Mark Johnson ACL Nominations committee 2006 report: The 2006 nominations committee consists of Martha Palmer, Johanna Moore and Mark Johnson. This year there are two positions to be filled in the upcoming ACL elections, and the following people have agreed to run: ACL VP elect: Steven Bird, Benjamin Tsou ACL exec: Nicoletta Calzolari, Tilman Becker Report on the state of the preparations of ACL07 Prepared by: Eva Hajicova and Anna Kotesovcova General Conference Chair: John Carroll Local Organizer: Eva Hajicova Administrator/Secretary of Local Arrangement Commitee:: Anna Kotesovcova 1. Dates: June 24-29, 2007 Tutorials: June 24, 2007 Main conference: June 25-27, 2007 Workshops: June 28-29, 2007 2. Location: TOP Hotel Praha Address: Blazimska 1781/4, 149 00 Prague 4, Czech Republic web page: www.tophotel.cz 3. Rooms reservation: Tutorials: 3 rooms (capacity 100, 65, 55) Main Conference: 3 rooms (capacity 800, 300, 200) Workshops: 6 rooms (capacity 100, 100, 80, 55, 50, 40) a large and comfortable space for posters (40-50 posters and additional devices) Note: These reservations are preliminary because we do not yet know the requirements of the Programme Co-Chairs, the Tutorial and Workshop Chairs, who will have to decide on the number of tutorials and workshops ACL-Exec dinner will be held in the Historical Building of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University on Monday, June 25. 4. Accommodation: (a) 450 rooms in the TOP Hotel (incl. 250 rooms with air- conditioning, but AC is not necessary in Prague at that time); price 3080 CZK/night for a single executive room, 2200 CZK/single/standard room. (very cheap for Prague and for the comfort) (b) 50-100. rooms in a student hostel (20 minute walking distance from the conference location, or 8 min by bus - 3 stops) price: 600 CZK/night/person (quality: very good, newly renovated. bathroom) (c) we will arrange for the possibility for the participants to reserve a room in some selected Prague hotels (of different categories), with a conference price; however, the price will be higher than that in the TOP hotel 5. Social programme: welcome reception: Sunday, 24 June, in the TOP hotel (Japanese garden, large reception hall), incl. in the fees banquet: Tuesday 26 June, art-nouveau style Municipal House in the historical center of Prague (capacity up to 700 people), price: approx. 80. USD concert: Wednesday,. 27 July, a string quartet, in the historical aula of Charles University in the center of Prague, capacity: 250 people (tickets on sale at the registration, approx. price: 10 USD 6. We will take care of an offer for a ladies programme for the days of the main conference and we will provide for a travel agent to offer post-conference trips in the country. 7. Conference fee: will be fixed by the end of the year, but at present it seems reasonable to count with 300 USD. (incl. CD-Rom with proceedings, book of abstracts, welcome reception,. conference material, a gift from the organizers). Remark: Current exchange rate: 1 USD = 22,16 CZK Eric Fosler-Lussier ACL Archivist report The position of ACL Archivist switched from Richard Sproat to Eric Fosler-Lussier in April 2006. Currently, the general public archive is being reorganized, with documents categorized both by year and type. The new archive will be up and running in the autumn of 2006. After that, the executive committee private archive will be reorganized in a similar fashion. Any comments or suggestions should be directed to thearchivist AT-nospam aclweb DOT org. Sponsorships chairs’ report for COLING/ACL 2006 Dominique Estival / Steven Krauwer Overview For Coling/ACL 2006, we started to contact potential sponsors mid-2005. As a result, we collected AU$79,000 in combined sponsorships, exhibits and paid advertising, which is the amount we had been aiming for. The list of sponsors is as follows: - HCSNet (Platinum). - Macquarie University (Gold) - CSIRO (Gold) - Microsoft Research (Gold, incl. wireless) - Appen (Silver, Student Volunteers) - Google (Silver, Cocktail reception) - XRCE (Bronze) - AFNLP (Student Support Fund) - ELRA (Student Support Fund) - DSTO (Glass) - ACS (Supporter) - NSF (student support for the Student Research Workshop) In addition, MSR and AFNLP provided funding for two best paper awards and 5 best reviewer awards. Following the recommendations from 2005, the responsibility for sponsoring activities was shared between Dominique Estival (local) and Steven Krauwer (international). While it is a good idea to involve more than one person for this task, the division of labour between “international” and “local” chairs did not work as well as had been hoped for. This was in part because the local organisation had been in place before the international chair was appointed. Although there was quite a lot of interaction and collaboration, there were also a few misunderstandings about decisions which had been made earlier, especially concerning the range of possibilities for sponsorships and how it was conveyed to potential sponsors. Following the 2005 recommendations, this year the student research workshop chair applied for and received NSF funding for the SRW. However, the grant application to the local government agency was not successful. We would still recommend trying to get funding from such sources, but to be prepared for disappointment. General remarks and recommendations Even though we were quite pleased by the generous contributions from a number of local and international organizations and companies, we were somewhat disappointed by our failure to attract many industrial sponsors. Some observations are in place here: - Some (potential) sponsors were disappointed to see that part of their contribution would be redefined as a donation to the Australian tax authorities. It is difficult to give recommendations on how to deal with this issue, as the situation will be different in different countries. - One issue probably specific to Australia was that many of the companies in the US and Europe found Australia too far away from their own markets to see any potential benefit from sponsoring. Similarly, it was very difficult to attract publishers to exhibit at this event. Recommendation: We have no specific recommendations here, other than either not to set our expectations too high in such cases, or to find convincing arguments that distance is not necessarily a problem. - In many cases our best contacts are with the research labs of major companies. It turns out that their available budgets for sponsoring are minimal or absent. In some cases they tried to contact their commercial departments, but with no success, most probably because an audience of researchers is not interesting enough for them. Recommendation: Again we have no other recommendation than to be realistic in our expectations - From discussions with Ken Church (Microsoft) at an early stage of our acquisition activities, it appeared that what we had on offer would not offer potential industrial sponsors the right type or the right amount of visibility. Unfortunately these discussions took place at a stage when it was too late to design a new and more effective sponsoring model. Recommendation: We recommend to have better coordination between the various sponsorship chairs and the conference organisers at an early stage, so a common strategy can be put in place. - One potential sponsor withdrew a few weeks before the conference, after having had their logo on the web site for several months. This was noticed by several people and caused other sponsors to complain about the “free” advertising that had been obained in that way. Recommendation: Only advertise sponsorships when they have actually been received. - We used a number of lists of potential sponsors from earlier conferences and other events. As could be expected many of the companies listed there did no longer exist and even if the company still existed many of the named contacts we had were no longer there. At the same time it should be noted that nearly all successful sponsorship requests were based on personal contacts. Recommendation: We should try to clean up the existing list of potential sponsors, and (this is the hardest bit) to keep it up to date. Has anyone ever tried a Wiki style approach to this, where ACL officials and conference organizers could enter their corrections, findings, tips, etc? In summary, our advice to future sponsorships chairs is: * Appoint all the chairs, and ensure a common understanding of the strategy, earlier. * Start contacting sponsors early the previous year (mid-year was good). * The student workshop chair should continue applying for NSF funding. * Only advertise sponsorships that have actually been received. * Clean up the list of potential sponsors and make it available. --------------------------------------- Report for COLING/ACL 2006 Student Research Workshop Chairs: Marine Carpuat, Kevin Duh Faculty Advisor: Rebecca Hwa 1. Program Committee The co-chairs of the COLING/ACL 2006 Student Research Workshop are Marine Carpuat (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) and Kevin Duh (University of Washington). Rebecca Hwa is the Faculty Advisor. The program committee was formed by the co-chairs in consultation with the Faculty Advisor. The final program committee consists of 73 reviewers, of which 38 were students and 35 were senior reviewers. 2. Paper Submission and Acceptance We received 40 submissions from 20 regions (see Table 1). All papers were assigned 4 reviewers (2 senior and 2 student reviewers). We accepted fifteen papers, of which eight were regular (oral) presentations and seven were posters. Table 1: Submission and acceptance by regions -------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- ---- REGION || #Submissions || #Acceptances -------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- ---- Australia || 1 || 0 Brazil || 1 || 0 Canada || 3 || 2 China || 3 || 1 Czech Republic || 1 || 0 France || 3 || 2 Germany || 5 || 3 Hong Kong || 3 || 1 India || 4 || 1 Iran || 1 || 0 Japan || 1 || 0 Korea || 1 || 0 Netherlands || 1 || 1 Philippines || 1 || 0 Romania || 2 || 0 Spain || 1 || 0 South Africa || 1 || 0 Taiwan || 2 || 0 United Kingdom || 1 || 1 United States || 4 || 3 -------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- ---- TOTAL || 40 || 15 -------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- ---- 3. Presentation Format The Student Research Workshop posters are included together with the main conference poster session on Day 1 of COLING/ACL. The regular (oral) presentations are held as a parallel track on site on Day 3. Each oral presentation consists of 15 minutes of talk, and 10 minutes for general audience questions and panelist feedback. 4. Panelists The co-chairs asked 21 conference attendees to be on the panel for providing feedback to student authors. All papers receive one or two panelists. These panelists were selected for their knowledge in the area and availability during the Workshop. 5. Funding We submitted our request to the program director of Human Language and Communication (HLC) at NSF in December and received notice of the award in February. The grant totaled $22,500. We were able to provide funds to every SRW participant. Because the cost of traveling to Sydney varies depending on the student's location, the level of funding is determined based on an estimated 75% of the cost of travel. We awarded $900 in funds to students from Asia, and $1200 to students from Europe and North America. The remaining $900 was used to cover the registration of the student co-chairs and served as additional funds for SRW participants with special needs. The grant also contributes $3000 towards the administrative cost of the conference (such as facility rental, the production of CDs, etc.). 6. Organization and Planning The Workshop was publicized by sending CFPs to computational linguistics mailing lists and direct emails to professors at various departments. The availability of funding appears to be an important incentive for submissions, and we found it was important to include some funding information on the CFPs. The Workshop webpage was placed prominently on the main conference website. In addition, the COLING/ACL Newsletters helped disseminate information on the Student Research Workshop. We are grateful to the main conference organizers for the support. The entire submission and review process was managed by the START system. This system proved immensely helpful for managing the 40 submissions and 73 reviewers. 7. Suggestions and Considerations a) We believe that the success of the Student Research Workshop depends on the quality of the reviewer and panelist feedbacks to students. We were happy to find 73 reviewers and 21 panelists who are supportive of this educational goal. We recommend that future Workshop organizers continue the tradition of concentrating their efforts on assembling good reviewers and panelists. b) We considered having all presenters do both an oral and a poster presentation, which gives extended exposure for their work--however, this was not implemented due to space/time restrictions. This is a potential idea for future Workshops. c) For many Workshop presenters, this is their first major conference attendance. Therefore, we thought it would beneficial for students if we could arrange their poster/regular sessions early during the conference, such that they can begin networking and get the most out during the duration of the conference. We suggest that future Workshop planners communicate with the main conference organizers in the early stages of planning to ensure that the logistics for this situation works out. d) This year, the submission deadline for the SRW is set to be at the same time as that of the main conference. We received some papers with double-submissions to the main conference and needed to make some difficult case-by-case decisions. We suggest that future Workshops have a clear policy on double-submissions posted on the website from the very beginning. e) Some participants seemed confused about the different student activities and the proper contact person for each. For example, we have received inquiries regarding student volunteering, student travel grants, and the summer school. It would be nice to have a page on the main conference website that summarizes all student activities, with pointers to relevant webpages and contacts. Computational Linguistics Book Review Editor's report Graeme Hirst July 2006 BOOK REVIEWS PUBLISHED In 2005, we published far fewer book reviews than normal in Computational Linguistics: only four reviews (and another four brief notices). The reason for the decline in the number of reviewable books is unclear, but it seems to have been temporary: In 2006 we will publish about 16 reviews, so the average over two years will be about normal. Most reviews are published in a timely manner -- that is, within 12 months of receipt of the book. This allows six months for the reviewer (most take less) and five months for journal production. MATERIAL REVIEWED I am continuing to be fairly strict in deciding if a book is to be reviewed, but try to include all books that are in "core" computational linguistics, as well as a variety of books from adjacent and overlapping disciplines that are likely to be useful in CL. We do not review technical reports, doctoral theses, conference proceedings, or workshop proceedings, except if revised for publication as a book by a recognized publisher. PRODUCTION MATTERS I am indebted to Nadia Talent for long hours of reading out loud with me to check the galleys. --------------------------------------------------- SIGWAC report Adam Kilgarriff ============= 1) July 2005: WAC1 workshop, Birmingham UK. (ca 40 attendees) 2) March 2006: SIGWAC approved by ACL 3) April 2006, EACL: WAC2 workshop, Trento, Italy (ca 30 attendees) Both events were energetic and successful. We are now planning a competition/shared task, CLEANEVAL, where the task is to produce clean text from arbitrary web pages. There are good reasons to believe this is the bottleneck to progress for many strands of NLP. Watch this space. AK, 26.6.06 --------------------------------------------------- Mentoring Service Richard Power The mentoring service for ACL’06 is now finished. Most papers were returned to authors by the deadline (21st February), but a few were late, mostly because demand was much greater than in previous years. However, all arrived in time for the authors to incorporate the suggestions. We received 20 papers for revision (compared with 7 last year). They came from China (8), Japan (5), Spain, Germany, Morocco, Tunisia, Korea, Germany, and a Japanese speaker in Australia (one each). The mentors were Deborah Dahl, Lila Ghemri, Chrys Chrystello, John Nerbonne, and Florence Reeder, all unpaid volunteers. Because of the increased demand most of them had to do four papers, as compared to 1-2 papers last year. This was too much: if we continue the service next year we need to recruit more mentors, since the demand especially from the far east is likely to increase further. As in previous years, the mentors took a lot of trouble over the papers and their suggestions were much appreciated by the authors. I encouraged the mentors not to correct all instances of basic errors like omitting the article in English, just to correct one or two and note the general rule, but the amount of work required was still considerable – we really have to get the number of papers per mentor down to 1-2. --------------------------------------------------- Report from the COLING/ACL 2006 Workshops Chair Suzanne Stevenson The Workshops Program Committee for COLING/ACL 2006 included five people from a range of geographical regions and representing a range of research areas in computational linguistics and natural language processing. The committee consisted of: Suzanne Stevenson (Chair), University of Toronto Ann Copestake, University of Cambridge Pascale Fung, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology Jamie Henderson, University of Edinburgh Ingrid Zukerman, Monash University Proposals for workshops and other co-located events for COLING/ACL were due on December 9, 2005. All workshop proposals were reviewed by at least 3 members of the Workshops Program Committee. The Workshops Chair collated all ratings and read all reviews, and made the final acceptance decisions. Workshop proposers were notified on January 17, 2006, as to whether their proposal was accepted. We received 24 proposals by the December 9 deadline, plus a late proposal from the EMNLP organizers, for a total of 25 proposed workshops. Of these, 4 were what we termed "co-located events", as established, on-going workshops/conferences: EMNLP, SIGdial, INLG, and TAG+; all of these proposals were accepted. The other 21 proposals were either one-time workshops or on-going workshops not quite of the regularity or size of the other established events. Of these 21, 10 were accepted as is, and 7 were rejected. The 4 remaining proposals consisted of two pairs of proposals that highly overlapped in content and potential audience. The Workshops Chair felt that a stronger program could be achieved if each of those pairs were merged, and the organizers agreed to work together to do so. Thus, we had a final count of 16 events: 3 2-day pre-conference co-located events; 1 2-day post-conference co-located event; 12 post-conference workshops (11 1-day workshops and 1 1.5-day workshop). All accepted events were confirmed for the conference. These events represent a very broad range of research topics in our field, and provide a strong program of participation beyond the main conference. Some topics for discussion by the ACL Exec: 1. Even after putting together all the information available from various sources (prior Workshops Chairs, published ACL info, etc.), numerous questions arose throughout the process of workshop review, selection, and organization. I would suggest that the guidelines published by ACL be expanded and clarified, with "institutional memory" (often in Priscilla Rasmussen's head) set down for future Workshops Chairs, and workshop proposers. This would include clarification of financial arrangements for SIG-sponsored workshops. I also expanded the Workshop Proposal Form and Workshop Proposal Review Form, and it would be nice to have a site where these could be posted for the use of future Workshops Chairs. 