A Glimpse of ACL 2019

Photo: Hali

As a computational linguistics student, attending ACL (Association of Computational Linguistics) annual meeting/conference is a prestigious moment for me. I wouldn't have initiated attending the event if my thesis supervisor hadn't asked me "Don't you want to submit your work at ACL student workshop?". I knew ACL would take place in Florence, Italy, this year, but I had no idea about the workshop. Also I was such a pessimistic person who would respond (to myself) like "Me? ACL? I don't even have something done yet." But then I changed my mind 2 weeks before the pre-submission mentoring deadline haha

If you are not familiar with CL/NLP research field, try to google "best conference for NLP". The first result will give you a list of top publications for CL/NLP and ACL conference (people just call it ACL) ranks the first. This year, the event organizer also organized a student research workshop, which was aimed for students (Master/PhD) to submit their finished/on-going research work or proposal. They could be less impactful (or may be not?) than the works submitted to the main conference, but this gives the student chance to present their work, hopefully get some constructive feedback, and feel the ambience of such a large event.

I submitted my work concerning "English-Indonesian Neural Machine Translation (NMT)" to the student workshop before the pre-submission mentoring deadline (March 5th). It was on the same day as the deadline for the main conference. This phase was not mandatory since the real deadline for submission in a workshop was on April 26th. But I took the opportunity to get some feedback on my paper. It was my first time to submit a scientific paper to a conference anyway, and I was never confident about my writing skill in English. I did a right a decision because I did receive some review pointing things that are crucial in my paper regarding the comprehensiveness. 

I was surprised that a month later I got an email that my paper was accepted! I was so happy that I actually got a feedback that my paper was well-written and easy to follow. Only the analysis part could have been more thorough. So that was how I ended up (not only attending but also) presenting at ACL!

Because the event was held in Europe, I think I was lucky to be staying in Europe because the travel to the event should be affordable. I was more lucky that my university would pay for the travel cost and registration fee. I am really thankful of that! ACL also offered some travel grants and volunteering opportunity for students to reduce the registration fee. I also applied for that program but didn't get accepted.

So, how was the event?

It was huuuuge. 

The socializing event. Photo: Hali

The whole event started from July 28th until August 2nd, 2019. The main conference was on July 29th-31st. I presented my poster during the poster presentation on July 31th along with the posters presented in the main conference. There was a welcome reception on the first day in a huge hall with 2 floors and there could be thousands people gathered there ranging from people whose name you I had only read on papers or books (Dan Jurafsky and Jason Eisner were there too!), whom I met at Summer School, my colleagues, and of course those I had just met.

In the main conference, there were several presentation and poster sessions every day running in parallel in different rooms. We were given a handbook with abstracts of the papers presented in the event, so we could read them before choosing the sessions we wanted to attend. To be honest, there were way too many interesting presentations, sometimes taking place at the same time. It was tiring to move here and there, so I mostly picked one session and remained in the room. Also some research works might be too specific on some topic and it was hard to comprehend them without prior knowledge (on the method, theory, etc). Sometimes I just got out of the room feeling dizzy and stupid haha. I like the poster sessions better because the authors would be willing to explain to you more thoroughly and clarify things you don't understand. There was also demo sessions for some implementation papers. I was there only once and in the last minute, so I couldn't explore much of it. But many people seemed to like these sessions too.

On the best paper award. Photo: Hali

I also attended a 1-day workshop about Conversational AI on August 1st. The speakers came from both industry and academia. The topic was related to the current state of conversational AI: the components in dialogue systems, chatbots, ethics for AI, etc. I always find this topic interesting and I really enjoyed the talks. 

How was the poster presentation?

At the beginning I was quite nervous not being able to speak English fluently or I couldn't explain my work in a way of people without a knowledge of NMT would understand (I know I'm such low confident T_T). But apparently I had been talking a lot since Day-1 that my speaking was quite understandable. It turned out to be exciting. 

My poster presentation

Anything else that was fun?

There was a socializing night on the third day of event. Of course I would expect there would be lots of food. But I didn't expect they would have some cultural performance, music on stage, DJ, and even fireworks. Those are awesome. Even though I was just hanging out with Hali, my friend at Saarland University xD.

There were booths from companies (mostly sponsors) and research institutes, which was one thing I really liked from the event because: 1. They have freebies: notebooks, tote bags, pens, stainless steel straws, mobile USB fan, etc; 2. Most of them were hiring!

During this event, I had a chance to meet other Indonesian researchers in NLP areas. It's always nice to know people from your own country also have the same interest as yours. Most of them are more senior than me. We are working on various topic of interest which can make the opportunity of collaboration in the future, hopefully.

The last thing is it feels so good to be back in Italy. The food is always awesome! I managed to visit new places which I couldn't visit 3 years ago. I should write a separate post for that.

Indonesians at ACL

I always enjoy food. Photo: Hali

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Overall, I was so impressed by this experience and am motivated to submit a good research work in the future. Well, the main motivation should always be to share the knowledge :)

If you are interested in the paper I submitted, please find it here.