As Lyn mentioned in the first blog post, an industry track, which focuses on disseminating results from applying NLP technology to real world applications, will debut at NAACL 2018. We are very excited to co-chair this new track and look forward to putting together an interesting program with your contribution and participation!
Why an Industry Track?
The idea of an industry track stemmed from the challenging issues encountered while attempting to apply state-of-the-art techniques to real-world language problems. As those who have attempted these problems know, practical applications are rarely as well defined as in laboratory settings and the data never as clean. In addition, there may be practical constraints with respect to processing speed that need to be met. The NAACL 2018 Industry Track was born out of the desire to provide a forum for researchers and application developers who are experienced in these issues to exchange ideas and share results and insightful anecdotes.
So, if you have experience in applying NLP technologies to practical applications and have interesting results (either positive or negative) to share, we would love for you to consider submitting a paper! We welcome papers covering a wide range of topics, including, but not limited to, novel practical solutions to known problems, evaluation methodologies, and implementation at scale. All papers will be reviewed by three reviewers on the program committee. For more information, including submission instructions, please see the Industry Track Call For Papers.
What Else Will There Be Other Than Papers?
In addition to paper presentations sessions, we are in the process of putting together a program that includes keynote speakers and panel discussions. Keynotes will feature experienced researchers who also have first hand experience applying those research results to practical applications. We are also planning on organizing panel discussions on focused topics that may be of interest to specific segments of the NAACL audience. Some topics under consideration revolve around careers in industry and entrepreneurship. We recently sent out a survey to the ACL membership soliciting suggestions on panel topics. If you have anything you’d like to see, please fill out the survey or get in touch with us directly.
All Industry Track sessions will run as a parallel session during the main conference days.
Got Ideas? Want to Help?
If you have anything specific you would like to see happen in the industry track, or if you would like to contribute to the reviewing process, please contact us at naacl2018-industrial-track@googlegroups.com. We look forward to hearing from you and seeing you in New Orleans!
Srinivas Bangalore (Interactions Labs)
Jennifer Chu-Carroll (Elemental Cognition)
Yunyao Li (IBM Research – Almaden)
NAACL 2018 Industry Track Co-Chairs
NAACL HLT 2018 Chairs Blog 