ACL Wiki - User contributions [en]

SRW tasks

2008-08-18T17:23:11Z

Wmaier:

==Summary==

This page summarizes all tasks that have to be carried out during the organization of the ACL Student Research Workshop. Please refer to the [[SRW|SRW page]] for more information.

==SRW tasks==

===Call for Papers and publicity===

The SRW must be made public very early, in order to encourage students to submit their work, and in order to encourage professors to encourage their students to submit their work. This should be done not only by submitting the CFP to lists, but also by sending personal messages to faculties, in order to increase the awareness of the SRW and its benefits. Don't forget to mention the (partial!) student travel funding as one of the major benefits of the workshop, as well as the personal tutoring by senior researchers. Ask PC members to link the workshop on their homepages/faculty pages. Before you post the call, the general conference chair should see it.

===Website and START===

In the last years, the SRW website was located within the main conference website and administered by the main conference site webmaster. It should contain the call for papers, including the members of the program committee, as well as the panelists and the accepted papers (as soon as fixed). We also added an NSF logo to acknowledge their sponsorship.

The SRW gets its own START site. The START system can be used to manage the entire reviewing process. Setting up this page as early as possible and getting familiar with the system is beneficial. START is provided to the SRW by the ACL. James Clarke (U Edinburgh) in place of Simone Teufel (U Cambridge) set it up for us.

===Budget and NSF grant===

Traditionally, the SRW gets funded by the National Science Foundation. The grant is used for funding of the travel of the participants. Usually, the faculty advisor solicits the fund at the NSF, the earlier, the better; the faculty advisor's university will be the holder of the fund.

===Coordinating the reimbursement of the students===

In 2008, Priscilla Rasmussen kindly offered to handle the reimbursements to students. Then, she will bill University of Pittsburgh (holder of the NSF grant) for one amount. Instructions should be given to the participants about what information to send where to get their reimbursements. The ACL and the SRW will not pay for funds to be disbursed in non-US funds. If someone requests that, the cost of conversion will need to come out of that participants' allotted amount.

We estimated estimated in advance the costs for each student to be sure the budget was realistic, based on projected airfares from popular internet travel sites and the cost for loding in a economic accomodation. We asked the students after the conference to send us a breakdown of their costs. An amount for each student was alloted accordingly. Due to a lower number of SRW participants, we were able to reimburse all participants for all of their costs. Note that possibly only partial reimbursements can be made if there are many participants or many participants have a long way to travel.

===Program committee and reviewing process===

We recruited the program committee out of members of previous year's program committees, known senior researchers, personal contacts and recommended people. A program committee member is not supposed to serve for more than two times. We did not have to let the ACL exec authorize the PC (even though the ACL handbook says differently).

The program committee should be composed of students and senior researchers. We had 61 reviewers (30 students, 31 senior researchers) and 27 submissions, which allowed us to assign five reviewers to a single paper (three senior researchers and two students). This meant at most three papers to review for each senior PC member and two papers to review for each student member. The high number of the reviews was highly praised by the authors after the workshop. We tried to select the reviewers such that all areas were sufficiently covered. We used a list of keywords to match the submissions to the reviewers. This was difficult and a lot of work. Especially if you have more submissions, consider using the bidding facilities in START, which allows the reviewers to express their preferences before you make the final distribution. START also offers you some other choices on the review process (e.g., control the degree of visibility of reviewers within the PC). Remember that you have to decide on all details of the reviewing process before the submission deadline. Since many of the reviewers will also review papers for the ACL main conference and the SRW has its own START page, also don't forget to mention that the SRW papers will not appear in the main conference START reviewer accounts.

===Proceedings===

The co-chairs are responsible for the compilation of the proceedings and the CD-ROM/ACL anthology version of the SRW proceedings. ACL offers great software, called ACLPUB, which automates parts of that process. However, preparing the book is a big chunk of work for which enough time should be allocated, mainly because authors tend not to follow formatting instructions. We could find all sorts of errors in the camera-ready versions of the papers, ranging from small ones, such as overful columns, to severe font problems. Since you have to anticipate two or even more rounds of revisions, set the deadline for the SRW authors for the submission of their camera-ready version early enough, at least 2 weeks before the publication chair deadline for the delivery of the finished proceedings.

===Panelists===

It is a tradition at the SRW to ask senior research to act as panelists for the SRW talks. In past years, one or two panelists were assigned to each paper. A panelist has to read the student's paper and prepare in-depth questions which should allow the student to advance in his research. A separate 5-min question session at the end of each talk is reserved to panelists questions, before the general public can ask its questions.

In past years, a general invitation along with the list of abstracts of the student papers was sent to a long list of senior researchers. Panelists posts were then distributed on a first-come-first-serve basis. We, in contrast, tried to search researchers which matched very well with a specific paper topic and asked them directly to be the panelist for a single paper. Both methods seem to work, although the first method is maybe a more feasible option if you have many submissions. We think that responses are more likely if in the invitation, it is made clear that that being a panelist is not as much work as being a reviewer.

===Schedule===

In the last years, efforts have been made to make the SRW look like a part of the main conference, not like a separate workshop. The oral session(s) have been scheduled in parallel to main conference sessions and SRW posters were hung indistinguishably along with main conference posters. This has proven to be beneficial for the SRW presenters, due to an increased amount of feedback. The program chair(s) should be informed about this.

===Coordination with conference organizers and local arrangements===

1. coordinate with the program co-chairs to schedule the talks and posters

2. coordinate with the general co-chairs about costs the SRW should pay for room, equipment, food, etc. Typically, the SRW contributes some of the funds from its NSF grant to cover these costs, but it seems this is handled on a volunteer basis.

3. coordinate with local arrangements about room setup for the SRW spoken sessions, including where the panelists should sit.

4. coordinate with local arrangements about setup for the poster session.

5. make it clear to the general co-chair and local arrangements that the student lunch ACL sponsors is completely separate from the SRW. The SRW does not pay for it or coordinate it. The SRW may have its own lunch, but that is a different lunch. This was a source of confusion for everyone in 2008.

===Miscellaneous===

Apart from the traditional ACL Student Lunch, we gathered with all participants, organizers and panelists of the SRW for a separate lunch on separate day. This was a great occasion to get to know each other more personally, and at the same time easy to organize.

SRW documents

2008-08-18T17:19:24Z

Wmaier:

==Summary==

This page contains all documents that were sent out during the organization of the ACL SRW 2008. Please refer to the [[SRW|SRW organization page]] for further information.

==SRW Documents==

===Invitation letter for reviewers===

Dear colleague,

we would like to invite you to serve on the Program Committee of the
Student Research Workshop at ACL-08:HLT. The event will be held
alongside the main conference in Columbus, Ohio, on June 15-20, 2008.

The committee will consist of a cross-section of students and
experienced researchers, representing all interests within the ACL
community. You will be asked to review papers from student
researchers. This is an important responsibility as you will not only
be able to provide students with an opportunity to showcase their
work, but also offer all students who submit invaluable feedback on
their work in progress. Initially, we anticipate you being assigned
3-4 papers to review.

If you accept this invitation (and we sincerely hope you do), we would
be grateful if you could include your areas of interest in your reply,
as chosen from the keywords below.

