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2016Q1 Reports: NAACL

2016-02-23T20:33:11Z

HalDaume: /* Treasurer's Report */

= Report from NAACL, February 2016 =

Hal Daumé III - Chapter board chair

Joel Tetreault - Treasurer

== Executive Committee Meetings ==

The board had a meeting at NAACL on 31 May 2015. Additionally the Board converses regularly by email.

== Treasurer's Report ==

The NAACL Chapter's bank account held $90,017.12 as of December 31, 2015. This figure takes into account the surplus from ACL 2014, but does not yet reflect the impact of the NAACL 2015 conference. To give context for that balance, this is the highest level it has been since June 2012. The balance for 2014 was $34k and for 2013 it was $29k. In 2015, our expenditures were once again the sponsorship of external events: NACLO ($5k), two Emerging Regions Fund awards at $1.5k apiece ($3k) and the Summer Workshop ($6k) for a total of $14k. In short, 2016 begins on a very strong note for NAACL. That being said, we should continue to seek out new sources of sponsorship as many fields not previously connected with NLP, such as finance and gaming, were major sponsors for last year's NAACL.

== NAACL Officers as of today ==

Chair Emily Bender University of Washington
Secretary Colin Cherry National Research Council Canada
Treasurer Joel Tetreault Yahoo! Labs
Past Chair Hal Daume III University of Maryland

Board Members:
Matt Post Johns Hopkins University
Fei Xia University of Washington
Marie-Catherine de Marneffe The Ohio State University
Julia Hockenmaier University of Illinois
Graeme Hirst (ex-officio, ACL representative) University of Toronto

== NAACL Issues Under Discussion ==

NAACL has initiated a new best paper policy, which will be posted soon. The goal is to make the selection process more uniform and to do a better job of promoting our members at their respective institutions.

NAACL recently held elections; the turnout was disappointingly low (232 votes out of 933 eligible). We don't know if ACL's is similar or what we can do to increase voter turnout.

== North America Conference in 2016 ==

NAACL 2016 will take place at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina, 12-17 June 2016. General chair is Kevin Knight; program co-chairs are Ani Nenkova and Owen Rambow.

== NAACL POST-CONFERENCE SURVEY RESULTS ==

This previously appeared in the last NAACL report, but appeared after the Exec meeting, so it is being duplicated here.

A summary of the survey results is in the following image:

[[File:naacl2015-survey-results.png]]

All the questions are Likert-style, with dark red (left) meaning “strongly disagree” and dark blue (right) meaning “strongly agree.”

There are two exceptions to this rule:

* “Attended” for which the semantics are: light red=never attend, grey=usually attend *ACL, light blue=usually attend NAACL, dark blue=attended NAACL 2015
* “Talk length”: red=shorten to 12+3; grey=shorten to 16+4; blue=keep at 20+5

Brief summary in text:

* People are generally very happy with basic logistics (thanks Priscilla!!!).
* Many people are in favor of having meta-reviews.
* People are generally split on having author response, but the majority want to keep it. In addition, people even more strongly want authors to be able to flag factual innacuracies in the reviews.
* People are about as split as they could possibly be on the question of making reviews public.
* There's support for having NAACL or ACL in Central or South America, but it's nowhere near strong support. Ditto for having NAACL in Winter or Spring.
* People are very split on the question of adding more awards beyond the current (new) NAACL model of four best papers and up to six honorable mentions.
* People generally like status quo for how the conference is run: the number of parallel sessions should neither grow nor shrink; talks should stay at 20+5.

Attendees also provided very useful long-form text on what they liked and what they thought could be improved.

The top of the "liked" is:

* The two invited talks (Fei-Fei Li and Lillian Lee) (*46)
* The content of the poster sessions (*23)
* The conference food (*13)

The top of the "could be improved" is:

* The crowding at the posters (*35)
* The food options for people with dietary restrictions, or general food complains (*9)
* The lack of daylight in the venue (*9)

2016Q1 Reports: NAACL

2016-02-23T18:59:26Z

HalDaume:

= Report from NAACL, February 2016 =

Hal Daumé III - Chapter board chair

Joel Tetreault - Treasurer

== Executive Committee Meetings ==

The board had a meeting at NAACL on 31 May 2015. Additionally the Board converses regularly by email.

== Treasurer's Report ==

The NAACL Chapter's bank account held $90,017.12 as of December 31, 2015. This figure takes into account the surplus from ACL 2014, but does not yet reflect the impact of the NAACL 2015 conference. To give context for that balance, this is the highest level it has been since June 2012. The balance for 2015 was $34k and for 2014 it was $29k. In 2015, our expenditures were once again the sponsorship of external events: NACLO ($5k), two Emerging Regions Fund awards at $1.5k apiece ($3k), Summer Workshop ($6k) and LSA ($4.8k) for a total of $18.8k. In short, 2016 begins on a very strong note for NAACL. That being said, we should continue to seek out new sources of sponsorship as many fields not previously connected with NLP, such as finance and gaming, were major sponsors for last year's NAACL.

== NAACL Officers as of today ==

Chair Emily Bender University of Washington
Secretary Colin Cherry National Research Council Canada
Treasurer Joel Tetreault Yahoo! Labs
Past Chair Hal Daume III University of Maryland

Board Members:
Matt Post Johns Hopkins University
Fei Xia University of Washington
Marie-Catherine de Marneffe The Ohio State University
Julia Hockenmaier University of Illinois
Graeme Hirst (ex-officio, ACL representative) University of Toronto

== NAACL Issues Under Discussion ==

NAACL has initiated a new best paper policy, which will be posted soon. The goal is to make the selection process more uniform and to do a better job of promoting our members at their respective institutions.

NAACL recently held elections; the turnout was disappointingly low (232 votes out of 933 eligible). We don't know if ACL's is similar or what we can do to increase voter turnout.

== North America Conference in 2016 ==

NAACL 2016 will take place at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina, 12-17 June 2016. General chair is Kevin Knight; program co-chairs are Ani Nenkova and Owen Rambow.

== NAACL POST-CONFERENCE SURVEY RESULTS ==

This previously appeared in the last NAACL report, but appeared after the Exec meeting, so it is being duplicated here.

A summary of the survey results is in the following image:

[[File:naacl2015-survey-results.png]]

All the questions are Likert-style, with dark red (left) meaning “strongly disagree” and dark blue (right) meaning “strongly agree.”

There are two exceptions to this rule:

* “Attended” for which the semantics are: light red=never attend, grey=usually attend *ACL, light blue=usually attend NAACL, dark blue=attended NAACL 2015
* “Talk length”: red=shorten to 12+3; grey=shorten to 16+4; blue=keep at 20+5

Brief summary in text:

* People are generally very happy with basic logistics (thanks Priscilla!!!).
* Many people are in favor of having meta-reviews.
* People are generally split on having author response, but the majority want to keep it. In addition, people even more strongly want authors to be able to flag factual innacuracies in the reviews.
* People are about as split as they could possibly be on the question of making reviews public.
* There's support for having NAACL or ACL in Central or South America, but it's nowhere near strong support. Ditto for having NAACL in Winter or Spring.
* People are very split on the question of adding more awards beyond the current (new) NAACL model of four best papers and up to six honorable mentions.
* People generally like status quo for how the conference is run: the number of parallel sessions should neither grow nor shrink; talks should stay at 20+5.

Attendees also provided very useful long-form text on what they liked and what they thought could be improved.

The top of the "liked" is:

* The two invited talks (Fei-Fei Li and Lillian Lee) (*46)
* The content of the poster sessions (*23)
* The conference food (*13)

The top of the "could be improved" is:

* The crowding at the posters (*35)
* The food options for people with dietary restrictions, or general food complains (*9)
* The lack of daylight in the venue (*9)

2016Q1 Reports: NAACL

2016-02-20T23:16:16Z

HalDaume: Created page with "= Report from NAACL, February 2016 = Hal Daumé III - Chapter board chair Joel Tetreault - Treasurer == Executive Committee Meetings == The board had a meeting at NA..."

