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).