Our annual Widening Natural Language Processing Workshop (WiNLP) will be held in conjunction with EMNLP 2024 in Miami, Florida. Since EMNLP is anticipating a hybrid format for their conference, we also anticipate our workshop will be hybrid, with both online and in-person attendees. The one-day workshop will occur during EMNLP’s workshop period on November 12th, 2024.

We invite authors from underrepresented groups in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to submit a two-page abstract to be considered for a poster presentation at our workshop. Submissions will be accepted through two reviewing cycles:

Our early visa-friendly deadline will be July 01, 2024 (anywhere on Earth/UTC-12). Decisions will be sent out by August 01, 2024. This deadline exists primarily for attendees interested in traveling in person who may need additional time to process their visa.

Our regular deadline will be September 10, 2024 (anywhere on Earth/UTC-12). Decisions will be sent out by October 8, 2024. Note that this is only one month before the event, and WiNLP does not have our own legal services to help with expediting visas. Individuals not eligible for visa waivers to the United States should plan to submit to the early deadline.

Important Dates

Early (visa-friendly) deadlines

Last date to join author workshopping (link will be added soon): June 17, 2024
Submission deadline: ~~July 01, 2024~~
Acceptance notification: ~~August 01, 2024~~
Travel grant applications due: ~~August 15, 2024~~
Travel grant notification: ~~August 18, 2024~~

Regular deadlines

Last date to join author workshopping (link will be added soon): ~~August 27, 2024~~
Submission deadline: ~~September 10, 2024~~
Acceptance notification: October 8, 2024
Travel grant applications due: October 15, 2024 – 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth)
Travel grant notification: October 25, 2024

Workshop Date

November, 2024 (TBD)
EMNLP 2024
Miami, Florida

Workshop Description

The WiNLP workshop is open to all to foster an inclusive and welcoming ACL environment. It aims to promote diversity and highlight the work of underrepresented groups in NLP: anyone who self-identifies within an underrepresented group [based on gender, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, disability status, or otherwise] is invited to submit a two-page abstract for a poster presentation. In our 2024 iteration, we hope to be more intentional about centering discussions of access and disability, as well as contributing to diversity in scientific background, discipline, training, obtained degrees, seniority, and communities from underrepresented languages.

The full-day event includes invited talks, oral presentations, and poster sessions. The workshop provides an excellent opportunity for junior members in the community to showcase their work and connect with senior mentors for feedback and career advice. It also offers recruitment opportunities with leading industrial labs. Most importantly, the workshop will provide an inclusive and accepting space, and work to lower structural barriers to joining and collaborating with the NLP community at large.

Submission guidelines

While everyone is encouraged to attend, the opportunity to present a talk or poster is intended for members of underrepresented groups at all career levels: students, post-docs, professors, and other researchers. Since many submissions are works in progress, we act as a non-archival repository for these works: while authors may elect to have their papers linked from our website, they will not be archived in the ACL Anthology. Authors may elect to not have their submission listed on the website if they wish to avoid de-anonymizing themselves for later submissions to other venues.

For review, submissions must be anonymized and follow the standard two-column format used in past WiNLP workshops. Each submission should be a two-page extended abstract PDF, with any number of additional pages allowed for references. No appendices will be accepted.

Submissions should be two pages long (not including references). Authors must use the ACL Rolling Review style files to format their submission, and must submit it electronically in PDF format via the WiNLP 2024 online submission system on openreview.

