Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Message from the General Chair EMNLP 2021 is one of the first hybrid conferences in the field of natural language processing.It is also for us, the organizing team, uncharted domain.Organizing a hybrid conference has felt like organizing two conferences, a virtual one and an in-person one, which seamlessly must work together and with a kind of multi-task objective make the conference experience synergistic and successful both remotely and in person.With this challenge come opportunities.The hybrid format allows remote participation in a conference that is held onsite in Punta Cana, The Dominican Republic, and allows creating a real conference feeling for those who do not want to travel the many miles from the other side of the world and increase their carbon footprint, and for those who have budget restrictions for traveling.We welcome you all!As in previous years, the purpose of the General Chair's preface is to express thanks to the amazing team of organizing chairs whose heroic efforts made this hybrid conference possible.The organizing team includes:• The Programme Chairs -Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia and Scott Yih -who did a tremendous job to manage the reviewing process and set up an outstanding scientific program.• The Senior Area Chairs, Area Chairs and Reviewers whose expertise enabled authors to learn from their reviews and to deliver papers that improved on their original submissions.• The Demonstration Chairs -Heike Adel and Shuming Shi -who selected outstanding demonstrations to complement the program of the main conference.• The Workshop Chairs -Minlie Huang and Parisa Kordjamshidi -who made a huge effort for organizing hybrid workshops and satellite conferences.• The Publication Chairs -Loic Barrault, Greg Durrett and Yansong Feng -who met the challenge of identifying and correcting the myriad ways in which papers could be wrongly formatted, and who assembled the result into the conference proceedings.• The Handbook Chair -Els Lefever -for the timely delivery of handbook information.• The Publication Chairs of Findings -Gabriel Stanovsky and Tim Van de Cruys -who made it possible that many interesting papers and their findings can be accessed and cited by the public.• The Tutorial Chairs -Jing Jiang and Ivan Vulic -who selected six excellent tutorials to be presented at the conference.• The Ethics Chairs -Margot Mieskes and Christopher Potts -who undertook the delicate task of checking papers that had been flagged for potential ethical issues.• The Website Chair -Miryam de Lhoneux -who ensured that the EMNLP 2021 website promoting this hybrid conference stayed up to date; Mingxiao Li who offered website support; and Nathan Cornille who was responsible for the graphical designs.