2. The treatment of on-going, well-established co-located events and "one off" workshops needs to be distinguished. Events such as EMNLP, SIGdial, INLG, or TAG+ may want to start publicizing earlier than the workshops reviewing schedule allows. Moreover, such established events are not likely to be rejected, and indeed are depended on for helping to create a strong overall conference program that attracts broad participation. The ACL Exec needs to decide on a policy for handling such cases, such as a "fast track" reviewing schedule. The tricky aspect of this will be deciding which events qualify for such fast tracking. For example, the four co-located events for this year (mentioned above) are broadly recognized as on-going workshops or even conferences, while other workshop proposals are clearly one-time events. However, others (such as the fairly regular SIGHAN workshop, or several workshops that were in their 2nd or 3rd incarnation) may not neatly fit into one category or the other. Some form of fast tracking is clearly needed, but guidelines are required for the size and regularity of an event to be considered for this. => Please note that this issue has been raised before, but has not => been resolved. It is very important that the ACL Exec make a => decision on this, to avoid problems that arise with the co-located => events. 3. ACL has a policy of allowing the (workshop) registration fee to be waived for exactly one invited speaker per workshop. A number of organizers complained about this policy, particularly in the case of multiday workshops. I would recommend that the ACL Exec consider a modification to the policy that would allow one workshop registration fee to be waived for each full day of a workshop/co-located event. 4. Two workshop proposals had organizers on the Workshops Program Committee. The Workshops Chair respected conflict of interest issues in these and other cases in making reviewing assignments. The Workshops Chair was a co-organizer of one of the workshops; this was cleared with the conference organizing committee prior to my involvement. It turned out that this workshop proposal received very high reviews, making acceptance of the workshop an easy decision. However, given 7 rejections out of 21 "one-time" proposals, it is clear that some policy needs to be in place for cases in which the Workshops Chair is involved in organizing a workshop. A suggestion from a prior Workshops Chair was to have the General Chair called on to make decisions in such situations. This may involve a reasonable time commitment, since to make a fair decision would require some knowledge of the range of reviews and ratings assigned to all proposals. => This is another issue that has been raised previously with the ACL => Exec, and not resolved. 5. There is no set policy for maximum length of workshops papers. I had assumed that the maximum was the same as for the conference (8 pages), but there is no policy on this. For this year, given the very small impact on publication costs, we allowed workshops up to 12 pages maximum, with strong encouragement to limit papers to 10 pages. However, this was discussed very late in the process (long after most submission deadlines and very close to the camera-ready deadlines). It would be preferable to have the policy decided on prior to the workshop CFPs going out, so that workshop organizers can plan accordingly. (It is worth noting that co-located events may have differing typical paper lengths from the main conference standard; for example, this year TAG+ wanted to have 12-page papers.) => This is another issue that has been raised previously with the ACL => Exec, and not resolved. --------------------------------------------------- Mark Steedman SIGNLL: 2005-2006 ACL Special Interest Group on Natural Language Learning To promote and inform about research on computational modeling of learning in natural language. ~450 members - Officers - Antal van den Bosch, Hwee Tou Ng, Erik Tjong Kim Sang - International advisory board - Main activities: - Conference series on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL) - Inform members via WWW and mailing list - CoNLL X (tenth anniversary) June 8-9 2006 - co-located with HLT-NAACL-06 - Chairs: Lluís Marquez and Dan Klein - 53 submissions, 18 accepted (34%) - Shared task on Dependency Parsing - Organized by Sabine Buchholz, Yuval Krymolowski, Erwin Marsi, Amit Dubey - 13 languages, 19 participants (= 247 systems) - Best paper award - to Rie Kubota Ando, “Applying Alternating Structure Optimization to WSD” --------------------------------------------------- HLT-NAACL 2007 Chair: Candy Sidner HLT-NAACL 07 is in the program planning stages. The conference will be held in Rochester, NY during April 22-28, 2007. The program cochairs are: Tanja Schultz (Carnegie Mellon University), Matt Stone (Rutgers University), and ChengXiang Zhai (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) who will be producing a CFP shortly. The local arrangements chairs are: James Allen, Dan Gildea and Len Schuburt (University of Rochester). Any interested member of the ACL who would like to work on the organizational aspects of HLT-NAACL 2007 should contact Candy Sidner at sidner@merl.com. --------------------------------------------------- Eric Fosler-Lussier ACL Archivist report The position of ACL Archivist switched from Richard Sproat to Eric Fosler-Lussier in April 2006. Currently, the general public archive is being reorganized, with documents categorized both by year and type. The new archive will be up and running in the autumn of 2006. After that, the executive committee private archive will be reorganized in a similar fashion. Any comments or suggestions should be directed to thearchivist AT-nospam aclweb DOT org. --------------------------------------------------- EACL 2006 Shuly Wintner April 3-7, 2006 Trento, Italy The main conference for EACL 2006 had a 46% increase in submitted papers compared to the 10th EACL which was held in 2003. This year we had 264 papers submitted from 35 countries in five continents. The large number of papers submitted, and the broad geographical basis, demonstrate the growth in our field and considerable interest in EACL as a truly international conference. All papers were read by a minimum of three people, with discussions where there were differences of opinion. The final selections were made at a one and a half-day program committee meeting in Brighton. Of the 264 submissions, 52 papers were accepted giving an acceptance rate of 19.7%. The conference also contained tutorials, workshops, posters, demos and a student workshop. Keynote addresses were delivered by Kevin Knight, of the Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, and Alfonso Caramazza, of the Cognitive Neuropsychology Laboratory, Harvard University. We would like to thank the invited speakers, the 240 reviewers, the 10 area chairs and all authors and participants for helping to make this conference a great success. --------------------------------------------------- Exhibitor Chair Report for 2006 Menno van Zaanen, Exhibitors Chair menno@ics.mq.edu.au It was hard to find exhibitors. The Platinum and Gold sponsors were not interested in exhibition booths and all publishers decided against exhibition, although several who were originally interested in exhibition decided on providing bag inserts or page ads in the program booklet. (The main reasons given were cost, e.g. travel and personel, and a focus on other conferences.) In the end, CJK Dictionary Institute and Gleebooks (a local bookshop) will be exhibiting. Additionally, a table will be provided where leaflets (mainly about new books) can be displayed. Point for discussion: We have contacted several additional companies that were not on the sponsorship list. --------------------------------------------------- Shuly Wintner ACL SIG on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages http://www.semitic.tk On May 2005, the ACL Exec approved the new SIG, which was inaugurated at the ACL 2005 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in June 29, 2005. During December 2005 the SIG held its first elections. 45 votes were cast, and the elected officers are: Chair: Shuly Wintner Secretary: Nizar Habash Information Officers: Mike Rosner, Violetta Cavalli-Sforza, Imed Zitouni The SIG has a website and a mailing list. Current Membership consists of 177 members. We plan a Workshop for ACL 2007 in Prague. --------------------------------------------------- Report on the state of the preparations of ACL07 Prepared by: Eva Hajicova and Anna Kotesovcova General Conference Chair: John Carroll Local Organizer: Eva Hajicova Administrator/Secretary of Local Arrangement Commitee:: Anna Kotesovcova 1. Dates: June 24-29, 2007 Tutorials: June 24, 2007 Main conference: June 25-27, 2007 Workshops: June 28-29, 2007 2. Location: TOP Hotel Praha Address: Blazimska 1781/4, 149 00 Prague 4, Czech Republic web page: www.tophotel.cz 3. Rooms reservation: Tutorials: 3 rooms (capacity 100, 65, 55) Main Conference: 3 rooms (capacity 800, 300, 200) Workshops: 6 rooms (capacity 100, 100, 80, 55, 50, 40) a large and comfortable space for posters (40-50 posters and additional devices) Note: These reservations are preliminary because we do not yet know the requirements of the Programme Co-Chairs, the Tutorial and Workshop Chairs, who will have to decide on the number of tutorials and workshops ACL-Exec dinner will be held in the Historical Building of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University on Monday, June 25. 4. Accommodation: (a) 450 rooms in the TOP Hotel (incl. 250 rooms with air-conditioning, but AC is not necessary in Prague at that time); price 3080 CZK/night for a single executive room, 2200 CZK/single/standard room. (very cheap for Prague and for the comfort) (b) 50-100. rooms in a student hostel (20 minute walking distance from the conference location, or 8 min by bus - 3 stops) price: 600 CZK/night/person (quality: very good, newly renovated. bathroom) (c) we will arrange for the possibility for the participants to reserve a room in some selected Prague hotels (of different categories), with a conference price; however, the price will be higher than that in the TOP hotel 5. Social programme: welcome reception: Sunday, 24 June, in the TOP hotel (Japanese garden, large reception hall), incl. in the fees banquet: Tuesday 26 June, art-nouveau style Municipal House in the historical center of Prague (capacity up to 700 people), price: approx. 80. USD concert: Wednesday,. 27 July, a string quartet, in the historical aula of Charles University in the center of Prague, capacity: 250 people (tickets on sale at the registration, approx. price: 10 USD 6. We will take care of an offer for a ladies programme for the days of the main conference and we will provide for a travel agent to offer post-conference trips in the country. 7. Conference fee: will be fixed by the end of the year, but at present it seems reasonable to count with 300 USD. (incl. CD-Rom with proceedings, book of abstracts, welcome reception,. conference material, a gift from the organizers). Remark: Current exchange rate: 1 USD = 22,16 CZK --------------------------------------- Report for COLING/ACL 2006 Student Research Workshop Chairs: Marine Carpuat, Kevin Duh Faculty Advisor: Rebecca Hwa 1. Program Committee The co-chairs of the COLING/ACL 2006 Student Research Workshop are Marine Carpuat (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) and Kevin Duh (University of Washington). Rebecca Hwa is the Faculty Advisor. The program committee was formed by the co-chairs in consultation with the Faculty Advisor. The final program committee consists of 73 reviewers, of which 38 were students and 35 were senior reviewers. 2. Paper Submission and Acceptance We received 40 submissions from 20 regions (see Table 1). All papers were assigned 4 reviewers (2 senior and 2 student reviewers). We accepted fifteen papers, of which eight were regular (oral) presentations and seven were posters. Table 1: Submission and acceptance by regions -------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- ---- REGION || #Submissions || #Acceptances -------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- ---- Australia || 1 || 0 Brazil || 1 || 0 Canada || 3 || 2 China || 3 || 1 Czech Republic || 1 || 0 France || 3 || 2 Germany || 5 || 3 Hong Kong || 3 || 1 India || 4 || 1 Iran || 1 || 0 Japan || 1 || 0 Korea || 1 || 0 Netherlands || 1 || 1 Philippines || 1 || 0 Romania || 2 || 0 Spain || 1 || 0 South Africa || 1 || 0 Taiwan || 2 || 0 United Kingdom || 1 || 1 United States || 4 || 3 -------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- ---- TOTAL || 40 || 15 -------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- ---- 3. Presentation Format The Student Research Workshop posters are included together with the main conference poster session on Day 1 of COLING/ACL. The regular (oral) presentations are held as a parallel track on site on Day 3. Each oral presentation consists of 15 minutes of talk, and 10 minutes for general audience questions and panelist feedback. 4. Panelists The co-chairs asked 21 conference attendees to be on the panel for providing feedback to student authors. All papers receive one or two panelists. These panelists were selected for their knowledge in the area and availability during the Workshop. 5. Funding We submitted our request to the program director of Human Language and Communication (HLC) at NSF in December and received notice of the award in February. The grant totaled $22,500. We were able to provide funds to every SRW participant. Because the cost of traveling to Sydney varies depending on the student's location, the level of funding is determined based on an estimated 75% of the cost of travel. We awarded $900 in funds to students from Asia, and $1200 to students from Europe and North America. The remaining $900 was used to cover the registration of the student co-chairs and served as additional funds for SRW participants with special needs. The grant also contributes $3000 towards the administrative cost of the conference (such as facility rental, the production of CDs, etc.). 6. Organization and Planning The Workshop was publicized by sending CFPs to computational linguistics mailing lists and direct emails to professors at various departments. The availability of funding appears to be an important incentive for submissions, and we found it was important to include some funding information on the CFPs. The Workshop webpage was placed prominently on the main conference website. In addition, the COLING/ACL Newsletters helped disseminate information on the Student Research Workshop. We are grateful to the main conference organizers for the support. The entire submission and review process was managed by the START system. This system proved immensely helpful for managing the 40 submissions and 73 reviewers. 7. Suggestions and Considerations a) We believe that the success of the Student Research Workshop depends on the quality of the reviewer and panelist feedbacks to students. We were happy to find 73 reviewers and 21 panelists who are supportive of this educational goal. We recommend that future Workshop organizers continue the tradition of concentrating their efforts on assembling good reviewers and panelists. b) We considered having all presenters do both an oral and a poster presentation, which gives extended exposure for their work--however, this was not implemented due to space/time restrictions. This is a potential idea for future Workshops. c) For many Workshop presenters, this is their first major conference attendance. Therefore, we thought it would beneficial for students if we could arrange their poster/regular sessions early during the conference, such that they can begin networking and get the most out during the duration of the conference. We suggest that future Workshop planners communicate with the main conference organizers in the early stages of planning to ensure that the logistics for this situation works out. d) This year, the submission deadline for the SRW is set to be at the same time as that of the main conference. We received some papers with double-submissions to the main conference and needed to make some difficult case-by-case decisions. We suggest that future Workshops have a clear policy on double-submissions posted on the website from the very beginning. e) Some participants seemed confused about the different student activities and the proper contact person for each. For example, we have received inquiries regarding student volunteering, student travel grants, and the summer school. It would be nice to have a page on the main conference website that summarizes all student activities, with pointers to relevant webpages and contacts. Computational Linguistics Book Review Editor's report Graeme Hirst July 2006 BOOK REVIEWS PUBLISHED In 2005, we published far fewer book reviews than normal in Computational Linguistics: only four reviews (and another four brief notices). The reason for the decline in the number of reviewable books is unclear, but it seems to have been temporary: In 2006 we will publish about 16 reviews, so the average over two years will be about normal. Most reviews are published in a timely manner -- that is, within 12 months of receipt of the book. This allows six months for the reviewer (most take less) and five months for journal production. MATERIAL REVIEWED I am continuing to be fairly strict in deciding if a book is to be reviewed, but try to include all books that are in "core" computational linguistics, as well as a variety of books from adjacent and overlapping disciplines that are likely to be useful in CL. We do not review technical reports, doctoral theses, conference proceedings, or workshop proceedings, except if revised for publication as a book by a recognized publisher. PRODUCTION MATTERS I am indebted to Nadia Talent for long hours of reading out loud with me to check the galleys. COLING/ACL 2006 LOCAL ORGANISERS' REPORT July 2006 Robert Dale and Cecile Paris 1 OVERVIEW This document provides a brief report on local organisation aspects of COLING/ACL 2006. It does not cover program-related matters, which are dealt with in the General Chair's report, nor sponsorship, which will be covered also in another report. In summary, we encountered no major issues in the end, and all the figures (number of registrants, sponsorship and budget) look good. This report contains some statistics about registration, information about various aspects of the conference, various things which were done differently this year, and some lessons learned. 