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2014Q3 Reports

2014-06-06T05:01:18Z

DanielMarcu:

ALL REPORTS ARE DUE ON JUNE 5, 2014

'''Reports from ACL Management'''

* [[2014Q3 Reports: Office Manager]]
* [[2014Q3 Reports: Secretary]]
* [[2014Q3 Reports: Treasurer]]
* [[2014Q3 Reports: NAACL]]
* [[2014Q3 Reports: EACL]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIG Officer]]
* [[2014Q3 Reports: Conference Officer]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: Information Officer]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: Nominating Committee]]

'''ACL 2014'''

* [[2014Q3 Reports: General Chair]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: Program Chairs]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: Local Arrangements Committee]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: Student Research Workshop Chairs]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: Publications Chairs]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: Reviewing Software]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: Tutorial Chairs]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: Workshop Chairs]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: Demo Chair]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: Sponsorship Committee]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: Publicity Chairs]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: Exhibits]]

'''Journals, Publications, and the Web'''

* [[2014Q3 Reports: CL Journal Editor]]
* [[2014Q3 Reports: TACL Journal Editor]]
* [[2014Q3 Reports: Squibs and Comments]] (to be discontinued ?)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: ACL Wikis]]

'''Recent Conferences'''

* [[2014Q3 Reports: EMNLP 2013]]
* [[2014Q3 Reports: IJCNLP 2013]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: EACL 2014]] (SUBMITTED)

'''Future Conferences'''

* [[2014Q3 Reports: COLING 2014]]
* [[2014Q3 Reports: EMNLP 2014]]
* [[2014Q3 Reports: NAACL 2015]]
* [[2014Q3 Reports: ACL-IJCNLP 2015]]
* [[2014Q3 Reports: ACL 2016]]
* [[2014Q3 Reports: ACL 2017]]

'''Other Reports'''

* [[2014Q3 Reports: AFNLP Representative]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: Linguistics Olympiads]]

'''Special Interest Groups'''

* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGANN]]
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGBioMed]]
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGDAT]]
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGDIAL]]
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGFSM]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGGEN]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGHAN]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGHUM]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGLEX]]
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGMOL]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGMORPHON]]
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGMT]]
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGNLL]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGPARSE]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGSEM]]
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGSEMITIC]]
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGSLPAT]]
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGWAC]]

2014Q3 Reports: General Chair

2014-06-06T04:58:12Z

DanielMarcu: /* 2014Q3 Reports: General Chair */

== 2014Q3 Reports: General Chair ==

Daniel Marcu

'''ACL’2014 At A Glance'''

* ACL’2014 received 1,123 submissions, of which it accepted 146 long papers and 129 short papers for a combined acceptance rate of 26.1%. After adding 19 TACL papers, the program was structured to include 159 oral and 145 poster presentations.
* Workshop proposals were handled jointly by ACL, EACL, and EMNLP. Across the three conferences, there were 42 submissions. Based on the workshop organizers’ preferences and the quality of the submissions, ACL’2014 eventually selected 17 workshops (15 one-day workshops and 2 two-day workshops). The ACL’2014 Workshop Chairs have also collaborated with the CoNNL’2014 organizers to make CoNNL’2014 a collocated event.
* ACL’2014 received 19 tutorial proposals, of which it selected 8; 39 demo proposals, of which it selected 21; 7 thesis and 19 research paper submissions for the Student Research Workshop, of which it accepted 5 and 8, respectively.
*ACL’2014 will have two distinguished invited speakers: Corinna Cortes (head of Google Research New York) will talk about her work on learning ensembles of structured prediction rules. Zoran Popović (Professor, University of Washington) will show how humans and machines can collaborate to solve hard problems that neither can solve alone.
*ACL’2014 has secured an impressive number of sponsorships: Baidu (Platinum Sponsor); Bloomberg, Google, Microsoft, Nuance, and Yahoo Labs (Gold Sponsors); Information Sciences Institute and Xerox Research Center Europe (Silver Sponsors); Brandeis University, Facebook, and Yandex (Bronze Sponsors); and IBM Research and the University of Washington (Supporters).

The number of submissions and accepted presentations is consistent with numbers observed in previous years while the sponsorship is higher than in previous years. All indicators point to a field that is striving while continuing to mature.

The organizing committee was outstanding: the chairs of each individual area have acted with high professionalism while fearlessly validating and testing new concepts and ideas. This has resulted in many innovations, from local organization to program structure, to publication approach. Our intention is to collect feedback from the conference participants in order to provide data grounded recommendations for future conferences.

We could have not got this far without the continuous guidance of the ACL Executive Committee, in particular Dragomir Radev and Priscilla Rasmussen, who bring to the table tremendous amounts of institutional knowledge and know-how. We are extremely grateful to them and everyone else who helped make ACL’2014 possible.

The rest of this report highlights only the main innovations and recommendations for future conference organizers. The reports of the individual chairs provide additional details, from challenges to recommendations, to innovations.

