2011Q1 Reports: Office

1 March 2011 -- Priscilla Rasmussen

ACL Business Office Report

Our accounting is now streamlined and works well except we still need to find a better system of coordination between Graeme and Chiaki (the accountant) and myself. Regarding our tax filings, we are now caught up through 2009 and are on track to file our 2010 taxes by the May 15th deadline. Mr. Pope, our accountant, has also been successful in getting ACL reinstated as a non-profit 501 (c) 3 with the State of New Jersey, where we are incorporated. So, we are now on a timely tax filing schedule, both with the IRS and New Jersey.

In January, the Directors and Officers insurance was paid for CY2011.

Last week, John Kirby, my assistant, gave his notice that he cannot work anymore. He has set the end of May as his final and full retirement due to health problems. He has been very dedicated to ACL’s activities and will be missed. But, with the Member Portal now operating well, there is less work to demand his attention other than at conference times. So, I plan to not hire a replacement for a while and see how it goes. I would hope to then hire someone either just to help me at conference times or minimally throughout the year and more so as conferences approach.

As you may already know, the previous landlord offered a reduction in the office rent to entice us to stay in the same space for 14 months (to June 1, 2011) and I accepted the offer. Now that June is approaching again and the office has been sold to a very nice gentleman a few months ago, I have called him to find out what his ideas are regarding the space and lease renewal. Once we meet, I will be able to report whether the rent will increase from the current $715/month to possibly as high as it had been ($850/month) or even higher. This will help us to decide whether the office should move to a smaller space or not. In preparation of possible bad news from the new landlord, I have begun searching for less expensive space that is smaller. So far, I have found one very good space for $600/month which is as large as the current space but located right next to a post office in a small office park. If the office moves, the space required would be about 2/3 of what we currently have (450 sq. ft. may be ideal rather than 750 sq. ft.) but, in the area, office space seems to either be larger or smaller than needed. I will keep looking for smaller space while waiting to see what the current landlord says about the lease renewal. Of course, it may be better to stay here if the rent is right, at least in part, to avoid the difficulties of address changing worldwide, keeping a more stable main office address for ACL and AMTA and avoiding the cost/trouble of the move itself. I welcome any opinions on whether to pursue moving and downsizing.

Publications and Royalties:

Now that we have an agreement with Curran Associates for print-on-demand of our publications as we have moved to USB flash drives and online access, I send to Curran Associates each USB stick as soon as the conference ends for their use in hardcopy production. This seems to be working well and, to date, we have received royalties from Curran Associates totaling $2,081.40. Other royalties we have received are from our long-term agreement with Copyright Clearance Center, totaling $764.67 for CY2010.

I continue to receive a minimal number of orders and, if I do have flash drives or CD-ROMs, I do fill the orders from the office. These orders numbered only 5 in CY2010.

In December, we finally received an invoice from MIT Press Journals for the FY2010 (ending June 2010) production of Computational Linguistics. With this $51,230 being paid, we are now current in our financial obligation to MIT Press Journals since they bill annually.

Membership:

In 2006, 2007 and 2009, and 2010, we surpassed 2100 members by the end of each year…our highest numbers in the past 15 years. When there are three conferences, one in each geographic area of the world we represent, we tend to increase memberships quite a bit. We ended 2010 with 2136 members; 1162 regular and 974 students.

We began 2011 with 257 multi-year members who carried over into 2011 plus a couple of anxious renewals that had come in at the very beginning of the year. Adding to this the 78 NAACL 2010 conference registrants who got a complimentary year of membership but had already paid for 2010 so had the extra year carried over to 2011, the total membership for 2011 now stands at 509. This is not so unusually low of a number given how early in the year it is. Please see Membership spreadsheets for details on countries represented and statistics.

Question: Do we want to continue the tradition of offering one complimentary year of membership to all NAACL attendees rather than having them pay when registering for the conference as ACLs are done?

The new Membership Portal is now working quite well. I am encouraging members to go to the portal to answer their own questions and to update their user profiles. It seems one must be a current member to post announcements/events so I have encouraged people to renew their memberships in order to post events. I think it will still take time for the members to get used to using the portal. Meanwhile, I am becoming more comfortable with navigating the portal to update people’s records, make corrections, glean information and statistics and otherwise work with it.

