EACL REPORT Donia Scott (Chair), John Carroll (Secretary) 1. Constitution A new EACL constitution has been approved by the Board and ratified by the membership. It regularises a number of financial and organisational issues relating to the management of the Chapter, and adds a new post, the "Chair-elect", to give a newly elected Chair some experience of the running of the Chapter before he/she actually takes over. The result of the membership ballot was 59 votes in favour and 1 against. The new constitution now awaits final approval by the ACL Executive Committee. 2. Conference Schedule According to a schedule decided last year, there will be an international ACL conference in Europe every 3 years, hosted jointly with EACL. Given this, EACL conferences will no longer be held biennially, but triennially, coincident with the year that the International ACL is in Asia. This means that there will be a computational linguistics conference in Europe held under the auspices of ACL two out of every three years. 3. EACL'03 The next meeting of the EACL will be in 2003. We issued a Call for Bids on 9 Mar 2001 (repeated on 29 Mar), the deadline for which was June 15. We have received three very interesting bids: from Budapest, Heidelberg and Trento. We hope to be able to report on the chosen site in Toulouse. 4. Sponsorships EACL continues to sponsor an introductory or foundational course in computational linguistics at the ESSLLI Summer School. At ESSLLI'2001, which this year will be in Helsinki, we are sponsoring "An Introduction to Computational Semantics" by Patrick Blackburn and Johan Bos. Members of EACL will be eligible for discounted registration at ESSLLI. 5. Newsletter We have started a biannual newsletter to all EACL members, reporting on the activities of the Chapter. The first issue, edited by Claire Gardent, went out on 22 June 2001. 6. Student Board EACL has recently formed a Student Board whose role is to generally assist the senior Board in carrying out EACL-related tasks. In a first phase, the Student Board will concentrate on two main tasks: the extension and maintenance of the EACL web site, and the organisation of the EACL conference Student Session. The current board is composed of: Malte Gabsdil (University of Saarbruecken), Jon Herring (University of Brighton), and Julia Hockenmaier (University of Edinburgh). Addendum: Report from EACL secretary (John Carroll) This report covers organisational and internal matters that are not covered in the main EACL report. 1. Board Members and Responsibilities As of 1 January 2001 the membership of the EACL Board (with areas of responsibility noted) is as follows: Chair: Donia Scott Secretary: John Carroll Treasurer: Mike Rosner Conference (ACL'01 Toulouse): Philippe Blache Education and training: ESSLLI, ELSNET, etc: Mike Rosner Euromasters in Language and Speech: Hans Uszkoreit Industrial liaison: Piek Vossen & Hans Uszkoreit Outreach: East-west (Central / Eastern Europe): Tomaz Erjavec North-south (North Africa / Middle East): Philippe Blache Publicity: News: Claire Gardent Web site: Mike Rosner 2. Domain Name EACL has registered a domain name, eacl.org, pre-paid for 10 years. The following emails @eacl.org are redirected to the relevant board member(s): board chair chairperson comments newsletter secretary treasurer webmaster 3. New EACL Conference Schedule With the agreed 3-year rotation cycle of ACL conferences between the three "international zones" (Europe, North America, Asia), the Board has decided to change the schedule of EACL conferences from a biennial to a triennial cycle, with the next conference being in 2003. So the schedule of EACL and ACL conferences in Europe for the next 10 years is: 2001 ACL/EACL, Toulouse 2003 10th Meeting of the EACL (call for bids to host out now) 2004 ACL/EACL, Europe 2006 11th Meeting of the EACL 2007 ACL/EACL, Europe 2009 12th Meeting of the EACL 2010 ACL/EACL, Europe 4. Constitution Vote The new EACL constitution regularises a number of financial and organisational issues relating to the management of the Chapter, and adds a new post, the "Chair-elect", to give a newly elected Chair some experience of the running of the Chapter before he/she actually takes over. In summary, changes from the old constitution are: Sections added: - Registered Office - Financial Management - Dissolution Other main changes: - the name "ACL / EUROPE" is replaced with "EACL" - the former "Advisory Committee" is now called the "Board" - the Chair-elect becomes an ex-officio member of the Board - apart from the officers and the Chair-elect, the Board contains 4 (rather than 3) Chapter members - no Board member (apart from the Treasurer) may serve more than 2 terms in any single office, and no longer than 6 consecutive years on the Board - members of the Nominating Committee are elected from the outgoing Board - membership of the Chapter is automatic for ACL members in the Middle East and Africa The new constitution had to be ratified by the membership of the European Chapter, so a ballot was held, conducted by email, between 19 April and 19 June 2001. Members could register a "Yes" vote, by sending an email to new-constitution-yes@eacl.org, or a "No" vote by an email to new-constitution-no@eacl.org. There were no problems reported with the ballot. The final result was 59 votes in favour, 1 against, out of a total of some 480 Chapter members at the time of the ballot. The new constitution now awaits final approval by the ACL Executive Committee. 5. Sponsorships In 2000, EACL sponsored the ESSLLI course `An Introduction to Grammar Engineering using HPSG' given by Ann Copestake and Rob Malouf. The amount was 2,006 euros, covering travel and accommodation costs for one of the two lecturers. In return for sponsorship, members of EACL got a reduced registration fee at ESSLLI. EACL was also a sponsor of the NATO Advanced Study Institute on Language Engineering for Lesser-Studied Languages, July 2000, held at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. Amount: 1,945 euros.