Call for Papers

Widening NLP Workshop 2021

The fifth WiNLP (“Widening NLP”) Workshop will be held in conjunction with EMNLP 2021 in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic.

For the regular call for papers, we invite every interested author from an underrepresented group to submit to WiNLP while minimizing conflicts between other ACL-related submission deadlines.

Summary of Dates:

Early submission author workshopping start: May 21, 2021
Early submission deadline (for those requiring time for visa processing): May 28, 2021
Early notification date: July 9, 2021
Author-workshopping start: August 6, 2021
Regular submission deadline: August 13, 2021 (Note: PDFs may be updated until August 13, 2021)
Regular notification date: September 24, 2021
Workshop date: November 11, 2021 (not November 7!)
Submission link: https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2021/WiNLP/

Workshop description

The WiNLP workshop is open to all to foster an inclusive and welcoming ACL environment. It aims to promote diversity and highlight the work of underrepresented groups in NLP: anyone who self-identifies within an underrepresented demographic [gender, ethnicity, nationality, etc]. The 2021 iteration of the workshop will, in particular, seek to highlight women and LGBTQ+ researchers, as well as diversity in scientific background, discipline, training, obtained degrees, seniority, and communities from underrepresented languages. The full-day event includes invited talks, oral presentations, and poster sessions. The workshop provides an excellent opportunity for junior members in the community to showcase their work and connect with senior mentors for feedback and career advice. It also offers recruitment opportunities with leading industrial labs. Most importantly, the workshop will provide an inclusive and accepting space, and work to lower structural barriers to joining and collaborating with the NLP community at large.

While everyone is encouraged to attend, the opportunity to present a talk or poster is intended for members of underrepresented groups at all career levels: students, post-docs, professors, and other researchers. We invite submissions in the form of an extended 2-page abstract on topics in computational linguistics and natural language processing, including but not limited to:

Cognitive modeling and psycholinguistics
Computational social science
Corpus development and evaluation
Dialog and interactive systems
Discourse and pragmatics
Document analysis including text categorization, topic models, and retrieval
Ethics in NLP
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

Submission guidelines

Submissions must be anonymized and follow the standard one-column format. Each submission should be a two-page extended abstract PDF, with any number of additional pages allowed for references (WiNLP/COLING proceedings format). No appendices will be accepted.

Submissions should follow the same style and format guidelines as past years (LaTeX style files, Word template) and be submitted electronically in PDF format via the WiNLP 2021 online submission system: https://ww w.softconf.com/emnlp2021/WiNLP/

Submission link: https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2021/WiNLP/
LaTeX template link: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/template-and-instructions-for-winlp-2021/cttkkxsjdrvh
Word template link: https://www.winlp.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/WiNLP20_Template.docx

Peer Workshopping and Reviewing Procedure

One week prior to the submission deadline, authors will have the option to peer-review each others’ abstracts in a non-anonymous format, in groups of two or three authors. Authors taking this option commit to help their peers edit and format their submissions, or revise for clarity, or provide general feedback before the submission is reviewed. Authors may use the feedback provided during this peer-editing period to update their submissions in time for the submission deadline. As in WiNLP 2020, the program committee may still provide reviews, feedback, and direct writing mentorship for applicants, but the intent of peer-editing is to share this responsibility with the participants so that it can scale with the size of the workshop. Whether or not authors take advantage of this peer-review option in advance of submission, all submissions are due on the deadline.
To sign up and take advantage of peer workshopping, use the following link: [Sign-Up Link]. You must sign up prior to the workshopping start date to be included in this process (that is, by May 20 at the latest for early review and by April 5 at the latest for regular review).
After the submission deadline, abstracts will be reviewed in the traditional double-blind format. Abstracts will be evaluated on relevance to the community; the presentation format (talk or poster) will be decided based on scientific merit and potential interest to a broad audience.

Multiple-Submission Policy

As we aim for improved and increased representation of underrepresented minorities, we will consider anonymized two pages abstracts of papers that have been submitted to other venues or have already been published elsewhere since January 1, 2021. However, authors must clearly indicate this at submission time.

Authors may not submit the same work to both the regular and visa-friendly deadlines.

Travel Support

There will be a limited amount of travel grants and/or additional funding to cover expenses, similar to the previous editions. More information will be made available closer to the submission deadline and linked from https://www.winlp.org/winlp-2021-workshop/