## Call for Papers: NLP COVID-19 Workshop @ ACL2020 https://www.nlpcovid19workshop.org

Paper submission deadline; June 30, 2020

Lives all around the world have been dramatically impacted by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The global research community has mobilized to respond with timely research and scientific analysis that can contribute to our understanding and management of the virus. This workshop will specifically focus on the use of natural language processing (NLP) to address COVID-19 and/or its collateral impacts.

This workshop will host late-breaking research papers. In order to support a **rapid review process**, we will offer rolling submissions and publications using the OpenReview platform (https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/ACL/2020/Workshop/NLP-COVID).

We aim to review publications within one week and will make papers immediately available upon acceptance.

## Overview The ACL community can play a unique role in supporting research to combat COVID-19. Many valuable insights and information may be contained in vast quantities of text and speech data. Thousands of previously published research articles (and those being published on a daily basis) on coronavirus may shape our understanding of the latest virus (SARS-CoV-2) or support best practice clinical management of the disease. Analysis of millions of social media posts can help us understand how the public at large is responding to the outbreak. Identifying spreading misinformation can be critical to public health messaging. Automatic identification and organization of helpful information collected from the web can aid the public response.

There are already several research activities that are leveraging natural language processing to contribute to the study of COVID-19. For example, for the CORD-19 dataset, SketchEngine has tokenized, POS-tagged, and lemmatized the text (https://www.sketchengine.eu/covid19/), the PubAnnotation team is collecting annotations (http://pubannotation.org/collections/CORD-19), and OHSU is soliciting queries for retrieval topics (https://dmice.ohsu.edu/hersh/COVIDSearch.html).

Additionally, several publicly available corpora have emerged to support COVID-19 research:

- The Kaggle CORD-19 challenge including 40k research papers (and growing) on COVID-19 or related viruses: https://www.kaggle.com/allen-institute-for-ai/CORD-19-research-challenge

- The National Library of Medicine (US NIH) LitCovid collection: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/research/coronavirus/

- COVID-19 Twitter data sets: http://www.panacealab.org/covid19/ and https://github.com/echen102/COVID-19-TweetIDs

- COVID-19 Data Resources: http://covid19dataresources.org/

This ACL 2020 workshop brings together NLP researchers to discuss best practices and approaches moving forward. We welcome submissions related to any aspect of NLP applied to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, including (but not limited to):

- Text mining of scientific literature related to COVID-19 (e.g. CORD-19) - Analysis of text from the web, social media or clinical data in support of public health activities related to COVID-19 - Sentiment analysis, mental health, or well-being analysis in social media or clinical data related to COVID-19 - Application of NLP to analysis of the collateral effects of COVID-19. Collateral effects include anything that is happening as a result of the virus, including economic effects. - Multi-lingual or cross-lingual analysis of COVID-19 related textual data - NLP for semantic search of COVID-19 related textual data - Chatbots and other interactive support systems related to COVID-19 - Analysis of spoken language related to COVID-19

## Submissions and Timelines

This workshop will offer rolling submissions and publications. Publications will be reviewed within one week and made available upon acceptance through OpenReview.

https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/ACL/2020/Workshop/NLP-COVID

Due to the rapid review process we adopt, we will utilize **single blind** reviewing, meaning that author information will be available to the reviewers but reviewers will remain anonymous. We also adopt **open reviews** such that reviewer comments, while anonymous, will be publicly viewable. We also invite anyone to comment on the work.

- Submission deadline (long & short papers): June 30, 2020 - Main conference dates: July 5-10, 2020 - ACL 2020 Workshops: July 09-10, 2020

We expect that most of the submissions to this workshop will be short papers, given the late-breaking nature of this research.

Following ACL, **full papers** should not exceed eight (8) pages of text, plus unlimited references. Final versions of full papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 9 pages) so that reviewers' comments can be taken into account. Full papers are intended to be reports of original research.

**Short papers** may consist of up to four (4) pages of content, plus unlimited references. Appropriate short paper topics include preliminary results, application notes, descriptions of work in progress, etc.

Templates and styles files for papers are available from the ACL2020 website: http://acl2020.org/downloads/acl2020-templates.zip An Overleaf template is also available: (https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/acl-2020-proceedings-template/zsrkc...) Authors should submit their papers using Open review: https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/ACL/2020/Workshop/NLP-COVID

Formal publication via the ACL Anthology will proceed after the workshop takes place.

## Organizing Committee - Mark Dredze - Emilio Ferrara - Raina MacIntyre - Jonathan May - Robert Munro - Cecile Paris - Karin Verspoor - Byron Wallace

## ACL 2020 Workshop Chairs - Milica Gasic - Veselin Stoyanov - Dilek Hakkani-Tür

## ACL 2020 General Chair - Dan Jurafsky

Given the rapidly evolving nature of this topic, we encourage contacting us with ideas and suggestions. Please contact Karin Verspoor, karin.verspoor@unimelb.edu.au