1. General Statistics

ACL2020 had an acceptance rate of 22.7% based on 3,429 submissions and 779 accepted papers. 3,429 is a record number of submissions for ACL. To put that number in perspective, just two years ago the number of submissions was 1,544, or less than half of this year! Ten years ago, there were “only” 956 submissions.

Of the 779 accepted papers, 571 were long papers and 208 were short papers. Note that when Desk Rejects and Withdrawals are removed, 29 and 312 papers respectively, the acceptance rate is 25.2%.

2. Comparison with Prior ACLs

This year’s ACL is in line with acceptance rates with the most recent editions of the ACL. ACL 2019 also had an acceptance rate of 22.7% with similar rates for long and short papers. For a history of acceptance rates at the ACL, please visit the ACL Wiki.

3. Track Statistics

Next, we break up the acceptance rate by track. Machine Learning for NLP, Dialogue and Interactive Technologies, Machine Translation, Information Extraction and NLP Applications were the top five most popular tracks, with each having over 200 submissions. Machine Learning for NLP had nearly 300 submissions (296). To show how much our field has grown, ACL 2002 received 258 submissions total across all tracks.

Acceptance rates for each track ranged from 17.9% to 41.7% as follows.

4. Country and Region Statistics

We follow ACL 2019 in extracting the country/region listed in Softconf by the contact author and calculating statistics on that set. Please note that the country/region data is self-reported by each author. There are 57 countries/regions represented in this subset. Below we list the 25 countries/regions with the most submissions. China led with 1,084, followed closely by the United States. In ACL 2019, the United States had 820 submissions and China had 817. Germany had the third most submissions then with 136.

Finally, we analyze the acceptance rates for each country/region, again based on contact author. The following table lists all 57 countries/regions in alphabetical order. In the end, 37 countries/regions have papers in the conference. The five with the most accepted papers were the US (305), China (185), Great Britain (50), Germany (44), and Japan (24). As observed by the ACL2019 Program Chairs, the distribution is too skewed for a fair comparison of acceptance rates. As in their analysis, if we consider the top 15 countries/regions in terms of number of submissions, those with the highest acceptance rates were Israel (40.9%), Great Britain (31.1%), United States (29.4%), Germany (29.3%), and a tie between Hong Kong and Singapore, both with 26.7%. This list is almost the same as last year, except Great Britain was not in the top five.

We look forward to “seeing” you in a month in the first virtual ACL ever. Please do not forget to register.

Many accommodations to make your presentations more accessible still depend on you. To ensure your work reaches a broad and diverse audience, please consider the following tips.

While preparing slides:

• Avoid relying solely on visuals: Graphics and animations play an important role during presentations, but presenters should be mindful that relying just on a visual channel for communication can limit its access. When using graphics to convey critical aspects of your work, also provide a textual description so that your content is more accessible.

• Use accessible colors: To ensure your visuals are more accessible, please use a color-blind friendly palette. Similarly, choose high resolution images for your visuals and use text color(s) with sufficient contrast against its background color for better readability. For some resources that may help you further, see the Accessibility for Camera-Ready Papers blog post.

• Use accessible fonts: Select font styles and font sizes that facilitate reading for everyone, including for researchers with dyslexia. For instance, avoid using ALL CAPS.

• Ensure screen reader friendliness: Many researchers with visual impairments use screen reader software to read aloud the content. If you will be releasing the slides publicly, please consider making them accessible for screen readers. Most presentation platforms support this functionality such as Microsoft PowerPoint, Google Slides, and Apple Keynote.

• Minimize visual complexity: Try to reduce the amount of content (text and visuals) in your slides, since visual complexity can be overwhelming and make it more difficult for your audience to absorb information during your presentation. For audience members who are deaf or hard of hearing, or who have difficulty following spoken English, there can be too little time to view the dense visuals on a slide while reading captions or watching sign-language interpretation.

During the presentation:

• Describe essential content verbally: Describe all the text/visuals on your slides to ensure that conference attendees with disabilities don’t miss out on any critical information. For example, if you have a results table, don’t simply say, “Here are our results,” and expect the audience to read the table quickly; instead, try describing the table and its highlights, for instance, by describing how well your system performed. If the visual is decorative, then skip describing it during the talk as it may be a distraction.

• Adjust to a reasonable pace: For information-rich slides in your presentation, you should try to allow people some extra time to view and understand the information.

• Be clear: Speak at an adequate speed and clearly. Avoid having to rush through your content. This is not just important for the listeners but also for sign language interpreters who may be supporting your talk. Look straight into the camera, so your lips will be visible to anyone relying on lipreading.

