Call for Papers


We are excited announce that we will have the best paper award! All archival papers will be considered for the best paper award!

Overview and Main focuses

State-of-the-art NLP technologies such as question answering and information retrieval systems have enabled many people to access information efficiently. However, these advances have been made in an English-first way, leaving other languages behind. Large-scale multilingual pre-trained models have achieved significant performance improvements on many multilingual NLP tasks (Hu et al., 2020; Conneau et al., 2020; Xue et al., 2020) where input text is provided. Yet, on knowledge-intensive tasks that require retrieving knowledge and generating output (Petroni et al., 2021), we observe limited progress (Asai et al., 2021). Moreover, in many languages, existing knowledge sources are critically limited (Roy et al., 2020), and thus finding knowledge in another language with abundant knowledge sources is often required. Despite many exciting recent progresses (Karpukhin et al., 2020) in English knowledge-intensive tasks, transferring such progresses to a wider set of languages is non-trivial as in many languages.

Our workshop focuses on building efficient, performant information access systems in a larger set of typologically diverse languages. We seek submissions on various aspects of this challenging task—(i) knowledge source / evaluation benchmark curation for low-resource languages, (ii) learning scenarios and model architectures for building multilingual information access system.

Research Paper Track

We encourage paper submissions that focus on various aspects of cross-lingual knowledge-intensive NLP tasks, including but not limited to:

We also encourage submissions on related topics such as:

Shared Task Track

We also host a shared task on cross-lingual open-retrieval QA, which covers 15 typologically diverse languages with and without training data. See details at this page. We accept system descriptions from our shared task as a workshop submission.

NB: We have special awards for creative entries that do not require massive compute or resource, to encourage participants all areas of industry and academia. Even submissions on a subset of languages will be considered!

Submission guidelines

Please submit your papers at Our OpenReview site.

Submissions should be at least 4 and at most 8 pages, not including citations; final versions of papers will be given one additional page (up to 9 pages). All submissions will be reviewed according to the same standards, regardless of length (i.e., there are no separate short and long paper tracks). Submissions may optionally include an appendix with no length restriction. The main paper must remain fully self-contained, as reviewers will not be asked to review appendices. Please format your papers using the standard style files for ARR submission format:

We accept submissions of both previously unpublished work and work recently published elsewhere.

Unpublished work

Previously-unpublished work must be anonymized, as it will go through a double-blind review process, and will be included in the workshop proceedings if accepted. This year, we are using a hybrid submission system: papers may be submitted either via OpenReview.

Unpublished work with ARR reviews

You can also submit your existing ARR submissions with reviews to our workshop via ARR system. Simply submit your work via the "Commitment Submission" option in the following website. OpenReview.

Published work (non-archival track)

Recently published work does not need to be anonymized and will not go thought the normal review process. Instead, authors are asked to submit their published work with the reviews, and we will conduct meta-review to see if the published work align with our workshop focus. The submission should clearly indicate the original venue and will be accepted if the organizers think the work will benefit from exposure to the audience of this workshop. Work published elsewhere will not be included in the workshop proceedings. Please submit your published work here.

Dual submissions

We allow submissions that are also under review in other venues, but please note that many conferences do not allow it, so make sure that you do not violate their policy as well. Please follow double-submission policy from ACL. Accepted cross-submissions will be presented as posters, with an indication of the original venue if it's already accepted elsewhere.

EMNLP 2022 allows submissions to be presented at our workshop as a non-archival paper. This is an official confirmation from the program chairs. Any work planned to be submitted to EMNLP 2022 is also welcomed at our workshop! (no matter it has received ARR reviews or not)

Anonymity period

We do not enforce an anonymity period. We do not restrict posting on preprint servers such as arXiv at any point of time.

Important dates

References

  1. Hu et al. "XTREME: A massively multilingual multi-task benchmark for evaluating cross-lingual generalisation." In ICML. 2020.
  2. Conneau et al. "Unsupervised cross-lingual representation learning at scale." In ACL. 2020.
  3. Xue et al. "mT5: A Massively Multilingual Pre-trained Text-to-Text Transformer." In NAACL. 2021.
  4. Petroni et al. "KILT: a Benchmark for Knowledge Intensive Language Tasks." In NAACL. 2021.
  5. Asai et al. "XOR QA: Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering." In NAACL, 2021.
  6. Roy et al.. "Information asymmetry in Wikipedia across different languages: A statistical analysis." Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. 2021.
  7. Karpukhin et al. "Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering". In EMNLP. 2020.