The NAACL HLT conference is the major international conference in North America in the field of natural language processing. The goal of this grant is subsidize travel, conference, and housing expenses of students selected to participate in the NAACL HLT Student Research Workshop which will be held during the conference June 3-8 in Montreal, Canada. The workshop aims to attract papers both from authors who are in their early stages of academic work (possibly undergraduate and masters students) as well as from students who are approaching graduate and would like to present their thesis work. The goal is to help attract students from the first group to pursue further academic work, and to help students from the second group in their job search and career planning.
Papers from the student workshop are presented as posters during the main poster session of the conference. Senior researchers are assigned as mentors to each student and provide individual feedback. A general session on on how to review papers and what to expect from reviewers is held during a lunch slot. 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 grant funded the organization of the Student Research workshop at the 2012 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. Ten of the authors at the workshop and one of the student organizers received partial funding to attend the conference. The student research workshop has two tracks for papers: general research papers (8 papers) and thesis track (4 papers). Students presented their research during the general poster session for the conference. Each student was assigned a prominent researcher as a mentor. Mentor and mentee had a chance to discuss aspects of the presented work. The students were able to request their preferred mentors. All but one of the students were paired with a mentor they had requested. The workshop also co-hosted a lunch for all student participants at NAACL 2012, followed by a panel discussion on what it takes to be an excellent reviewer, the responsibilities of reviewers and the impact of improper reviewing practices on the research community. The workshop offered a unique chance for students to present their work at the top venue for natural language processing research in North America and to discuss their work with distinguished scholars. The lunch and panel discussion were helpful in training younger scholars, creating a sense of community.
