## 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/zsrk…)
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(a)unimelb.edu.au