2nd CFP : Fifth Workshop on Teaching NLP (deadline March 15)

[Ted Pedersen]

This is a workshop I'm involved in organizing. Please share our CFP if
you know anyone who might be interested!

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Fifth Workshop on Teaching NLP: Second Call for Papers

Submission Deadline : Mon, March 15, 2021 (11:59 pm, UTC-12, anywhere on earth)
Workshop Dates : Thur June 10 and Fri June 11, 2021 (in conjunction
with NAACL 2021)

https://sites.google.com/view/teaching-nlp-workshop/call-for-papers

New in the 2nd CFP : Instructions to Reviewers, the Reviewing Form,
and a live submission link
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The Fifth Workshop on Teaching NLP will be co-located with the 2021
Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for
Computational Linguistics (NAACL-HLT 2021), which is currently
scheduled to be held in Mexico City, Mexico, from June 6 - 11, 2021.
The Teaching NLP workshop will take place on June 10th and June 11th.
The first day will focus on working groups where we will share
experiences and develop recommendations for best practices, while the
second day will include talks and/or posters, keynotes, and panel
discussions.

We are planning this workshop as a hybrid event, where full
participation will be possible virtually or in-person. This will allow
us to more easily pivot to a fully virtual workshop should this be the
overall modality of the NAACL conference. We also want to encourage
broad participation in our workshop, and do not want to exclude those
who are unable or prefer not to travel should NAACL be in-person.
Finally, should NAACL become a fully virtual event then this workshop
would do the same.

Workshop description

The field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) is growing rapidly,
with new state-of-the-art methods emerging every year, if not sooner.
As educators in NLP, we struggle to keep up. We need to make decisions
about what to teach and how to teach it with every offering of a
course, sometimes even as a course is being offered. The fast-paced
nature of NLP brings unique challenges for curriculum design, and the
immense growth of the field has lead to not just core NLP courses, but
also to more specialized classes and seminars in subareas such as
Natural Language Understanding, Computational Social Science, Machine
Translation, and many more. We also have an increasing number of
students interested in NLP, bringing with them a wide range of
backgrounds and experiences.

This workshop seeks to address questions such as, but not limited to:

Topic selection

- What are fundamental concepts that NLP practitioners and researchers
should learn?

- What is the appropriate balance between the use of tools versus
understanding of more fundamental concepts?

- What is the appropriate balance between Linguistics versus Machine Learning?

- What is the appropriate balance between more traditional NLP versus
NLP with deep learning?

- How has the rapid development of NLP techniques impacted the
evolution of courses?

Adapting curricula for different audiences

- How should we prepare students for different career trajectories,
and for both their short-term prospects and long-term development?

- How should we tailor our classes for a broad mix of students of
different backgrounds (e.g. social sciences, medicine, humanities)?

- How do we teach NLP to students who have limited programming experience?

- How do we scale our teaching for larger class sizes while preserving
the accessibility of complex material?

Course and academic program design

- How do we adapt curriculum to alternative teaching styles, e.g.
remote courses, flipped classroom, lectures vs. small seminars?

- What kinds of course paths and options should we provide for
students traversing an NLP-related degree?

- How do we create curriculum and materials for a new NLP course?

- What kinds of homework, programming assignments, and projects are
particularly effective in teaching NLP concepts?

- What kinds of materials are most effective in reaching students,
e.g., textbooks, videos, interactive exercises, blog posts, academic
papers?

Responsible and ethical NLP

- How can we encourage practices that lead to reproducible results in NLP?

- What kinds of activities, questions, and exercises are helpful for
teaching ethical NLP?

This long-overdue fifth edition of the Teaching NLP Workshop builds on
prior successful offerings to tackle the most pressing issues in how
to design NLP courses and bring together instructors from many
backgrounds to discuss, create, and refine instructional design and
material.

We welcome submissions from countries outside of North America.