= Report from NAACL, February 2016 =

Hal Daumé III - Chapter board chair

Joel Tetreault - Treasurer

== Executive Committee Meetings ==

The board had a meeting at NAACL on 31 May 2015. Additionally the Board converses regularly by email.

== Treasurer's Report ==

The NAACL Chapter's bank account held $90,017.12 as of December 31, 2015. This figure takes into account the surplus from ACL 2014, but does not yet reflect the impact of the NAACL 2015 conference. To give context for that balance, this is the highest level it has been since June 2012. The balance for 2015 was $34k and for 2014 it was $29k. In 2015, our expenditures were once again the sponsorship of external events: NACLO ($5k), two Emerging Regions Fund awards at $1.5k apiece ($3k), Summer Workshop ($6k) and LSA ($4.8k) for a total of $18.8k. In short, 2016 begins on a very strong note for NAACL. That being said, we should continue to seek out new sources of sponsorship as many fields not previously connected with NLP, such as finance and gaming, were major sponsors for last year's NAACL.

== NAACL Officers as of today ==

Chair Emily Bender University of Washington
Secretary Colin Cherry National Research Council Canada
Treasurer Joel Tetreault Yahoo! Labs
Past Chair Hal Daume III University of Maryland

Board Members:
Matt Post Johns Hopkins University
Fei Xia University of Washington
Marie-Catherine de Marneffe The Ohio State University
Julia Hockenmaier University of Illinois
Graeme Hirst (ex-officio, ACL representative) University of Toronto

== NAACL Issues Under Discussion ==

NAACL has initiated a new best paper policy, which will be posted soon. The goal is to make the selection process more uniform and to do a better job of promoting our members at their respective institutions.

NAACL recently held elections; the turnout was disappointingly low (232 votes out of 933 eligible). We don't know if ACL's is similar or what we can do to increase voter turnout.

== North America Conference in 2016 ==

NAACL 2016 will take place at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina, 12-17 June 2016. General chair is Kevin Knight; program co-chairs are Ani Nenkova and Owen Rambow.

== NAACL POST-CONFERENCE SURVEY RESULTS ==

This previously appeared in the last NAACL report, but appeared after the Exec meeting, so it is being duplicated here.

A summary of the survey results is in the following image:

[[File:naacl2015-survey-results.png]]

All the questions are Likert-style, with dark red (left) meaning “strongly disagree” and dark blue (right) meaning “strongly agree.”

There are two exceptions to this rule:

* “Attended” for which the semantics are: light red=never attend, grey=usually attend *ACL, light blue=usually attend NAACL, dark blue=attended NAACL 2015
* “Talk length”: red=shorten to 12+3; grey=shorten to 16+4; blue=keep at 20+5

Brief summary in text:

* People are generally very happy with basic logistics (thanks Priscilla!!!).
* Many people are in favor of having meta-reviews.
* People are generally split on having author response, but the majority want to keep it. In addition, people ever more strongly want authors to be able to flag factual innacuracies in the reviews.
* People are about as split as they could possibly be on the question of making reviews public.
* There's support for having NAACL or ACL in Central or South America, but it's nowhere near strong support. Ditto for having NAACL in Winter or Spring.
* People are very split on the question of adding more awards beyond the current (new) NAACL model of four best papers and up to six honorable mentions.
* People generally like status quo for how the conference is run: the number of parallel sessions should neither grow nor shrink; talks should stay at 20+5.

Attendees also provided very useful long-form text on what they liked and what they thought could be improved.

The top of the "liked" is:

* The two invited talks (Fei-Fei Li and Lillian Lee) (*46)
* The content of the poster sessions (*23)
* The conference food (*13)

The top of the "could be improved" is:

* The crowding at the posters (*35)
* The food options for people with dietary restrictions, or general food complains (*9)
* The lack of daylight in the venue (*9)

2015Q3 Reports: NAACL

2015-10-20T16:17:06Z

HalDaume: /* UPDATE 20 OCT 2015, NAACL POST-CONFERENCE SURVEY */

= Report from NAACL, July 2015 =

Hal Daumé III - Chapter board chair

Joel Tetreault - Treasurer

== Executive Committee Meetings ==

The board had a meeting at NAACL on 31 May 2015. Additionally the Board converses regularly by email.

== Treasurer's Report ==

More details at: http://naacl.org/minutes/2015/NAACL_Treasurer_Report_2015.pdf

As of May 31, 2015, our budget balance was $59,889, the highest it's been since we took a hit from NAACL 2010 in LA. We had approximately $19,000 in outlays: $5000 to NACL, $3000 to the emerging regions fund, $6000 to the Jelinek summer workshop and $4800 to LSA. We had a very large amount of committed sponsorship in 2015 ($59k, more than double the $25k in 2013).

== North American conference in 2015 ==

NAACL was held in Denver CO, USA this year, from 31 May through 5 June. This was the largest NAACL ever by far (901 attendees as of the first day, versus a max of 650-700 in previous years). It featured two keynote addresses: Lillian Lee and Fei-fei Li, 6 tutorials, 13 one-day workshops, Semeval (2 day workshop) and was colocated with *SEM. Joyce Chai and Anoop Sarkar were program chairs; Rada Mihalcea was general chair.
ACL is in North America this year, so there is no separate NAACL.

== NAACL Officers as of 8 June 2014 ==

Chair Hal Daume III University of Maryland
Secretary Michael White Ohio State University
Treasurer Joel Tetreault Yahoo! Research
Past Chair Chris Callison-Burch University of Pennsylvania

Board Members:
Matt Post Johns Hopkins University
Fei Xia University of Washington
Emily Bender University of Washington
Eduard Hovy Carnegie Mellon University
Graeme Hirst (ex-officio, ACL representative) University of Toronto

We have elections this year for four outgoing members: Hal (chair), Mike (secretary) and Emily and Ed (board members). The nominating committee is actively seeking candidates to replace these members; this will go to a vote that concludes on 15 Dec 2015.

== New Initiatives ==

The board is currently exploring three main initiatives:

* Backend in START (subcommittee chair: Matt Post). Matt and CCB will be collecting suggestions (starting with their own long list) for ways of improving the process of working with START. NAACL will take the lead on working with softconf to implement these changes for NAACL 2016; after discussion, we hope that the ACL exec might be convinced to contribute funds towards tasks that will benefit the ACL as a whole.

* NAACL in South America (chair: Fei Xia). Fei and Joel noted that helping to host ACL/NAACL in Central or South America is likely to be the most important way in which NAACL can help progress CL there. Meanwhile the Emerging Regions Fund remains active and helpful. Fei clarified that according to the NAACL constitution, NAACL will serve members of the ACL in Central and South America until regional chapters are created for members there. As such, she noted that it does not make sense to consider changing the NAACL name until the question of regional chapters for Central and South America has been settled by ACL members there. Fei will work on updating the contacts list started by Ted Pedersen for ACL members in Central and South America who might be interested in hosting a future conference.

* Reviewing models (chair: Mike White). Largely driven by what we would like in reviewing, as well as by looking at what other conferences have been doing, we are putting together a list of "best practices." The main items discussed were reviewer feedback (eg a "star" system for good reviewers, maintained over time); publicly available reviews; resubmitted papers; author feedback; meta-reviews from area chairs.

NAACL is conducting a post-conference survey (see https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1tqhV5h-iiCruwWkoNtC4qO5h_gdzERyXaltZY0vvrR8/viewform); we will make the results available to ACL once they are in.

== North America Conference in 2016 ==

NAACL 2016 will take place at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina, 12-17 June 2016. General chair is Kevin Knight; program co-chairs are Ani Nenkova and Owen Rambow.

== Specific Items for ACL Exec ==

* We would still like ACL to revisit the decision that supplementary materials not be required to be anonymous. This is inconsistent with NAACL's policy.

* NAACL has decided to make it a policy that all reviewer scores (including overall recommendation) be made available to authors at response time---assuming there is an author response---and would like to encourage ACL to adopt a similar rule.

