Date: 7th July, 2003
Meeting room 101
Sapporo Convention Center (where the ACL conference takes place)
How to get to the Convention Center from the Sapporo Grand Hotel:
>From the Sapporo Grand Hotel to the Convention Center, the whole trip
takes about 20 to 25 minutes.
5 minutes to Odori Subway Station from the hotel,
5 minute-ride on a train (three stations away from Odori Station)
10-minute walk from Higashi Sapporo Subway Station to the venue
Teleparticipants: Sandra Carberry, Diane Litman
8:30 Breakfast
9:15 Welcome -- Mark Johnson
9:20 * Minutes of previous meeting -- Sandra Carberry
9:30 * Treasurer's report -- Kathy McCoy
ACL-02 Final Balance
Chapter shadow accounts developments (if any)
* Investments -- Martha Palmer and Kathy McCoy
9:45 * Secretary's report -- Sandra Carberry
* Electronic elections report -- Sandra Carberry
* Handbooks -- Sandra Carberry
* ACL Website -- Sandra Carberry
10:15 * Nominations -- John Nerbonne
10:30 ACL Office report -- Priscilla Rasmussen
Membership
10:45 Tea / Coffee
Conferences
11:00 NAACL
* Chapter Report -- Diane Litman (Chair)
finances, chapter events, new board members, plans, HLT update
11:15 * ACL-05 Site Selection -- Johana Moore
* ACL-05 HLT involvement -- Diane Litman, Johanna Moore
* Conference organization and difficulty of finding sites
-- Johanna Moore, Diane Litman
11:45 ACL-03, 7th - 12th July, 2003
Sapporo Convention Center, Sapporo, Japan
http://www.ec-inc.co.jp/ACL2003/
* Conference Chair -- Prof. Jun'ichi Tsujii
* Local Arrangements -- Dr. Kenji Araki
* Program Co-Chairs -- Erhard Hinrichs, Dan Roth
student workshop, workshops, tutorials, etc.
12:15 ACL-04 July, 2004
21/07/04 Tutorials and some workshops
22-24/07/04 Main conference
25-26/07/04 workshops
International Conventions Centre of Barcelona (CCIB)
Barcelona, Spain.
* Conference Chair -- Donia Scott
* Local Arrangements -- Toni Badia
* Program Chairs -- Lyn Walker, Walter Daelemans
12:45 * ACL-O6 Call for bids -- Martha Palmer
13:00 Lunch
14:00 Conference organization issues
* ACL anthology support (e.g., $500 charge to conferences)
-- John Nerbonne, Steven Bird
* Conference registration software -- Kathy McCoy
* Electronic submission and reviewing software
-- John Nerbonne (Chair), Johanna Moore, Annie Zaenen
Chapters, etc.
14:45 EACL
* Chapter Report -- Claire Gardent (Chair)
finances, chapter events, new board members, plans
15:00 * Asian Federation -- Hiroshi Nakagawa
15:15 * SIGs -- Johanna Moore
15:30 Coffee/Tea
15:45 Publications
* CL journal -- Robert Dale, Julia Hirschberg
16:00 * Distribution of proceedings / print on demand
-- David Yarowsky (chair), Julia Hirschberg, Mark Johnson
* How soon after a conference should its proceedings appear in the anthology?
16:15 * Executive Committee Tasks -- John Nerbonne, Julia Hirschberg
16:30 * Suggestions for program committee organization -- Mark Johnson
17:00 * Executive Meeting, Winter 2003 -- Johanna Moore
17:05 * Other Business
17:50 Closing
18:00 ACL Welcoming Reception (in Convention Center)
Note: Financial tables are in separate files at the end of the reports.