• Avoid ambient noise: When recording your talk, please choose a quiet environment without noise in the background.

We also recommend reviewing the ACM SIGACCESS Accessible Presentation Guide, which also points to this video resource with examples.

Additional relevant links for exploration

• Dyslexia friendly style guide from the British Dyslexia Association

We’re excited to give you some more details on the virtual infrastructure for ACL 2020!

In this post, we’ll summarize the main conference, which will take place July 6-8; more information on tutorials (July 5) and workshops (July 9-10) later!

In designing the conference, we drew heavily on the infrastructure pioneered by Sasha Rush and the ICLR organization committee at ICLR 2020, together with lots of advice from the organizers of other virtual conferences and the ACM. We will be using SlidesLive for pre-recorded talks, Zoom for live sessions, RocketChat for chat, and a special web portal. Our goal was to enable participation around the world and maximize inclusion, engagement, and learning in a safe environment.

There will be 909 presentations at the main conference (779 from ACL, 7 from Computational Linguistics, 31 from Transaction of ACL, 43 demos, and 49 Student Research Workshop papers). Each will have a pre-recorded talk (long/demo/SRW papers 12 minutes, short papers 7 minutes), two live Q&A video sessions at different times, and a linked RocketChat channel. Authors are already being emailed instructions by SlidesLive about how to record and upload their talks.

In addition to the talks and Q&A sessions, there will be livestreamed keynote presentations, award sessions, and business meetings, as well as mentoring and other sessions and sponsor booths.

Each day we will have 10 video Q&A sessions in different time zones across the world, where two sessions are grouped back-to-back as shown in the following table. We will also have a 2-hour plenary session (7am - 9am PDT) for keynote talks, award sessions, and business meetings.

(The choice of time for the plenary session is based on guidelines from the ACM. While there is no ideal time, this particular time slot allows most of the world to participate before midnight and after 7am.)

Legend:

• The above table lists the 10 one-hour live QA sessions as well as the two-hour plenary session. Please use the map below if your time zone is not reflected.
• UTC+0 times are marked in bold
• +1 means a day ahead of UTC, -1 means a day behind

Papers and Live Video Q&A Sessions

• All accepted papers will have a pre-recorded video talk (12 minutes for long papers, demos, and Student Research Workshop papers; 7 minutes for short papers) and slides available for your access. TACL and CL papers presented at the conference are treated the same as a main conference long paper. Videos will be captioned, and videos and slides will be available before the start of the conference and you can watch them at your convenience.
• Each Video Q&A session will be organized by parallel tracks for specific topic areas (e.g., semantics, machine translation, etc.). Each paper in the track will have a separate Zoom room where you can engage in live discussions with the authors. You can jump between Zoom rooms during the session.
• You can also use RocketChat to ask written questions of the authors.
• To provide better access across the globe, each paper will be allocated two Q&A sessions at different times.

Plenary Sessions

• The two Keynote talks will be livestreamed at their designated time. The talk will be 45 minutes followed by at least a 30 minutes live Q&A session with the speaker. You can post your questions via chat, and a moderator will read out the questions to the speaker during live Q&A.
• Award sessions include livestreamed talks and live award ceremonies for the Lifetime Achievement Award, Distinguished Service Award, and Test of the Time Awards.
• The Best Paper ceremony where we will announce the best paper awards.
• Business meetings will be a mix of pre-recorded short presentations and live discussions organized by the ACL Executive board. We strongly encourage you to participate and provide your feedback on various issues the ACL executive board is working on! The session chair will moderate the discussion, and you can raise your hand using the Zoom interface to participate.

Student Research Workshop (SRW)

• There are 49 papers accepted to the SRW at ACL 2020.
• All accepted papers will have a pre-recorded video talk of 12 minutes.
• The live Q&A sessions for each paper will take place July 6th-8th, alongside those of the main conference.
• The SRW will use the same platforms as the main conference (SlideLive, Zoom, RocketChat).

Demonstrations

• There are 43 demonstration papers at the main conference.
• Each demo paper will have a pre-recorded 12-minute talk presenting the details about the demonstration, two live Q&A video sessions for about 30 minutes at different times, and a linked RocketChat channel.

