https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/api.php?action=feedcontributions&feedformat=atom&user=JurafskyAdmin Wiki - User contributions [en]2026-04-27T19:59:48ZUser contributionsMediaWiki 1.43.6https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=739552020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-27T18:41:35Z<p>Jurafsky: /* Summary of what happened */</p>
<hr />
<div>== ACL 2020 post-conference report: General Chair ==<br />
==== Dan Jurafsky ====<br />
<br />
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
==== Summary of what happened ====<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>We ran a virtual ACL with only a few months notice, and it wasn't a disaster!<br />
<li> ACL was the largest ever, with record number of submissions (3,429), accepted papers (778), and attendees (4,972).<br />
<li>It was also the most diverse ACL ever!<br />
<li> We cut registration fees down sharply to $125 (regular) and $50 (students), and also significantly increased the grants for free registration for those in need, and paid registration for all organization committee members and a very large number of volunteers.<br />
<li>Nonetheless, we had a healthy surplus. We should increase subsidies for those in need, and probably could decrease registration fees further (perhaps decrease fees significantly, and raise them for late registration, since late registrations were a large problem).<br />
<li> For our virtual infrastructure we chose to mostly follow the ICLR model,<br />
with some modifications:<br />
<ul><br />
<li> pre-recorded talks, recorded using the SlidesLive web-based tools, with ASR-based captions hand-corrected by authors.<br />
<li> a website dashboard based on the miniconf package, with a schedule page that can be adjusted to each timezone, a<br />
separate webpage for each paper that gives its pre-recorded video, paper, zoom channel, and Rocketchat link.<br />
<li> Livestreamed plenary sessions, also run by SlidesLive, with a mix of recorded talks and live presentations<br />
<li> Rocketchat sessions associated with each talk<br />
<li> Two 1-hour Zoom Q&A sessions for each of the talks.<br />
<li> Tutorials that were a mix of live sessions and pre-recorded talks<br />
<li> Workshops that also used a mix of live sessions and pre-recorded talks<br />
</ul><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<b>Other Positive Results:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>The new tracks (Ethics, Interpretation, Taking Stock, etc) were <br />
very popular; they were the most watched talks (https://twitter.com/yoavgo/status/1282459579339681792)<br />
<li>People had lots of great discussion on chat; ACL conferences should ramp up use of chat media.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start<br />
<li>The team was awesome!! Every set of chairs was amazing and rose to the occasion to deal with the shift to virtual.<br />
<li>This year we added publicity team in China, important for reaching out to a large audience there.<br />
<li>This year (as last year) we got CC-BY4.0 permissions from authors to upload their videos of talks to the ACL Anthology. New this year, we also uploaded transcripts of the talks, making the videos more accessible, first asking authors to correct the ASR transcripts of their talks. We need a way to encourage more authors to correct their transcripts.<br />
</ul><br />
<b>Negative:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>The infrastructure team had to work way too hard, especially the last two weeks + the conference, it was a completely unreasonable load on them. Beware! Advice on infrastructure below.<br />
<li>People in China had to use VPNs to watch the pre-recorded talks.<br />
<li>All the software (but especially SlidesLive, but also Zoom) had all sorts of problems.<br />
We probably don't want to reuse SlidesLive (although it's not obvious there's a better replacement), but Zoom we may have no choice.<br />
<li>Ethics and PCC stuff caused headaches that could have been avoided<br />
with ethics statements as part of submissions and best paper awards.<br />
<li>Communication with authors was very very difficult; there was no<br />
one emailing list that got every author at main, demo, SRW, tutorials, workshops. This<br />
caused innumerable problems.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start but needs tweeking<br />
<li>Having the demos and SRW at the main conference, but not run by the PC,<br />
was problematic, in terms of scheduling (it would have been better to have demos<br />
and main papers scheduled by same person), communication (every message had to be sent<br />
through 3 separate groups of chairs), ethics (papers and awards weren't checked consistently).<br />
Probably we should rethink this structure; maybe make demo chairs a kind of area chair?<br />
And move SRW to the workshop days?<br />
<li>Workshops were much less well dealt with on our virtual site than the rest of the conference, since they all<br />
finalized their scheduled very late and we weren't able to get their infrastructure (web pages, schedules, zoom links) created<br />
sufficiently.<br />
<li>It would have been great to have been able to make the website visible a few days earlier,<br />
to let people start watching papers.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
=== Overview of suggestions for future conferences ===<br />
<br />
==== Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs ====<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Either pay for a completely professional conference organizer that does all infrastructure themselves, or if we're going to continue to use the miniconf website that we used this year, then:<br />
<ol><br />
<li> Have double the number of virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably <br />
you need 18, including specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, and more.<br />
<li>Assign completely separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who can be closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. <br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
</ol><br />
<li> Either way the workshops will need stricter deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier<br />
than with a physical conference, and did I mention strictly enforced? <br />
<li>Create a Virtual Social chair to find ways to <br />
get people to meet each other more (see https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Publicity_Chairs).<br />
Esther Seyffarth volunteers to do it for EMNLP or COLING.<br />
<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair.<br />
<li>Pub chair info needs to be gotten to them much earlier; pub chairs need<br />
to talk to previous pub chairs <b>immediately</b> and work on new FAQs.<br />
<li>Diversity and Inclusion chairs created many subchairs to run various D&I committees. This worked well, and should be done again.<br />
<li>All the non-virtual-infrastructure chairs were also overworked. Probably we need<br />
more chairs, 3 instead of 2 chairs for various things, 4 PCs instead of 3,<br />
or even possibly 2 general chairs with specific duties.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
====Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners ====<br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>While using a video-presentation company like SlidesLive had many advantages, in the end our advice<br />
is that ACL should try to find alternatives to SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression that they would do human captioning of live sessions, but then changed to ASR captioning<br />
<li>They clearly struggled with processing 1500+ video presentations in just around 2 weeks; they also changed their commitment to what they were planning to deliver in terms of captioning multiple times during the pre-conference period<br />
<li>Their setup for allowing authors to correct captions was not easy to use.<br />
<li>Their recording setup didn't allow any author editing, which made it frustrating to have<br />
to record in single takes<br />
<li>We only realized later that they were willing to paste together multiple segments, so<br />
tutorials could have been recorded in multiple chunks.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, wasn't technical and didn't seem to be a good listener, so complaints often<br />
were not addressed.<br />
<li>One problem occurred on the day before the workshops when they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room). It was their lack<br />
of clear explanations and dry runs that caused the much-commented-upon 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, and was especially a problem in the workshops.<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, it's possible that they will begin to improve as they grow as a company,<br />
and frankly we don't know if there are strong alternatives:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>One option is to find a professional virtual conference organizer that runs everything (including running the website), as well as the videos. We were unable to find such, so we don't know if this is possible.<br />
<li><br />
SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
We assume by now there are probably other options.<br />
<li>In general, a recording company like SlidesLive has advantages over asking <br />
participants to just record themselves: consistency, affordability to participants (no need for folks to buy video recording software), <br />
professionals dealing with problems in livestream. slideslive also checked each of the 1500+ videos by hand for sound and composition problems, and ran them through ASR captioning..<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Live human captions (CART) for the livestream plenary events were done by ACS Captions who were great. We should reuse them.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Switching to Virtual: Other Advice on Infrastructure ====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Better ways to create a list of "papers to see" and download entire schedules (instead of downloading one paper-slot at a time)<br />
<li>QA sessions could possibly be improved by incorporating more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks.<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> Fix miniconf so that the whole website (including workshops, plenary pages, etc) can shift timezone, not just the schedule page.<br />
<li>Perhaps building an FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions using a standard toolkit (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot); suggestion from Nitin Madnani.<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Getting more Author Permissions:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>This year (as last year) we got CC-BY4.0 permissions from authors to upload their videos of talks to the ACL Anthology. In addition, we asked authors to correct the ASR transcripts of their talks, and we are also uploading the transcripts to the Anthology.<br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Global Inclusion:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to (a) solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or (b) continue to require that people in those countries use VPNs.<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Vimeo (used by ACL Anthology and also SlidesLive pre-recorded talks) is <b>not</b> visible in China, Indonesia, Vietnam<br />
<li>SlidesLive livestream (but not pre-recorded, which uses Vimeo) <b>is</b> visible in China<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case, can't use Google or Microsoft either<br />
<li> Proposal: we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we should set up mirrors for videos.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Ethics:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form, and<br />
add ethics and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair (and then need to decide which things are PCC and which are ethics)<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<p><b>Historical note in case useful: switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I briefly fill Exec in that virtual is an option, but still low-probability<br />
<li>Mar 6: Things worsen. We change Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things worsened more, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual, we wait to hear about hotel $$$<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to going virtual. We delay a few more days for ACL Exec to confirm all this.<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul></div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=739542020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-27T18:41:10Z<p>Jurafsky: /* Summary of what happened */</p>
<hr />
<div>== ACL 2020 post-conference report: General Chair ==<br />
==== Dan Jurafsky ====<br />
<br />
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
==== Summary of what happened ====<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>We ran a virtual ACL with only a few months notice, and it wasn't a disaster!<br />
<li> ACL was the largest ever, with record number of submissions (3,429), accepted papers (778), and attendees (4,972).<br />
<li>It was also the most diverse ACL ever!<br />
<li> We cut registration fees down sharply to $125 (regular) and $50 (students), and also significantly increased the grants for free registration for those in need, and paid registration for all organization committee members<br />
<li>Nonetheless, we had a healthy surplus. We should increase subsidies for those in need, and probably could decrease registration fees further (perhaps decrease fees significantly, and raise them for late registration, since late registrations were a large problem).<br />
<li> For our virtual infrastructure we chose to mostly follow the ICLR model,<br />
with some modifications:<br />
<ul><br />
<li> pre-recorded talks, recorded using the SlidesLive web-based tools, with ASR-based captions hand-corrected by authors.<br />
<li> a website dashboard based on the miniconf package, with a schedule page that can be adjusted to each timezone, a<br />
separate webpage for each paper that gives its pre-recorded video, paper, zoom channel, and Rocketchat link.<br />
<li> Livestreamed plenary sessions, also run by SlidesLive, with a mix of recorded talks and live presentations<br />
<li> Rocketchat sessions associated with each talk<br />
<li> Two 1-hour Zoom Q&A sessions for each of the talks.<br />
<li> Tutorials that were a mix of live sessions and pre-recorded talks<br />
<li> Workshops that also used a mix of live sessions and pre-recorded talks<br />
</ul><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<b>Other Positive Results:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>The new tracks (Ethics, Interpretation, Taking Stock, etc) were <br />
very popular; they were the most watched talks (https://twitter.com/yoavgo/status/1282459579339681792)<br />
<li>People had lots of great discussion on chat; ACL conferences should ramp up use of chat media.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start<br />
<li>The team was awesome!! Every set of chairs was amazing and rose to the occasion to deal with the shift to virtual.<br />
<li>This year we added publicity team in China, important for reaching out to a large audience there.<br />
<li>This year (as last year) we got CC-BY4.0 permissions from authors to upload their videos of talks to the ACL Anthology. New this year, we also uploaded transcripts of the talks, making the videos more accessible, first asking authors to correct the ASR transcripts of their talks. We need a way to encourage more authors to correct their transcripts.<br />
</ul><br />
<b>Negative:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>The infrastructure team had to work way too hard, especially the last two weeks + the conference, it was a completely unreasonable load on them. Beware! Advice on infrastructure below.<br />
<li>People in China had to use VPNs to watch the pre-recorded talks.<br />
<li>All the software (but especially SlidesLive, but also Zoom) had all sorts of problems.<br />
We probably don't want to reuse SlidesLive (although it's not obvious there's a better replacement), but Zoom we may have no choice.<br />
<li>Ethics and PCC stuff caused headaches that could have been avoided<br />
with ethics statements as part of submissions and best paper awards.<br />
<li>Communication with authors was very very difficult; there was no<br />
one emailing list that got every author at main, demo, SRW, tutorials, workshops. This<br />
caused innumerable problems.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start but needs tweeking<br />
<li>Having the demos and SRW at the main conference, but not run by the PC,<br />
was problematic, in terms of scheduling (it would have been better to have demos<br />
and main papers scheduled by same person), communication (every message had to be sent<br />
through 3 separate groups of chairs), ethics (papers and awards weren't checked consistently).<br />
Probably we should rethink this structure; maybe make demo chairs a kind of area chair?<br />
And move SRW to the workshop days?<br />
<li>Workshops were much less well dealt with on our virtual site than the rest of the conference, since they all<br />
finalized their scheduled very late and we weren't able to get their infrastructure (web pages, schedules, zoom links) created<br />
sufficiently.<br />
<li>It would have been great to have been able to make the website visible a few days earlier,<br />
to let people start watching papers.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
=== Overview of suggestions for future conferences ===<br />
<br />
==== Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs ====<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Either pay for a completely professional conference organizer that does all infrastructure themselves, or if we're going to continue to use the miniconf website that we used this year, then:<br />
<ol><br />
<li> Have double the number of virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably <br />
you need 18, including specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, and more.<br />
<li>Assign completely separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who can be closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. <br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
</ol><br />
<li> Either way the workshops will need stricter deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier<br />
than with a physical conference, and did I mention strictly enforced? <br />
<li>Create a Virtual Social chair to find ways to <br />
get people to meet each other more (see https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Publicity_Chairs).<br />
Esther Seyffarth volunteers to do it for EMNLP or COLING.<br />
<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair.<br />
<li>Pub chair info needs to be gotten to them much earlier; pub chairs need<br />
to talk to previous pub chairs <b>immediately</b> and work on new FAQs.<br />
<li>Diversity and Inclusion chairs created many subchairs to run various D&I committees. This worked well, and should be done again.<br />
<li>All the non-virtual-infrastructure chairs were also overworked. Probably we need<br />
more chairs, 3 instead of 2 chairs for various things, 4 PCs instead of 3,<br />
or even possibly 2 general chairs with specific duties.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
====Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners ====<br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>While using a video-presentation company like SlidesLive had many advantages, in the end our advice<br />
is that ACL should try to find alternatives to SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression that they would do human captioning of live sessions, but then changed to ASR captioning<br />
<li>They clearly struggled with processing 1500+ video presentations in just around 2 weeks; they also changed their commitment to what they were planning to deliver in terms of captioning multiple times during the pre-conference period<br />
<li>Their setup for allowing authors to correct captions was not easy to use.<br />
<li>Their recording setup didn't allow any author editing, which made it frustrating to have<br />
to record in single takes<br />
<li>We only realized later that they were willing to paste together multiple segments, so<br />
tutorials could have been recorded in multiple chunks.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, wasn't technical and didn't seem to be a good listener, so complaints often<br />
were not addressed.<br />
<li>One problem occurred on the day before the workshops when they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room). It was their lack<br />
of clear explanations and dry runs that caused the much-commented-upon 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, and was especially a problem in the workshops.<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, it's possible that they will begin to improve as they grow as a company,<br />
and frankly we don't know if there are strong alternatives:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>One option is to find a professional virtual conference organizer that runs everything (including running the website), as well as the videos. We were unable to find such, so we don't know if this is possible.<br />
<li><br />
SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
We assume by now there are probably other options.<br />
<li>In general, a recording company like SlidesLive has advantages over asking <br />
participants to just record themselves: consistency, affordability to participants (no need for folks to buy video recording software), <br />
professionals dealing with problems in livestream. slideslive also checked each of the 1500+ videos by hand for sound and composition problems, and ran them through ASR captioning..<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Live human captions (CART) for the livestream plenary events were done by ACS Captions who were great. We should reuse them.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Switching to Virtual: Other Advice on Infrastructure ====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Better ways to create a list of "papers to see" and download entire schedules (instead of downloading one paper-slot at a time)<br />
<li>QA sessions could possibly be improved by incorporating more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks.<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> Fix miniconf so that the whole website (including workshops, plenary pages, etc) can shift timezone, not just the schedule page.<br />
<li>Perhaps building an FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions using a standard toolkit (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot); suggestion from Nitin Madnani.<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Getting more Author Permissions:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>This year (as last year) we got CC-BY4.0 permissions from authors to upload their videos of talks to the ACL Anthology. In addition, we asked authors to correct the ASR transcripts of their talks, and we are also uploading the transcripts to the Anthology.<br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Global Inclusion:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to (a) solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or (b) continue to require that people in those countries use VPNs.<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Vimeo (used by ACL Anthology and also SlidesLive pre-recorded talks) is <b>not</b> visible in China, Indonesia, Vietnam<br />
<li>SlidesLive livestream (but not pre-recorded, which uses Vimeo) <b>is</b> visible in China<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case, can't use Google or Microsoft either<br />
<li> Proposal: we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we should set up mirrors for videos.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Ethics:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form, and<br />
add ethics and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair (and then need to decide which things are PCC and which are ethics)<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<p><b>Historical note in case useful: switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I briefly fill Exec in that virtual is an option, but still low-probability<br />
<li>Mar 6: Things worsen. We change Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things worsened more, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual, we wait to hear about hotel $$$<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to going virtual. We delay a few more days for ACL Exec to confirm all this.<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul></div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=739532020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-27T18:37:32Z<p>Jurafsky: /* ACL 2020 post-conference report: General Chair */</p>
<hr />
<div>== ACL 2020 post-conference report: General Chair ==<br />
==== Dan Jurafsky ====<br />
<br />
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
==== Summary of what happened ====<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>We ran a virtual ACL with only a few months notice, and it wasn't a disaster!<br />
<li> ACL was the largest ever, with record number of submissions (3,429), accepted papers (778), and attendees (4,972).<br />
<li>It was also the most diverse ACL ever!<br />
<li> For our virtual infrastructure we chose to mostly follow the ICLR model,<br />
with some modifications:<br />
<ul><br />
<li> pre-recorded talks, recorded using the SlidesLive web-based tools, with ASR-based captions hand-corrected by authors.<br />
<li> a website dashboard based on the miniconf package, with a schedule page that can be adjusted to each timezone, a<br />
separate webpage for each paper that gives its pre-recorded video, paper, zoom channel, and Rocketchat link.<br />
<li> Livestreamed plenary sessions, also run by SlidesLive, with a mix of recorded talks and live presentations<br />
<li> Rocketchat sessions associated with each talk<br />
<li> Two 1-hour Zoom Q&A sessions for each of the talks.<br />
<li> Tutorials that were a mix of live sessions and pre-recorded talks<br />
<li> Workshops that also used a mix of live sessions and pre-recorded talks<br />
</ul><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<b>Other Positive Results:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>The new tracks (Ethics, Interpretation, Taking Stock, etc) were <br />
very popular; they were the most watched talks (https://twitter.com/yoavgo/status/1282459579339681792)<br />
<li>People had lots of great discussion on chat; ACL conferences should ramp up use of chat media.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start<br />
<li>The team was awesome!! Every set of chairs was amazing and rose to the occasion to deal with the shift to virtual.<br />
<li>This year we added publicity team in China, important for reaching out to a large audience there.<br />
<li>This year (as last year) we got CC-BY4.0 permissions from authors to upload their videos of talks to the ACL Anthology. New this year, we also uploaded transcripts of the talks, making the videos more accessible, first asking authors to correct the ASR transcripts of their talks. We need a way to encourage more authors to correct their transcripts.<br />
</ul><br />
<b>Negative:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>The infrastructure team had to work way too hard, especially the last two weeks + the conference, it was a completely unreasonable load on them. Beware! Advice on infrastructure below.<br />
<li>People in China had to use VPNs to watch the pre-recorded talks.<br />
<li>All the software (but especially SlidesLive, but also Zoom) had all sorts of problems.<br />
We probably don't want to reuse SlidesLive (although it's not obvious there's a better replacement), but Zoom we may have no choice.<br />
<li>Ethics and PCC stuff caused headaches that could have been avoided<br />
with ethics statements as part of submissions and best paper awards.<br />
<li>Communication with authors was very very difficult; there was no<br />
one emailing list that got every author at main, demo, SRW, tutorials, workshops. This<br />
caused innumerable problems.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start but needs tweeking<br />
<li>Having the demos and SRW at the main conference, but not run by the PC,<br />
was problematic, in terms of scheduling (it would have been better to have demos<br />
and main papers scheduled by same person), communication (every message had to be sent<br />
through 3 separate groups of chairs), ethics (papers and awards weren't checked consistently).<br />
Probably we should rethink this structure; maybe make demo chairs a kind of area chair?<br />
And move SRW to the workshop days?<br />
<li>Workshops were much less well dealt with on our virtual site than the rest of the conference, since they all<br />
finalized their scheduled very late and we weren't able to get their infrastructure (web pages, schedules, zoom links) created<br />
sufficiently.<br />
<li>It would have been great to have been able to make the website visible a few days earlier,<br />
to let people start watching papers.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
=== Overview of suggestions for future conferences ===<br />
<br />
==== Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs ====<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Either pay for a completely professional conference organizer that does all infrastructure themselves, or if we're going to continue to use the miniconf website that we used this year, then:<br />
<ol><br />
<li> Have double the number of virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably <br />
you need 18, including specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, and more.<br />
<li>Assign completely separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who can be closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. <br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
</ol><br />
<li> Either way the workshops will need stricter deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier<br />
than with a physical conference, and did I mention strictly enforced? <br />
<li>Create a Virtual Social chair to find ways to <br />
get people to meet each other more (see https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Publicity_Chairs).<br />
Esther Seyffarth volunteers to do it for EMNLP or COLING.<br />
<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair.<br />
<li>Pub chair info needs to be gotten to them much earlier; pub chairs need<br />
to talk to previous pub chairs <b>immediately</b> and work on new FAQs.<br />
<li>Diversity and Inclusion chairs created many subchairs to run various D&I committees. This worked well, and should be done again.<br />
<li>All the non-virtual-infrastructure chairs were also overworked. Probably we need<br />
more chairs, 3 instead of 2 chairs for various things, 4 PCs instead of 3,<br />
or even possibly 2 general chairs with specific duties.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
====Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners ====<br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>While using a video-presentation company like SlidesLive had many advantages, in the end our advice<br />
is that ACL should try to find alternatives to SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression that they would do human captioning of live sessions, but then changed to ASR captioning<br />
<li>They clearly struggled with processing 1500+ video presentations in just around 2 weeks; they also changed their commitment to what they were planning to deliver in terms of captioning multiple times during the pre-conference period<br />
<li>Their setup for allowing authors to correct captions was not easy to use.<br />
<li>Their recording setup didn't allow any author editing, which made it frustrating to have<br />
to record in single takes<br />
<li>We only realized later that they were willing to paste together multiple segments, so<br />
tutorials could have been recorded in multiple chunks.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, wasn't technical and didn't seem to be a good listener, so complaints often<br />
were not addressed.<br />
<li>One problem occurred on the day before the workshops when they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room). It was their lack<br />
of clear explanations and dry runs that caused the much-commented-upon 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, and was especially a problem in the workshops.<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, it's possible that they will begin to improve as they grow as a company,<br />
and frankly we don't know if there are strong alternatives:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>One option is to find a professional virtual conference organizer that runs everything (including running the website), as well as the videos. We were unable to find such, so we don't know if this is possible.<br />
<li><br />
SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
We assume by now there are probably other options.<br />
<li>In general, a recording company like SlidesLive has advantages over asking <br />
participants to just record themselves: consistency, affordability to participants (no need for folks to buy video recording software), <br />
professionals dealing with problems in livestream. slideslive also checked each of the 1500+ videos by hand for sound and composition problems, and ran them through ASR captioning..<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Live human captions (CART) for the livestream plenary events were done by ACS Captions who were great. We should reuse them.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Switching to Virtual: Other Advice on Infrastructure ====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Better ways to create a list of "papers to see" and download entire schedules (instead of downloading one paper-slot at a time)<br />
<li>QA sessions could possibly be improved by incorporating more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks.<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> Fix miniconf so that the whole website (including workshops, plenary pages, etc) can shift timezone, not just the schedule page.<br />
