NAACL-HLT 2018 Industry Track: Call for Papers

The 16th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for 
Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT 2018) will be 
held in New Orleans, Louisiana, June 1 to June 6, 2018. NAACL-HLT 2018 invites 
the submission to the the Industry Track.


Description of the Industry Track

Language technologies and their applications are an integral and critical part 
of our daily lives.  The development of many of these technologies trace their 
roots to academic and industrial research laboratories where researchers 
invented a plethora of algorithms, benchmarked them against shared datasets and 
perfected the performance of these algorithms to provide plausible solutions to 
real-world applications. While a controlled laboratory setting is vital for a 
deeper scientific understanding of the language problem and the impact of 
algorithmic design choices on the performance of a technology, transitioning 
the technology to real-world industrial strength applications raises a 
different, but yet challenging, set of technical issues. Such issues do not 
receive the deserved attention in language technology forums and are often 
relegated to isolated instances and vagaries of specific systems, with little 
effort to learn from common experiences.

We invite submissions describing innovations and implementations in all areas 
of speech and natural language processing technologies and systems that are 
relevant to industrial applications. The primary focus of this track is on 
papers that advance the understanding of, and demonstrate the effective 
handling of, practical issues related to the deployment of language processing 
technologies in real-world systems. This includes novel algorithms that address 
challenges of scalable and practical language processing systems, methodologies 
and experiences in adopting and adapting research advances in industrial 
applications, innovative industrial-scale open-source software and its impact 
on practical applications, and challenges of technology-driven evaluation 
metrics as they relate to application performance. This track provides an 
opportunity to highlight the key learnings and new research challenges posed by 
real world implementations such as:

Engineering challenges encountered while implementing at scale
Design of application-relevant training/evaluation datasets
Methods and processes to upkeep system performance
Methods and processes needed to leverage production logs to maintain and 
improve the performance of component technologies
Design of offline and online evaluation methodologies
Novel previously unsolved problems
Novel practical solutions to known problems
Experience papers describing learnings and best practices

In addition, opinion/vision papers and papers highlighting interesting negative 
results related to real-world applications are also welcome.

Submissions must clearly identify one of the following three areas they fall 
into:
Deployed: Must describe deployment of a system that solves a non-trivial 
real-world problem. The focus should be on describing the problem, its 
significance, decisions and tradeoffs made when making design choices for the 
solution, deployment challenges, and lessons learned.
Discovery: Must include results obtained from NLP applications in real world 
scenarios that result in insights that are interesting and actionable. These 
discoveries should reveal promising directions in their application areas, 
leading to further system or societal enhancements. For example, an actionable 
discovery from an analysis of call center transcripts may reveal that certain 
language choices negatively impact customer experience, leading to better 
training of service representatives and improved customer experience.
Emerging: Submissions do not have to describe deployed systems but must have 
clear applications to industry to distinguish them from NAACL research papers. 
They may also provide insight into issues and factors that affect the 
successful use and deployment of natural language processing. Papers that 
describe enabling infrastructure for large-scale deployment of natural language 
processing techniques also fall in this category.

Evaluation and decision criteria

Submissions will be reviewed in a double-blind manner and assessed based on 
their novelty, technical quality, potential impact, and clarity. Submissions in 
the industry track should emphasize real-world implementations of natural 
language processing systems or provide insights based on real-world datasets 
with obvious industry impact. For papers that rely heavily on empirical 
evaluations, the experimental methods and results should be clear, well 
executed, and repeatable.

Paper Submissions

Note: the ACL is creating expanded publication guidelines which will be made 
available via the NAACL-HLT 2018 website and submission system when they are 
available. The ACL publication guidelines will supersede the guidelines below 
in case of conflict.

Authors are invited to submit original, full-length (6 page) industry papers 
that are not previously published, accepted to be published, or under 
consideration for publication in any other forum.

Manuscripts should be submitted electronically, in PDF format and formatted 
using the
official NAACL-HLT 2018 style templates:
LaTeX
Microsoft Word

Papers cannot exceed 6 pages in length (excluding references) and should be 
submitted through the NAACL-HLT 2018 industry track online submission system. 
Submissions of identical or closely related work to multiple NAACL-HLT tracks 
will be treated as duplicate submissions.

Presentation Requirement

All accepted papers must be presented at the conference to appear in the 
proceedings. Authors of papers accepted for presentation at NAACL-HLT 2018 
Industry Track, which will run in parallel with the Research Track, must notify 
the track chairs by the camera-ready deadline as to whether the paper will be 
presented.

Previous presentations of the work (e.g. preprints on 
arXiv.org<http://arXiv.org>) should be indicated in a footnote that should be 
excluded from the review submission, but included in the final version of 
papers appearing in the NAACL-HLT 2018 proceedings.

At least one author of each accepted paper must register for NAACL-HLT 2018 by 
the early registration deadline.

Contact Information

Track chairs:
* Srinivas Bangalore (Interactions Labs)
* Jennifer Chu-Carroll (Elemental Cognition)
* Yunyao Li (IBM Research - Almaden)

Email: 
[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>

General chair: Marilyn Walker (University of California Santa Cruz)

Email: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>

Important Dates

Paper Submission Deadline
Feb 20, 2018 (anywhere in the world)

Acceptance Notification
March 25, 2018 (anywhere in the world)

Final Version Submission Deadline
April 15, 2018 (anywhere in the world)
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