Registration and Fees

• You must register in order to attend ACL 2020 and access the ACL 2020 website portal, videos, and live events. (But of course the papers will be available to everyone at the open access ACL Anthology; at some point later this summer the talk videos will join them there at the Anthology as well).
• The ACL 2020 registration fees are drastically reduced this year, which we hope will greatly increase inclusion! Regular registration is $125 and student registration is $50.
• The low fees include workshops and tutorials. (You still need to register for workshops/tutorials but there is no additional charge.)
• As usual, ACL Membership for the year is also required ($100 regular, $50 for students). ACL membership fees are valid for the whole year (meaning EMNLP and AACL!). Furthermore, it’s your membership fees that fund all our really important open access efforts, such as keeping our journals and the Anthology open access to the world with no charge!

NOTE: Those who already volunteered following our earlier call for website development volunteers, can we trouble you to please fill out this Google form or this Microsoft Office form (incase the Google form is not accessible) so we can ensure you get free registration.

VOLUNTEER/SCHOLARSHIP PROGRAM

We seek student and non-student volunteers for the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2020). In exchange for one full day equivalent of work, students receive free registration to the main conference (including workshops and tutorials) and ACL membership. Non-student volunteers also receive free registration to the main conference (including workshops and tutorials).

As ACL 2020 will be virtual, volunteer tasks will be different from previous years. We are seeking volunteers to help us in the follwing tasks:

• develop the virtual conference website (using CSS/JS, Python/Flask, Apache/NGINX, and GitHub CI and Actions),
• organize video presentations,
• act as technical host for live video Q&A sessions, and
• provide assistance for conference events including tutorials, the main conference, and workshops (including the student research workshop).

As we will receive most of the presentations prior to the conference, a large portion of the tasks will be done in advance, maximizing volunteer access to the conference events.

SELECTION CRITERIA

Applicants for the Volunteer/scholarship Program will be evaluated based on the material they submit in their application packages (see below for the submission requirements).
Preference will be given to students who are presenting a paper in the main conference, the Student Research Workshop, or any of the associated workshops and do not have other means of support.

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE

Applicants for the Volunteer/scholarship Program should fill one of the application forms below (not both):

• Google application form OR
• Microsoft Office application form

TIMELINE

Application deadline: Friday, June 9 June 12, 2020
Notification of acceptance: Friday, June 19, 2020

CONTACT

Student Volunteers Chairs (acl2020.volunteers@gmail.com)
Student Research Workshop Chairs and Faculty Advisors (acl.srw20@gmail.com)

1. Use high resolution images for your visuals, so that they remain clear even if the reader zooms in. If your figures incorporate text, use fonts and font sizes that are legible. Using text color with sufficient contrast against its background color also makes the text more readable. You can use Contrast Checker to check for different foreground/background color combinations that may be preferable.

2. Visuals should be interpretable in grayscale for broader accessibility. If you do use colors to convey information, try using a color palette that is inclusive of readers with color blindness. Many popular visualization libraries provide easy-to-use colorblind-friendly palettes (e.g., seaborn or bokeh for Python, ggplot2 for R). You could also use Color Oracle to check how your images will appear to readers with impaired color vision.

3. Some researchers interface with computers using screen readers. For a screen reader to be able to read your paper PDF effectively, it should be “tagged” with the underlying logical structure, reading order, etc. While there are applications like Adobe Acrobat Pro that can be used to review a PDF for accessibility and may help resolve some issues automatically, the process requires some manual effort such as adding alternate texts for your visuals (simplified instructions here: Accessible PDF Author Guide; also viewable as a video with captions here: video guide to making accessible PDFs). If you have access to such software, we encourage you to use it to make your PDFs accessible.

4. When using such software to add alternate texts for visuals in your PDF, consider that alternate texts are meant to convey through text what the visuals are conveying, thereby making those visuals accessible to screen reader users. They should highlight the aspects of the visuals that are salient to the paper, rather than merely describing the visuals or repeating their captions. Adding alternate texts applies to all visuals used in your paper, including tables, charts, images, and diagrams.

5. If your paper has a voiced supplementary video, please add captions to the video so that it is accessible for deaf or hard of hearing researchers. Various free options exist online to accomplish this, some of which are outlined here: free resources for captioning videos.

6. If your paper discusses accessibility issues or refers to people with disabilities, please consult the ACM SIGACCESS Accessible Writing Guide for guidelines.

Thank you for helping to make your papers more accessible to all readers. If you have follow-up questions, please send an email to acl2020-diversity-inclusion-chairs@googlegroups.com with “Accessibility Subcommittee” in the subject line.

