Birds-of-a-Feather and Affinity Group Meetup

Welcome to Birds-of-a-Feather and Affinity Group Meetings

At EMNLP 2024, we continue the tradition of conducting birds-of-a-feather (or BoF) and Affinity Group Meeting sessions to help newbie researchers get in touch with other people working in the same areas. Here’s a quick primer for people who haven’t attended such sessions before!

What do we hope to accomplish with BoF and Affinity Group Meeting sessions?

  • We want to provide junior researchers/people attending a CL conference for the first time with a platform to discuss ideas and issues with other researchers in their areas of interest. This can be a good avenue for junior researchers to get feedback on ongoing ideas, learn about relevant ongoing projects at other groups/universities, and develop a broader understanding of their field of interest.
  • We want to facilitate more exchange of research ideas and enable collaborative discussions.

How are BoF and Affinity Group Meeting sessions structured?

  • All BoF and Affinity Group Meeting sessions are in-person only.
  • Each meetup will be led by the session chair(s).
  • Anyone who wants to attend can join; prior signup is unnecessary.

When are the BoF and Affinity Group meeting sessions happening?

All BoF & Affinity Session will run Parallel with the Oral/Poster Sessions

Tuesday, Nov 12

11:00 - 12:30 LLMs for Embodied Agents

  • Organizer: Manling Li
  • Room: Foster (Convention Center 2nd level)

11:00 - 12:30 Law Law Land: Legal Language Meets Large Language Models

  • Organizer: Santosh Tokala
  • Room: Johnson (Convention Center 2nd level)

12:30 - 14:00 Large Multimodal Models for Biomedical Research

  • Organizer: Tianyu Liu
  • Room: Miami Lecture Hall (Convention Center Level 2)

14:00 - 15:30 LLM Agents for Acoustics and Continuous Signals

  • Organizer: Huck Yang
  • Room: Foster (Convention Center Level 2)

16:00 - 17:30 Southeast Asian NLP

  • Organizer: Genta Winata
  • Room: Johnson (Convention Center Level 2)

16:00 - 17:30 NLP for Structured Data

  • Organizer: Vivek Gupta
  • Room: Miami Lecture Hall (Convention Center Level 2)

Wednesday, Nov 13

10:30 - 12:00 Fostering Native and Cultural Inclusivity in LLMs

  • Organizer: Firoj Alam
  • Room: Foster

10:30 - 12:00 NLP Tools for Community-Owned Religious Texts in Low-Resourced Languages

  • Organizer: Inam Ullah
  • Room: Johnson

Thursday, Nov 14

10:30 - 12:00 2112: The AI Odyssey

  • Organizer: Prasson Bajpai
  • Room: Foster

10:30 - 12:00 Embeddings, Reranker, Small LM for Better Search

  • Organizer: Han Xiao
  • Room: Miami Lecture Hall

More details can be found on the following Platforms: Underline and Whova.

Attendees are free to carry forward the discussion after the BoF and Affinity Group Meeting sessions end (or even continue in the same room if it is available!).

Additional Guidelines for Attendees

  • Your session chair(s) will invite you to introduce yourself briefly.
  • The session format can vary based on the preferences of the chair(s), for example, it may be structured as an Ask Me Anything, a slide deck roundtable, a roundtable Q&A, etc. Your session chair(s) will explain the format at the beginning of the session.
  • Please follow the participation guidelines set by the session chair(s) (e.g., raising your hand to ask questions, etc.)
  • Please do not record the session.
  • Please abide by the ACL Anti-Harassment Policy at all times.

We hope you enjoy these meetups and get a chance to make new friends who share your research interests!