NAACL 2018 has an impressive line up of 17 workshops across a wide range of topics from Generalization in the age of Deep Learning to Ethics in NLP. Workshops provide researchers with an opportunity to submit early stage or narrowly focused work and get feedback from a targeted audience. Attendees have an opportunity to take a deep dive into their own specialty or into a new area they’d like to explore.
The workshops will be held June 5-6 with the exception of Widening NLP (WiNLP), which will be held June 1. WiNLP’s mission is to promote and support underrepresented groups in the field and having the workshop before the conference gives attendees a chance to get to know and network throughout the conference.
NAACL is hosting some of the field’s best known workshops. SemEval and *SEM, both 2 day workshops, will be coordinating their schedules as well as some of their activities, such as joint keynote addresses. Some workshops have been going on for more than a decade, such as NLP for Building Educational Applications in its 13th year and Textgraphs-12.
Workshops that are just starting out can provide a view into emerging areas in the field, such as the following, all of which are just in their second year: Stylistic Variation, Subword and Character level models in NLP, and Computational Modeling of Peoples Opinions, Personality, and Emotions in Social Media.
Shared tasks have become an important part of many workshops, since they allow researchers to compare results on a single task and corpus. Shared tasks this year include second language acquisition modeling (BEA), anaphora resolution (CRAC) and detection of verb metaphors (Figurative Language Processing).
Workshops are also an excellent venue for bringing together researchers from multiple disciplines, such as Storytelling, which has a Visual Storytelling Challenge. Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology will bring together NLP researchers and clinicians to discuss applications in mental health.
Several workshops are tackling challenging problems in computational semantics, including Spatial Language Understanding and Semantics Beyond Events and Roles, Cognitum focuses and integration of NLP and Knowledge representation and reasoning.
With such a broad range of exciting topics, we expect a great turnout. Check out the individual workshop pages for Calls for Papers and deadlines. We’re looking forward to seeing you in New Orleans!
NAACL HLT 2018 Chairs Blog 