Acoustic modeling . Audio and video retrieval . Cognitive modeling
. Content-based/collaborative information filtering . Corpora and
treebanks . Cross-language information retrieval . Dialogue
. Discourse . Discriminative training . Distributed information
retrieval . Evaluation metrics and methodologies . Grammar development
and engineering . Grammar extraction and induction . Grammar
formalisms . Human/machine dialogue systems . Human/human conversation
and meeting processing . Inference and entailment . Information
extraction . Information retrieval models . Interactive/Personalized
information retrieval . Intranet/Enterprise Search . Knowledge
acquisition . Language identification . Language modeling . Language
resources . Learning techniques for language processing
. Lexical acquisition . Lexical/Pronunciation modeling . Lexical
semantics . Machine translation . Mathematical models of language
. Morphology . Multi-lingual generation . Multi-lingual resources
. Multi-lingual speech recognition . Multi-word
expressions/collocations . Multimodal representations and processing
. Natural language interfaces . NLP applications . Ontology learning
. Parsing . Paraphrase . Phonology . Pragmatics . Psycholinguistics
. Question answering . Rich transcription . Semantics
. Semantic distance . Semantic role labeling . Sentiment analysis
. Surface realization . Syntax . NLP/IR applications . Speech
generation . Speech mining . Speech recognition . Speech summarization
. Speech-based interfaces . Spoken language understanding . Text
alignment . Text categorization and clustering . Text generation
. Text/Web mining . Text planning . Text representation . Text
summarization . Topic detection and tracking . Unsupervised learning
. Web information retrieval . Web technology . Word sense
disambiguation

We would be grateful if you could let us know if you can serve, and
under what areas you feel you can review, as soon as possible. We are
looking forward to your participation and know that you can help make
the Student Workshop at ACL 2008 a success.

Below we are including the call for papers. Please, contact us if you
need any further information.

Sincerely,
ACL 2008 SRW co-chairs

[... Call for papers ...]

===Call for papers===

------------------------------------------------------
ACL 2008 Student Research Workshop
June 15-20, 2008, Columbus Ohio

Call for Papers
------------------------------------------------------

1. General Invitation for Submissions

The Student Research Workshop is an established tradition at ACL
conferences. The workshop provides a venue for student researchers
investigating topics in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language
Processing to present their work and receive feedback. Participants
will have the opportunity to receive feedback from a general audience
as well as from panelists; the panelists are experienced researchers
who will prepare in-depth comments and questions in advance of the
presentation.

We would like to invite student researchers to submit their work to
the workshop. Since this workshop is an excellent opportunity to ask
for suggestions, to receive useful feedback and to run your ideas by
an international audience of researchers, the emphasis of the workshop
will be on work in progress. The research being presented can come
from any topic area within computational linguistics including, but
not limited to, the following topic areas:

- pragmatics, discourse, semantics, syntax and the lexicon
- phonetics, phonology and morphology
- linguistic, mathematical and psychological models of language
- information retrieval, information extraction, question answering
- summarization and paraphrasing
- speech recognition, speech synthesis
- corpus-based language modeling
- multi-lingual processing, machine translation, translation aids
- spoken and written natural language interfaces, dialogue systems
- multi-modal language processing, multimedia systems
- message and narrative understanding systems

2. Submission Requirements

The emphasis of the workshop is on original and unpublished
research. The papers should describe original work in
progress. Students who have settled on their thesis direction but
still have significant research left to do are particularly encouraged
to submit their papers.

Since the main purpose of presenting at the workshop is to exchange
ideas with other researchers and to receive helpful feedback for
further development of the work, papers should clearly indicate
directions for future research wherever appropriate. All authors of
multi-author papers must be students. Papers submitted for this
workshop are eligible only if they have not been presented at any
other meeting with publicly available published proceedings. Students
who have already presented at an ACL/EACL/NAACL Student Research
Workshop may not submit to this workshop. They should submit their
papers to the main conference instead. It must be indicated if a paper
has been submitted to another conference or workshop.

3. Submission Procedure

Submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings and
should not exceed six (6) pages, including references. We strongly
recommend the use of ACL LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word Style
files tailored for this year's conference. These files will be
available soon from the student workshop pages of the conference
site. A description of the format will also be available in case you
are unable to use these style files directly. All the submissions must
be electronic. Please use the submission page to submit your paper.

4. Reviewing Procedure

Reviewing of papers submitted to the Student Workshop will be managed
by the Student Workshop Co-Chairs, with the assistance of a team of
reviewers. Each submission will be matched with a mixed panel of
student and senior researchers for review. The final acceptance
decision will be based on the results of the review. Note that
reviewing of papers will be double-blind; therefore, please make sure
your paper shows the title, but no author information. You should
likewise not have any self identifying references anywhere in the
paper submitted for review. For example, rather than this: ''We showed
previously (Smith, 2001), ...'', use citations such as: ''Smith (2001)
previously showed ...''.

5. Schedule

The papers must be submitted no later than midnight, January 10th,
2008 . No papers received after January 10th, 2008 will be
accepted. Acknowledgment will be emailed soon after
receipt. Notification of acceptance will be sent to authors (by email)
on February 28th, 2008. Detailed formatting guidelines for the
preparation of the final camera-ready copy will be provided to authors
with their acceptance notice.

Important Dates:

Paper submission deadline: January 10, 2008
Notification of acceptance: February 28, 2008
Camera-ready paper submission deadline: April 14, 2008
Conference date: June 15-20, 2008
(The workshop will be held during the main conference)

6. Contact Information

If you need to contact the Co-Chairs of the Student Workshop, please
use: acl08srw@ling.osu.edu. An e-mail sent to this address will be
forwarded to all Co-Chairs.

Ebru Arisoy (Speech Co-Chair)
Bogazici University,
Bebek, Istanbul, Turkey

Wolfgang Maier (NLP Co-Chair)
University of Tuebingen
Tuebingen, Germany

Keisuke Inoue (IR Co-Chair)
Syracuse University
Syracuse, New York, USA

===Panelist invitation letter===

Dear Prof. X,

we, the organizers of the Student Research Workshop, would like to invite you, as an accomplished researcher in the field of Computational Linguistics, to participate in the panel of the Student Research Workshop at ACL-08: HLT.

It is a tradition at the ACL Student Research Workshop that after their presentation, student authors receive feedback from a senior researcher panelists. A panelist has read the 6-page paper of a student, is familiar with both the related research and with advising students, attends the presentation of the student and gives about 5 minutes feedback directly after the presentation or in front of the student's poster. This feedback should enable the student to improve her/his work and should give valuable hints on how to continue with his/her research.

The ACL Student Research Workshop will take place on June 16 during the main ACL conference in Columbus. We thought that paper #n, "title" (selected for {poster,paper} presentation), is especially interesting for you. If you will attend the conference and would be interested in serving as a panelist for paper #n, please respond to this mail within one week. You can find an abstract of the paper at http://xyz

As a reward for serving as a panelist, your name will be mentioned on the ACL-08 SRW page - this is unfortunately the only the honour we can offer you. But maybe you also find it interesting to get in contact with promising student researchers working in your area.

If you cannot attend ACL or you don't feel like being a panelist, we would be grateful if you could point out other senior researchers that might be willing to serve as a panelist for paper #n.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us.

Sincerely,
ACL 2008 SRW co-chairs.

===Learning the estimated costs for the NFS grant e-mail===
Dear ---:

As a student presenter at SRW, you will be given some funding to partially cover your expenses for attending ACL and SRW. Grants are made on a reimbursement basis. Reimbursable items include air travel, transportation to and from airports, meals, lodgings, and conference registration fees. The purpose of the grant is to assist you; it may not cover the full cost of attending the conference, yet we hope that it provides sufficient funds to offset much of your major costs, such as airfare.

Please let us know your estimated travel expenses as soon as possible. You will be notified how much funding you will be given after you send us your estimated travel expenses.

It is important to note that since the grants are supplied by the U.S. National Science Foundation, we are able to cover your travel expenses *ONLY* if you use an U.S. air carrier. You may still travel with a non-U.S. carrier: in that case you can use your grant money to cover other expenses, such as registration and accommodation.

There is a special exception to the above rule: use of a non-U.S. air carrier is permissible and reimbursable if travel by a:

1. non-US air carrier would eliminate two or more aircraft
changes en route;
2. U.S.-flag air carrier would extend the time in a travel status
by at least four hours more than travel by a foreign-flag air
carrier; or,
3. U.S.-flag air carrier would require a connecting time of four
hours or more at an overseas interchange point.