2 Registration Statistics A. Conference registration: We have 654 full delegates, including the complementary registrations (e.g. for the ICCL members, for the sponsors who were entitled to free registrations, and the student volunteers). 337 of these were non-students who registered by the early-bird deadline, and 179 were students who registered by the early-bird deadline. We also have a number of people attending only single days and some attending only the co-located events (workshops and tutorials). All in all, we have 738 registrants as of July 3rd, which is a higher number than we had expected. Workshops and tutorials are quite variable in their attendance numbers (from 15 registrants to ARTE, to 172 for EMNLP). B. Dinner: we currently have 358 people signed up for the dinner. 3 SOCIAL EVENTS We organised several social events: - A welcoming reception the evening before the main conference, Sunday 16th July. This event includes Aboriginal music. - The opening session of the conference, on Monday 17th July, will include a short Aboriginal welcoming ceremony. - The traditional Coling excursion, which is included in the registration cost, is a harbour cruise on Wednesday 19th July. It departs from Circular Quay, crosses the harbour to Taronga Zoo, where we'll alight for morning tea; then, the ferries (there will likely be two: see below) will take attendees to Manly, where lunch can be had and a beach can be sat on. After lunch, we return to Circular Quay via a circuitous route around the harbour, with cocktails (cash bar) at dusk. Those who get tired of cruises quickly can make their own way home mid-cruise by land (or public ferries) from either the zoo or Manly (instructions provided). The nature of the wharf at Taronga means we cannot use a large ferry with sufficient capacity for all attendees, so instead we will be either one or two smaller ferries (each with capacity of 500) depending on number of attendees. - Poster sessions are being run on the Monday and Tuesday evenings with drinks and nibbles. - The conference dinner, an opt-in additional cost item at registration, is being held at the Star City casino on Thursday 24th July. The dinner venue is within walking distance, or a short monorail ride, of the conference venue, and has a fantastic view of the harbour. 4 WIRELESS ACCESS We have negotiated a reasonably-priced wireless access deal that will allow us to provide reasonable access to all registered participants. This has been sponsored by Microsoft. 5 SPONSORSHIP Sponsorhip was difficult but we ended up with the amount we had aimed for, despite the fact that our application for a A$40k government grant to support the conference was not successful. The organisations to which the two local chairs belong were quite generous in their support. The sponsorship chairs will have their own report on this issue. A few lessons learned from us: - Getting sponsorship is increasingly difficult, as there are many competing conferences. It is interesting to note, however, that some conferences (e.g., CHI and SIGIR) are much more successful at attracting sponsors than Coling/ACL. This might be due to the fact that, by tradition, Coling/ACL are very academically oriented. - Getting a sponsorship chair is difficult (as it is a hard job), and, again, there are competing conferences/events looking for such chairs. We suggest that, in the future, chairs be chosen as early as as possible to avoid conflicts. - Chasing up sponsors has been difficult, and, in some cases, we still have not received the money. This brings up the suggestion that there should be no advertising for a sponsor (e.g., their logo on the web site) until the money is actually received. - The sponsorship material needs to be thought of very carefully to ensure equity amongst sponsors (what they get versus what they give). - We must remember that there is a direct relationship between sponsorship and registration cost (e.g., in our case, every US$5k in sponsorship brought the registration cost down by US$10 per person). - Based on our experiences, we would suggest that the sponsorship issue is one that needs to be thoroughly reviewed for future ACL events. 6 BUDGETS While we still have to work on the final numbers, our budget is healthy. Our break even point was at 450 paying participants, which we have reached. The registration fee was more than some recent ACLs, and it was reasonably comparable with Coling 2002, held in Taiwan, or even NAACL this year. It should be kept in mind that this conference is a full 4 days (as opposed to 3 days for ACL) and that registration cost includes the Wednesday excursion. (It does, however, leave the conference dinner as an optional extra.) On our analysis, the registration fee is comparable to other conferences (besides ACL), and cheaper than some (e.g., CHI). We attempted to firm up the budget numbers (and thus registration costs) as early as possible to give plenty of time for people to plan their trip. 7 MARKETING/ADVERTISING We set up a website as early as possible, and it was updated periodically with new information. We also used the periodic newsletter as a way to let everyone know what was happening. The issue of printing posters was discussed at length, and, in the end, we produced one and sent it to a mailing list provided by Priscilla. 8 PROCEEDINGS PRODUCTION Our quotes indicated that printing in Australia would be cheaper than printing in the US and shipping to Australia. This year, however, we made the proceedings an opt-in extra cost on the registration form, with the default provision being the CD-ROM version of the proceedings. This was to save paper and avoid giving people two very large volumes to take home (excluding the companion volumes, another 1000 pages). As the size of the proceedings increases, this seems to be the only viable option. It is interesting to note that only a few people (123) opted for the hard-copy proceedings. 9 New this year - This year, due to the size of the event, we employed a Professional Conference Organiser (PCO). We went through a bidding process, interviewed a number of organisations, and chose a small company, Well Done Events, with no flashy brochures or front, but all the experience required. This turned out to be well worth the money. Through the PCO contacts and expertise, we were able to get better deals with the venue, catering, audio/visual, printing, hotels, etc. Registration and on-line payment were done through the PCO, and all went smoothly, including chasing up and sorting our various acounts. We were also able to help with visas, through the PCO's contact at the Immigration Office. Finally, the logistics and details were taken care of, also assuring that nothing fell through the cracks. Having a PCO was also extremely useful as we dealt with a commercial venue (as opposed to a university one). - We tried to have a healthy, environment-friendly and socially aware conference. We thus attempted to have healthy lunch and break food. We also sought to have as little waste as possible (paper/etc.), and to buy whenever possible fair-trade products (e.g., coffee). This turned out to be difficult. We did avoid the printing of proceedings (which many people would leave behind due to the weight) and the PC meeting, which would have meant flying people from all over the world for a week end (also resulting in higher registration fees due to the cost of such a meeting). Our choice for a conference bag is a strong re-usable shopping bad, and our choice for a "conference gift" is useful, small and environmentally friendly. - Given the lack of paper proceedings this year, we have an expanded "delegate's handbook". It now contains all the abstracts, so that people still have the information they need to decide which talks to attend. - Besides the newsletter, the PCO sent to all registrants some "quick notes", with various bits of useful information about the conference. - We are doing our best to collect statistics about a number of things, so that future conference chairs can have some numbers on which to base predictions: for example, this year, we will be counting the number of people in the rooms. We also know how many people asked for a hard copy proceedings. We will do our best to ensure all this information is available for future use. 10 What worked well and what went wrong Of course, we cannot say yet anything about the success of the conference until after the event and based on the feedback we will receive. From our perspective, however, we note the following: - What worked well: - having a PCO (for the reasons already mentioned above); - regular meetings involving the local organising chairs and the PCO; - regular updates in email with the ACL exec and COLING/ACL; - planning as early as possible all the tasks; - the newsletters and the quick notes; - being able to change one's registration on-line. - what could have worked better: - the whole sponsorship process; - time line for proceedings (it was very short and involved a mad rush at the end -- thanks to Olivia Kwong, the publication chair, for her work!); - student volunteers: the process was started quite late, which meant that the the early bird deadline was passed by the time the student volunteers got chosen. We thus had to have much more email back and forth than really necessary, and ended up having to reimburse students who had been chosen as SVs but had already registered; - the Opening speaker: we attempted to have a notable political person to open the conference. While we started the process quite early, it took time before we received any response, which turned out to be negative. We went through a process of asking other people, and again, getting a response was very slow. We have only secured our opening speaker this week. We recommend to future chairs to take care of this as early in the process as possible, although it is not a crucial aspect of the conference. ---End COLING/ACL 2006 - Report from the General Chair The most important item is that the group of Chairs for this COLING/ACL has been really wonderful, very cooperative, easy to discuss issues among all, responsive, not to mention very competent. All most important decisions have been taken, or discussed, together. All the real work - hard work - has been done by them, and they will report on all the various aspects. In my report I want to first thank all of them. There have been episodes of help given to one another in difficult situations, e.g. students of Claire Cardie offered for help with the HTML version of the program when the locals were too busy with printing matters, etc. Just a few points: - We had many interactions with the organizers of EMNLP, David Yarowsky and Ken Church, involving also the Advisory Board, wrt their location before or after the main conference, and we reached an agreement, satisfactory for both. - Notifications have been sent out on time, despite the hard work of the Program Chairs with so many submissions, and having to deal with both Regular papers and Posters. There was only a small delay for the Interactive presentations. - Collecting and sending out information in the Newsletters has been very efficient, also a sign of the cooperation among all. - Also the choice by the Local Chairs of the local company for registration etc. has proved to be very good. - A novelty of today is a new search facility which allows to search all the content on the site. - Enquiries of different types have been promptly answered by the relevant people. - We have never perceived the situation going out of control, both from the scientific and from the local/logistic point of view. The Advisory Board: - The most strategic decisions have been taken after consultation with the Advisory Board, who have been always very cooperative and proactive. In particular we discussed issues such as: o scientific focus of the program – in between Coling and ACL traditions o area chairs o program structure & reserve papers o highlight of research on Asian languages, resulting in a panel, top 4 Asian language papers in parallel, special session, award for best paper o publications of proceedings, etc. - The decision to have this Board was certainly very positive, and it was important to have a representative of AFNLP in it. I’m proud to say that, also because of all the efforts and initiatives of all the people involved, with different roles, COLING/ACL 2006 will probably be, altogether, the biggest ever happening in Computational Linguistics. In general, I think that we have tried to maintain the spirit of both Conferences, COLING and ACL, not so much a compromise, but trying to take the best of both. This will obviously result in an event with its own special character and personality, which we will enjoy together in Sydney! Nicoletta Calzolari Pisa, 2 July 2006 ++++++++ I add the report I received on 28 February by Richard Power, in case it’s useful: Nicoletta The mentoring is now over. Last year I was asked for a brief report, so I'm sending one now (below): please forward to anyone else who needs it. best wishes, Richard ===================== The mentoring service for COLING-ACL’06 is now finished. Most papers were returned to authors by the deadline (21st February), but a few were late, mostly because demand was much greater than in previous years. However, all arrived in time for the authors to incorporate the suggestions. We received 20 papers for revision (compared with 7 last year). They came from China (8), Japan (5), Spain, Germany, Morocco, Tunisia, Korea, Germany, and a Japanese speaker in Australia (one each). The mentors were Deborah Dahl, Lila Ghemri, Chrys Chrystello, John Nerbonne, and Florence Reeder, all unpaid volunteers. Because of the increased demand most of them had to do four papers, as compared to 1-2 papers last year. This was too much: if we continue the service next year we need to recruit more mentors, since the demand especially from the far east is likely to increase further. As in previous years, the mentors took a lot of trouble over the papers and their suggestions were much appreciated by the authors. I encouraged the mentors not to correct all instances of basic errors like omitting the article in English, just to correct one or two and note the general rule, but the amount of work required was still considerable – we really have to get the number of papers per mentor down to 1-2. EACL 2006 Shuly Wintner April 3-7, 2006 Trento, Italy The main conference for EACL 2006 had a 46% increase in submitted papers compared to the 10th EACL which was held in 2003. This year we had 264 papers submitted from 35 countries in five continents. The large number of papers submitted, and the broad geographical basis, demonstrate the growth in our field and considerable interest in EACL as a truly international conference. All papers were read by a minimum of three people, with discussions where there were differences of opinion. The final selections were made at a one and a half-day program committee meeting in Brighton. Of the 264 submissions, 52 papers were accepted giving an acceptance rate of 19.7%. The conference also contained tutorials, workshops, posters, demos and a student workshop. Keynote addresses were delivered by Kevin Knight, of the Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, and Alfonso Caramazza, of the Cognitive Neuropsychology Laboratory, Harvard University. We would like to thank the invited speakers, the 240 reviewers, the 10 area chairs and all authors and participants for helping to make this conference a great success. Exhibitor Chair Report for 2006 Menno van Zaanen, Exhibitors Chair menno@ics.mq.edu.au It was hard to find exhibitors. The Platinum and Gold sponsors were not interested in exhibition booths and all publishers decided against exhibition, although several who were originally interested in exhibition decided on providing bag inserts or page ads in the program booklet. (The main reasons given were cost, e.g. travel and personel, and a focus on other conferences.) In the end, CJK Dictionary Institute and Gleebooks (a local bookshop) will be exhibiting. Additionally, a table will be provided where leaflets (mainly about new books) can be displayed. Point for discussion: We have contacted several additional companies that were not on the sponsorship list. HLT-NAACL 2007 Chair: Candy Sidner HLT-NAACL 07 is in the program planning stages. The conference will be held in Rochester, NY during April 22-28, 2007. The program cochairs are: Tanja Schultz (Carnegie Mellon University), Matt Stone (Rutgers University), and ChengXiang Zhai (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) who will be producing a CFP shortly. The local arrangements chairs are: James Allen, Dan Gildea and Len Schuburt (University of Rochester). Any interested member of the ACL who would like to work on the organizational aspects of HLT-NAACL 2007 should contact Candy Sidner at sidner@merl.com. Mentoring Service Richard Power The mentoring service for ACL’06 is now finished. Most papers were returned to authors by the deadline (21st February), but a few were late, mostly because demand was much greater than in previous years. However, all arrived in time for the authors to incorporate the suggestions. We received 20 papers for revision (compared with 7 last year). They came from China (8), Japan (5), Spain, Germany, Morocco, Tunisia, Korea, Germany, and a Japanese speaker in Australia (one each). The mentors were Deborah Dahl, Lila Ghemri, Chrys Chrystello, John Nerbonne, and Florence Reeder, all unpaid volunteers. Because of the increased demand most of them had to do four papers, as compared to 1-2 papers last year. This was too much: if we continue the service next year we need to recruit more mentors, since the demand especially from the far east is likely to increase further. As in previous years, the mentors took a lot of trouble over the papers and their suggestions were much appreciated by the authors. I encouraged the mentors not to correct all instances of basic errors like omitting the article in English, just to correct one or two and note the general rule, but the amount of work required was still considerable – we really have to get the number of papers per mentor down to 1-2. NAACL Treasurer's reports June 2006 The chapter's finances are clear through April 2004. Thereafter a dense fog descends, which has not yet lifted. The current balance of the NAACL (money market) account is $45,045. However, from May 2004 on, the account balance bears a distant relationship to the Chapter's true financial situation. At the time I took office, financial accounting for the HLT-NAACL 2004 had not been begun. I am attempting to gather the pieces that will allow this to happen, but it's a slow job so long after the event. ACL 2005 (proceeds to be split with NAACL) is in better shape and should be accounted for by the date of ACL 2006. HLT-NAACL 2006 predicted attendance is about 680 (317 regular and 190 student main conference registrations done on-line). This is slightly lover the number used in the budget. I have at the point, two principal remarks concerning policy: 1. The Chapter Board should work to ensure that the Chapter accounts henceforth do not fall this far into arrears. This is actually mandated by Article 7 of our Constitution. 