Report from NAACL
Diane Litman, Chair

The NAACL Executive Committee met on June 2, 2001, at the NAACL
conference in Pittsburgh, PA. The agenda included:

* Reports from NAACL Officers
* NAACL-01 Report
* ACL-02/NAACL-02 Report
* NAACL-03/HLT Discussion
* Discussion of Past and Upcoming Elections
* Constitutional Issues
* Discussion of Policies
* Web/Email Issues
* Formulation of Exec Job Descriptions
* Discussion of New Initiatives

The minutes of this meeting will soon be available on the NAACL
webpage (http://www.naacl.org).

Last year we ran our first elections. The nominating committee
suggested 9 candidates, 5 of whom agreed to be nominated.  An
additional nomination came from the NAACL membership.  The vote was
conducted electronically, using new software developed at ISI.  The
election exposed some problems with the current constitution, so the
membership was also asked to vote on two amendments.  890 emails were
sent (although about 100+ messages bounced), resulting in 285 votes
being cast.  The new executive board members are Graeme Hirst and Dan
Jurasky; the changes to the constitution were approved with wide
majorities.  We also used this opportunity to ask our members to fill
in a survey, but the results were very heterogeneous.  We have found a
student volunteer to reduce the email problems experienced last
summer.

The NAACL-01 conference (our first solo conference) was extremely
successful.  We attracted approximately 500 people, have heard nothing
but very positive feedback, and expect a financial surplus. The
program included 31 papers (acceptance rate of 28%, mostly from North
America), 3 invited speakers, a student research workshop, 4 other
workshops, co-location with EMNLP, 4 tutorials, 27 demonstrations, and
a full-day exhibit program.  Reports from all of the conference chairs
will be archived, and are available upon request.  The conference
website is still active, and can be found at
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ref/naacl2001.html.

The planning of the NAACL-03 conference has begun.  We are in
continuing discussions with representatives of various funding
agencies, regarding the merger of the NAACL and HLT conferences.  Ed
Hovy is in the process of negotiating a final "Memorandum of
Understanding."

We are currently working on other goals of our organization, e.g.
supporting new educational initiatives.