We invite submissions on topics in computational linguistics and NLP, including but not limited to:

Cognitive modeling and psycholinguistics
Computational social science
Corpus development and evaluation
Dialog and interactive systems
Discourse and pragmatics
Document analysis including text categorization, topic models, and retrieval
Ethics in NLP
Natural language generation
Information extraction, text mining, and question answering
Language-inclusive multimodal integration
Linguistic theories for NLP
Low-resource or endangered languages
Machine learning
Machine translation
Mathematical models of language
Multilinguality
Phonology, morphology, and word segmentation
Resources and evaluation
Semantics
Sentiment analysis and opinion mining
Social media: Twitter, blogs, discussion forums, and other social media
Sociolinguistics
Speech, prosody, and spoken dialog
Summarization
Tagging, chunking, syntax, and parsing
Vision, robots, and other grounding applications

Submission link: https://openreview.net/group?id=EMNLP/2024/Workshop/WiNLP

ARR style files: https://acl-org.github.io/ACLPUB/formatting.html#style-files

Multiple Submission Policy

As we aim for improved and increased representation of underrepresented minorities, we will consider anonymized two page abstracts of papers that have been submitted to other venues or have already been published elsewhere since August 13, 2023. However, authors must clearly indicate this at submission time in the submission form. While our reviewers are instructed not to seek to de-anonymize submissions, authors from previously published works acknowledge that anonymity may not be guaranteed in those cases should a reviewer recognize their work.

Authors may NOT submit the same work to both the regular and visa-friendly deadlines. While an author may appear on works in both submission deadlines, they must have substantially distinct content. Submissions to the main deadline deemed to duplicate early submissions will be rejected without review.

ACL Rolling Review (ARR)

Authors who have work submitted to ARR on or after August 15, 2024 may also submit an extended abstract to the WiNLP workshop. Because our conference accepts two-page abstracts as our primary form of submission, we ask that authors still submit an extended abstract through our Openreview page to ensure every poster has a corresponding two-page abstract. By default, abstracts are listed with their authors on the website, but our accepted abstracts are not archived in the ACL Anthology. Authors may elect to have their abstract linked from the conference website as a camera-ready. If your work is accepted while it should be under anonymity for reviewing purposes, please let us know when we solicit your camera-ready paper if you need your submission to be either unlisted or listed with anonymous authors.

Peer Workshopping and Reviewing Procedure

Ten days prior to the submission deadline, authors will have the option to peer-review each others’ abstracts in a non-anonymous format, in groups of two or three authors. To participate in this process, authors must sign up using this form no less than two weeks before the deadline to which they choose to submit: either June for early review or August for regular review. Authors taking this option commit to help their peers edit and format their submissions, or revise for clarity, or provide general feedback before the submission is reviewed. Authors may use the feedback provided during this peer-editing period to update their submissions in time for the submission deadline. The program committee may still provide reviews, feedback, and direct writing mentorship for applicants, but the intent of peer-editing is to share this responsibility with the participants so that it can scale with the size of the workshop.

Whether or not authors take advantage of this peer-review option in advance of submission, all submissions are due on the deadline (anywhere on earth). After the submission deadline, abstracts will be reviewed in the traditional double-blind format. Abstracts will be evaluated on relevance to the community; the presentation format (talk or poster) will be decided based on scientific merit and potential interest to a broad audience.

Travel Support

There will be a limited amount of travel grants and/or additional funding to cover expenses, similar to the previous editions. Financial support will be made available for travel, lodging, registration, and visa costs for one author for each submission, subject to our available funding. The funded author may elect to attend virtually if they prefer. The selected author should be identified as part of the travel grant submission form. If we find ourselves with extra funds, we will attempt to support further funding for virtual attendance for additional authors, but we do not guarantee we can support any further in-person attendance. We recommend additional student authors keep an eye out for the EMNLP call for student volunteers or call for D&I subsidies as opportunities for further funding.

Different institutions have different funding availability, so we ask authors to please explore their funding options locally in addition to through WiNLP so we can extend our funds to as many participants as possible. More information will be made available closer to the submission deadline and linked from our workshop website at https://www.winlp.org/winlp-2024-workshop/ . Travel expenses are handled via reimbursement (primarily through $USD check or PayPal). If you will be unable to front the cost of travel expenses and your school or employer is unable to assist, please reach out to the organizers as soon as possible.