Birds-of-a-Feather and Affinity Group Meetup
Welcome to Birds-of-a-Feather and Affinity Group Meetings
At EMNLP 2023, we continue the tradition of conducting birds-of-a-feather (or BoF) and Affinity Group Meeting sessions to help newbie researchers get in touch with other people working in the same areas. Here’s a quick primer for people who haven’t attended such sessions before!
What do we hope to accomplish with BoF and Affinity Group Meeting sessions?
- We want to provide junior researchers/people attending a CL conference for the first time with a platform to discuss ideas and issues with other researchers in their areas of interest. This can be a good avenue for junior researchers to get feedback on ongoing ideas, learn about relevant ongoing projects at other groups/universities, and develop a broader understanding of their field of interest.
- We want to facilitate more exchange of research ideas and enable collaborative discussions.
How are BoF and Affinity Group Meeting sessions structured?
- All BoF and Affinity Group Meeting sessions are in-person only.
- Each meetup will be led by the session chair(s).
- Anyone who wants to attend can join; prior signup is unnecessary.
When are the BoF and Affinity Group meeting sessions happening?
| Date | Time | Room | Session ID | Session Title | Session Chairs |
| 8-Dec | 14:00-15:30 | Aquarius 2 | BOF-2 | NLP on legal texts | Santosh Tokala |
| 8-Dec | 16:00-17:30 | Aquarius 1 | BOF-3 | [Open multilingual text collections under the umbrella of the EU Horizon HPLT project (https://hplt-project.org/) | Andrey Kutuzov |
| 8-Dec | 16:00-17:30 | Aquarius 2 | BOF-5 | NLP for Climate Change | Jingwei Ni |
| 8-Dec | 17:30-19:30 | Aquarius 3/4 | AGM-1 | Queer in AI social at EMNLP | Pranav A |
| 9-Dec | 9:00-10:30 | Aquarius 1 | BOF-4 | EthioNLP | Teshome Ababu |
| 9-Dec | 11:00-12:30 | Aquarius 1 | BOF-6 | Embeddings | Han Xiao |
| 9-Dec | 11:00-12:30 | Aquarius 2 | BOF-7 | Recipes in Building Language Reasoners | Yiyuan Li and Wenting Zhao |
| 9-Dec | 11:00-12:30 | Aquarius 4 | BOF-14 | Benchmarking LLMs for Low resource Languages | Firoj Alam |
| 9-Dec | 13:45-14:30 | Aquarius 1 | BOF-8 | ACL Mentorship: Sharing learnings from this conference & identifying promising research directions | Mentors from ACL Mentorship: Zhijing Jin, Rada Mihalcea, Mohit Bansal, Yuntian Deng, and Others |
| 9-Dec | 13:45-14:30 | Aquarius 2 | BOF-9 | Controlled/Constrained Text Generation | Allen Roush |
| 9-Dec | 13:45-14:30 | Aquarius 4 | BOF-10 | Arabic NLP | Khalil Mrini and Rawan N. Almatham |
| 10-Dec | 9:00-10:30 | Aquarius 1 | BOF-11 | Discourse & Pragmatics | Valentina Pyatkin, Elias Stengel-Eskin, and Janet Liu |
| 10-Dec | 9:00-10:30 | Aquarius 2 | AGM-2 | Christians@NLP | Philipp Heinisch |
| 10-Dec | 11:00-12:30 | Aquarius 1 | BOF-12 | Text Simplification and Readability | Fernando Alva Manchego |
| 10-Dec | 11:00-12:30 | Aquarius 2 | BOF-13 | Automatic Text Evaluation | Gisela Vallejo and Zhuohan Xie |
Attendees are free to carry forward the discussion after the BoF and Affinity Group Meeting sessions end (or even continue in the same room if it is available!).
If you have any questions about the information listed in the schedule, please contact the D&I chairs via emnlp2023diversity@googlegroups.com.
Additional Guidelines for Attendees
- Your session chair(s) will invite you to introduce yourself briefly.
- The session format can vary based on the preferences of the chair(s), for example, it may be structured as an Ask Me Anything, a slide deck roundtable, a roundtable Q&A, etc. Your session chair(s) will explain the format at the beginning of the session.
- Please follow the participation guidelines set by the session chair(s) (e.g., raising your hand to ask questions, etc.)
- Please do not record the session.
- Please abide by the ACL Anti-Harassment Policy at all times.
We hope you enjoy these meetups and get a chance to make new friends who share your research interests!