2. The Chapter should work harder to ensure a revenue stream such that it can support activities and people (principally, students) in ways that are beneficial to the future of the Chapter. The chapter’s current income and expenditure pattern is very simple (see the attached graph - only to be viewed on PDF version). Of the ways o generating income, making money off of running conferences seems the most plausible to me. At the 2002 NAACL meeting, Priscilla suggested conference sound aim to make a profit of $5K - $20K. We should probably aim at the high end of that. I would advocate further expanding opportunities for revenue raising through better supporting employers and companies (think SIGGRAPH). Christopher Manning, NAACL Treasurer; June 1, 2006, Palo Alto, CA. Publicity Chair of COLING/ACL 2006 Timothy Baldwin As Publicity Chair of COLING/ACL, my main responsibilities were to advertise the conference and satellite events as widely as possible, to keep an eye on the web site to ensure that news and announcement items were up to date, and to compile and distribute newsletters. As primary portal for all official COLING/ACL announcements, I was entrusted with responsibility for sending out the calls for papers/proposals for the main conference, satellite events and tutorials, using a pre-arranged collection of mailing lists to send things out to. I also compiled a total of 5 newsletters (with one post-conference newsletter to come) keeping potential participants abreast of any new developments and informing them of impending deadlines. All announcements were sent out in a timely manner, including contributions from various members of the COLING/ACL Organising Committee (esp. Judy Potter). There were no major complications of note. Mark Steedman SIGNLL: 2005-2006 ACL Special Interest Group on Natural Language Learning To promote and inform about research on computational modeling of learning in natural language. ~450 members - Officers - Antal van den Bosch, Hwee Tou Ng, Erik Tjong Kim Sang - International advisory board - Main activities: - Conference series on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL) - Inform members via WWW and mailing list - CoNLL X (tenth anniversary) June 8-9 2006 - co-located with HLT-NAACL-06 - Chairs: Lluís Marquez and Dan Klein - 53 submissions, 18 accepted (34%) - Shared task on Dependency Parsing - Organized by Sabine Buchholz, Yuval Krymolowski, Erwin Marsi, Amit Dubey - 13 languages, 19 participants (= 247 systems) - Best paper award - to Rie Kubota Ando, “Applying Alternating Structure Optimization to WSD” ----------------------------------------------------------------- Report on SIGSEM, July 2006 Patrick Blackburn ----------------------------------------------------------------- The major event organised by SIGSEM in 2006 was ICoS-5, the fifth workshop on Inference in Computational Semantics, which was held from 20 - 21 April 2006 in Buxton, England. IC0S-5 was widely regarded by participants as the most successful and interesting ICoS to date, with a number of interesting new developments and directions becoming evident. The invited speakers were: Christian Ebert (University of Bielefeld): Expressive Power and Complexity of Underspecified Representations Patrick Pantel (ISI, University of Southern California): Knowledge Harvesting and Fusion from Small and Large Corpora Stephen Pulman (Oxford University): Bridging the gap between formal and computational semantics In addition, 12 research papers and 6 short papers/posters were presented. The Richard Montague Memorial award (the traditional ICoS award for best presentation) was awarded to Patrick Pantel for his invited talk. The events endorsed by SIGSEM in 2006 were: Robotics: Science & Systems 2006 Workshop on Intuitive Human-Robot Interaction For Getting The Job Done. Philadelphia PA, August 18 2006 KONVENS06: workshop on on the Interface between Lexical and Discourse Semantics. Konstanz, Germany, October 7, 2006 DELFI 2006: workshop on Natural Language Processing in Augmented and Ambient Learning. Darmstadt, Germany, September, 11th 2006 As far upcoming activities, the next large workshop in which SIGSEM will be involved is the Seventh International Workshop on Computational Semantics (IWCS-7) which will be held at Tilburg University, The Netherlands, from 10-12 January 2007. This event is held every two years (at Tilburg) and is the main workshop solely devoted to computational semantics. And, last but not least, SIGSEM elections will be held later this year. Patrick Blackburn, the SIGSEM president, has already made it known he will not be standing for re-election. The election process should be finished by the end of the year, or early in 2007, and it is hoped that IWCS-7 will provide a forum in which the new SIGSEM team can meet to discuss their plans. Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages www.semitic.tk • SIG approved by ACL EXEC on May 2005 • Inaugurated during the ACL-2005 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages, in Ann Arbor, MI, on June 29th, 2005 • Current Membership: 177 • Elections held during December 2005 • Elected officers: • Chair: Shuly Wintner • Secretary: Nizar Habash • Information Officers: Mike Rosner, Violetta Cavalli-Sforza, Imed Zitouni • Future events: planned Workshop at ACL-2007. Shuly Wintner ACL SIG on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages http://www.semitic.tk On May 2005, the ACL Exec approved the new SIG, which was inaugurated at the ACL 2005 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in June 29, 2005. During December 2005 the SIG held its first elections. 45 votes were cast, and the elected officers are: Chair: Shuly Wintner Secretary: Nizar Habash Information Officers: Mike Rosner, Violetta Cavalli-Sforza, Imed Zitouni The SIG has a website and a mailing list. Current Membership consists of 177 members. We plan a Workshop for ACL 2007 in Prague. SIGWAC report Adam Kilgarriff ============= 1) July 2005: WAC1 workshop, Birmingham UK. (ca 40 attendees) 2) March 2006: SIGWAC approved by ACL 3) April 2006, EACL: WAC2 workshop, Trento, Italy (ca 30 attendees) Both events were energetic and successful. We are now planning a competition/shared task, CLEANEVAL, where the task is to produce clean text from arbitrary web pages. There are good reasons to believe this is the bottleneck to progress for many strands of NLP. Watch this space. AK, 26.6.06 =================================================== Report from the COLING/ACL 2006 Workshops Chair Suzanne Stevenson The Workshops Program Committee for COLING/ACL 2006 included five people from a range of geographical regions and representing a range of research areas in computational linguistics and natural language processing. The committee consisted of: Suzanne Stevenson (Chair), University of Toronto Ann Copestake, University of Cambridge Pascale Fung, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology Jamie Henderson, University of Edinburgh Ingrid Zukerman, Monash University Proposals for workshops and other co-located events for COLING/ACL were due on December 9, 2005. All workshop proposals were reviewed by at least 3 members of the Workshops Program Committee. The Workshops Chair collated all ratings and read all reviews, and made the final acceptance decisions. Workshop proposers were notified on January 17, 2006, as to whether their proposal was accepted. We received 24 proposals by the December 9 deadline, plus a late proposal from the EMNLP organizers, for a total of 25 proposed workshops. Of these, 4 were what we termed "co-located events", as established, on-going workshops/conferences: EMNLP, SIGdial, INLG, and TAG+; all of these proposals were accepted. The other 21 proposals were either one-time workshops or on-going workshops not quite of the regularity or size of the other established events. Of these 21, 10 were accepted as is, and 7 were rejected. The 4 remaining proposals consisted of two pairs of proposals that highly overlapped in content and potential audience. The Workshops Chair felt that a stronger program could be achieved if each of those pairs were merged, and the organizers agreed to work together to do so. Thus, we had a final count of 16 events: 3 2-day pre-conference co-located events; 1 2-day post-conference co-located event; 12 post-conference workshops (11 1-day workshops and 1 1.5-day workshop). All accepted events were confirmed for the conference. These events represent a very broad range of research topics in our field, and provide a strong program of participation beyond the main conference. Some topics for discussion by the ACL Exec: 1. Even after putting together all the information available from various sources (prior Workshops Chairs, published ACL info, etc.), numerous questions arose throughout the process of workshop review, selection, and organization. I would suggest that the guidelines published by ACL be expanded and clarified, with "institutional memory" (often in Priscilla Rasmussen's head) set down for future Workshops Chairs, and workshop proposers. This would include clarification of financial arrangements for SIG-sponsored workshops. I also expanded the Workshop Proposal Form and Workshop Proposal Review Form, and it would be nice to have a site where these could be posted for the use of future Workshops Chairs. 2. The treatment of on-going, well-established co-located events and "one off" workshops needs to be distinguished. Events such as EMNLP, SIGdial, INLG, or TAG+ may want to start publicizing earlier than the workshops reviewing schedule allows. Moreover, such established events are not likely to be rejected, and indeed are depended on for helping to create a strong overall conference program that attracts broad participation. The ACL Exec needs to decide on a policy for handling such cases, such as a "fast track" reviewing schedule. The tricky aspect of this will be deciding which events qualify for such fast tracking. For example, the four co-located events for this year (mentioned above) are broadly recognized as on-going workshops or even conferences, while other workshop proposals are clearly one-time events. However, others (such as the fairly regular SIGHAN workshop, or several workshops that were in their 2nd or 3rd incarnation) may not neatly fit into one category or the other. Some form of fast tracking is clearly needed, but guidelines are required for the size and regularity of an event to be considered for this. => Please note that this issue has been raised before, but has not => been resolved. It is very important that the ACL Exec make a => decision on this, to avoid problems that arise with the co-located => events. 3. ACL has a policy of allowing the (workshop) registration fee to be waived for exactly one invited speaker per workshop. A number of organizers complained about this policy, particularly in the case of multiday workshops. I would recommend that the ACL Exec consider a modification to the policy that would allow one workshop registration fee to be waived for each full day of a workshop/co-located event. 4. Two workshop proposals had organizers on the Workshops Program Committee. The Workshops Chair respected conflict of interest issues in these and other cases in making reviewing assignments. The Workshops Chair was a co-organizer of one of the workshops; this was cleared with the conference organizing committee prior to my involvement. It turned out that this workshop proposal received very high reviews, making acceptance of the workshop an easy decision. However, given 7 rejections out of 21 "one-time" proposals, it is clear that some policy needs to be in place for cases in which the Workshops Chair is involved in organizing a workshop. A suggestion from a prior Workshops Chair was to have the General Chair called on to make decisions in such situations. This may involve a reasonable time commitment, since to make a fair decision would require some knowledge of the range of reviews and ratings assigned to all proposals. => This is another issue that has been raised previously with the ACL => Exec, and not resolved. 5. There is no set policy for maximum length of workshops papers. I had assumed that the maximum was the same as for the conference (8 pages), but there is no policy on this. For this year, given the very small impact on publication costs, we allowed workshops up to 12 pages maximum, with strong encouragement to limit papers to 10 pages. However, this was discussed very late in the process (long after most submission deadlines and very close to the camera-ready deadlines). It would be preferable to have the policy decided on prior to the workshop CFPs going out, so that workshop organizers can plan accordingly. (It is worth noting that co-located events may have differing typical paper lengths from the main conference standard; for example, this year TAG+ wanted to have 12-page papers.) => This is another issue that has been raised previously with the ACL => Exec, and not resolved. SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP ON MULTIMEDIA LANGUAGE PROCESSING (SIGMEDIA) July 1st 2006 CHAIR: Elisabeth André ( University of Augsburg , Germany , andre@informatik.uni-augsburg.de) MAILING ADDRESS: andre@informatik.uni-augsburg.de URL: http://www.sigmedia.org CONFERENCES AND WORKSHOPS: The main activity was the organization of a Tutorial and Research Workshop on PERCEPTION AND INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGIES which was held in Kloster Irsee from June 19 to June 20, 2006 . The organizing committee consisted of: Elisabeth André, University of Augsburg , Germany , Laila Dybkjaer, University of Southern Denmark , Wolfgang Minker, Heiko Neumann and Michael Weber, all three from University of Ulm , Germany. Given the state of ongoing research in perceptive interfaces, we found it timely to organize a Tutorial and Research Workshop to discuss how to enhance natural language dialogue systems with perceptive capabilities. The URL of the workshop is: http://it.e-technik.uni-ulm.de/World/Research.DS/irsee-workshops/pit06/introduction.html The workshop proceedings have been published by Springer: http://www.springer.com/dal/home/generic/search/results?SGWID=1-40109-22-173660906-0 The workshop was a continuation of a successful series of workshops that started with an ISCA Tutorial and ResearchWorkshop on Multimodal Dialogue Systems in 1999. This workshop was followed by a second one focusing on mobile dialogue systems (IDS 2002) and a third one exploring the role of affect in dialogue (ADS 2004). As the previous workshops, the PIT workshop was organized in collaboration with SIGDial. SIGMEDIA plans to participate in the organization of a follow-up workshop in about 2 years focusing on a specific aspect related to natural language dialogue systems. The exact theme will be determined by the beginning of next year. SIGPARSE Annual Report, July 2006 --------------------------------- The main aim of SIGPARSE is to ensure the continuity of the biennial `International Workshop on Parsing Technologies' (IWPT) series. The last workshop in this series was the one with number , which was held in October 2005 in Vancouver, Canada. For the first time, IWPT was organized not as a standalone workshop but as a satellite event of a large conference, in this case the joint Human Language Technology/Empirical Methods in NLP (HLT/EMNLP) conference. This combination worked very well, both from a logistic point of view and for participation. IWPT 2005 was a quite succesful workshop both in terms of number of participants and quality of submitted papers. Invited speakers were Mari Ostendorf and Jill Burstein. Rob Malouf was program chair, Alon Lavie logistic arrangements chair, and Harry Bunt general chair. It was decided to change the name from Workshop to Conference, and to have the next (10th) one in 2007 Europe. Paola Marlo agreed to be the program chair. We will look for an opportunity to have ICPT 2007 in again in conjunction with a large conference. To facilitate its operation and the communication in the parsing community, a SIGPARSE website continues to be maintained at the University of Twente by Hendri Hondorp, and a mailing list at CMU operated by by Kenji Sagae. Harry Bunt, July 2006. 2005-2006 Annual Report SIGMORPHON (Computational Morphology and Phonology) Jason Eisner SIGPHON BECOMES SIGMORPHON! --------------------------- SIGMORPHON is ACL's special interest group for computational morphology, phonology, and phonetics. It was created as SIGPHON in 1994. In 2006, the membership voted overwhelmingly to expand the scope of the group beyond computational phonology. When proposing this change in last year's ACL report, we noted that no other ACL SIG covered morphology, whereas SIGPHON had prominently featured it in our last three workshops and their CFPs. Furthermore, there are at least as many morphologists as phonologists on SIGPHON's Executive Committee (Adam Albright, Jason Eisner, Eric Fosler-Lussier, Katrin Kirchhoff, Richard Wicentowski). The membership also voted to pass several minor procedural changes to the SIG's constitution. WORKSHOP -------- Our eighth biannual workshop was held at HLT-NAACL 2006 in New York. The program was chaired by Richard Wicentowski and Greg Kondrak and featured 9 peer-reviewed papers and an invited talk. Participation from linguistics departments was high. ONLINE ACTIVITIES ----------------- sigmorphon.org serves the community by maintaining a mailing list, past proceedings, and online bibliographies. We plan to advertise the SIG's expanded scope in order to recruit new members to the SIG and increase discussion on its mailing list. Moritz Neugebauer and Christian Monson have recently undertaken a substantial update of the bibliography's contents (see http://sigmorphon.uni-koeln.de/ for their work in progress). Report on the activities of the ACL Natural Language Software Registry, hosted at DFKI in Saarbrücken. There were no particular development for the NLSR in this reporting period. In the next months we will thinks in steps for updating the information included in the Registry so far. The information included in the Registry is still being made available within LT-World, the language technology information portal, also hosted at DFKI (http://www.lt-world.org/). Report for SIGMOL, Mathematics of Language, July 2006 Gerald Penn Our last bi-annual meeting, MoL-9, was co-located with the ESSLLI Conference on Formal Grammar (FG/MoL-05) at HCRC, University of Edinburgh, 5-7 August, 2005. Forty-one papers were submitted of which 20 were selected for the program. There were invited talks by Nicholas Asher, Uwe Moennich, and Mark Steedman. The proceedings for this meeting are currently under preparation, and will be published through CSLI Publications on-line. We are also shopping around for a journal in which to publish a special issue. MOL has also endorsed this year's ACL-COLING workshop on Tree-Adjoining Grammars (TAG+8). We are now taking bids for our 10th meeting in 2007, as well as nominations for the next president. 