Metadata and COLING submissions

As the deadline for submission draws near, we’d like to alert our authors to a few things that are a bit different from previous COLINGs and other computational linguistics/NLP venues in the hopes that this will help the submission process go smoothly.

Paper types

Please consider the paper type you indicate carefully, as this will affect what the reviewers are instructed to look for you in your paper.  We encourage you to read the description of the paper types and especially the associated reviewer questions carefully. Which set of questions would you most like to have asked of your paper? (And if reading the questions inspires you to reframe/edit a bit to better address them before submitting, that is absolutely fair game!)

Emiel van Miltenburg raised the point on Twitter last week that it can be difficult to categorize papers and in particular that certain papers might fall between our paper types, combining characteristics of more than one, or being something else entirely.

Emiel and colleagues wondered whether we could implement a “tagging” system where authors could indicate the range of paper types their paper relates to. That is an intriguing idea, but it doesn’t work with the way we are using paper types to improve the diversity and rage of papers at COLING. As noted above, the paper types entail different questions on the review forms. We’re doing that because otherwise it seems that everything gets evaluated against the NLP Engineering Experiment paper type, which in turn means it’s hard to get papers of the other types accepted.  And as we hope we’ve made it blindingly clear, we really are interested in getting a broad range of paper types!

Keywords

The other aspect of our submission form that will have a strong impact on how your paper is reviewed is the keywords. Following the system pioneered by Ani Nenkova and Owen Rambow as PC co-chairs for NAACL 2016, we have asked our reviewers to all describe their areas of expertise along five dimensions:

  1. Linguistic targets of study
  2. Application tasks
  3. Approaches
  4. Languages
  5. Genres

(All five of these have a none of the above/not-applicable option.) The reviewers (and area chairs) all indicated all of the items on each of these dimensions they have the expertise and interest to review for. For authors, we ask you to indicate which items on each dimension best describe the paper you are submitting. Softconf will then match your paper to an area based on the assignment of papers to areas that best optimizes reviewer expertise for the papers submitted.

In sum: To ensure the most informed reviewing possible of your paper, please fill out these keywords carefully.  We urge you to start your submission in the system ahead of time so you aren’t trying to complete this task in a hurry just at the deadline.

Dual submission policy

Our Call for Papers indicates the following dual submission policy:

Papers that have been or will be under consideration for other venues at the same time must indicate this at submission time. If a paper is accepted for publication at COLING, it must be immediately withdrawn from other venues. If a paper under review at COLING is accepted elsewhere and authors intend to proceed there, the COLING committee must be notified immediately.

We have added a field in the submission form for you to be able to indicate this information.

LRE Map

COLING 2018 is participating in LRE map, as described in this guest post by Nicoletta Calzolari. In the submission form, you are asked to provide information about language resources your research has used—and those it has produced. Do not worry about anonymity on this form.  This information is not shared with reviewers.

2 thoughts on “Metadata and COLING submissions

  1. There is indeed a field for dual submission in the form, although it asks for a “title page”. So the list of other conferences I submit to and declarations should be on the title page? Is there any template for this title page, like the one you have for the submission itself?

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