Additional relevant links for exploration

• Adobe PDF Accessibility Overview
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
• WebAIM’s PDF Accessibility Primer
• ACM SIGACCESS Describing Figures
• Knowledge Base of AccessComputing

At ACL 2020, the D&I team consists of 13 volunteers from diverse backgrounds and life experiences serving on five subcommittees with their own missions. Leading up to the conference, more information from the D&I team will be shared in blog posts which we hope will be useful for both new and returning participants in the ACL community.

Academic Inclusion Chairs

Mission: Ensure the venue is welcoming to researchers from diverse subdisciplines, conducive to building academic networks across disciplines and career stages.

Aakanksha Naik, Carnegie Mellon University
Emily Prud’hommeaux, Boston College
Alla Rozovskaya, Queens College (City University of New York)

Accessibility Chairs

Mission: Ensure the venue is accessible for researchers with any disability, including provision of requested access services.

Sushant Kafle, Google/Rochester Institute of Technology
Masoud Rouhizadeh, Johns Hopkins University
Naomi Saphra, University of Edinburgh

Childcare Chairs

Mission: Ensure adequate childcare provisions to help researchers who are caregivers of children to attend the conference.

Khyathi Chandu, Carnegie Mellon University
Stephen Mayhew, Duolingo

Financial Access Chairs

Mission: Ensure provision of financial access to researchers from underrepresented demographics and geographies to attend the conference.

Allyson Ettinger, University of Chicago
Ryan Georgi, KPMG
Tirthankar Ghosal, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Patna

Socio-cultural Inclusion Chairs

Mission: Ensure a welcoming and inclusive environment for researchers from various socio-cultural subgroups, accommodate for diverse needs for food and drinks at the conference, as well as support initiatives for groups to socialize and network.

Shruti Palaskar, Carnegie Mellon University
Maarten Sap, University of Washington

If you have questions about Diversity and Inclusion efforts at ACL 2020 or suggestions for how to enhance your ACL 2020 experience, please reach out to us directly via email (acl2020-diversity-inclusion-chairs@googlegroups.com). We look forward to welcoming you in Seattle!

As you know, we are experimenting with several conference process changes this year: (1) a COI detection system developed by Amanda Stent and Arya McCarthy, (2) a reviewer-paper matching system developed by Graham Neubig, and (3) removed the “reviewer bidding” phase, on top of significant manual effort from our Senior Area Chairs and Area Chairs in the review assignment phase. These changes were meant to improve reviewer/paper matching while improving detection of conflicts of interest as well as minimizing the weaknesses of the bidding method.

We need to first thank you all for filling out the global profile and the author/reviewer form! Your effort has made it possible to use the automated systems. It has also led to the largest ever pool of reviewer candidates!

Many of you have received paper assignments (notified through an email), and also many have not received any assignments. Paper assignments were made based on the information you provided on the reviewer form, the number of submissions in each area, the results from automated assignment systems, as well as manual adjustment from PCs/SACs/ACs. If you did not receive any assignment at this point, it is still possible you will be called upon to review at any point before final decisions are made. We would like to thank you in advance for your willingness and efforts in this review process!

We’ve listed a lot of helpful tips and resources for reviewing effectively here:

https://acl2020.org/reviewers

But one thing we would like to add is that always helps to start the reviews early! :)

In case you are curious about what has been involved in coming to this point, in the past month or so, the PC/SAC/AC have done the following:

• Went through all submissions to identify desk rejects. No paper was desk rejected because of the Global profile or author/review form issues.
• Assigned papers to each area. In many cases, the author specified area (during submission) was not the best home for reviewing the paper.
• Allocated reviewers to each track based on the preferences indicated on the reviewer form as well as the number of submissions to each track.
• Assigned area chairs and reviewers to each paper (this was done first by an automated method and then the SACs moved people manually)
• ACs double checked the submissions as well as the reviewer assignments.

With all of your help, we are looking forward to putting together an exciting program for ACL 2020!

Please, if you have a moment, read over the blog and update your Global Profile as necessary. It will take less than 5 minutes and will not only help make this conference a success but future NLP conferences as well.

Getting to your Global Profile

As a reminder, you can access your Global Profile by going here first:

https://www.softconf.com/acl2020/papers/

Then, log into your START account, go to “User” -> “Account information”-> “Update Profile”. At the bottom, click on “Please click here to update your global user information”. Please provide all the information requested on the form.

Global Profile Samples

Sometimes the easiest way to know if you’ve filled in something right is to look at some examples. We made two fictitious ones below. Bonus points if you know where Rutland is.

The first one (link) describes a person with prior publications and some experience in the field.

The second one (link) describes someone who is new to the field. They don’t have any publications and thus no semantic scholar, so they fill in n/a.

