Tutorial: How to write an NLP paper (WiNLP@EACL 2021, 04/19/2021)
Channel: Vagrant
Date: 12/05/2021

This is a recording of a tutorial on writing for academic conferences, given as part of the WiNLP satellite event at EACL 2021, with a specific focus on how to write a good extended abstract. Slides can be found at http://www.winlp.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/winlp-writing-tutorial.pdf

Participants for this tutorial should be first time authors (or close to), submitting to conferences and workshops or other academic venues like fellowships in or adjacent to the field of NLP and Computational Linguistics (*ACL community).

The first part of the tutorial covers the “life of a paper,” demystifying conference calls for papers, formatting guidelines and templates, rules like the ACL’s anonymity period, and a number of small things that are often left unsaid: What is an area chair? Is author order important? What is a camera-ready? How do I use a rebuttal?

The second part zooms (no pun intended) in on the writing itself: how do I write a good extended abstract? We establish and motivate some guidelines for academic writing, from knowing your audience to anticipating common flaws in academic papers. Emphasis is placed on extended abstracts and how to actually cram all the things you want to say into so small a space (and how not to!), and we finish up by listing some specific tools like useful LaTeX packages, gotchas like pixel images, and a list of resources for further reading.

- Vagrant Gautam / @DippedRusk / me@dippedrusk.com
- Sabrina J. Mielke / @sjmielke / sjmielke@jhu.edu