Submission is electronic, using the Softconf START conference management system. The submission site is available at https://www.softconf.com/acl2021/papers/. All long, short and theme papers must follow the ACL Author Guidelines. Here are the Abstract Submission Form and the Full Paper Submission Form for your reference.

Paper submissions must use the official ACL-IJCNLP 2021 style templates, which are available as an Overleaf template and also downloaded directly (Latex and Word). Please follow the paper formatting guidelines general to *ACL conferences available here. The templates themselves contain only specific notes (e.g., LaTeX notes in the .tex file).

Please do not modify these style files, or use templates designed for other conferences. Submissions that do not conform to the required styles, including paper size, margin width, and font size restrictions, will be rejected without review. Submissions which include appendices in the main papers will be rejected without review.

Here is the current version of the Review Form. We may make minor changes later.

Optional Supplementary Materials: Appendices, Software and Data

Each ACL-IJCNLP 2021 submission can be accompanied by a single PDF appendix, one .tgz or .zip archive containing software, and one .tgz or .zip archive containing data. ACL-IJCNLP 2021 encourages the submission of these supplementary materials to improve the reproducibility of results, and to enable authors to provide additional information that does not fit in the paper. For example, preprocessing decisions, model parameters, feature templates, lengthy proofs or derivations, pseudocode, sample system inputs/outputs, and other details that are necessary for the exact replication of the work described in the paper can be put into the appendix. However, the paper submissions need to remain fully self-contained, as these supplementary materials are completely optional, and reviewers are not even asked to review or download them. If the pseudo-code or derivations or model specifications are an important part of the contribution, or if they are important for the reviewers to assess the technical correctness of the work, they should be a part of the main paper, and not appear in the appendix. Supplementary materials need to be fully anonymized to preserve the double-blind reviewing policy.

Note: The supplementary material does not count towards page limit and should not be included in paper, but must be submitted separately using the appropriate field on the submission website. Appendix may consist of up to four (4) pages.

PRESENTATION REQUIREMENT

All accepted papers must be presented at the conference to appear in the proceedings. Authors of papers accepted for presentation at ACL-IJCNLP 2021 must notify the program chairs by the camera-ready deadline if they wish to withdraw the paper.

At least one author of each accepted paper must register for ACL-IJCNLP 2021 by the early registration deadline.

CONTACT INFORMATION

General chair:
Chengqing Zong, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Program co-chairs:
Fei Xia, University of Washington
Wenjie Li, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Roberto Navigli, Sapienza University of Rome

Email: acl2021programchairs@googlegroups.com