<li>Perhaps building an FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions using a standard toolkit (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot); suggestion from Nitin Madnani.<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Getting more Author Permissions:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>This year (as last year) we got CC-BY4.0 permissions from authors to upload their videos of talks to the ACL Anthology. In addition, we asked authors to correct the ASR transcripts of their talks, and we are also uploading the transcripts to the Anthology.<br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Global Inclusion:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to (a) solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or (b) continue to require that people in those countries use VPNs.<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Vimeo (used by ACL Anthology and also SlidesLive pre-recorded talks) is <b>not</b> visible in China, Indonesia, Vietnam<br />
<li>SlidesLive livestream (but not pre-recorded, which uses Vimeo) <b>is</b> visible in China<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case, can't use Google or Microsoft either<br />
<li> Proposal: we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we should set up mirrors for videos.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Ethics:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form, and<br />
add ethics and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair (and then need to decide which things are PCC and which are ethics)<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<p><b>Historical note in case useful: switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I briefly fill Exec in that virtual is an option, but still low-probability<br />
<li>Mar 6: Things worsen. We change Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things worsened more, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual, we wait to hear about hotel $$$<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to going virtual. We delay a few more days for ACL Exec to confirm all this.<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul></div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=739522020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-27T18:36:11Z<p>Jurafsky: /* Summary of what happened */</p>
<hr />
<div>== ACL 2020 post-conference report: General Chair ==<br />
==== Dan Jurafsky ====<br />
<br />
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
==== Summary of what happened ====<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>We ran a virtual ACL with only a few months notice, and it wasn't a disaster!<br />
<li> ACL was the largest ever, with record number of submissions (3,429), accepted papers (778), and attendees (4,972).<br />
<li>It was also the most diverse ACL ever!<br />
<li> For our virtual infrastructure we chose to mostly follow the ICLR model,<br />
with some modifications:<br />
<ul><br />
<li> pre-recorded talks, recorded using the SlidesLive web-based tools, with ASR-based captions hand-corrected by authors.<br />
<li> a website dashboard based on the miniconf package, with a schedule page that can be adjusted to each timezone, a<br />
separate webpage for each paper that gives its pre-recorded video, paper, zoom channel, and Rocketchat link.<br />
<li> Livestreamed plenary sessions, also run by SlidesLive, with a mix of recorded talks and live presentations<br />
<li> Rocketchat sessions associated with each talk<br />
<li> Two 1-hour Zoom Q&A sessions for each of the talks.<br />
<li> Tutorials that were a mix of live sessions and pre-recorded talks<br />
<li> Workshops that also used a mix of live sessions and pre-recorded talks<br />
</ul><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<b>Other Positive Results:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>The new tracks (Ethics, Interpretation, Taking Stock, etc) were <br />
very popular; they were the most watched talks (https://twitter.com/yoavgo/status/1282459579339681792)<br />
<li>People had lots of great discussion on chat; ACL conferences should ramp up use of chat media.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start<br />
<li>The team was awesome!! Every set of chairs was amazing and rose to the occasion to deal with the shift to virtual.<br />
<li>This year we added publicity team in China, important for reaching out to a large audience there.<br />
<li>This year (as last year) we got CC-BY4.0 permissions from authors to upload their videos of talks to the ACL Anthology. New this year, we also uploaded transcripts of the talks, making the videos more accessible, first asking authors to correct the ASR transcripts of their talks. We need a way to encourage more authors to correct their transcripts.<br />
</ul><br />
<b>Negative:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>The infrastructure team had to work way too hard, especially the last two weeks + the conference, it was a completely unreasonable load on them. Beware! Advice on infrastructure below.<br />
<li>People in China had to use VPNs to watch the pre-recorded talks.<br />
<li>All the software (but especially SlidesLive, but also Zoom) had all sorts of problems.<br />
We probably don't want to reuse SlidesLive, but Zoom we may have no choice.<br />
<li>Ethics and PCC stuff caused headaches that could have been avoided<br />
with ethics statements as part of submissions and best paper awards.<br />
<li>Communication with authors was very very difficult; there was no<br />
one emailing list that got every author at main, demo, SRW, tutorials, workshops. This<br />
caused innumerable problems.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start but needs tweeking<br />
<li>Having the demos and SRW at the main conference, but not run by the PC,<br />
was problematic, in terms of scheduling (it would have been better to have demos<br />
and main papers scheduled by same person), communication (every message had to be sent<br />
through 3 separate groups of chairs), ethics (papers and awards weren't checked consistently).<br />
Probably we should rethink this structure; maybe make demo chairs a kind of area chair?<br />
And move SRW to the workshop days?<br />
<li>Workshops were much less well dealt with on our virtual site than the rest of the conference, since they all<br />
finalized their scheduled very late and we weren't able to get their infrastructure (web pages, schedules, zoom links) created<br />
sufficiently.<br />
<li>It would have been great to have been able to make the website visible a few days earlier,<br />
to let people start watching papers.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
=== Overview of suggestions future conferences ===<br />
<br />
==== Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs ====<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Either pay for a completely professional conference organizer that does all infrastructure themselves, or if we're going to continue to use the miniconf website that we used this year, then:<br />
<ol><br />
<li> Have double the number of virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably <br />
you need 18, including specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, and more.<br />
<li>Assign completely separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who can be closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. <br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
</ol><br />
<li> Either way the workshops will need stricter deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier<br />
than with a physical conference, and did I mention strictly enforced? <br />
<li>Create a Virtual Social chair to find ways to <br />
get people to meet each other more (see https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Publicity_Chairs).<br />
Esther Seyffarth volunteers to do it for EMNLP or COLING.<br />
<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair.<br />
<li>Pub chair info needs to be gotten to them much earlier; pub chairs need<br />
to talk to previous pub chairs <b>immediately</b> and work on new FAQs.<br />
<li>Diversity and Inclusion chairs created many subchairs to run various D&I committees. This worked well, and should be done again.<br />
<li>All the non-virtual-infrastructure chairs were also overworked. Probably we need<br />
more chairs, 3 instead of 2 chairs for various things, 4 PCs instead of 3,<br />
or even possibly 2 general chairs with specific duties.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
====Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners ====<br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>While using a video-presentation company like SlidesLive had many advantages, in the end our advice<br />
is that ACL should try to find alternatives to SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression that they would do human captioning of live sessions, but then changed to ASR captioning<br />
<li>They clearly struggled with processing 1500+ video presentations in just around 2 weeks; they also changed their commitment to what they were planning to deliver in terms of captioning multiple times during the pre-conference period<br />
<li>Their setup for allowing authors to correct captions was not easy to use.<br />
<li>Their recording setup didn't allow any author editing, which made it frustrating to have<br />
to record in single takes<br />
<li>We only realized later that they were willing to paste together multiple segments, so<br />
tutorials could have been recorded in multiple chunks.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, wasn't technical and didn't seem to be a good listener, so complaints often<br />
were not addressed.<br />
<li>One problem occurred on the day before the workshops when they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room). It was their lack<br />
of clear explanations and dry runs that caused the much-commented-upon 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, and was especially a problem in the workshops.<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, it's possible that they will begin to improve as they grow as a company,<br />
and frankly we don't know if there are strong alternatives:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>One option is to find a professional virtual conference organizer that runs everything (including running the website), as well as the videos. We were unable to find such, so we don't know if this is possible.<br />
<li><br />
SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
We assume by now there are probably other options.<br />
<li>In general, a recording company like SlidesLive has advantages over asking <br />
participants to just record themselves: consistency, affordability to participants (no need for folks to buy video recording software), <br />
professionals dealing with problems in livestream. slideslive also checked each of the 1500+ videos by hand for sound and composition problems, and ran them through ASR captioning..<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Live human captions (CART) for the livestream plenary events were done by ACS Captions who were great. We should reuse them.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Switching to Virtual: Other Advice on Infrastructure ====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Better ways to create a list of "papers to see" and download entire schedules (instead of downloading one paper-slot at a time)<br />
<li>QA sessions could possibly be improved by incorporating more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks.<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> Fix miniconf so that the whole website (including workshops, plenary pages, etc) can shift timezone, not just the schedule page.<br />
<li>Perhaps building an FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions using a standard toolkit (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot); suggestion from Nitin Madnani.<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Getting more Author Permissions:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>This year (as last year) we got CC-BY4.0 permissions from authors to upload their videos of talks to the ACL Anthology. In addition, we asked authors to correct the ASR transcripts of their talks, and we are also uploading the transcripts to the Anthology.<br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Global Inclusion:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to (a) solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or (b) continue to require that people in those countries use VPNs.<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Vimeo (used by ACL Anthology and also SlidesLive pre-recorded talks) is <b>not</b> visible in China, Indonesia, Vietnam<br />
<li>SlidesLive livestream (but not pre-recorded, which uses Vimeo) <b>is</b> visible in China<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case, can't use Google or Microsoft either<br />
<li> Proposal: we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we should set up mirrors for videos.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Ethics:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form, and<br />
add ethics and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair (and then need to decide which things are PCC and which are ethics)<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<p><b>Historical note in case useful: switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I briefly fill Exec in that virtual is an option, but still low-probability<br />
<li>Mar 6: Things worsen. We change Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things worsened more, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual, we wait to hear about hotel $$$<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to going virtual. We delay a few more days for ACL Exec to confirm all this.<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul></div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports&diff=739452020Q3 Reports2020-07-24T23:49:21Z<p>Jurafsky: </p>
<hr />
<div>'''Reports from ACL Exec-plus'''<br />
<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Office Manager]] (Priscilla Rasmussen)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Secretary]] (Shiqi Zhao)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Treasurer]] (David Yarowsky)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: NAACL]] (Colin Cherry)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: EACL]] (Sharon Goldwater)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: AACL]] (Haifeng Wang)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Member at-large]] (Anna Korhonen)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Member at-large / Conference Officer]] (Barbara Di Eugenio)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Member at-large / Information Officer]] (Nitin Madnani)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: PCC Co-Chairs]] (Graeme Hirst, Emily M. Bender)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Anthology Director]] (Matt Post)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Publicity Director]] (Barbara Plank)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Equity Director]] (Natalie Schluter) <br />
<br />
'''ACL 2020'''<br />
<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: General Chair]] (Dan Jurafsky)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Program Chairs]] (Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Workshop Chairs]] (Milica Gašić, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Saif M. Mohammad, Ves Stoyanov)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Tutorial Chairs]] (Agata Savary, Yue Zhang)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Publication Chairs]] (Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Rui Yan)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Demonstration Chairs]] (Asli Celikyilmaz, Shawn Wen)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Virtual Infrastructure Chairs]] (Hao Fang, Sudha Rao, Yi Luan, Hamid Palangi, Lianhui Qin, Yizhe Zhang)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Student Research Workshop Chairs]] (Rotem Dror, Jiangming Liu, Shruti Rijhwani, Yizhong Wang)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Faculty Advisors to the SRW]] (Omri Abend, Sujian Li, Zhou Yu) <br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs]] (Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Publicity Chairs]] (Emily M. Bender, Zhiyuan Liu, Esther Seyffarth)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Local Sponsorship Chairs]] (Hoifung Poon, Kristina Toutanova)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Conference Handbook Chair]] (Nanyun Peng)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Captioning and Sustainability Co-Chairs]] (Ananya Ganesh, Klaus Zechner)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Student Volunteer Coordinator]] (Marjan Ghazvininejad)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Professional Conduct Committee notes on virtual conference]] (Emily M. Bender, Graeme Hirst)<br />
<br />
'''Journals, Publications, and the Web'''<br />
<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: CL Journal Editor]] (Hwee Tou Ng)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: TACL Journal Editor]] (Mark Johnson, Ani Nenkova, Brian Roark)<br />
<br />
'''Recent Conferences'''<br />
<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019]] (Kentaro Inui)<br />
<br />
'''Future Conferences'''<br />
<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: EMNLP 2020]] (Bonnie Webber)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: AACL-IJCNLP 2020]] (Kam-Fai Wong)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: EACL 2021]] (Paola Merlo)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: NAACL 2021]] (Kristina Toutanova)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: ACL 2021]] (Chengqing Zong)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: ACL 2022]] (Rada Mihalcea)<br />
<br />
'''SIG & BIG'''<br />
<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGANN]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGBioMed]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGDAT]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGDIAL]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGEDU]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGEL]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGFSM]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGGEN]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGHAN]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGHUM]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGLEX]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGMOL]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGMORPHON]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGMT]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGNLL]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGPARSE]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGRREP]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGSEM]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGSLAV]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGSLPAT]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGTYP]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGUR]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGWAC]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: EquiCL]]<br />
<br />
'''Exec Meeting'''<br />
* [[2020Q3 Agenda]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Minutes (public version)]]</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Workshop_Chairs&diff=739412020Q3 Reports: Workshop Chairs2020-07-24T01:05:24Z<p>Jurafsky: Created page with "The workshop chairs report is currently here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1m6xUW4lu6mtAH7lhX12Vk2LC-YrZ1fC1aor_JJs3I9E/edit"</p>
<hr />
<div>The workshop chairs report is currently here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1m6xUW4lu6mtAH7lhX12Vk2LC-YrZ1fC1aor_JJs3I9E/edit</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=739402020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-23T20:05:09Z<p>Jurafsky: /* Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners */</p>
<hr />
<div>== ACL 2020 post-conference report: General Chair ==<br />
==== Dan Jurafsky ====<br />
<br />
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
==== Summary of what happened ====<br />
<br />
<b>Positive:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>We ran a virtual ACL with only a few months notice, and it wasn't a disaster!<br />
<li>Largest ever in every way (including attendance)!<br />
<li>Also most diverse ACL ever!<br />
<li>The new tracks (Ethics, Interpretation, Taking Stock, etc) were <br />
very popular; they were the most watched talks (https://twitter.com/yoavgo/status/1282459579339681792)<br />
<li>People had lots of great discussion on chat; ACL conferences should ramp up use of chat media.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start<br />
<li>The team was awesome!! Every set of chairs was amazing and rose to the occasion to deal with the shift to virtual.<br />
<li>This year we added publicity team in China, important for reaching out to a large audience there.<br />
<li>This year (as last year) we got CC-BY4.0 permissions from authors to upload their videos of talks to the ACL Anthology. New this year, we also uploaded transcripts of the talks, making the videos more accessible, first asking authors to correct the ASR transcripts of their talks. We need a way to encourage more authors to correct their transcripts.<br />
</ul><br />
<b>Negative:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>The infrastructure team had to work way too hard, especially the last two weeks + the conference, it was a completely unreasonable load on them. Beware! Advice on infrastructure below.<br />
<li>People in China had to use VPNs to watch the pre-recorded talks.<br />
<li>All the software (but especially SlidesLive, but also Zoom) had all sorts of problems.<br />
We probably don't want to reuse SlidesLive, but Zoom we may have no choice.<br />
<li>Ethics and PCC stuff caused headaches that could have been avoided<br />
with ethics statements as part of submissions and best paper awards.<br />
<li>Communication with authors was very very difficult; there was no<br />
one emailing list that got every author at main, demo, SRW, tutorials, workshops. This<br />
caused innumerable problems.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start but needs tweeking<br />
<li>Having the demos and SRW at the main conference, but not run by the PC,<br />
was problematic, in terms of scheduling (it would have been better to have demos<br />
and main papers scheduled by same person), communication (every message had to be sent<br />
through 3 separate groups of chairs), ethics (papers and awards weren't checked consistently).<br />
Probably we should rethink this structure; maybe make demo chairs a kind of area chair?<br />
And move SRW to the workshop days?<br />
<li>Workshops were much less well dealt with on our virtual site than the rest of the conference, since they all<br />
finalized their scheduled very late and we weren't able to get their infrastructure (web pages, schedules, zoom links) created<br />
sufficiently.<br />
<li>It would have been great to have been able to make the website visible a few days earlier,<br />
to let people start watching papers.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
=== Overview of suggestions future conferences ===<br />
<br />
==== Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs ====<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Either pay for a completely professional conference organizer that does all infrastructure themselves, or if we're going to continue to use the miniconf website that we used this year, then:<br />
<ol><br />
<li> Have double the number of virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably <br />
you need 18, including specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, and more.<br />
<li>Assign completely separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who can be closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. <br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
</ol><br />
<li> Either way the workshops will need stricter deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier<br />
than with a physical conference, and did I mention strictly enforced? <br />
<li>Create a Virtual Social chair to find ways to <br />
get people to meet each other more (see https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Publicity_Chairs).<br />
Esther Seyffarth volunteers to do it for EMNLP or COLING.<br />
<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair.<br />
<li>Pub chair info needs to be gotten to them much earlier; pub chairs need<br />
to talk to previous pub chairs <b>immediately</b> and work on new FAQs.<br />
<li>Diversity and Inclusion chairs created many subchairs to run various D&I committees. This worked well, and should be done again.<br />
<li>All the non-virtual-infrastructure chairs were also overworked. Probably we need<br />
more chairs, 3 instead of 2 chairs for various things, 4 PCs instead of 3,<br />
or even possibly 2 general chairs with specific duties.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
====Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners ====<br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>While using a video-presentation company like SlidesLive had many advantages, in the end our advice<br />
is that ACL should try to find alternatives to SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression that they would do human captioning of live sessions, but then changed to ASR captioning<br />
<li>They clearly struggled with processing 1500+ video presentations in just around 2 weeks; they also changed their commitment to what they were planning to deliver in terms of captioning multiple times during the pre-conference period<br />
<li>Their setup for allowing authors to correct captions was not easy to use.<br />
<li>Their recording setup didn't allow any author editing, which made it frustrating to have<br />
to record in single takes<br />
<li>We only realized later that they were willing to paste together multiple segments, so<br />
tutorials could have been recorded in multiple chunks.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, wasn't technical and didn't seem to be a good listener, so complaints often<br />
were not addressed.<br />
<li>One problem occurred on the day before the workshops when they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room). It was their lack<br />
of clear explanations and dry runs that caused the much-commented-upon 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, and was especially a problem in the workshops.<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, it's possible that they will begin to improve as they grow as a company,<br />
and frankly we don't know if there are strong alternatives:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>One option is to find a professional virtual conference organizer that runs everything (including running the website), as well as the videos. We were unable to find such, so we don't know if this is possible.<br />
<li><br />
SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
We assume by now there are probably other options.<br />
<li>In general, a recording company like SlidesLive has advantages over asking <br />
participants to just record themselves: consistency, affordability to participants (no need for folks to buy video recording software), <br />
professionals dealing with problems in livestream. slideslive also checked each of the 1500+ videos by hand for sound and composition problems, and ran them through ASR captioning..<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Live human captions (CART) for the livestream plenary events were done by ACS Captions who were great. We should reuse them.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Switching to Virtual: Other Advice on Infrastructure ====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Better ways to create a list of "papers to see" and download entire schedules (instead of downloading one paper-slot at a time)<br />
<li>QA sessions could possibly be improved by incorporating more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks.<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> Fix miniconf so that the whole website (including workshops, plenary pages, etc) can shift timezone, not just the schedule page.<br />
<li>Perhaps building an FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions using a standard toolkit (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot); suggestion from Nitin Madnani.<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Getting more Author Permissions:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>This year (as last year) we got CC-BY4.0 permissions from authors to upload their videos of talks to the ACL Anthology. In addition, we asked authors to correct the ASR transcripts of their talks, and we are also uploading the transcripts to the Anthology.<br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Global Inclusion:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to (a) solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or (b) continue to require that people in those countries use VPNs.<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Vimeo (used by ACL Anthology and also SlidesLive pre-recorded talks) is <b>not</b> visible in China, Indonesia, Vietnam<br />
<li>SlidesLive livestream (but not pre-recorded, which uses Vimeo) <b>is</b> visible in China<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case, can't use Google or Microsoft either<br />
<li> Proposal: we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we should set up mirrors for videos.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Ethics:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form, and<br />
add ethics and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair (and then need to decide which things are PCC and which are ethics)<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<p><b>Historical note in case useful: switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I briefly fill Exec in that virtual is an option, but still low-probability<br />
<li>Mar 6: Things worsen. We change Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things worsened more, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual, we wait to hear about hotel $$$<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to going virtual. We delay a few more days for ACL Exec to confirm all this.<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul></div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=739392020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-23T20:03:19Z<p>Jurafsky: /* ACL 2020 post-conference report: General Chair */</p>
<hr />
<div>== ACL 2020 post-conference report: General Chair ==<br />
==== Dan Jurafsky ====<br />
<br />
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
==== Summary of what happened ====<br />
<br />
<b>Positive:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>We ran a virtual ACL with only a few months notice, and it wasn't a disaster!<br />
<li>Largest ever in every way (including attendance)!<br />
<li>Also most diverse ACL ever!<br />
<li>The new tracks (Ethics, Interpretation, Taking Stock, etc) were <br />
very popular; they were the most watched talks (https://twitter.com/yoavgo/status/1282459579339681792)<br />
<li>People had lots of great discussion on chat; ACL conferences should ramp up use of chat media.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start<br />
<li>The team was awesome!! Every set of chairs was amazing and rose to the occasion to deal with the shift to virtual.<br />
<li>This year we added publicity team in China, important for reaching out to a large audience there.<br />
<li>This year (as last year) we got CC-BY4.0 permissions from authors to upload their videos of talks to the ACL Anthology. New this year, we also uploaded transcripts of the talks, making the videos more accessible, first asking authors to correct the ASR transcripts of their talks. We need a way to encourage more authors to correct their transcripts.<br />
</ul><br />
<b>Negative:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>The infrastructure team had to work way too hard, especially the last two weeks + the conference, it was a completely unreasonable load on them. Beware! Advice on infrastructure below.<br />
<li>People in China had to use VPNs to watch the pre-recorded talks.<br />
<li>All the software (but especially SlidesLive, but also Zoom) had all sorts of problems.<br />
We probably don't want to reuse SlidesLive, but Zoom we may have no choice.<br />
<li>Ethics and PCC stuff caused headaches that could have been avoided<br />
with ethics statements as part of submissions and best paper awards.<br />
<li>Communication with authors was very very difficult; there was no<br />
one emailing list that got every author at main, demo, SRW, tutorials, workshops. This<br />
caused innumerable problems.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start but needs tweeking<br />
<li>Having the demos and SRW at the main conference, but not run by the PC,<br />
was problematic, in terms of scheduling (it would have been better to have demos<br />
and main papers scheduled by same person), communication (every message had to be sent<br />
through 3 separate groups of chairs), ethics (papers and awards weren't checked consistently).<br />
Probably we should rethink this structure; maybe make demo chairs a kind of area chair?<br />
And move SRW to the workshop days?<br />
<li>Workshops were much less well dealt with on our virtual site than the rest of the conference, since they all<br />
finalized their scheduled very late and we weren't able to get their infrastructure (web pages, schedules, zoom links) created<br />
sufficiently.<br />
<li>It would have been great to have been able to make the website visible a few days earlier,<br />
to let people start watching papers.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
=== Overview of suggestions future conferences ===<br />
<br />
==== Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs ====<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Either pay for a completely professional conference organizer that does all infrastructure themselves, or if we're going to continue to use the miniconf website that we used this year, then:<br />
<ol><br />
