Diversity & Inclusion Chairs

Diversity & Inclusion Chairs

Pranav A, Samira Shaikh, Pat Verga, Murathan Kurfali, Khyati Mahajan, Prathyusha Jwalapuram, Luca Soldaini, and Sabine Weber

Call for Themed Get-Togethers

NAACL 2021 will support several types of virtual rooms to facilitate the strong community-building role that is central to the conference. We hope to create opportunities for all participants to meet new people and to share knowledge, best practices, opportunities, and interests.

If you are interested in hosting a virtual room/social, please complete this form by May 15.

A virtual room or social is a participant-led video-driven meeting centred around different themes. The themes can be of any kind, including:

  • Trivia (e.g. language diversity game at EACL 2021), virtual games, cooking demonstrations (e.g. Catalan cooking demo at COLING 2020)

  • Special interest groups (e.g. Linguists at NAACL, Pet lovers at NAACL)

  • Around skills exchange and training (e.g. giving better presentations, guidance on academic job applications, well-being in AI, mental health support, parenting)

These events will be listed on the NAACL 2021 Virtual Conference webpage with a link to the video session, included in the calendar of events, and publicized.

Folks hosting socials will decide on its content, timing and length, as well as handle sign-up to these events. We will promote the socials on the conference website, virtual conference platform and social media. If desired, we will also create and promote virtual conference rooms.

We may combine activities, or suggest other modifications (such as suggesting alternative dates/times) in order to balance the programme of activities.

Virtual rooms must abide by ACL’s code of conduct: https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/acl-code-ethics

Requests for virtual rooms which are in conflict with the above, or not in line with the goals of an affinity group social, will be rejected.

Virtual socials may adopt one of the following formats:

  • Private Gather town or Topia: Done by WINLP @ AACL 2020 and Queer in AI @ EMNLP 2020. This can be useful if you want the socials to be accessible for folks who are not registered for the main conference. We will not provide the Gather town; we expect you to set up your own Gather town for your event.

  • Public Zoom calls: We can provide Zoom rooms for your event (note that the number of participants might be capped). Similar events were held by WINLP @ AACL 2020 and Queer in AI @ EMNLP 2020. This can be useful if you want the socials to be accessible for folks who are not registered for the main conference.

  • NAACL’s Gather town: This would be generally restricted to registrants, however a designated area/room within the Gather town can be set up for your event.

  • Panel webinars: This can be done either on Youtube (example: NLP with Friends), Twitch, Instagram live, Twitter spaces or Tiktok livestreams.

We recommend that you either opt for a private Gather town space or a public Zoom, call so that your socials will be accessible to folks who are not registrants of NAACL. We believe that affinity group socials which are aimed especially at underrepresented folks should be accessible without any barriers. If you are opting for Gather town, we strongly suggest you read about Gather town’s limitations on accessibility.

Informal enquiries can be made to: naacl2021-diversity-inclusion@googlegroups.com.