Call for Main Conference Papers

NAACL 2022 invites the submission of long and short papers featuring substantial, original, and unpublished research in all aspects of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing. NAACL 2022 has a goal of a diverse technical program—in addition to traditional research results, papers may contribute negative findings, survey an area, announce the creation of a new resource, argue a position, report novel linguistic insights derived using existing techniques, and reproduce, or fail to reproduce, previous results.

As in recent years, some of the presentations at the conference will be of papers accepted by the Transactions of the ACL (TACL) and by the Computational Linguistics (CL) journals.

New this year:

Reviewing for main conference submissions will be handled by the ACL Rolling Review, except for Special Theme submissions.
Accepted papers will have the option to earn reproducibility badges.
Submission TopicsPermalink
NAACL 2022 aims to have 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
Efficient Methods for NLP
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
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: Human-Centered Natural Language Processing
NAACL 2022 Theme Track: “Human-Centered Natural Language Processing”Permalink
As NLP applications increasingly mediate people’s lives, it is crucial to understand how the design decisions made throughout the NLP research and development lifecycle impact people, whether there are users, developers, data providers or other stakeholders. For NAACL 2022, we invite submissions that address research questions that meaningfully incorporate stakeholders in the design, development, and evaluation of NLP resources, models and systems. We particularly encourage submissions that bring together perspectives and methods from NLP and Human-Computer Interaction. In addition to research papers presenting studies, we invite survey and position papers that take stock of past work in human-centered NLP and propose directions for framing future research.

Topics of interest include: usability studies of language technologies; needs-findings studies; studies of human factors in the NLP R&D lifecycle, including interactive systems; human-centered fairness, accountability, explainability, transparency, and ethics in NLP systems.

Relevant methods include (but are not limited to) user-centered design, value-sensitive design, participatory design, assets-based design, and qualitative methods, such as grounded theory. We welcome contributions that use such methods to study NLP problems, as well as methodological innovations and tools that tailor these methods to NLP.

More information about the special theme, including how special theme submissions differ from regular paper submissions can be found here.

ACL Rolling ReviewPermalink
ACL 2022 and NAACL 2022 have decided to help implement the vision of using the ACL Rolling Review (ARR) as a reviewing system while final decisions will continue to be made by the conferences. The purpose of ARR is to improve efficiency and turnaround of reviewing in *ACL conferences while keeping the diversity (geographic and otherwise) and editorial freedom. For 2022, both conferences have worked out a coordinated submission plan to allow for maximum flexibility during their submission periods for the authors. ARR is a new review system for *ACL conferences, where reviewing and acceptance of papers to publication venues is done in a two-step process:

centralized rolling review via ARR, where submissions receive reviews and meta-reviews from ARR reviewers and action editors;
commitment to a publication venue (e.g., NAACL 2022), so that Senior Area Chairs and Program Chairs make acceptance decisions for a submission using the ARR reviews and meta-reviews.
ARR uses Open Review as its platform. The reviewing process continues to be double blind. Reviews will not be open in ARR; however, authors might choose to open their anonymized submission through the platform.

Important Dates for NAACL 2022Permalink
Anonymity period begins: 1 month before submitting to the ACL Rolling Review, following ARR CFP guidelines.

Paper submission deadline to ARR: January 15, 2022

Long & short papers submitted to ARR at the latest by January 15, 2022 can be committed for consideration to NAACL 2022 (see below). At submission time to ARR, authors will be asked to select one preferred venue (e.g., ACL 2022, NAACL 2022), for the purpose of calculating acceptance rate. However selecting NAACL 2022 as a preferred venue does not require authors to commit to NAACL 2022.

Commitment deadline for NAACL 2022: March 2, 2022

Deadline for authors to commit their reviewed papers, reviews, and meta-review to NAACL 2022. It is not necessary to have selected NAACL as a preferred venue during submission.

Notification of acceptance: April 7, 2022

Deadline for authors to withdraw papers from NAACL 2022 or Findings of NAACL 2022: April 11, 2022

Camera-ready version of papers due: May 3, 2022

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

Paper Submission DetailsPermalink
Long PapersPermalink

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

Long paper submissions should follow ARR formatting requirements. Final camera-ready versions of accepted long papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 9 pages) so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account.

Short PapersPermalink

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 include:

A small, focused contribution
A negative result
An opinion piece
An interesting application nugget
Short paper submissions should follow the ARR formatting requirements. Upon acceptance, short papers will be given five (5) content pages in the proceedings. Authors are strongly encouraged to use this additional page to address reviewers’ comments in their final versions.