= UPDATE 20 OCT 2015, NAACL POST-CONFERENCE SURVEY =

A summary of the survey results is in the following image:

[[File:naacl2015-survey-results.png]]

All the questions are Likert-style, with dark red (left) meaning “strongly disagree” and dark blue (right) meaning “strongly agree.”

There are two exceptions to this rule:

* “Attended” for which the semantics are: light red=never attend, grey=usually attend *ACL, light blue=usually attend NAACL, dark blue=attended NAACL 2015
* “Talk length”: red=shorten to 12+3; grey=shorten to 16+4; blue=keep at 20+5

Brief summary in text:

* People are generally very happy with basic logistics (thanks Priscilla!!!).
* Many people are in favor of having meta-reviews.
* People are generally split on having author response, but the majority want to keep it. In addition, people ever more strongly want authors to be able to flag factual innacuracies in the reviews.
* People are about as split as they could possibly be on the question of making reviews public.
* There's support for having NAACL or ACL in Central or South America, but it's nowhere near strong support. Ditto for having NAACL in Winter or Spring.
* People are very split on the question of adding more awards beyond the current (new) NAACL model of four best papers and up to six honorable mentions.
* People generally like status quo for how the conference is run: the number of parallel sessions should neither grow nor shrink; talks should stay at 20+5.

Attendees also provided very useful long-form text on what they liked and what they thought could be improved.

The top of the "liked" is:

* The two invited talks (Fei-Fei Li and Lillian Lee) (*46)
* The content of the poster sessions (*23)
* The conference food (*13)

The top of the "could be improved" is:

* The crowding at the posters (*35)
* The food options for people with dietary restrictions, or general food complains (*9)
* The lack of daylight in the venue (*9)

Thanks to all for filling out the survey!

2015Q3 Reports: NAACL

2015-10-20T16:15:18Z

HalDaume:

= Report from NAACL, July 2015 =

Hal Daumé III - Chapter board chair

Joel Tetreault - Treasurer

== Executive Committee Meetings ==

The board had a meeting at NAACL on 31 May 2015. Additionally the Board converses regularly by email.

== Treasurer's Report ==

More details at: http://naacl.org/minutes/2015/NAACL_Treasurer_Report_2015.pdf

As of May 31, 2015, our budget balance was $59,889, the highest it's been since we took a hit from NAACL 2010 in LA. We had approximately $19,000 in outlays: $5000 to NACL, $3000 to the emerging regions fund, $6000 to the Jelinek summer workshop and $4800 to LSA. We had a very large amount of committed sponsorship in 2015 ($59k, more than double the $25k in 2013).

== North American conference in 2015 ==

NAACL was held in Denver CO, USA this year, from 31 May through 5 June. This was the largest NAACL ever by far (901 attendees as of the first day, versus a max of 650-700 in previous years). It featured two keynote addresses: Lillian Lee and Fei-fei Li, 6 tutorials, 13 one-day workshops, Semeval (2 day workshop) and was colocated with *SEM. Joyce Chai and Anoop Sarkar were program chairs; Rada Mihalcea was general chair.
ACL is in North America this year, so there is no separate NAACL.

== NAACL Officers as of 8 June 2014 ==

Chair Hal Daume III University of Maryland
Secretary Michael White Ohio State University
Treasurer Joel Tetreault Yahoo! Research
Past Chair Chris Callison-Burch University of Pennsylvania

Board Members:
Matt Post Johns Hopkins University
Fei Xia University of Washington
Emily Bender University of Washington
Eduard Hovy Carnegie Mellon University
Graeme Hirst (ex-officio, ACL representative) University of Toronto

We have elections this year for four outgoing members: Hal (chair), Mike (secretary) and Emily and Ed (board members). The nominating committee is actively seeking candidates to replace these members; this will go to a vote that concludes on 15 Dec 2015.

== New Initiatives ==

The board is currently exploring three main initiatives:

* Backend in START (subcommittee chair: Matt Post). Matt and CCB will be collecting suggestions (starting with their own long list) for ways of improving the process of working with START. NAACL will take the lead on working with softconf to implement these changes for NAACL 2016; after discussion, we hope that the ACL exec might be convinced to contribute funds towards tasks that will benefit the ACL as a whole.

* NAACL in South America (chair: Fei Xia). Fei and Joel noted that helping to host ACL/NAACL in Central or South America is likely to be the most important way in which NAACL can help progress CL there. Meanwhile the Emerging Regions Fund remains active and helpful. Fei clarified that according to the NAACL constitution, NAACL will serve members of the ACL in Central and South America until regional chapters are created for members there. As such, she noted that it does not make sense to consider changing the NAACL name until the question of regional chapters for Central and South America has been settled by ACL members there. Fei will work on updating the contacts list started by Ted Pedersen for ACL members in Central and South America who might be interested in hosting a future conference.

* Reviewing models (chair: Mike White). Largely driven by what we would like in reviewing, as well as by looking at what other conferences have been doing, we are putting together a list of "best practices." The main items discussed were reviewer feedback (eg a "star" system for good reviewers, maintained over time); publicly available reviews; resubmitted papers; author feedback; meta-reviews from area chairs.

NAACL is conducting a post-conference survey (see https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1tqhV5h-iiCruwWkoNtC4qO5h_gdzERyXaltZY0vvrR8/viewform); we will make the results available to ACL once they are in.

== North America Conference in 2016 ==

NAACL 2016 will take place at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina, 12-17 June 2016. General chair is Kevin Knight; program co-chairs are Ani Nenkova and Owen Rambow.

== Specific Items for ACL Exec ==

* We would still like ACL to revisit the decision that supplementary materials not be required to be anonymous. This is inconsistent with NAACL's policy.

* NAACL has decided to make it a policy that all reviewer scores (including overall recommendation) be made available to authors at response time---assuming there is an author response---and would like to encourage ACL to adopt a similar rule.

= UPDATE 20 OCT 2015, NAACL POST-CONFERENCE SURVEY =

A summary of the survey results is in the following image:

[[File:naacl2015-survey-results.png]]

All the questions are Likert-style, with dark red (left) meaning “strongly disagree” and dark blue (right) meaning “strongly agree.”

There are two exceptions to this rule:

* “Attended” for which the semantics are: light red=never attend, grey=usually attend *ACL, light blue=usually attend NAACL, dark blue=attended NAACL 2015
* “Talk length”: red=shorten to 12+3; grey=shorten to 16+4; blue=keep at 20+5

Brief summary in text:

* People are generally very happy with basic logistics (thanks Priscilla!!!).

* Many people are in favor of having meta-reviews.

* People are generally split on having author response, but the majority want to keep it. In addition, people ever more strongly want authors to be able to flag factual innacuracies in the reviews.

* People are about as split as they could possibly be on the question of making reviews public.

* There's support for having NAACL or ACL in Central or South America, but it's nowhere near strong support. Ditto for having NAACL in Winter or Spring.

* People are very split on the question of adding more awards beyond the current (new) NAACL model of four best papers and up to six honorable mentions.

* People generally like status quo for how the conference is run: the number of parallel sessions should neither grow nor shrink; talks should stay at 20+5.

Attendees also provided very useful long-form text on what they liked and what they thought could be improved.

The top of the "liked" is:

1. The two invited talks (Fei-Fei Li and Lillian Lee) (*46)
2. The content of the poster sessions (*23)
3. The conference food (*13)

The top of the "could be improved" is:

1. The crowding at the posters (*35)
2. The food options for people with dietary restrictions, or general food complains (*9)
3. The lack of daylight in the venue (*9)

Thanks to all for filling out the survey!

File:Naacl2015-survey-results.png

2015-10-20T16:11:01Z

HalDaume: Survey results from the NAACL 2015 post-conference survey.png

Survey results from the NAACL 2015 post-conference survey.png

2015Q3 Reports: NAACL

2015-07-13T23:42:09Z

HalDaume:

2015Q3 Reports: NAACL

2015-07-13T23:40:37Z

HalDaume: Created page with "= Report from NAACL, July 2015 = Hal Daumé III - Chapter board chair Joel Tetreault - Treasurer == Executive Committee Meetings == The board had a meeting at NAACL..."