'''Main Innovations'''

* We scheduled two large poster sessions on two evenings of the conference, to accommodate the large number of poster presentations and give participants more time to socialize.
* Instead of a paid banquet, we will have a no-fee light social event. We hope this will provide a better avenue for socializing and sharing ideas.
* The president’s talk will be given on the first morning of the conference. Since we choose our presidents based on their prominence in the field, we thought it would be wise to give them the opportunity to choose between a humorous presentation, typical of our tradition, a scholar presentation, or a combination of both.
* We optimized the conference schedule based on feedback received from more than 300 conference participants. The response to our solicitation was tremendous.
* We solicited nominations for outstanding reviewers and acknowledged them in the proceedings (around 14% of reviewers were acknowledged).
* Created an XML version of the majority of the papers accepted for publication. This will enable machine-based access to our work and provide the foundation for better research on our own research.

'''Recommendations'''

Policies:

* Clarify policy for self-published papers.
* Enable persistence of reviewers and their assignment completion date in START.
* Make explicit what chairs own the synchronization of the conference schedule with the papers associated with the schedule: the publication, program, or local chair?
* Relax the copyright policy, which currently provisions for the transfer of the entire copyright away from the authors (see the recommendations made by the Publication Chairs).

Processes:

* Ensure early creation within START of initial websites for the workshops with their admin users and basic information.
* Expand Student Workshop to undergraduate students we want to attract to do graduate work in our field.

Tools:

* Collaborate with START to integrate Mark Dredze’s reviewer management tool into START.
* Create additional scripts for streamlining the reviewing/publication process (checking non-anonymity and formatting; enabling merging of schedules and metadata; etc.)

2014Q3 Reports: General Chair

2014-06-06T04:52:36Z

DanielMarcu: Created page with " == 2014Q3 Reports: General Chair == Daniel Marcu '''ACL’2014 At A Glance''' • ACL’2014 received 1,123 submissions, of which it accepted 146 long papers and 129 short..."

== 2014Q3 Reports: General Chair ==

Daniel Marcu

'''ACL’2014 At A Glance'''

• ACL’2014 received 1,123 submissions, of which it accepted 146 long papers and 129 short papers for a combined acceptance rate of 26.1%. After adding 19 TACL papers, the program was structured to include 159 oral and 145 poster presentations.

• Workshop proposals were handled jointly by ACL, EACL, and EMNLP. Across the three conferences, there were 42 submissions. Based on the workshop organizers’ preferences and the quality of the submissions, ACL’2014 eventually selected 17 workshops (15 one-day workshops and 2 two-day workshops). The ACL’2014 Workshop Chairs have also collaborated with the CoNNL’2014 organizers to make CoNNL’2014 a collocated event.

• ACL’2014 received 19 tutorial proposals, of which it selected 8; 39 demo proposals, of which it selected 21; 7 thesis and 19 research paper submissions for the Student Research Workshop, of which it accepted 5 and 8, respectively.

• ACL’2014 will have two distinguished invited speakers: Corinna Cortes (head of Google Research New York) will talk about her work on learning ensembles of structured prediction rules. Zoran Popović (Professor, University of Washington) will show how humans and machines can collaborate to solve hard problems that neither can solve alone.

• ACL’2014 has secured an impressive number of sponsorships: Baidu (Platinum Sponsor); Bloomberg, Google, Microsoft, Nuance, and Yahoo Labs (Gold Sponsors); Information Sciences Institute and Xerox Research Center Europe (Silver Sponsors); Brandeis University, Facebook, and Yandex (Bronze Sponsors); and IBM Research and the University of Washington (Supporters).

The number of submissions and accepted presentations is consistent with numbers observed in previous years while the sponsorship is higher than in previous years. All indicators point to a field that is striving while continuing to mature.

The organizing committee was outstanding: the chairs of each individual area have acted with high professionalism while fearlessly validating and testing new concepts and ideas. This has resulted in many innovations, from local organization to program structure, to publication approach. Our intention is to collect feedback from the conference participants in order to provide data grounded recommendations for future conferences.

We could have not got this far without the continuous guidance of the ACL Executive Committee, in particular Dragomir Radev and Priscilla Rasmussen, who bring to the table tremendous amounts of institutional knowledge and know-how. We are extremely grateful to them and everyone else who helped make ACL’2014 possible.

The rest of this report highlights only the main innovations and recommendations for future conference organizers. The reports of the individual chairs provide additional details, from challenges to recommendations, to innovations.

'''Main Innovations'''

• We scheduled two large poster sessions on two evenings of the conference, to accommodate the large number of poster presentations and give participants more time to socialize.

• Instead of a paid banquet, we will have a no-fee light social event. We hope this will provide a better avenue for socializing and sharing ideas.

