Call for Papers

The 4th Workshop on "Evaluation & Comparison of NLP Systems" 1st November 2023, co-located at IJCNLP-AACL 2023

The 4th Workshop on Evaluation and Comparison for NLP systems (Eval4NLP), co-located at the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (IJCNLP-AACL 2023), invites the submission of long and short papers, with a theoretical or experimental nature, describing recent advances in system evaluation and comparison in NLP.

Important Dates

All deadlines are 11.59 pm UTC -12h (“Anywhere on Earth”).

  • August 25September 1, 2023: Direct submission to Eval4NLP deadline through OpenReview here
  • September 25September 30, 2023: Submission of pre-reviewed papers to Eval4NLP through OpenReview here
  • October 2, 2023: Notification of acceptance
  • October 10, 2023:October 13, 2023: Camera-ready papers due
  • November 1, 2023: Workshop day

Shared Task

This year’s version will come with a shared task on explainable evaluation of generated language (MT and summarization) with a focus on LLM prompts. Please find more information on the shared task page.

Topics

  1. Designing evaluation metrics
    Proposing and/or analyzing:
    • Metrics with desirable properties, e.g., high correlations with human judgments, strong in distinguishing high-quality outputs from mediocre and low-quality outputs, robust across lengths of input and output sequences, efficient to run, etc.;
    • Reference-free evaluation metrics, which only require source text(s) and system predictions;
    • Cross-domain metrics, which can reliably and robustly measure the quality of system outputs from heterogeneous modalities (e.g., image and speech), different genres (e.g., newspapers, Wikipedia articles and scientific papers) and different languages;
    • Cost-effective methods for eliciting high-quality manual annotations; and
    • Methods and metrics for evaluating interpretability and explanations of NLP models
  2. Creating adequate evaluation data
    Proposing new datasets or analyzing existing ones by studying their:
    • Coverage and diversity, e.g., size of the corpus, covered phenomena, representativeness of samples, distribution of sample types, variability among data sources, eras, and genres; and
    • Quality of annotations, e.g., consistency of annotations, inter-rater agreement, and bias check
  3. Reporting correct results
    Ensuring and reporting:
    • Statistics for the trustworthiness of results, e.g., via appropriate significance tests, and reporting of score distributions rather than single-point estimates, to avoid chance findings;
    • Reproducibility of experiments, e.g., quantifying the reproducibility of papers and issuing reproducibility guidelines; and
    • Comprehensive and unbiased error analyses and case studies, avoiding cherry-picking and sampling bias.

Submission Guidelines

The workshop welcomes two types of submission -- long and short papers. Long papers may consist of up to 8 pages of content, plus unlimited pages of references. Short papers may consist of up to 4 pages of content, plus unlimited pages of references. Please follow the ACL ARR formatting requirements, using the official templates. Final versions of both submission types will be given one additional page of content for addressing reviewers’ comments. The accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings.

The review process is double-blind. Therefore, no author information should be included in the papers. Self-references that reveal the author's identity must be avoided. Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review.

Two submission modes: standard and pre-reviewed

Eval4NLP features two modes of submissions. Standard submissions: We invite the submission of papers that will receive up to three double-blind reviews from the Eval4NLP committee, and a final verdict from the workshop chairs. Pre-reviewed: To a later deadline, we invite unpublished papers that have already been reviewed, either through ACL ARR, or recent AACL/EACL/ACL/EMNLP/COLING venues (these papers will not receive new reviews but will be judged together with their reviews via a meta-review; authors are invited to attach a note with comments on the reviews and describe possible revisions).

Final verdicts will be either accept, reject, or conditional accept, i.e., the paper is only accepted provided that specific (meta-)reviewer requirements have been met. Please also note the multiple submission policy.

The submisson site (OpenReview) for direct submissions is available here. Further, the submisson site (OpenReview) for pre-reviewd submissions is available here.

Optional Supplementary Materials

Authors are allowed to submit (optional) supplementary materials (e.g., appendices, software, and data) to improve the reproducibility of results and/or to provide additional information that does not fit in the paper. All of the supplementary materials must be zipped into one single file (.tgz or .zip) and submitted via OpenReview together with the paper. However, because supplementary materials are completely optional, reviewers may or may not review or even download them. So, the submitted paper should be fully self-contained.

Preprints

Papers uploaded to preprint servers (e.g., ArXiv) can be submitted to the workshop. There is no deadline concerning when the papers were made publicly available. However, the version submitted to Eval4NLP must be anonymized, and we ask the authors not to update the preprints or advertise them on social media while they are under review at Eval4NLP.

Reviews from ACL Rolling Review and *ACL Venues

This year, our workshop also welcomes submissions that have received 3 reviews from ACL Rolling Review (ARR) or another venue (e.g., IJCNLP-AACL, COLING, EMNLP, etc.). Authors of any papers that have 3 reviews ready by TBD may submit their papers and reviews to our workshop TBD (this is a different link than the direct submission link). Please note the multiple submission policy.

Multiple Submission Policy

Eval4NLP allows authors to submit a paper that is under review in another venue (journal, conference, or workshop) or to be submitted elsewhere during the Eval4NLP review period. However, the authors need to withdraw the paper from all other venues if they get accepted and want to publish in Eval4NLP.

Note that the IJCNLP-AACL and ARR do not allow double submissions. So, papers submitted both to the main conference and IJCNLP-AACL workshops (including us) will violate the multiple submission policy of the main conference. If authors would like to submit a paper under review by IJCNLP-AACL to the Eval4NLP workshop, they need to withdraw their paper from IJCNLP-AACL and submit it to our workshop before the workshop submission deadline.

Best Paper Awards

We will award three prizes to the best three paper submissions (subject to availability; more details to come soon). Both long and short submissions will be eligible for prizes.

Presenting Published Papers

If you want to present a paper which has been published recently elsewhere (such as other top-tier AI conferences) at our workshop, you may send the details of your paper (Paper title, authors, publication venue, abstract, and a link to download the paper) directly to eval4nlp@gmail.com. We will select a few high-quality and relevant papers to present at Eval4NLP. This allows such papers to gain more visibility from the workshop audience and increases the variety of the workshop program.

The submission deadline for this track is TBD and the notification of acceptance will be sent on TBD. The submitted papers will be judged separately from the main track (submitted via softconf). Note that the chosen papers are considered as non-archival here and will not be included in the workshop proceedings.

Contact Information

Email: eval4nlp@gmail.com