The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the primary international organization in the field of natural language processing. 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 Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Student Research Workshop, which is part of the ACL conference on July 11-16, 2010 in Uppsala, Sweden. The workshop consists of two tracks: paper presentations and poster presentations. Each paper presentation is followed by a discussion chaired by respected researchers in the field. The poster session provides a further opportunity for extended one-on-one interaction with the members of the CL research community. All selected work has only student authors and 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 computational linguistics community. It allows the best students in the field to take their first important step toward becoming professional computational linguists by receiving critical feedback on their work from external experts, and by making contacts with other students and senior researchers in their field. The students who are involved in running and selecting papers for the workshop also gain valuable opportunities for professional growth and interaction with the researchers on the organizing committee of the main conference. The workshop contributes to the maintenance and development of a skilled and diverse computational linguistics and natural language processing research community.
The purpose of this project was to subsidize travel as well as conference and housing expenses for students who were selected to participate in the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Student Research Workshop as well as the ACL main conference held from July 11 to July 16, 2010 in Uppsala, Sweden. The Student Research Workshop is organized annually to provide a valuable opportunity for the next generation of computational linguists to enter the research community. It allows the best students in the field to take an important first 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 researchers in their field. Another benefit of the student research workshop is that it is organized and run by students. Participating in the organization of the workshop offers students excellent opportunities for professional growth. They gain technical experiences in reviewing and selecting research papers written by their peers, as well as practical experiences in organizing a sizable conference event. Senior researchers on the organizing committee of the main conference advise and mentor the student organizers. The workshop format is a stimulating environment for students to present their work and be exposed to outside perspectives at a critical time in their research career. Following the successful format from the 2008 and 2009 ACL Student Research Workshops, the 2010 workshop in Uppsala included two tracks: full paper presentations and poster presentations by both graduate students and undergraduate students. This framework facilitated interaction between students at various stages of their academic careers and improved the quality of the presented papers. The full presentation track was aimed at students who have settled on their thesis direction. The emphasis was on presenting significant research towards a Ph.D., with the opportunity of getting feedback from the community before their dissertation work is completed. The poster track, on the other hand, focused on original and unpublished research that was more preliminary and still in progress. The poster format allowed students to interact with a large number of conference attendees over a less rigid setting. Moreover, with an emphasis on preliminary on?going work, the poster track encouraged participation from undergraduate students, and afforded them an opportunity to meet potential future graduate advisors.