<li> Have double the number of virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably <br />
you need 18, including specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, and more.<br />
<li>Assign completely separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who can be closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. <br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
</ol><br />
<li> Either way the workshops will need stricter deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier<br />
than with a physical conference, and did I mention strictly enforced? <br />
<li>Create a Virtual Social chair to find ways to <br />
get people to meet each other more (see https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Publicity_Chairs).<br />
Esther Seyffarth volunteers to do it for EMNLP or COLING.<br />
<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair.<br />
<li>Pub chair info needs to be gotten to them much earlier; pub chairs need<br />
to talk to previous pub chairs <b>immediately</b> and work on new FAQs.<br />
<li>Diversity and Inclusion chairs created many subchairs to run various D&I committees. This worked well, and should be done again.<br />
<li>All the non-virtual-infrastructure chairs were also overworked. Probably we need<br />
more chairs, 3 instead of 2 chairs for various things, 4 PCs instead of 3,<br />
or even possibly 2 general chairs with specific duties.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
====Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners ====<br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>While SlidesLive had many advantages, in the end our advice<br />
is that ACL should strongly consider not using SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression that they would do human captioning of live sessions, but then changed to ASR captioning<br />
<li>They clearly struggled with processing 1500+ video presentations in just around 2 weeks; they also changed their commitment to what they were planning to deliver in terms of captioning multiple times during the pre-conference period<br />
<li>Their setup for allowing authors to correct captions was not easy to use.<br />
<li>Their recording setup didn't allow any author editing, which made it frustrating to have<br />
to record in single takes<br />
<li>We only realized later that they were willing to paste together multiple segments, so<br />
tutorials could have been recorded in multiple chunks.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, wasn't technical and didn't seem to be a good listener, so complaints often<br />
were not addressed.<br />
<li>One problem occurred on the day before the workshops when they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room). It was their lack<br />
of clear explanations and dry runs that caused the much-commented-upon 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, and was especially a problem in the workshops.<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, we don't know if there are strong alternatives:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>One option is to find a professional virtual conference organizer that runs everything (including running the website), as well as the videos. We were unable to find such, so we don't know if this is possible<br />
<li><br />
SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
We assume by now there are probably other options.<br />
<li>In general, a recording company like SlidesLive has advantages over asking <br />
participants to just record themselves: consistency, affordability to participants (no need for folks to buy video recording software), <br />
professionals dealing with problems in livestream. slideslive also checked each of the 1500+ videos by hand for sound and composition problems, and ran them through ASR captioning..<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Live human captions (CART) for the livestream plenary events were done by ACS Captions who were great. We should reuse them.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Switching to Virtual: Other Advice on Infrastructure ====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Better ways to create a list of "papers to see" and download entire schedules (instead of downloading one paper-slot at a time)<br />
<li>QA sessions could possibly be improved by incorporating more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks.<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> Fix miniconf so that the whole website (including workshops, plenary pages, etc) can shift timezone, not just the schedule page.<br />
<li>Perhaps building an FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions using a standard toolkit (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot); suggestion from Nitin Madnani.<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Getting more Author Permissions:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>This year (as last year) we got CC-BY4.0 permissions from authors to upload their videos of talks to the ACL Anthology. In addition, we asked authors to correct the ASR transcripts of their talks, and we are also uploading the transcripts to the Anthology.<br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Global Inclusion:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to (a) solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or (b) continue to require that people in those countries use VPNs.<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Vimeo (used by ACL Anthology and also SlidesLive pre-recorded talks) is <b>not</b> visible in China, Indonesia, Vietnam<br />
<li>SlidesLive livestream (but not pre-recorded, which uses Vimeo) <b>is</b> visible in China<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case, can't use Google or Microsoft either<br />
<li> Proposal: we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we should set up mirrors for videos.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Ethics:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form, and<br />
add ethics and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair (and then need to decide which things are PCC and which are ethics)<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<p><b>Historical note in case useful: switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I briefly fill Exec in that virtual is an option, but still low-probability<br />
<li>Mar 6: Things worsen. We change Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things worsened more, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual, we wait to hear about hotel $$$<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to going virtual. We delay a few more days for ACL Exec to confirm all this.<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul></div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=739112020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-23T02:33:02Z<p>Jurafsky: /* ACL 2020 post-conference report: General Chair */</p>
<hr />
<div>== ACL 2020 post-conference report: General Chair ==<br />
==== Dan Jurafsky ====<br />
<br />
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
==== Summary of what happened ====<br />
<br />
<b>Positive:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>We ran a virtual ACL with only a few months notice, and it wasn't a disaster!<br />
<li>Largest ever in every way (including attendance)!<br />
<li>Also most diverse ACL ever!<br />
<li>The new tracks (Ethics, Interpretation, Taking Stock, etc) were <br />
very popular; they were the most watched talks (https://twitter.com/yoavgo/status/1282459579339681792)<br />
<li>People had lots of great discussion on chat; ACL conferences should ramp up use of chat media.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start<br />
<li>The team was awesome!! Every set of chairs was amazing and rose to the occasion to deal with the shift to virtual.<br />
<li>This year we added publicity team in China, important for reaching out to a large audience there.<br />
</ul><br />
<b>Negative:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>The infrastructure team had to work way too hard, especially the last two weeks + the conference, it was a completely unreasonable load on them. Beware! Advice on infrastructure below.<br />
<li>People in China had to use VPNs to watch the pre-recorded talks.<br />
<li>All the software (but especially SlidesLive, but also Zoom) had all sorts of problems.<br />
We probably don't want to reuse SlidesLive, but Zoom we may have no choice.<br />
<li>Ethics and PCC stuff caused headaches that could have been avoided<br />
with ethics statements as part of submissions and best paper awards.<br />
<li>Communication with authors was very very difficult; there was no<br />
one emailing list that got every author at main, demo, SRW, tutorials, workshops. This<br />
caused innumerable problems.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start but needs tweeking<br />
<li>Having the demos and SRW at the main conference, but not run by the PC,<br />
was problematic, in terms of scheduling (it would have been better to have demos<br />
and main papers scheduled by same person), communication (every message had to be sent<br />
through 3 separate groups of chairs), ethics (papers and awards weren't checked consistently).<br />
Probably we should rethink this structure; maybe make demo chairs a kind of area chair?<br />
And move SRW to the workshop days?<br />
<li>Workshops were much less well dealt with on our virtual site than the rest of the conference, since they all<br />
finalized their scheduled very late and we weren't able to get their infrastructure (web pages, schedules, zoom links) created<br />
sufficiently.<br />
<li>It would have been great to have been able to make the website visible a few days earlier,<br />
to let people start watching papers.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
=== Overview of suggestions future conferences ===<br />
<br />
==== Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs ====<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Either pay for a completely professional conference organizer that does all infrastructure themselves, or if we're going to continue to use the miniconf website that we used this year, then:<br />
<ol><br />
<li> Have double the number of virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably <br />
you need 18, including specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, and more.<br />
<li>Assign completely separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who can be closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. <br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
</ol><br />
<li> Either way the workshops will need stricter deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier<br />
than with a physical conference, and did I mention strictly enforced? <br />
<li>Create a Virtual Social chair to find ways to <br />
get people to meet each other more (see https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Publicity_Chairs).<br />
Esther Seyffarth volunteers to do it for EMNLP or COLING.<br />
<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair.<br />
<li>Pub chair info needs to be gotten to them much earlier; pub chairs need<br />
to talk to previous pub chairs <b>immediately</b> and work on new FAQs.<br />
<li>Diversity and Inclusion chairs created many subchairs to run various D&I committees. This worked well, and should be done again.<br />
<li>All the non-virtual-infrastructure chairs were also overworked. Probably we need<br />
more chairs, 3 instead of 2 chairs for various things, 4 PCs instead of 3,<br />
or even possibly 2 general chairs with specific duties.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
====Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners ====<br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>We think the ACL should probably not use SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression that they would do human captioning of live sessions, but then changed to ASR captioning<br />
<li>They clearly struggled with processing 1500+ video presentations in just around 2 weeks; they also changed their commitment to what they were planning to deliver in terms of captioning multiple times during the pre-conference period<br />
<li>Their setup for allowing authors to correct captions was not easy to use.<br />
<li>Their recording setup didn't allow any author editing, which made it frustrating to have<br />
to record in single takes<br />
<li>We only realized later that they were willing to paste together multiple segments, so<br />
tutorials could have been recorded in multiple chunks.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, wasn't technical and didn't seem to be a good listener, so complaints often<br />
were not addressed.<br />
<li>One problem occurred on the day before the workshops when they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room). It was their lack<br />
of clear explanations and dry runs that caused the much-commented-upon 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, and was especially a problem in the workshops.<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, we don't know if there are strong alternatives:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>One option is to find a professional virtual conference organizer that runs everything (including running the website), as well as the videos. We were unable to find such, so I don't know if this is poissible<br />
<li><br />
SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
<li>We assume by now there are probably other options, but inclusion is extremely important to keep in mind<br />
(making it possible to record for folks in countries without ability to buy video recording software), as<br />
is having professionals deal with the livestream events, and slideslive also checked every video by hand for sound and composition problems<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Live human captions (CART) were done by ACS Captions who were great. we should use them.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Switching to Virtual: Other Advice on Infrastructure ====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Better ways to create a list of "papers to see" and download entire schedules (instead of downloading one paper-slot at a time)<br />
<li>QA sessions could possibly be improved by incorporating more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> Fix miniconf so that the whole website (including workshops, plenary pages, etc) can shift timezone, not just the schedule page.<br />
<li>Nitin's suggestion: "use one of the many bot frameworks (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot) to make a simple FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions"<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Getting more Author Permissions:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Global Inclusion:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to (a) solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or (b) continue to require that people in those countries use VPNs.<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Vimeo (used by ACL Anthology and also SlidesLive pre-recorded talks) is <b>not</b> visible in China, Indonesia, Vietnam<br />
<li>SlidesLive livestream (but not pre-recorded, which uses Vimeo) <b>is</b> visible in China<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case, can't use Google or Microsoft either<br />
<li> Proposal: we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we should set up mirrors for videos.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Ethics:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form, and<br />
add ethics and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair (and then need to decide which things are PCC and which are ethics)<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<p><b>Historical note: switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I briefly fill Exec in that virtual is an option, but still low-probability<br />
<li>Mar 6: Things worsen. We change Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things worsened more, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual, we wait to hear about hotel $$$<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to going virtual. We delay a few more days for ACL Exec to confirm all this.<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul></div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=739102020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-22T19:09:27Z<p>Jurafsky: /* Global Inclusion: */</p>
<hr />
<div>== ACL 2020 post-conference report: General Chair ==<br />
==== Dan Jurafsky ====<br />
<br />
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
==== Summary of what happened ====<br />
<br />
<b>Positive:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>We ran a virtual ACL with only a few months notice, and it wasn't a disaster!<br />
<li>Largest ever in every way (including attendance)!<br />
<li>Also most diverse ACL ever!<br />
<li>The new tracks (Ethics, Interpretation, Taking Stock, etc) were <br />
very popular; they were the most watched talks (https://twitter.com/yoavgo/status/1282459579339681792)<br />
<li>People had lots of great discussion on chat; ACL conferences should ramp up use of chat media.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start<br />
<li>The team was awesome!! Every set of chairs was amazing and rose to the occasion to deal with the shift to virtual.<br />
<li>This year we added publicity team in China, important for reaching out to a large audience there.<br />
</ul><br />
<b>Negative:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>The infrastructure team had to work way too hard, especially the last two weeks + the conference, it was a completely unreasonable load on them. Beware! Advice on infrastructure below.<br />
<li>People in China had to use VPNs to watch the pre-recorded talks.<br />
<li>All the software (but especially SlidesLive, but also Zoom) had all sorts of problems.<br />
We probably don't want to reuse SlidesLive, but Zoom we may have no choice.<br />
<li>Ethics and PCC stuff caused headaches that could have been avoided<br />
with ethics statements as part of submissions and best paper awards.<br />
<li>Communication with authors was very very difficult; there was no<br />
one emailing list that got every author at main, demo, SRW, tutorials, workshops. This<br />
caused innumerable problems.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start but needs tweeking<br />
<li>Having the demos and SRW at the main conference, but not run by the PC,<br />
was problematic, in terms of scheduling (it would have been better to have demos<br />
and main papers scheduled by same person), communication (every message had to be sent<br />
through 3 separate groups of chairs), ethics (papers and awards weren't checked consistently).<br />
Probably we should rethink this structure; maybe make demo chairs a kind of area chair?<br />
And move SRW to the workshop days?<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
=== Overview of suggestions future conferences ===<br />
<br />
==== Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs ====<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Either pay for a completely professional conference organizer that does all infrastructure themselves, or if we're going to continue to use the miniconf website that we used this year, then:<br />
<ol><br />
<li> Have double the number of virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably <br />
you need 18, including specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, and more.<br />
<li>Assign completely separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who can be closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. <br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
</ol><br />
<li> Either way the workshops will need stricter deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier<br />
than with a physical conference, and did I mention strictly enforced? <br />
<li>Create a Virtual Social chair to find ways to <br />
get people to meet each other more (see https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Publicity_Chairs).<br />
Esther Seyffarth volunteers to do it for EMNLP or COLING.<br />
<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair.<br />
<li>Pub chair info needs to be gotten to them much earlier; pub chairs need<br />
to talk to previous pub chairs <b>immediately</b> and work on new FAQs.<br />
<li>Diversity and Inclusion chairs created many subchairs to run various D&I committees. This worked well, and should be done again.<br />
<li>All the non-virtual-infrastructure chairs were also overworked. Probably we need<br />
more chairs, 3 instead of 2 chairs for various things, 4 PCs instead of 3,<br />
or even possibly 2 general chairs with specific duties.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
====Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners ====<br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>We think the ACL should probably not use SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression that they would do human captioning of live sessions, but then changed to ASR captioning<br />
<li>They clearly struggled with processing 1500+ video presentations in just around 2 weeks; they also changed their commitment to what they were planning to deliver in terms of captioning multiple times during the pre-conference period<br />
<li>Their setup for allowing authors to correct captions was not easy to use.<br />
<li>Their recording setup didn't allow any author editing, which made it frustrating to have<br />
to record in single takes<br />
<li>We only realized later that they were willing to paste together multiple segments, so<br />
tutorials could have been recorded in multiple chunks.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, wasn't technical and didn't seem to be a good listener, so complaints often<br />
were not addressed.<br />
<li>One problem occurred on the day before the workshops when they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room). It was their lack<br />
of clear explanations and dry runs that caused the much-commented-upon 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, and was especially a problem in the workshops.<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, we don't know if there are strong alternatives:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>One option is to find a professional virtual conference organizer that runs everything (including running the website), as well as the videos. We were unable to find such, so I don't know if this is poissible<br />
<li><br />
SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
<li>We assume by now there are probably other options, but inclusion is extremely important to keep in mind<br />
(making it possible to record for folks in countries without ability to buy video recording software), as<br />
is having professionals deal with the livestream events, and slideslive also checked every video by hand for sound and composition problems<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Live human captions (CART) were done by ACS Captions who were great. we should use them.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Switching to Virtual: Other Advice on Infrastructure ====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>QA sessions could possibly be improved by incorporating more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> minor: if you use miniconf, fix so that the whole website can shift timezone.<br />
<li>Nitin's suggestion: "use one of the many bot frameworks (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot) to make a simple FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions"<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Getting more Author Permissions:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Global Inclusion:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else continue to require VPNs.<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Vimeo (used by ACL Anthology and also SlidesLive pre-recorded talks) is <b>not</b> visible in China, Indonesia, Vietnam<br />
<li>SlidesLive livestream (but not pre-recorded, which uses Vimeo) <b>is</b> visible in China<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case, can't use Google or Microsoft either<br />
<li> Proposal: we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we should set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Ethics:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form, and<br />
add ethics, and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<p><b>Historical note: switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I briefly fill Exec in that virtual is an option, but still low-probability<br />
<li>Mar 6: Things worsen. We change Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things worsened more, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual, we wait to hear about hotel $$$<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to going virtual. We delay a few more days for ACL Exec to confirm all this.<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul></div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=739092020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-22T19:08:44Z<p>Jurafsky: /* Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners */</p>
<hr />
<div>== ACL 2020 post-conference report: General Chair ==<br />
==== Dan Jurafsky ====<br />
<br />
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
==== Summary of what happened ====<br />
<br />
<b>Positive:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>We ran a virtual ACL with only a few months notice, and it wasn't a disaster!<br />
<li>Largest ever in every way (including attendance)!<br />
<li>Also most diverse ACL ever!<br />
<li>The new tracks (Ethics, Interpretation, Taking Stock, etc) were <br />
very popular; they were the most watched talks (https://twitter.com/yoavgo/status/1282459579339681792)<br />
<li>People had lots of great discussion on chat; ACL conferences should ramp up use of chat media.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start<br />
<li>The team was awesome!! Every set of chairs was amazing and rose to the occasion to deal with the shift to virtual.<br />
<li>This year we added publicity team in China, important for reaching out to a large audience there.<br />
</ul><br />
<b>Negative:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>The infrastructure team had to work way too hard, especially the last two weeks + the conference, it was a completely unreasonable load on them. Beware! Advice on infrastructure below.<br />
<li>People in China had to use VPNs to watch the pre-recorded talks.<br />
<li>All the software (but especially SlidesLive, but also Zoom) had all sorts of problems.<br />
We probably don't want to reuse SlidesLive, but Zoom we may have no choice.<br />
<li>Ethics and PCC stuff caused headaches that could have been avoided<br />
with ethics statements as part of submissions and best paper awards.<br />
<li>Communication with authors was very very difficult; there was no<br />
one emailing list that got every author at main, demo, SRW, tutorials, workshops. This<br />
caused innumerable problems.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start but needs tweeking<br />
<li>Having the demos and SRW at the main conference, but not run by the PC,<br />
was problematic, in terms of scheduling (it would have been better to have demos<br />
and main papers scheduled by same person), communication (every message had to be sent<br />
through 3 separate groups of chairs), ethics (papers and awards weren't checked consistently).<br />
Probably we should rethink this structure; maybe make demo chairs a kind of area chair?<br />
And move SRW to the workshop days?<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
=== Overview of suggestions future conferences ===<br />
<br />
==== Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs ====<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Either pay for a completely professional conference organizer that does all infrastructure themselves, or if we're going to continue to use the miniconf website that we used this year, then:<br />
<ol><br />
<li> Have double the number of virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably <br />
you need 18, including specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, and more.<br />
<li>Assign completely separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who can be closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. <br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
</ol><br />
<li> Either way the workshops will need stricter deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier<br />
than with a physical conference, and did I mention strictly enforced? <br />
<li>Create a Virtual Social chair to find ways to <br />
get people to meet each other more (see https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Publicity_Chairs).<br />
Esther Seyffarth volunteers to do it for EMNLP or COLING.<br />
<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair.<br />
<li>Pub chair info needs to be gotten to them much earlier; pub chairs need<br />
to talk to previous pub chairs <b>immediately</b> and work on new FAQs.<br />
<li>Diversity and Inclusion chairs created many subchairs to run various D&I committees. This worked well, and should be done again.<br />
<li>All the non-virtual-infrastructure chairs were also overworked. Probably we need<br />
more chairs, 3 instead of 2 chairs for various things, 4 PCs instead of 3,<br />
or even possibly 2 general chairs with specific duties.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
====Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners ====<br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>We think the ACL should probably not use SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression that they would do human captioning of live sessions, but then changed to ASR captioning<br />
<li>They clearly struggled with processing 1500+ video presentations in just around 2 weeks; they also changed their commitment to what they were planning to deliver in terms of captioning multiple times during the pre-conference period<br />
<li>Their setup for allowing authors to correct captions was not easy to use.<br />
<li>Their recording setup didn't allow any author editing, which made it frustrating to have<br />
to record in single takes<br />
<li>We only realized later that they were willing to paste together multiple segments, so<br />
tutorials could have been recorded in multiple chunks.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, wasn't technical and didn't seem to be a good listener, so complaints often<br />
were not addressed.<br />
<li>One problem occurred on the day before the workshops when they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room). It was their lack<br />
of clear explanations and dry runs that caused the much-commented-upon 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, and was especially a problem in the workshops.<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, we don't know if there are strong alternatives:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>One option is to find a professional virtual conference organizer that runs everything (including running the website), as well as the videos. We were unable to find such, so I don't know if this is poissible<br />
<li><br />
SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
<li>We assume by now there are probably other options, but inclusion is extremely important to keep in mind<br />
(making it possible to record for folks in countries without ability to buy video recording software), as<br />
is having professionals deal with the livestream events, and slideslive also checked every video by hand for sound and composition problems<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Live human captions (CART) were done by ACS Captions who were great. we should use them.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Switching to Virtual: Other Advice on Infrastructure ====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>QA sessions could possibly be improved by incorporating more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> minor: if you use miniconf, fix so that the whole website can shift timezone.<br />
<li>Nitin's suggestion: "use one of the many bot frameworks (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot) to make a simple FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions"<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Getting more Author Permissions:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Global Inclusion:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else continue to require VPNs.<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Vimeo (used by ACL Anthology and also SlidesLive pre-recorded talks) not visible in China, Indonesia, Vietnam<br />
<li>SlidesLive livestream (but not pre-recorded, which uses Vimeo) <b>is</b> is visible in China<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case, can't use Google or Microsoft either<br />
<li> Proposal: we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we should set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Ethics:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form, and<br />
add ethics, and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<p><b>Historical note: switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I briefly fill Exec in that virtual is an option, but still low-probability<br />
<li>Mar 6: Things worsen. We change Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things worsened more, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual, we wait to hear about hotel $$$<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to going virtual. We delay a few more days for ACL Exec to confirm all this.<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul></div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=739082020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-22T19:07:34Z<p>Jurafsky: /* Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners */</p>
<hr />
<div>== ACL 2020 post-conference report: General Chair ==<br />
==== Dan Jurafsky ====<br />
<br />
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
==== Summary of what happened ====<br />
<br />
<b>Positive:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>We ran a virtual ACL with only a few months notice, and it wasn't a disaster!<br />