2015Q1 Reports: NAACL

2015-02-23T14:18:20Z

HalDaume:

Report from NAACL, February 2015

Hal Daume - Chapter board chair

Chris Callison-Burch - Past NAACL chair

Joel Tetreault - NAACL treasurer

Elections

The results of the most recent NAACL election were released in December 2014. Matt Post and Fei Xia were elected to serve on the board, replacing out-going members Katrin Erk and Julia Hirschberg. Joel Tetrault has be re-elected treasurer.

Here is a list of all current members of the NAACL board: http://www.naacl.org/officers

== Executive Committee Meetings ==

The board communicates regularly via email. The board met in person at ACL 2014 in Baltimore and will meet at NAACL 2015 in Denver.

== NAACL Treasurer's Report ==

This report is from Joel Tetreault, the NAACL Treasurer.

The NAACL Chapter's bank account held $34,268.60 as of January 31, 2015. However this number does not reflect the $8,121 surplus we have from NAACL 2013, so the bank account really stands at $43k. To put the above figures in perspective, last year's (2014) end of year balance was $29k and 2012 was $41k. So with the $8k surplus we are at a highest point in the last two years, so the building back from the NAACL 2010 loss continues, albeit slowly. In 2014, our expenditures were once again the sponsoring of external events: NACLO ($5k), two emerging regions funds at $1.5k apiece ($3k) and the LSA Summer Institute ($4.8k), for a total of $12.8k. In 2013 our outlays (NACLO and an emerging regions fund) totaled $6.5k.

While 2015 has begun on a promising note, there is still work to be done to rebuild the NAACL account. This is important because it allows us to better grow the field of Computational Linguistics in North and South America through the sponsorship of conferences and other novel events (such as NACLO).

As in the previous year, my recommendation is to be very selective on sponsorship while finding novel ways to keep costs down in organizing the NAACL conference, as we did in 2013.

== Results of NAACL 2014 initiatives ==

* Reinstated two-year rotating terms for pubs-chairs
* Question for ACL: how will this affect years when NAACL is ACL?
* Emily and Matt are in charge of the Emerging Regions initiative
* We are working to get more "local"/"startup" funding for conferences (in particular NAACL 2015)
* ACL's policy is that supplementary materials need not be anonymous. NAACL disagrees with this policy and is requiring NAACL submissions to be fully anonymous. NAACL encourages ACL to revisit this decision.
* New policies for best paper: there will always be awards for best long, best short and best student, and up to six runners-up will be publicized. This is consistent with ACL though more specific on number of runners up.
* NAACL has adopted ACL's policy on arxiv
* NAACL instituted an anti-harassment policy; Emily and I reviewed reactions to the policy as well as confusions. We revised the policy immediately and included a question about it in the post conference survey. It seems that there is a vocal very tiny minority opposed and everyone else is in favor or neutral.
* NAACL continues to support NACLO.

== North American conference in 2016 ==

The location of NAACL 2016 is San Diego. June 12-17, 2016. Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina. The guest room rate is $189 for regulars and I got a small block of student rooms at the same hotel for $129 (this block may be increased from the current 50 rooms per night when we get closer to the time). They gave some really good concessions to save us money (especially 10% of **2014** menu prices and 20% off AV and internet although I may get more of a discout).

The board is in the process of selecting a general chair.

2015Q1 Reports: NAACL

2015-02-17T03:02:13Z

HalDaume:

Report from NAACL, February 2015

Hal Daume - Chapter board chair

Chris Callison-Burch - Past NAACL chair

Joel Tetreault - NAACL treasurer

Elections

The results of the most recent NAACL election were released in December 2014. Matt Post and Fei Xia were elected to serve on the board, replacing out-going members Katrin Erk and Julia Hirschberg. Joel Tetrault has be re-elected treasurer.

Here is a list of all current members of the NAACL board: http://www.naacl.org/officers

== Executive Committee Meetings ==

The board communicates regularly via email. The board met in person at ACL 2014 in Baltimore and will meet at NAACL 2015 in Denver.

== NAACL Treasurer's Report ==

This report is from Joel Tetreault, the NAACL Treasurer.

The NAACL Chapter's bank account held $34,268.60 as of January 31, 2015. However this number does not reflect the $8,121 surplus we have from NAACL 2013, so the bank account really stands at $43k. To put the above figures in perspective, last year's (2014) end of year balance was $29k and 2012 was $41k. So with the $8k surplus we are at a highest point in the last two years, so the building back from the NAACL 2010 loss continues, albeit slowly. In 2014, our expenditures were once again the sponsoring of external events: NACLO ($5k), two emerging regions funds at $1.5k apiece ($3k) and the LSA Summer Institute ($4.8k), for a total of $12.8k. In 2013 our outlays (NACLO and an emerging regions fund) totaled $6.5k.

While 2015 has begun on a promising note, there is still work to be done to rebuild the NAACL account. This is important because it allows us to better grow the field of Computational Linguistics in North and South America through the sponsorship of conferences and other novel events (such as NACLO).

As in the previous year, my recommendation is to be very selective on sponsorship while finding novel ways to keep costs down in organizing the NAACL conference, as we did in 2013.

== Results of NAACL 2014 initiatives ==

* Reinstated two-year rotating terms for pubs-chairs
* Question for ACL: how will this affect years when NAACL is ACL?
* Emily and Matt are in charge of the Emerging Regions initiative
* We are working to get more "local"/"startup" funding for conferences (in particular NAACL 2015)
* ACL's policy is that supplementary materials need not be anonymous. NAACL disagrees with this policy and is requiring NAACL submissions to be fully anonymous. NAACL encourages ACL to revisit this decision.
* New policies for best paper: there will always be awards for best long, best short and best student, and up to six runners-up will be publicized. This is consistent with ACL though more specific on number of runners up.
* NAACL has adopted ACL's policy on arxiv
* NAACL instituted an anti-harassment policy; Emily and I reviewed reactions to the policy as well as confusions. We revised the policy immediately and included a question about it in the post conference survey. It seems that there is a vocal very tiny minority opposed and everyone else is in favor or neutral.
* NAACL continues to support NACLO.

== North American conference in 2016 ==

The location of NAACL 2016 is San Diego. The board is in the process of selecting candidates for general chair.

2015Q1 Reports: NAACL

2015-02-11T18:52:38Z

HalDaume:

Report from NAACL, February 2015

Hal Daume - Chapter board chair

Chris Callison-Burch - Past NAACL chair

Joel Tetrault - NAACL treasurer

Elections

The results of the most recent NAACL election were released in December 2014. Matt Post and Fei Xia were elected to serve on the board, replacing out-going members Katrin Erk and Julia Hirschberg. Joel Tetrault has be re-elected treasurer.

Here is a list of all current members of the NAACL board: http://www.naacl.org/officers

== Executive Committee Meetings ==

The board communicates regularly via email. The board met in person at ACL 2014 in Baltimore and will meet at NAACL 2015 in Denver.

== NAACL Treasurer's Report ==

This report is from Joel Tetreault, the NAACL Treasurer.

....

== Results of NAACL 2014 initiatives ==

* Reinstated two-year rotating terms for pubs-chairs
* Question for ACL: how will this affect years when NAACL is ACL?
* Emily and Matt are in charge of the Emerging Regions initiative
* We are working to get more "local"/"startup" funding for conferences (in particular NAACL 2015)
* ACL's policy is that supplementary materials need not be anonymous. NAACL disagrees with this policy and is requiring NAACL submissions to be fully anonymous. NAACL encourages ACL to revisit this decision.
* New policies for best paper: there will always be awards for best long, best short and best student, and up to six runners-up will be publicized. This is consistent with ACL though more specific on number of runners up.
* NAACL has adopted ACL's policy on arxiv
* NAACL instituted an anti-harassment policy; Emily and I reviewed reactions to the policy as well as confusions. We revised the policy immediately and included a question about it in the post conference survey. It seems that there is a vocal very tiny minority opposed and everyone else is in favor or neutral.
* NAACL continues to support NACLO.

