Preface by the Program Committee Co-Chairs

摘要

Welcome to EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019, the first joint EMNLP and IJCNLP conference! While this is the first time IJCNLP is held in Hong Kong, EMNLP left its footprints here in 2000 when it was still a tiny conference. There is nothing more exciting than seeing it return to Hong Kong after 19 years as one of the largest NLP conferences. Owing to a significant increase in the number of submissions to recent NLP conferences, we, for the first time in the history of EMNLP and IJCNLP, attempted to reduce workload for reviewers by implementing a dual submission policy, where we disallowed authors to submit papers that are under review by a journal or another conference at the time of submission. Despite this policy, EMNLP-IJCNLP received 2914 submissions (excluding those withdrawn by the authors after initial submissions). This is an increase of over 30% compared with EMNLP 2018, making EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 the largest NLP conference ever! Out of the 2914 submissions, 38 were desk-rejected for various reasons including formatting problems, length problems and violation of the dual submission policy. In spite of the record number of submissions, we managed to maintain a similar acceptance rate as past NLP conferences given the vast amount of space available to us at the AsiaWorld-Expo. In the end, we accepted 683 submissions. Some statistics of the accepted papers can be found below.