<li>Largest ever in every way (including attendance)!<br />
<li>Also most diverse ACL ever!<br />
<li>The new tracks (Ethics, Interpretation, Taking Stock, etc) were <br />
very popular; they were the most watched talks (https://twitter.com/yoavgo/status/1282459579339681792)<br />
<li>People had lots of great discussion on chat; ACL conferences should ramp up use of chat media.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start<br />
<li>The team was awesome!! Every set of chairs was amazing and rose to the occasion to deal with the shift to virtual.<br />
<li>This year we added publicity team in China, important for reaching out to a large audience there.<br />
</ul><br />
<b>Negative:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>The infrastructure team had to work way too hard, especially the last two weeks + the conference, it was a completely unreasonable load on them. Beware! Advice on infrastructure below.<br />
<li>People in China had to use VPNs to watch the pre-recorded talks.<br />
<li>All the software (but especially SlidesLive, but also Zoom) had all sorts of problems.<br />
We probably don't want to reuse SlidesLive, but Zoom we may have no choice.<br />
<li>Ethics and PCC stuff caused headaches that could have been avoided<br />
with ethics statements as part of submissions and best paper awards.<br />
<li>Communication with authors was very very difficult; there was no<br />
one emailing list that got every author at main, demo, SRW, tutorials, workshops. This<br />
caused innumerable problems.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start but needs tweeking<br />
<li>Having the demos and SRW at the main conference, but not run by the PC,<br />
was problematic, in terms of scheduling (it would have been better to have demos<br />
and main papers scheduled by same person), communication (every message had to be sent<br />
through 3 separate groups of chairs), ethics (papers and awards weren't checked consistently).<br />
Probably we should rethink this structure; maybe make demo chairs a kind of area chair?<br />
And move SRW to the workshop days?<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
=== Overview of suggestions future conferences ===<br />
<br />
==== Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs ====<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Either pay for a completely professional conference organizer that does all infrastructure themselves, or if we're going to continue to use the miniconf website that we used this year, then:<br />
<ol><br />
<li> Have double the number of virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably <br />
you need 18, including specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, and more.<br />
<li>Assign completely separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who can be closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. <br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
</ol><br />
<li> Either way the workshops will need stricter deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier<br />
than with a physical conference, and did I mention strictly enforced? <br />
<li>Create a Virtual Social chair to find ways to <br />
get people to meet each other more (see https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Publicity_Chairs).<br />
Esther Seyffarth volunteers to do it for EMNLP or COLING.<br />
<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair.<br />
<li>Pub chair info needs to be gotten to them much earlier; pub chairs need<br />
to talk to previous pub chairs <b>immediately</b> and work on new FAQs.<br />
<li>Diversity and Inclusion chairs created many subchairs to run various D&I committees. This worked well, and should be done again.<br />
<li>All the non-virtual-infrastructure chairs were also overworked. Probably we need<br />
more chairs, 3 instead of 2 chairs for various things, 4 PCs instead of 3,<br />
or even possibly 2 general chairs with specific duties.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
====Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners ====<br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>We think the ACL should probably not use SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression that they would do human captioning of live sessions, but then changed to ASR captioning<br />
<li>They clearly struggled with processing 1500+ video presentations in just around 2 weeks; they also changed their commitment to what they were planning to deliver in terms of captioning multiple times during the pre-conference period<br />
<li>Their setup for allowing authors to correct captions was not easy to use.<br />
<li>Their recording setup didn't allow any author editing, which made it frustrating to have<br />
to record in single takes<br />
<li>We only realized later that they were willing to paste together multiple segments, so<br />
tutorials could have been recorded in multiple chunks.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, wasn't technical and didn't seem to be a good listener, so complaints often<br />
were not addressed.<br />
<li>One problem occurred on the day before the workshops when they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room). It was their lack<br />
of clear explanations and dry runs that caused the much-commented-upon 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, and was especially a problem in the workshops.<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, we don't know if there are strong alternatives:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>One option is to find a professional virtual conference organizer that runs everything (including running the website), as well as the videos. We were unable to find such, so I don't know if this is poissible<br />
<li><br />
SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
<li>We assume by now there are probably other options, but inclusion is extremely important to keep in mind<br />
(making it possible to record for folks in countries without ability to buy video recording software), as<br />
is having professionals deal with the livestream events.<br />
<li>Slideslive also checked every video for sound or other problems<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Live human captions (CART) were done by ACS Captions who were great. we should use them.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Switching to Virtual: Other Advice on Infrastructure ====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>QA sessions could possibly be improved by incorporating more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> minor: if you use miniconf, fix so that the whole website can shift timezone.<br />
<li>Nitin's suggestion: "use one of the many bot frameworks (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot) to make a simple FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions"<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Getting more Author Permissions:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Global Inclusion:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else continue to require VPNs.<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Vimeo (used by ACL Anthology and also SlidesLive pre-recorded talks) not visible in China, Indonesia, Vietnam<br />
<li>SlidesLive livestream (but not pre-recorded, which uses Vimeo) <b>is</b> is visible in China<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case, can't use Google or Microsoft either<br />
<li> Proposal: we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we should set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Ethics:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form, and<br />
add ethics, and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<p><b>Historical note: switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I briefly fill Exec in that virtual is an option, but still low-probability<br />
<li>Mar 6: Things worsen. We change Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things worsened more, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual, we wait to hear about hotel $$$<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to going virtual. We delay a few more days for ACL Exec to confirm all this.<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul></div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=739072020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-22T19:06:58Z<p>Jurafsky: </p>
<hr />
<div>== ACL 2020 post-conference report: General Chair ==<br />
==== Dan Jurafsky ====<br />
<br />
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
==== Summary of what happened ====<br />
<br />
<b>Positive:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>We ran a virtual ACL with only a few months notice, and it wasn't a disaster!<br />
<li>Largest ever in every way (including attendance)!<br />
<li>Also most diverse ACL ever!<br />
<li>The new tracks (Ethics, Interpretation, Taking Stock, etc) were <br />
very popular; they were the most watched talks (https://twitter.com/yoavgo/status/1282459579339681792)<br />
<li>People had lots of great discussion on chat; ACL conferences should ramp up use of chat media.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start<br />
<li>The team was awesome!! Every set of chairs was amazing and rose to the occasion to deal with the shift to virtual.<br />
<li>This year we added publicity team in China, important for reaching out to a large audience there.<br />
</ul><br />
<b>Negative:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>The infrastructure team had to work way too hard, especially the last two weeks + the conference, it was a completely unreasonable load on them. Beware! Advice on infrastructure below.<br />
<li>People in China had to use VPNs to watch the pre-recorded talks.<br />
<li>All the software (but especially SlidesLive, but also Zoom) had all sorts of problems.<br />
We probably don't want to reuse SlidesLive, but Zoom we may have no choice.<br />
<li>Ethics and PCC stuff caused headaches that could have been avoided<br />
with ethics statements as part of submissions and best paper awards.<br />
<li>Communication with authors was very very difficult; there was no<br />
one emailing list that got every author at main, demo, SRW, tutorials, workshops. This<br />
caused innumerable problems.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start but needs tweeking<br />
<li>Having the demos and SRW at the main conference, but not run by the PC,<br />
was problematic, in terms of scheduling (it would have been better to have demos<br />
and main papers scheduled by same person), communication (every message had to be sent<br />
through 3 separate groups of chairs), ethics (papers and awards weren't checked consistently).<br />
Probably we should rethink this structure; maybe make demo chairs a kind of area chair?<br />
And move SRW to the workshop days?<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
=== Overview of suggestions future conferences ===<br />
<br />
==== Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs ====<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Either pay for a completely professional conference organizer that does all infrastructure themselves, or if we're going to continue to use the miniconf website that we used this year, then:<br />
<ol><br />
<li> Have double the number of virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably <br />
you need 18, including specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, and more.<br />
<li>Assign completely separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who can be closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. <br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
</ol><br />
<li> Either way the workshops will need stricter deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier<br />
than with a physical conference, and did I mention strictly enforced? <br />
<li>Create a Virtual Social chair to find ways to <br />
get people to meet each other more (see https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Publicity_Chairs).<br />
Esther Seyffarth volunteers to do it for EMNLP or COLING.<br />
<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair.<br />
<li>Pub chair info needs to be gotten to them much earlier; pub chairs need<br />
to talk to previous pub chairs <b>immediately</b> and work on new FAQs.<br />
<li>Diversity and Inclusion chairs created many subchairs to run various D&I committees. This worked well, and should be done again.<br />
<li>All the non-virtual-infrastructure chairs were also overworked. Probably we need<br />
more chairs, 3 instead of 2 chairs for various things, 4 PCs instead of 3,<br />
or even possibly 2 general chairs with specific duties.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
====Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners ====<br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>We think the ACL should probably not use SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression that they would do human captioning of live sessions, but then changed to ASR captioning<br />
<li>They clearly struggled with processing 1500+ video presentations in just around 2 weeks; they also changed their commitment to what they were planning to deliver in terms of captioning multiple times during the pre-conference period\\\<br />
<li>Their setup for allowing authors to correct captions was not easy to use.<br />
<li>Their recording setup didn't allow any author editing, which made it frustrating to have<br />
to record in single takes<br />
<li>We only realized later that they were willing to paste together multiple segments, so<br />
tutorials could have been recorded in multiple chunks.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, wasn't technical and didn't seem to be a good listener, so complaints often<br />
were not addressed.<br />
<li>One problem occurred on the day before the workshops when they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room). It was their lack<br />
of clear explanations and dry runs that caused the much-commented-upon 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, and was especially a problem in the workshops.<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, we don't know if there are strong alternatives:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>One option is to find a professional virtual conference organizer that runs everything (including running the website), as well as the videos. We were unable to find such, so I don't know if this is poissible<br />
<li><br />
SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
<li>We assume by now there are probably other options, but inclusion is extremely important to keep in mind<br />
(making it possible to record for folks in countries without ability to buy video recording software), as<br />
is having professionals deal with the livestream events.<br />
<li>Slideslive also checked every video for sound or other problems<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Live human captions (CART) were done by ACS Captions who were great. we should use them.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Switching to Virtual: Other Advice on Infrastructure ====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>QA sessions could possibly be improved by incorporating more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> minor: if you use miniconf, fix so that the whole website can shift timezone.<br />
<li>Nitin's suggestion: "use one of the many bot frameworks (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot) to make a simple FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions"<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Getting more Author Permissions:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Global Inclusion:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else continue to require VPNs.<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Vimeo (used by ACL Anthology and also SlidesLive pre-recorded talks) not visible in China, Indonesia, Vietnam<br />
<li>SlidesLive livestream (but not pre-recorded, which uses Vimeo) <b>is</b> is visible in China<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case, can't use Google or Microsoft either<br />
<li> Proposal: we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we should set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Ethics:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form, and<br />
add ethics, and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<p><b>Historical note: switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I briefly fill Exec in that virtual is an option, but still low-probability<br />
<li>Mar 6: Things worsen. We change Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things worsened more, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual, we wait to hear about hotel $$$<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to going virtual. We delay a few more days for ACL Exec to confirm all this.<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul></div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=739062020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-22T19:06:04Z<p>Jurafsky: /* ACL 2020 post-conference report: General Chair */</p>
<hr />
<div>== ACL 2020 post-conference report: General Chair ==<br />
==== Dan Jurafsky ====<br />
<br />
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
==== Summary of what happened ====<br />
<br />
Positive:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>We ran a virtual ACL with only a few months notice, and it wasn't a disaster!<br />
<li>Largest ever in every way (including attendance)!<br />
<li>Also most diverse ACL ever!<br />
<li>The new tracks (Ethics, Interpretation, Taking Stock, etc) were <br />
very popular; they were the most watched talks (https://twitter.com/yoavgo/status/1282459579339681792)<br />
<li>People had lots of great discussion on chat; ACL conferences should ramp up use of chat media.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start<br />
<li>The team was awesome!! Every set of chairs was amazing and rose to the occasion to deal with the shift to virtual.<br />
<li>This year we added publicity team in China, important for reaching out to a large audience there.<br />
</ul><br />
Negative:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>The infrastructure team had to work way too hard, especially the last two weeks + the conference, it was a completely unreasonable load on them. Beware! Advice on infrastructure below.<br />
<li>People in China had to use VPNs to watch the pre-recorded talks.<br />
<li>All the software (but especially SlidesLive, but also Zoom) had all sorts of problems.<br />
We probably don't want to reuse SlidesLive, but Zoom we may have no choice.<br />
<li>Ethics and PCC stuff caused headaches that could have been avoided<br />
with ethics statements as part of submissions and best paper awards.<br />
<li>Communication with authors was very very difficult; there was no<br />
one emailing list that got every author at main, demo, SRW, tutorials, workshops. This<br />
caused innumerable problems.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start but needs tweeking<br />
<li>Having the demos and SRW at the main conference, but not run by the PC,<br />
was problematic, in terms of scheduling (it would have been better to have demos<br />
and main papers scheduled by same person), communication (every message had to be sent<br />
through 3 separate groups of chairs), ethics (papers and awards weren't checked consistently).<br />
Probably we should rethink this structure; maybe make demo chairs a kind of area chair?<br />
And move SRW to the workshop days?<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
=== Overview of suggestions future conferences ===<br />
<br />
==== Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs ====<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Either pay for a completely professional conference organizer that does all infrastructure themselves, or if we're going to continue to use the miniconf website that we used this year, then:<br />
<ol><br />
<li> Have double the number of virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably <br />
you need 18, including specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, and more.<br />
<li>Assign completely separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who can be closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. <br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
</ol><br />
<li> Either way the workshops will need stricter deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier<br />
than with a physical conference, and did I mention strictly enforced? <br />
<li>Create a Virtual Social chair to find ways to <br />
get people to meet each other more (see https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Publicity_Chairs).<br />
Esther Seyffarth volunteers to do it for EMNLP or COLING.<br />
<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair.<br />
<li>Pub chair info needs to be gotten to them much earlier; pub chairs need<br />
to talk to previous pub chairs <b>immediately</b> and work on new FAQs.<br />
<li>Diversity and Inclusion chairs created many subchairs to run various D&I committees. This worked well, and should be done again.<br />
<p>All the non-virtual-infrastructure chairs were also overworked. Probably we need<br />
more chairs, 3 instead of 2 chairs for various things, 4 PCs instead of 3,<br />
or even possibly 2 general chairs with specific duties.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
====Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners ====<br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>We think the ACL should probably not use SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression that they would do human captioning of live sessions, but then changed to ASR captioning<br />
<li>They clearly struggled with processing 1500+ video presentations in just around 2 weeks; they also changed their commitment to what they were planning to deliver in terms of captioning multiple times during the pre-conference period\\\<br />
<li>Their setup for allowing authors to correct captions was not easy to use.<br />
<li>Their recording setup didn't allow any author editing, which made it frustrating to have<br />
to record in single takes<br />
<li>We only realized later that they were willing to paste together multiple segments, so<br />
tutorials could have been recorded in multiple chunks.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, wasn't technical and didn't seem to be a good listener, so complaints often<br />
were not addressed.<br />
<li>One problem occurred on the day before the workshops when they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room). It was their lack<br />
of clear explanations and dry runs that caused the much-commented-upon 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, and was especially a problem in the workshops.<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, we don't know if there are strong alternatives:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>One option is to find a professional virtual conference organizer that runs everything (including running the website), as well as the videos. We were unable to find such, so I don't know if this is poissible<br />
<li><br />
SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
<li>We assume by now there are probably other options, but inclusion is extremely important to keep in mind<br />
(making it possible to record for folks in countries without ability to buy video recording software), as<br />
is having professionals deal with the livestream events.<br />
<li>Slideslive also checked every video for sound or other problems<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Live human captions (CART) were done by ACS Captions who were great. we should use them.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Switching to Virtual: Other Advice on Infrastructure ====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>QA sessions could possibly be improved by incorporating more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> minor: if you use miniconf, fix so that the whole website can shift timezone.<br />
<li>Nitin's suggestion: "use one of the many bot frameworks (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot) to make a simple FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions"<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Getting more Author Permissions:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Global Inclusion:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else continue to require VPNs.<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Vimeo (used by ACL Anthology and also SlidesLive pre-recorded talks) not visible in China, Indonesia, Vietnam<br />
<li>SlidesLive livestream (but not pre-recorded, which uses Vimeo) <b>is</b> is visible in China<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case, can't use Google or Microsoft either<br />
<li> Proposal: we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we should set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Ethics:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form, and<br />
add ethics, and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<p><b>Historical note: switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I briefly fill Exec in that virtual is an option, but still low-probability<br />
<li>Mar 6: Things worsen. We change Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things worsened more, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual, we wait to hear about hotel $$$<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to going virtual. We delay a few more days for ACL Exec to confirm all this.<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul></div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=739052020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-22T19:03:54Z<p>Jurafsky: /* ACL 2020 post-conference report: General Chair */</p>
<hr />
<div>== ACL 2020 post-conference report: General Chair ==<br />
==== Dan Jurafsky ====<br />
<br />
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
==== Summary of what happened ====<br />
<br />
Positive:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>We ran a virtual ACL with only a few months notice, and it wasn't a disaster!<br />
<li>Largest ever in every way (including attendance)!<br />
<li>Also most diverse ACL ever!<br />
<li>The new tracks (Ethics, Interpretation, Taking Stock, etc) were <br />
very popular; they were the most watched talks (https://twitter.com/yoavgo/status/1282459579339681792)<br />
<li>People had lots of great discussion on chat; ACL conferences should ramp up use of chat media.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start<br />
<li>The team was awesome!! Every set of chairs was amazing and rose to the occasion to deal with the shift to virtual.<br />
<li>This year we added publicity team in China, important for reaching out to a large audience there.<br />
</ul><br />
Negative:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>The infrastructure team had to work way too hard, especially the last two weeks + the conference, it was a completely unreasonable load on them. Beware! Advice on infrastructure below.<br />
<li>People in China had to use VPNs to watch the pre-recorded talks.<br />
<li>All the software (but especially SlidesLive, but also Zoom) had all sorts of problems.<br />
We probably don't want to reuse SlidesLive, but Zoom we may have no choice.<br />
<li>Ethics and PCC stuff caused headaches that could have been avoided<br />
with ethics statements as part of submissions and best paper awards.<br />
<li>Communication with authors was very very difficult; there was no<br />
one emailing list that got every author at main, demo, SRW, tutorials, workshops. This<br />
caused innumerable problems.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start but needs tweeking<br />
<li>Having the demos and SRW at the main conference, but not run by the PC,<br />
was problematic, in terms of scheduling (it would have been better to have demos<br />
and main papers scheduled by same person), communication (every message had to be sent<br />
through 3 separate groups of chairs), ethics (papers and awards weren't checked consistently).<br />
Probably we should rethink this structure; maybe make demo chairs a kind of area chair?<br />
And move SRW to the workshop days?<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
=== Overview of suggestions future conferences ===<br />
<br />
==== Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs ====<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Either pay for a completely professional conference organizer that does all infrastructure themselves, or if we're going to continue to use the miniconf website that we used this year, then:<br />
<ol><br />
<li> Have double the number of virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably <br />
you need 18, including specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, and more.<br />
<li>Assign completely separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who can be closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. <br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
</ol><br />
<li> Either way the workshops will need stricter deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier<br />
than with a physical conference, and did I mention strictly enforced? <br />
<li>Create a Virtual Social chair to find ways to <br />
get people to meet each other more (see https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Publicity_Chairs).<br />
Esther Seyffarth volunteers to do it for EMNLP or COLING.<br />
<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair.<br />
<li>Pub chair info needs to be gotten to them much earlier; pub chairs need<br />
to talk to previous pub chairs <b>immediately</b> and work on new FAQs.<br />
<li>Diversity and Inclusion chairs created many subchairs to run various D&I committees. This worked well, and should be done again.<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
====Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners ====<br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>We think the ACL should probably not use SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression that they would do human captioning of live sessions, but then changed to ASR captioning<br />
<li>They clearly struggled with processing 1500+ video presentations in just around 2 weeks; they also changed their commitment to what they were planning to deliver in terms of captioning multiple times during the pre-conference period\\\<br />
<li>Their setup for allowing authors to correct captions was not easy to use.<br />
<li>Their recording setup didn't allow any author editing, which made it frustrating to have<br />
to record in single takes<br />
<li>We only realized later that they were willing to paste together multiple segments, so<br />
tutorials could have been recorded in multiple chunks.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, wasn't technical and didn't seem to be a good listener, so complaints often<br />
were not addressed.<br />
<li>One problem occurred on the day before the workshops when they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room). It was their lack<br />
of clear explanations and dry runs that caused the much-commented-upon 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, and was especially a problem in the workshops.<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, we don't know if there are strong alternatives:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>One option is to find a professional virtual conference organizer that runs everything (including running the website), as well as the videos. We were unable to find such, so I don't know if this is poissible<br />
<li><br />
SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
<li>We assume by now there are probably other options, but inclusion is extremely important to keep in mind<br />
(making it possible to record for folks in countries without ability to buy video recording software), as<br />
is having professionals deal with the livestream events.<br />
<li>Slideslive also checked every video for sound or other problems<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Live human captions (CART) were done by ACS Captions who were great. we should use them.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Switching to Virtual: Other Advice on Infrastructure ====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>QA sessions could possibly be improved by incorporating more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> minor: if you use miniconf, fix so that the whole website can shift timezone.<br />
<li>Nitin's suggestion: "use one of the many bot frameworks (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot) to make a simple FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions"<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Getting more Author Permissions:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Global Inclusion:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else continue to require VPNs.<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Vimeo (used by ACL Anthology and also SlidesLive pre-recorded talks) not visible in China, Indonesia, Vietnam<br />
<li>SlidesLive livestream (but not pre-recorded, which uses Vimeo) <b>is</b> is visible in China<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case, can't use Google or Microsoft either<br />
<li> Proposal: we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we should set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Ethics:====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form, and<br />
add ethics, and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<p><b>Historical note: switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:</b><br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I briefly fill Exec in that virtual is an option, but still low-probability<br />
<li>Mar 6: Things worsen. We change Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things worsened more, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual, we wait to hear about hotel $$$<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to going virtual. We delay a few more days for ACL Exec to confirm all this.<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul></div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=739042020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-22T18:25:06Z<p>Jurafsky: /* ACL 2020 post-conference report: General Chair */</p>
