ECNLP 3 (ACL 2020)

The Third Workshop on e-Commerce and NLP

Held at ACL 2020 virtual conference

NLP and IR have been closely linked to e-commerce applications since the early days of the fields. This close relationship between the two is evidenced by early publications as well as the growing number of recent publications at the intersection of the two areas.

Today, NLP and IR play a significant role in e-commerce tasks, including product search, recommender systems, product question answering, sentiment analysis, product description and review summarization, chatbots and shopping assistants, and customer review processing, among many other tasks being investigated by researchers in the field. These methods play a key part in today's online retail and shopping landscape, and continue to evolve and further enhance the customer experience.

The ECNLP workshop aims to provide a venue for the dissemination of NLP/IR research related to e-commerce and online shopping, bringing together researchers from both academia and industry.

Workshop Proceedings

The ECNLP 3 proceedings are available on the ACL Anthology website!

https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/events/acl-2020/#2020-ecnlp-1

Join the Workshop Online


Keynote Talks

Personalized Natural Language Processing for e-Commerce

Speaker: Prof. Julian McAuley

In this talk I'll discuss how techniques from user modeling and recommender systems can be used to develop personalized models of natural language. Personalized language models are valuable when dealing with language that deals with preferences, is subjective, or depends on personal context, etc. We show that such applications are abundant in e-commerce settings, and give examples of personalized NLP systems ranging from question answering to recipe generation.

Entity Discovery and Linking: Moving from Academia to Industry

Speaker: Prof. Heng Ji

Entity discovery and linking (EDL) is a key technology to discover and fuse entity knowledge across domains and languages together, and thus it has many wide applications in both government-supported academic research (e.g., disaster monitoring) and industrial research (e.g., customized entity recommendation). In this talk I will give an overview of recent advances on EDL in the academic world, focusing on cross-genre cross-lingual transfer and fine-grained EDL. Then I will summarize some challenges on deploying these techniques to industrial applications and potential required extensions, including real-time online entity profiling, and joint entity extraction, linking and recommendation.

Key Dates

  • Submission Deadline: April 15, 2020

  • Acceptance Notification: May 11 4, 2020

  • Camera-ready versions: May 25 18, 2020

  • Workshop (virtual): July 10, 2020

News and Updates:

  • Reviewing has been completed, notifications to authors have been sent. Camera-ready papers due May 25, instructions here

  • New date for camera-ready submission, see updated timeline

  • Submission is closed, we are now reviewing. Thanks to all authors who submitted a paper!

  • The ACL2020 conference and workshops will either be held virtually in July, or in-person at a later date. See https://acl2020.org/

  • ECNLP 3 will be held as a 1-day workshop at ACL 2020 in Seattle, Washington, USA on July 10, 2020!

  • START link for submissions: https://www.softconf.com/acl2020/ecnlp/

Submission Instructions

ECNLP 3 invites quality research contributions in different formats:

    • Original long research papers (8 pages plus references and appendix)

    • Original short research papers (4 pages plus references and appendix)

    • Position and opinion papers (4 pages)

ECNLP will use the ACL Submission Guidelines. Authors are invited to submit a full paper of up to eight (8) pages of content, plus unlimited references; final versions of long papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 9 pages) so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account. We also invite short papers of up to 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.

Papers must be submitted in PDF according to the format published in the ACL 2020 official style guidelines (https://acl2020.org/calls/papers/). Templates are available at the previous link. The PDF files must have all non-standard fonts embedded. Workshop papers must be self-contained and in English. Papers submitted cannot exceed the above page limits.

Submissions will be made via START at https://www.softconf.com/acl2020/ecnlp/

Guidelines for the camera-ready version of the paper are given at https://acl2020.org/authors/camera-ready-instructions/