Submission information

We invite two kinds of submissions. All submissions should follow
NAACL 2021 style guidelines and formatting and should be submitted via
softconf:

https://www.softconf.com/naacl2021/teachingnlp2021/

Type 1 submissions: Teaching materials

We invite submissions of short papers of 1-2 pages that describe
teaching materials such as curricula, course GitHub repositories,
Jupyter notebooks, slides, homework and programming assignments, or
projects. The associated teaching materials should be submitted in
addition to the short paper. These papers will be peer-reviewed and
published as a part of the workshop proceedings, however the teaching
materials themselves will not be published. Instead, we will create a
Teaching NLP repository where authors may opt-in to make their
materials available for re-use after the workshop. These submissions
do not need to be anonymized.

Type 2 submissions: Papers

We invite papers of any length (4-10 pages preferred) discussing
pedagogical aspects of NLP focusing on, but not limited to, any of the
following general topics:

- Tools and methodologies (e.g., teaching with code, active learning,
flipped classroom)

- Scaling curricula to fit large class sizes

- Adapting existing curriculum to incorporate new NLP advancements

- Teaching online NLP courses, or adjusting courses to become remote
due to Covid-19

- Teaching underrepresented students

- Challenges of designing the first NLP course or related degree
program at a college, university, or on a MOOC platform

- Teaching students who have no or little computer science backgrounds
and/or programming experience

- Bridging the gap between academic training and industry needs

- Incorporating ethics, reproducibility, and responsible practices in
NLP courses

- Teaching multilingual NLP

These papers may take the form of a reflection or summary of previous
experiences, a formal evaluation or assessment of particular
pedagogical techniques, a case study, or an opinion piece.

While there are no page limits to submissions, longer papers will be
expected to offer a greater contribution. Authors may choose a
non-archival submission, recognizing that some disciplines do not
accept journal articles published in workshop proceedings.

Important dates

Workshop submissions due: March 15, 2021

Notification of acceptance: April 15, 2021

Camera-ready papers due: April 26, 2021

Teaching NLP workshop: June 10-11, 2021

Note: All deadlines are 11:59 pm UTC -12h (anywhere on earth).

Instruction for Reviewers

For transparency purposes, here are the instructions we will provide
for reviewers.

Thank you for agreeing to review for the Teaching NLP workshop! We’d
like to offer a few thoughts to consider before you start your
reviews.

We are accepting two kinds of submissions, traditional papers (no
length limit) and short papers (1-2 pages) accompanied by teaching
materials. In the interests of simplicity, we are using the same
review form for both kinds of submissions. The reviewing form asks
questions about relevance, clarity, and impact and can be found below.
In general the goal for your review should be to provide feedback to
the authors that allows them to improve their final camera-ready
version.

It’s important to remember that how we teach NLP depends quite a bit
on the kinds of students we have and the nature of their backgrounds.
Keep in mind that the paper or teaching materials you are reviewing
might be intended for a very different sort of student than you
typically encounter. Make sure that submissions make it clear who
their students are, and try to judge the submission from that
perspective (rather than from the nature of your own students). Of
course it may be that your students and the submissions students are
very similar, in which case you are encouraged to comment on how a
paper or teaching material submission might impact your own teaching.

We hope to have submissions that give specific ideas about how and
what to teach in our NLP classes, as well as submissions that make us
think more deeply about broader issues that affect our students and
how we teach. In general the question we’d like to ask yourself as you
review a paper or teaching material submission is whether (and how) it
might benefit someone teaching a similar group of students. The nature
of those benefits could be very specific, like a homework assignment
or way to organize a class, or it could be more general and provide
motivation, inspiration, or re-assurance.

A few procedural notes. There are no length limits to paper
submissions. We ask however that you comment on whether the length of
a paper is appropriate for the content presented. Teaching material
submissions are not anonymous, and will ideally provide materials that
will be fairly directly useful to someone currently engaged in
teaching or developing an NLP class. While paper submissions should be
anonymous, it may be difficult to be truly anonymous especially if web
sites or supplemental materials are provided. We would ask reviewers
to assume good faith on the part of authors, and to not judge a
submission negatively if it is not fully anonymous.

Finally, we hope you consider attending the Teaching NLP workshop. We
are planning a variety of events including participatory sessions
where workshop attendees brainstorm, discuss, and develop solutions,
as well as keynote talks, panels, and presentation of the papers and
teaching materials you are soon to review. You are already an
important part of our event, and we hope to see you at the workshop!

Review Form : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pIHSTo1mrz_LTpWfWB3GOfDE_uHGJTc9/view