== North American conference in 2016 ==

The location of NAACL 2016 is San Diego. The board is in the process of selecting candidates for general chair.

2015Q1 Reports: NAACL

2015-02-11T18:25:57Z

HalDaume: /* Results of NAACL 2013 initiatives */

2015Q1 Reports: NAACL

2015-02-11T18:25:40Z

HalDaume: Created page with "Report from NAACL, February 2015 Hal Daume - Chapter board chair Chris Callison-Burch - Past NAACL chair Joel Tetrault - NAACL treasurer Elections The results of the most..."

2014Q3 Reports: NAACL

2014-06-22T12:42:34Z

HalDaume: /* Treasurer's Report */

= Report from NAACL, June 2014 =

Hal Daumé III - Chapter board chair

Joel Tetreault - Treasurer

== Executive Committee Meetings ==

The board has a planned meeting on Wednesday 25 June 2014, during this year's ACL. Additionally the Board converses regularly by email.

== Treasurer's Report ==

=== UPDATE, 22 JUNE ===

I got a tentative update from Graeme on the Atlanta conference. Priscilla was eyeballing a $20k surplus last summer but it seems that Graeme is saying the number is closer to $5k or so (and this is split between the sigs too). That really is akin to breaking even and might cause us to rein in original outlays this year. Then again, it's best to wait until the official numbers come out before jumping.

It took basically a year to get these numbers, and it would be good to have these numbers sooner, especially if we need to make decisions on what we are supporting earlier in the year, before the numbers traditionally come out. At the same time, if our coffers were filled up, it wouldn't make too much of a difference.

=== REPORT BULLET POINTS ===

* Our budget took a huge blow in 2010 after the Los Angeles NAACL conference, but the last two NAACLs we have been building back slowly. We need to keep this positive growth. Currently the bank account stands at $42k.
* I took the tactic of being fiscally conservative last year to help get us out of the hole. This meant being selective of which events we sponsor. We should continue this strategy in 2014.
* For 2014, we should continue to sponsor NACLO, Emerging Regions Fund and the 2015 LSA Summer Institute.
* For the future, we should consider having *several* sponsorship chairs who start early and target many of the new NLP startups and companies with NLP wings to increase our sponsorship per conference.

=== NAACL REPORT - JUNE 10, 2014 ===

The NAACL Chapter's bank account holds $42,075.50 as of June 10, 2014. This includes the $17,987 surplus from NAACL 2012 and the recent $5,000 outlay to support NACLO this year. To put the above figures in perspective, last year's end-of-year balance was $41,776.06 (which was the lowest balance since 2007), so we are starting to build back from the loss incurred in NAACL 2010 right after our bank account peaked at $154k. Note that our bank account does not yet include the *projected *$20k surplus from NAACL 2013. If those estimates end up being correct, we would be over $60k for 2014 which is a much healthier state to be in.

In 2013, our primary expenditures were the sponsoring of external events: NACLO ($5k) and the NAACL Emerging Regions Fund ($1.5k). Our 2014 expenditures are likely to be the same.

A small bank account balance is troublesome for two reasons. First, it decreases our effectiveness to support Computational Linguistics locally and in Central and South America. Second, it decreases our ability to absorb a conference that incurs a large debt. Since the conference is the primary source of revenue, our ability to build back the account balance is contingent on conferences being continually successful. The last two years have seen registration rates go up slightly to increase revenues, however there is a limit to how much this can change the account over the long term.

*Related Links*

* Much of the above is reproduced from my 2014 Treasurer Report to ACL: http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2014Q1_Reports:_NAACL

* More details of our 2013 year can be found in my previous report and presentation: http://naacl.org/minutes/2013/NAACL_Treasurer_Presentation_2013.pdf and http://naacl.org/minutes/2013/NAACL_Treasurer_Report_2013.pdf

* To catch up on the NAACL 2010 loss, Chris Manning's 2012 Treasurer Report provides some more details: http://naacl.org/minutes/2012/2012-treasurers-report.pdf

=== NAACL Financial Strategy / Outlays ===

Given the financial situation that we were in 2013, I took the position of being fiscally conservative. In previous years we had funded several events such as the JHU Workshop, LSA, etc. up to almost $30k in some years. This is great for promoting CL, however I felt we needed to dial things back to revive the account. So last year we passed on sponsoring LSA at our regular $10k/yr. There wasn't a JHU Summer Workshop so that actually was a major outlay we didn't need to consider "fortunately." The following table lists our major outlays for the last three years.

*2011 (Total = $27,997)*
LSA Linguistic Institute 2011 $10,000
NACLO 2011 $ 5,000
Emerging Regions Fund $ 2,030
JHU WS 2011 $10,967
*2012 (Total = $27,329)*
NACLO 2012 $ 5,000
Emerging Regions Fund $ 1,480
LSA Linguistics Institute 2013 $10,000
JHU WS 2012 $10,849
*2013 (Total = $6,500)*
NACLO 2013 $ 5,000
Emerging Regions Fund $ 1,500

*I want to continue to be conservative for 2014.* I know it's an unpopular thing but we really can't take another hit like we did in 2010 and I want to have enough in the account for years to come to buffer us just in case this happens, as well as increase our ability to sponsor more events. That being said, I want to continue to sponsor the NACLO and emerging regions fund since they are going to have the biggest impact down the road for getting more people into NLP in North and South America. Last year we decided to fund NACLO for $5k and have a budget of $1500 for one or two emerging regions conferences.

=== Future Improvements ===

So far, the last two NAACLs have produced surpluses which is a step in the right direction. A large part of that is due to Priscilla negotiating hard with the conference hotels to keep our costs down and minimize the risks (thanks Priscilla!), as well our conference sponsors. She proposed the idea at our NAACL Board Meeting in Atlanta of hosting the conference in the same city twice or partnering with the same hotel chain to cut a better overall deal. I think this is a fantastic idea and as of a few weeks ago we have locations already signed for the next two NAACL conferences (with the 2016 one possibly co-located with ICML). Additionally, I want to note that at the last NAACL we had several innovations: co-locating with ICML and hosting a joint workshop, the conference scheduler app (Matt Post), the videos (CCB et al.) and changing up the format of the banquet. I think these changes go a long way in making NAACL stand out from the other NLP conferences and hopefully will attract more people to come out in '15 and '16.

One idea I had I wanted to throw out there was with respect to sponsorship chairs for NAACL. Typically Priscilla contacts the main players since she has a relationship with them (Google, MS, Amazon, Nuance, etc.) and a sponsorship chair helps out with other companies. I was thinking that given how hot NLP is right now in industry (it's often *hard *to find good NLP engineers and scientists) that we possibly enlarge the number of sponsor chairs and try to target startups and smaller companies (many of whom are founded by top NLP PhDs in the last few years) and companies that have a growing NLP wing (for example, Reuters or some hedge funds in NYC actually). We may not get $5000 or more from these places but $1000 here and there can start adding up if we have a lot of places to call from. However, this requires a bunch of dedicated and personable people to help identify and talk to these smaller places that may have just popped up. Additionally, having been in industry for many years now, sponsorship budgets for the following year are often locked down in the late fall or early winter. This means that if we don't start asking before January, companies may not have money allocated if we ask around March. So the idea I wanted to float was: *let's get more sponsorship chairs, especially those who have contacts with the smaller companies, and let's start early on this*.

