Summary of Acceptance Decisions

Decisions have been finalised, and notifications emailed to contact authors. Thanks for your patience! EMNLP will be the biggest NLP conference to date, and accordingly there was a long and complex process between submission and notification. After receiving 3677 submissions, 3359 of these went through review, of which 754 were accepted to EMNLP and 520 were accepted to Findings of EMNLP. This gives an acceptance rate of 22.4% for EMNLP and a further 15.5% for Findings. In terms of paper type, the long paper acceptance rate to EMNLP is 24.6% and 16.7% for short papers.

As outlined in the email, there are two impending deadlines:

1. For those with papers accepted to Findings, you need to decide whether to take up the offer. If you elect not to do so, please withdraw your paper by 25th September.
2. All those with accepted papers will now need to prepare camera ready versions. Please take into account the reviewer and meta-reviewer (AC) comments, and upload your paper by 5th October. The same deadline applies to EMNLP papers and Findings papers. You are allowed an additional content page in your camera ready submission; please use this space to address the reviewers’ comments.

All deadlines are 23:59 in AOE (anywhere on earth) timezone.

Many of you are mulling over whether to publish in Findings versus trying for a subsequent conference. We have posted about Findings on our blog here and here. Please read these posts if you haven’t already to understand what Findings is and the reasons for its creation. You can also refer to the reviewing committee proposal where the idea was originally hatched.

Findings is new, and has yet to establish a reputation for quality. We very much hope that many of you choose to publish your work here, so that it can build a strong reputation as a bona fide outlet for excellent NLP research. The papers we have selected for Findings were reviewed positively by the programme committee, and were judged to be high quality research which is worthy of publication. With an effective acceptance rate of 38.0% (22.4% + 15.5%), this is in line with premier NLP conferences in previous years (e.g., EMNLP, NAACL, COLING and CoNLL have all had conferences with acceptance rates between 30-40%). Please consider publishing your work in this new venue, allowing it to establish prestige. Doing so will also provide a vote of support for ‘Findings’ as another important means of growing the publication options in our fast-growing field.

Quoting Noah Smith who makes a compelling case:

" I'm optimistic about "Findings of EMNLP" and other similar plans to add publication capacity to NLP conferences. Reputation and prestige are social constructs. In NLP, we are constructing them. What it "means" to have a paper published in EMNLP vs. Findings is something we get to decide. Findings will be a respected venue if strong, citation-worthy work is published there. Good, useful, informative work has been getting rejected under the old model, and that slows everyone down (authors who must decide to work on the paper for another round, its future reviewers, and all of us who don't get to see the work for another cycle). For papers of mine that got into "Findings," I'm advocating to my coauthors accept that outcome and hope others will too. The main down-side is that you won't get a conference talk or poster, but surely with modern indexing tools and "democratized" platforms for sharing content, I'm pretty sure we can find our way through this."

We hope you share these sentiments!

A few final comments:

• If you didn’t get an email notification about your paper, please contact us at emnlp2020programmechairs@gmail.com
• If you have a paper accepted to Findings, you cannot submit this elsewhere, as this is considered to be full publication. If you wish to submit to another conference or similar, then you will need to withdraw from Findings.
• Findings does not include a presentation or a poster presentation. Having said this, we will check with EMNLP workshop organisers, who may wish to invite authors to present their work at a workshop.
• Is Findings a conference or a journal? It is neither, combining elements of both formats. If forced to choose, we would say that it is most similar to a conference publication on the grounds that it shares the same reviewing process.
• Publishing in Findings is free of charge, just like EMNLP. Authors of Findings papers will not be required to register for the conference. All EMNLP papers are required to have at least one author register for the conference, in order to present their work.

– EMNLP Programme Chairs