2007 also marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Chomsky's "Syntactic Structures". We will commemorate this at the 10th meeting as well. ACL ANTHOLOGY Report, July 2006 Steven Bird The ACL Anthology is a digital archive of research papers in computational linguistics, sponsored by the CL community, and freely available to all. It includes the Computational Linguistics journal, and proceedings of many conferences and workshops including: ACL, EACL, NAACL, ANLP, TINLAP, COLING, HLT, MUC, and Tipster. The anthology now contains just over 11,000 papers (up from 9365 papers twelve months ago), along with full-text search. Most of the papers are also indexed by Citeseer and scholar. google, helping the citation counts of ACL authors. The ACM Digital Library is creating rich metadata and doing full citation linking for all anthology materials. ADDITIONS OVER LAST 12 MONTHS: Proceedings from ACL-06, EACL-06, HLT-NAACL-06, HLT/EMNLP-05, IJCNLP-05, CL Journal 2004 (always one full year in arrears). PERSISTENT URLs: The ACL website supports persistent URLs for all papers that are resolved to a copy at the selected mirror site. These URLs have the form http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P99-1012, and they may be used for citation purposes (e.g. in BibTeX entries). FUTURE MATERIALS: Jason Eisner and Philipp Koehn have modified the ACL publication software to generate conference CD-ROMs using the same directory layout and file-naming conventions as the anthology. BibTeX files are automatically generated and made available to users. It is now much easier to incorporate new materials into the anthology. Conference proceedings are published in the anthology at the same time as the conference. The journal and any SIG workshops not held in conjunction with an ACL meeting will continue to require manual processing. Unfortunately this year's EACL meeting did not use the ACL publication software and the materials needed to be processed manually by the EACL publications team after the conference. The instructions for the publication software need to be updated to cover two further tasks: (i) obtaining the workshop identifiers from the editor, and (ii) uploading the materials to the anthology. ONGOING ACTIVITIES DIGITAL OBJECT IDENTIFIERS: These are akin to ISBN numbers, but apply to individual papers. In collaboration with the ACM we will assign DOIs to each anthology item in the coming year. The nominal cost for DOI assignment is $1 per article, or $10k for the whole anthology. The ACM will cover the cost for past materials, while the ACL will cover the cost of DOI assignment for anthology materials from 2006 onwards. CONVERSION OF PAST CONFERENCE MATERIALS: Several conferences in 2003 and 2004 produced electronic materials that are not compatible with the anthology. These materials are hosted on the site as they appeared on CD-ROM, but they still need to be converted to the anthology layout and naming scheme for consistency. SITE DESIGN: The site design is simple and functional; user input on improving the design would be welcomed. REQUESTED MATERIALS: Anyone with hardcopy of MUC 1998 proceedings or a CDROM copy of HLT 2002 is requested to contact the editor. TOPICAL INDEXING: The existence of persistent URLs makes it easy for individuals and special interest groups to set up annotated bibliographies with pointers to papers in the anthology. Moreover, the community's own text categorization techniques ought to be applied to its own text collection. The anthology site should link to any well-curated, comprehensive categorizations of its content, so that members of the CL community can benefit from them. ACL Secretary report Given that there is no separate webmaster at this time, my report includes the webmaster report as well. The Web site has been moved to www.1and1.com (thanks to James Sweeney) and has been working without incidents since day 1. The page was redesigned by James who use the Joomla software that makes maintaining the site relatively straightforward. I was in charge of collecting the votes for the 2006 ACL Lifetime Achievement Award (LTA). The winner will be announced at the conference. The exec was also in charge with picking the general chair and program co-chairs for ACL 2007. These are John Carroll (general chair) and Annie Zaenen (program co-chair). One more co-chair is in the process of being selected. A new archivist was recruited. Eric Fosler-Lussier of Ohio-State University will take over Richard Sproat's position. A new SIG was approved. Adam Kilgarriff will be the first chair or the new SIGWAC (Special Interest group on Web As Corpus). The latest issue of the ACL newsletter was sent out in March - it can be found here: http://www.aclweb.org/archive/Newsletter-06.doc The minutes of the ACL exec January 2006 phone meeting are here: http://www.aclweb.org/archive/private/ACLMINUTES06-1 (password protected) A pay raise for Priscilla was approved by the exec. The exec approved the use of ACL money topay for DOI identifiers for our publications. Dragomir R. Radev Program Committee Chairs Report Jeff Bilmes, University of Washington - bilmes@ee.washington.edu Jennifer Chu-Carroll, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center - jencc@us.ibm.com Mark Sanderson, University of Sheffield - m.sanderson@shef.ac.uk 1. Schedule December 16, 2005 Full Paper submissions due February 17, 2006 PC meeting February 23, 2006 Full Paper notification of acceptance March 3, 2006 Short Paper submissions due April 6, 2006 Short Paper notification of acceptance April 17, 2006 Camera-ready full/short papers due June 4-9, 2006 Conference 2. Overview remarks (Note that this 2006 report is adapted from the structure of the 2004 post-conference report written by Dumais, Marcu and Roukos.) The co-chairs represent the three main fields covered by HLT/NAACL 2006 – Jeff Bilmes (Speech), Jennifer Chu-Carroll (NLP) and Mark Sanderson (IR). We generally divided tasks such as suggestions and recruiting of reviewers, publicity, and assignment to area chairs by discipline. For those tasks that cut across the disciplines, for some tasks we found the work could be divided equally among us, such as determining the final schedule, for others we assigned someone to lead the work: Jennifer, organization of PC meeting; Jeff, review software; Mark, final report. We think that this arrangement worked well in general, but we do recognize that because NLP dominates the programme of the conference, Jennifer Chu-Carroll ended up with more work to do in each of the shared tasks. 3. Paper reviewing process We think the paper reviewing process went very well. The quality of full-paper and short paper submissions was high and submissions were up on previous years. We agree with the 2004 PC chairs’ view that this is largely due to the quality of makeup of the program committee, and recognition of HLT/NAACL as an outlet for good work at the intersection of NLP, IR and Speech. It is clear though that for IR and Speech, only work at that intersection (e.g. QA, language models for Speech) is being submitted in numbers to HLT/NAACL, more core IR or core Speech papers were not. Particularly for IR this can in part be attributed to ACM SIGIR’s submission deadline being just 6 weeks later than HLT/NAACL’s deadline. As in 2004, reviewing was done using a two-tiered system, Senior Programme Committee (SPC) members and Reviewers. Twenty eight SPC were responsible for a topical area and coordinated the reviewing process (recruiting reviewers, assigning papers to reviewers, managing reviews and attending the PC meeting) in those areas. The SPC are listed at the end of this section. The same review committee handled both Long papers (8 pages) and Late-breaking papers and posters (4 pages). The Co-Chairs made an initial assignment of submissions to the SPC. There was a face-to-face PC meeting for Long papers. Despite the different disciplines, at the review meeting, a common view on what was acceptable emerged quickly at the meeting. Final decisions for Late-breaking papers were made by conference call. Some Late-breaking papers were selected to be presented orally and others as posters. Reviewing for both Full and Late-breaking papers was blind. Long paper reviewing was carried out over the Dec/Jan holidays with a period of discussion in early February. Late-breaking papers were due after the decisions for Long papers were announced, thus allowing people to resubmit if desired (some were encouraged to do so by the initial reviewers). We found the reviewing process particularly the system of decentralizing management of reviews to the Senior PC worked very well. Unlike the experiences of the 2004 PC chairs, we found the reviewing software to work well, like in 2004, we also used the START conference reviewing software and found it to fit the work flow of our reviewing process well. There was excellent customer support. Based on the distribution of submissions from 2004, we selected twenty eight SPC. Some chairs covered the same nominal area, which we did to balance the anticipated load. There was a slight over recruitment of SPC chairs in IR, here load was balanced across long and short papers, where some chairs took more of a role in the short paper submissions and others in the long. In general the load balancing worked well, and we tried to assign no more than 15 Long Papers and 10 Short Papers to each SPC member. After the PC meeting, SPC Chairs were invited to nominate a best paper candidate from the papers submitted in their field. A total of seven nominations were received. Within those nominations were four papers first authored by students. The nominated papers were split into two short lists for best paper and best student paper. All SPC chairs were canvassed for their opinions on the papers and votes from them were tallied. Best student paper had a clear winner, for best paper, there was a tie and as an additional complication, one the papers was co-authored by an SPC. Therefore, the tied papers were read by one of the program chairs and a conference call was held between them to decide on the eventual winner. The Best Paper Award for HLT/NAACL 2006 went to: Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar Induction Based on Structural Zeros by Mehryar Mohri (Google Research) and Brian Roark (OGI and OHSU) The Best Student Paper Award went to Prototype-Driven Learning for Sequence Models by Aria Haghighi and Dan Klein (UC Berkeley). We invited two Keynote Speakers who together we thought best encompassed the different disciplines of the conference. The speakers were Joshua Goodman (Microsoft Research), Email and Spam and Spim and Spat; and Diane Litman (University of Pittsburgh) Spoken Dialogue for Intelligent Tutoring Systems: Opportunities and Challenges. The Senior Program Committee, Affiliations were: Johan Bos University of Roma "La Sapienza" Jamie Callan Carnegie Mellon University Joyce Chai Michigan State University Jason Eisner Johns Hopkins University Mark Gales Cambridge University Fredric Gey University of California Berkeley Roxana Girju University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Mark Hasegawa-Johnson University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Julia Hirschberg Columbia University Alon Lavie Carnegie Mellon University Wei-Ying Ma Microsoft Research Asia Mehryar Mohri Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences & Google Research Marius Pasca Google Gerald Penn University of Toronto Dragomir Radev University of Michigan Owen Rambow CCLS, Columbia University Steve Renals University of Edinburgh Stefan Riezler Google Rohini Srihari SUNY Buffalo Amanda Stent SUNY Stony Brook Michael Strube EML Research Christoph Tillmann IBM T.J. Watson Research Center Peter Turney National Research Council Canada Ellen Voorhees NIST Ralph Weischedel BBN Technologies Fei Xia University of Washington ChengXiang Zhai University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Ming Zhou Microsoft Research Asia 4. Summary of paper quality and acceptances The number of submissions increased substantially over the 2004 conference, and the quality of submissions was excellent. We received 257 submissions for full papers, of which 62 were accepted (25% acceptance rate). We received 127 submissions for the late-breaking papers track, of which 52 were accepted (41%). 5. Publications In the 2004, the PC Chairs highlighted problems with coordinating responsibilities and information with the publication chairs. Assuming that changes were put in place since 2004, we found this process to run well in 2006, although there was some confusion between the chairs and others in the organizing committee who was responsible for some of the tasks, such as setting the schedule and recruiting of session chairs. 6. Areas for Improvement HLT/NAACL is still in its infancy, but it is certainly pleasing to have a strong growth in submissions from the last running of this conference from three years ago. We used the knowledge of all three chairs to solicit submissions from as many parts of our three communities as possible. While there were a many interdisciplinary papers submitted and accepted, it is certainly the case that much of the conference’s program was dominated by NLP-centered topics with little direct interest to IR and Speech research. We think this make up of the conference also reflects the view of the conference in the three research communities: it isn’t viewed as a forum for core IR or Speech papers. However, if it is the goal of HLT/NAACL to improve the numbers of IR and Speech papers submitted, quite how this situation can be improved isn’t entirely clear to us. For example, within the IR field, the 2006 PC chair recruited well known members of the IR community to the SPC covering a wide range of topic areas and advertised the conference extensively. However, because of the dates of the conference, submissions were being solicited in the same time-frame of SIGIR, which harmed submission numbers and the perception of the conference in IR as a forum for “NLP-related IR” research persists. It has been noted that acceptance rates in the IR and Speech areas appear to have been tougher than in the NLP areas. However, both Speech and IR PC chairs have reviewed the papers that failed and concluded that the papers were just not good enough to be acceptable to a conference such as HLT/NAACL. 7. Profiles of Submissions Below we summarize the makeup of the Full and Short paper submissions, in terms of international representation and in terms of topic distributions. Full Short Submitted Accepted Submitted Accepted Area 11 2 4 1 Speech Acoustic Modeling 18 4 17 7 NLP Discourse/Dialogue/Multimodality 19 5 7 2 IR General Information Retrieval, including Web Search 21 4 9 7 NLP Generation/Summarization 39 9 15 7 NLP Information Extraction 12 1 14 3 NLP/Speech Language Modeling 18 3 9 4 IR Language Processing for Information Retrieval 7 2 3 2 Speech Lexical/Pronunciation Modeling 26 10 15 5 NLP Machine Translation 37 12 12 7 NLP Parsing/Grammar/Morphology 20 4 9 2 NLP/IR Question Answering 33 7 12 4 NLP Semantics Submitted full paper keywords # Keywords # Keywords 3 Acoustic Modeling 2 Multi lingual speech recognition 21 Corpora 2 Multimodal representations and processing 1 Cross language information retrieval 3 New Approaches to ASR 6 Dialogue systems 23 NLP applications 13 Discourse 28 Parsing 9 Discriminative Training 1 Phonology 10 Evaluation 23 Question answering 2 Formal Models for IR 1 Rich transcription 20 Information extraction 5 Semantics 3 Information retrieval models 1 Sentiment analysis 3 Interactive IR 9 Speech based interfaces 1 Language identification 1 Speech recognition 6 Language modeling 8 Text alignment 5 Language resources 5 Text generation 1 Learning techniques for language processing 1 Text mining 2 Lexical and knowledge acquisition 15 Text summarization 3 Lexical/Pronunciation Modeling 3 Topic Detection and Tracking 13 Machine translation 1 Web information retrieval 2 Mathematical models of language 3 Word sense disambiguation 2 Morphology Full papers, countries (of contact author only): 3 Australia 1 Jordan 2 Bangladesh 2 Netherlands 1 Brazil 1 Nigeria 5 Canada 1 Pakistan 6 China 1 Poland 4 Czech Republic 1 Portugal 1 Denmark 3 Republic of Korea 2 Finland 1 Russian Federation 5 France 2 Singapore 11 Germany 6 Spain 2 Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China 1 Sweden 5 India 1 Taiwan Province of China 2 Iran (Islamic Republic of) 1 Thailand 2 Ireland 3 Turkey 3 Israel 18 United Kingdom 5 Italy 147 United States 12 Japan Short Paper Keywords 3 Acoustic Modeling 1 Multi lingual Retrieval 11 Corpora 1 Multimodal representations and processing 5 Dialogue systems 15 NLP applications 11 Discourse 1 New Approaches to ASR 1 Discriminative Training 9 Parsing 5 Evaluation 1 Psycholinguistics 1 Evaluation in IR 12 Question answering 6 Information extraction 2 Sentiment analysis 2 Information retrieval models 6 Speech based interfaces 2 Language identification 2 Speech summarization 7 Language modeling 1 Text alignment 3 Language resources 5 Text summarization 1 Learning techniques for language processing 1 Topic Detection and Tracking 8 Machine translation 1 Web information retrieval 2 Morphology Short papers, countries (of contact author only): 1 Brazil 17 Japan 9 Canada 1 Netherlands 3 China 1 Portugal 1 Finland 2 Republic of Korea 4 Germany 1 Singapore 1 Greece 3 Spain 4 Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China 1 Sweden 1 Hungary 2 Switzerland 5 India 1 Taiwan Province of China 1 Iran (Islamic Republic of) 1 Thailand 2 Ireland 7 United Kingdom 2 Israel 54 United States 1 Italy Roll Ups by Area (NLP, IR, Speech) Area Full (accepted) Short (accepted) Speech 4 3 NLP/Speech 1 3 NLP 46 37 NLP/IR 4 2 IR 8 6 SIGLEX is the Special Interest Group on the Lexicon, providing an umbrella for research interests on lexical issues ranging from lexicography and the use of online dictionaries to computational lexical semantics. SIGLEX is also the umbrella organization for Senseval/Semeval - the evaluation exercise for systems for the semantic analysis of text. The following ACL members are currently serving as SIGLEX officers: President: Rada Mihalcea, University of North Texas Secretary: Ted Pedersen, University of Minnesota, Duluth Executive Board: Francesca Bertagna, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale (ILC-CNR) Stefan Evert, Universitat Stuttgart Katrin Erk, Saarland University Jimmy Lin, University of Maryland Diana McCarthy, University of Sussex Claudia Soria, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale (ILC-CNR) Board Member with Special Portfolio/Webmaster: Ken Litkowski, CL Research One of the main events for 2006 is the preparation of the next Senseval/Semeval evaluations. The