ACL 2020
Seattle, Washington, USA
July 5-10, 2020
http://acl2020.org


**NEW DEVELOPMENTS FOR THE SECOND CFP (ACL2020)**

We have several exciting and important developments in the ACL2020 conference that we want to highlight at the top of the second call for papers:

1) Reviewer and Author Profile Signup
2) Paper Templates
3) Theme
4) Dual Submission
5) Publication Date


1) Special Instructions for Reviewer and Author Signup
As our field has grown considerably over the last five years, it is important that our reviewing process scales accordingly. For the ACL2020 conference, we are creating a new review process with a goal to better manage conflict of interest (COI) and better match submissions with appropriate reviewers. The big picture is that authors and reviewers must create or update a Global Profile and fill out the ACL2020 Reviewer/Author Information Form.

Global Profile: please fill out this form in order to compute conflicts of interest and better match papers with appropriate reviewers.
https://www.softconf.com/acl2020/super/scmd.cgi?ucmd=updateProfile

ACL2020 Reviewer/Author Information Form: this allows us to better match papers with the best reviewers:
https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=9028kaqAQ0OMdrEjlJf7WV1_1tZ1K-JCmL49YyhKe89UQTczV0xMNVhZSzhaWjVaNzJIS0U2MzNXUy4u

A blog post including more detailed instructions and commonly asked questions will be found here: https://acl2020.org/blog/author-reviewer-profile/


2) 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/acl2020/papers/

Both long and short papers must follow the ACL Author Guidelines:
https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Author_Guidelines
Style sheets (Latex, Word) are available here: http://acl2020.org/downloads/acl2020-templates.zip

And the Overleaf template is also available here: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/acl-2020-proceedings-template/zsrkcwjptpcd


3) Theme: As 2020 quickly approaches, we felt this was a great time to reflect on the state of the field of NLP, as well its future, with a special Theme track. We hope you consider submitting a paper! You can find details here: https://acl2020.org/blog/theme/


4) Archival and Dual Submissions can be a bit tricky. We outline what is acceptable and what isn’t on this blog: https://acl2020.org/blog/arxiv-papers-double-submissions/


5) Publication Date: The official publication date is June 19, 2020, just over two weeks before the conference begins. On this date the proceedings are made available in the ACL Anthology, and will be indicated as such in the ACL Anthology bibliographic records. The official publication date may affect the deadline for any patent filings related to published work. (For those rare conferences whose proceedings are published in the ACL Anthology after the conference is over, the official publication date remains the first day of the conference.)


**CALL FOR PAPERS - MAIN CONFERENCE**

The 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2020) 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. This year’s conference will for the first time also feature presentations of papers accepted by the Computational Linguistics (CL) journal.


IMPORTANT DATES

New: Completion of START Global Profile: December 9, 2019
New: Completion of ACL2020 Reviewer and Chair/Author Information Form: December 9, 2019

Paper submission deadline (long & short papers): December 9, 2019
Notification of acceptance: April 3, 2020
Camera-ready due: April 24, 2020
Proceedings publication: June 19, 2020
Tutorials: July 5, 2020
Conference: July 6-8, 2020
Workshops and Co-located conferences: July 9-10, 2020

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


ACL 2020 Theme: Taking Stock of Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going

The last few years have witnessed an unprecedented growth in NLP since the field began over sixty years ago. The availability of large amounts of data and computing resources have led to new models and representations and exciting results on many NLP benchmark tasks. SOTA systems have approached human performance on several benchmark tasks. As we embrace these new exciting results and advances, ACL 2020 is particularly interested in papers that can provide insights for the community to assess how much we have accomplished in developing a machine’s ability in understanding and generating human language and how far we are pushing the boundaries as a field given the long history of NLP research.

Potential submissions of interest include (but not limited to) position papers, empirical/theoretical papers that:

Reflect on the progress of the field or a sub-topic area from a larger spectrum and make connections and/or comparisons between the past and the present to provide a holistic view on where we stand today with respect to the past;
Examine, analyze, and interpret SOTA models and results to shed light on limitations as well as key advances that may have lasting impact;
Bring novel ideas for advancing the field, e.g., to enable and measure machine’s ability in language processing beyond laboratory benchmarks;

We anticipate to have a special session for this theme at the conference and a best Thematic Paper Award in addition to the traditional Best Paper Awards.


SUBMISSIONS

ACL 2020 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):

Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics
Computational Social Science and Social Media
Dialogue and Interactive Systems
Discourse and Pragmatics
Ethics and NLP
Generation
Information Extraction
Information Retrieval and Text Mining
Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP
Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond
Theory and Formalism in NLP (Linguistic and Mathematical)
Machine Learning for NLP
Machine Translation
NLP Applications
Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation
Question Answering
Resources and Evaluation
Semantics: Lexical
Semantics: Sentence Level
Semantics: Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics
Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
Speech and Multimodality
Summarization
Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing
Theme


PAPER SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Long Papers

Long paper 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 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

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 4 pages of content, plus unlimited references. Upon acceptance, short papers will be given 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 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.


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 November 9, 2019 11:59PM UTC-12:00) up to the date when your paper is either accepted, rejected, or withdrawn (April 3, 2020).

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.


Instructions for Double-Blind Review

As reviewing will be double blind, papers must not include authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references or links (such as github) 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 2020 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 2020 after the paper submission deadline.


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 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


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 2020. Authors of papers accepted for presentation at ACL 2020 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 2020 must ensure that submissions do not overlap significantly ()25%) with each other in content or results.


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/acl2020/papers/

Both long and short papers must follow the ACL Author Guidelines:
https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Author_Guidelines

Style sheets (Latex, Word) are available here.
http://acl2020.org/downloads/acl2020-templates.zip

The Overleaf template is also available here. https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/acl-2020-proceedings-template/zsrkcwjptpcd

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.


Optional Supplementary Materials: Appendices, Software and Data

Each ACL 2020 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 2020 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.


PRESENTATION REQUIREMENT

All accepted papers must be presented at the conference to appear in the proceedings. Authors of papers accepted for presentation at ACL 2020 must notify the program chairs by the camera-ready deadline if they wish to withdraw the paper.

Previous presentations of the work (e.g. preprints on arXiv.org) should be indicated in a footnote in the final version of papers appearing in the ACL 2020 proceedings. Please note that this footnote should not be in the submission version of the paper.

At least one author of each accepted paper must register for ACL 2020 by the early registration deadline.


FURTHER INFORMATION

The conference website will be continually updated with information on workshops, tutorials, venue, traveling, etc.

Relevant blogs related to submissions.
1) On the theme: https://acl2020.org/blog/theme/
2) On the archive papers and double submissions: https://acl2020.org/blog/arxiv-papers-double-submissions/


ORGANIZERS

General Chair
Dan Jurafsky (Stanford University, USA)

Program Co-Chairs
Joyce Chai (University of Michigan, USA)
Natalie Schluter (IT University, Copenhagen, Denmark)
Joel Tetreault (Dataminr, USA)


CONTACT

E-mail: ACL2020ProgramChairs@gmail.com