2009Q1 Reports: NAACL
Report from NAACL, March 2009 Owen Rambow, Chapter Board Chair
1. Elections
The NAACL election was held electronically in the Fall of 2008. Chris Brew (OSU) and Ted Petersen (UMN Duluth) replace Jennifer Chu-Carrol (IBM) and Bill Dolan (Microsoft) on the Board.
2. Executive Committee Meetings
The Board converses regularly by e-mail. In addition, in 2009, the Board will meet in person at the NAACL HLT 2009 conference in Boulder. This needs to be scheduled asap (competition with ACL Board for time).
3. NAACL Treasurer's report
March 2009
The Chapter's bank account held $71,460.74 at the end of Feb 2009, and hasn't changed noticeably since then. This is a modest increase over the same time last year ($67,000.83) and a big increase over the same time in 2007 ($31,609.34). As usual, delays in conference accounting mean that this number can be far from the Chapter's true financial situation.
The gain comes from the fact that last month I eventually got the mothership to hand over NAACL's share of the profits from ACL 2005. Expenses have been for supporting students attending JHU WS2008 and for supporting NACLO 2008.
The Treasurer's undone items are accounting for NAACL HLT 2006 and 2007. I intend to make progress on the former during spring break and have it done before the summer NAACL Executive meeting.
Christopher Manning, NAACL Treasurer; March 12, 2009, Palo Alto, CA. .
4. North American conference in 2008
The 2008 conference was joint with ACL. The preparation of the conference using the coordinating committee with members from the ACL and NAACL boards worked well, once this was established (a bit late). The NAACL Board is grateful to the ACL Board for agreeing to some of its requests for creating a sense of continuation for the North American conferences. This includes the name (the appearance of "HLT" in the short name and "Human Language Technology Conference" in the long name, as well as adoption of the format that attempts to reach out to the Speech and IR communities. The report on this conference can be found elsewhere. (ADD LINK.)
5. North American conference in 2009
NAACL HLT 2009 will take place in Boulder, Colorado, in June 2009. Mari Ostendorf is conference chair, Michael Collins, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (NLP) Lucy Vanderwende, Microsoft (NLP) Doug Oard, University of Maryland (IR) Shri Narayanan, University of Southern California (Speech) are PC co-chairs, and Martha Palmer and James Martin are local organizers. Paper selection for the main conference (long papers) is about to be announced. No major problems have arisen so far, other than a heated debate about the conference dinner (no ideal solution available).
6. North American conference in 2010
A call for proposals has been issued. A bid from ISI/USC for a conference in downtown Los Angeles was accepted, but competing bids were also excellent and the choice was hard.
7. North American conference in 2011
This is joint with ACL. The coordinating committee was formed early and work has started smoothly under Ido Dagan's leadership.
8. Support for Summer Schools and Other Educational Outreach
The NAACL Board has not yet discussed renewing support for the JHU Summer WOrkshop, though I expect this will happen.