58th Annual Meeting of ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) 2020 July 5 - July 8
Unlike the NAACL (North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics which is the regional arm of ACL ) conference last year, held in Minneapolis, ACL 2020 becoming virtual was very convenient. There were no issues with parking spots, which allows everybody to watch more sessions than usual. One essential item to consider with virtual conferences is time zones. Presenters are around the globe, so make sure the presentation time is in local time. Here is my account of ACL 2020 and a quick framing of what I think the effect and impact of sessions in ACL 2020 would be. ACL 2020 - Effect and Impact BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) is not going away anytime soon. Bidirectionality in deep neural networks gives better representations of words because it takes into consideration the left and the right context. The built-in bidirectionality in BERT shows that context helps in most NLP (Natural Language Processing) tasks. That is why BERT i