For non-NLP people reading this: ACL is the biggest conference for Natural Language Processing and has been growing rapidly the last years. Numerous top researchers and companies (Google, DeepMind, ...) attend to present their work.

This blog post is a (mostly) unfiltered collections of impressions of ACL 2020. For a more condensed, research-focused article, I can point to Vered Shwartz' Highlights of ACL 2020; or for a discussion on the virtual format to Yoav Goldberg's The missing pieces in virtual-ACL.

The post focuses on how it was to navigate an online conference for someone who is quite new to research. On the content side of ACL, I will mostly discuss the topic of Grounded Language.

So just four days before ACL 2020 was going to to start, I was in the middle of finalizing a paper submission to COLING and handing in my Bachelor thesis. So I had given no thought to ACL at all. I was not presenting any paper at ACL, it costs 125$ and I didn't have a clear objective of what to attend. So why attending? Luckily a colleague convinced me to sign up and I do not regret it! After all, I am seriously considering a PhD in this field and I also want to get to know people from academia and industry.

This was my very first conference. It would have been more personal and less overwhelming in person, but also: I couldn't have attended in person in Seattle.

Saturday

I got my password and I am now ready to go! It is all a bit overwhelming. Talks, QAs, Tutorials, so much to choose from and ways to make good or bad first impressions.

The first step is to make a schedule for next week, and trying to keep it light (since I am handing in my thesis in a few days). Do not fall into FOMO (Fear of missing out)!

I need to remind myself to stay humble and curious, instead of shy and intimidated by all the experts. Go out, understand, collaborate. That's all.

So to not get overwhelmed, I defined what I want to get out of the conference:

• looking for places to do a PhD or Master's, or also shorter research projects
• Get a solid overview of the current research and labs in the field of Grounded Language. This is the field I want to ultimately do my PhD in (not 100% sure yet). There is a ACL track dedicated to this called Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and more.
  • Broad overview of what Grounded Language is? Cognitive, Deep Learning, Robotics?
  • Who are the big labs, professors, people? Where can I gain experience first?
• industry connections
• socialize with people and look at some random papers or papers from people I know

I attended the pre-social organized by Esther Seyffahrt in the evening where people read from their hilariously mis-transcribed talks. The irony here is of course that we are NLP-people with expert knowledge on transcription.

There is the Multi-Modal Dialogue Tutorial I consider. It is tagged as "cutting-edge" in contrast to the other category "introductory", so I hope I can take something away from it.

Sunday