Papers

Call For Papers

The 17th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT 2019) will be held in Minneapolis from June 2nd to June 7th, 2019. NAACL-HLT 2019 aims to bring together researchers interested in the design and study of natural language processing technology as well as its applications to new problem areas. With this goal in mind, NAACL-HLT 2019 invites the submission of long and short papers on creative, substantial and unpublished research in all aspects of computational linguistics.

NAACL-HLT 2019 has a goal of a diverse technical program–in addition to traditional research results, papers may present 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.

Submit a Paper

Topics

While NAACL 2019 will have a theme (described below), we anticipate a comprehensive technical program. Relevant topics for the conference include, but are not limited to, the following areas (in alphabetical order):

  • Cognitive modeling / Psycholinguistics
  • Dialog and Interactive systems
  • Discourse and Pragmatics
  • Generation
  • Information Extraction
  • Machine Learning for NLP
  • Machine Translation
  • NLP Applications
  • Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation
  • Question Answering
  • Resources and Evaluation
  • Semantics
  • Sentiment Analysis
  • Social Media
  • Speech
  • Style
  • Summarization
  • Tagging, Chunking, Syntax and Parsing
  • Text Mining
  • Theory and Formalisms
  • Vision, Robotics, and Other Grounding

Theme Topics

At NAACL-HLT 2019, while we anticipate a broad technical program, we are especially interested in papers that address the tension between data privacy and model bias in NLP. There is a growing awareness of the inherent biases in opportunistically collected data sets, and yet there is a risk of skewing your models or losing information in attempting to explicitly introduce balance. The main challenge in this is how to ensure diversity of the underlying feature space without violating individual privacy, e.g. balancing gender requires defining and tracking gender. There are a number of active workshops in related areas (Ethics in NLP, and the Workshop on NLP for Internet Freedom being two) and we want to bring some of the same topics to the forefront in the main conference. Potential topics of interest include: using NLP for surveillance and profiling, balancing the need for broadly representative data sets with protections for individuals, understanding and addressing model bias, and where bias correction becomes censorship. We anticipate that this theme will inform the plenary sessions, and a Best Thematic Paper award will be given in addition to traditional Best Paper Awards.

As in recent years, some of the presentations at the conference will be of papers accepted by the Transactions of the ACL. In addition, please consult the separate CFP for NAACL-HLT 2019 industry track submissions. Separate CFPs will also be forthcoming for submissions for system demonstrations and for student research workshop papers.

Submission Types and Requirements

Abstract Submission Will Be Required for Long and Short Papers

Paper submission will be a two-step process. Please read carefully. Step 1 is the abstract submission process that requires you to register the title, author list, abstract and keywords by December 3, 2018 in the START system. This will help us to accelerate matching papers with reviewers. Step 2 is the long and short paper submission which will be due on December 10, 2018. The title, author list, abstract and keywords may not be changed after December 3, 2018; if they change, the entry in START will not match the full paper when it is registered, and it will be rejected as not having met the Abstract deadline.

Long Papers

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

Long paper submissions may consist of up to eight (8) pages of content, plus unlimited references; 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.

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 those presented 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
  • Work in progress
  • A negative result
  • An opinion piece
  • An interesting application nugget

Short paper submissions may consist of up to four (4) pages of content, plus unlimited references. Upon acceptance, short papers will be given five (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 in one or more oral or poster sessions. 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.

Author Guidelines

The ACL has released policies for submission, review and citation. Accompanying these are guidelines for authors. NAACL-HLT 2019 will adhere to these policies and guidelines. Submissions should:

  • Be relevant: Submissions to NAACL-HLT 2019 should be relevant to the audience.
  • Be original: The content of submissions to NAACL-HLT 2019 (the ideas, the findings, the results and the words) should be original; that is, should not have been published (or be accepted for publication) in another refereed, archival form (such as a book, a journal, or a conference proceedings). Authors are referred to the ACL author guidelines for additional information on what constitutes existing publication.

Authors may present preliminary versions of their work in other venues that are not refereed and/or not archival (e.g. course reports, theses, non-archival workshops, or on preprint servers such as arXiv.org). Authors should list all such previous presentations in the submission form. This will help the area chairs if questions of originality arise.

Double submission

Papers that have been or will be submitted to other venues must indicate this at submission time, and must be withdrawn from the other venues if accepted to NAACL-HLT 2019. Authors of papers accepted for presentation at NAACL-HLT 2019 must notify the program chairs by the camera-ready deadline as to whether the paper will be presented.

Authors submitting more than one paper to NAACL-HLT 2019 must ensure that the submissions do not overlap significantly (>25%) with each other. A given paper may only be submitted to a single NAACL-HLT 2019 track (Research, Industry, SRW or demos); any paper found to be submitted to more than one track will be rejected by all tracks. Resubmission to an appropriate workshop that follows the main conference is not affected by this policy.

