ACL 2001 Publication Chair Report Roberto Zamparelli ACL published the proceedings of its annual conference for the second time this year, following a tradition inaugurated by David Yarowski, Publication Chair for ACL 2000. This CD-ROM produced contained complete PDF and postscript versions for: - the complete set of papers of the main conference; - the papers from 10 of the 11 thematic workshops (one whorshop choose not to have proceedings); - the papers of the Student Research Workshop; - tutorial abstracts; In addition, the CD-ROM contained: - venue and sponsor information and an archive of the conference web pages (including author instructions for submission and publication); - a BibTeX bibliographic entry for each paper; - an author index for each workshop and a combined author index for all the articles in the CD-ROM. The indexes were generated automatically by a set of software tools, developed last year by David Yarowkski, and updated this year to include the double PS/PDF option and the BIB entry. The layout of the CD-ROM closely follows the one developed last year by David Yarowsky, Silviu Cucerzan and Michaela Fok, with a few changes in the color schema and new pictures. The availability of these tools and of a layout to follow greatly simplified the job of assembling the hardcopy volumes and the CD-ROM. The Program-Chair Giorgio Satta and I tried to give papers a more uniform look than in previous years by enforcing stricter formatting rules for the main conference and the workshops. I should add that I had no experience with large-scale electronic publishing, just a basic knowledge of HTML, LaTeX, Postscript, and PDF. The job was done locally on a linux/win98 PC, with the help of an assistent funded by my department at the University of Bergamo. We encountered no particular technical problems. I would like to acknowledge David Yarowsky's generous assistance on many aspects of the project. In particular, apart from updating and documenting the software tools, he created a site for automatic paper submission on the web, which proved quite useful. Special thanks also to Giorgio Satta and Norbert Reithinger for helpful, patient and constant support, my local assistant Nicola Benaglia and to the organizers of the conference I interacted with: Bonnie Webber, Patrick Saint-Dizier, Rebecca Bruce, Eleni Miltsakaki, Christof Monz and Antonio Ribeiro and Steven Krauwer. Notes for future Publication Chairs ------------------------------------ The job of the Publication Chairs for ACL 2001 consisted in preparing the CD-Rom described above and editing the hardcopy of the ``Companion Volume'', which contains the papers of the Student Research Workshop, and the Tutorial Abstracts (Demonstration Notes were not present this year). WORKLOAD -------- It is difficult to quantify the amount of work this required. My assistant Nicola Benaglia was hired for 100 hours, but used up maybe 80% of that amount. To give an idea, the deadlines were as follows: - April 20: Formatting instructions published on the web. - May 12: Deadline to receive the camera-ready hardcopies (no page numbers) and their electronic versions from authors of the main conference. Workshops had various deadlines, all later than May 12. - May 25: Deadline to have the camera-ready hardcopies of all volumes in France (with pages numbered) and for submitting the electronic version via the web interface (for the main conference) or via FTP (for the workshops) - June 13: Deadline to send the CD-Rom to France. Eventually we opted for putting a .zip archive file with all the content of the CD-Rom and have the local conference organizer download it (about 260MB expanded). By far the most labour-intensive part of the job was (1) checking that the electronic papers followed the formatting specs and (2) contacting the authors and/or the workshop organizers to ask them to (re)submit their work. We decided to accept papers well after the deadline, particularly when we had asked authors to resubmit, even though this meant a peak of work right before the deadlines. FORMATTING ISSUES ----------------- To try to give a common look to all the papers in the main conference and workshops we gave more precise formatting specs that in previous ACL editions, partly adapted from the X IJCAI conference camera-ready guidelines. The camera ready-style was similar to the submission format (both required two columns and the dimensions were the same). However, the camera-ready specs asked to use "Times" fonts instead of the LaTeX default Computer Modern. We provided a sample ".tex" LaTeX file, a LaTeX style ".sty" file, a sample Winword ".doc" file and a Winword style ".dot" file. One problem we encountered was that many authors used (or thought they were using) the sample files and didn't check the correctness of their output. Due to differences in the printer driver they used and/or the process they used to produce PDF, these papers were often out of specs both in the printed and in the electronic version. It is therefore crucial to convince the authors that the have to check what they produce WITH A RULER. While we believe that a shift in the position of the paper on the page is not a real problem (we have on occasions corrected it on the postscript version with the UNIX command: pstops '0@1(Xcm,Ycm)' original-file.ps moved-file.ps which moves a file X cm. right and Y cm. up), the issue of different font sizes, baseline stretch and textbox size are significant. Since the policy for the main conference is to charge $250 per extra page, authors who fits more text on a page may save a considerable amount. Under time pressure, we had sometimes difficult decisions to take. In general our policy was assume good faith in authors and to privilege completeness of content over perfection of form. We are aware that this led to some injustices. One possibility for future publication editions to consider is to require an extra fee for authors who go over limit by number of pages OR total number of words OR total number of lines. A related issue concerns the relation between the hardcopy and the electronic version. We required them to be identical, but in the case of the workshops this turned out ot be very difficult. The deadlines were tight for them, and right after mailing their hardcopies many authors submitted electronic versions which were totally or partially unreadable, or completely out of specs. We asked them to reformat and resubmit. At the end of the process, even if the content was unchanged (and we could hardly be sure, since the Publication Chair doesn't have access to the hardcopy version during the production of the electronic one) the format and even the number of pages was different. Once again, we thought that having a readable paper was the main criterion. However, this could lead to potential problems for people who cite by page number. Authors were asked to submit PDF and optionally postscript versions of their papers. In some cases one of the two versions was missing, unreadable or huge, and we had to reconstruct it from the other, using the UNIX tools pdftops or pstopdf or other systems. In a few exceptional cases we had to derive the .ps from a Winword document. Foreign fonts or symbols were rarely a problem. We had however underestimated the variability in margin text/sizes across various versions of Word and various printer drivers. OTHER ISSUES ------------ One issue that remains unresolved is whether or to what extent publication of the material on CD-Rom damages sales of the printed version. A second issue concerns the dissemination of the information of the procedings via the use of the Research Citation Index (formerly Citeseer), on the web. Since this is something which can be done after the ruh of the conference I plan to bring up the issue in due time with the other chairs.