The third annual WeCNLP (West Coast NLP) Summit is an opportunity to foster discussion and collaboration between NLP researchers in academia and industry. The event will include talks and a panel from research leaders on the latest advances in NLP technologies.

In light of the global health safety recommendations related to COVID-19, WeCNLP will be a virtual event this year in lieu of an in-person conference. WeCNLP 2020 will be composed of invited and lightning talks, poster & demo sessions, a panel discussion on NLP research during and after the COVID-19 outbreak, and a virtual happy hour. Three invited talk sessions will cover the following topics:

* Multimodal NLP
* Privacy, safety, federated learning & explainability
* Scalability of NLP applications

WeCNLP will accept two types of submissions for posters:

* Abstracts describing original, completed or ongoing, unpublished research. We welcome abstract submissions, in theory, methodology, as well as applications in all areas related to NLP. We also welcome abstract submissions on negative results as well as submissions highlighting challenges faced in industrial or academic settings.
* Full papers ‘as is’ that are accepted to other peer-reviewed conferences or workshops (e.g. ACL, LREC, COLING, etc.). In the submission, please state where your paper was accepted, and if already presented, was it a poster, short paper or a long paper. The paper submission must be anonymized for blind review.

Authors of accepted abstracts and papers will be asked to present their work in a virtual poster session. Selected abstracts and papers will be presented both as a lightning talk and at the poster session. All abstract and paper submissions should be anonymous, and will be peer-reviewed in a double-blind manner. Since previously accepted papers have been peer-reviewed elsewhere, they will receive less detailed review notes from the WeCNLP committee. Papers submitted to other venues that are not yet accepted should be reworked into Abstract submissions.

Important Dates:

* August 24, 2020 – Abstract & paper submission deadline
* October 1, 2020 – Notification of submission acceptance
* October 30, 2020 – WeCNLP Summit

WeCNLP is committed to providing an inclusive summit to participants with diverse needs, academic interests, and socio-demographic backgrounds. There are numerous barriers that limit various participants’ groups ability to attend our conferences. Our whole community benefits when we strive to remove those barriers and everyone feels welcome at the conference and can fully participate! Accordingly, WeCNLP will strive toward striking a balance across these different dimensions to ensure more inclusion and diversity in conference participation. Hence, we encourage submissions to indicate (voluntarily) any distinguishing diversity factors such as race, gender, etc.

Please refer to the site https://www.wecnlp.ai/ for more information and please send email to juancarabina@fb.com or udhay@apple.com for further questions.