If you do decide to use a non-U.S. carrier and would like to get reimbursed for it, you will need to submit a U.S. air carrier itinerary document that shows that you've satisfied the above special exception.

Please let us know if you have any questions. We are looking forward to meeting you at ACL and SRW.

ACL-SRW co-chairs

===Notification of the NSF grant e-mail===
Dear ---:

As a student presenter at SRW, you will be given a grant of XXX US dollars to partially cover your expenses for attending ACL and SRW.
In the distribution of the grant, we aim to cover your expenses for airfare, ACL registration, and membership fee. We also aim to contribute toward 4 nights stay in a shared room in one of the conference hotels (check http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/acl08/roommate.html for the roommate matching service) and meals during the conference. Note that the amount we allocated for lodging is $XX per night and the amount we allocated for meals is $XX per day. The purpose of the grant is to assist you; we hope that it provides sufficient funds to offset much of your costs.

Grants are made on a reimbursement basis. Reimbursable items include air travel, transportation to and from airports, meals, lodgings, and conference registration fees. Please make your purchases now and keep all relevant receipts, including boarding passes. You will need to submit them after the conference. Detailed instructions regarding the format of reimbursement forms will be emailed to you later.

It is important to note that since the grants are supplied by the U.S. National Science Foundation, we are able to cover your travel expenses *ONLY* if you use an U.S. air carrier. You may still travel with a non-U.S. carrier: in that case you can use your grant money to cover other expenses, such as registration and accommodation.

There is a special exception to the above rule: use of a non-U.S. air carrier is reimbursable if travel by a:

1. non-US air carrier would eliminate two or more aircraft
changes en route;
2. U.S.-flag air carrier would extend the time in a travel status
by at least four hours more than travel by a foreign-flag air
carrier; or,
3. U.S.-flag air carrier would require a connecting time of four
hours or more at an overseas interchange point.

If you do decide to use a non-U.S. carrier and would like to get reimbursed for it, you will need to submit a U.S. air carrier itinerary document that shows that you've satisfied the above special exception.

Please let us know if you have any questions. We are looking forward to meeting you at ACL and SRW.

ACL SRW co-chairs

PS. You will register to the main ACL conference for the SRW. The SRW will be held in conjunction with the ACL main conference, and with your registration, you will be able to attend both SRW and the main conference events. If you want to attend the workshops after the main conference, you also need to register for these workshops. Don't forget to register early on the ACL website so that you get the early-bird price (deadline: May 17). The registration website is: http://www.aclweb.org/membership/acl2008reg.php.

PPS. IMPORTANT: If you will need a visa to enter the USA, don't delay your visa applications! For the invitation letter to obtain the visa, check the ACL website (http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/acl08/)

===E-mail for the reimbursements===
Dear ---:

It was nice to meet you in person at ACL-SRW. We hope you received very helpful feedbacks from the senior researchers for your further research. As a student presenter at SRW, you were allocated some funding to partially cover your expenses for attending ACL and SRW and now it is time for the reimbursements.
You need to mail the original copies of your receipts to Priscilla Rasmussen. She will send you a check after she gets all your receipts.

Please follow the below instructions to get your check in a short time.
1) Send the below information to acl08srw@ling.osu.edu asap.
- the breakdown of your expenses
(i.e. airfare=$1200, lodging=$62,5x4 nights=$250, ...)
- the total amount of reimbursement (i.e. total amount=$2000)
- the address to send a check
*** As long as the total cost does not exceed the allowance, you can request a reimbursement with different itemized costs than our estimates. (e.g. you can spend more on travel, if you save on lodging, etc.) However, there is an upper limit for each item.
*** If your total cost is more than the amount that we have allocated for you, you may be given an extra $100.

2) Send all your receipts to the below address by July 7.
Priscilla Rasmussen
ACL Business Manager
209 N. Eighth Street
Stroudsburg, PA 18360

*** Photocopies of receipts will be accepted if the original copies will be needed for other grant requests. In that case, you need to let us know the amount that will be paid by ACL-SRW grant.
Please do not hesitate to contact us for your questions regarding the reimbursements.

Best Regards,
ACL 2008 SRW co-chairs

SRW documents

2008-08-18T17:17:24Z

Wmaier: New page: ==SRW Documents== ===Summary=== This page contains all documents that were sent out during the organization of the ACL SRW 2008. ===Invitation letter for reviewers=== Dear colleague, ...

==SRW Documents==

===Summary===

This page contains all documents that were sent out during the organization of the ACL SRW 2008.

===Invitation letter for reviewers===

Dear colleague,

we would like to invite you to serve on the Program Committee of the
Student Research Workshop at ACL-08:HLT. The event will be held
alongside the main conference in Columbus, Ohio, on June 15-20, 2008.

The committee will consist of a cross-section of students and
experienced researchers, representing all interests within the ACL
community. You will be asked to review papers from student
researchers. This is an important responsibility as you will not only
be able to provide students with an opportunity to showcase their
work, but also offer all students who submit invaluable feedback on
their work in progress. Initially, we anticipate you being assigned
3-4 papers to review.

If you accept this invitation (and we sincerely hope you do), we would
be grateful if you could include your areas of interest in your reply,
as chosen from the keywords below.

Acoustic modeling . Audio and video retrieval . Cognitive modeling
. Content-based/collaborative information filtering . Corpora and
treebanks . Cross-language information retrieval . Dialogue
. Discourse . Discriminative training . Distributed information
retrieval . Evaluation metrics and methodologies . Grammar development
and engineering . Grammar extraction and induction . Grammar
formalisms . Human/machine dialogue systems . Human/human conversation
and meeting processing . Inference and entailment . Information
extraction . Information retrieval models . Interactive/Personalized
information retrieval . Intranet/Enterprise Search . Knowledge
acquisition . Language identification . Language modeling . Language
resources . Learning techniques for language processing
. Lexical acquisition . Lexical/Pronunciation modeling . Lexical
semantics . Machine translation . Mathematical models of language
. Morphology . Multi-lingual generation . Multi-lingual resources
. Multi-lingual speech recognition . Multi-word
expressions/collocations . Multimodal representations and processing
. Natural language interfaces . NLP applications . Ontology learning
. Parsing . Paraphrase . Phonology . Pragmatics . Psycholinguistics
. Question answering . Rich transcription . Semantics
. Semantic distance . Semantic role labeling . Sentiment analysis
. Surface realization . Syntax . NLP/IR applications . Speech
generation . Speech mining . Speech recognition . Speech summarization
. Speech-based interfaces . Spoken language understanding . Text
alignment . Text categorization and clustering . Text generation
. Text/Web mining . Text planning . Text representation . Text
summarization . Topic detection and tracking . Unsupervised learning
. Web information retrieval . Web technology . Word sense
disambiguation

We would be grateful if you could let us know if you can serve, and
under what areas you feel you can review, as soon as possible. We are
looking forward to your participation and know that you can help make
the Student Workshop at ACL 2008 a success.

Below we are including the call for papers. Please, contact us if you
need any further information.

Sincerely,
ACL 2008 SRW co-chairs

[... Call for papers ...]

===Call for papers===

------------------------------------------------------
ACL 2008 Student Research Workshop
June 15-20, 2008, Columbus Ohio

Call for Papers
------------------------------------------------------

1. General Invitation for Submissions

The Student Research Workshop is an established tradition at ACL
conferences. The workshop provides a venue for student researchers
investigating topics in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language
Processing to present their work and receive feedback. Participants
will have the opportunity to receive feedback from a general audience
as well as from panelists; the panelists are experienced researchers
who will prepare in-depth comments and questions in advance of the
presentation.