<hr />
<div>== ACL 2020 post-conference report: General Chair ==<br />
==== Dan Jurafsky ====<br />
<br />
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
==== Summary of what happened ====<br />
<br />
Positive:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>We ran a virtual ACL with only a few months notice, and it wasn't a disaster!<br />
<li>Largest ever in every way (including attendance)!<br />
<li>Also most diverse ACL ever!<br />
<li>The new tracks (Ethics, Interpretation, Taking Stock, etc) were <br />
very popular; they were the most watched talks (https://twitter.com/yoavgo/status/1282459579339681792)<br />
<li>People had lots of great discussion on chat; ACL conferences should ramp up use of chat media.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start<br />
<li>The team was awesome!! Every set of chairs was amazing and rose to the occasion to deal with the shift to virtual.<br />
<li>This year we added publicity team in China, important for reaching out to a large audience there.<br />
</ul><br />
Negative:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>The infrastructure team had to work way too hard, especially the last two weeks + the conference, it was a completely unreasonable load on them. Beware! Advice on infrastructure below.<br />
<li>People in China had to use VPNs to watch the pre-recorded talks.<br />
<li>All the software (but especially SlidesLive, but also Zoom) had all sorts of problems.<br />
We probably don't want to reuse SlidesLive, but Zoom we may have no choice.<br />
<li>Ethics and PCC stuff caused headaches that could have been avoided<br />
with ethics statements as part of submissions and best paper awards.<br />
<li>Communication with authors was very very difficult; there was no<br />
one emailing list that got every author at main, demo, SRW, tutorials, workshops. This<br />
caused innumerable problems.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start but needs tweeking<br />
<li>Having the demos and SRW at the main conference, but not run by the PC,<br />
was problematic, in terms of scheduling (it would have been better to have demos<br />
and main papers scheduled by same person), communication (every message had to be sent<br />
through 3 separate groups of chairs), ethics (papers and awards weren't checked consistently).<br />
Probably we should rethink this structure; maybe make demo chairs a kind of area chair?<br />
And move SRW to the workshop days?<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
=== Overview of suggestions future conferences ===<br />
<br />
==== Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs ====<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Either pay for a completely professional conference organizer that does all infrastructure themselves, or if we're going to continue to use the miniconf website that we used this year, then:<br />
<ol><br />
<li> Have double the number of virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably <br />
you need 18, including specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, and more.<br />
<li>Assign completely separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who can be closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. <br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
</ol><br />
<li> Either way the workshops will need stricter deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier<br />
than with a physical conference, and did I mention strictly enforced? <br />
<li>Create a Virtual Social chair to find ways to <br />
get people to meet each other more (see https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Publicity_Chairs).<br />
Esther Seyffarth volunteers to do it for EMNLP or COLING.<br />
<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair.<br />
<li>Pub chair info needs to be gotten to them much earlier; pub chairs need<br />
to talk to previous pub chairs <b>immediately</b> and work on new FAQs.<br />
<li>Diversity and Inclusion chairs created many subchairs to run various D&I committees. This worked well, and should be done again.<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<p><br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners <br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>We think the ACL should probably not use SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression that they would do human captioning of live sessions, but then changed to ASR captioning<br />
<li>They clearly struggled with processing 1500+ video presentations in just around 2 weeks; they also changed their commitment to what they were planning to deliver in terms of captioning multiple times during the pre-conference period\\\<br />
<li>Their setup for allowing authors to correct captions was not easy to use.<br />
<li>Their recording setup didn't allow any author editing, which made it frustrating to have<br />
to record in single takes<br />
<li>We only realized later that they were willing to paste together multiple segments, so<br />
tutorials could have been recorded in multiple chunks.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, wasn't technical and didn't seem to be a good listener, so complaints often<br />
were not addressed.<br />
<li>One problem occurred on the day before the workshops when they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room). It was their lack<br />
of clear explanations and dry runs that caused the much-commented-upon 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, and was especially a problem in the workshops.<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, we don't know if there are strong alternatives:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>One option is to find a professional virtual conference organizer that runs everything (including running the website), as well as the videos. We were unable to find such, so I don't know if this is poissible<br />
<li><br />
SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
<li>We assume by now there are probably other options, but inclusion is extremely important to keep in mind<br />
(making it possible to record for folks in countries without ability to buy video recording software), as<br />
is having professionals deal with the livestream events.<br />
<li>Slideslive also checked every video for sound or other problems<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Live human captions (CART) were done by ACS Captions who were great. we should use them.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Other Advice on Infrastructure <br />
<ul><br />
<li>QA sessions could possibly be improved by incorporating more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> minor: if you use miniconf, fix so that the whole website can shift timezone.<br />
<li>Nitin's suggestion: "use one of the many bot frameworks (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot) to make a simple FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions"<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Permissions:<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Global Inclusion:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else continue to require VPNs.<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Vimeo (used by ACL Anthology and also SlidesLive pre-recorded talks) not visible in China, Indonesia, Vietnam<br />
<li>SlidesLive livestream (but not pre-recorded, which uses Vimeo) <b>is</b> is visible in China<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case, can't use Google or Microsoft either<br />
<li> Proposal: we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we should set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Ethics:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form, and<br />
add ethics, and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Historical note: switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I briefly fill Exec in that virtual is an option, but still low-probability<br />
<li>Mar 6: Things worsen. We change Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things worsened more, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual, we wait to hear about hotel $$$<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to going virtual. We delay a few more days for ACL Exec to confirm all this.<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul></div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=739032020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-22T18:18:02Z<p>Jurafsky: /* ACL 2020 post-conference report: General Chair */</p>
<hr />
<div>== ACL 2020 post-conference report: General Chair ==<br />
==== Dan Jurafsky ====<br />
<br />
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
==== Summary of what happened ====<br />
<br />
Positive:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>We ran a virtual ACL with only a few months notice, and it wasn't a disaster!<br />
<li>Largest ever in every way (including attendance)!<br />
<li>Also most diverse ACL ever!<br />
<li>The new tracks (Ethics, Interpretation, Taking Stock, etc) were <br />
very popular; they were the most watched talks (https://twitter.com/yoavgo/status/1282459579339681792)<br />
<li>People had lots of great discussion on chat; ACL conferences should ramp up use of chat media.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start<br />
<li>The team was awesome!! Every set of chairs was amazing and rose to the occasion to deal with the shift to virtual.<br />
<li>This year we added publicity team in China, important for reaching out to a large audience there.<br />
</ul><br />
Negative:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>The infrastructure team had to work way too hard, especially the last two weeks + the conference, it was a completely unreasonable load on them. Beware! Advice on infrastructure below.<br />
<li>People in China had to use VPNs to watch the pre-recorded talks.<br />
<li>All the software (but especially SlidesLive, but also Zoom) had all sorts of problems.<br />
We probably don't want to reuse SlidesLive, but Zoom we may have no choice.<br />
<li>Ethics and PCC stuff caused headaches that could have been avoided<br />
with ethics statements as part of submissions and best paper awards.<br />
<li>Communication with authors was very very difficult; there was no<br />
one emailing list that got every author at main, demo, SRW, tutorials, workshops. This<br />
caused innumerable problems.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start but needs tweeking<br />
<li>Having the demos and SRW at the main conference, but not run by the PC,<br />
was problematic, in terms of scheduling (it would have been better to have demos<br />
and main papers scheduled by same person), communication (every message had to be sent<br />
through 3 separate groups of chairs), ethics (papers and awards weren't checked consistently).<br />
Probably we should rethink this structure; maybe make demo chairs a kind of area chair?<br />
And move SRW to the workshop days?<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
=== Overview of suggestions future conferences ===<br />
<br />
==== Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs ====<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Either pay for a completely professional conference organizer that does all infrastructure themselves, or if we're going to continue to use the miniconf website that we used this year, then:<br />
<ol><br />
<li> Have double the number of virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably <br />
you need 18, including specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, and more.<br />
<li>Assign completely separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who can be closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. <br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
</ol><br />
<li> Either way the workshops will need stricter deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier<br />
than with a physical conference, and did I mention strictly enforced? <br />
<li>Create a Virtual Social chair to find ways to <br />
get people to meet each other more (see https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Publicity_Chairs).<br />
Esther Seyffarth volunteers to do it for EMNLP or COLING.<br />
<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair.<br />
<li>Pub chair info needs to be gotten to them much earlier; pub chairs need<br />
to talk to previous pub chairs <b>immediately</b> and work on new FAQs.<br />
<li>Diversity and Inclusion chairs created many subchairs to run various D&I committees. This worked well, and should be done again.<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<p><br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners <br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>We think the ACL should probably not use SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression that they would do human captioning of live sessions, but then changed to ASR captioning<br />
<li>They clearly struggled with processing 1500+ video presentations in just around 2 weeks; they also changed their commitment to what they were planning to deliver in terms of captioning multiple times during the pre-conference period\\\<br />
<li>Their setup for allowing authors to correct captions was not easy to use.<br />
<li>Their recording setup didn't allow any author editing, which made it frustrating to have<br />
to record in single takes<br />
<li>We only realized later that they were willing to paste together multiple segments, so<br />
tutorials could have been recorded in multiple chunks.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, wasn't technical and didn't seem to be a good listener, so complaints often<br />
were not addressed.<br />
<li>One problem occurred on the day before the workshops when they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room). It was their lack<br />
of clear explanations and dry runs that caused the much-commented-upon 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, and was especially a problem in the workshops.<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, we don't know if there are strong alternatives:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>One option is to find a professional virtual conference organizer that runs everything (including running the website), as well as the videos. We were unable to find such, so I don't know if this is poissible<br />
<li><br />
SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
<li>We assume by now there are probably other options, but inclusion is extremely important to keep in mind<br />
(making it possible to record for folks in countries without ability to buy video recording software), as<br />
is having professionals deal with the livestream events.<br />
<li>Slideslive also checked every video for sound or other problems<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Live human captions (CART) were done by ACS Captions who were great. we should use them.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Other Advice on Infrastructure <br />
<ul><br />
<li><br />
<li>QA sessions could possibly be improved by incorporating more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> minor: if you use miniconf, fix so that the whole website can shift timezone.<br />
<li>Nitin's suggestion: "use one of the many bot frameworks (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot) to make a simple FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions"<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Permissions:<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
<li><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Global Inclusion:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else continue to require VPNs.<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Vimeo (used by ACL Anthology and also SlidesLive pre-recorded talks) not visible in China, Indonesia, Vietnam<br />
<li>SlidesLive livestream (but not pre-recorded, which uses Vimeo) <b>is</b> is visible in China<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case, can't use Google or Microsoft either<br />
<li> Proposal: we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we should set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Ethics:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form, and<br />
add ethics, and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Historical note: switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I briefly fill Exec in that virtual is an option, but still low-probability<br />
<li>Mar 6: Things worsen. We change Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things worsened more, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual, we wait to hear about hotel $$$<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to going virtual. We delay a few more days for ACL Exec to confirm all this.<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul><</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=739022020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-22T18:15:29Z<p>Jurafsky: /* ACL 2020 post-conference report: General Chair */</p>
<hr />
<div>== ACL 2020 post-conference report: General Chair ==<br />
==== Dan Jurafsky ====<br />
<br />
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
==== Summary of what happened ====<br />
<br />
Positive:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>We ran a virtual ACL with only a few months notice, and it wasn't a disaster!<br />
<li>Largest ever in every way (including attendance)!<br />
<li>Also most diverse ACL ever!<br />
<li>The new tracks (Ethics, Interpretation, Taking Stock, etc) were <br />
very popular; they were the most watched talks (https://twitter.com/yoavgo/status/1282459579339681792)<br />
<li>People had lots of great discussion on chat; ACL conferences should ramp up use of chat media.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start<br />
<li>The team was awesome!! Every set of chairs was amazing and rose to the occasion to deal with the shift to virtual.<br />
<li>This year we added publicity team in China, important for reaching out to a large audience there.<br />
</ul><br />
Negative:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>The infrastructure team had to work way too hard, especially the last two weeks + the conference, it was a completely unreasonable load on them. Beware! Advice on infrastructure below.<br />
<li>People in China had to use VPNs to watch the pre-recorded talks.<br />
<li>All the software (but especially SlidesLive, but also Zoom) had all sorts of problems.<br />
We probably don't want to reuse SlidesLive, but Zoom we may have no choice.<br />
<li>Ethics and PCC stuff caused headaches that could have been avoided<br />
with ethics statements as part of submissions and best paper awards.<br />
<li>Communication with authors was very very difficult; there was no<br />
one emailing list that got every author at main, demo, SRW, tutorials, workshops. This<br />
caused innumerable problems.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start but needs tweeking<br />
<li>Having the demos and SRW at the main conference, but not run by the PC,<br />
was problematic, in terms of scheduling (it would have been better to have demos<br />
and main papers scheduled by same person), communication (every message had to be sent<br />
through 3 separate groups of chairs), ethics (papers and awards weren't checked consistently).<br />
Probably we should rethink this structure; maybe make demo chairs a kind of area chair?<br />
And move SRW to the workshop days?<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
=== Overview of suggestions future conferences ===<br />
<br />
==== Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs ====<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Either pay for a completely professional conference organizer that does all infrastructure themselves, or if we're going to continue to use the miniconf website that we used this year, then:<br />
<ol><br />
<li> Have double the number of virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably <br />
you need 18, including specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, and more.<br />
<li>Assign completely separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who can be closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. <br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
</ol><br />
<li> Either way the workshops will need stricter deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier<br />
than with a physical conference, and did I mention strictly enforced? <br />
<li>Create a Virtual Social chair to find ways to <br />
get people to meet each other more (see https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Publicity_Chairs).<br />
Esther Seyffarth volunteers to do it for EMNLP or COLING.<br />
<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair.<br />
<li>Pub chair info needs to be gotten to them much earlier; pub chairs need<br />
to talk to previous pub chairs <b>immediately</b> and work on new FAQs.<br />
<li>Diversity and Inclusion chairs created many subchairs to run various D&I committees. This worked well, and should be done again.<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<p><br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners <br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>We think the ACL should probably not use SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression that they would do human captioning of live sessions, but then changed to ASR captioning<br />
<li>They clearly struggled with processing 1500+ video presentations in just around 2 weeks; they also changed their commitment to what they were planning to deliver in terms of captioning multiple times during the pre-conference period\\\<br />
<li>Their setup for allowing authors to correct captions was not easy to use.<br />
<li>Their recording setup didn't allow any author editing, which made it frustrating to have<br />
to record in single takes<br />
<li>We only realized later that they were willing to paste together multiple segments, so<br />
tutorials could have been recorded in multiple chunks.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, wasn't technical and didn't seem to be a good listener, so complaints often<br />
were not addressed.<br />
<li>One problem occurred on the day before the workshops when they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room). It was their lack<br />
of clear explanations and dry runs that caused the much-commented-upon 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, and was especially a problem in the workshops.<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, we don't know if there are strong alternatives:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>One option is to find a professional virtual conference organizer that runs everything (including running the website), as well as the videos. We were unable to find such, so I don't know if this is poissible<br />
<li><br />
SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
<li>We assume by now there are probably other options, but inclusion is extremely important to keep in mind<br />
(making it possible to record for folks in countries without ability to buy video recording software), as<br />
is having professionals deal with the livestream events.<br />
<li>Slideslive also checked every video for sound or other problems<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Live human captions (CART) were done by ACS Captions who were great. we should use them.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Other Advice on Infrastructure <br />
<ul><br />
<li><br />
<li>QA sessions could possibly be improved by incorporating more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> minor: if you use miniconf, fix so that the whole website can shift timezone.<br />
<li>Nitin's suggestion: "use one of the many bot frameworks (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot) to make a simple FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions"<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Permissions:<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
<li><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Global Inclusion:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else require VPNs.<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Vimeo (used by ACL Anthology and also SlidesLive pre-recorded talks) not visible in China, Indonesia, Vietnam<br />
<li>SlidesLive live (but not pre-recorded, which uses Vimeo) <b>is</b> is visible in China<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case, can't use Google or Microsoft either<br />
<li> Proposal: we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we should set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Ethics:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form,<br />
add ethics, and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair<br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case.<br />
<li> Perhaps we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we'll need to set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I briefly fill Exec in that virtual is an option, but still low-probability<br />
<li>Mar 6: Things worsen. We change Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things worsened more, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual, we wait to hear about hotel $$$<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to ogoing virtual<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul><</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=739012020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-22T18:14:31Z<p>Jurafsky: /* ACL 2020 post-conference report: General Chair */</p>
<hr />
<div>== ACL 2020 post-conference report: General Chair ==<br />
==== Dan Jurafsky ====<br />
<br />
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
==== Summary of what happened ====<br />
<br />
Positive:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>We ran a virtual ACL with only a few months notice, and it wasn't a disaster!<br />
<li>Largest ever in every way (including attendance)!<br />
<li>Also most diverse ACL ever!<br />
<li>The new tracks (Ethics, Interpretation, Taking Stock, etc) were <br />
very popular; they were the most watched talks (https://twitter.com/yoavgo/status/1282459579339681792)<br />
<li>People had lots of great discussion on chat; ACL conferences should ramp up use of chat media.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good starts<br />
<li>The team was awesome!! Every set of chairs was amazing and rose to the occasion to deal with the shift to virtual.<br />
<li>This year we added publicity team in China, important for reaching out to a large audience there.<br />
</ul><br />
Negative:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>The infrastructure team had to work way too hard, especially the last two weeks + the conference, it was a completely unreasonable load on them. Beware! Advice on infrastructure below.<br />
<li>People in China had to use VPNs to watch the pre-recorded talks.<br />
<li>All the software (but especially SlidesLive, but also Zoom) had all sorts of problems.<br />
We probably don't want to reuse SlidesLive, but Zoom we may have no choice.<br />
<li>Ethics and PCC stuff caused headaches that could have been avoided<br />
with ethics statements as part of submissions and best paper awards.<br />
<li>Communication with authors was very very difficult; there was no<br />
one emailing list that got every author at main, demo, SRW, tutorials, workshops. This<br />
caused innumerable problems.<br />
<li>Mentoring of reviewers was a good start but needs tweeking<br />
<li>Having the demos and SRW at the main conference, but not run by the PC,<br />
was problematic, in terms of scheduling (it would have been better to have demos<br />
and main papers scheduled by same person), communication (every message had to be sent<br />
through 3 separate groups of chairs), ethics (papers and awards weren't checked consistently).<br />
Probably we should rethink this structure; make demo chairs a kind of area chair?<br />
And move SRW to the workshop days?<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
=== Overview of suggestions future conferences ===<br />
<br />
==== Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs ====<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Either pay for a completely professional conference organizer that does all infrastructure themselves, or if we're going to continue to use the miniconf website that we used this year, then:<br />
<ol><br />
<li> Have double the number of virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably <br />
you need 18, including specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, and more.<br />
<li>Assign completely separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who can be closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. <br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
</ol><br />
<li> Either way the workshops will need stricter deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier<br />
than with a physical conference, and did I mention strictly enforced? <br />
<li>Create a Virtual Social chair to find ways to <br />
get people to meet each other more (see https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Publicity_Chairs).<br />
Esther Seyffarth volunteers to do it for EMNLP or COLING.<br />
<br />
<li>Probably need an ethics chair.<br />
<li>Pub chair info needs to be gotten to them much earlier; pub chairs need<br />
to talk to previous pub chairs <b>immediately</b> and work on new FAQs.<br />
<li>Diversity and Inclusion chairs created many subchairs to run various D&I committees. This worked well, and should be done again.<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<p><br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners <br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>We think the ACL should probably not use SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression that they would do human captioning of live sessions, but then changed to ASR captioning<br />
<li>They clearly struggled with processing 1500+ video presentations in just around 2 weeks; they also changed their commitment to what they were planning to deliver in terms of captioning multiple times during the pre-conference period\\\<br />
<li>Their setup for allowing authors to correct captions was not easy to use.<br />
<li>Their recording setup didn't allow any author editing, which made it frustrating to have<br />
to record in single takes<br />
<li>We only realized later that they were willing to paste together multiple segments, so<br />
tutorials could have been recorded in multiple chunks.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, wasn't technical and didn't seem to be a good listener, so complaints often<br />
were not addressed.<br />
<li>One problem occurred on the day before the workshops when they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room). It was their lack<br />
of clear explanations and dry runs that caused the much-commented-upon 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, and was especially a problem in the workshops.<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, we don't know if there are strong alternatives:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>One option is to find a professional virtual conference organizer that runs everything (including running the website), as well as the videos. We were unable to find such, so I don't know if this is poissible<br />
<li><br />
SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
<li>We assume by now there are probably other options, but inclusion is extremely important to keep in mind<br />
(making it possible to record for folks in countries without ability to buy video recording software), as<br />
is having professionals deal with the livestream events.<br />
<li>Slideslive also checked every video for sound or other problems<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Live human captions (CART) were done by ACS Captions who were great. we should use them.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Other Advice on Infrastructure <br />
<ul><br />
<li><br />
<li>QA sessions could possibly be improved by incorporating more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> minor: if you use miniconf, fix so that the whole website can shift timezone.<br />
<li>Nitin's suggestion: "use one of the many bot frameworks (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot) to make a simple FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions"<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Permissions:<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
<li><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Global Inclusion:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else require VPNs.<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Vimeo (used by ACL Anthology and also SlidesLive pre-recorded talks) not visible in China, Indonesia, Vietnam<br />
<li>SlidesLive live (but not pre-recorded, which uses Vimeo) <b>is</b> is visible in China<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case, can't use Google or Microsoft either<br />
<li> Proposal: we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we should set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Ethics:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form,<br />
add ethics, and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair<br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case.<br />
<li> Perhaps we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we'll need to set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I briefly fill Exec in that virtual is an option, but still low-probability<br />
<li>Mar 6: Things worsen. We change Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things worsened more, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual, we wait to hear about hotel $$$<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to ogoing virtual<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul><</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=739002020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-22T17:35:43Z<p>Jurafsky: </p>
<hr />
<div>== ACL 2020 post-conference report: General Chair ==<br />
==== Dan Jurafsky ====<br />
<br />
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
==== Summary of what happened ====<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>We managed to run a virtual conference! And it wasn't a disaster!<br />