name change (Senseval -> Semeval) is meant to reflect the wider range of semantic phenomena covered by these SIGLEX evaluations that take place every three years. The event preparations are led by the Senseval/Semeval co-chairs Richard Wicentowski (Swarthmore College), Lluis Marquez (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya), and Eneko Agirre (University of Basque Country). At the time of writing, the call for tasks has just closed, with 24 different tasks being submitted, reflecting the increased interest of the community in this event. During 2005-2006, SIGLEX has endorsed the following events: * Interdisciplinary Workshop on the Identification and Representation of Verb Features and Verb Classes : Saarland University, Saarbruecken, Germany, February 28 - March 1, 2005 * Applications of GermaNet II: Workshop of the GLDV AK Lexikographie: held in conjunction with the Biennial Conference of the Society of Linguistics, University of Bonn, Germany, 30 March - 1 April, 2005 * Third International Workshop on Generative Approaches to the Lexicon, Geneva, Switzerland, May 19-21, 2005 * Workshop on Deep Lexical Acquisition, ACL 2005, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 30 June 2005 * 3rd ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on Prepositions, EACL 2006, Trento, Italy, April 3, 2006, * Multi-Word-Expressions in a Multilingual Context, EACL 2006, Trento, Italy, April 3, 2006 * Making Sense of Sense: Bringing Psycholinguistics and Computational Linguistics Together, EACL 2006, Trento, Italy, April 4, 2006 * Workshop on Multiword Expressions: Identifying and Exploiting Underlying Properties, COLING/ACL 2006, Sydney, Australia, July 23, 2006 * Workshop on Linguistic Distances, COLING/ACL 2006, Sydney, Australia, July 23, 2006 Computational Linguistics Editor's Report for 2005-2006 Robert Dale 1 OVERVIEW The journal maintains its position as a high-impact publication vehicle with a strong reputation. Our submissions were up for the reported year, but our speed of reviewing was down. The major issue this year has been a coninuation of our copy-editing and typesetting problems. MIT Press switched typesetters to an operation based in the Philippines; during the first year we had various problems with typesetting, most of which have now been resolved but some of which still remain; in particular, we have yet to obtain a bug free set of macros for our authors to use. Then, our long-standing freelance copy editor resigned to take up another position, and MIT Press switched to using the typesetter for copy-editing. Although this has some apparent advantages it has also been something of a nightmare, with significant problems arising in the copy editing process. We are still trying to resolve a number of issues here. Some minor changes to the journal: - At the end of each year, we now print the names of all the non-editorial-board reviewers who helped out that year. - The 'Last Words' is in the process of switching from one column per year to one per issue, as of the first issue in 2007. - Just after Coling/ACL, we will announce a new category of 'review papers'. 2 SPECIAL ISSUES One close to appearance: 'Question Answering in Restricted Domains'. The quality of the papers received for this was not great, so we will end up with three papers; this will probably appear as a special section rather than being an entire special issue. Two others with closing submission dates around now: - Prepositions in Applications - Semantic Role Labeling 3 STATISTICS Time to first decision for new submissions: For 2001 papers: 110 days For 2002 papers: 127 days For 2003 papers: 129 days For 2004 papers: 131 days For 2005 papers: 146 days 80 Submissions consisting of 62 New (+3 Resubmissions of a new submission in 2005), 14 Resubmissions (+1 Resubmission of a resubmission in 2005). Here's the traditional 'disposition by first decision' table: Decision 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999 Submitted 62 53 65 65 57 64 47 Accept 13 11 16 23 18 15 13 Reject 29 22 20 20 12 11 9 Resubmit as squib 0 3 2 2 2 1 3 Revise and resubmit 37 23 25 18 22 27 12 Withdrawn 0 1 0 2 3 3 2 No decision 1 2 2 0 0 7 8 This looks like our numbers of submissions are fairly static with a drop in 2004, but that's not the case: since 2004, we now factor out resubmissions of papers initially submitted in earlier years whereas previously these were counted in the total number of submissions. This means our number of submissions is actually up. Here's the breakdown by country of first author for the paper submitted in 2003 and 2004: 2003 2004 2005 Europe Bulgaria 1 0 0 Finland 1 2 0 France 3 1 1 Germany 4 2 4 Iran 2 1 0 Ireland 0 1 0 Israel 1 2 0 Italy 1 1 0 Netherlands 1 1 1 Poland 1 1 0 Portugal 2 0 1 Romania 0 1 0 Slovenia 0 1 1 Spain 2 5 4 Sweden 2 0 0 Switzerland 0 1 2 Turkey 1 0 1 United Kingdom 7 8 14 North America Canada 5 4 6 Mexico 1 0 0 United States 21 12 25 Asia China 0 3 3 Hong Kong 3 0 1 India 1 1 1 Japan 2 1 0 Iran 0 0 1 Korea 0 1 1 New Zealand 0 0 1 Singapore 0 0 2 Taiwan 2 0 0 Thailand 1 0 0 Vietnam 0 1 0 South America Brazil 1 2 0 Total 65 53 76 At the time of writing, for 2006 we have the following: 31 Submissions and Resubmissions consisting of 18 New, 12 Resubmissions (+1 Resubmission of a resubmission in 2006) Ave time to decision for New submissions: 66 days 2006 Decisions: Submitted 31 Accept 4 Reject 3 Revise and resubmit 4 No decision yet 20 (Note: At this time in 2004, we had 42 submissions) ----End Report of COLING/ACL 2006 Publications Chair As the publications chair for this conference, I have directly benefitted from the hard work of the previous publications chairs Jason Eisner and Philipp Koehn, who have prepared a set of excellent tools which, when used in combination with data from START, streamline the publication process considerably. I have made certain adjustments to the scripts and various templates to customize them for A4 size and with appropriate headers to suit this year's conference. 1. Main conference publications The printing of main conference proceedings is different this year. As we step forward to protect our environment, we are moving away from hardcopies. Participants do not get hardcopy proceedings, unless they explicity request during registration and pay extra for them. It turned out that out of 600+ pre-registered participants, only 100+ had opted for them. The demand for the printed companion volume was even less, and considering the budget, it was finally decided not to print hardcopies of the companion volume. 2. Workshop publications All 16 workshops have printed proceedings. The publication tools were distributed to the workshop organisers in advance. They were responsible to assemble their own volumes, for which I had done some overall final editing and proofreading to fit everything harmoniously together. All proceedings covers were designed by the local organizing committee. 3. CDROM All papers in the main conference and workshops are available on CDROM, which are distributed to all participants. We have only included pdf files this time as we have a lot of papers and it happened that the ps files alone had almost taken up the full capacity of a CD. Moreover, the conversion of files from pdf to ps had not been smooth at all (see technical issues below). All papers are also expected to be available at the ACL Anthology by the time of the conference. 4. Technical issues (a) Deviant paper formatting (e.g. paper size, font embedding, etc.) has always been a problem, and it is no exception this time. About one-third of the main conference papers and posters were incorrectly sized, although it has been emphasised again and again that A4 size is required. I had to ask those authors to re-submit a correctly sized version. (b) The font-embedding problem had been a frustrating one. Nimbus fonts cannot be retained when using pdflatex to concatenate individual pdf files. As my system did not seem to have tetex-3.0, I had to find work-arounds by manipulating the font files and the font-mapping files. (c) The conversion of the pdf files to ps files was not smooth. Workshop organisers had reported problems of various kinds using acroread for the conversion, such as missing pages. I myself also experienced unpredictable behaviour of the conversion of papers with Asian fonts, not only with acroread but also with pdf2ps. It seems Acrobat Professional is more reliable but it works on windows. (d) The publication tools/scripts are unix/linux-based. Several workshop organisers do not use unix and therefore have problems running the scripts to assemble their workshop proceedings. I had asked them to supply the necessary materials (e.g. frontmatters, paper ordering, etc.) and run the scripts, and let them proofread the product. (e) The most unexpected hiccup, after all, comes from the printing house in the last minute. Although they managed to solve the problem by changing to some more tolerant printers (as they called them), they had to ask the local organisers to proofread the printouts. Thanks to Robert Dale and his team for doing this extra work in the last minute. 5. Suggestions and discussions (a) It might be better to ask authors to submit all source files, ps, pdf of the final papers, in case the publications chair needs a quick fix to formatting problems, and it saves the risky process of converting pdf to ps. (b) We should consider whether we will go on to print hardcopy proceedings in future conferences. The problem this year is we could not decide on the quantity until very late, after the early registration period. This introduced uncertainty in the publication process. (c) I wish to re-echo the suggestion made by Jason and Philipp last year for centralized computing. It is important to make sure the up-to-date and correctly configured and mutually compatible software needed to run the scripts are available, for the publication process to go smoothly. The publications chair and the workshop organisers should have access to them. (d) Early communications with the printing house is apparently important. Obviously what can be printed on simple office printers is not necessarily printable elsewhere. Olivia Kwong July 2006 ACL Treasurer's Report -- July 2006 Kathy McCoy GENERAL BANK STATEMENT REPORT The account balances continue to fluctuate especially because of the large number of conferences what we are involved with. I tried to pick a reasonable place to show the balances. These are rough estimates of the accounts as of June 30, 2006. (Many thanks to Mike Rosner who oversees our European accounts and provided the information associated with them.) (SLIDE) ___________________________________________________ Account Balances -- 6/30/06 Converted to base currency: US dollar As of 6/30/2006 Account Total Wachovia Money Market Account $259,197.54 Swiss Bonds $159,993.16 Wachovia CAP Account $72,004.84 Maltese Bank Euro Account $51,513.00 NAACL -- First Union Checking $45,101.80 Wachovia - Walker Fund $29,847.82 French Bank European Account $29,768.83 EACL Shadow Account -- Savings $11,943.28 All Others $4,788.80 Total Assets $664,159.07 ___________________________________________________ Notice that we have a number of accounts -- about half in the US held at Wachovia Bank and about half in Europe (Switzerland, France, Malta) which are overseen for ACL by Mike Rosner. The two biggest accounts are our "savings" accounts and both are fairly stable. We might think about putting much of the Wachovia Money Market Account in longer term investments that give us higher interest. Mike Rosner has just done something similar for the European Accounts. Most of our activity is in the Wachovia CAP account. This account fluctuates quite a bit over the year since this is the account that all of the credit card payments come into (and is our checking account). (Actually the lows aren't quite as low as is shown here!) SLIDE: Net-Worth-Accts-Over-Time-6-06.pdf SLIDE: Net-Worth-Over-Time-6-06.pdf (can't show in ACL Treasurer's Report -- July 2006 Kathy McCoy GENERAL BANK STATEMENT REPORT The account balances continue to fluctuate especially because of the large number of conferences what we are involved with. I tried to pick a reasonable place to show the balances. These are rough estimates of the accounts as of June 30, 2006. (Many thanks to Mike Rosner who oversees our European accounts and provided the information associated with them.) (SLIDE) ___________________________________________________ Account Balances -- 6/30/06 Converted to base currency: US dollar As of 6/30/2006 Account Total Wachovia Money Market Account $259,197.54 Swiss Bonds $159,993.16 Wachovia CAP Account $72,004.84 Maltese Bank Euro Account $51,513.00 NAACL -- First Union Checking $45,101.80 Wachovia - Walker Fund $29,847.82 French Bank European Account $29,768.83 EACL Shadow Account -- Savings $11,943.28 All Others $4,788.80 Total Assets $664,159.07 ___________________________________________________ Notice that we have a number of accounts -- about half in the US held at Wachovia Bank and about half in Europe (Switzerland, France, Malta) which are overseen for ACL by Mike Rosner. The two biggest accounts are our "savings" accounts and both are fairly stable. We might think about putting much of the Wachovia Money Market Account in longer term investments that give us higher interest. Mike Rosner has just done something similar for the European Accounts. Most of our activity is in the Wachovia CAP account. This account fluctuates quite a bit over the year since this is the account that all of the credit card payments come into (and is our checking account). (Actually the lows aren't quite as low as is shown here!) SLIDE: Net-Worth-Accts-Over-Time-6-06.pdf SLIDE: Net-Worth-Over-Time-6-06.pdf (can't show in text) By looking at the way the net worth changes over time from 1/1/02 to 6/30/06, we can see quite a bit of fluctuation. You can see that our bank balances remain pretty healthy with a high in July 2003 reaching almost $828,000 and a low at the end of 2004 of about $471,000. (Slightly different numbers than I showed last year because the conversion rate it is using now is as of 12/31/2005.) The good news is that the trend is a positive one. We are definitely healthy. (SLIDE) ___________________________________________________ Income Versus Expenses by Category Converted to base currency: US dollar 1/1/2005 Through 6/30/2006 Income Categories Total ACL-05 $308,588.42 HLT-NAACL-06 $259,540.00 Membership $145,056.33 EMNLP/HLT-05 $115,040.91 Publications Income $24,902.83 HLT-NAACL-04 $18,796.02 ACL-04 $14,504.60 Sig-Dial-05 $9,530.93 ACL Offices $8,205.87 Investment Income $7,360.77 From Walker $3,979.00 ACL-06 $3,000.00 SigMol-05 $2,522.94 Funds $2,063.04 Misc Deposit $1,168.39 NAACL Offices $500.01 SIG-MOL-05 $200.00 EACL Shadow Income $114.03 Total Income Categories $925,074.09 Expense Categories ACL-2005 $255,294.97 EMNLP/HLT-2005 $116,409.62 HLT-NAACL-2006 $98,566.17 ACL Office $85,101.17 ACL-2006 $51,729.62 CL Journal $50,117.19 Publication $31,130.64 ACL-2007 $23,853.25 Memberships $16,752.19 NAACL-2006 $11,196.51 NAACL Administration $10,536.15 Anthology $8,573.80 Account Adjustment $3,979.00 EACL Shadow $3,799.50 ACL-2003 $3,333.75 SigDial-2005 $3,209.52 Sig-Mol-2005 $2,826.87 WPT-2005 $2,824.31 ACL Exec $2,723.82 EACL-2006 $1,842.03 Fund Expenses $1,037.44 IWPT-2005 $651.37 Misc $600.00 DUC-2005 $539.62 NAACL-2007 $450.60 ACL-2004 $397.50 Sig-Dial-2005 $344.17 Taxes $303.91 Bank Charges $300.00 EACL Administration $261.63 Walker Fund Bank Charge $217.00 ACL Conferences $214.93 SigNLL $194.19 Priscilla Travel $160.00 SigMol-2005 $108.56 NAACL Office $72.00 EACL $35.35 SIGHAN $34.99 Total Expense Categories $789,723.34 Grand Total $135,350.75 ___________________________________________________ This file gives you a year slice of the categories that we are making/spending money in. Note that last year this samse slice was a loss. REPORT ON ACL2004 I am sorry to report that we still do not have this conference finalized. I am working on it with a relatively new bookkeeper. After a couple of missteps, we are getting close. But, the accounting is complicated because of issues with exchange rates. I hope to have it resolved soon (sig accounts depend on it). SIG SHADOW REPORT Because so much is resting on the conferences and associated workshops, it does not make sense to report at this time. WALKER FUND DRIVE As you saw with email, I would like to try to raise level of funding in the Walker fund (which is not paying out very well). Question: Can we seed the Walker Fund with some of our surplus (e.g., add $20,000)? And/or can we give an incentive for people who contribute (like double their contribution)? Or both, perhaps add $10,000 and offer double contributions. MEMBERSHIP ISSUE AT COLING-ACL-2006 As you may be aware, there was a bit of an oversight with the registration system and it turns out that membership was not required or encouraged by coming to this conference. This is really bad since being joint with Coling gives us a great opportunity to pick up new members. I vote that we give everyone who is attending this conference a free year membership to the ACL. This was suggested by Martha when the mistake was realized, but I was hesitant not knowing how well this conference was going to do and not yet knowing what the books actually looked like. Now I am assured that the conference will make money and that our bank account is quite healthy. I would not record this anywhere (i.e., the memberships will just be given with no accounting showing what it was paid for with) and we just act like it was part of registering for the conference all along. I do not want to give up the opportunity to gain these new members and I believe it would be a good use of our funds (and would be consistent with ACL policy which requires membership for ACL conference attendance). COLING/ACL 2006 Program Co-Chairs: Claire Cardie Pierre Isabelle - Pierre and I began talking by phone last May of 2005 to determine various aspects of the joint conference. - PLANNING MEETING AT ACL-2005. We met with Nicoletta Calzolari (general chair), and Robert Dale and Cecile Paris (local arrangements) at ACL-2005 in Ann Arbor to discuss the goals and general structure of the conference. In addition, we presented our ideas for the conference at a lunch meeting with representatives from the ACL executive committee and the ICCL, which runs COLING conferences. The main conference program will be fairly standard for an ACL conference: - parallel sessions - invited speakers or panels, one per day - poster sessions - demos (demo chair: James Curran) At these meetings, it was decided that we would try to take advantage of the conference's location in Asia to highlight papers focusing on Asian language processing, possibly in a separate session of the main conference. - PAPERS+POSTERS. In order to meet the combined desires of the ICCL and the ACL executive committee, we opted for a single submission and reviewing process for papers and posters. Papers were submitted to one of two categories: the REGULAR PAPER category or the POSTER category. Authors had to designate one of these categories at submission time. Although both categories of submission were