ACL01 Workshop Chair
Rebecca Bruce

There was a strong response to the call for workshop proposals this
year; nineteen high-quality workshop proposals were received.  Of the
nineteen, one proposal, SENSEVAL, had been prearranged.  Seven
proposals were submitted by European organizers, six by organizers
located within North America, and six were a collaboration of
organizers located in both Europe and North America.

Due in part to resource limitations, selection of a sub-set of the
workshop proposals was necessary.  For example, the projected
attendance for the combined 19 workshops exceeded the projected
attendance of the ACL conference.  In the future, it would be helpful
to have guidelines regarding the maximum number of workshops to be
sponsored by an ACL conference.

Selection decisions were made by myself with much appreciated advice
from Bonnie Webber.  During the selection process three pairs of
workshops were merged, one organizer was asked to resubmit their
proposal as a tutorial, and four organizers were given a brief review
and asked to resubmit their proposals next year.  In conclusion, we
ended up with five two-day workshops and six one-day workshops.  None
of these workshops received financial support from the ACL, although
conference and workshop fees were waived for one workshop organizer.
Two of the workshops did receive financial support from external
sponsors.

The preparation of the workshop web page
(http://www.cs.unca.edu/~bruce/acl01/workshop.html) went smoothly.
All calls for papers were posted by Feb 19, 2001 and programs were
added as they became available.  The workshop information for the
conference brochure was send to Priscilla on April 20, 2001.  All
questions regarding local arrangements have been handled very well by
the local arrangements chair, Patrick Saint-Dizier.

The most difficult aspect of the workshop organization process was the
establishment of guidelines for publication of the workshop
proceedings.  In the end, these guidelines were provided by David
Yarowsky in the form of a well organized set of instructions, programs
and sample documents.  I strongly recommend that this package become
part of the documentation regarding ACL conferences.  Perhaps it could
be incorporated in the, "Conference Organization Handbook" compiled by
Ed Hovy, which already contains a great deal of useful information.