Protect a disabled NLPer; don't come sick to EMNLP!

disability phd travel by Vagrant Gautam

A plea to stay home if you're sick, and wear a mask if you're not.


Although I haven't previously talked about it online, many of my colleagues and friends know that I have a chronic lung condition. In my childhood, colds could escalate into hospital visits, and as a teenager, I couldn't do the same sports as other kids. As an adult, it's been mostly controlled, except since COVID appeared. I am at higher risk to catch it and also to have complications[1] from it, so my life has changed a lot since 2020 - I rarely eat at indoor restaurants, I don't go out to indoor bars and clubs anymore, and I mask on public transit and other indoor spaces like conferences where everyone is sharing air.

Unfortunately, at my first in-person conference (EMNLP 2023 in Singapore), there were a lot of sick people who showed up anyway, which was clear from the coughing and sneezing you could hear in every room. As conferences are crowded and in closed spaces with poor ventilation[2], they provide perfect conditions for illness to spread and for disabled scientists like me to end up with additional disabilities.

This year, I will be attending EMNLP again (in Florida this time) to present four papers[3]. I like having opportunities to talk to people about my work and learn about theirs, which is why I want to attend EMNLP in the first place, despite generally minimizing my conference travel. People in the NLP community can take two simple steps so I can be an equal participant:

  1. Please don't show up sick, whether you have a cold, the flu or COVID.
  2. Please wear a mask (as I will be), as all of these are also transmissible before you start to show any symptoms. In fact, your wearing a mask protects me better than my one-way masking.

Hope to see you there! I'll be the one looking like this, plus or minus the sunglasses:

Vagrant dressed in all black, a black mask and black round sunglasses. A carabiner with keys hangs from a belt loop and a tote bag from the Deutsche Kinemathek (German film museum) hangs from their shoulder as they lean against a backrest in a tram, showing a tattooed forearm. Their t-shirt says "Saarbrigge, du Geiler!" because it is from Saarbrücken.

  1. See this story about the effects of COVID reinfection and this Nature review article on long COVID ↩︎

  2. In about 10-20 years I feel very confident that high-performance air filtering will become a standard in most buildings and public spaces, just like other sanitary services like clean water and sewage systems, which will greatly reduce transmission of infectious diseases and remove other allergens I am sensitive to. ↩︎

  3. A TACL paper I led on pronoun fidelity with language models, a main conference paper I co-led with Arjun Subramonian looking at "democratization" in machine learning and NLP, a main conference paper Marius Mosbach led on the impact of interpretability and analysis work on NLP, and a (CRAC) workshop paper I led on pronominal bias in coreference resolution. ↩︎