the same maximum length, the presentation format would vary --- regular papers would be presented during one of the parallel paper sessions at the conference, and poster presentations would be repeated several times before small groups of people at one of the conference poster sessions. Regular papers are most appropriate for presenting substantial research results, while posters are more appropriate for presenting an ongoing research effort. Importantly for ACL, regular papers and poster papers would need to appear in separate volumes of the proceedings; and the acceptance rate for regular papers would need to stay below 25%. Importantly for ICCL, the combined acceptance rate among regular and poster papers should be around 40%. In spite of the guidelines we placed in the call for papers and on the review form for each category of submission , the distinction caused some confusion among both authors and reviewers. In addition, the vast majority of authors opted for paper presentations (see below). - CALL FOR PAPERS AND POSTERS. The call for papers and posters went out in early October. Handouts were included in conference materials at HLT-EMNLP in Vancouver. Richard Power offered to coordinate a mentoring service for authors from regions of the world where English is not the language of scientific exchange. - SCHEDULE. We created and basically stayed on the following schedule: February 15 (weds) reviewers recruited February 28 (tues) submissions arrive March 1 (weds) papers assigned to primary track/area March 1-4 (weds-sun) reviewer bidding phase March 5 (mon) initial assignment of reviewers to papers using START March 7 (weds) final assignment of reviewers to papers by area chairs March 8 (thurs) reviewing stage begins April 17 (mon) reviews due April 17-24 (tues-mon) e-mail/START discussion amongst reviewers and area chairs on "disagreement" papers April 25-27 (tues-thurs) area chair discussion/decisions on accept/reject; paper/poster Fri, April 28 author notification - AREA CHAIRS. Based on submission numbers from ACL 2005 (436 submissions) and ACL 2004 (351 submissions), we prepared for 500 submissions. We establised 19 areas and recruited 20 area chairs (two for the machine translation area, which had 56 submissions in 2005). Johan Bos (University of Edinburgh) Jason Chang (National Tsing Hua University) David Chiang (USC Information Sciences Institute) Eva Hajicova (Charles University) Chu-Ren Huang (Academia Sinica) Martin Kay (Stanford University) Emiel Krahmer (Tilburg University) Roland Kuhn (National Research Council of Canada) Lillian Lee (Cornell University) Yuji Matsumoto (Nara Institute of Technology) Dan Moldovan (University of Texas) Mark-Jan Nederhof (University of Groningen) Hwee Tou Ng (National University of Singapore) John Prager (IBM Watson Research Center) Anoop Sarkar (Simon Fraser University Donia Scott (Open University UK) Simone Teufel (University of Cambridge) Benjamin Tsou (City University, Hong Kong) Ming Zhou (Microsoft Beijing) ChengXiang Zhai (University of Illinois) - SUBMISSIONS. We got more submissions than expected --- 628 vs. ~500. # paper submissions: 558 (88.9%) # poster submissions: 70 (11.1%) Submission stats by area, showing the expected vs. the actual number of submissions are below. AREA expected # actual # of subs of subs Phonology, Word Segmentation, Morphology; POS tagging, chunking 40 35 Grammars/syntax 15 16 Parsing 25 45 Lexical Semantics 10 28 WSD 30 20 Inference, pragmatics 20 47 Coreference, Discourse, Dialog, Prosody and Multi-modality 45 38 Speech and Language Modeling 40 25 Machine Learning methods 50 22 Language resources, corpus annotation 10 22 Machine Translation and Multilinguality 60 81 Information retrieval and text classification, including sentiment analysis 10 56 Information Extraction 45 56 Question-Answering 20 19 Summarization 25 20 Generation 25 12 NLP applications and tools (e.g. tutoring) 20 39 Asian languages 15 47 Totals 505 628 As a result, we made IR its own area, and recruited ChengXiang Zhai (University of Illinois) as its area chair. In addition, many more reviewers needed to be recruited, 384 in all. - SUBMISSION STATS BY COUNTRY/REGION. Note that these numbers were computed AFTER a number of papers were withdrawn or rejected without review. We received submissions from 40+ countries: 39% from 13 countries in Asia, 29% from 17 countries in Europe, 25% from Canada and the United States, 4% from Australia and New Zealand, less than 1% from South America (Brazil) and from Africa (South Africa and Tunisia), 3% from 4 countries in the Middle East. Asia================================================== 15 countries 266/616: 43% of submissions CHINA: 55 (8.93%) HONGKONG: 8 (1.30%) INDIA: 11 (1.79%) JAPAN: 107 (17.37%) MALAYSIA: 2 (0.32%) PAKISTAN: 1 (0.16%) PHILIPPINES: 1 (0.16%) REPUBLIC-OF-KOREA: 13 (2.11%) SINGAPORE: 20 (3.25%) SRILANKA: 3 (0.49%) TAIWAN: 18 (2.92%) THAILAND: 4 (0.65%) TURKEY: 1 (0.16%) AUSTRALIA: 22 (3.57%) NEWZEALAND: 1 (0.16%) Europe================================================== 17 countries 177/616= 29% AUSTRIA: 3 (0.49%) CZECHREPUBLIC: 7 (1.14%) FINLAND: 2 (0.32%) FRANCE: 34 (5.52%) GERMANY: 36 (5.84%) GREECE: 3 (0.49%) HUNGARY: 1 (0.16%) IRELAND: 8 (1.30%) ITALY: 9 (1.46%) NETHERLANDS: 2 (0.32%) PORTUGAL: 4 (0.65%) ROMANIA: 1 (0.16%) RUSSIANFEDERATION: 1 (0.16%) SPAIN: 17 (2.76%) SWEDEN: 6 (0.97%) SWITZERLAND: 4 (0.65%) UNITED-KINGDOM: 6 (0.97%) UNITEDKINGDOM: 32 (5.19%) ***dup South America ============================================= 2/616= <1% BRAZIL: 2 (0.32%) North America ============================================= 153/616= 25% CANADA: 13 (2.11%) UNITED-STATES: 140 (22.73%) Middle East ================================================ 4 countries 16/616= 3% IRAN: 3 (0.49%) ISRAEL: 11 (1.79%) SAUDIARABIA: 1 (0.16%) UNITED-ARAB-EMIRATES: 1 (0.16%) Africa ===================================================== 2 countries 2/616= <1% SOUTHAFRICA: 1 (0.16%) TUNISIA: 1 (0.16%) - CONFERENCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM. As in previous ACL conferences, we used the START system to manage submissions and reviews. Things generally went well and we got good support from Rich Gerber. - BIDDING. One new component of the reviewing process for Coling/ACL was "bidding" for papers by reviewers. This had worked well for other conferences (AAAI, ICML, KDD, etc.). In general, it also worked well for us. In particular, reviewers generally received the papers that they preferred via bidding; they only needed to bid on papers for the areas that they were reviewers for; and START makes automatic assignments (which can be modified) based on the bids, so that, in general, it is easy for area chairs to assign papers to reviewers. We had hoped that bidding would give us greater flexibility in assigning reviewers to papers, e.g. for papers that span more than one area or if we wanted to share reviewers across areas. But START did not have a reasonable mechanism for doing this. Some reviewers (e.g. Peter Turney) were disappointed by that and expressed a strong preference for the way these matters were handled by CyberChairPRO at ICML and other conferences. Nevertheless, we were happy with the bidding process overall. - REVIEWING. The reviewing process went very smoothly. As indicated in the schedule presented above, it included a discussion period for papers on which reviewers strongly disagreed. 100% of reviews were turned in on or nearly on the due date! - ACCEPTANCE RATES AND STATS. Paper presentation: 23%; Poster presentation: 20%; Overall: 43% N.B. (1) Since only 11% of the submissions were in the poster category, the majority of submissions that were accepted as posters had in fact been submitted in the paper category. N.B. (2) The numbers above are in fact the ratios between the number of papers/posters accepted and the total number of submissions. The proportion of positive decisions from the PC was slightly higher, but some papers were pulled out, especially for paper submissions that were being redirected to the poster category. For more details, see the .htm file. - DOUBLE SUBMISSIONS. Double submissions were a bit of a problem. In spite of the wording in the call for proposals, some (30+?) authors failed to note parallel submissions. The current wording is the following: "Papers that are being submitted in parallel to other conferences or workshops must indicate this on the title page, as must papers that contain significant overlap with previously published work." We suggest that the wording be stronger next year. The new wording should probably make it clear that if the authors decide to submit to another conference only after they have completed their submission to the ACL conference, then they must update their submission info with the ACL. There was a particular problem with EMNLP submissions; we needed confirmation on accepted Coling/ACL papers and posters BEFORE the EMNLP decision notification date. Authors of 8-10 EMNLP submissions that we had accepted as posters, wanted to wait until the EMNLP decisions were made before committing to attend Coling/ACL for a poster presentation. - INVITED SPEAKERS. With input from the area chairs, we decided on two invited speakers, one from within the Coling/ACL community and one from a field traditionally outside the purview of NLP/CL. - ASIAN LANGUAGE EVENTS. In honor of the joint conference's location in Asia, we planned a special Asian language event that consists of the presentation of the top four Asian language papers in a parallel session and a plenary talk/panel focusing on issues in Asian language processing, followed by the presentation of the Best Asian Language Paper Award. The panel was organized by Aravind Joshi. The Asian language best paper was selected by the area chairs and program chairs. - BEST REVIEWER AWARD. In order to acknowledge the crucial role from our reviewers, we were planning to grant a Best Reviewer Awards at the Closing Session. We asked our area chairs to designate some contenders for the title. Our plan was to randomly draw 5 names from the resulting list. However, we realized that some people were taking this matter too seriously ("this is stuff for beefing up one's CV") for the kind of lightweight informal process we had set up. This is why we decided to deemphasize this by dropping the name "Best Reviewer Award". Instead as part of the general "thanking" episode we will draw the names of 5 great reviewers. EACL Report, June 2006 ========================= Gertjan van Noord, Chair Anette Frank, Secretary Contents -------- 1. EACL 2006 Conference 2. EACL 2009 3. EACL Newsletter 4. EACL participation in ACL 2007 Board 5. EACL Student Board 6. EACL Sponsorships 7. Executive Board meeting 8. Financial report 9. EACL officers 1. EACL 2006 Conference ----------------------- The 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the ACL was held April 3-7 in Trento, Italy. With 316 registered participants it was one of the largest EACL meetings in history, albeit somewhat smaller than EACL 2003 in Budapest. In addition to the main programme, there was a workshop programme (12 workshops), a set of tutorials (4), a student research workshop, and a poster and demos programme. The meeting was very well organized, thanks, in particular, to the efforts of the local organizers as well as the program chairs. Financially, it appears the conference will make a small surplus, but the final figures are still pending. Thanks to the efforts of the publication chairs, the full set of publications is now also available through the ACL Anthology. The workshop programme was satisfactory (with a substantial amount of registrations), although there was wild variation among workshops. The number of participants for the tutorials was slightly below expectations, perhaps due to timing (in parallel to workshops). The issue was raised whether (and if so, how) tutorial materials could be included in the ACL Anthology. Based on feedback during the meeting of the EACL board with the various chairs, the student board organised a feedback exercise which indicated quite clearly that the student workshop has full support from the community. Full details can be found at the EACL website. With the help of the local organizers, the sponsorships chairs implemented a system of various levels of sponsorships. Despite quite some effort, it remained hard to obtain many sponsors. The acceptance rate for the main programme was, once again, low. Some ideas have been discussed to change the setup of the conference in 2009 to attract other types of papers, perhaps including a different organization of the poster session. 2. EACL 2009 ------------ Preparations for the next EACL meeting, to be held in 2009, are now underway. A call for bids has been issued. The call for bids is open until December 15, 2006. Details are available from the EACL website. 3. EACL Newsletter ------------------ Issue 8 of the EACL newsletter appeared in May 2006. All EACL newsletters are on-line at the EACL website, www.eacl.org The letter is electronically distributed to EACL members and the ACL Board. Contents of Issue 8 were: * Editorial by Alex Lascarides * View from the chair * Report on EACL 2006 * Report on EACL 2006 Programme * Call for bids: EACL 2009 * Report of the PASCAL Challenge * Report on TALN 2006 * Acceptance rates at ACLs * EACL Membership * EACL Private Pages * EACL Student Sponsorships * Calendar 3. Participation of EACL exec board in ACL 2007 organisation ------------------------------------------------------------ Next to the EACL chair, treasurer and secretary, Alex Lascarides as chair-elect will join the ACL 2007 organisation board. 4. EACL Student board --------------------- The EACL student board has organised the Student Research Workshop at EACL 2006, and has conducted an opinion poll regarding the appreciation of the latter. The results were encouraging. Sebastian Pado's service on the EACL Student Board is ending June 30, 2006. Sebastian has done excellent work for the maintenance of the EACL web pages, and far beyond. Nuria Bertomeu, PhD student in the joint International Graduate College of the University of the Saarland and the University of Edinburgh, has been nominated to join the Student Board in July. She will introduce herself in the next EACL Newsletter edition. 5. EACL Sponsorships -------------------- In 2006, EACL has offered substantial financial support for ESSLLI 2006, valuing 3000 Euros in total. It was requested that for student grants, preference should be given to students of Eastern European countries. The EACL has also funded five students from the geographical area of the EACL who had papers accepted at the EACL 2006 conference (in the main session, the student research workshop, the poster/demo session, or co-located workshops). The support EACL provided was up to 500 EUR per student. Finally, EACL has sponsored one student from Eastern European countries with 500 EUR, to support her participation in the Lexicom Workshop in Lexical Computing and Lexicography in Opatija, Croatia. 6. Executive Board Meeting -------------------------- The annual meeting of the Executive Board was held in conjunction with the EACL 2006 conference, Trento, April 5th. Participating Board members were Geertjan van Noord, Alex Lascarides, Mike Rosner, Anette Frank, Paola Merlo, Galia Angelova and Ido Dagan. 7. Report to Chamber of Commerce -------------------------------- In June, the EACL provided a report to the Chamber of Commerce, as prescribed by the EACL constitution. The report was signed by the EACL President, Treasurer and Secretary. 8. Financial report ------------------- The consolidated financial statement for 2005 is as given below. EUROPEAN CHAPTER 2005 CONSOLIDATED STATEMENT 31/12/2004 opening balance 13,140 INCOME Interest 96 ACL/EACL04 Barcelona (not available) EXPENSES withholding tax -34 SITE VISIT, TRENTO -1,217 EACL ASSOCIATION FEE -31 eacl.org.mt domain -71 ESSLI sponsorship -3,000 EACL Board Mtg Expenses -51 net loss = -4,404 31/12/2005 closing balance 8,832 9. EACL Officers per July, 1st, 2006 ------------------------------------ The EACL Board has been constant, except for Nuria Bertomeu joining the Student Board, in replacement of Sebastian Pado. Chair Gertjan van Noord (University of Groningen, NL) Secretary Anette Frank (DFKI, Germany) Treasurer Mike Rosner (University of Malta) Chair-elect Alex Lascarides (University of Edinburgh) Advisory Board Galia Angelova (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) Ido Dagan (Bar Ilan University, Israel) Paola Merlo (University of Geneva) Felisa Verdejo (UNED, Spain) Nominating Committee Philippe Blache (CNRS & Université de Provence, France) John Carroll (University of Sussex, UK) Claire Gardent (LORIA, France) Donia Scott (University of Brighton, UK) Student Board Nuria Bertomeu (University of the Saarland, Germany) Jonathon Read (University of Sussex, UK) Violeta Seretan (University of Geneva, Switzerland) Computational Linguistics Squibs and Discussions: report for 2005 At the beginning of year 2005, there were four submissions in the squibs pipeline. In the course of year 2005, 14 additional papers were (re-) submitted. At the end of the year, there was only one submissions left in the pipeline. Thus, 17 decisions were made during year 2005. The results were as follows: * 5 papers accepted * 4 papers rejected * 8 invitations to rework the (re-)submission The mean time taken for these decisions was 115 days. Thus far, 9 papers have been (re-) submitted in 2005. -- Pierre Isabelle Squibs editor for Computational Linguistics 12 July 2006 Report from NAACL, July 2006 Owen Rambow, Chapter Board Chair http://www.naacl.org 1. Elections The NAACL election was held electronically in the Fall of 2005. Owen Rambow was elected Chair, Chris Manning Treasurer, and Regina Barzilay and Mary Harper were elected to the Board. Lillian Lee was re-elected Secretary. 2. Executive Committee Meetings The Board converses regularly by e-mail. In addition, in 2006, the Board met by conference call in February and in person at the HLT-NAACL conference in Brooklyn. The minutes of the meetings will be available on the NAACL website. 3. Shadow Account Status See separate report by the NAACL Treasurer, Chris Manning. 4. North American conference in 2006 A detailed report on the HLT-NAACL 2006 conference will appear on the NAACL website. 5. North American conference in 2007 The NAACL HLT conference will be held in late April 2007 in Rochester, New York. James Allen heads the local organization committee. Candy Sidner (MERL) is chair of the conference, with Matthew Stone (Rutgers), Tanja Schultz (CMU) and ChengXiang Zhai (UIUC) the NLP, Speech, and IR PC co-chairs, resp. The first call for papers should be ready in time for ACL, with a main track submission deadline in October or November. 6. North American conference in 2008 This conference is under the control of the ACL Executive Board. 7. Support for Summer Schools We are again sponsoring students to attend the summer courses in computational linguistics that held in conjunction with the summer CLSP workshops at the Johns Hopkins University . We received applications from 14 students, of whom 12 were selected by a sub-committee of the Chapter Board (Andy Kehler and Owen Rambow). The total cost to NAACL will be just under $8000. For the first time, we funded more or less (tuition only; also housing; also transportation) based on perceived need. All students offered support accepted (even those only offered tuition), to our surprise. 