• The president’s talk will be given on the first morning of the conference. Since we choose our presidents based on their prominence in the field, we thought it would be wise to give them the opportunity to choose between a humorous presentation, typical of our tradition, a scholar presentation, or a combination of both.

• We optimized the conference schedule based on feedback received from more than 300 conference participants. The response to our solicitation was tremendous.

• We solicited nominations for outstanding reviewers and acknowledged them in the proceedings (around 14% of reviewers were acknowledged).

• Created an XML version of the majority of the papers accepted for publication. This will enable machine-based access to our work and provide the foundation for better research on our own research.

'''Recommendations'''

• Policies:

o Clarify policy for self-published papers.

o Enable persistence of reviewers and their assignment completion date in START.

o Make explicit what chairs own the synchronization of the conference schedule with the papers associated with the schedule: the publication, program, or local chair?

o Relax the copyright policy, which currently provisions for the transfer of the entire copyright away from the authors (see the recommendations made by the Publication Chairs).

• Processes:

o Ensure early creation within START of initial websites for the workshops with their admin users and basic information.

o Expand Student Workshop to undergraduate students we want to attract to do graduate work in our field.

• Tools:

o Collaborate with START to integrate Mark Dredze’s reviewer management tool into START.

o Create additional scripts for streamlining the reviewing/publication process (checking non-anonymity and formatting; enabling merging of schedules and metadata; etc.)

2014Q3 Reports: Local Arrangements Committee

2014-06-06T04:47:56Z

DanielMarcu: Created page with " == Local Arrangements - ACL 2014 == '''David Yarowsky, Local Arrangements Chair''' ACL 2014 local arrangements are going smoothly on all fronts. We will be well prepared fo..."

== Local Arrangements - ACL 2014 ==

'''David Yarowsky, Local Arrangements Chair'''

ACL 2014 local arrangements are going smoothly on all fronts. We will be well prepared for our likely record ACL attendance this year. As always, extraordinary thanks goes to Priscilla for all she does to make our conferences run successfully at all levels, and for her expert advice, experience and negotiation skills during this entire multi-year planning process.

Particular thanks is due to Matt Post, Ann Irvine and Juri Ganitkevitch, editors of the Conference Handbook. This job is really two parts; one is the local section (with restaurant, activity, venue and transportation advice, for example), written by Ann and Juri, as well as sponsor advertising and other conference logistical details. The second part is the title/abstract/timings/session-room section of the handbook, which is in effect a small proceedings, and Matt Post has skillfully extracted and assembled the nearly complete START database plus schedule information for the main conference and all workshops, replicating much of what the publications chairs have done. Given the similarities of these tasks to the job of the full Publications Chairs, we would encourage that in the future the prparation of the Proceedings section of the handbook be considered part of the official job of the Publications Chairs, while the local arrangements team focuses on the local aspects of the conference.

Yuan Cao has productively served as the Student Volunteer Chair, including the selection of student travel awards, along with Svitlana Volkova, fortunately synergistic with her role as Student Research Workshop co-chair.

The design of the conference bag was prepared by Jeff Hayes, with substantial contributions from Meg Mitchell and Keisuke Sakaguchi.

Naomi Saphra and others have contributed to organization of the ACL social and dancing at the National Aquarium. We have received positive feedback on the novel ACL experiment of making the "banquet" accessible to all as in the LREC model, via a combination of 2nd poster session buffet dinner plus the social event a few blocks away in the aquarium. It will be interesting to see how this combination works; the model may be viable for future conferences where a banquet venue (museum, etc.) is close to the main conference venue.

We'd also like to thank Laura Graham and Baltimore's acclaimed Single Carrot Theater for providing a customized showing of the highly regarded Czech play about language called The Memo, on Thursday evening on the Johns Hopkins campus as part of our broader entertainment ensemble for the conference, along with the Tuesday aquarium social and Wednesday Exec++ dinner at the historic Evergreen House and Library.

This year we also experimented with the novel idea of a survey of which talks people likely wished to attend, both to estimate attendance (to fit sessions to rooms) and to help prepare the schedule itself via an optimization algorithm utilized by Kristina. Overall this was a substantial success, with over 350 attendees completing the survey (a remarkably high participation rate), yielding a schedule with reduced parallel paper conflicts. The survey also yielded some surprising results with respect to the likely most popular sessions, which tend to be cross-cutting areas of broad interest (such as Semantics, IE and machine learning), as opposed to topics which draw a more focused core audience, such as machine translation, which is becoming increasingly specialized. Finally a third motivation of this process was to encourage potential attendees to review the list of accepted papers and begin to plan their conference talk schedule. As part of the value-add we can offer those who complete the survey, I'd like to also give back an annotated completed schedule with talks marked with the participant's survey response (likely/maybe/unlikely) so they can avoid duplication of effort and facilitate a participant's session-by-session attendance planning.

There are certainly many more things that we will be doing in the next month right before the conference; our job is unfortunately not done as of these reports.