Contributions to this post were provided by Greg Durrett from the University of Texas at Austin. 

The 17th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT 2019) was held in Minneapolis, June 3 to June 5, 2019. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored the 2019 NAACL Student Research Workshop (SRW) in conjunction with NAACL HLT 2019.

The SRW gave student researchers in natural language processing (NLP) the opportunity to present their work and receive constructive feedback and mentorship by experienced members of the ACL community. 

Twenty-three student participants from eight countries presented original research projects and thesis proposals as both talks and posters during the main conference. By participating in the conference, students had access to mentoring from senior researchers, plus dedicated SRW events for students to interact with each other and the organizers.

Papers were selected through peer review, with an acceptance rate of 36%. Topics spanned the full range of NLP, including question answering, social media analysis, text generation, spoken language understanding, and more. To encourage students who did not have experience with academic writing to submit, the workshop’s pre-submission mentoring programs paired interested student authors with mentors who helped them with editing.

The workshop also served to introduce three more senior PhD students to conference organizing. All aspects of the workshop except fundraising were led by the student committee, with the two faculty organizers serving only in an advisory role.

For more information about the workshop, please see the workshop website.