<li>Largest ever in # of papers (not surprising) but also in attendance!<br />
<li>Also most diverse ACL ever!<br />
<li>People had lots of great discussion on chat; ACL conferences should ramp up use of chat media.<br />
<li>The team was awesome!! Every set of chairs was amazing and rose to the occasion to deal with the shift to virtual.<br />
<li>Biggest problem: The infrastructure team had to work way too hard, especially the last two weeks + the conference, it was a completely unreasonable load on them. Beware! Advice on infrastructure below.<br />
<li><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
=== Overview of suggestions future conferences ===<br />
<br />
==== Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs ====<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Either pay for a completely professional conference organizer that does all infrastructure themselves, or if we're going to continue to use the Miniconf website that we used this year, then:<br />
<ol><br />
<li> Have double the number of virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably <br />
you need 18, including specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, and more.<br />
<li>Assign completely separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who can be closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. <br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
</ol><br />
<li> Either waythe workshops will need stricter deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier stricter<br />
than with a physical conference.<br />
<li>Create a Virtual Social chair (see https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Publicity_Chairs)<br />
<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair (see below)<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<p><br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners <br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>We think the ACL should probably not use SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression that they would do human captioning of live sessions, but then changed to ASR captioning<br />
<li>Their setup for allowing authors to correct captions was not easy to use.<br />
<li>Their recording setup didn't allow any author editing, which made it frustrating to have<br />
to record in single takes<br />
<li>We only realized later that they were willing to paste together multiple segments, so<br />
tutorials could have been recorded in multiple chunks.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, wasn't technical and didn't seem to be a good listener, so complaints often<br />
were not addressed.<br />
<li>One problem occurred on the day before the workshops when they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room). It was their lack<br />
of clear explanations and dry runs that caused the much-commented-upon 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, and was especially a problem in the workshops.<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, we don't know if there are strong alternatives:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>One option is to find a professional virtual conference organizer that runs everything (including running the website), as well as the videos. We were unable to find such, so I don't know if this is poissible<br />
<li><br />
SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
<li>We assume by now there are probably other options, but inclusion is extremely important to keep in mind<br />
(making it possible to record for folks in countries without ability to buy video recording software), as<br />
is having professionals deal with the livestream events.<br />
<li>Slideslive also checked every video for sound or other problems<br />
</ul><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Infrastructure <br />
<ul><br />
<li><br />
<li>QA sessions could possibly be improved by incorporating more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> minor: if you use miniconf, fix so that the whole website can shift timezone.<br />
<li>Nitin's suggestion: "use one of the many bot frameworks (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot) to make a simple FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions"<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Permissions:<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
<li><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Global Inclusion:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else require VPNs.<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Vimeo (used by ACL Anthology and also SlidesLive pre-recorded talks) not visible in China, Indonesia, Vietnam<br />
<li>SlidesLive live (but not pre-recorded, which uses Vimeo) <b>is</b> is visible in China<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case, can't use Google or Microsoft either<br />
<li> Proposal: we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we should set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Ethics:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form,<br />
add ethics, and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair<br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case.<br />
<li> Perhaps we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we'll need to set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I briefly fill Exec in that virtual is an option, but still low-probability<br />
<li>Mar 6: Things worsen. We change Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things worsened more, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual, we wait to hear about hotel $$$<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to ogoing virtual<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul><</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Captioning_and_Sustainability_Co-Chairs&diff=738992020Q3 Reports: Captioning and Sustainability Co-Chairs2020-07-22T16:56:56Z<p>Jurafsky: </p>
<hr />
<div>===Lessons Learned: ACL 2020 Captioning Co-Chairs===<br />
====Klaus Zechner, Ananya Ganesh (ETS)====<br />
<br />
====Overall summary====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Providing captions to conference presentations, Q&A sessions, panel discussions etc. makes the conference more accessible – not only for attendees who are hearing impaired but also for attendees who may have some difficulty following speakers who speak fast and/or whose native language is not English<br />
<li>Automatic captioning (essentially: ASR) does currently not seem at a level of quality that is required for providing such accessibility and assistance to conference participants; reasons include problems recognizing technical terms and proper names, handling foreign accents etc. While it may be possible to adapt existing systems (e.g. by training it on the ACL anthology), realistically, both manual corrections/editing, as well as some level of human live captioning is likeley needed for some time to come.<br />
<li>ACL 2020 provided captioning for the majority of plenary sessions, including live Q&A plenary sessions, for all video-recorded presentations of papers (some automatic, some edited by presenters), but not for other live Q&A sessions.<br />
<li>The video hosting company was SlidesLive – they clearly struggled with processing 1500+ video presentations in just around 2 weeks; they also changed their commitment to what they were planning to deliver in terms of captioning multiple times during the pre-conference period which negatively impacted planning for captioning.<br />
<li>Live human captions (CART) were provided by ACS Captions: their service was outstanding, they have a high level of technical expertise, and the cost is reasonable (~$90/hour) given their high accuracy and almost simultaneous live captioning capabilities<br />
<li>Many authors chose to edit the automated captions provided by SlidesLive despite a very short notice just a few days before the start of the conference; this resulted in their presentations having high quality captions for the conference participants.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Specific suggestions====<br />
<br />
=====Time line:=====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Paper authors had to upload their presentation videos by June 17; SlidesLive promised processing by June 30 but was still processing presentations 2 days later, so that some authors had to edit their captions within a very short time (or were running late, compared to when their presentations were viewed by conference participants).<br />
<li>We recommend asking authors to upload their video presentations around 1 month before the start of the conference, in case a service such as SlidesLive is used that semi-automatically processes all prerecorded presentations and adds captions to them.<br />
<li>Authors should have at least 1 week before the start of the conference to edit automatically generated captions for their presentations.<br />
<li>All of these services by the hosting company – video upload, caption download/video viewing, edited caption upload etc. – should be tested before a contract is signed to ensure that the respective company has the capability to deliver the services and has sufficient time to make suggested changes, e.g., to their platforms they use for uploading/downloading of files etc. (e.g. there were issues with access rights; easy search functions for authors; organization of files etc.)<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
=====Reaching out to presenters:=====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Since ACL is organized in multiple strands: main conference, demos, tutorials, student research workshop etc., it was cumbersome and difficult to quickly reach out to all ACL presenters, e.g., in order to inform them about the caption editing process.<br />
<li>We recommend that a conference establish a list of all presenters (mailing list) that can be easily used for purposes of communication that are pertinent to all presenters and that should go out via email and not just as blog post (e.g., the PCs would have sole access to this list to avoid spamming).<br />
<li>Currently, the option provided by SlidesLive to let the presenters download and upload captions was just through a Google Drive. This made it difficult for the presenters to find their caption files, as well as not being very secure. We recommend that SlidesLive either establish a portal for presenters to securely upload and download caption files for their talk, or take on the responsibility of personally emailing captions to presenters, which was not possible given the tight timeline.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
=====Contract with CART company:=====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>We recommend using services by ACS Captions as they are highly professional and reasonably priced.<br />
<li>We also recommend using a contract model that asks for a fixed number of hours for CART services (e.g., covering plenary live sessions) and makes it possible to add additional hours of service after the registration deadline; that way, any participants who express a need for such <li>We also recommend that the CART service provider interact early with the video hosting company or whoever provides the interactive online meeting spaces to ensure a seamless integration of CART services.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
=====Automated captioning:=====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Depending on the platform used, it may make sense to investigate multiple automated captioning systems; priority may be given to a service that allows for adaptation of their ASR language model, e.g., by processing the ACL anthology.<br />
<li>As stated above, even the best of automatic services is not likely to meet high standards of accuracy expected by ACL participants who need to rely predominantly on such captions for following presentations or live Q&A sessions.<br />
</ul></div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Captioning_and_Sustainability_Co-Chairs&diff=738982020Q3 Reports: Captioning and Sustainability Co-Chairs2020-07-22T16:55:56Z<p>Jurafsky: Created page with "===Lessons Learned: ACL 2020 Captioning Co-Chairs=== ====Klaus Zechner, Ananya Ganesh (ETS)==== ====Overall summary==== <ul> <li>Providing captions to conference presentation..."</p>
<hr />
<div>===Lessons Learned: ACL 2020 Captioning Co-Chairs===<br />
====Klaus Zechner, Ananya Ganesh (ETS)====<br />
<br />
====Overall summary====<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Providing captions to conference presentations, Q&A sessions, panel discussions etc. makes the conference more accessible – not only for attendees who are hearing impaired but also for attendees who may have some difficulty following speakers who speak fast and/or whose native language is not English<br />
<li>Automatic captioning (essentially: ASR) does currently not seem at a level of quality that is required for providing such accessibility and assistance to conference participants; reasons include problems recognizing technical terms and proper names, handling foreign accents etc. While it may be possible to adapt existing systems (e.g. by training it on the ACL anthology), realistically, both manual corrections/editing, as well as some level of human live captioning is likeley needed for some time to come.<br />
<li>ACL 2020 provided captioning for the majority of plenary sessions, including live Q&A plenary sessions, for all video-recorded presentations of papers (some automatic, some edited by presenters), but not for other live Q&A sessions.<br />
<li>The video hosting company was SlidesLive – they clearly struggled with processing 1500+ video presentations in just around 2 weeks; they also changed their commitment to what they were planning to deliver in terms of captioning multiple times during the pre-conference period which negatively impacted planning for captioning.<br />
<li>Live human captions (CART) were provided by ACS Captions: their service was outstanding, they have a high level of technical expertise, and the cost is reasonable (~$90/hour) given their high accuracy and almost simultaneous live captioning capabilities<br />
<li>Many authors chose to edit the automated captions provided by SlidesLive despite a very short notice just a few days before the start of the conference; this resulted in their presentations having high quality captions for the conference participants.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
====Specific suggestions====<br />
<br />
<ol><br />
<li>Time line:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Paper authors had to upload their presentation videos by June 17; SlidesLive promised processing by June 30 but was still processing presentations 2 days later, so that some authors had to edit their captions within a very short time (or were running late, compared to when their presentations were viewed by conference participants).<br />
<li>We recommend asking authors to upload their video presentations around 1 month before the start of the conference, in case a service such as SlidesLive is used that semi-automatically processes all prerecorded presentations and adds captions to them.<br />
<li>Authors should have at least 1 week before the start of the conference to edit automatically generated captions for their presentations.<br />
<li>All of these services by the hosting company – video upload, caption download/video viewing, edited caption upload etc. – should be tested before a contract is signed to ensure that the respective company has the capability to deliver the services and has sufficient time to make suggested changes, e.g., to their platforms they use for uploading/downloading of files etc. (e.g. there were issues with access rights; easy search functions for authors; organization of files etc.)<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<li>Reaching out to presenters:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Since ACL is organized in multiple strands: main conference, demos, tutorials, student research workshop etc., it was cumbersome and difficult to quickly reach out to all ACL presenters, e.g., in order to inform them about the caption editing process.<br />
<li>We recommend that a conference establish a list of all presenters (mailing list) that can be easily used for purposes of communication that are pertinent to all presenters and that should go out via email and not just as blog post (e.g., the PCs would have sole access to this list to avoid spamming).<br />
<li>Currently, the option provided by SlidesLive to let the presenters download and upload captions was just through a Google Drive. This made it difficult for the presenters to find their caption files, as well as not being very secure. We recommend that SlidesLive either establish a portal for presenters to securely upload and download caption files for their talk, or take on the responsibility of personally emailing captions to presenters, which was not possible given the tight timeline.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<li>Contract with CART company:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>We recommend using services by ACS Captions as they are highly professional and reasonably priced.<br />
<li>We also recommend using a contract model that asks for a fixed number of hours for CART services (e.g., covering plenary live sessions) and makes it possible to add additional hours of service after the registration deadline; that way, any participants who express a need for such <li>We also recommend that the CART service provider interact early with the video hosting company or whoever provides the interactive online meeting spaces to ensure a seamless integration of CART services.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<li>Automated captioning:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Depending on the platform used, it may make sense to investigate multiple automated captioning systems; priority may be given to a service that allows for adaptation of their ASR language model, e.g., by processing the ACL anthology.<br />
<li>As stated above, even the best of automatic services is not likely to meet high standards of accuracy expected by ACL participants who need to rely predominantly on such captions for following presentations or live Q&A sessions.<br />
</ul><br />
</ol></div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=738012020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-15T16:11:51Z<p>Jurafsky: </p>
<hr />
<div>== ACL 2020 post-conference report: General Chair ==<br />
==== Dan Jurafsky ====<br />
<br />
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
Some initial notes, to be modified as I see everyone's reports<br />
<br />
==== Summary of what happened ====<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>We managed to run a virtual conference! And it wasn't a disaster!<br />
<li>Largest ever in # of papers (as usual) and also in attendance!<br />
<li>Also most diverse ACL ever!<br />
<li>People had lots of great discussion on chat; ACL conferences should ramp up use of chat media.<br />
<li>The team was awesome!! Every set of chairs was amazing and rose to the occasion to deal with the shift to virtual.<br />
<li>Biggest problem: The infrastructure team had to work way too hard, especially the last two weeks + the conference, it was a completely unreasonable load on them.<br />
<li><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
=== Overview of suggestions future conferences ===<br />
<br />
==== Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs ====<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Have more virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably we need twice that,<br />
with specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, and more.<br />
<li>Assign separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who can be closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. (And the workshops will need stricter deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier stricter<br />
than with a physical conference.)<br />
<li>Create a Virtual Social chair (see https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_Publicity_Chairs)<br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair (see below)<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<p><br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners <br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>We think the ACL should probably not use SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, didn't seem to listen to our needs.<br />
<li>On one day, they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room, which caused the 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, especially in the workshops).<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, we don't know if there are storng alternatives. SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
<li>We assume by now there are probably other options, but inclusion is extremely important to keep in mind<br />
(making it possible to record for folks in countries without ability to buy video recording software).<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Infrastructure <br />
<ul><br />
<li><br />
<li>QA sessions could be improved by incorporate more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> minor: if you use miniconf, fix so that the whole website can shift timezone.<br />
<li>Nitin's suggestion: "use one of the many bot frameworks (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot) to make a simple FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions"<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Permissions:<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
<li><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Global Inclusion:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else require VPNs.<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Vimeo (used by ACL Anthology and also SlidesLive pre-recorded talks) not visible in China, Indonesia, Vietnam<br />
<li>SlidesLive live (but not pre-recorded, which uses Vimeo) <b>is</b> is visible in China<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case, can't use Google or Microsoft either<br />
<li> Proposal: we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we should set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Ethics:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form,<br />
add ethics, and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair<br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case.<br />
<li> Perhaps we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we'll need to set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I briefly fill Exec in that virtual is an option, but still low-probability<br />
<li>Mar 6: Things worsen. We change Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things worsened more, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual, we wait to hear about hotel $$$<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to ogoing virtual<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul><</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=738002020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-15T16:09:46Z<p>Jurafsky: </p>
<hr />
<div>== ACL 2020 post-conference report: General Chair ==<br />
==== Dan Jurafsky ====<br />
<br />
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
Some initial notes, to be modified as I see everyone's reports<br />
<br />
==== Summary of what happened ====<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>We managed to run a virtual conference! And it wasn't a disaster!<br />
<li>Largest ever in # of papers (as usual) and also in attendance!<br />
<li>Also most diverse ACL ever!<br />
<li>People had lots of great discussion on chat; ACL conferences should ramp up use of chat media.<br />
<li>The team was awesome!! Every set of chairs was amazing and rose to the occasion to deal with the shift to virtual.<br />
<li>Biggest problem: The infrastructure team had to work way too hard, especially the last two weeks + the conference, it was a completely unreasonable load on them.<br />
<li><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<b>Our advice for future conferences</b><br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Have more virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably we need twice that,<br />
with specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, and more.<br />
<li>Assign separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who can be closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. (And the workshops will need stricter deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier stricter<br />
than with a physical conference.)<br />
<li>We need a social chair to find ways to encourage folks to chat more.<br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair (see below)<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<p><br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners <br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>We think the ACL should probably not use SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, didn't seem to listen to our needs.<br />
<li>On one day, they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room, which caused the 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, especially in the workshops).<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, we don't know if there are storng alternatives. SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
<li>We assume by now there are probably other options, but inclusion is extremely important to keep in mind<br />
(making it possible to record for folks in countries without ability to buy video recording software).<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Infrastructure <br />
<ul><br />
<li><br />
<li>QA sessions could be improved by incorporate more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> minor: if you use miniconf, fix so that the whole website can shift timezone.<br />
<li>Nitin's suggestion: "use one of the many bot frameworks (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot) to make a simple FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions"<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Permissions:<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
<li><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Global Inclusion:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else require VPNs.<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Vimeo (used by ACL Anthology and also SlidesLive pre-recorded talks) not visible in China, Indonesia, Vietnam<br />
<li>SlidesLive live (but not pre-recorded, which uses Vimeo) <b>is</b> is visible in China<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case, can't use Google or Microsoft either<br />
<li> Proposal: we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we should set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Ethics:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form,<br />
add ethics, and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair<br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case.<br />
<li> Perhaps we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we'll need to set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I briefly fill Exec in that virtual is an option, but still low-probability<br />
<li>Mar 6: Things worsen. We change Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things worsened more, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual, we wait to hear about hotel $$$<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to ogoing virtual<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul><</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=737992020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-15T16:08:57Z<p>Jurafsky: </p>
<hr />
<div>== ACL 2020 post-conference report: General Chair ==<br />
==== Dan Jurafsky ====<br />
<br />
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
Some initial notes, to be modified as I see everyone's reports<br />
<br />
=== =Summary of what happened ====<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>We managed to run a virtual conference! And it wasn't a disaster!<br />
<li>Largest ever in # of papers (as usual) and also in attendance!<br />
<li>Also most diverse ACL ever!<br />
<li>People had lots of great discussion on chat; ACL conferences should ramp up use of chat media.<br />
<li>The team was awesome!! Every set of chairs was amazing and rose to the occasion to deal with the shift to virtual.<br />
<li>Biggest problem: The infrastructure team had to work way too hard, especially the last two weeks + the conference, it was a completely unreasonable load on them.<br />
<li><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<b>Our advice for future conferences</b><br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Have more virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably we need twice that,<br />
with specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, and more.<br />
<li>Assign separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who can be closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. (And the workshops will need stricter deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier stricter<br />
than with a physical conference.)<br />
<li>We need a social chair to find ways to encourage folks to chat more.<br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair (see below)<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<p><br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners <br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>We think the ACL should probably not use SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, didn't seem to listen to our needs.<br />
<li>On one day, they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room, which caused the 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, especially in the workshops).<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, we don't know if there are storng alternatives. SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
<li>We assume by now there are probably other options, but inclusion is extremely important to keep in mind<br />
(making it possible to record for folks in countries without ability to buy video recording software).<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Infrastructure <br />
<ul><br />
<li><br />
<li>QA sessions could be improved by incorporate more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> minor: if you use miniconf, fix so that the whole website can shift timezone.<br />
<li>Nitin's suggestion: "use one of the many bot frameworks (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot) to make a simple FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions"<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Permissions:<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
<li><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Global Inclusion:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else require VPNs.<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Vimeo (used by ACL Anthology and also SlidesLive pre-recorded talks) not visible in China, Indonesia, Vietnam<br />
<li>SlidesLive live (but not pre-recorded, which uses Vimeo) <b>is</b> is visible in China<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case, can't use Google or Microsoft either<br />
<li> Proposal: we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we should set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Ethics:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form,<br />
add ethics, and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair<br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case.<br />
<li> Perhaps we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we'll need to set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I briefly fill Exec in that virtual is an option, but still low-probability<br />
<li>Mar 6: Things worsen. We change Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things worsened more, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual, we wait to hear about hotel $$$<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to ogoing virtual<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul><</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=737802020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-14T01:11:21Z<p>Jurafsky: </p>
<hr />
<div>The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
Some initial notes, to be modified as I see everyone's reports<br />
<br />
<b>Summary of what happened</b><br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>We managed to run a virtual conference! And it wasn't a disaster!<br />
<li>Largest ever in # of papers (as usual) and also in attendance!<br />
<li>Also most diverse ACL ever!<br />
<li>People had lots of great discussion on chat; ACL conferences should ramp up use of chat media.<br />
<li>The team was awesome!! Every set of chairs was amazing and rose to the occasion to deal with the shift to virtual.<br />
<li>Biggest problem: The infrastructure team had to work way too hard, especially the last two weeks + the conference, it was a completely unreasonable load on them.<br />
<li><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<b>Our advice for future conferences</b><br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Have more virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably we need twice that,<br />
with specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, and more.<br />
<li>Assign separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who can be closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. (And the workshops will need stricter deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier stricter<br />
than with a physical conference.)<br />
<li>We need a social chair to find ways to encourage folks to chat more.<br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair (see below)<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<p><br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners <br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>We think the ACL should probably not use SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, didn't seem to listen to our needs.<br />
<li>On one day, they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room, which caused the 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, especially in the workshops).<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, we don't know if there are storng alternatives. SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
