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 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies Student Session. This session is part of the ACL HLT conference to be held on June 19-24, 2011 in Portland, Oregon, USA. The Student Session includes two separate categories of submissions: thesis proposals and research papers. The goal is to provide a forum for students at different stages in their research.
The Student Session 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 session also gain valuable opportunities for professional growth and interaction with the researchers on the organizing committee of the main conference. The Student Session contributes to the maintenance and development of a skilled and diverse computational linguistics and natural language processing research community.
This project received funds for organizing the ACL 2011 Student Session. The funds were requested to give travel assisntance to student researchers presenting their work at the Student Session. Following the tradition of previous ACL Student Research Workshops, the Student Session's goal is to aid students at multiple stages in their education, from senior-level undergraduates to graduate students at different stages. Therefore, we decided to include two different submission tracks: thesis proposals and research papers. The first option was targeted to seasoned graduate students who wish to get feedback on their proposal and strengthen their final work. The second track, research papers, was intended for students new to academic conferences. We believed this framework would facilitate interaction between students at various stages of their academic careers and improve the quality of the presented papers. This year student session was organized by the student co-chairs: Sasa Petrovic (University of Edinburgh), Emily Pitler (University of Pennsylvania), and Ethan Selfridge (Oregon Health & Science University) and the faculty advisors: Miles Osborne (University of Edinburgh) and Thamar Solorio (University of Alabama at Birmingham). In order to give the Student Session more visibility, we decided to have all papers accepted presented as posters in a session held in conjunction with the main conference posters. The Student Session received a total of 57 submissions, of which 22 were accepted for presentation. We had a very succesful Student Session. The work presented was strong in quality. In addition, the student participants had the great benefits of disseminating their research and receive detailed feedback from senior members in the field.