Conferences:

NAACL 2010 in Los Angeles was quite a success with a final registration count of 662. Many people commented on the beauty and interesting features of the hotel and were quite impressed at the relatively modest guest room costs ($139) given the quality of the hotel and its staff. We were able to cut costs quite a bit and obtain a good amount of sponsorship and I believe we should make a nice surplus (hopefully, in the $40-50,000 range).

ACL 2010 in Uppsala was a wonderful success, with a total registration count of 950 after refunds, cancellations and no-shows were removed from the registration database. The huge efforts of Joakim Nivre, Ulla Conti and the entire conference organizing team can be a good model for future organizers, especially when working with a divided venue that is sure to cause additional problems and requires extra planning for all to go smoothly.

The Office also provided support to INLG 2010, which had 49 attendees in Ireland and generated 26 new or renewing members. Sponsored by SIGGEN, the recently completed final accounting should give an additional $10,558 to the SIGGEN coffers.

And the Office provided management of the registration to EMNLP 2010 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. EMNLP 2010 was a great success, with 292 final registrants and generating 141 new or renewing ACL memberships. I believe a healthy surplus will be achieved for SIGDAT but am unsure of the full and final budget details.

ACL-HLT 2011, in Portland, Oregon will be a great meeting, across the street from the banks of the Columbia River and near an interesting and lively downtown area. The planning and budgeting is now in place and all contracts are signed. In the next couple of weeks, Brian and I will begin to pull together the final budget estimates to set registration fees so we can hopefully have registration open toward the end of this month. I am expecting we might reach 1000+ attendees, given the lack of many competing conferences this year and Rada’s comment that she and Yuji are receiving an unexpectedly high number of short papers. It is now looking like our poster session will be very large, possibly numbering close to 100 posters (including the SRW posters). Both Brian and I are seeing more indications that this will be a very large and possibly more complex meeting given we will use the ballroom in the hotel across the street for one parallel session and have high attendance. In early April, I will be going out to Portland for a couple of days to walk through all the space and finalize our space planning, go over budget and other details, make sure the poster/dinner space is adequate now that we have extended our reserved space, etc.

The NAACL Board asked that I locate a venue for NAACL HLT 2012 and, after quite a search, we have agreed to hold the conference in Montreal, June 3-8, 2012 at the Le Centre Sheraton. The contract has been signed and planning should begin shortly after ACL HLT 2011 is wrapped up.

The planning for ACL 2012, to be held at Jeju, South Korea, July 8-13, 2012 is moving along nicely. Gary Geumbae Lee (Local Chair) and Haizhou Li (General Chair) and Graeme have been working on the budget, pulling it into shape and Gary and the local team are finalizing space and banquet plans. Having made the site visit to Jeju, I can promise a great experience to all attendees…Jeju is known, from what I am told, as the Hawaii of Asia.

Conference Sponsorship:

NAACL-HLT 2010 was also very successful in garnering sponsorships and received just over $38,119 in total sponsorship. Srinivas Bangalore, Ed Hovy and I were the most active in acquiring these funds.

For ACL 2010, we received donations totaling $46,244 plus Platinum Level Sponsorships of 240,000 SEK (around $30,000) from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation) and Swedish Research Council (VR). Quite a few different people played roles in acquiring this excellent level of sponsorship.

And, with ACL HLT 2011 coming soon, we currently have sponsorships totaling $50,550, of which $7,250 is SIGdial 2011 sponsorship and $1,000 is for the CoNLL 2011 Best Student Paper award. To date, Google is our only Platinum Level sponsor but I just received word that Baidu may also come in as a Platinum Level sponsor, adding another $12,000 to our total. This conference will be the first time we are trying something a bit different. Since Portland is known for its beer and is reputed to be up-and-coming in its wine production, Richard Sproat (Local Sponsorship Chair) was successful in recruiting Widmer brewery and Barefoot Winery for donations of beverages for our banquet, thereby helping to reduce the cost to us of the complimentary drink tickets. They may consider also making donations to our Welcome Reception but this is not definite yet.

The new plan of appointing a Sponsorship Committee with two representatives from each regional world area (Asia, North/South America and Europe/Africa) and having an overall Chair (currently Srinivas Bangalore) is working very well. While it is usually quite difficult to get sponsorships from world areas not hosting the conference, this year, Kevin Duh (Asia Co-Chair) has been successful in obtaining two (smaller) Supporter Level sponsorships from Japanese companies. And, we have been a bit creative in ways of enticing larger sponsorships from the old standby companies (Google, for example, has increased from their previous Silver Level).

Many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!