Semantic Scholar ID

Find your semantic scholar webpage and place the URL in this text box. If you have a semantic scholar page, but it’s mixed with someone else’s papers, that’s fine. Please list that URL. But it’s a good idea in general to curate your semantic scholar so it only reflects your work–do that later and update the profile url if necessary thereafter. Having other papers there won’t impact the processes in ACL2020.

If you have never published before, you will not have a semantic scholar page, and thus list n/a in the text box.

If you have published before but semantic scholar does not have a page for you (it happens sometimes), you have to create a page. Updates to semantic scholar can take several days so, in the meantime, please list n/a. Once the semantic scholar page is available, update the Global Profile with the URL.

COI Text Box

In this field you enter the semantic scholar URLs of researchers who you have or currently collaborate with but do not have any publications with. Note that there should be one URL per line without any punctuation.

Year of PhD Graduation

If you have a doctorate, list your year of graduation (ie. 2014). If you are in a PhD program, list the year you expect to graduate (use your best guess). If you do not have a PhD and are not in a PhD program, list n/a.

Secondary Email

This is important to list in case we or future program chairs need to get in touch with you about reviews or other conference related duties. It should not be the same as your Primary Email.

Affiliations Text Box

You should create a list of domains here as specified and illustrated in the Profile instructions. List one on each line without punctuation.

And that’s it! Please go into your Global Profile today and review the above. It’s easy and will only take a few moments.

Finally, we have now received all necessary Author/Reviewer form responses. Thanks for your help!

• failure to be awarded a visa (either denied or delayed despite good faith efforts to apply on time) or government travel restrictions that legally prevent attendance,
• illness or other reasons that physically prevent attendance,
• other extenuating urgent/personal circumstances

If any such extenuating circumstance arises, email the remote presentation chairs. Note that the number of remote presentations is limited due to logistics. If there are more requests than slots, priority will be given to visa or medical factors beyond the authors’ control.

As stated in the call for papers, remote presenters will still need to register as usual for the main conference, regardless of presentation format.

To keep things running smoothly, we will ask remote presenters to pre-record their talks and use the live remote link only for the question session.

Hao Fang hao.fang@microsoft.com and Yi Luan luanyi@google.com, Remote Presentation Chairs

Here are a couple reminders/clarifications regarding the Global Profile and the Author/Reviewer information form.

Do I need to fill both Global Profile and Author/Reviewer information form?

Yes. Global Profile is within the START system which hosts many other conferences (including ACL related conferences). The Author/Reviewer information form collects information specifically for ACL2020. With your permission, information from this form may be passed down to future ACL related conferences.

Is it mandatory to provide my “Semantic Scholar ID” in both the Global Profile and the Author/Reviewer information form?

Yes. It is mandatory to provide your Semantic Scholar ID which allows the automatic detection of COI and reviewer assignment (please check this blog from Amanda Stent and Graham Neubig for details). In addition, these two boxes in the Global Profile are crucial:

• Affiliations - Past and Present
• Please enter the Semantic Scholar IDs of everyone who may be biased in reviewing your submission.

In the Global Profile, if a field does not apply to you, please leave it blank.

Here is some information from Semantic Scholar about how to find a Semantic Scholar profile ID: One way to do this is to type “Semantic Scholar” and your name into a search engine of your choice, and find the returned profile that corresponds to you. Another option is to find one of your papers on www.semanticscholar.org, and click on your name, or you can search for your name on Semantic Scholar and pick the page with most of your work from the author panel on the right-hand side of the search results.

Your Semantic Scholar ID is an url. For example, Noam Chomsky’s is https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/Noam-Chomsky/2329142.

You can add or remove papers by claiming your profile (click on “CLAIM AUTHOR PAGE”) and fix paper details using the “Contact” button on the top right of the page. Feel free to contact Semantic Scholar Support with questions or concerns.

I filled the Author/Reviewer information form, will I get a confirmation? Can I update the form after I submit it?

Please make sure you hit the “submit” button. Once you submit your form, you should receive an immediate confirmation that “Your response was submitted”. If you absolutely have to change your form, please fill in another form with the same START ID.

How do I know if my or my co-author’s profiles were filled in correctly?

You and your co-authors can always check your respective Global Profile anytime. Unfortunately, for the author/reviewer information form, there is not a direct way to know whether the forms are filled correctly. What you (the main author) can do is to communicate with your co-authors (which should be the case when you put together a paper anyway) and make sure they have filled the forms. After the submission deadline, we will be in touch with you if there is any problem.