📄 EACL 2026 Student Research Workshop: Mentorship Program Report

Summary

This report evaluates how effectively the mentorship track, run alongside the Student Research Workshop (SRW) at EACL 2026, met the needs of the people who took part. It follows the transparency model of the ACL 2023 Program Chairs' reports. The organizers ran two voluntary exit surveys, one for mentees and one for mentors, combining Likert-scale items with free-text answers. Because response rates were partial, the findings show tendencies rather than a complete picture. Both groups were broadly satisfied. Mentees said feedback sharpened their contributions, fitted their papers to SRW norms and raised their confidence. Mentors found the work rewarding. The few bad experiences were severe but isolated, and they came from process problems rather than lack of expertise or effort: tight schedules, unclear expectations about how deep or iterative feedback should be, and drafts that were either too immature or almost finished. The strongest quantitative signal concerns desk rejections. Mentored papers were desk rejected far less often than non-mentored ones. This suggests mentorship mainly improves presentation and compliance with submission rules. The authors argue the program should become a permanent part of the SRW.

Key points

• The program received 53 submissions: 40 accepted, 1 withdrawn and 12 desk rejected. Desk rejections were for template (6), page limit (2), anonymity (2) and student-author requirement (2) violations. Another 13 papers lacked a Limitations section and were warned rather than rejected.
• The mentor call reached 973 people and drew 39 volunteers. After checking requirements and OpenReview profiles, 28 remained, and each mentor handled 1.62 papers on average.
• Of the 40 mentored papers, 32 (80%) went on to the formal SRW. Of these, 10 were accepted, 21 rejected and 1 desk rejected (3.1%). Among 138 non-mentored submissions, 20 were desk rejected (14.5%).
• Mentor guidelines were newly published for this edition, but survey feedback indicates they need more detail about what each side should expect.
• The authors make four recommendations:
  • define the scope of mentorship and the expected depth of feedback explicitly;
  • communicate deadlines more clearly and provide escalation paths when contact stalls;
  • add a light screening step for paper readiness;
  • institutionalize the program.