Tutorial Chair Report for 2002
Hwee Tou Ng

I prepared the call for tutorial proposals and the first call was
publicly broadcast on November 7, 2001. The content of the call for
proposals follows closely that of the previous years. The remuneration
rate for each tutorial presenter is the same as last year: US$500 per
session plus $25 per registrant in the range 21-50 plus $15 per
registrant in excess of 50. The various deadlines for submission and
evaluation also mirror closely those of the previous year.

In mid December 2001, I enlisted the help of two tutorial reviewers,
Dr. Pamela Jordan of the University of Pittsburgh, USA and Dr. Jakub
Zavrel of Textkernal, the Netherlands.

By the submission deadline on January 11, 2002, I have received an
enthusiastic response of 11 proposals. Many of them are of high
quality, and this makes the selection process somewhat challenging
since we only have slots for 4 half-day tutorials to be held in one
day (i.e., acceptance rate of only 36%). The two reviewers and I
deliberated on the selection individually, and each came up with an
independent assessment and ranking of the proposals. We discussed
among ourselves and resolved our differences to arrive at 4 selected
tutorials. We then sought the views of the ACL-02 committee, the ACL
executive committee, and the NAACL executive committee. After some
discussions via email, the final accepted tutorials for ACL-02 are (in
alphabetical order of the speakers' last name):

(1) Sadaoki Furui, Toward Spontaneous Speech Recognition and
Understanding

(2) David D. Lewis, Machine Learning for Text Classification
Applications

(3) Jean-Michel Renders, Kernel Methods and Support Vector Machines -
Application to NLP Problems

(4) Michael Strube, NLP-Approaches to Reference Resolution

The final choices were made taking into account the appropriateness
and timeliness of the topics, the speakers' reputation and knowledge
of the topics, with a view to ensuring a balanced representation.
Tutorial (1) and (2) will be held in the morning, with the other two
held in the afternoon. We took care to avoid scheduling (2) and (3) at
the same time, since they may tend to attract the same
corpus-based/statistical NLP audience.

I sent out the acceptance and rejection notices on January 25,
2002. By the end of March, tutorial descriptions were put up on the
conference web site. The tutorial notes from all 4 speakers were also
received largely on time, by mid May 2002, and they take up a total of
522 pages! This gives an idea of the amount of materials that will be
covered in the tutorials.

The tutorial registration fee is set at US$115 and US$145 per tutorial
session for early and late registration respectively. Each tutorial
attendee will receive one hardcopy of the tutorial notes, which
include the tutorial slides and a bibliography. The numbers of
attendees who pre-registered are: Furui 10, Lewis 47, Renders 35, and
Strube 35. The speech tutorial seems to attract fewer attendees, but
the other numbers are encouraging, and these numbers are comparable to
the attendance figures of the last ACL-01. Overall, I look forward to
a successful tutorial program on Sunday, July 7, 2002.