Mark Johnson
Our Association is forty-one years old this year, which makes it older than many of our members. I'm pleased to report that the Association is still healthy and vigorous, and is well-prepared for the next forty-odd years. We launched no major new initiatives in the past year, but instead used the time to develop and strengthen our existing activities:
The issues facing our organization are not yet major challenges, if we can act on them soon enough:
To summarize, our organization continues to be healthy in terms of membership numbers and its finances, and for this we should be grateful to the Office Manager Priscilla Rasmussen, Treasurer Kathy McCoy, and the Association's Secretary Sandra Carberry. I'd like to thank Sandra in particular for many long hours she has devoted to ACL on issues both large and small. We are extremely lucky to have someone as devoted as she is, and as anyone that has been involved in the day to day running of the ACL knows, we are a better organization thanks to her efforts.
Mark Johnson
2003 ACL President
June, 2003
Sandra Carberry
The ACL election web page is being set up. Greg Silber is now handling the election software, and the election will be overseen by Greg, Dmitriy Genzel, and me.
Drago Radev is continuing to serve as "technical webmaster" with responsibility for a variety of items, including the ACL Universe and maintaining the email aliases. Updates have been made to the ACL handbook, and the conference chairs have been asked to provide information that will be added to their portion of the handbook.
The ACL officers and Executive Board members have been given a template for recording their duties along with a timetable and suggestions for the person following them in office. These will be stored on the ACL web site for access by future officers.
Dan and Erhard used the START system. http://www.softconf.com/START/ for submission and reviewing this year. We have not made a lot of progress on identifying reviewing software for ACL, so I thought it might be useful to build on Dan and Erhard's experience and try the START system for ACL-04 and perhaps NAACL-04. Dmitry Genzel, a student of Charniak's at Brown, has agreed to provide technical support; I envision this as Dmitry helping set up the system at the new site and work on fixes or minor revisions, but not major revisions like Dan did (unless of course Dmitry wants to put more effort into it, but that is not the expectation). I have not worked with Dmitry before so I contacted Eugene who said "as far as I can remember, if Dmitry says he will do something, then he will do it. If it were me I would take him up on his offer."
Below I've summarized further information, including answers to questions that were raised by the Exec and answers to other questions that I posed to the owner of the START system. I am not pushing for the use of this system. And I cannot predict how it will work out, except that Dan and Erhard were happy with it. If the Exec and ACL-04 conference and PC chairs want to go this direction, then we needto identify the host site and then contact the START owner toget the license. If Dmitry Genzel is to help with tech support, then he will need an account at the host site so that he canaccess the system. (Dan also said that his student was now an expert at the software, so perhaps Dan's student and Dmitry might work together on this?)
DAN'S OPINION
-------------
Dan's comment about the START system is:"Yes, I think it's pretty good, and I believe Erhard likes it too. All the area chairs that came to the committee meeting were pretty happy with it."
ANSWERS TO EXEC QUESTIONS
-------------------------
The following are Dan's answers to questions posed by the Exec:
1. How much customization did you have to do? How many person hours would you estimate were involved.
Some of the customization is necessary and is actually part of
setting up the conference. This includes decisions such as:
- having two level of reviewers (area chairs and committee members)
- setting up blind reviews (and deciding who can see what)
- setting up different permissions such as - can reviewers see other reviews, for which papers, and when.
- setting up review forms
- a few more.
In addition, we made the pages looks a bit different than the original given to us, solved a few bugs the system had, etc. We also developed some tools to collect statistics on the review process and results. Between me and my assistant we easily spent 50 hours on it. (This does not include "using" the system to do the program chair work.)
2. How much effort/hours would you estimate would be involved in setting it up and making needed changes for subsequent conferences?
A new program chair can probably set it up and get acquainted with the system within a day or two.
3. Was the customer support good?
We did not use it. Once we installed the system we did all on our own.
4. Did you download it and host it at your own site, or did you host it at softconf.com (ie., the vendor). I'm assuming that you hosted it at your institution, since you customized it.
Yes, we hosted it. This, in fact, was one of the criteria I used to choose the system. I did not not a system that is hosted somewhere else. First, there are issues with having the database somewhere else. And, I preferred to be responsible on fixing problems than counting on someone doing it remotely. (The system is simply a collection of perl scripts) This turned out to be important - we found a permission related bug in the system that was discovered only after the area chairs received their assignments, and we had to solve it that night...
