Sam Bowman from New York University provided contributions to this post.

The 16th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT 2018) was held in New Orleans, June 1 to June 6, 2018. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored the 2018 NAACL Student Research Workshop (SRW) in conjunction with NAACL HLT 2018.

The SRW gave student researchers in natural language processing (NLP) the opportunity to present their work and receive constructive feedback and mentorship by experienced members of the ACL community.

Twenty student participants from nine countries presented original research projects and thesis proposals as both talks and posters during the main conference. In addition, presenters were explicitly paired with senior mentors from the natural language processing community, who met with them during conference breaks and during an organized group dinner to discuss both the projects that the students presented and the students’ longer term career goals.

Papers were selected through peer review, with an acceptance rate of 39%. To encourage students who did not have experience with academic writing to submit, the workshop’s pre-submission mentoring programs paired interested student authors with mentors who helped them with editing.

The workshop also served to introduce four more senior PhD students to conference organizing. All aspects of the workshop except fundraising were led by the student committee, with the two senior organizers serving only in an advisory role.

For more information about the workshop, please see the workshop website.