<li>We assume by now there are probably other options, but inclusion is extremely important to keep in mind<br />
(making it possible to record for folks in countries without ability to buy video recording software).<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Infrastructure <br />
<ul><br />
<li><br />
<li>QA sessions could be improved by incorporate more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> minor: if you use miniconf, fix so that the whole website can shift timezone.<br />
<li>Nitin's suggestion: "use one of the many bot frameworks (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot) to make a simple FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions"<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Permissions:<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
<li><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Global Inclusion:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else require VPNs.<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Vimeo (used by ACL Anthology and also SlidesLive pre-recorded talks) not visible in China, Indonesia, Vietnam<br />
<li>SlidesLive live (but not pre-recorded, which uses Vimeo) <b>is</b> is visible in China<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case, can't use Google or Microsoft either<br />
<li> Proposal: we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we should set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Ethics:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form,<br />
add ethics, and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair<br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case.<br />
<li> Perhaps we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we'll need to set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I briefly fill Exec in that virtual is an option, but still low-probability<br />
<li>Mar 6: Things worsen. We change Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things worsened more, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual, we wait to hear about hotel $$$<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to ogoing virtual<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul><</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=737792020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-14T01:04:53Z<p>Jurafsky: </p>
<hr />
<div>The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
Some initial notes, to be modified as I see everyone's reports<br />
<br />
<b>Summary of what happened</b><br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>We managed to run a virtual conference! And it wasn't a disaster!<br />
<li>Largest ever in # of papers (as usual) and also in attendance!<br />
<li>Also most diverse ACL ever!<br />
<li>People had lots of great discussion on chat; ACL conferences should ramp up use of chat media.<br />
<li>The team was awesome!! Every set of chairs was amazing and rose to the occasion to deal with the shift to virtual.<br />
<li>Biggest problem: The infrastructure team had to work way too hard, especially the last two weeks + the conference, it was a completely unreasonable load on them.<br />
<li><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<b>Our advice for future conferences</b><br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Have more virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably we need twice that,<br />
with specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, and more.<br />
<li>Assign separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who can be closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. (And the workshops will need stricter deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier stricter<br />
than with a physical conference.)<br />
<li>We need a social chair to find ways to encourage folks to chat more.<br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair (see below)<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<p><br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners <br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>We think the ACL should probably not use SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, didn't seem to listen to our needs.<br />
<li>On one day, they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room, which caused the 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, especially in the workshops).<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, we don't know if there are storng alternatives. SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
<li>We assume by now there are probably other options, but inclusion is extremely important to keep in mind<br />
(making it possible to record for folks in countries without ability to buy video recording software).<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Infrastructure <br />
<ul><br />
<li><br />
<li>QA sessions could be improved by incorporate more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> minor: if you use miniconf, fix so that the whole website can shift timezone.<br />
<li>Nitin's suggestion: "use one of the many bot frameworks (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot) to make a simple FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions"<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Permissions:<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
<li><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Global Inclusion:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else require VPNs.<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Vimeo (used by ACL Anthology and also SlidesLive pre-recorded talks) not visible in China, Indonesia, Vietnam<br />
<li>SlidesLive live (but not pre-recorded, which uses Vimeo) <b>is</b> is visible in China<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case, can't use Google or Microsoft either<br />
<li> Proposal: we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we should set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Ethics:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form,<br />
add ethics, and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair<br />
For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else require VPNs.<br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case.<br />
<li> Perhaps we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we'll need to set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I briefly fill Exec in that virtual is an option, but still low-probability<br />
<li>Mar 6: Things worsen. We change Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things worsened more, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual, we wait to hear about hotel $$$<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to ogoing virtual<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul><</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=737782020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-14T01:04:06Z<p>Jurafsky: </p>
<hr />
<div>The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
Some initial notes, to be modified as I see everyone's reports<br />
<br />
<b>Summary of what happened</b><br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>We managed to run a virtual conference! And it wasn't a disaster!<br />
<li>Largest ever in # of papers (as usual) and also in attendance!<br />
<li>Also most diverse ACL ever!<br />
<li>People had lots of great discussion on chat; ACL conferences should ramp up use of chat media.<br />
<li>Biggest problem: The infrastructure team had to work way too hard, especially the last two weeks + the conference, it was a completely unreasonable load on them.<br />
<li><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<b>Our advice for future conferences</b><br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Have more virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably we need twice that,<br />
with specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, and more.<br />
<li>Assign separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who can be closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. (And the workshops will need stricter deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier stricter<br />
than with a physical conference.)<br />
<li>We need a social chair to find ways to encourage folks to chat more.<br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair (see below)<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<p><br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners <br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>We think the ACL should probably not use SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, didn't seem to listen to our needs.<br />
<li>On one day, they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room, which caused the 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, especially in the workshops).<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, we don't know if there are storng alternatives. SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
<li>We assume by now there are probably other options, but inclusion is extremely important to keep in mind<br />
(making it possible to record for folks in countries without ability to buy video recording software).<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Infrastructure <br />
<ul><br />
<li><br />
<li>QA sessions could be improved by incorporate more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> minor: if you use miniconf, fix so that the whole website can shift timezone.<br />
<li>Nitin's suggestion: "use one of the many bot frameworks (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot) to make a simple FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions"<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Permissions:<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
<li><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Global Inclusion:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else require VPNs.<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Vimeo (used by ACL Anthology and also SlidesLive pre-recorded talks) not visible in China, Indonesia, Vietnam<br />
<li>SlidesLive live (but not pre-recorded, which uses Vimeo) <b>is</b> is visible in China<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case, can't use Google or Microsoft either<br />
<li> Proposal: we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we should set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Ethics:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form,<br />
add ethics, and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair<br />
For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else require VPNs.<br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case.<br />
<li> Perhaps we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we'll need to set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I briefly fill Exec in that virtual is an option, but still low-probability<br />
<li>Mar 6: Things worsen. We change Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things worsened more, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual, we wait to hear about hotel $$$<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to ogoing virtual<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul><</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=737772020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-14T00:59:10Z<p>Jurafsky: </p>
<hr />
<div>The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
Some initial notes, to be modified as I see everyone's reports<br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Have more virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably we need twice that,<br />
with specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, and more.<br />
<li>Assign separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who can be closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. (And the workshops will need stricter deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier stricter<br />
than with a physical conference.)<br />
<li>We need a social chair to find ways to encourage folks to chat more.<br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair (see below)<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<p><br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners <br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>We think the ACL should probably not use SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, didn't seem to listen to our needs.<br />
<li>On one day, they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room, which caused the 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, especially in the workshops).<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, we don't know if there are storng alternatives. SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
<li>We assume by now there are probably other options, but inclusion is extremely important to keep in mind<br />
(making it possible to record for folks in countries without ability to buy video recording software).<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Infrastructure <br />
<ul><br />
<li><br />
<li>QA sessions could be improved by incorporate more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> minor: if you use miniconf, fix so that the whole website can shift timezone.<br />
<li>Nitin's suggestion: "use one of the many bot frameworks (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot) to make a simple FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions"<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Permissions:<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
<li><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Global Inclusion:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else require VPNs.<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Vimeo (used by ACL Anthology and also SlidesLive pre-recorded talks) not visible in China, Indonesia, Vietnam<br />
<li>SlidesLive live (but not pre-recorded, which uses Vimeo) <b>is</b> is visible in China<br />
</ul><br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case, can't use Google or Microsoft either<br />
<li> Proposal: we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we should set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Ethics:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form,<br />
add ethics, and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair<br />
For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else require VPNs.<br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case.<br />
<li> Perhaps we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we'll need to set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I briefly fill Exec in that virtual is an option, but still low-probability<br />
<li>Mar 6: Things worsen. We change Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things worsened more, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual, we wait to hear about hotel $$$<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to ogoing virtual<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul><</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=737762020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-14T00:56:16Z<p>Jurafsky: </p>
<hr />
<div>The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
Some initial notes, to be modified as I see everyone's reports<br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Have more virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably we need twice that,<br />
with specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, and more.<br />
<li>Assign separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who can be closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. (And the workshops will need stricter deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier stricter<br />
than with a physical conference.)<br />
<li>We need a social chair to find ways to encourage folks to chat more.<br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair (see below)<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<p><br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners <br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>We think the ACL should probably not use SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, didn't seem to listen to our needs.<br />
<li>On one day, they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room, which caused the 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, especially in the workshops).<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, we don't know if there are storng alternatives. SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
<li>We assume by now there are probably other options, but inclusion is extremely important to keep in mind<br />
(making it possible to record for folks in countries without ability to buy video recording software).<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Infrastructure <br />
<ul><br />
<li><br />
<li>QA sessions could be improved by incorporate more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> minor: if you use miniconf, fix so that the whole website can shift timezone.<br />
<li>Nitin's suggestion: "use one of the many bot frameworks (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot) to make a simple FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions"<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Permissions:<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
<li><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Global Inclusion:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else require VPNs.<br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case.<br />
<li> Perhaps we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we'll need to set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Ethics:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form,<br />
add ethics, and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair<br />
For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else require VPNs.<br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case.<br />
<li> Perhaps we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we'll need to set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I briefly fill Exec in that virtual is an option, but still low-probability<br />
<li>Mar 6: Things worsen. We change Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things worsened more, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual, we wait to hear about hotel $$$<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to ogoing virtual<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul><</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=737752020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-14T00:54:28Z<p>Jurafsky: </p>
<hr />
<div>The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
Some initial notes, to be modified as I see everyone's reports<br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Have more virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably we need twice that,<br />
with specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, and more.<br />
<li>Assign separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who can be closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. (And the workshops will need stricter deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier stricter<br />
than with a physical conference.)<br />
<li>We need a social chair to find ways to encourage folks to chat more.<br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair (see below)<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<p><br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners <br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>We think the ACL should probably not use SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, didn't seem to listen to our needs.<br />
<li>On one day, they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room, which caused the 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, especially in the workshops).<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, we don't know if there are storng alternatives. SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
<li>We assume by now there are probably other options, but inclusion is extremely important to keep in mind<br />
(making it possible to record for folks in countries without ability to buy video recording software).<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Infrastructure <br />
<ul><br />
<li><br />
<li>QA sessions could be improved by incorporate more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> minor: if you use miniconf, fix so that the whole website can shift timezone.<br />
<li>Nitin's suggestion: "use one of the many bot frameworks (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot) to make a simple FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions"<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Permissions:<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
<li><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Global Inclusion:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else require VPNs.<br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case.<br />
<li> Perhaps we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we'll need to set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Ethics:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form,<br />
add ethics, and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair<br />
For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else require VPNs.<br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case.<br />
<li> Perhaps we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we'll need to set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I ask Exec for their advice, advice disagreed<br />
<li>Mar 6: We changed Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things have worsened, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to ogoing virtual<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul><</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=737742020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-14T00:54:18Z<p>Jurafsky: </p>
<hr />
<div>The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
Some initial notes, to be modified as I see everyone's reports<br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Have more virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably we need twice that,<br />
with specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, and more.<br />
<li>Assign separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who can be closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. (And the workshops will need stricter deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier stricter<br />
than with a physical conference.)<br />
<li>We need a social chair to find ways to encourage folks to chat more.<br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair (see below)<br />
</ul><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<p><br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners <br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>We think the ACL should probably not use SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, didn't seem to listen to our needs.<br />
<li>On one day, they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room, which caused the 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, especially in the workshops).<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, we don't know if there are storng alternatives. SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
<li>We assume by now there are probably other options, but inclusion is extremely important to keep in mind<br />
(making it possible to record for folks in countries without ability to buy video recording software).<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Infrastructure <br />
<ul><br />
<li><br />
<li>QA sessions could be improved by incorporate more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> minor: if you use miniconf, fix so that the whole website can shift timezone.<br />
<li>Nitin's suggestion: "use one of the many bot frameworks (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot) to make a simple FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions"<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Permissions:<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
<li><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Global Inclusion:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else require VPNs.<br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case.<br />
<li> Perhaps we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we'll need to set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Ethics:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form,<br />
add ethics, and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair<br />
For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else require VPNs.<br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case.<br />
<li> Perhaps we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we'll need to set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I ask Exec for their advice, advice disagreed<br />
<li>Mar 6: We changed Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things have worsened, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to ogoing virtual<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul><</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=737672020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-13T19:45:22Z<p>Jurafsky: </p>
<hr />
<div>The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
Some initial notes, to be modified as I see everyone's reports<br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Have virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably we need twice that,<br />
with specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, <br />
<li>Assign separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who is closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. The workshops need strict deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier stricter<br />
than with a physical conference.<br />
<li>We need a social chair to find ways to encourage folks to chat more.<br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair (see below)<br />
</ul><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<p><br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners <br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>We think the ACL should probably not use SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, didn't seem to listen to our needs.<br />
<li>On one day, they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room, which caused the 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, especially in the workshops).<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, we don't know if there are storng alternatives. SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
<li>We assume by now there are probably other options, but inclusion is extremely important to keep in mind<br />
(making it possible to record for folks in countries without ability to buy video recording software).<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Infrastructure <br />
<ul><br />
<li><br />
<li>QA sessions could be improved by incorporate more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> minor: if you use miniconf, fix so that the whole website can shift timezone.<br />
<li>Nitin's suggestion: "use one of the many bot frameworks (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot) to make a simple FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions"<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Permissions:<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
<li><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Global Inclusion:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else require VPNs.<br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case.<br />
<li> Perhaps we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we'll need to set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Ethics:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form,<br />
add ethics, and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair<br />
For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else require VPNs.<br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case.<br />
<li> Perhaps we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we'll need to set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I ask Exec for their advice, advice disagreed<br />
<li>Mar 6: We changed Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things have worsened, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to ogoing virtual<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul><</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=737662020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-13T19:44:29Z<p>Jurafsky: </p>
<hr />
<div>The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
Some initial notes, to be modified as I see everyone's reports<br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Have virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably we need twice that,<br />
with specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, <br />
<li>Assign separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who is closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. The workshops need strict deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier stricter<br />
than with a physical conference.<br />
<li>We need a social chair to find ways to encourage folks to chat more.<br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair (see below)<br />
</ul><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners <br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>We think the ACL should probably not use SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, didn't seem to listen to our needs.<br />
<li>On one day, they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room, which caused the 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, especially in the workshops).<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, we don't know if there are storng alternatives. SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
<li>We assume by now there are probably other options, but inclusion is extremely important to keep in mind<br />
(making it possible to record for folks in countries without ability to buy video recording software).<br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Infrastructure <br />
<ul><br />
<li><br />
<li>QA sessions could be improved by incorporate more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> minor: if you use miniconf, fix so that the whole website can shift timezone.<br />
<li>Nitin's suggestion: "use one of the many bot frameworks (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot) to make a simple FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions"<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Permissions:<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
<li><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Global Inclusion:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else require VPNs.<br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case.<br />
<li> Perhaps we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we'll need to set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Ethics:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form,<br />
add ethics, and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair<br />
For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else require VPNs.<br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case.<br />
<li> Perhaps we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we'll need to set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I ask Exec for their advice, advice disagreed<br />
<li>Mar 6: We changed Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things have worsened, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to ogoing virtual<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul><</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=737652020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-13T19:44:10Z<p>Jurafsky: </p>
<hr />
<div>The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
Some initial notes, to be modified as I see everyone's reports<br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Have virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably we need twice that,<br />
with specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, <br />
<li>Assign separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who is closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. The workshops need strict deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier stricter<br />
than with a physical conference.<br />
<li>We need a social chair to find ways to encourage folks to chat more.<br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair (see below)<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners <br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>We think the ACL should probably not use SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind<br />
<li>Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute,<br />
too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.<br />
<li>Our contact, Alex Chandler, didn't seem to listen to our needs.<br />
<li>On one day, they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.<br />
<li>They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms,<br />
and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the<br />
audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room, which caused the 40-second delayed echo in <br />
the LTA and in many other speakers, especially in the workshops).<br />
</ul><br />
<li>However, we don't know if there are storng alternatives. SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered<br />
(we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference,<br />
and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them;<br />
we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point). <br />
<li>We assume by now there are probably other options, but inclusion is extremely important to keep in mind<br />
(making it possible to record for folks in countries without ability to buy video recording software).<br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Infrastructure <br />