5. Do you recommend using it? What are the positives and negatives?
Yes, I think it's a pretty good package. We discussed it briefly in the committee meeting and all the area chairs were happy with it. That's the case also with all the reviewers I talked to.
It's going to take more time to list all arguments but briefly:
- I think the systems simplifies the work for the program chairs in terms of submission distribution of papers, simplify assignments and allows easy access to all the information.
- Likewise - it simplifies the work of area chairs - both in assignment and in following up on the status of the reviewing. [Which, along with some nagging, contributed to the fact that we got 1050/1080 of the reviews on time!]
- It allows for a better review process in that it can be set up to support reviewers seeing other reviews on the same paper, once they submitted theirs.
PRICING
-------
I contacted the owner of the START system to get pricing information. If we host it ourselves, meaning at the institution of one ofthe PC chairs for the particular conference, then the cost is $500 for the first event, $400 for the second event, $300 for the third event, etc. until one reaches the minimum per event charge of $100. If the system is hosted at softconf.com, then the starting price for the first event is $600 instead of $500 and it would take 6 events to get to the minimum per-event fee of $100. We can try START for one conference, and later decide to extend our license to cover multiple events. In such a case, he'll apply the discounted fees retroactively.
USING DAN'S MODIFIED SYSTEM
----------------------------
In discussing our needs with the owner of the START system, I said that we would probably want to license the START system as modified by Dan Roth. He did not say that we could not do that, but his argument against it follows (in addition to the fact that it could not be hosted at his site):
"Please note: Since ACL-03 used START V2, the system has been improved quite a bit. There are a lot of new features, which members of the ACL-03 committee did not have the chance to use. Also, a few bugs were found in previous releases, all of which have been fixed. There are no outstanding bugs reported. Hence, I do not think it would be a wise move to use a previous version of START V2 for an upcoming conference. You should use the latest version (the present one is V2.45.2 - about 13 revisions later than that used for ACL-03). If there is some particular feature you need in the START V2 for your confererence(s) - and it is not currently in the product - let me know. I'll probably be able to incorporate this feature myself, as an option, and make it available to all users. Anyway, I think you'll see that the benefits of using the latest version outweigh the liabilities (if there are any)."
"Perhaps you should check out a demo at softconf.com, compare it to Dan's install, and tell me what you believe is lacking in the core functionality. Then I can probably give you "Dan's Modification" as an option; meanwhile you'd be able to use the most up-to-date version of START V2. For what it's worth, I doubt that the modification was very major. It's not very easy to change any of START's core functionality, unless one REALLY knows what one is doing. Even for an expert web programmer, changing the code inside of START would be very hard to do."
TECHNICAL SUPPORT
-----------------
"All START licenses include service, wherever the program is hosted. You can count on my help while you are using the software: to resolve technical problems, or for advice on setting up the program to best fit your needs, or for any issue concerning the software (or using it)."
Kathy McCoy
FINANCES:
This report refers to 3 "charts" on the web for the financial report. See also annexes to the reports.
The charts:
net-worth-12-31-02.pdf
net-worth-12-31-02.ps
This contains a line graph of ACL's networth over time (from about 5 years ago). You can see we hit a low point in the first quarter of 1999 of $338,255.52 from which we had a jagged by fairly steady rise through the last quarter of 2001 reaching a high of $730,787. Over the last year we have had a fall back down to about $525,231.
What I cannot explain is how we possibly reached our high point, given that I think the problem was really our conferences in 1999 (which basically broke even) and in 2000 (which had a loss of about $30,000). I can only speculate that we paid most of the monies for both of these conferences IN ADVANCE of the conference. This was the opposite of what we did for NAACL2001 and ACL2002. The other thing that may be in effect is the 5-year memberships. That likely infused money into the accounts and may have given a false impression of our income from memberships at that time.
NOTE: I did not do an update on the European accounts. I will have that for the next meeting. But, these should have gone higher over the past year.
Also, I have not included NAACL's account here -- it contains about $10,000 at this point.
