Call for Papers

NLP Beyond Text 2020 - First International Workshop on Natural Language Processing Beyond Text (NLPBT 2020)

Description

Humans interact with each other through several means (e.g., voice, gestures, written text, facial expressions, etc.) and a natural human-machine interaction system should preserve the same modality. However, traditional Natural Language Processing (NLP) focuses on analyzing textual input to solve language understanding and reasoning tasks, and other modalities are only partially targeted.

This workshop aims to be a forum for both academia and industry researchers where new and unfinished research in the area of Multi/Cross-Modal NLP can be discussed. In particular, the focus of this workshop are (i) studying how to bridge the gap between NLP on spoken and written language and (ii) exploring how NLU models can be empowered by jointly analyzing multiple input sources, including language (spoken or written), vision (gestures and expressions) and acoustic (paralingustic) modalities.

Workshop topics include but are not limited to:

Workshop topics include but are not limited to:

  • Text pre-processing on ASR transcriptions

  • Bridging the gap between NLU of written texts and SLU

  • Multi/Cross-modal Natural Language Understanding

  • Multi/Cross-modal Emotion/Sentiment Analysis

  • Multi/Cross-modal Conversational Systems

  • Multi/Cross-modal Machine Translation

  • Multi/Cross-modal Question Answering

  • Relevant resources and datasets for multi/cross-modal NLP

Important Dates

All deadlines must be considered at 11.59pm GMT-12 (anywhere on Earth).

  • Submission Deadline: August 15, 2020 August 31, 2020

  • Retraction of papers accepted at EMNLP 2020: September 15, 2020

  • Acceptance Notification: September 29, 2020 October 2, 2020

  • Camera-ready version: October 10, 2020 October 11, 2020

  • Workshop: November 20, 2020

Dual Submission Policy

EMNLP 2020 is allowing dual submissions between the main conference and the EMNLP 2020 workshops. We are giving the authors the possibility to submit to NLPBT 2020 papers submitted also to EMNLP 2020. To enable an optimal review process, it is required that authors submitting to NLPBT 2020 includes in their submission the paper ID of the submission at the main conference (if any). If a paper is accepted to the main conference, it must be retracted from NLPBT 2020.

We will require that the main conference reviews will be forwarded to the workshop. In any case, the NLPBT Program Committee will perform a review process by considering also the main conference reviews.

Instructions for Authors

Papers must be submitted in PDF according to the ACL/EMNLP guidelines (https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Author_Guidelines). Papers must be self-contained and in English.

Template files can be found here.

Submission is electronic, using the Softconf START conference management system: https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2020/nlpbt2020/

Paper Submission Information

Long Papers

Long paper submissions must describe substantial, original, and unpublished work. Uncompleted work is also accepted. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation and analysis should be included. Review forms will be made available prior to the deadlines. Long papers may consist of up to 8 pages of content, plus unlimited pages for references. No additional pages will be given for the final paper version.

Short Papers

Short paper submissions must describe original and unpublished work. Uncompleted work is also accepted. 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

  • A negative result

  • An opinion piece

  • An interesting application nugget

Short papers may consist of up to 4 pages of content, plus unlimited references.

The program committee will select a list of the short or long papers that will be presented orally during the virtual workshop.

While short papers will be distinguished from long papers in the proceedings, there will be no distinction in the proceedings between papers presented orally and not.

Authorship

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 NLPBT 2020 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 NLPBT 2020 after the paper submission deadline.

Instructions For Double-Blind Review

As reviewing will be double blind, papers must not include authors’ names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references or links (such as github) 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) …” Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review.

Papers should not refer, for further detail, to documents that are not available to the reviewers. For example, do not omit or redact important citation information to preserve anonymity. Instead, use third person or named reference to this work, as described above (“Smith showed” rather than “we showed”). If important citations are not available to reviewers (e.g., awaiting publication), these paper/s should be anonymized and included in the appendix. They can then be referenced from the submission without compromising anonymity.

Presentation Requirement

All accepted papers must be presented at the conference to appear in the proceedings. Authors of papers accepted for presentation at NLPBT 2020 must notify the program chairs by the camera-ready deadline if they wish to withdraw the paper.

Previous presentations of the work (e.g. preprints on arXiv.org) should be indicated in a footnote in the final version of papers appearing in the NLPBT 2020 proceedings. Please note that this footnote should not be in the submission version of the paper.

At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the workshop by the early registration deadline. Please, check the EMNLP 2020 website to register to the workshop.

Additional Information and Contact Details

For any inquiry, please contact: giusecas [AT] amazon.com