We would like to invite student researchers to submit their work to
the workshop. Since this workshop is an excellent opportunity to ask
for suggestions, to receive useful feedback and to run your ideas by
an international audience of researchers, the emphasis of the workshop
will be on work in progress. The research being presented can come
from any topic area within computational linguistics including, but
not limited to, the following topic areas:

- pragmatics, discourse, semantics, syntax and the lexicon
- phonetics, phonology and morphology
- linguistic, mathematical and psychological models of language
- information retrieval, information extraction, question answering
- summarization and paraphrasing
- speech recognition, speech synthesis
- corpus-based language modeling
- multi-lingual processing, machine translation, translation aids
- spoken and written natural language interfaces, dialogue systems
- multi-modal language processing, multimedia systems
- message and narrative understanding systems

2. Submission Requirements

The emphasis of the workshop is on original and unpublished
research. The papers should describe original work in
progress. Students who have settled on their thesis direction but
still have significant research left to do are particularly encouraged
to submit their papers.

Since the main purpose of presenting at the workshop is to exchange
ideas with other researchers and to receive helpful feedback for
further development of the work, papers should clearly indicate
directions for future research wherever appropriate. All authors of
multi-author papers must be students. Papers submitted for this
workshop are eligible only if they have not been presented at any
other meeting with publicly available published proceedings. Students
who have already presented at an ACL/EACL/NAACL Student Research
Workshop may not submit to this workshop. They should submit their
papers to the main conference instead. It must be indicated if a paper
has been submitted to another conference or workshop.

3. Submission Procedure

Submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings and
should not exceed six (6) pages, including references. We strongly
recommend the use of ACL LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word Style
files tailored for this year's conference. These files will be
available soon from the student workshop pages of the conference
site. A description of the format will also be available in case you
are unable to use these style files directly. All the submissions must
be electronic. Please use the submission page to submit your paper.

4. Reviewing Procedure

Reviewing of papers submitted to the Student Workshop will be managed
by the Student Workshop Co-Chairs, with the assistance of a team of
reviewers. Each submission will be matched with a mixed panel of
student and senior researchers for review. The final acceptance
decision will be based on the results of the review. Note that
reviewing of papers will be double-blind; therefore, please make sure
your paper shows the title, but no author information. You should
likewise not have any self identifying references anywhere in the
paper submitted for review. For example, rather than this: ''We showed
previously (Smith, 2001), ...'', use citations such as: ''Smith (2001)
previously showed ...''.

5. Schedule

The papers must be submitted no later than midnight, January 10th,
2008 . No papers received after January 10th, 2008 will be
accepted. Acknowledgment will be emailed soon after
receipt. Notification of acceptance will be sent to authors (by email)
on February 28th, 2008. Detailed formatting guidelines for the
preparation of the final camera-ready copy will be provided to authors
with their acceptance notice.

Important Dates:

Paper submission deadline: January 10, 2008
Notification of acceptance: February 28, 2008
Camera-ready paper submission deadline: April 14, 2008
Conference date: June 15-20, 2008
(The workshop will be held during the main conference)

6. Contact Information

If you need to contact the Co-Chairs of the Student Workshop, please
use: acl08srw@ling.osu.edu. An e-mail sent to this address will be
forwarded to all Co-Chairs.

Ebru Arisoy (Speech Co-Chair)
Bogazici University,
Bebek, Istanbul, Turkey

Wolfgang Maier (NLP Co-Chair)
University of Tuebingen
Tuebingen, Germany

Keisuke Inoue (IR Co-Chair)
Syracuse University
Syracuse, New York, USA

===Panelist invitation letter===

Dear Prof. X,

we, the organizers of the Student Research Workshop, would like to invite you, as an accomplished researcher in the field of Computational Linguistics, to participate in the panel of the Student Research Workshop at ACL-08: HLT.

It is a tradition at the ACL Student Research Workshop that after their presentation, student authors receive feedback from a senior researcher panelists. A panelist has read the 6-page paper of a student, is familiar with both the related research and with advising students, attends the presentation of the student and gives about 5 minutes feedback directly after the presentation or in front of the student's poster. This feedback should enable the student to improve her/his work and should give valuable hints on how to continue with his/her research.

The ACL Student Research Workshop will take place on June 16 during the main ACL conference in Columbus. We thought that paper #n, "title" (selected for {poster,paper} presentation), is especially interesting for you. If you will attend the conference and would be interested in serving as a panelist for paper #n, please respond to this mail within one week. You can find an abstract of the paper at http://xyz

As a reward for serving as a panelist, your name will be mentioned on the ACL-08 SRW page - this is unfortunately the only the honour we can offer you. But maybe you also find it interesting to get in contact with promising student researchers working in your area.

If you cannot attend ACL or you don't feel like being a panelist, we would be grateful if you could point out other senior researchers that might be willing to serve as a panelist for paper #n.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us.

Sincerely,
ACL 2008 SRW co-chairs.

===Learning the estimated costs for the NFS grant e-mail===
Dear ---:

As a student presenter at SRW, you will be given some funding to partially cover your expenses for attending ACL and SRW. Grants are made on a reimbursement basis. Reimbursable items include air travel, transportation to and from airports, meals, lodgings, and conference registration fees. The purpose of the grant is to assist you; it may not cover the full cost of attending the conference, yet we hope that it provides sufficient funds to offset much of your major costs, such as airfare.

Please let us know your estimated travel expenses as soon as possible. You will be notified how much funding you will be given after you send us your estimated travel expenses.

It is important to note that since the grants are supplied by the U.S. National Science Foundation, we are able to cover your travel expenses *ONLY* if you use an U.S. air carrier. You may still travel with a non-U.S. carrier: in that case you can use your grant money to cover other expenses, such as registration and accommodation.

There is a special exception to the above rule: use of a non-U.S. air carrier is permissible and reimbursable if travel by a:

1. non-US air carrier would eliminate two or more aircraft
changes en route;
2. U.S.-flag air carrier would extend the time in a travel status
by at least four hours more than travel by a foreign-flag air
carrier; or,
3. U.S.-flag air carrier would require a connecting time of four
hours or more at an overseas interchange point.

If you do decide to use a non-U.S. carrier and would like to get reimbursed for it, you will need to submit a U.S. air carrier itinerary document that shows that you've satisfied the above special exception.

Please let us know if you have any questions. We are looking forward to meeting you at ACL and SRW.

ACL-SRW co-chairs

===Notification of the NSF grant e-mail===
Dear ---:

As a student presenter at SRW, you will be given a grant of XXX US dollars to partially cover your expenses for attending ACL and SRW.
In the distribution of the grant, we aim to cover your expenses for airfare, ACL registration, and membership fee. We also aim to contribute toward 4 nights stay in a shared room in one of the conference hotels (check http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/acl08/roommate.html for the roommate matching service) and meals during the conference. Note that the amount we allocated for lodging is $XX per night and the amount we allocated for meals is $XX per day. The purpose of the grant is to assist you; we hope that it provides sufficient funds to offset much of your costs.

Grants are made on a reimbursement basis. Reimbursable items include air travel, transportation to and from airports, meals, lodgings, and conference registration fees. Please make your purchases now and keep all relevant receipts, including boarding passes. You will need to submit them after the conference. Detailed instructions regarding the format of reimbursement forms will be emailed to you later.

It is important to note that since the grants are supplied by the U.S. National Science Foundation, we are able to cover your travel expenses *ONLY* if you use an U.S. air carrier. You may still travel with a non-U.S. carrier: in that case you can use your grant money to cover other expenses, such as registration and accommodation.

There is a special exception to the above rule: use of a non-U.S. air carrier is reimbursable if travel by a:

1. non-US air carrier would eliminate two or more aircraft
changes en route;
2. U.S.-flag air carrier would extend the time in a travel status
by at least four hours more than travel by a foreign-flag air
carrier; or,
3. U.S.-flag air carrier would require a connecting time of four
hours or more at an overseas interchange point.

If you do decide to use a non-U.S. carrier and would like to get reimbursed for it, you will need to submit a U.S. air carrier itinerary document that shows that you've satisfied the above special exception.

