Kritika Agrawal
- MS Student
International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad
Attended 2019 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
2019, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
NAACL 2019 in Minneapolis,USA was a life changing experience for me and I cannot thank ACM W and my institute’s lab, DSAC, enough for giving me this wonderful opportunity. Over the past year, I have been investigating Structural Information Extraction from scientific articles. My paper, that has been accepted in workshop collocated with this conference, is the culmination of this work. The method provided by my work, being domain independent, can be used in any scientific field to understand and query scientific knowledge in a more structured format. Being the first author, I was required to present my work at the conference, and being an undergraduate, this was the first time I was attending one! Being able to attend the conference and the workshop allowed me to meet pioneers in the field and potential collaborators, to get feedback on my paper, and to get ideas about other potential works through first-hand interactions with various researchers. The conference had several kinds of sessions – oral presentations, workshops, tutorials, poster presentations and many networking sessions. Sessions were divided into different categories based on different fields within computational linguistics. First time attendees like me were also assigned a mentor and big sibling. There were plenty of networking opportunities starting with reception, mentoring breakfast, birds-of-feather meet ups and an amazing social event at Minneapolis Art Institute. NAACL 2019 also saw hiring booths established by several research companies. The employment and internship opportunities gained from NAACL were plenty! NAACL was an absolutely amazing experience for me as I got to experience a community that I wish to become an integral part of some day. Though initially a little overwhelming, the numerous formal and informal sessions provided a platform for insightful, comfortable, and fun interactions. For my first conference, I could not have asked for a better experience!