Call for Papers

Submission website: https://www.softconf.com/acl2020/nli/

Dates

All deadlines are 11:59 PM Pacific time.

• Workshop Paper Due Date: April 6, 2020 April 20, 2020 (deferred due to the pandemic)
• Notification of acceptance: May 4, 2020 May 11, 2020
• Camera-ready papers due: May 18, 2020 May 22, 2020
• Workshop date: July 10, 2020

List of Topics 

This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from different communities related to NLIs. As such, the workshop welcomes and covers a wide range of topics around NLIs, including (non-exclusively):

• Linguistic analysis and modeling. What are the linguistic characteristics of human-machine interaction via NLIs? How to develop better models to accommodate and leverage such characteristics?
• Interactivity, continuous learning, and personalization. How to enable NLIs to interact with users to resolve the knowledge gaps between them for better accuracy and transparency? Can NLIs learn from interactions to reduce human intervention over time? How can NLIs (learn to) be customized and adapt to user preferences? Interaction design, faithful generation, learning from user feedback, online learning.
• Data collection and crowdsourcing. Modern machine learning models are data-hungry while data collection for NLIs are particularly expensive because of the domain expertise needed for formal meaning representation and grounding. How to collect data for NLIs at scale with low cost?
• Scalability, adaptability, and portability. How to construct NLIs that can reliably and efficiently operate at a large scale (e.g., on billion-scale knowledge graphs)? How to construct NLIs that can simultaneously support multiple inter-connected domains of possibly different nature? How to transfer knowledge learned from existing domains to help learning in new domains?
• Explainability and trustworthiness. How to make the reasoning process and the results explainable and trustworthy to users? How to help users understand how an answer is obtained or a command is executed?
• Privacy. How to ensure NLIs are compliant with privacy constraints? How to train, monitor, and debug NLIs within the compliance boundary?
• Evaluation and user study. How to systematically evaluate different usability aspects of an NLI as perceived by users? What are the protocols for conducting a reproducible user study? Whether there is significant gap between in vitro and in vivo evaluation and how to bridge that?

Submission Guidelines

We welcome two types of papers: regular workshop papers and cross-submissions. Only regular workshop papers will be included in the workshop proceedings. All submissions should be in PDF format and made through the Softconf website set up for this workshop (https://www.softconf.com/acl2020/nli/). In line with the ACL main conference policy, camera-ready versions of papers will be given one additional page of content.

• Regular workshop papers: Authors should submit a long paper of up to 8 pages, with unlimited pages for references (references only; appendix should be included in the main text and counted towards the page limit), or a short paper of up to 4 pages, with unlimited pages for references, following the ACL 2019 formatting requirements (see the ACL 2020 Call For Papers for reference: https://acl2020.org/calls/papers/). The reported research should be substantially original. All submissions will be reviewed in a single track, regardless of length. Accepted papers will be presented as posters, and best papers may be given the opportunity for a brief talk to introduce their work. Reviewing will be double-blind, and thus no author information should be included in the papers; self-reference that identifies the authors should be avoided or anonymised. Accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings.

• Cross-submissions: In addition to previously unpublished work, we also solicit papers on relevant topics that have appeared in a non-NLP venue (e.g., workshop or conference papers at NeurIPS/ICML/AAAI/SIGKDD/ICRA/VLDB/WWW/SIGIR/ISWC/SIGCHI, among others). Accepted cross-submissions will be presented as posters, with an indication of original venue, but will not be included in the workshop proceedings. Cross-submissions are ideal for related work which would benefit from exposure to the NLI audience. Submission length is determined by the original venue. Interested authors should submit their papers in PDF format through the NLI Softconf website (https://www.softconf.com/acl2020/nli/), with a note on the original venue. Papers in this category do not need to follow the ACL format and selection will be solely determined by the organising committee.