Report of ACL 2007 Publications Chair



As the publications chair for this conference, I have used the 
publication tool ACL PUB built by ACL2005 publications chairs Jason 
Eisner and Philipp Koehn. 


1. Main conference publications 


Same CoLing/ACL 06, participants do not get hardcopy proceedings, unless 
they explicity request during registration and pay extra for them. On 
the other hand, we do prepare the printed companion volume, as Priscilla 
find it hard to sell the proceedings to libraries and others 
post-conference and then have to explain why they are not getting the full 2-
volume set. Also it does form part of the written record of the conference.


A tool has been given to Start to integrate to take away the author ID 
information, which could be ready for the next meeting. 


2. Workshop publications


All 16 workshops have printed proceedings.  Besides ACL PUB, a dummy 
data set was also created and distributed to the other book chairs, 
basically the organizers of WS, P&D, SRW, collocated conference in 
advance, so that they could have a dryrun to avoid the last minute 
panic. They've been given further messages on how to assemble the 
proceeding, feedback on their proceeding issues after the proofreading.



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. This time it appears only 
EMNLP-CoNLL encounter problem on converting pdf to ps, which could be
solved finally. If no more issue appears on the conversion to ps files, 
we might still keep to ps files to make it easier to the unix users.  


All papers are also expected to be available at the ACL Anthology by the 
time if not earlier of the conference.


4. Technical issues


Deviant paper formatting (e.g. paper size, font embedding, etc.) has 
always been a problem, and it is no exception this time.  99 out of 131 
papers have been communicated with the authors to make the necessary 
ammendaments. Among which about 26 papers used A4 instead of Letter 
sized required, although it has been emphasised again and again that 
Letter size is required.  



The similar thing happens to almost all the other proceedings as well. 
      

5. Suggestions and discussions


(1)It'll be good to make the report of the previous years' publication 
chair available to the current one. So that he or she could benefit from 
the experience. This might be extended to the other book chairs as well. 


(2)It needs to remind the other book chairs in advance that they're 
responsible to the quality of their proceedings. Some of them tends to 
overlook the paper formatting issues totally.  


Su Jian
June 2007