The 1st Workshop on Simple and Efficient Natural Language Processing (SustaiNLP 2020) will be co-located with EMNLP2020 and will be held virtually on November 11, 2020.
MOTIVATION
The NLP community in recent years focuses on improving performance on standard benchmarks, predominantly using neural models. While it has led to progress on various tasks, it also resulted in a worrisome increase in model complexity and the amount of computational resources required for training and using current state-of-the-art models. Moreover, the recent research efforts have, for the most part, failed to identify sources of empirical gains in models, failing to justify the model complexity beyond benchmark performance. In this context, the SustaiNLP workshop has two main objectives: (1) encouraging development of more efficient NLP models; and (2) providing simpler architectures and empirical justification of model complexity.
TOPICS OF INTEREST
We encourage submissions in the following topics, including but are not limited to:
Models that yield competitive performance but require less training data, less computational resources, or less training time
Models with lower computational complexity of prediction/inference
Theoretical or empirical justification of the complexity of existing NLP models, e.g., by showing that meaningful simplifications of the model lead to significant deterioration in performances, interpretability, and/or robustness;
Conceptual or practical simplification of an existing model, yielding comparable performance, while offering advantages like interpretability, inference time, robustness, etc.
Suggesting new best practices in reporting experimental results
Critically analyzing existing evaluation protocols
Suggesting new evaluation protocols
IMPORTANT DATES
Anonymity period begins: July 30, 2020
Submission deadline: August 30, 2020 September 11, 2020
Notification of acceptance: September 29, 2020
Camera-ready papers due: October 10, 2020
Workshop: November 11, 2020
All deadlines are 11.59 pm UTC -12h (“anywhere on Earth”).
SUBMISSIONS
Submission is electronic, using the Softconf START conference management system.
Submission link: https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2020/sustainlp2020/
Both long and short papers must follow the EMNLP 2020 style file: https://2020.emnlp.org/files/emnlp2020-templates.zip
We solicit three categories of papers:
Standard workshop papers: anonymized submissions describing substantially original research not previously published in other venues.
Extended abstracts: anonymized submissions describing preliminary but interesting ideas or results not previously published in other venues.
Cross-submissions: non-anonymized papers on relevant topics that have previously been accepted for publication in another venue.
Only standard workshop papers will be included in the proceedings as archival publications. All three categories of papers may be long (maximum 8 pages plus references) or short (maximum 4 pages plus references).
Supplementary Material: Each submission can be accompanied by a single PDF appendix. The paper submissions need to remain fully self-contained, as these supplementary materials are completely optional, and reviewers are not even asked to review or download them. Supplementary materials need to be fully anonymized to preserve the double-blind reviewing policy.
Dual Submission with EMNLP is allowed. You will be asked to specify the cross-submission information in the START system. If the paper is accepted to both EMNLP and the workshop, it will be considered as a cross-submission and will not be a part of the workshop proceedings. If it gets rejected from EMNLP and accepted to the workshop and you want us to consider it as a standard workshop paper which will be included in the proceedings, please contact us to let us know.