Call for papers

Call for Papers: CODI 2021 - 2nd workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse

Held in conjunction with EMNLP 2021 November 10-11, 2021

Important information: The CODI workshop organization should be hybrid, following the EMNLP program chairs’ decision: “EMNLP 2021 is currently officially scheduled to be held in hybrid mode, online and in Punta Cana, in the Dominican Republic. ”.

News: Note that we updated our CFP, to highlight the fact that we accept double submissions. Please refer to the dedicated section below.

Aims and scope

The last five years have seen a dramatic improvement in the ability of NLP systems to understand and produce words and sentences. This development has created a renewed interest in discourse problems as researchers move towards the processing of long-form text and conversations. There is a surge of activity in discourse parsing, coherence models, text summarization, corpora for discourse level reading comprehension, and discourse related/aided representation learning, to name a few. At this juncture, we envision that a workshop that brings together discourse experts and upcoming researchers will catalyze the speed and knowledge needed to solve such problems, as well as serve as a forum for the discussion of suitable datasets and reliable evaluation methods.

The previous workshops on discourse in machine translation (DiscoMT), linking lexical, sentential and discourse semantics (LSDSem), discourse structure in natural language generation (DSNNLG), discourse parsing and treebanking (DisRPT) and coreference (CORBON/ CRAC), have shown that there is considerable interest and success in bringing together the community working on specific problems. We believe that the discourse community will also benefit from a general forum where work ranging from corpus development/analysis to computational models, and evaluation is discussed, and desiderata can be drawn for future progress.

The Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse (CODI) brings together researchers interested in all aspects of discourse and its computational modeling. The first CODI workshop was held at EMNLP 2020 and showcased diverse discourse research (see the papers presented).

Shared Tasks

This year, the workshop will also host two shared tasks:

Please visit the corresponding websites for more information.

Topics of interest

We welcome symbolic and probabilistic approaches, corpus development and analysis, as well as machine and deep learning approaches to discourse. We appreciate theoretical contributions as well as practical applications, including demos of systems and tools. The goal of the workshop is to provide a forum for the community of NLP researchers working on all aspects of discourse.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • discourse structure

  • discourse connectives

  • discourse relations

  • annotation tools and schemes for discourse phenomena

  • corpora annotated with discourse phenomena

  • discourse parsing

  • cross-lingual discourse processing

  • cross-domain discourse processing

  • anaphora and coreference resolution

  • event coreference

  • argument mining

  • coherence modeling

  • discourse and semantics

  • discourse in applications such as machine translation, summarization, etc.

  • evaluation methodology for discourse processing

Submissions

We solicit four categories of papers:

  • (1) regular workshop papers,

  • (2) demos,

  • (3) extended abstracts

  • and (4) shared tasks papers.


Only regular workshop papers, shared task papers and demos will be included in the proceedings as archival publications.


Regular papers must describe original unpublished research. Long papers may consist of up to 8 pages of content, plus unlimited pages for references. Short papers can have up to 4 pages, plus unlimited pages for references.


Demo submissions may describe systems, tools, visualizations, etc., and may consist of up to 4 pages, plus unlimited pages for references.


Accepted long, short, and demo papers will be presented orally.


Extended abstracts can describe work in progress or those already published elsewhere. These may be two pages long (without references). Extended abstracts are non-archival. They will be presented orally, and included in the workshop program and handbook, but will not appear in the workshop proceedings.


Please submit your paper on: https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2021/CODI/.


For shared task papers, please refer to the corresponding websites:


Shared task papers will be presented during the dedicated sessions, either orally or as posters. They will be included in the workshop proceedings.


Final versions of all types of papers will be given one additional page of content.


Double submission


We allow for double submissions. Please indicate during submission to which other conference or workshop your work has been submitted.


We may also invite authors of papers accepted to the conferences (e.g. EMNLP, ACL) including Findings to present their work at the workshop. Please indicate whether your paper has been accepted to e.g. ACL during submission, or let us know by email that your paper has been accepted elsewhere (including Findings) upon notification. These papers will not be part of the proceedings of the workshop.

Submission website

All submissions must follow the EMNLP 2021 formatting instructions described here: https://2021.emnlp.org/call-for-papers/style-and-formatting

Please submit your papers using https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2021/CODI.


Note that CRAC and DISRPT shared tasks have their own submission pages.

Important dates

  • 18 May, 2021: 1st Call for Workshop Papers

  • 15 June, 2021: 2nd Call for Workshop Papers

  • 5 July, 2021: Anonymity period starts

  • 15 July, 2021: 3rd Second Call for Papers

  • 5 Aug 12 Aug, 2021: Workshop Papers Due (long, short, demo, extended abstracts)

  • 5 Sept, 23 Sept, 2021: Notification of Acceptance

  • 15 Sept, 28 Sept 2021: Camera-ready papers due

  • Nov 10-11, 2021: Workshop Date

Please check the dedicated websites to get information about the deadlines for the two shared tasks.

All deadlines are 11.59 pm UTC -12h (“anywhere on Earth”).