To see where our money is coming and going see:
income-vs-expense-by-cat.pdf
income-vs-expense-by-cat.ps
This contains our income versus expenses by category over the past 2 years. You can see that our biggest income and biggest expense remains our conferences. Membership is our next income producer, with the journal being the next largest expense. We also have a lot of office expenses (which don't have any good corresponding income categories).
As I have mentioned in the past, I have tried to categorize salaries so that they are not all included in ACL Office (e.g., it is important the Priscilla's time gets categorized to the individual conferences especially in light of the shadow accounts).
We have started to implement the shadow accounts for the chapters and for the sigs. Unfortunately, the accounting from ACL2002 is still being completed, and that affects the shadow accounting for NAACL. The European shadow will be reported on by Mike Rosner.
ON-LINE REGISTRATION
I hired a company named AgoraNet and worked with them to design and implement on-line registration software. We have used it for two conferences and it seems to be working beautifully. Currently the company has updated the pages for new conferences, and it writes all registration information to a database at Delaware. The interface seems good, and the reports that it produces for the office are great. I will also have them do the registration for ACL-04 because it will be the first time that we accept Euro credit cards (something new for the interface to handle). Once the design settles, I hope to hire a student to do the updating for new conferences.
ACL BOOKKEEPER
We hired a bookkeeper in March. Her first task was to go through the accounting for ACL-2002, and she is working out very well. She is very thorough and has uncovered some questions that we need to get answers to before we can report on the finances for that conference!
The 2003 Nominating Committee of the Association for Computational
Linguistics, consisting of Wolfgang Wahlster
(Chair, 2001-03), Ed Hovy (2002-04), and John
Nerbonne (2003-05) is delighted to present the following slate of candidates
for consideration by the membership of ACL:
VP-elect
:
Key-Sun Choi (KAIST, Korea)
-- kschoi@cs.kaist.ac.kr
Jun-Ichi Tsujii (Japan) -- tsujii@is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp
Member at
large of the ACL Executive Committee:
Tilman Becker (Germany)
-- Tilman.Becker@dfki.de
Walter Daelemans (Belgium) -- walter.daelemans@uia.ua.ac.
Remarks
from the Nominating Committee on this Slate of Candidates:
In light of ACL's continuing
outreach to Asia, the nominating committee has nominated two outstanding
Asian researchers for the position of Vice President Elect.
Two Europeans have been nominated for the open slot on the committee to balance representation from the various continents.
All of the nominees have a long history of distinguished technical
contribution and reliable professional service to ACL.
Remarks
on the Search Process:
The Nominating Committee started its search on 8 February 2003
and finished its work on 19 February by forwarding the above slate of candidates,
who have all agreed to run, to Sandra Carberry.
===============================================================
Claire Gardent, Chair
John Carroll, Secretary
1. EACL'03 Conference (Budapest, 12-17 April 2003)
EACL'O3 gathered 350 participants thus being the biggest EACL since the inception of the conference. The conference had a strong European flavour with 78% participants from Europe, 12% from America, 7% from Australasia and 3% from Africa; and a truly international dimension with 40 countries being represented (29 being European).
As is now usual in ACL related conferences, the event consisted of a main conference, a student research workshop, demos, (12) workshops and (4) tutorials. For the first time however, the EACL conference included a research notes session with the aim of opening up the conference to a wider audience. Thus whilst for the main conference, the acceptance rate was 26.5%, research notes had an acceptance rate of 60%. Demos were accepted to the rate of 80% whilst the student research workshop adopted a selective 33% acceptance rate.
2. New EACL Student Board
The current EACL Student Board -- Malte Gabsdil, Jon Herring, and Julia Hockenmaier -- have done a great job setting up and managing the EACL web site, and organising the EACL'03 student workshop. Their term of office finishes in July.
The new Student Board that will serve from July, for 2 years, is:
Leonoor van der Beek, University of Groningen
Irina Chugur, UNED, Madrid
Sebastian Pado, University of Saarbruecken
The old board is in the process of handing over to the new one.
3. Newsletter
Gertjan van Noord (EACL Chair-elect) has taken over from Claire Gardent as editor of the EACL newsletter. The fourth issue will be sent out to members later this year.
