Record edition 2021 on Empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing is ready to start

Today is the day of EMNLP 2021, the record edition of international Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing 2021 held from November 7 – 11 in the Dominican Republic with attendees participating both virtually and on-site. 3,717 full papers had been submitted by 11,425 authors. 841 submissions were accepted to the main conference. Among them, 315 were accepted as oral papers, and 526 were accepted as posters. An answer in where NLP is going nowadays in face of massive ML development will try to give also the three keynote speakers: Professors Ido Dagan (Main Conference on Sunday, November 7), Evelina Fedorenko (Monday, November 8) and Steven Bird (Tuesday, November 9). Thursday and Friday November 10-11 will be workshops on the stage. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. For participants connected in remote mode there’ll be GatherTown sessions for virtual poster sessions and meetings. By the end of the conference on November 12 all  papers will be online.

The quick development of Deep Learning and the state-of-the-art of the field, but also burning topics driving the political debate in our global society (biases, fake news, privacy in data, sustainability etc.) are at the heart of this year’s conference, after the long reclusion due to Covid-19.

An intuitive and browsable interactive graph representing all works and people whith their nationality has been made by Georgia Tech Machine Learning Lab.

To browse among all contributors and papers University La Sapienza NLP and Babelscape provided SemanticPaths, a multilingual semantic search engine for EMNLP 2021. It allows to browse all conference papers, people, research bodies, topics and areas. The Whova app allows all participants to connect with each other and discuss about all conference topics. The whole manual of the conference presents all keynote speechs, sessions, workshops. Altough the participation to the conference is restricted to scientists and researches, on the underline website one can access most of the material (practically everything except the live conferences) like the pre-recorded videos, and posters. The event is sponsored by the main actors fo technological development in the field, who also have a recruitment section with open positions.

We at Innovation Nation will follow the event and focus on the most interesting papers from a journalistic perspective.