The table below lists our sponsorship intake and ACLs the last six years. Note that we are actually fairly stable the last few years but I think given the state of NLP in industry in North America, I think we can do a lot better for 2015. While emailing Priscilla, she also noted that the local sponsor chairs can play an important role: *"at ACL 2011 in Portland, Brian Roark and Richard Sproat contacted a local brewery and got free beer for our banquet which saved a couple of thousand in free drink tickets we would have otherwise handed out. So, maybe this person could also think of local parts of nationwide chains to hit up (Dunkin Doughnuts? Starbucks? Staples?)"*

*ACL* *NAACL*
2007 Prague unclear 2007 Rochester $ 19,000.00
2008 Columbus $ 36,700.00 2008 N/A
2009 Singapore $ 26,456.24 2009 Boulder $ 30,750.00
2010 Uppsala $ 46,244.40 approx $30K in 2010 Los Angeles $ 38,719.09
kind from Swedish
government
2011 Portland $ 62,550.00 +Banquet beer 2011 N/A
sponsor
2012 Jeju $ 39,504.79 + small amount 2012 Montreal $ 30,304.84
from Tourism Bd/
each non-Korean
2013 Sofia $ 62,052.75 + $11,000 in kind 2013 Atlanta $ 25,452.25
2014 Baltimore $ 57,292.24 2014 N/A

== North American conference in 2014 ==

ACL is in North America this year, so there is no separate NAACL.

== NAACL Officers as of 8 June 2014 ==

Chair Hal Daume III University of Maryland
Secretary Michael White Ohio State University
Treasurer Joel Tetreault Yahoo! Research
Past Chair Chris Callison-Burch University of Pennsylvania

Board Members:
Emily M. Bender University of Washington
Katrin Erk University of Texas at Austin
Julia Hirschberg Columbia University
Eduard Hovy Carnegie Mellon University

== New Initiatives ==

=== Anti-Harassment Policy ===

The most significant new initiative for NAACL is the creation of an Anti-Harassment Policy. Details are here:

http://naacl.org/policies/anti-harassment.html

This was the result of extensive discussion, particularly regarding implementation. Its approval was unanimous among the members of the board. We additionally encouraged (successfully) ACL 2014 to adopt this policy for this year's conference.

=== Repeated Use of Hotel Chains ===

As suggested by Priscilla, we can often get a better financial deal by going with the same physical hotel two years in a row. We can get a slightly less good financial deal by going with the same hotel *chain* two years in a row. We decided that to save $10,000 + extras it wasn't worth breaking with the model of a rotating location, but that it was worth $5,000 + extras to stay with the same chain.

Thus, when selecting sites for NAACL 2015 (we chose Denver; see below), we simultaneously selected a site for NAACL 2016 to ensure that we can negotiate with both hotels simultaneously. NAACL 2016 will be held in San Diego (see below).

=== Policy on Endorsement ===

NAACL has received many requests to "endorse" (and sometimes also to financially sponsor) related events. We decided to create an endorsement policy. The policy can be viewed here:

http://naacl.org/policies/sponsorship-requests.html

== North America Conference in 2015 ==

NAACL 2015 will be held in Denver, Colorado, USA, from May 31st - June 5th at:

Sheraton Denver Downtown
1550 Court Place
Denver, CO
http://www.starwoodhotels.com/sheraton/property/overview/index.html?propertyID=3205

This is steps from the 16th Street pedestrian mall. There is a promotional video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY435zgRxHo

Tentatively papers will be due Monday 8 December, 2014.

The general chair is Rada Mihalcea (Univ. Michigan). The program co-chairs are Joyce Chai (Michigan State) and Anoop Sarkar (Simon Fraser).

== North America Conference in 2016 ==

NAACl 2016 will take place at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina, 12 - 17 June 2016. The guest room rate is $189 for regulars and I got a small block of student rooms at the same hotel for $129 (this block may be increased from the current 50 rooms per night when we get closer to the time). They gave some really good concessions to save us money (especially 10% of **2014** menu prices and 20% off AV and internet although Priscialla may be able to get more of a discount).

2014Q3 Reports

2014-06-10T16:39:15Z

HalDaume:

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]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[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: ACL Wiki]]

'''Recent Conferences'''

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

'''Future Conferences'''

* [[2014Q3 Reports: COLING 2014]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: EMNLP 2014]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: NAACL 2015]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: ACL-IJCNLP 2015]]
* [[2014Q3 Reports: EMNLP 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]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGBioMed]]
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGDAT]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[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]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGMT]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGNLL]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGPARSE]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGSEM]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGSEMITIC]]
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGSLPAT]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGWAC]]

2014Q3 Reports: NAACL

2014-06-10T16:38:43Z

HalDaume: /* Treasurer's Report */

= Report from NAACL, June 2014 =

Hal Daumé III - Chapter board chair

Joel Tetreault - Treasurer

== Executive Committee Meetings ==

The board has a planned meeting on Wednesday 25 June 2014, during this year's ACL. Additionally the Board converses regularly by email.

== Treasurer's Report ==

=== REPORT BULLET POINTS ===

* Our budget took a huge blow in 2010 after the Los Angeles NAACL conference, but the last two NAACLs we have been building back slowly. We need to keep this positive growth. Currently the bank account stands at $42k.
* I took the tactic of being fiscally conservative last year to help get us out of the hole. This meant being selective of which events we sponsor. We should continue this strategy in 2014.
* For 2014, we should continue to sponsor NACLO, Emerging Regions Fund and the 2015 LSA Summer Institute.
* For the future, we should consider having *several* sponsorship chairs who start early and target many of the new NLP startups and companies with NLP wings to increase our sponsorship per conference.

=== NAACL REPORT - JUNE 10, 2014 ===

The NAACL Chapter's bank account holds $42,075.50 as of June 10, 2014. This includes the $17,987 surplus from NAACL 2012 and the recent $5,000 outlay to support NACLO this year. To put the above figures in perspective, last year's end-of-year balance was $41,776.06 (which was the lowest balance since 2007), so we are starting to build back from the loss incurred in NAACL 2010 right after our bank account peaked at $154k. Note that our bank account does not yet include the *projected *$20k surplus from NAACL 2013. If those estimates end up being correct, we would be over $60k for 2014 which is a much healthier state to be in.

In 2013, our primary expenditures were the sponsoring of external events: NACLO ($5k) and the NAACL Emerging Regions Fund ($1.5k). Our 2014 expenditures are likely to be the same.

A small bank account balance is troublesome for two reasons. First, it decreases our effectiveness to support Computational Linguistics locally and in Central and South America. Second, it decreases our ability to absorb a conference that incurs a large debt. Since the conference is the primary source of revenue, our ability to build back the account balance is contingent on conferences being continually successful. The last two years have seen registration rates go up slightly to increase revenues, however there is a limit to how much this can change the account over the long term.

*Related Links*

* Much of the above is reproduced from my 2014 Treasurer Report to ACL: http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2014Q1_Reports:_NAACL

* More details of our 2013 year can be found in my previous report and presentation: http://naacl.org/minutes/2013/NAACL_Treasurer_Presentation_2013.pdf and http://naacl.org/minutes/2013/NAACL_Treasurer_Report_2013.pdf

* To catch up on the NAACL 2010 loss, Chris Manning's 2012 Treasurer Report provides some more details: http://naacl.org/minutes/2012/2012-treasurers-report.pdf

=== NAACL Financial Strategy / Outlays ===

Given the financial situation that we were in 2013, I took the position of being fiscally conservative. In previous years we had funded several events such as the JHU Workshop, LSA, etc. up to almost $30k in some years. This is great for promoting CL, however I felt we needed to dial things back to revive the account. So last year we passed on sponsoring LSA at our regular $10k/yr. There wasn't a JHU Summer Workshop so that actually was a major outlay we didn't need to consider "fortunately." The following table lists our major outlays for the last three years.

*2011 (Total = $27,997)*
LSA Linguistic Institute 2011 $10,000
NACLO 2011 $ 5,000
Emerging Regions Fund $ 2,030
JHU WS 2011 $10,967
*2012 (Total = $27,329)*
NACLO 2012 $ 5,000
Emerging Regions Fund $ 1,480
LSA Linguistics Institute 2013 $10,000
JHU WS 2012 $10,849
*2013 (Total = $6,500)*
NACLO 2013 $ 5,000
Emerging Regions Fund $ 1,500

*I want to continue to be conservative for 2014.* I know it's an unpopular thing but we really can't take another hit like we did in 2010 and I want to have enough in the account for years to come to buffer us just in case this happens, as well as increase our ability to sponsor more events. That being said, I want to continue to sponsor the NACLO and emerging regions fund since they are going to have the biggest impact down the road for getting more people into NLP in North and South America. Last year we decided to fund NACLO for $5k and have a budget of $1500 for one or two emerging regions conferences.