Please let us know if you have any questions. We are looking forward to meeting you at ACL and SRW.

ACL SRW co-chairs

PS. You will register to the main ACL conference for the SRW. The SRW will be held in conjunction with the ACL main conference, and with your registration, you will be able to attend both SRW and the main conference events. If you want to attend the workshops after the main conference, you also need to register for these workshops. Don't forget to register early on the ACL website so that you get the early-bird price (deadline: May 17). The registration website is: http://www.aclweb.org/membership/acl2008reg.php.

PPS. IMPORTANT: If you will need a visa to enter the USA, don't delay your visa applications! For the invitation letter to obtain the visa, check the ACL website (http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/acl08/)

===E-mail for the reimbursements===
Dear ---:

It was nice to meet you in person at ACL-SRW. We hope you received very helpful feedbacks from the senior researchers for your further research. As a student presenter at SRW, you were allocated some funding to partially cover your expenses for attending ACL and SRW and now it is time for the reimbursements.
You need to mail the original copies of your receipts to Priscilla Rasmussen. She will send you a check after she gets all your receipts.

Please follow the below instructions to get your check in a short time.
1) Send the below information to acl08srw@ling.osu.edu asap.
- the breakdown of your expenses
(i.e. airfare=$1200, lodging=$62,5x4 nights=$250, ...)
- the total amount of reimbursement (i.e. total amount=$2000)
- the address to send a check
*** As long as the total cost does not exceed the allowance, you can request a reimbursement with different itemized costs than our estimates. (e.g. you can spend more on travel, if you save on lodging, etc.) However, there is an upper limit for each item.
*** If your total cost is more than the amount that we have allocated for you, you may be given an extra $100.

2) Send all your receipts to the below address by July 7.
Priscilla Rasmussen
ACL Business Manager
209 N. Eighth Street
Stroudsburg, PA 18360

*** Photocopies of receipts will be accepted if the original copies will be needed for other grant requests. In that case, you need to let us know the amount that will be paid by ACL-SRW grant.
Please do not hesitate to contact us for your questions regarding the reimbursements.

Best Regards,
ACL 2008 SRW co-chairs

SRW tasks

2008-08-18T17:12:42Z

Wmaier: New page: '''Call for Papers and publicity''' The SRW must be made public very early, in order to encourage students to submit their work, and in order to encourage professors to encourage their st...

'''Call for Papers and publicity'''

The SRW must be made public very early, in order to encourage students to submit their work, and in order to encourage professors to encourage their students to submit their work. This should be done not only by submitting the CFP to lists, but also by sending personal messages to faculties, in order to increase the awareness of the SRW and its benefits. Don't forget to mention the (partial!) student travel funding as one of the major benefits of the workshop, as well as the personal tutoring by senior researchers. Ask PC members to link the workshop on their homepages/faculty pages. Before you post the call, the general conference chair should see it.

'''Website and START'''

In the last years, the SRW website was located within the main conference website and administered by the main conference site webmaster. It should contain the call for papers, including the members of the program committee, as well as the panelists and the accepted papers (as soon as fixed). We also added an NSF logo to acknowledge their sponsorship.

The SRW gets its own START site. The START system can be used to manage the entire reviewing process. Setting up this page as early as possible and getting familiar with the system is beneficial. START is provided to the SRW by the ACL. James Clarke (U Edinburgh) in substitution for Simone Teufel (U Cambridge) set it up for us.

'''Budget and NSF grant'''

Traditionally, the SRW gets funded by the National Science Foundation. The grant is used for funding of the travel of the participants. Usually, the faculty advisor solicits the fund at the NSF, the earlier, the better; the faculty advisor's university will be the holder of the fund.

'''Coordinating the reimbursement of the students'''

In 2008, Priscilla Rasmussen kindly offered to handle the reimbursements to students. Then, she will bill University of Pittsburgh (holder of the NSF grant) for one amount. Instructions should be given to the participants about what information to send where to get their reimbursements. The ACL and the SRW will not pay for funds to be disbursed in non-US funds. If someone requests that, the cost of conversion will need to come out of that participants' allotted amount.

We estimated estimated in advance the costs for each student to be sure the budget was realistic, based on projected airfares from popular internet travel sites and the cost for loding in a economic accomodation. We asked the students after the conference to send us a breakdown of their costs. An amount for each student was alloted accordingly. Due to a lower number of SRW participants, we were able to reimburse all participants for all of their costs. Note that possibly only partial reimbursements can be made if there are many participants or many participants have a long way to travel.

'''Program committee and reviewing process'''

We recruited the program committee out of members of previous year's program committees, known senior researchers, personal contacts and recommended people. A program committee member is not supposed to serve for more than two times. We did not have to let the ACL exec authorize the PC (even though the ACL handbook says differently).

The program committee should be composed of students and senior researchers. We had 61 reviewers (30 students, 31 senior researchers) and 27 submissions, which allowed us to assign five reviewers to a single paper (three senior researchers and two students). This meant at most three papers to review for each senior PC member and two papers to review for each student member. The high number of the reviews was highly praised by the authors after the workshop. We tried to select the reviewers such that all areas were sufficiently covered. We used a list of keywords to match the submissions to the reviewers. This was difficult and a lot of work. Especially if you have more submissions, consider using the bidding facilities in START, which allows the reviewers to express their preferences before you make the final distribution. START also offers you some other choices on the review process (e.g., control the degree of visibility of reviewers within the PC). Remember that you have to decide on all details of the reviewing process before the submission deadline. Since many of the reviewers will also review papers for the ACL main conference and the SRW has its own START page, also don't forget to mention that the SRW papers will not appear in the main conference START reviewer accounts.

'''Proceedings'''

The co-chairs are responsible for the compilation of the proceedings and the CD-ROM/ACL anthology version of the SRW proceedings. ACL offers great software, called ACLPUB, which automates parts of that process. However, preparing the book is a big chunk of work for which enough time should be allocated, mainly because authors tend not to follow formatting instructions. We could find all sorts of errors in the camera-ready versions of the papers, ranging from small ones, such as overful columns, to severe font problems. Since you have to anticipate two or even more rounds of revisions, set the deadline for the SRW authors for the submission of their camera-ready version early enough, at least 2 weeks before the publication chair deadline for the delivery of the finished proceedings.

'''Panelists'''

It is a tradition at the SRW to ask senior research to act as panelists for the SRW talks. In past years, one or two panelists were assigned to each paper. A panelist has to read the student's paper and prepare in-depth questions which should allow the student to advance in his research. A separate 5-min question session at the end of each talk is reserved to panelists questions, before the general public can ask its questions.

In past years, a general invitation along with the list of abstracts of the student papers was sent to a long list of senior researchers. Panelists posts were then distributed on a first-come-first-serve basis. We, in contrast, tried to search researchers which matched very well with a specific paper topic and asked them directly to be the panelist for a single paper. Both methods seem to work, although the first method is maybe a more feasible option if you have many submissions. We think that responses are more likely if in the invitation, it is made clear that that being a panelist is not as much work as being a reviewer.

'''Schedule'''

In the last years, efforts have been made to make the SRW look like a part of the main conference, not like a separate workshop. The oral session(s) have been scheduled in parallel to main conference sessions and SRW posters were hung indistinguishably along with main conference posters. This has proven to be beneficial for the SRW presenters, due to an increased amount of feedback. The program chair(s) should be informed about this.

'''Coordination with conference organizers and local arrangements'''

1. coordinate with the program co-chairs to schedule the talks and posters

2. coordinate with the general co-chairs about costs the SRW should pay for room, equipment, food, etc. Typically, the SRW contributes some of the funds from its NSF grant to cover these costs, but it seems this is handled on a volunteer basis.

3. coordinate with local arrangements about room setup for the SRW spoken sessions, including where the panelists should sit.

4. coordinate with local arrangements about setup for the poster session.

