Preliminary Call for Papers

The 2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL-HLT 2021) is currently scheduled to take place in Mexico City, Mexico from June 6th to June 11th, 2021. We are monitoring the ongoing global pandemic and will update the conference plans (e.g. moving to a virtual or hybrid format) as needed closer to the conference dates.

NAACL-HLT 2021 aims to bring together researchers interested in the design and study of natural language processing technology as well as its applications to new problem areas. With this goal in mind, NAACL-HLT 2021 invites the submission of long and short papers on creative, substantial and unpublished research in all aspects of computational linguistics. This preliminary call for papers will be updated with more details in the first full call for papers and more details will be available on the conference website.

NAACL-HLT 2021 has a goal of a diverse technical program–in addition to traditional research results, papers may present negative findings, survey an area, announce the creation of a new resource, argue a position, report novel linguistic insights derived using existing techniques, and reproduce, or fail to reproduce, previous results.

Topics

While NAACL-HLT 2021 will have a theme (TBD), we anticipate a comprehensive technical program. Relevant topics for the conference include, but are not limited to, the following areas (in alphabetical order):

  • Computational Social Science and Social Media
  • Dialogue and Interactive systems
  • Discourse and Pragmatics
  • Green NLP
  • Language Generation
  • Information Extraction
  • Information Retrieval and Text Mining
  • Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP
  • Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond
  • Language Resources and Evaluation
  • Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics
  • Machine Learning for NLP: Classification and Structured Prediction Models
  • Machine Learning for NLP: Language Modeling and Sequence to Sequence Models
  • Machine Translation
  • Multilinguality
  • NLP Applications
  • Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation
  • Question Answering
  • Semantics: Lexical Semantics
  • Semantics: Sentence-level Semantics and Textual Inference
  • Sentiment Analysis and Stylistic Analysis
  • Speech
  • Summarization
  • Syntax: Tagging, Chunking, and Parsing

Submission Types and Requirements

Following the previous conferences, NAACL-HLT 2021 will be open for two types of submissions: long and short papers. Author guidelines will be published at the conference webpage. Submission is electronic, using the Softconf START conference management for both long and short papers.

Important Dates

Start of the anonymity period* Friday October 23, 2020
Final paper submissions due
(long & short)		 Monday November 23, 2020
Notification of acceptance Wednesday March 10, 2021
Camera ready papers due Sunday April 11, 2021

All deadlines are 11.59 pm UTC -12h.

* Anonymity period runs from 1 month before the submission deadline (starting Wednesday, October 23, 2020 11:59PM UTC-12:00) up to the date when your paper is either accepted, rejected, or withdrawn (March 10, 2021). You may not make a non-anonymized version of your paper available online to the general community (for example, via a preprint server) during the anonymity period. By a version of a paper we understand another paper having essentially the same scientific content but possibly differing in minor details (including title and structure) and/or in length (e.g., an abstract is a version of the paper that it summarizes). If you have posted a non-anonymized version of your paper online before the start of the anonymity period, you may submit an anonymized version to the conference. The submitted version must not refer to the non-anonymized version, and you must inform the program chair(s) that a non-anonymized version exists. You may not update the non-anonymized version during the anonymity period, and we ask you not to advertise it on social media or take other actions that would further compromise double-blind reviewing during the anonymity period. Note that, while you are not prohibited from making a non-anonymous version available online before the start of the anonymity period, this does make double-blind reviewing more difficult to maintain, and we therefore encourage you to wait until the end of the anonymity period if possible. Alternatively, you may consider submitting your work to the Computational Linguistics journal, which does not require anonymization and has a track for “short” (i.e., conference-length) papers.

Contact Information

Email: naacl-2021-program-chairs@googlegroups.com

Program co-chairs:

  • Anna Rumshisky (University of Massachusetts Lowell)
  • Luke Zettlemoyer (University of Washington & Facebook)
  • Dilek Hakkani-Tur (Amazon Alexa AI)

General chair: Kristina Toutanova (Google)