=== Future Improvements ===

So far, the last two NAACLs have produced surpluses which is a step in the right direction. A large part of that is due to Priscilla negotiating hard with the conference hotels to keep our costs down and minimize the risks (thanks Priscilla!), as well our conference sponsors. She proposed the idea at our NAACL Board Meeting in Atlanta of hosting the conference in the same city twice or partnering with the same hotel chain to cut a better overall deal. I think this is a fantastic idea and as of a few weeks ago we have locations already signed for the next two NAACL conferences (with the 2016 one possibly co-located with ICML). Additionally, I want to note that at the last NAACL we had several innovations: co-locating with ICML and hosting a joint workshop, the conference scheduler app (Matt Post), the videos (CCB et al.) and changing up the format of the banquet. I think these changes go a long way in making NAACL stand out from the other NLP conferences and hopefully will attract more people to come out in '15 and '16.

One idea I had I wanted to throw out there was with respect to sponsorship chairs for NAACL. Typically Priscilla contacts the main players since she has a relationship with them (Google, MS, Amazon, Nuance, etc.) and a sponsorship chair helps out with other companies. I was thinking that given how hot NLP is right now in industry (it's often *hard *to find good NLP engineers and scientists) that we possibly enlarge the number of sponsor chairs and try to target startups and smaller companies (many of whom are founded by top NLP PhDs in the last few years) and companies that have a growing NLP wing (for example, Reuters or some hedge funds in NYC actually). We may not get $5000 or more from these places but $1000 here and there can start adding up if we have a lot of places to call from. However, this requires a bunch of dedicated and personable people to help identify and talk to these smaller places that may have just popped up. Additionally, having been in industry for many years now, sponsorship budgets for the following year are often locked down in the late fall or early winter. This means that if we don't start asking before January, companies may not have money allocated if we ask around March. So the idea I wanted to float was: *let's get more sponsorship chairs, especially those who have contacts with the smaller companies, and let's start early on this*.

The table below lists our sponsorship intake and ACLs the last six years. Note that we are actually fairly stable the last few years but I think given the state of NLP in industry in North America, I think we can do a lot better for 2015. While emailing Priscilla, she also noted that the local sponsor chairs can play an important role: *"at ACL 2011 in Portland, Brian Roark and Richard Sproat contacted a local brewery and got free beer for our banquet which saved a couple of thousand in free drink tickets we would have otherwise handed out. So, maybe this person could also think of local parts of nationwide chains to hit up (Dunkin Doughnuts? Starbucks? Staples?)"*

*ACL* *NAACL*
2007 Prague unclear 2007 Rochester $ 19,000.00
2008 Columbus $ 36,700.00 2008 N/A
2009 Singapore $ 26,456.24 2009 Boulder $ 30,750.00
2010 Uppsala $ 46,244.40 approx $30K in 2010 Los Angeles $ 38,719.09
kind from Swedish
government
2011 Portland $ 62,550.00 +Banquet beer 2011 N/A
sponsor
2012 Jeju $ 39,504.79 + small amount 2012 Montreal $ 30,304.84
from Tourism Bd/
each non-Korean
2013 Sofia $ 62,052.75 + $11,000 in kind 2013 Atlanta $ 25,452.25
2014 Baltimore $ 57,292.24 2014 N/A

== North American conference in 2014 ==

ACL is in North America this year, so there is no separate NAACL.

== NAACL Officers as of 8 June 2014 ==

Chair Hal Daume III University of Maryland
Secretary Michael White Ohio State University
Treasurer Joel Tetreault Yahoo! Research
Past Chair Chris Callison-Burch University of Pennsylvania

Board Members:
Emily M. Bender University of Washington
Katrin Erk University of Texas at Austin
Julia Hirschberg Columbia University
Eduard Hovy Carnegie Mellon University

== New Initiatives ==

=== Anti-Harassment Policy ===

The most significant new initiative for NAACL is the creation of an Anti-Harassment Policy. Details are here:

http://naacl.org/policies/anti-harassment.html

This was the result of extensive discussion, particularly regarding implementation. It's approval was unanimous among the members of the board. We additionally encouraged (successfully) ACL 2014 to adopt this policy for this year's conference.

=== Repeated Use of Hotel Chains ===

As suggested by Priscilla, we can often get a better financial deal by going with the same physical hotel two years in a row. We can get a slightly less good financial deal by going with the same hotel *chain* two years in a row. We decided that to save $10,000 + extras it wasn't worth breaking with the model of a rotating location, but that it was worth $5,000 + extras to stay with the same chain.

Thus, when selecting sites for NAACL 2015 (we chose Denver; see below), we simultaneously selected a site for NAACL 2016 to ensure that we can negotiate with both hotels simultaneously. NAACL 2016 will be held in San Diego (see below).

=== Policy on Endorsement ===

NAACL has received many requests to "endorse" (and sometimes also to financially sponsor) related events. We decided to create an endorsement policy. The policy can be viewed here:

http://naacl.org/policies/sponsorship-requests.html

== North America Conference in 2015 ==

NAACL 2015 will be held in Denver, Colorado, USA, from May 31st - June 5th at:

Sheraton Denver Downtown
1550 Court Place
Denver, CO
http://www.starwoodhotels.com/sheraton/property/overview/index.html?propertyID=3205

This is steps from the 16th Street pedestrian mall. There is a promotional video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY435zgRxHo

Tentatively papers will be due Monday 8 December, 2014.

The general chair is Rada Mihalcea (Univ. Michigan). The program co-chairs are Joyce Chai (Michigan State) and Anoop Sarkar (Simon Fraser).

== North America Conference in 2016 ==

NAACl 2016 will take place at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina, 12 - 17 June 2016. The guest room rate is $189 for regulars and I got a small block of student rooms at the same hotel for $129 (this block may be increased from the current 50 rooms per night when we get closer to the time). They gave some really good concessions to save us money (especially 10% of **2014** menu prices and 20% off AV and internet although Priscialla may be able to get more of a discount).

2014Q3 Reports

2014-06-09T14:16:18Z

HalDaume:

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]] (SUBMITTED but awaiting new treasurer report)
* [[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: ACL Wiki]]

'''Recent Conferences'''

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

'''Future Conferences'''

* [[2014Q3 Reports: COLING 2014]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: EMNLP 2014]]
* [[2014Q3 Reports: NAACL 2015]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: ACL-IJCNLP 2015]]
* [[2014Q3 Reports: EMNLP 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]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGBioMed]]
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGDAT]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[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]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGMT]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGNLL]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGPARSE]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGSEM]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGSEMITIC]]
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGSLPAT]] (SUBMITTED)
* [[2014Q3 Reports: SIGWAC]]

2014Q3 Reports: NAACL

2014-06-09T14:15:33Z

HalDaume: Created page with "= Report from NAACL, June 2014 = Hal Daumé III - Chapter board chair Joel Tetreault - Treasurer == Executive Committee Meetings == The board has a planned meeting o..."

2014Q1 Reports: NAACL

2014-02-24T15:39:47Z

HalDaume:

Report from NAACL, February 2014

Hal Daume - Chapter board chair

Chris Callison-Burch - Past NAACL chair

Joel Tetrault - NAACL treasurer

Elections

The results of the most recent NAACL election were released in December 2013. Hal Daume was elected to be the new chair, narrowly edging out David Chiang with 112 votes to David’s 108. Ed Hovy was newly elected to the board (replacing Mona Diab), and Emily Bender was re-elected to her board position. Michael White was elected to be the new secretary (replacing Anoop Sarkar).