5. make it clear to the general co-chair and local arrangements that the student lunch ACL sponsors is completely separate from the SRW. The SRW does not pay for it or coordinate it. The SRW may have its own lunch, but that is a different lunch. This was a source of confusion for everyone in 2008.

'''Miscellaneous'''

Apart from the traditional ACL Student Lunch, we gathered with all participants, organizers and panelists of the SRW for a separate lunch on separate day. This was a great occasion to get to know each other more personally, and at the same time easy to organize.

SRW

2008-08-18T17:08:04Z

Wmaier:

==Organization ACL-SRW 2008==

===Introduction===

This document has been compiled by the organizers of the ACL-08:HLT Student Research Workshop, Ebru Arisoy (Bogazici University, Turkey), Wolfgang Maier (University of Tübingen, Germany) and Keisuke Inoue (Syracuse University, USA) and faculty advisor Prof. Jan Wiebe (University of Pittsburgh). Its purpose is to share the experiences during the organization and to facilitate the work of future co-chairs.

===ACL SRW Organization===

In order to make the organization as efficient as possible, we have made the experience that where possible, it is beneficial to appoint at the beginning of the organization one of the co-chairs as the responsible person for a certain subtask. It is this co-chair's duty to ensure that all of the corresponding work gets done. For this purpose, we have tried to isolate all independent subtasks of the workshop organization and describe them in detail [[SRW tasks|here]].

===Documents===

We have compiled all [[SRW documents|documents]] sent out during the organization of the SRW.

