Call for Papers

The 9th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP 2024), co-located with ACL 2024 in Bangkok, Thailand, invites papers of a theoretical or experimental nature describing recent advances in vector space models of meaning, compositionality, and the application of deep neural networks and spectral methods to NLP. We welcome submissions on representations of text, as well as representations that are multi-modal, cross-lingual, representations of symbolic languages, code, enriched with external knowledge, or structure-informed (syntax, morphology, etc). Topics for the workshop will include, but are not limited to:

• Developing new representations: at any level of granularity (document to character) using supervised, unsupervised or semi-supervised techniques for a multitude of tasks such as language modeling, similarity search, clustering, etc.

• Efficient learning of representations: with respect to training and inference time, model size, amount of training data, etc.

• Evaluating representations: with respect to training objectives (for LLMs: next token prediction, RLHF, span-mask denoising, etc), types of test data (e.g., text vs code), and architectures (decoder-only, encoder-decoder, etc), as well as assessing representations for generalization, compositionality, and robustness (e.g., adversarial), etc. 

• Representation analysis: methods for visualizing, explaining, and inspecting specific properties of representations (e.g., through probing), enhancing their interpretability, investigating their influence on the model's behavior, assessing the causal impact of interventions within the representation space on the model's behavior, etc. 

• Relating representation to behavior: whether, and to what extent, a model’s representations cause, condition, or boost its behavior (e.g., for LLMs: relationship between encoded knowledge and task performance). Is possessing good representations necessary or sufficient for solving a task? Vice versa, is model behavior informative of its learned representations?

Key Dates

Direct paper submission deadline:          May 17, 2024 May 20, 2024

ARR commitment deadline:                    June 1, 2024

Notification of acceptance:         June 17, 2024

Camera-ready papers due:                     July 1, 2024

Workshop date:                                       Aug 16, 2024

Submissions

We solicit three categories of papers: regular workshop papers, extended abstracts and cross-submissions. Only regular workshop papers will be included in the proceedings as archival publications, and only regular workshop papers will be eligible for best paper prizes. All categories of papers may be long (maximum 8 pages of content + up to one page for limitations (required) + unlimited references) or short (maximum 4 pages of content +  up to one page for limitations (required) + unlimited references). Please refer to ARR website for more detail about the formats. We encourage authors to include a broader impact and ethical concerns statement, following ARR Ethics Policy from the main conference. Papers can be submitted directly via OpenReview via the following link: https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/ACL/2024/Workshop/RepL4NLP.

Extended Abstracts

Preliminary but interesting ideas or results that have not been published before may be submitted as extended abstracts. Accepted extended abstracts will be presented as posters, and included in the workshop program and handbook, but will not be included in the workshop proceedings (and are not eligible for best paper prizes). Extended abstract submissions are therefore ideal for preliminary work which would benefit from exposure but is not ready for publication. Authors should submit a long extended abstract of up to 8 pages, with up to 2 additional pages for references, or a short extended abstract of up to 4 pages, with up to 2 additional pages for references. Submissions should follow the ACL 2024 formatting requirements (see the ACL 2024 Call For Papers for reference: https://2024.aclweb.org/calls/main_conference_papers/). Reviewing will be double-blind, and thus no author information should be included in the papers; self-reference that identifies the authors should be avoided or anonymized.

Cross-Submissions

In addition to previously unpublished work, we also solicit papers on relevant topics that have appeared in a non-NLP venue (e.g., workshop or conference papers at NeurIPS or ICML) or findings papers in NLP venues. Accepted cross-submissions will be presented as posters, with an indication of original venue, but will not be included in the workshop program and handbook, or the workshop proceedings (and are not eligible for best paper prizes). Cross-submissions are ideal for related work which would benefit from exposure to the RepL4NLP audience. Submission length is determined by the original venue. Interested authors should submit their papers in PDF format through the RepL4NLP submission portal with a note on the original venue. Papers in this category do not need to follow the ACL format and selection will be solely determined by the organising committee. These submissions do not undergo the standard reviewing process and the organizing comitee makes the decision on whether they will be presented. We ask the authors to submit these works directly via email to repl4nlp@googlegroups.com.

ACL 2024 fast-track submissions

Papers submitted to the ACL 2024 main conference that have not been selected can be submitted to the RepL4NLP 2024 fast-track. To do so, please complete the following form: <Make New Form> We will then make a decision based on your reviews received from ACL 2024. Note that you do not need to submit the reviews received from ACL 2024. 

Contact Information

The co-chairs of the workshop can be contacted by email at: repl4nlp@googlegroups.com.