Pre-publication

The anonymity period for NAACL-HLT 2019 is from November 3, 2018 to February 22, 2019.

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.

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.

Facilitate double blind review

Double blind review is a form of peer review in which the identities of authors are not provided to reviewers, and the identities of reviewers are not provided to authors. To facilitate double blind review, submissions must not identify authors or their affiliations. For example, self-references 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) …”.

Any preliminary non-archival versions of submitted papers should be listed in the submission form but not in the review version of the paper. NAACL-HLT 2018 reviewers are generally aware that authors may present preliminary versions of their work in other venues, but will not be provided the list of previous presentations from the submission form.

Authors are referred to the ACL author guidelines for additional information on how to facilitate double blind review.

Accurately represent contributors

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 NAACL-HLT 2019 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 NAACL-HLT 2019 after the abstract submission deadline.

Describe research review and data management

If a submission describes work with a data set previously released by an organization or group (e.g. the LDC, ELRA, Kaggle), the source of the data should be appropriately referenced.

If a submission describes work with “found” data (e.g. data sampled from social media or the web), the source(s) of the data should be appropriately referenced, the method for sampling the data should be described, and any necessary permissions to use and/or release the data should be documented. In addition, the submission should document institutional review of the work as appropriate.

If a submission describes work involving human participants or personally identifiable information (including crowdsourced work), the submission should document institutional review of the work as well as informed consent and compensation procedures for participants, and anonymization procedures for the data.

Submissions should accurately reference prior and related work, including code and data. If a piece of prior work appeared in multiple venues, the version that appeared in a refereed, archival venue should be referenced. If multiple versions of a piece of prior work exist, the one used by the authors should be referenced. Authors should not rely on automated citation indices to provide accurate references for prior and related work.

Authors are referred to the ACL author guidelines for additional information on how to appropriately cite prior work.

Include appendices and supplementary resources as appropriate

Papers should not refer, for further detail, to documents, code or data resources that are not available to the reviewers. NAACL-HLT 2019 does encourage the submission of additional material that is relevant to the reviewers but not an integral part of the paper. There are two such types of material: appendices, which can be read, and non-readable supplementary materials, often data or code. Do not include this additional material in the same document as your main paper. Additional material must be submitted as one or more separate files, and must adhere to the same anonymity guidelines as the main paper. The paper must be self-contained: it is optional for reviewers to look at the supplementary material.

Follow style and format guidelines

Submissions should follow the NAACL-HLT 2019 style guidelines. Long paper submissions must follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings without exceeding eight (8) pages of content. Short paper submissions must also follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings, and must not exceed four (4) pages. References do not count against these limits. We strongly recommend the use of the official NAACL-HLT 2019 style templates:

All submissions must be in PDF format.

Submissions that do not adhere to the above author guidelines or ACL policies will be rejected without review.

Paper Submission

Submission is electronic, using the Softconf START conference management for both long and short papers.

Presentation Requirement

All accepted papers must be presented at the conference to appear in the proceedings. Authors of papers accepted for presentation at NAACL-HLT 2019 must notify the program chairs by the camera-ready deadline as to whether the paper will be presented.

Previous presentations of the work (e.g. preprints on arXiv.org) should be indicated in a footnote that should be excluded from the review submission, but included in the final version of papers appearing in the NAACL-HLT 2019 proceedings.

At least one author of each accepted paper must register for NAACL-HLT 2019 by the early registration deadline.

Important Dates

Abstract submissions due
(long, short, & industry track)		MondayDecember 3, 2018
Final paper submissions due
(long, short, & industry track)		MondayDecember 10, 2018
Notification of acceptanceFridayFebruary 22, 2019
Camera ready papers dueWednesdayApril 3, 2019
All deadlines are 11.59 pm UTC -12h.

Contact Information

  • Email: contact@naacl2019.org
  • Program co-chairs
    • Christy Doran (Interactions)
    • Ted Pedersen (University of Minnesota Duluth)
    • Thamar Solorio (University of Houston)
  • General chair: Jill Burstein (Educational Testing Service)

Frequently Asked Questions

What date should we use for the pre-publication anonymity period start date, the submission date or the release date?

This question relates to the fact that venues like arxiv.org can take up to three days to publish the paper. The date that counts is submission date of a non-anonymized version. So you may submit a non-anonymized version to arxiv or other preprint servers up until November 2nd.

I want to submit my NAACL paper to a non-archival workshop with submission date BEFORE the anonymity period starts, but that happens DURING the anonymity period.

The policy does not prevent this, so long as it is a non-archival version.

Can we advertise a non-anonymized version on social media or on other channels?

Not during the anonymity period.

In general, however, we want to encourage authors to avoid things that will compromise double-blind reviewing. If you cannot wait to submit non-anonymized versions or if you need to have a non-anonymized version available earlier, 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.