Presentation at the ConferencePermalink

All accepted papers must be presented at the conference to appear in the proceedings. The authors of papers accepted for presentation at NAACL 2022 or at the Findings of NAACL 2022 must notify the program chairs by April 11, 2022 if they wish to withdraw their paper. At least one author of each accepted paper must register for NAACL 2022 by the early registration deadline.

Long and short 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. While short papers will be distinguished from long papers in the proceedings, there will be no distinction in the proceedings between papers presented orally and papers presented as posters.

Theme PapersPermalink

Special theme papers should be submitted to the NAACL 2022 Open Review site by the January 15 deadline. They will be evaluated according to a dedicated review form by a theme-specific reviewer pool.

The submission requirements for theme papers are the same as for long papers. However, the nature of a long paper is different from a theme paper and the reviewing process will be separate, with a dedicated submission site, reviewer pool and review form. See details on the distinction between a regular paper and a theme paper here.

Instructions for Double-Blind ReviewPermalink

See ARR CFP guidelines on Double-Blind Review.

AuthorshipPermalink

See ARR CFP guidelines on Authorship.

Citation and ComparisonPermalink

See ARR CFP guidelines on Citation and Comparison.

Multiple Submission PolicyPermalink

We follow the ARR Multiple Submission Policy. See the ARR CFP guidelines on Multiple Submission Policy.

Ethics PolicyPermalink

Authors are required to honor the ethical code set out in the ACL Code of Ethics, and comply with the ethics guidelines for ARR submissions.

We are working with ARR to integrate an extensive checklist (inspired by the NeurIPS 2021 one and the reproducible data checklist from Rogers, Baldwin & Leins’s paper) into the scientific reviewing process: authors will be asked that their paper take this list into account; reviewers will be asked to ensure that papers comply with instructions from the checklist. We strongly suggest authors to familiarize themselves early on with these checklists (read the NeurIPS 2021 one and the paper mentioned above), as it will likely positively influence the way they approach research and write their paper, rather than treating such questions as an afterthought.

The NAACL ethics committee will be approached to add ethics review expertise if Senior Area Chairs request it on the basis of issues identified by the ARR reviewers.

Reproducibility CriteriaPermalink

See ARR Author Checklist.

In addition to the ARR Author Checklist during submission, NAACL 2022 will introduce a badge system to highlight accepted papers which release code and trained models that help reproducibility.

After notification of acceptance, authors can earn up to three badges based on the level of support they provide for reproducibility. The authors can choose any subset of the following options:

Badge 1: Provide a link to code
Badge 2: Provide a link to a trained model
Badge 3: Package and set up their system in a way that helps verify that the trained model will reproduce some key results from their paper.
The submissions will be verified by a pool of reviewers.

The papers which earn a particular badge will be highlighted together (e.g., on the conference website); we expect a list of the papers which release code or a model will be a great starting point for future research. It’s not required for any paper to participate in this badging system, the primary goals of these three badges is to formalize how authors can release code and trained models, and to make it easier for other researchers to find and use them. These badges build on the suggested badges from the ACM. Badge 1 and 2 are types of “Artifact Available” badges which indicate that authors make some materials available, and Badge 3 is a “Results Replicated” badge also meant to provide a working runtime environment so future researchers can easily build on or compare against the published work. Our community has already benefited from some authors releasing these types of scientific artifacts, and so we hope this type of incentive structure will be established as a regular aspect of our field.

Paper Submission and TemplatesPermalink

The paper submissions will be done via ARR. For more information about templates, guidelines, and instructions, see the ARR CFP guidelines.

Optional Supplementary Materials: Appendices, Software, and DataPermalink

See the ARR CFP guidelines.

Notes On NAACL 2022 ArrangementsPermalink
Registration waivers: NAACL 2022 will provide a limited number of registration waivers. Student volunteers will receive registration waivers. The Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) budget will also support qualified authors from underrepresented developing countries or in financial need, who have accepted papers in the main conference. Applications for waivers will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis via a form included in paper acceptance notifications. More details will be provided in the future. For reference, please see previous year’s grant initiative.

Remote presentation option: The format of the conference (hybrid or in-person) has not yet been decided. Regardless of the decision, the NAACL organizers will make ample efforts to offer remote presentations (for reference, see NAACL 2019 arrangements) and keep some virtual components in the conference. More details regarding this will be announced in the future.

Visa applications: We understand that authors may face visa issues and processing delays. We will provide visa invitation letters as early as possible, to facilitate early visa applications. As stated above, remote presentations and virtual components will also be available for the conference.

Contact InformationPermalink
General chair: Dan Roth, University of Pennsylvania & Amazon

Program co-chairs (email):

Marine Carpuat, University of Maryland
Marie-Catherine de Marneffe , The Ohio State University
Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz, National Autonomous University of Mexico