Here is a list of all current members of the NAACL board: http://www.naacl.org/officers

== Executive Committee Meetings ==

The board communicates regularly via email. The board met in person at NAACL 2013 in Atlanta and will meet at ACL 2014 in Baltimore.

== NAACL Treasurer's Report ==

This report is from Joel Tetreault, the NAACL Treasurer.

The NAACL Chapter's bank account held $29083.35 as of January 31, 2014. However this number does not yet reflect the $22k surplus we have from NAACL 2012, so the bank account really stands at $51k. The financials of the NAACL 2013 conference are still being put together right by Priscilla and Graeme, but the projection is that the conference made a surplus. To put the above figures in perspective, last year's end-of-year balance was $41,776.06 (which was the lowest balance since 2007), so we are starting to build back from the loss incurred in NAACL 2010 where our bank account peaked at $154k. In 2013, our primary expenditures were the sponsoring of external events: NACLO ($5k) and the NAACL Emerging Regions Fund ($1.5k).

While we ended 2013 on a positive note, there is still a lot of work to be done to rebuild the NAACL account. This is important because it allows us to better grow the field of Computational Linguistics in North and South America through the sponsorship of conferences and other novel events (such as NACLO). My recommendation for 2014 is to once again be very selective on sponsorship while finding novel ways to keep costs down in organizing the NAACL conference, as we did in 2013.

== Results of NAACL 2013 initiatives ==

NAACL 2013 in Atlanta featured two new initiatives.
(1) We hired a professional videographer to record all of the main conference talks and tutorials. The videos can be viewed online at http://techtalks.tv/naacl/2013/ and are linked from the ACL anthology.

The cost of recording was $12,000. This was partially offset by an additional donation from Google and a new donation from Intel. These sponsors are acknowledged in the opening frame of all videos. We also recouped some of the cost by discontinuing the distribution of conference proceedings on thumb drives (a savings of approximately $8000),

The videos allowed us to introduce a new Best Talk award. We sent out a post-conference survey immediately after the conference to all of the NAACL 2013 attendees. One question asked them which was their favorite talk of the conference. The top 4 vote getters were nominated for the Best Talk award. Links to their videos was distributed to the NAACL membership along with a voting form. The nominees were:

* Colin Cherry "Improved Reordering for Phrase-Based Translation using Sparse Features" http://techtalks.tv/talks/improved-reordering-for-pbsmt-using-sparse-features/58430/
* Juri Ganitkevitch "PPDB: The Paraphrase Database" http://techtalks.tv/talks/ppdb-the-paraphrase-database/58473/
* Dan Garrette "Learning a Part-of-Speech Tagger from Two Hours of Annotation" http://techtalks.tv/talks/learning-a-part-of-speech-tagger-from-two-hours-of-annotation/58441/
* Sebastian Riedel "Relation Extraction with Matrix Factorization and Universal Schemas" http://techtalks.tv/talks/relation-extraction-with-matrix-factorization-and-universal-schemas/58435/

After the vote, Sebastian Riedel won the Best Talk award. In the future, we recommend forming a committee to select nominees. The committee can take the post-conference survey under advisement, but should have the discretion to add additional nominees (for instance, to improve diversity).

(2) Matt Post, the NAACL 2013 publications chair, developed a conference handbook app. The app was very popular. You can download a copy of it from the iTunes store:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=649937857&mt=8
or the Android store:
http://naacl2013.crowdcompass.com/apps
We recommend consulting with Matt Post on future versions of a handbook app, if you decide to create one for ACL.

== North American conference in 2015 ==

The location of NAACL 2015 is TBD. The board has selected a short list of candidates for the GC chair, and Hal is contacting them now.

2014Q1 Reports: NAACL

2014-02-24T15:39:33Z

HalDaume:

2014Q1 Reports: NAACL

2014-02-24T15:38:24Z

HalDaume: Created page with "Report from NAACL, February 2014 Hal Daume - Chapter board chair Chris Callison-Burch - Past chair Joel - Past chair Elections The results of the most recent NAACL electio..."

Report from NAACL, February 2014

Hal Daume - Chapter board chair
Chris Callison-Burch - Past chair
Joel - Past chair

Elections

The results of the most recent NAACL election were released in December 2013. Hal Daume was elected to be the new chair, narrowly edging out David Chiang with 112 votes to David’s 108. Ed Hovy was newly elected to the board (replacing Mona Diab), and Emily Bender was re-elected to her board position. Michael White was elected to be the new secretary (replacing Anoop Sarkar).

Here is a list of all current members of the NAACL board: http://www.naacl.org/officers

== Executive Committee Meetings ==

The board communicates regularly via email. The board met in person at NAACL 2013 in Atlanta and will meet at ACL 2014 in Baltimore.

== NAACL Treasurer's Report ==

This report is from Joel Tetreault, the NAACL Treasurer.

The NAACL Chapter's bank account held $30,540.22 as of October 31, 2013. However this number does not yet reflect the $22k surplus we have from NAACL 2012, so the bank account really stands at $52k for the end of 2013. The financials of the NAACL 2013 conference are still being put together right by Priscilla and Graeme, but the projection is that the conference made a surplus. To put the above figures in perspective, last year's end-of-year balance was $41,776.06, so we are starting to build back from the loss incurred in NAACL 2010 where our bank account peaked at $154k. In 2013, our primary expenditures were the sponsoring of external events: NACLO ($5k) and the NAACL Emerging Regions Fund ($1.5).

While we ended 2013 on a positive note, there is still a lot of work to be done to rebuild the NAACL account. This is important because it allows us to better grow the field of Computational Linguistics in North and South America through the sponsorship of conferences and other novel events (such as NACLO). My recommendation for 2014 is to once again be very agressive on sponsorship while finding novel ways to keep costs down in organizing the NAACL conference, as we did in 2013.

== Results of NAACL 2013 initiatives ==

NAACL 2013 in Atlanta featured two new initiatives.
(1) We hired a professional videographer to record all of the main conference talks and tutorials. The videos can be viewed online at http://techtalks.tv/naacl/2013/ and are linked from the ACL anthology.

The cost of recording was $12,000. This was partially offset by an additional donation from Google and a new donation from Intel. These sponsors are acknowledged in the opening frame of all videos. We also recouped some of the cost by discontinuing the distribution of conference proceedings on thumb drives (a savings of approximately $8000),

The videos allowed us to introduce a new Best Talk award. We sent out a post-conference survey immediately after the conference to all of the NAACL 2013 attendees. One question asked them which was their favorite talk of the conference. The top 4 vote getters were nominated for the Best Talk award. Links to their videos was distributed to the NAACL membership along with a voting form. The nominees were:

* Colin Cherry "Improved Reordering for Phrase-Based Translation using Sparse Features" http://techtalks.tv/talks/improved-reordering-for-pbsmt-using-sparse-features/58430/
* Juri Ganitkevitch "PPDB: The Paraphrase Database" http://techtalks.tv/talks/ppdb-the-paraphrase-database/58473/
* Dan Garrette "Learning a Part-of-Speech Tagger from Two Hours of Annotation" http://techtalks.tv/talks/learning-a-part-of-speech-tagger-from-two-hours-of-annotation/58441/
* Sebastian Riedel "Relation Extraction with Matrix Factorization and Universal Schemas" http://techtalks.tv/talks/relation-extraction-with-matrix-factorization-and-universal-schemas/58435/

After the vote, Sebastian Riedel won the Best Talk award. In the future, we recommend forming a committee to select nominees. The committee can take the post-conference survey under advisement, but should have the discretion to add additional nominees (for instance, to improve diversity).

(2) Matt Post, the NAACL 2013 publications chair, developed a conference handbook app. The app was very popular. You can download a copy of it from the iTunes store:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=649937857&mt=8
or the Android store:
http://naacl2013.crowdcompass.com/apps
We recommend consulting with Matt Post on future versions of a handbook app, if you decide to create one for ACL.

== North American conference in 2015 ==

The location of NAACL 2015 is TBD. The board has selected a short list of candidates for the GC chair, and Hal is contacting them now.