The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the primary international organization in the field of natural language processing and computational linguistics. The ACL's annual conference is the major international conference in this field. This project is to subsidize travel, conference and housing expenses of students selected to participate in the ACL Student Research Workshop, which will take place during the main ACL conference on August 4-9, 2013 in Sofia, Bulgaria. The Student Research Workshop accepts papers in two categories: thesis/research proposal and general research papers. The thesis/research proposal can have only one author who must be a student. The research papers can have multiple authors, with the first author being a student. The workshop is organized and run by students.
The Student Research Workshop provides a valuable opportunity for the next generation of natural language processing researchers to enter the research community. It allows the students in the field to take an important step towards becoming professional computational linguists by receiving critical feedback on their work from experts outside of their dissertation committee, and by making contacts with other students and senior researchers in their field. The students who are involved in running and reviewing for the student workshop also gain valuable opportunities for professional growth and interaction with the researchers on the organizing committee of the main conference. The ACL Student Research Workshop contributes to the maintenance and development of a skilled and diverse computational linguistics and natural language processing community.
The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Student Research Workshop was held during the 51st annual meeting of ACL on August 4-9, 2013 in Sofia, Bulgaria. This workshop provided student researchers working at the intersection of computer science and linguistics with a valuable opportunity to enter the research community, providing them with critical feedback from their peers and experts in the field. The workshop also provided three student organizers with practical experience in organizing a sizable conference event, including recruiting knowledgeable reviewers, assigning appropriate papers to reviewers, reviewing research papers, managing presentations and posters, handling travel and reimbursement, and publishing articles online as part of the ACL Anthology. Three faculty members helped mentor the student organizers throughout this process. The ACL Student Research Workshop received 52 student article submissions, and after review by 50 experts in the field recruited by the student organizers, selected 25 articles for publication. Coordinating with the ACL main conference, the workshop was organized such that 3 student papers were presented orally in one of the parallel sessions of the main conference and 22 papers were shown as posters as part of the poster session of the main conference. All papers were published to the ACL anthology at http://aclweb.org/anthology/P/P13/#3000.
