Report from ACL/EACL-07 Workshop chair:


The committee consisted of myself, Katja Markert, Beth Ann Hockey and Dekai Wu.
We received 27 applications for workshops, which was more than expected. The 
committee chose 15 Workshops of different lengths, cf. below. The choice was 
very hard to do, as the quality of proposals and committees was very high. One 
factor this year, in addition to the usual ones, was the wish to be broad, 
i.e., to give research which is CL-related but not core-CL a place to present 
close in time to the core conference (e.g. embodied NLP, cognitive aspects...). 
We also wanted to allow old favourites which always have a wide participation, and encourage empirical, task-based competitions.


Two of the workshops were the result of a merger (WS9 and WS10).


The 15 chosen workshops are:
2 day:
  WS1 SemEval


1.5-day:
  WS9 Joint Workshop on Entailment and Paraphrase and 3rd PASCAL Recognizing  
     Textual Entailment (RTE-3) Challenge 
  WS10 Workshop on Linguistic Annotation (the LAW)


1 day:
  WS2  Statistical Machine Translation
  WS3  Comp. Approaches to Semitic Languages: Common Issues and Resources 
  WS5  BioNLP'07 
  WS7  Deep Linguistic Processing 
  WS8  SIGMORPHON Computational Research in Morphology and Phonology, 
  WS12 NLP for Balto-Slavonic languages, Special Focus on IE 
  WS13 Grammar-based approaches to spoken language processing 
  WS15 Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Acquisition 

.5 day: 
  WS4  Language Technology for Cultural Heritage Data 
  WS6  A Broader Perspective on Multiword Expressions 
  WS11 4th ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on Prepositions 
  WS15 Embodied Language Processing 


This year, workshops were allowed to have posters. This was due to the fact 
that three of the workshops (WS1, WS2 and WS9) were in the form of 
competitions, and it had been planned that all participating systems should be 
given some space for presentation. Due to high submission rates and quality of 
submissions in other WS, these also opted for poster presentations.


The organisation of posters for the workshops was the most time-consuming 
aspect of my work, because so many workshops decided they wanted to have 
posters, and the decision came very late (during or after the reviewing 
period). I suggest that this should be changed for future ACLs; if posters 
will be allowed in following ACLs, I would recommend that clear rules eg. 
about finances and deadlines for ordering posters, should be established 
beforehand.


To my knowledge, all WS organisers kept the deadline for proceedings to go to 
the publications chairs.


Special thanks to the local organisers, who provided fast, professional, 
unburocractic support for the WS organisation.


Simone Teufel
May 2007