4. EACL Foundation
John Nerbonne is pushing forward with plans for a foundation associated with the ACL European Chapter. The motivation is to create a "European legal person" which would allow EACL to apply for EU funding. The foundation will be registered at the Chamber of Commerce in Utrecht (The Netherlands), and have an official postal address at the University of Groningen. The board of the foundation will consist of the three primary officers of the EACL, ex officio, the chair, the secretary and the treasurer.
The ACL executive committee has approved this, on condition that the foundation submit an annual report (which should simply become part of the EACL chair's annual report), and a clean financial relationship Ð a separate bank account.
John Nerbonne has an estimate from Lubbers and Dijk, of 800 euros for their work and the cost of registering the foundation. There is an annual registration fee of around 30 euros.
5. Sponsorships
As usual, EACL will sponsor an ESSLLI'03 foundational course, with a contribution of 750 euro towards travel costs for the presenter. In return for sponsorship, members of EACL will be eligible for a reduced registration fee.
EACL will sponsor the computational lexicography training workshop LEXICOM, to be held at the University of Brighton, 13-19 July 2003. The contribution will be 750 euro, to be administered by LEXICOM to support the participation of a student from Eastern Europe.
EACL will also provide 750 euro sponsorship to the EUROLAN 2003 Summer School 'The Semantic Web and Language Technology: its Potential and Practicalities' in Bucharest, 28 July - 8 August 2003. The support is intended for student grants for disadvantaged participants from Eastern Europe.
June 2003
Diane Litman, Chair
http://www.naacl.org
1. Elections
The NAACL election in the fall of 2002 (held electronically) had 4 candidates for 2 open Chapter Board positions (2 year terms). Graeme Hirst was re-elected, and Dekang Lin replaced Dan Jurafsky (who did not run for re-election).
The 2003 election (for Chair, Secretary, Treasurer, and 2 Board positions) will be happening this fall; the nominating committee is already setting the process in motion. Both the Chair and Secretary are ineligible for re-election to those positions due to term
limits. The Chair will remain on the board for 2 more years as Past Chair.
2. Shadow Account Status
2001 balance 33,104.27
2002 JHU workshop - 9,519.96
NAACL Board meetings, Web fees, etc. - 1,723.05
----------
BALANCE 21,861.26
TO BE RECONCILED:
+ 2002 ACL Conference (surplus expected, but apparently much smaller than ACL initially estimated)
- 2003 JHU workshop (approximately 10,000)
+/- 2003 HLT-NAACL Conference (+ expected)
3. HLT-NAACL 2003
Recall that for 2003, the NAACL Chapter Board decided to merge the NAACL conference series with the HLT (Human Language Technology) conference series. The conference was a fusion of the (NA)ACL and HLT styles (e.g., plenary demos, highly referred long papers, late-breaking short papers/posters, student workshop and tutorials, etc.), and also spanned several previously relatively independent subareas of human language technology. As a result, the conference was designed to especially encourage reports of work on synergistic combinations of language technologies, as was the selection of conference organizers:
General chair:
Eduard Hovy, USC Information Sciences Institute
Program co-chairs:
Marti Hearst, U of California Berkeley
Mari Ostendorf, U of Washington, Seattle
Local arrangements chair:
Dekang Lin, U of Alberta
Workshop and tutorial co-chairs:
IR: James Allan, U of Massachusetts at Amherst
NLP: Jason Eisner, Johns Hopkins University
Speech: Wayne Ward, U of Colorado
Demo co-chairs:
Bob Frederking, CMU
Bob Younger, SPAWAR
Publications co-chairs:
Dragomir Radev, U of Michigan
Steven Abney, U of Michigan
Student Workshop co-chairs:
Faculty Advisor: Marc Light, U of Iowa
IR: Victor Lavrenko, UMass Amherst
Speech: Costas Boulis, U of Washington
NLP: Eric Breck, Cornell U
In addition, the conference gave special consideration to papers that addressed the special topic of new approaches to and uses of unsupervised and lightly supervised learning techniques.
