Student Travel Support for 2017 Workshop for Women and Underrepresented Minorities in NLP

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the primary international organization for computational linguistics and natural language processing. It also is one of the primary application areas for researchers in machine learning and artificial intelligence. The proceedings of its annual meeting provide the foundation of the field; it is the most cited and most respected publication in computational linguistics. Yet demographic representation within the authors and leaders in the ACL community is notably lop-sided. This project is to subsidize travel to the workshop for women and underrepresented minorities in NLP (WiNLP), which will be a part of the 2017 meeting of the ACL held in Vancouver, Canada on July 30, 2017. The workshop aims to highlight and foster the work by researchers of diverse backgrounds within the ACL community. This contributes to America's pool of researchers with the variety of backgrounds, experiences, interests and areas of expertise required for science and engineering to be successful and benefit broad segments of society. The WiNLP workshop provides a venue for women and underrepresented minorities to present their work, and to get feedback and advice from mentors who are senior researchers in the field. The workshop solicits submissions in the form of a 2-page extended abstract focusing on all areas of NLP. Accepted abstracts are presented either as a poster of a talk. The workshop will also include a mentoring sessions and invited talks by established researchers in the field. This enables women and underrepresented minorities to get feedback from the broad ACL community, to participate in that community, and for that community to become more aware of their work.