==Timeline Organisation ACL-SRW 2007==

Chris Biemann, Violeta Seretan, Ellen Riloff

{| border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="5"
|width="25%"|'''Date'''
|width="25%"|'''Event'''
|width="50%"|'''Comment'''
|-
|valign="top"|October 27, 2006
|valign="top"|2nd student co-chair acknowledged
|valign="top"|Make sure that all co-chairs will be able to travel to the conference. ACL guidelines say that co-chairs must be self-financing.
|-
|valign="top"|October 31, 2006
|valign="top"|ACL Guidelines available to student co-chairs
|valign="top"|http://www.cis.udel.edu/~carberry/ACL/index-conf-handbook.html
|-
|valign="top"|November 3, 2006
|valign="top"|Start working on the Call for Papers (CfP)
|valign="top"|CfP must clearly state a number of things that are different from usual CfPs, regarding student specific issues. Also, try to avoid misunderstandings of previous years: double submission policy, previously published work, minimum/maximum page count, anonymous review. Fix dates for submission and acceptance. It is advisable to use the same dates as the main session. Camera-ready deadline should be at least one week earlier than the main conf camera ready deadline to account for inexperienced formatters. The CfP already contains most of the planning, so be very careful with it and discuss it thoroughly.
|-
|valign="top"|November 7, 2006
|valign="top"|Ask webmasters to set up the webpage
|valign="top"|Webpage should be up as soon as possible and updated as soon as changes occur - otherwise people ask about discrepancies, which causes extra work.
|-
|valign="top"|November 7, 2006
|valign="top"|Ask ACL Secretary or local organizers to set up a common email address that is forwarded to all co-chairs
|valign="top"|This ensures that everyone gets all mails; further, private email addresses are not published on the web which reduces spam (you’ll get a lot of it)
|-
|valign="top"|November 9, 2006
|valign="top"|Set up a shared spreadsheet document at docs.google
|valign="top"|Very useful for putting together lists and other information
|-
|valign="top"|November 9, 2006
|valign="top"|Communicate CfP to general conference chair
|valign="top"|Official calls should be double-checked by the main conf. organization
|-
|valign="top"|November 10, 2006
|valign="top"|HTML version of CfP policy question: is handled by us
|valign="top"|Webmasters ensure uniform layout with the rest of the page, however they might be too busy for that. Clarify!
|-
|valign="top"|November 10, 2006
|valign="top"|Starting to work on the reviewer candidate list
|valign="top"|Collect names together with current email addresses and mark people as senior or junior. Use SRW reviewers from previous years (if they have not already served twice) and ask people you know. We asked 94 people, 70 replied, 6 had non-valid email addresses, 53 accepted. Some people were asked later doe to shortage for some areas (keywords)
|-
|valign="top"|November 14, 2006
|valign="top"|1st CfP ok-ed, HTML version ready
|
|-
|valign="top"|November 15, 2006
|valign="top"|common email address up and working
|
|-
|valign="top"|November 16, 2006
|valign="top"|Working on list of keywords
|valign="top"|Keywords are good for assigning reviewers to papers and to find out whether all areas a covered. We used a blend of keywords from different ACL conferences as could be seen when submitting a paper via the START system. Our list is in Appendix A.
|-
|valign="top"|November 17, 2006
|valign="top"|Distribution of 1st CfP
|valign="top"|We used the following lists, maybe you find more?
* corpora@uib.no (membership necessary, or send directly to Knut Hofland)
* LINGUIST List (via web submission interface)
* elsnet-list@elsnet.org
* euralex@euralex.org
* cluk@dcs.shef.ac.uk
* LN@cines.fr
* ACL: Priscilla Rasmussen <rasmusse@ptd.net>
|-
|valign="top"|November 17, 2006
|valign="top"|CfP on webpage
|
|-
|valign="top"|November 24, 2006
|valign="top"|Reviewer invitation letter sent out to 1st round of reviewer candidates (84)
|valign="top"|Letter: see Appendix B
|-
|valign="top"|November 30, 2006
|valign="top"|Reviewer invitation letter sent out to 2nd round of reviewer candidates (10)
|valign="top"|Second round reviewers were selected in anticipation to meet yet underrepresented keywords. Check http://www.elsnet.org/experts/
|-
|valign="top"|December 4, 2006
|valign="top"|ACL newsletter nr.1 sent out including CfP
|
|-
|valign="top"|December 7, 2006
|valign="top"|List of reviewers fixed
|
|-
|valign="top"|December 8, 2006
|valign="top"|Thanks for being reviewer - letter sent out, with question about affiliation and spelling
|valign="top"|Special characters are heaps of fun in international name lists; name spelling and affiliation should be checked before being published
|-
|valign="top"|December 12, 2006
|valign="top"|first of a handful of mails that ask for invitation letters for long lists of "students"
|valign="top"|It seems to be common to try to get invitation letters for visa via scientific conferences. Prepare a letter stating that once a paper was accepted, there will be an invitation letter, but not earlier.
|-
|valign="top"|December 12, 2006
|valign="top"|START system submission page up and running
|valign="top"|START system is very useful, try to check out the options
|-
|valign="top"|December 18, 2006
|valign="top"|Preparation of funding proposal to NSF by faculty advisor
|Get an idea about how to split the money between students and organization, estimate costs, decide on a best paper award
|-
|valign="top"|December 19, 2006
|valign="top"|2nd CfP communicated to include it in ACL newsletter Nr. 2
|
|-
|valign="top"|December 19, 2006
|valign="top"|2nd CfP distributed via same lists as 1st CfP
|
|-
|valign="top"|December 19, 2006
|valign="top"|Program committee on webpage
|
|-
|valign="top"|January 3, 2007
|valign="top"|ACL approaching deadlines reminder sent out by ACL
|
|-
|valign="top"|January 10, 2007
|valign="top"|funding proposal communicated to NSF by faculty advisor
|
|-
|valign="top"|January 15, 2007
|valign="top"|last CfP sent out on all lists
|
|-
|valign="top"|January 23, 2007
|valign="top"|Submission deadline
|valign="top"|We received 52 submissions, some not formatted right, some not anonymized, some not meeting the standards. We ignored formatting issues if they were not too far off, asked to re-submit anonymized versions (by email to us) and did not do anything about the standards. A min page count would have been nice.
|-
|valign="top"|January 23, 2007
|valign="top"|First of several mails asking for deadline extension
|valign="top"|To be answered negatively, see ACL policy
|-
|valign="top"|January 29, 2007
|valign="top"|Finished assignments reviewers-papers
|valign="top"|This took a while, be sure o be available in that time. Also, check for conflicts of interests (same affiliation)
|-
|valign="top"|January 30, 2007
|valign="top"|Reviewing process started
|
|-
|valign="top"|January 31, 2007
|valign="top"|Minor changes in reviewer assignment due to conflicts of interest (pointed out by reviewers)
|
|-
|valign="top"|March 1, 2007
|valign="top"|Clarifying schedule, room, poster arrangements and student lunch
|valign="top"|We had very good attendance and feedback with holding the SRW as a parallel session to main and putting the posters just along the main conference posters
|-
|valign="top"|March 8, 2007
|valign="top"|Sent out reminder about review deadline
|
|-
|valign="top"|March 10, 2007
|valign="top"|Review deadline
|
|-
|valign="top"|March 14, 2007
|valign="top"|all reviews available
|
|-
|valign="top"|March 15, 2007
|valign="top"|Starting to discuss about acceptance
|
|-
|valign="top"|March 20, 2007
|valign="top"|clarify double submissions with those indicating it and with ACL paper chair
|valign="top"|Do NOT allow a paper to be accepted in both main and SRW. Also, try to search for publications with similar title from the same author to find out about double publication. This is a bit tedious, but proved to be necessary.
|-
|valign="top"|March 23, 2007
|valign="top"|Accepted papers decided for posters /oral presentation
|
|-
|valign="top"|March 23, 2007
|valign="top"|Timing, rooms etc. fixed
|valign="top"|Could have been earlier to take out the stress
|-
|valign="top"|March 23, 2007
|valign="top"|Notification of acceptance/rejection sent out
|
|-
|valign="top"|March 29, 2007
|valign="top"|List of accepted papers published on webpage
|
|-
|valign="top"|April 1, 2007
|valign="top"|Sent out preliminary information about funding
|valign="top"|This should be done early because of the Air America Act for NSF-funded events. Do not promise any amounts, rather indicate something like "approximately 75% of expenses".
|-
|valign="top"|April 13, 2007
|valign="top"|ACL newsletter Nr. 3 sent out
|
|-
|valign="top"|April 15, 2007
|valign="top"|Funding from NSF arrived
|
|-
|valign="top"|April 16, 2007
|valign="top"|Sent out detailed information about NSF-compliant receipts to participants
|valign="top"|We offered to have the flights checked by a U.S. travel agency to confirm that there are REALLY no U.S. carriers flying from Europe to Europe :) This should have been sorted out earlier, since some people already had booked their flights.
|-
|valign="top"|April 16, 2007
|valign="top"|NSF logo on sponsor page
|
|-
|valign="top"|April 19, 2007
|valign="top"|Clarifying poster sizes and orientation
|
|-
|valign="top"|April 20, 2007
|valign="top"|Instructions from publication chair arrived
|valign="top"|The proceedings preparation software needs some training - better do that before time gets tight
|-
|valign="top"|April 25, 2007
|valign="top"|Camera ready deadline remainder with detailed formatting instructions ...
|valign="top"|... which will not be followed in most cases, still. Mention the max page count explicitly again, since people will be confused about differing main and SRW paper length for oral and poster presentations
May 2, 2007 first round of revisions for camera-ready papers Some people might need very detailed descriptions what they did wrong. Take care for paper size, this does not show well when only opening papers - print them all to see margin differences.
|-
|valign="top"|May 4, 2007
|valign="top"|Deadline for 1st round of revisions. This was also ACL main camera-ready deadline
|
|-
|valign="top"|May 4, 2007
|valign="top"|started discussing about how to get panelists for feedback
|valign="top"|since panelists should be present at the conference, it makes sense to scan the list of accepted papers for well-known names. Also, the organizing committee might be a source. It did not prove useful in previous years to use conference-independent directories like ELSNET, since most people are not attending. Also check co-chairs and participants of satellite events!
|-
|valign="top"|May 5, 2007
|valign="top"|ACL newsletter nr. 5 and hotel reservation opening
|valign="top"|accommodation should be recommended to participants in order to plan the money and to avoid too high expectations or fluctuations. The stipend does not have to cover accommodation during all satellite events, but should cover the main conf.
|-
|valign="top"|May 7, 2007
|valign="top"|Deadline for 2nd round of revisions
|valign="top"|Our mails were full of the word URGENT. Still, 9 out of 16 had changes to do
|-
|valign="top"|May 8, 2007
|valign="top"|Sent out poster size information to poster presenters
|valign="top"|Check with poster chair, and ensure SRW posters keep hanging as long as other posters.
|-
|valign="top"|May 9, 2007
|valign="top"|Starting to assemble the proceedings
|valign="top"|allow for some hours of instruction reading before actually doing it. Ask about the cover page: is the SRW part of a companion volume or a separate book?
|-
|valign="top"|May 8, 2007
|valign="top"|Sent out invitation letters to panelists candidates, see Appendix
|valign="top"|We asked to reply with a list of papers they would comment on. See Appendix C for letter.
|-
|valign="top"|May 10, 2007
|valign="top"|Deadline for 3rd round or revisions
|valign="top"|Revisions were done on a point-to point basis. Be sure to check your email regularly in these days to avoid delays.
|-
|valign="top"|May 12, 2007
|valign="top"|starting to write the preface for the proceedings volume
|valign="top"|We decided to have also short summaries of papers. We could have done this earlier to avoid time problems with the proceedings
|-
|valign="top"|May 14, 2007
|valign="top"|Official proceedings deadline
|
|-
|valign="top"|May 15, 2007
|valign="top"|Information about schedule coming in from general chair
|valign="top"|since this is necessary for the proceedings, this was a bit late. Had to decide how to group papers rather quickly
|-
|valign="top"|May 15, 2007
|valign="top"|Finalizing date and time for the poster session
|valign="top"|Although posters hopefully keep hanging, there is need for an allotted time slot so panelists (and others) can find presenters. Should be parallel to one of the main poster sessions.
|-
|valign="top"|May 15, 2007
|valign="top"|Call for panelist assignment
|valign="top"|We had a great response for panelists and needed to assign a remaining 5 papers to those who had not expressed their preferences, so we asked the unassigned panelists.
|-
|valign="top"|May 16, 2007
|valign="top"|First inquiries about travel grants are coming in
|valign="top"|It would have been easier to send out information on grants as soon as possible and as detailed as possible. Estimate the cost per participant well beforehand (e.g. for different continents) and give the students rough figures as well as what they exactly will be able to reimburse. Answering inquires on a point-to-point basis eats up too much time
|-
|valign="top"|May 17, 2007
|valign="top"|Finalizing Proceedings
|valign="top"|Although late, we were doing well compared to other workshops :) Sorting out errors beforehand saves a lot of time later after delivering the thought-to-be-final version.
|-
|valign="top"|May 18, 2007
|valign="top"|Proceedings approved by publication chair
|
|-
|valign="top"|May 18, 2007
|valign="top"|Starting to work on ACL meeting report draft
|valign="top"|Almost missed it! Luckily, versions of previous years help a lot.
|-
|valign="top"|May 22, 2007
|valign="top"|ACL-related report deadline
|
|-
|valign="top"|May 22, 2007
|valign="top"|Sending out paper assignments for reviewers
|valign="top"|Check with main chairs for schedules of the panelist's talks. We unfortunately had to refuse 1 panelist since the only paper of interest to him ran in parallel to his presentation.
|-
|valign="top"|May 23, 2007
|valign="top"|Sent out information about reimbursements and asked about estimates from students
|valign="top"|Should explicitly mention various forms of travel (car, train, plane), should ask people to find a cheap hotel. Should clarify how registration is handled: in previous years SRW participants registered as student volunteers without having to work but without having to pay. The NSF grant was then used to pay registration fees to ACL directly. We let students register regularly and reimbursed later, but would not recommend this for the future: some missed the early registration deadline, and all had to pay the membership fee.
|-
|valign="top"|June 1, 2007
|valign="top"|HTML version of program available, also abstracts of oral presentation and posters, including panelists
|valign="top"|Actually, having the abstracts online took until June, 18, which was definitely too late.
|-
|valign="top"|June 1, 2007
|valign="top"|Estimation of costs is done
|valign="top"|We were lucky to have less long-distance participants than anticipated
|-
|valign="top"|June 5, 2007
|valign="top"|Notifications about panelists to participants and about schedule
|
|-
|valign="top"|June 5, 2007
|valign="top"|Choose your Menu for the Exec++ dinner
|
|-
|valign="top"|June 5, 2007
|valign="top"|ACL newsletter Nr .5 (II)
|
|-
|valign="top"|June 12, 2007
|valign="top"|Notes for the exec++ dinner come in
|valign="top"|Prepare a very short presentation about the SRW. The shorter, the more happier the execs.
|-
|valign="top"|June 12, 2007
|valign="top"|Invitation to post conference wrap up breakfast comes in
|
|-
|valign="top"|June 18, 2007
|valign="top"|Worries about the student lunch
|valign="top"|We were not sure whether we organize it or the local chairs take care of it. Further, we did not know who will pay for it. Further, it was forgotten to be announced in the program and had to be included in errata. Don't forget the student lunch! Clarify who's responsible well beforehand.
|-
|valign="top"|June 20, 2007
|valign="top"|Slides for exec++ and business meeting prepared
|
|-
|valign="top"|June 23, 2007
|valign="top"|Going to Prague!
|
|-
|valign="top"|June 25, 2007
|valign="top"|Poster Session SRW
|valign="top"|Great response! One panelist did not arrive, the panel was then hold on 27th.
|-
|valign="top"|June 25, 2007
|valign="top"|Exec++ dinner
|valign="top"|Yummy
|-
|valign="top"|June 26, 2007
|valign="top"|Oral Session SRW
|valign="top"|Even greater response. People had to leave the room because there were no places to stand (let alone to sit). Next time, ask for a bigger room (like all other rooms) and a microphone (like all other rooms). Be sure to keep the schedule for people that switch sessions
|-
|valign="top"|June 27, 2007
|valign="top"|Business meeting
|
|-
|valign="top"|June 28, 2007
|valign="top"|Wrap up breakfast
|valign="top"|Be sure to mention behalves of students - you're their only representative there.
|-
|valign="top"|June 29, 2007
|valign="top"|First of many "thank you" letters from participants
|valign="top"|:) All that was for a purpose :)
|-
|valign="top"|June 29, 2007
|valign="top"|First of numerous enquiries about the precise reimbursement procedure
|valign="top"|Check with Priscilla on the conference how to proceed. Fix a strategy, even if everybody's busy. Reimbursement got quite delayed because everyone went on holiday and nobody knew where to send the stuff to.
|-
|valign="top"|July, 25 2007
|valign="top"|ACL newsletter nr. 6
|
|-
|valign="top"|August 4, 2007
|valign="top"|Sent detailed reimbursement information where to send what
|valign="top"|Could have been one month earlier. Even better would be to hand out instructions (or even reimbursement forms) to the participants on-site.
|-
|valign="top"|August 24, 2007
|valign="top"|Sorting out reimbursement and fixing upper limits
|valign="top"|Some people simply send all receipts and wait how much they get (which is common in some countries), so better acknowledge before Priscilla sends out cheques
|-
|valign="top"|August 30, 2007
|valign="top"|First cheques arriving
|
|-
|valign="top"|October 4, 2007
|valign="top"|Reimbursement finished
|valign="top"|To cash in ACL cheques is very expensive in some countries :(
|}