The conference was just held, and by all accounts was very successful. Over 400 people attended the meeting (despite the outbreak of SARS, and both EACL and ACL within a relatively short time span). We were happy with the mix of workshops and tutorials, and moderately happy with the mix of long paper area coverage. 162 full and 80 short papers were submitted, of which 37 and 41 were accepted. There were 9 workshops, 9 tutorials (2 of which unfortunately had to be canceled due to lack of registration), 17 demos (3 of which were presented in a plenary session), and a student workshop.
The conference website
contains full details regarding the conference.
4. HLT-NAACL 2004
Based on the success of this year's HLT-NAACL meeting, we are continuing the merged meeting in 2004. The meeting will be held in Boston (probably in early May). We extremely fortunate to have assembled the following conference team:
General chair:
Julia Hirschberg, Columbia University
Program co-chairs:
Susan Dumais, Microsoft
Daniel Marcu, USC Information Sciences Institute
Salim Roukos, IBM
Local arrangements chair:
Christy Doran, Mitre
5. ACL 2005
Looking ahead to 2005, ACL will again be in North America. Since NAACL is a co-host with ACL, we cannot have a separate merged meeting with HLT that year. In order to keep the momentum of the merged conference series going, both NAACL and HLT would be very interested in having a co-located HLT event during ACL.
6. Support for Summer Schools
We are in the second year of a three year cooperation with Johns Hopkins's CSLP Summer School on Human Language Technology. This year we have funded 10 undergraduate and graduate students to attend the 10 day course that takes place before the workshop.
Since ACL asked us to take responsibility for any future arrangements with the LSA Linguistics Institute, we also handled the arrangements for the 2003 Institute (although ACL still paid the bill this one last time). A member of NAACL and a member of the LSA worked together on the courses and instructors to be funded. Money was also set aside to provide financial assistance to worthy NAACL student members, but apparently none applied. LSA has promised to be more diligent about promoting the Institute to our membership in the future.
After ACL referred NASSLLI to NAACL, NASSLLI has as yet not pursued our offers of cooperation for their 2003 (or future) summer institutes.
7. Outreach to Latin America
Previously, the NAACL executive committee asked Ted Pedersen to act as a liaison to members of the CL/NLP research community in Latin America. Ted has set up a Registry for Latin American Researchers website: http://www.d.umn.edu/~rass0028/classtest/registry.cgi
8. Executive Committee Meetings
The NAACL Board met for its first ever winter meeting on February 14, via telephone (following the ACL model). The NAACL Board met again in person during our 2003 Conference. The minutes of both meetings will be made available on the web.
Junichi Tsujii
(1) AFNLP planned to hold its first conference at the Hainan Island, China in December, 2003. However, it has taken more time than we expected for Chinese colleagues to get approval from their authority of joining AFNLP. There has also been uncertainty due to SARS outbreaks in Asia, and quite a few international conferences initially planned in China have been postponed or cancelled. Due to these two factors, preparation of the first conference has not made much progress, and we now think that we have to either cancel or postpone it.
(2) However, Prof.B.Tsuo in Hong Kong and colleagues in Taiwan have made significant progress in resolving the difficulty that prevented our Chinese colleagues from joining AFNLP, and we will have a meeting during ACL03 at Sapporo to approve the revised constitution of AFNLP. Chinese colleagues tell us that the constitution we porpose is fine with them, and with approval by them, I hope we will be able to announce their membership at the time of ACL.
(3) We will have a meeting of conference coordination committee (CCC) of AFNLP during ACL03 to decide the venue and the date of our first conference. Currently, two options are being discussed. One option is to postpone the first conference at the Hainan Island to late February or March, 2004. Another option is to cancel it and re-arrange the conference in November or December, 2004. In the second option, we have to choose the venue.
(4) In either option, we would like to have close coordination with other ACL-related conferences and we appreciate all supports we will have from ACL.
===============================================================
Junichi Tsujii (Department of Computer Science, University of Tokyo, Japan)
I have c