BlackboxNLP 2021: Analyzing and interpreting neural networks for NLP -- EMNLP 2021 When: November 11, 2021 Where: Hybrid - Punta Cana & Online Website: https://blackboxnlp.github.io Workshop description ----------------------------- Neural networks have rapidly become a central component in NLP systems in the last few years. The improvement in accuracy and performance brought by the introduction of neural networks has typically come at the cost of our understanding of the system: How do we assess what the representations and computations are that the network learns? The goal of this workshop is to bring together people who are attempting to peek inside the neural network black box, taking inspiration from machine learning, psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: * Applying analysis techniques from neuroscience to analyze high-dimensional vector representations in artificial neural networks; * Analyzing the network’s response to strategically chosen input in order to infer the linguistic generalizations that the network has acquired; * Examining network performance on simplified or formal languages; * Proposing modifications to neural architectures that increase their interpretability; * Testing whether interpretable information can be decoded from intermediate representations; * Explaining specific model predictions made by neural networks; * Generating and evaluating the quality of adversarial examples in NLP; * Developing open-source tools for analyzing neural networks in NLP; * Evaluating the analysis results: how do we know that the analysis is valid? BlackboxNLP 2021 is the fourth BlackboxNLP workshop. The programme and proceedings of the previous editions, which were held at EMNLP 2018, ACL 2019 and EMNLP 2020, can be found on the workshop website. Submissions ----------------- We call for two types of papers: 1) Archival papers. These are papers reporting on completed, original and unpublished research, with a maximum length of 8 pages + references. Papers shorter than this maximum are also welcome. Accepted papers are expected to be presented at the workshop and will be published in the workshop proceedings. They should report on obtained results rather than intended work. These papers will undergo double-blind peer-review, and should thus be anonymized. 2) Extended abstracts. These may report on work in progress or may be cross submissions that have already appeared in a non-NLP venue. The extended abstracts are of maximum 2 pages + references. These submissions are non-archival in order to allow submission to another venue. The selection will not be based on a double-blind review and thus submissions of this type need not be anonymized. Submissions should follow the official EMNLP 2021 style guidelines. The submission site is: https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2021/BlackboxNLP Our workshop also welcomes submissions through ACL Rolling Review (https://aclrollingreview.org/). Authors of any papers that are submitted to ARR before July 15, 2021 and have their reviews ready may submit their papers and reviews for consideration for the workshop up to one week before our notification date, i.e. by August 27, 2021. Contact --------------------- Please contact the organizers at blackboxnlp@googlegroups.com for any questions. Important dates --------------------- August 5, 2021 – Submission deadline. TBD – Retraction of workshop papers accepted for EMNLP. August 27, 2021 – Deadline for submitting ARR-reviewed papers September 3, 2021 – Notification of acceptance. September 15, 2021 – Camera-ready papers due. November 11, 2021 – Workshop. Note: All deadlines are 11:59PM UTC-12:00.