===Appendix A===

Keywords for categorizing papers and reviewer’s fields of expertise

Acoustic modeling . Audio and video retrieval . Cognitive modeling . Content-based/collaborative information filtering . Corpora and treebanks . Cross-language information retrieval . Dialogue . Discourse . Discriminative training . Distributed information retrieval . Evaluation metrics and methodologies . Grammar development and engineering . Grammar extraction and induction . Grammar formalisms . Human/machine dialogue systems . Human/human conversation and meeting processing . Inference and entailment . Information extraction . Information retrieval models . Interactive/Personalized information retrieval . Intranet/Enterprise Search . Knowledge acquisition . Language identification . Language modeling . Language resources . Name . Learning techniques for language processing . Lexical acquisition . Lexical/Pronunciation modeling . Lexical semantics . Machine translation . Mathematical models of language . Morphology . Multi-lingual generation . Multi-lingual resources . Multi-lingual speech recognition . Multi-word expressions/collocations . Multimodal representations and processing . Natural language interfaces . NLP applications . Ontology learning . Parsing . Paraphrase . Phonology . Pragmatics . Psycholinguistics . Question answering . Name . Rich transcription . Semantics . Semantic distance . Semantic role labeling . Sentiment analysis . Surface realization . Syntax . NLP/IR applications . Speech generation . Speech mining . Speech recognition . Speech summarization . Speech-based interfaces . Spoken language understanding . Text alignment . Text categorization and clustering . Text generation . Text/Web mining . Name . Text planning . Text representation . Text summarization . Topic detection and tracking . Unsupervised learning . Web information retrieval . Web technology . Word sense disambiguation

===Appendix B: Invitation letter for reviewers===

Subject: Inviting you to join the program committee for the ACL-07 Student Research Workshop.

Dear colleague,

We would like to invite you to serve on the Program Committee of the Student
Research Workshop at ACL 2007. The event will be held alongside the main conference
in Prague, Czech Republic, on June 25-27, 2007.

The committee will consist of a cross-section of students and experienced
researchers, representing all interests within the ACL community. You will be asked
to review papers from student researchers. This is an important responsibility as
you will not only be able to provide students with an opportunity to showcase their
work, but also offer all students who submit invaluable feedback on their work in
progress. Initially, we anticipate you being assigned 3-4 papers to review.

If you accept this invitation (and we sincerely hope you do), we would be grateful
if you could include your areas of interest in your reply, as chosen from the
keywords below.

KEYWORDS ....

We would be grateful if you could let us know if you can serve, and under what areas
you feel you can review, as soon as possible. We are looking forward to your
participation and know that you can help make the Student Workshop at ACL 2007 a
success.

Below we are including the call for papers. Please, contact us if you need any
further information.

Sincerely,

===Appendix C: Invitation to be a panelist===

Subject: ACL-07 SRW panelist?

Dear Colleague,

We, the organisers of the Student Research Workshop, would like to
invite you, as an accomplished researcher in the field of Computational
Linguistics, to participate in the panel of the Student Research
Workshop at ACL-07.

It is a tradition at the ACL Student Research Workshop that after their
presentation, student authors receive feedback from a senior researcher
panelists. A panelist has read the 6-page paper of a student, is
familiar with both the related research and with advising students,
attends the presentation of the student and gives about 5 minutes
feedback directly after the presentation or in front of the student's
poster. This feedback should enable the student to improve her/his work
and should give valuable hints on how to continue with his/her research.

The ACL Student Research Workshop will take place on Tuesday, June 26th
during the main ACL conference in Prague. If you will attend the
conference and would probably be interested in serving as a panelist,
please respond to this mail within one week. You can have a look at the
student abstracts at http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dfpdxs6h_6df4f53.
It would be nice if you could indicate 1-4 preferences, which we will
try to follow when assigning panelists to students.

As a reward for serving as a panelist, your name will be mentioned on
the ACL07-SRW page - this is unfortunately the only the honour we can
offer you. But maybe you also find it interesting to get in contact
with promising student researchers working in your area.

If you cannot attend ACL or you don't feel like being a panelist, please
forward this mail to other senior researchers that might be willing to
serve.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us.

Sincerely...