2018Q1 Reports: NAACL

Report from NAACL, February 2018

Julia Hockenmaier (Chapter board chair), Emily M. Bender (Past Chapter board chair)

Executive Committee Meetings

The board had a meeting at ACL on July 31, 2017. Additionally the Board converses regularly by email.

Treasurer's Report

The NAACL Chapter's bank account held $88,797.07 as of December 31, 2017. In 2017, our expenditures totaled $28k and were comprised of outlays of $5k to NACLO, two Emerging Regions Fund awards at $1.5k apiece ($3k),​ ​and$10k for the JSALT Summer School. ​ ​NAACL 2016 in San Diego was a successful conference: it resulted in a surplus of $29k. At the same time, NAACL 2015 incurred a loss of $36​k which has not been factored into the balance.​ ​To put these numbers in perspective, our bank account last year held​ ​just over $73k with similar outlays, and ​f​​our​ years ago we carried a $41k balance.

NAACL Officers as of today

 Chair         Julia Hockenmaier   University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
 Secretary     Colin Cherry        National Research Council Canada
 Treasurer     Joel Tetreault      Grammarly
 Past Chair    Emily M. Bender     University of Washington 
 
 Board Members:
 Marie-Catherine de Marneffe                      The Ohio State University
 Philip Resnik	                                  University of Maryland
 Ellen Riloff	                                  University of Utah
 Marilyn Walker                                   University of California Santa Cruz
 Luke Zettlemoyer                                 University of Washington/Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
 David Yarowsky (ex-officio, ACL representative)  Johns Hopkins University

NAACL Issues Under Discussion

[ TO BE ADDED]

North America Conference in 2018

NAACL 2018 will take place June 1--June 6 2019 in New Orleans. Marilyn Walker (UC Santa Cruz) is the General Chair. Heng Ji (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) and Amanda Stent (Bloomberg) are the Program Chairs.

Test of Time award

This year the program chairs for NAACL 2018 decided to set up a process that will result in awarding two "Test of Time" awards to two papers. This required making a number of decisions:

• Who should make the nominations?
• What time period should the nominated papers cover?
• Should the papers considered for nomination come from just the NAACL conferences or could the nominators consider a broader group of papers?
• How should the award papers be selected from the nominations? Should there be a small expert committee of people or should the selection be done by the whole NAACL membership.

The initial decisions were to focus on the period from 2002-2012 since the NAACL conference first started in 2000, and to ask the the area chairs for NAACL 2018 to form the nominating committee. While we had the approval of the NAACL board, the area chairs almost immediately requested that they could nominate papers that appeared during the designated time period that had appeared in other ACL sponsored conferences. This necessitated getting the approval of ACL and EMNLP boards for including papers that had appeared there in the pool.

The result was a pool of 19 papers that can be found here, along with the rationale for their nomination. [1]

After consulting with the community, the general chair and area chairs on how to select the awardees, we formed two committees:

• Expert award committee: consisted of all ACL and NAACL conferences’ general chairs, program chairs and NAACL board chairs between 2013-2018.
• Community award committee: consisted of all the top 1000 authors ranked by the ACL Anthology Network, based on the number of publications at ACL venues.

We define Conflict-of-Interests (COI) as “authored a nominated paper, or co-authored with any of the nominated paper authors between 2013-2018, or nominated a paper as NAACL-HLT 2018 area chairs“. We excluded any members who have any COIs with any of the nominated papers from these two committees.

The description of the award and the reason for having two committees is in our NAACL blog at: [2]

The papers nominated are at: [3]

We are in the process of collecting the votes now. The process should be completed by March 15th. We have received a lot of interest and useful feedback on the idea and the process, along with the suggestion that ACL should take this on an institutionalize it rather than leave it as something for individual program chairs to decide to do or not do. We will prepare a fuller report on our conclusions about this as part of our report on the NAACL 2018 conference.