8. Debugging the NAACL Conference The NAACL Board wants to change the way in which its annual conference is organized, mainly because the body in charge of the conference includes funders qua funders. We have identified the following goals. The HLT Advisory Board, which has been in charge of the conference, has also agreed. We seek agreement of the ACL Board. We also would like to discuss the issue of the ACL conference when in North America. NAACL Board Decisions on its Annual (modulo ACL in NA) Conference ----------------------------------------------------------------- Content: We keep orientation to NLP, Speech & IR (which represents a vision about our field!); we keep short papers with later deadline; we keep three PC co-chairs. Organization: the NAACL Board decides, an Advisory Board advises; AB is composed of funders, IR, Speech representatives, and representatives from the commercial world; exact way of determining composition to be determined. The conference is not a merger of two conferences, but instead is out conference. Name: "Human Language Technologies: The nth Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics"; short name: "NAACL HLT" (a noun-noun compound, with "HLT" the head and "NAACL" the modifier). SIGHAN REPORT 2005 4th SIGHAN Workshop 14-15 Oct 2005, Jeju, with IJCNLP-05 22 submissions, accepted 10 regular papers and 6 posters 2nd Bakeoff Summer 2005 Word segmentation 36 groups signed up, 23 groups submitted results 2006 5th SIGHAN Workshop 22-23 July 2006, Sydney, with COLING/ACL 2006 24 submissions, accepted 8 regular papers and 6 posters 3rd Bakeoff Spring 2006 Word segmentation and named entity recognition 36 groups signed up, 29 groups submitted results REPORT ON SIGDIAL ACTIVITIES: July 2005 to June 2006 David Traum, SIGdial President SIGdial is the ACL and ISCA Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue which was formed in November 1997. More information about SIGdial can be found on the webpages: http://www.sigdial.org including an actively updated calendar of upcoming events, resources, and previous reports. Members can join from the webpage, which includes participation in a low-volume, moderated mailing list (mainly conference and job announcements). SIGdial currently has 395 members from 33 countries (up 26 and down 5 from last year). An election of officers and three advisory board members was held in Fall of 2005 for the years 2006 and 2007. SIGdial is currently led by officers David Traum (President), Wolfgang Minker (Vice President), and Kristiina Jokinen (Secretary), and Science Advisory Committee members Jan Alexandersson, Michael McTear, Tim Paek, Alexander Rudnicky, Candace Sidner, and Ronnie Smith. Additional positions are President Emeritus: Laila Dybkjaer, Information officer: Karen Ward, SIG SLUD/JSAI liaison: Syun Tutiya, ISCA Liaison: Rolf Carlson, Mailing List Maintainer: Laurent Romary, Student Liaisons: Holmer Hemsen (Europe), Dan Bohus (America), and Kotaro Funakoshi (Asia), and Stephen Choularton (S Pacific). SIGdial has held an annual workshop on discourse and dialogue since 2000. The last workshop was held in September 2005, in Lisbon Portugal, just before the Interspeech 2005 conference. The chairs were Laila Dybkjaer and Wolfgang Minker. The next workshop will be in July 2006, just co-located with ACL-COLING. The chairs are Jan Alexandersson and Alexander Knott. More information on SIGdial workshops can be found here: http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/ SIGdial also endorses a number of other dialogue-related workshops and events that are open to the general community. The SIGdial Endorsed events for the previous and upcoming year are: July 7th 2005: Symposium on Dialogue Modelling and Generation (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) Sept 1st 2005: The Young Researcher's Roundtable on Spoken Dialogue systems (Lisbon, Portugal) July 7-9, 2006: Workshop on Constraints in Discourse (Maynooth, Ireland) August 7-11th, 2006 ESSLLI 2006 Workshop on "Coherence in Generation and Dialogue" (Malaga, Spain) September 11th-13th 2006: Brandial 2006: The 10th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (Potsdam, Germany) September 16th, 2006: Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems (Pittsburgh, PA) September 17th, Interspeech2006 - ICSLP Satellite Workshop Dialogue on Dialogues: Multidisciplinary Evaluation of Advanced Speech-based Interactive Systems (Pittsburgh, PA) SIGGEN report 2005-2006 Conferences and Workshops: - ENLG 2005, Aberdeen (http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/W/W05/ ) - INLG 2006, Sydney - Workshop on Using Corpora for NLG (http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/ucnlg/Proceedings/index.html) - planned: - WORKSHOP ON MULTIMODAL OUTPUT GENERATION to be held on January 25 and 26, 2007 at Aberdeen University - ENLG 2007 (with ACL 2007, Prag early June) Other activities: - finalized INLG 2004 finances w/ profit - newsletter, mailing list - website with Wiki hosted at DFKI and UEDIN: www.siggen.org upcoming elections 1) Tilman B. has finished his two years 2) Irene G. has finished the last year of Lyn Walker's term 3) David R. has finished as students get only a one-year term 4) David M. and Charles have one year left Priscilla Rasmussen 15 July 2006 ACL Business Office Report I am very pleased to report that John Kirby, my new office assistant, is working out beautifully…innovative and clearly anxious to help in any way. He was incredibly helpful with HLT/NAACL 2006 both in the office and onsite. He also was a major part of why we were able to make the recent office move as painlessly and inexpensively as could be possible when moving such a large volume of boxes of books (as well as furniture) in such a short timespan! I am also thrilled to report that the April 1st move to another location has been a very good move for us. When I returned from the Prague site visit, there was a letter from the landlord saying our lease would not be renewed (which came as quite a surprise!) and that we had until July to make the move. Of course, with both HLT/NAACL and COLING/ACL conferences approaching, we had to move quickly. I was able to find a smaller, single-unit office space in downtown Stroudsburg that suited our needs perfectly. We entered into a 3-year lease (with 2 additional years option at minimal cost-of-living increases) which will, over the first three years, wind up being the same rental costs as if we had stayed where we were. Unpacking and setting up the office while receiving registrations and memberships and keeping on top of it all was a challenge but I think we did pretty well. Publications: Publications orders seem to be holding steady, with a few companies ordering on a regular basis and in multiple-copy quantities each time. We really do not get many orders at all from members any more but, I’ve reported on all this before. I just want to mention that, in the move, we downsized a bit more in quantities we hold in stock but are keeping ample amounts of all publications to be able to fill any orders that do come in. And, I am now downsizing the quantities I ask for from each conference which saves both the conference and ACL some money. Membership: We now have a total of 1,409 members (down by 151 from the end of 2005; about 100 were student members lost). The Trento Local Organizing Team and I worked very closely pre-EACL 2006 to verify current membership and those who were not members were told to complete the online membership directly with ACL. We monitored their completion of the memberships and this worked quite smoothly. Of course, for HLT/NAACL 2006, we gave the now-standard extra year of membership, bringing up our current year membership by 540 and extending 126 current members by one year. Please refer to the Membership Statistics Report for further breakdown of the membership. However, I think we missed an opportunity to keep our membership up to between 1500 and 1600 and possibly bringing in some new members who might remain long-term through renewals, by not requiring ACL membership of those attending COLING/ACL 2006. We had made this a requirement the last time COLING and ACL were held jointly (in 1998) and I’d recommend we do so in the future for any joint meetings. Walker Fund: At COLING/ACL 2006, we made four awards totaling $3,200. Two were for $700 each to students from the USA, one was for $1,200 to a student from Romania, and one was for $600 to a student from he USA/China. Both USA students are also serving as Student Volunteers. Originally, I was not going to award volunteerships as well as Walker Fund awards but we wound up needing extra volunteers, they were anxious to be volunteers, and this was a way of extending their awards. Conferences: Both HLT/NAACL 2006, with almost 700 registrations, and COLING/ACL 2006, with over 725 registrations, are very successful! While I haven’t finalized the budget of HLT/NAACL yet, it does look like a surplus is definite, despite a few glitches with the hotel. And, of course, it is too early to know for sure, but with the low breakeven Robert Dale and Cecile Paris were working with and the somewhat unexpected larger number of actual attendees, this conference should also do quite well financially (as well as being a wonderful experience!). Having made the site visit to Prague the beginning of March, I am sure ACL 2007 will be exciting and an absolutely wonderful event. The Local Team already had a great plan in place, good venues for all events, and a quite competent assistant to take on a lot of the logistical details. And, set in such a lovely city, this should be an excellent experience for everyone who comes! I also made the site visit to Rochester, with Regina Barzilay, for HLT/NAACL 2007. The venue, a combination of two hotels (one as the conference hotel and one at a lower cost for students) and the convention center, all connected by bridges within one block, should work very well. Most impressive was that James Allen, the Local Organizer lead person, managed to mobilize the Tourism and Convention Bureau and others within the city to collaborate in making this a very successful and interesting venue…Just wait until you see the banquet site! WINTER SCHOOL Report, July 2006 Steven Bird ACL/HCSNet Advanced Program in Natural Language Processing University of Melbourne, 10-14 July 2006 http://lt.csse.unimelb.edu.au/nlp06/ The HCSNet/ACL Advanced Program in Natural Language Processing consisted of a series of advanced tutorials on major topics of current research interest in NLP. In developing the program our goals were twofold: to encourage international students to come to Australia for the COLING/ACL by providing a second week of NLP content, and to give Australian students the benefit of extended interaction with researchers who will be attending the COLING/ACL. We were delighted to welcome 70 participants from 15 countries. PROGRAM The program was organised by Nicola Stokes, Lawrence Cavedon, Timothy Baldwin, and James Curran. The NLP/IR and Discourse & Dialogue tracks ran in parallel in the mornings, while the Lexical Semantics and Probabilistic Parsing tracks ran in parallel in the afternoons. Full abstracts and bio sketches were posted on the website. NLP/IR: Sophia Ananiadou (Manchester), Francis Bond (NTT Japan), Inderjeet Mani (MITRE and Brandeis), Alistair Moffat (Melbourne) DISCOURSE AND DIALOGUE: Ivana Kruijff-Korbayova (Saarland), Diane Litman (Pittsburgh), Michael Strube (EML Research), David Traum (USC) LEXICAL SEMANTICS: Collin Baker (Berkeley), Timothy Baldwin (Melbourne), Paul Buitelaar (DFKI), James Curran (Sydney), Graeme Hirst (Toronto) PROBABILISTIC PARSING: Stephen Clark (Oxford), James Curran (Sydney), Steven Bird (Melbourne), Anoop Sarkar (Simon Fraser) SPONSORSHIP AND BUDGET The ACL provided A$20k sponsorship, and this was mainly used to fund 33 scholarships (covering registration and accommodation). The ARC Network in Human Communication Science (HCSNet) also provided A$20k sponsorship, and this was mainly used to fund 14 presenters (covering accommodation and travel subsidy). Other sponsors were the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, the University of Melbourne, and National ICT Australia. Budget summary (approximate figures only, pending final accounting) Aus$ Comment +45,000 Income (sponsorship and registrations) -13,000 Student accommodation (218 nights in student dorms) - 6,000 Presenter accommodation (38 nights in hotel) - 9,000 Presenter travel subsidy -10,000 Conference management, administration, materials - 7,000 Catering ---------------------- = 0 ACL SCHOLARSHIPS Applications were evaluated according to the following criteria, listed in order of importance: (i) commitment by student's institution to fund travel to Australia; (ii) whether the student has a paper accepted at the COLING/ACL conference or a satellite event; (iii) student's curriculum vitae; (iv) relevance of school program to student's research project. All applicants who had papers accepted for the COLING/ACL conference or a satellite event were offered scholarships. This exhausted the scholarship funding. Scholarship holders came from the following countries: Australia (8), Brazil (2), Canada (3), China (4), Germany (2), India (2), Ireland (1), Israel (1), Japan (2), Netherlands (1), Singapore (1), Sri Lanka (2), UK (1), USA (3). EVALUATION Summary evaluation: Presenters and participants alike felt that this was a useful event, building on the travel and organisation of the main conference, but permitting more relaxed interaction. In regions where NLP summer schools are not already established, this proved to be an effective way to give graduate students more extended and tailored input than they get from the main conference. Detailed evaluation: 43 participants completed an evaluation form. Of the 25 scholarship holders coming from outside Australia, 14 indicated that the existence of the event helped them get sponsorship to travel to Australia. All 43 respondents said they would recommend this kind of event to other students. Participants rated the program in four areas, scoring it in the range 1-5 (1=bad, 5=good), and providing free text comments: A. Program: 4.2 (quality of content, timetable, topic selection, level) Some participants pointed out the varying levels of difficulty within a single theme; several said that the content was not advanced enough for them; no-one complained about the choice of tracks that were scheduled concurrently. Representative quote: "A very nice overview of each area, with good scheduling". B. Benefit: 4.0 (helpfulness to your research, interaction with presenters) Most participants said the program was very helpful, filling in gaps and giving them more extended access to presenters than the main conference. Representative quotes: "Very beneficial; I learnt a lot, deepened my knowledge and met presenters and had very useful discussions with them, in addition to other students"; "The smaller group before the main conference was an excellent opportunity to meet and mingle. The mix of topics was good. I learnt a lot." C. Local Arrangements: 4.4 (accommodation, catering, venue, registration) Participants praised the venue and social program, but some were critical of the student accommodation (too basic, lacking in internet connectivity). Representative quote: "Well organised event, excellent accommodation, and tasty coffee breaks". D. Organisation: 4.4 (website, communication, scholarship process) Participants were generally very positive, though a few pointed out that the conference management had been slow to confirm registrations, and that the program for one of the tracks was not finalised until a few days before the event. ACL-COLING'06 tutorial chair report Claire Gardent 1. Report In response to the CFP, I received 20 tutorial proposals covering the areas of statistical NLP (7 proposals), Arabic Processing (1 proposal), Grammars and parsing (3 proposals), Data Mining (1 proposals), Semantic Processing (5 proposals)and Multimodal Processing (3 proposals). The decision criteria used to select 5 among these 20 proposals were the following : -- at most one tutorial per thematic -- tutorials which have been/will be given recently in ACL related conferences were dispreferred -- experienced teachers and people for which I had some evidence that they were good speakers/teachers were preferred. The reviewing process resulted in the acceptance of 5 proposals namely: T1. Synchronous Grammars and Tree Automata David Chiang (USC/Information Sciences Institute) and Kevin Knight (USC/Information Sciences Institute) T2. Dependency Parsing Joakim Nivre (School of Mathematics and Systems Engineering) and Sandra K .A N|bler (University of T N|bingen) T3. Discourse Annotation: Discourse Connectives and Discourse Relations Aravind Joshi, Rashmi Prasad and Bonnie Webber T4. Multimodal Language Processing Michael Johnston and Srinivas Bangalore, (AT&T Labs--Research) T5. Mining Unstructured Data Ronen Feldman (Bar-Ilan University, Israel) T5 was cancelled by the tutorial giver in June so that in effect, the final tutorial program consisted of 4 tutorials. As of June 4th, registrations for tutorials were as follows: T1 32 T2 39 T3 13 T4 10 T5 27 (cancelled, not yet distributed) 2. Calendar November 4 - First CFP December 5 - Second CFP January 5 - Submission deadline for tutorial proposals January 20 - Notification of acceptance April 10 - Tutorial descriptions due June 18 - Tutorial course material due July 16 - Tutorial date SIGDAT (Ken Church, David Yarowsky) =================================== SIGDAT - 2006 Summer Report SIGDAT is ACL's special interest group for linguistic data and corpus-based approaches to NLP. In 2006, SIGDAT is organizing a 2-day Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-2006). The meeting is scheduled immediately after ACL-06 in Sydney on July 22-23. Dan Jurafsky and Eric Gaussier are program chairs. The conference appears to be highly successful: Over 400 submissions were received, and 43 full papers accepted and 30 posters accepted, yielding an acceptance rate under 20%. The proceedings exceeds 600 pages, and essentially the entire conference will be held in parallel sessions, except for a poster session, plenary lecture and panel session. In terms of scale on several dimensions, EMNLP is now at a similar size to several recent NAACL and EACL meetings. In fall 2005, SIGDAT will co-organized the HLT/EMNLP 2005 joint Conference on Human Language Technology and Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, October 6-8 2005 in Vancouver, Canada. Ray Mooney was General Chair, and Chris Brew, Lee-Feng Chien and Katrin Kirchoff were program co-chairs. The conference received an unexpectedly high 403 full paper submissions, of which fewer than 90 were accepted, yielding an acceptance rate below 22%. Submissions spanned the HLT areas of IR, speech and a full spectrum of NLP. - David Yarowsky Secretary-Treasurer