2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT 2022) (NAACL)

NAACL 2022 invites the submission of long and short papers featuring substantial, original, and unpublished research in all aspects of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing. NAACL 2022 has a goal of a diverse technical program—in addition to traditional research results, papers may contribute negative findings, survey an area, announce the creation of a new resource, argue a position, report novel linguistic insights derived using existing techniques, and reproduce, or fail to reproduce, previous results.

As in recent years, some of the presentations at the conference will be on papers accepted by the Transactions of the ACL (TACL) and by the Computational Linguistics (CL) journals.

New this year:

Reviewing for main conference submissions will be handled by the ACL Rolling Review, except for Special Theme submissions.
Accepted papers will have the option to earn reproducibility badges.
Submission TopicsPermalink
NAACL 2022 aims to have a broad technical program. Relevant topics for the conference include, but are not limited to, the following areas (in alphabetical order):

Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics
Dialogue and Interactive Systems
Discourse and Pragmatics
Efficient Methods for NLP
Ethics and NLP
Generation
Information Extraction
Information Retrieval and Text Mining
Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP
Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond
Linguistic theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics
Machine Learning for NLP
Machine Translation and Multilinguality
NLP Applications
Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation
Question Answering
Resources and Evaluation
Semantics: Lexical
Semantics: Sentence-level Semantics, Textual Inference and Other areas
Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
Speech and Multimodality
Summarization
Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing

Theme: Human-Centered Natural Language Processing
NAACL 2022 Theme Track: “Human-Centered Natural Language Processing”

As NLP applications increasingly mediate people’s lives, it is crucial to understand how the design decisions made throughout the NLP research and development lifecycle impact people, whether there are users, developers, data providers or other stakeholders. For NAACL 2022, we invite submissions that address research questions that meaningfully incorporate stakeholders in the design, development, and evaluation of NLP resources, models and systems. We particularly encourage submissions that bring together perspectives and methods from NLP and Human-Computer Interaction. In addition to research papers presenting studies, we invite survey and position papers that take stock of past work in human-centered NLP and propose directions for framing future research.

Topics of interest include: usability studies of language technologies; needs-findings studies; studies of human factors in the NLP R&D lifecycle, including interactive systems; human-centered fairness, accountability, explainability, transparency, and ethics in NLP systems.

Relevant methods include (but are not limited to) user-centered design, value-sensitive design, participatory design, assets-based design, and qualitative methods, such as grounded theory. We welcome contributions that use such methods to study NLP problems, as well as methodological innovations and tools that tailor these methods to NLP.

More information about the special theme, including how special theme submissions differ from regular paper submissions can be found here.

ACL Rolling Review

ACL 2022 and NAACL 2022 have decided to help implement the vision of using the ACL Rolling Review (ARR) as a reviewing system while final decisions will continue to be made by the conferences. The purpose of ARR is to improve efficiency and turnaround of reviewing in *ACL conferences while keeping the diversity (geographic and otherwise) and editorial freedom. For 2022, both conferences have worked out a coordinated submission plan to allow for maximum flexibility during their submission periods for the authors. ARR is a new review system for *ACL conferences, where reviewing and acceptance of papers to publication venues is done in a two-step process:
- centralized rolling review via ARR, where submissions receive reviews and meta-reviews from ARR reviewers and action editors;
- commitment to a publication venue (e.g., NAACL 2022), so that Senior Area Chairs and Program Chairs make acceptance decisions for a submission using the ARR reviews and meta-reviews.

ARR uses Open Review as its platform. The reviewing process continues to be double blind. Reviews will not be open in ARR; however, authors might choose to open their anonymized submission through the platform.

Paper Submission DetailsPermalink
Long PapersPermalink
Long papers must describe substantial, original, completed, and unpublished work. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation and analysis should be included.

Long paper submissions should follow ARR formatting requirements. Final camera-ready versions of accepted long papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 9 pages) so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account.

Short PapersPermalink
Short paper submissions must describe original and unpublished work. Please note that a short paper is not a shortened long paper. Instead, short papers should have a point that can be made in a few pages. Some kinds of short papers include:

A small, focused contribution
A negative result
An opinion piece
An interesting application nugget
Short paper submissions should follow the ARR formatting requirements. Upon acceptance, short papers will be given five (5) content pages in the proceedings. Authors are strongly encouraged to use this additional page to address reviewers’ comments in their final versions.

Presentation at the ConferencePermalink
All accepted papers must be presented at the conference to appear in the proceedings. The authors of papers accepted for presentation at NAACL 2022 or at the Findings of NAACL 2022 must notify the program chairs by April 11, 2022 if they wish to withdraw their paper. At least one author of each accepted paper must register for NAACL 2022 by the early registration deadline.

Long and short papers will be presented orally or as posters as determined by the program committee. The decisions as to which papers will be presented orally and which as poster presentations will be based on the nature rather than the quality of the work. While short papers will be distinguished from long papers in the proceedings, there will be no distinction in the proceedings between papers presented orally and papers presented as posters.

Theme PapersPermalink
Special theme papers should be submitted to the NAACL 2022 Open Review site by the January 15 deadline. They will be evaluated according to a dedicated review form by a theme-specific reviewer pool.

The submission requirements for theme papers are the same as for long papers. However, the nature of a long paper is different from a theme paper and the reviewing process will be separate, with a dedicated submission site, reviewer pool and review form.