<ul><br />
<li><br />
<li>QA sessions could be improved by incorporate more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> minor: if you use miniconf, fix so that the whole website can shift timezone.<br />
<li>Nitin's suggestion: "use one of the many bot frameworks (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot) to make a simple FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions"<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Permissions:<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
<li><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Global Inclusion:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else require VPNs.<br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case.<br />
<li> Perhaps we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we'll need to set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Ethics:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form,<br />
add ethics, and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair<br />
For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else require VPNs.<br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case.<br />
<li> Perhaps we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we'll need to set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I ask Exec for their advice, advice disagreed<br />
<li>Mar 6: We changed Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things have worsened, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual<br />
<li>Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to ogoing virtual<br />
<li>April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.<br />
</ul><</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=737642020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-13T19:17:47Z<p>Jurafsky: </p>
<hr />
<div>The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
Some initial notes, to be modified as I see everyone's reports<br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Have virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs<br />
led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably we need twice that,<br />
with specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the<br />
non-virtual website, chat, <br />
<li>Assign separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who is closely in contact with the workshop<br />
chairs at all times. The workshops need strict deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier stricter<br />
than with a physical conference.<br />
<li>We need a social chair to find ways to encourage folks to chat more.<br />
<li>Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs,<br />
since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrasturcture<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair (see below)<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Advice on Infrastructure <br />
<ul><br />
<li>QA sessions could be improved by incorporate more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)<br />
<li>Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks<br />
<li>How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions<br />
(and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)<br />
<li>if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker<br />
about how to deal with delay.<br />
<li> minor: if you use miniconf, fix so that the whole website can shift timezone.<br />
<li>Nitin's suggestion: "use one of the many bot frameworks (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot) to make a simple FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions"<br />
<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Permissions:<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations<br />
<li>Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos<br />
<li>Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.<br />
<li><br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Global Inclusion:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else require VPNs.<br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case.<br />
<li> Perhaps we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we'll need to set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Ethics:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form,<br />
add ethics, and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.<br />
<li>Possibly have an ethics chair<br />
For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.,<br />
or else require VPNs.<br />
<li>Iran is a particularly difficult case.<br />
<li> Perhaps we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government,<br />
so we'll need to set up mirrors.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.<br />
<li> Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes<br />
<li> Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I ask Exec for their advice, advice disagreed<br />
<li>Mar 6: We changed Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel <br />
<li>Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April<br />
<li> Mar 17: Things have worsened, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual<br />
<li>April 2: We decide to go virtual and announce on homepage.<br />
</ul><</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports&diff=736902020Q3 Reports2020-07-06T18:39:25Z<p>Jurafsky: </p>
<hr />
<div>'''Reports from ACL Exec-plus'''<br />
<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Office Manager]] (Priscilla Rasmussen)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Secretary]] (Shiqi Zhao)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Treasurer]] (David Yarowsky)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: NAACL]] (Colin Cherry)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: EACL]] (Sharon Goldwater)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: AACL]] (Haifeng Wang)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Member at-large]] (Anna Korhonen)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Member at-large / Conference Officer]] (Barbara Di Eugenio)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Member at-large / Information Officer]] (Nitin Madnani)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: PCC Co-Chairs]] (Graeme Hirst, Emily Bender)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Anthology Director]] (Matt Post)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Publicity Director]] (Barbara Plank)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Equity Director]] (Natalie Schluter) <br />
<br />
'''ACL 2020'''<br />
<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: General Chair]] (Dan Jurafsky)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Program Chairs]] (Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Local Organizing Co-chairs]] (Priscilla Rasmussen)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Workshop Chairs]] (Milica Gašić, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Saif M. Mohammad, Ves Stoyanov)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Tutorial Chairs]] (Agata Savary, Yue Zhang)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Publication Chairs]] (Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Rui Yan)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Demonstration Chairs]] (Asli Celikyilmaz, Shawn Wen)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Virtual Infrastructure Chairs]] (Hao Fang, Sudha Rao, Yi Luan, Hamid Palangi, Lianhui Qin, Yizhe Zhang)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Student Research Workshop Chairs]] (Rotem Dror, Jiangming Liu, Shruti Rijhwani, Yizhong Wang)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Faculty Advisors to the SRW]] (Omri Abend, Sujian Li, Zhou Yu) <br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs]] (Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Publicity Chairs]] (Emily M. Bender, Zhiyuan Liu, Esther Seyffarth)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Local Sponsorship Chairs]] (Hoifung Poon, Kristina Toutanova)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Conference Handbook Chair]] (Nanyun Peng)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Captioning and Sustainability Co-Chairs]] (Ananya Ganesh, Klaus Zechner)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Student Volunteer Coordinator]] (Marjan Ghazvininejad)<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Journals, Publications, and the Web'''<br />
<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: CL Journal Editor]] (Hwee Tou Ng)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: TACL Journal Editor]] (Mark Johnson, Ani Nenkova, Brian Roark)<br />
<br />
'''Recent Conferences'''<br />
<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019]] (Kentaro Inui)<br />
<br />
'''Future Conferences'''<br />
<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: EMNLP 2020]] (Bonnie Webber)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: AACL-IJCNLP 2020]] (Kam-Fai Wong)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: EACL 2021]] (Paola Merlo)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: NAACL 2021]] (Kristina Toutanova)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: ACL 2021]] (Chengqing Zong)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: ACL 2022]] (Rada Mihalcea)<br />
<br />
'''SIG & BIG'''<br />
<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGANN]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGBioMed]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGDAT]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGDIAL]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGEDU]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGEL]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGFSM]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGGEN]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGHAN]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGHUM]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGLEX]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGMOL]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGMORPHON]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGMT]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGNLL]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGPARSE]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGRREP]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGSEM]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGSLAV]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGSLPAT]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGTYP]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGUR]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGWAC]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: EquiCL]]<br />
<br />
'''Exec Meeting'''<br />
* [[2020Q3 Agenda]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Minutes (public version)]]</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports&diff=736892020Q3 Reports2020-07-06T18:37:35Z<p>Jurafsky: </p>
<hr />
<div>'''Reports from ACL Exec-plus'''<br />
<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Office Manager]] (Priscilla Rasmussen)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Secretary]] (Shiqi Zhao)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Treasurer]] (David Yarowsky)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: NAACL]] (Colin Cherry)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: EACL]] (Sharon Goldwater)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: AACL]] (Haifeng Wang)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Member at-large]] (Anna Korhonen)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Member at-large / Conference Officer]] (Barbara Di Eugenio)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Member at-large / Information Officer]] (Nitin Madnani)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: PCC Co-Chairs]] (Graeme Hirst, Emily Bender)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Anthology Director]] (Matt Post)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Publicity Director]] (Barbara Plank)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Equity Director]] (Natalie Schluter) <br />
<br />
'''ACL 2020'''<br />
<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: General Chair]] (Dan Jurafsky)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Program Chairs]] (Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Local Organizing Co-chairs]] (Priscilla Rasmussen)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Workshop Chairs]] (Milica Gašić, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Saif M. Mohammad, Ves Stoyanov)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Tutorial Chairs]] (Agata Savary, Yue Zhang)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Publication Chairs]] (Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Rui Yan)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Demonstration Chairs]] (Asli Celikyilmaz, Shawn Wen)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Virtual Infrastructure Chairs]] (Hao Fang, Sudha Rao, Yi Luan, Hamid Palangi, Lianhui Qin, Yizhe Zhang)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Student Research Workshop Chairs]] (Rotem Dror, Jiangming Liu, Shruti Rijhwani, Yizhong Wang)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Faculty Advisors to the SRW]] (Omri Abend, Sujian Li, Zhou Yu) <br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs]] (Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Publicity Chairs]] (Emily M. Bender, Esther Seyffarth)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Local Sponsorship Chairs]] (Hoifung Poon, Kristina Toutanova)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Conference Handbook Chair]] (Nanyun Peng)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Captioning and Sustainability Co-Chairs]] (Ananya Ganesh, Klaus Zechner)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Student Volunteer Coordinator]] (Marjan Ghazvininejad)<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Journals, Publications, and the Web'''<br />
<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: CL Journal Editor]] (Hwee Tou Ng)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: TACL Journal Editor]] (Mark Johnson, Ani Nenkova, Brian Roark)<br />
<br />
'''Recent Conferences'''<br />
<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019]] (Kentaro Inui)<br />
<br />
'''Future Conferences'''<br />
<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: EMNLP 2020]] (Bonnie Webber)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: AACL-IJCNLP 2020]] (Kam-Fai Wong)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: EACL 2021]] (Paola Merlo)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: NAACL 2021]] (Kristina Toutanova)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: ACL 2021]] (Chengqing Zong)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: ACL 2022]] (Rada Mihalcea)<br />
<br />
'''SIG & BIG'''<br />
<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGANN]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGBioMed]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGDAT]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGDIAL]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGEDU]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGEL]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGFSM]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGGEN]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGHAN]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGHUM]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGLEX]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGMOL]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGMORPHON]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGMT]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGNLL]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGPARSE]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGRREP]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGSEM]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGSLAV]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGSLPAT]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGTYP]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGUR]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGWAC]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: EquiCL]]<br />
<br />
'''Exec Meeting'''<br />
* [[2020Q3 Agenda]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Minutes (public version)]]</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports:_General_Chair&diff=736882020Q3 Reports: General Chair2020-07-06T18:36:54Z<p>Jurafsky: Created page with "placeholder"</p>
<hr />
<div>placeholder</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports&diff=736872020Q3 Reports2020-07-06T18:36:01Z<p>Jurafsky: </p>
<hr />
<div>'''Reports from ACL Exec-plus'''<br />
<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Office Manager]] (Priscilla Rasmussen)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Secretary]] (Shiqi Zhao)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Treasurer]] (David Yarowsky)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: NAACL]] (Colin Cherry)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: EACL]] (Sharon Goldwater)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: AACL]] (Haifeng Wang)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Member at-large]] (Anna Korhonen)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Member at-large / Conference Officer]] (Barbara Di Eugenio)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Member at-large / Information Officer]] (Nitin Madnani)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: PCC Co-Chairs]] (Graeme Hirst, Emily Bender)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Anthology Director]] (Matt Post)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Publicity Director]] (Barbara Plank)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Equity Director]] (Natalie Schluter) <br />
<br />
'''ACL 2020'''<br />
<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: General Chair]] (Dan Jurafsky)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Program Chairs]] (Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Local Organizing Co-chairs]] (Jianfeng Gao, Priscilla Rasmussen, Luke Zettlemoyer)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Workshop Chairs]] (Milica Gašić, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Saif M. Mohammad, Ves Stoyanov)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Tutorial Chairs]] (Agata Savary, Yue Zhang)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Publication Chairs]] (Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Rui Yan)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Demonstration Chairs]] (Asli Celikyilmaz, Shawn Wen)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Virtual Infrastructure Chairs]] (Hao Fang, Sudha Rao, Yi Luan, Hamid Palangi, Lianhui Qin, Yizhe Zhang)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Student Research Workshop Chairs]] (Rotem Dror, Jiangming Liu, Shruti Rijhwani, Yizhong Wang)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Faculty Advisors to the SRW]] (Omri Abend, Sujian Li, Zhou Yu) <br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs]] (Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Publicity Chairs]] (Emily M. Bender, Esther Seyffarth)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Local Sponsorship Chairs]] (Hoifung Poon, Kristina Toutanova)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Conference Handbook Chair]] (Nanyun Peng)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Captioning and Sustainability Co-Chairs]] (Ananya Ganesh, Klaus Zechner)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: Student Volunteer Coordinator]] (Marjan Ghazvininejad)<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Journals, Publications, and the Web'''<br />
<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: CL Journal Editor]] (Hwee Tou Ng)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: TACL Journal Editor]] (Mark Johnson, Ani Nenkova, Brian Roark)<br />
<br />
'''Recent Conferences'''<br />
<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019]] (Kentaro Inui)<br />
<br />
'''Future Conferences'''<br />
<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: EMNLP 2020]] (Bonnie Webber)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: AACL-IJCNLP 2020]] (Kam-Fai Wong)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: EACL 2021]] (Paola Merlo)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: NAACL 2021]] (Kristina Toutanova)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: ACL 2021]] (Chengqing Zong)<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: ACL 2022]] (Rada Mihalcea)<br />
<br />
'''SIG & BIG'''<br />
<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGANN]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGBioMed]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGDAT]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGDIAL]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGEDU]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGEL]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGFSM]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGGEN]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGHAN]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGHUM]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGLEX]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGMOL]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGMORPHON]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGMT]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGNLL]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGPARSE]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGRREP]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGSEM]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGSLAV]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGSLPAT]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGTYP]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGUR]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: SIGWAC]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Reports: EquiCL]]<br />
<br />
'''Exec Meeting'''<br />
* [[2020Q3 Agenda]]<br />
* [[2020Q3 Minutes (public version)]]</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q1_Reports:_ACL_2020&diff=735942020Q1 Reports: ACL 20202020-03-11T02:32:46Z<p>Jurafsky: </p>
<hr />
<div><br />
== General Chair ==<br />
Dan Jurafsky, Stanford University<br />
<br />
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) will take place in Seattle, Washington at the Hyatt Regency Seattle in downtown Seattle from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
We have a great set of chairs! We are continuing 2019's new roles (Diversity and Inclusion chairs, Remote Presentation Chairs, AV Chairs) and adding new ones: (Sustainability chair), and we are doing well in demographic representation among our chairs (gender and region).<br />
<br />
Following advice from last year, we have been using Slack for most intra-committee communication (and we put the Slack channel into the ACL pro space, so it can be preserved for future years), and using email only when absolutely necessary.<br />
<br />
As usual, the growing size of the conference (both in papers and attendees) is a challenge, but both in papers and space we have been doing well (see the individual chair summaries below).<br />
<br />
Highlights include: <br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>The program chairs moved the submission date earlier (to Dec 9), and the notification date earlier (to April 3), to allow more time for attendees visa processing.<br />
<li> We received a record 3,429 submissions (~15% increase over ACL2019)<br />
<li>The program chairs removed the neutral 3 rating (requiring reviewers to choose 2.5 or 3.5), and asked reviewers to also evaluate the ethical implications of each submission.<br />
<li> As usual, the call, submission, reviewing and selection of tutorials and workshops was coordinated jointly for all the conferences including COLING; for this year<br />
that meant ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP. All tutorials and Workshops have been chosen and scheduled and announced.<br />
<li> We're asking the Exec to approve our D&I budget.<br />
<li>The D&I chairs propose to continue to do onsite child care (as used at ACL2019) rather than the voucher system (as used at NAACL2019), since onsite child care worked well for us at ACL 2019, makes it easier for parents to navigate in an unknown location, and is now the standard best practice used by our sister conferences (AAAI, NeurIPS, Interspeech, CHI, etc.).<br />
<li><br />
The committee found sections of the ACL Conference Handbook to be out of date and in some cases missing entirely.<br />
and I have asked all of the chairs to update their own relevant section of the handbook, and the chairs have begun to do this.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
On Mar 11, we will have a site visit at the hotel in Seattle which besides Priscilla will include the General Chair, and representatives from the Program Chairs, the D&I chairs, and the AV chairs. We will also use that occasion to have a committee mtg including those folks plus the relatively large number of ACL2020 organizing committee members who are local to Seattle.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Program Chairs == <br />
Joyce Chai, University of Michigan<br />
<br />
Natalie Schluter, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark<br />
<br />
Joel Tetreault, Dataminr, USA<br />
<br />
---<br />
<br />
'''New Initiatives This Year'''<br />
<br />
'''''Earlier Submission Deadline and Notification'''''<br />
<br />
To accommodate a more realistic workflow, given (1) the rapid growth in the number of submissions to ACL conferences, (2) together with avoiding the period for authors from Dec. 15-Jan. 15 while giving us more time to implement and test new implementations, we moved the submission deadline back to December 9. Specifically, previous PCs advised us to do this to set a precedent for future PCs, in accommodating a more realistic timeline. The timeline is still packed, but workable. We also plan notifications to be out earlier than normal, to provide an extra 1-2 weeks for visa applicants, as an inclusion measure.<br />
<br />
'''''Four New Tracks'''''<br />
<br />
ACL2020 introduced four new tracks:(1) Ethics and NLP. Ethical issues have become increasingly important as more advanced tools become available for NLP research and development. We dedicated a new track and explicitly invite contributions that study ethical issues and impact regarding NLP research and applications. (2) Interpretation and Analysis of Models for NLP. As the community strives for pushing performance boundaries, understanding behaviors of STOA models becomes critical. (3) Theory and Formalism. This track is designed to encourage submissions targeted to theoretical underpinning of NLP models which had little/small presence in the past ACL conferences. (4) Theme: Taking Stock of Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going. The last few years have witnessed an unprecedented growth in NLP since the field began over sixty years ago. This track is designed to invite submissions that can provide insight for the community to assess how much we have accomplished today with respect to the past and where the field should be heading to. The theme track is different from other tracks. We therefore made some modifications in the review form to reflect that.<br />
<br />
'''''Extended Automatic COI Detection/Automatic Reviewer-Paper Assignment'''''<br />
<br />
We carried out offline COI detection and automatic paper assignment for the first time for an *ACL conference. The code used were ACL2020-customised implementations of Amanda Stent’s COI detection software and Graham Neubig’s automatic reviewer-paper assignment software.<br />
<br />
'''''Mandatory Reviewer Duty and Recruitment'''''<br />
<br />
To meet the reviewer demands of a growing conference, we made reviewer volunteering mandatory for submission authors. This resulted in a record number of volunteer candidate reviewers (over 11K). We note that these volunteers were candidates and only a subset of them were actually given reviewing assignments.<br />
Using a Microsoft Reviewer/Author form, we collected a variety of information on potential reviewers like ACL anthology page, website, self-declared reviewer experience, 1st & 2nd track preferences, etc. to (1) provide information sheets on reviewers to SACs and ACs, as a tool when manually correcting the automatic reviewer-paper assignments,<br />
(2) to manually balance the reviewer pools among tracks, and (3) to filter the list of reviewers based on whether the reviewer (i) had superiority PhD-student or higher, (ii) had reviewed for at least 4 previous *ACL conference, and (iii) had a minimum number of ACL anthology publications.<br />
To counterbalance (3ii), we provided SACs with a list of novice reviewers and introduced our a Reviewer Mentoring Program (see below).<br />
<br />
'''''New Reviewer Mentoring Program'''''<br />
<br />
Given the rapid growth of NLP in terms of number of papers and new students, it is very important for our community to mentor and train our new reviewers. ACL2020 has launched a pilot program which calls for each AC to mentor at least one novice reviewer. Ultimately, the goal is to provide long-needed mentoring to new reviewers. At the very least, this process will inform ACL on constructing a reviewer mentoring program that is more scalable in the future. For most tracks, each AC was paired with at least a mentee (often a Ph.D. student, or a junior researcher who has just graduated). The AC would work with the mentee, provide feedback and help the mentee to improve the quality of his/her reviews. Close to 300 junior researchers were selected to participate in this program. We will put together a detailed report on this program after the conference. <br />
<br />
'''''Updated Review Form with New Rating Scale and Evaluation Item'''''<br />
<br />
We have separate review forms for regular tracks and the theme track. Our review forms were built upon the form from EMNLP-IJCNLP2019 and ACL2019 with '''''two new extensions'''''. <br />
(1) We have removed the rating 3 (ambivalent) from the overall recommendation as we would like reviewers to take a stand on whether the paper is above the borderline (3.5) or below the borderline (2.5). The reason for this change is that ambivalent cases often take a long time to discuss. By taking a stand, reviewers would provide more informative feedback for AC/SAC to make a recommendation. ICLR 2020 has adopted similar rating strategies (although with a different scale). <br />
(2) As ethical concerns and societal impacts are an important consideration for NLP research, we have explicitly ask reviewers to evaluate ethical implications of each submission. On the review form, we ask reviewers whether there are any ethical concerns about a submission that the area chairs and program chairs should be aware of. We also encourage reviewers to flag such concerns to the authors.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Other Efforts'''<br />
<br />
'''''Initial submission reviews and desk rejects'''''<br />
<br />
We have received a record number of 3,429 submissions (approximately a 15% increase over ACL2019). All papers were carefully inspected to check for violations of ACL policies (ranging from formatting to anonymization to use of supplementary material). Similar to ACL2019, we used assistants to speed up an otherwise long process. All issues identified by assistants were cross-examined by two PCs. We noticed that many papers did not strictly follow the ACL style sheet. We have thus been lenient in terms of margin, line numbers, fonts, etc formatting issues. As a result 29 submissions were desk rejected for violating ACL policies on anonymity, page length, double blind review, etc. <br />
<br />
'''''Manual adjustment of submission tracks'''''<br />
<br />
Many papers were not submitted to the right track where they could receive reviews from most relevant reviewers. SACs were instructed to flag the papers that should be moved to a different track. We went through every single suggestion and moved papers around if warranted. This turned out to be a major effort. In total, 500-600 papers were moved across tracks as a result. <br />
<br />
'''''Manual adjustment of AC and reviewer assignment'''''<br />
<br />
As the automatic reviewer assignment is not perfect, SACs did much manual work adjusting AC assignments as well as reviewer assignments. This effort varied among tracks. Given the current set up in Softconf, ACs’ roles are pretty limited. ACs are essentially meta-reviewers who do not have access to the reviewer accounts, and therefore, cannot add reviewers, nor make reviewer assignments, nor contact reviewers directly. We have given this feedback to softconf and hopefully the system will be updated to support extended AC roles for future conferences. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''''Communication'''''<br />
<br />
Because of several new initiatives implemented this year, extensive efforts have been made to communicate these changes to SACs, ACs, reviewers, as well as authors. Besides direct emails, we have used blog postings as well as twitters as our additional communication channels assisted by the publicity chair and the web chairs.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Submission Status'''<br />
<br />
We have received 3,429 papers (2244 long and 1185 short) have been submitted. Here is the distribution of long, short and total papers per track.<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics: 49 39 88<br />
<li> Computational Social Science and Social Media: 73 38 111<br />
<li> Dialogue and Interactive Systems: 204 71 275<br />
<li> Discourse and Pragmatics: 36 20 56<br />
<li> Ethics and NLP: 30 22 52<br />
<li> Generation: 142 71 213<br />
<li> Information Extraction: 159 83 242<br />
<li> Information Retrieval and Text Mining: 55 41 96<br />
<li> Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP: 110 54 164<br />
<li> Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond: 69 24 93<br />
<li> Machine Learning for NLP: 186 109 295<br />
<li> Machine Translation: 158 104 262<br />
<li> NLP Applications: 169 99 268<br />
<li> Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation: 38 15 53<br />
<li> Question Answering: 109 63 172<br />
<li> Resources and Evaluation: 88 48 136<br />
<li> Semantics: Lexical: 57 37 94<br />
<li> Semantics: Sentence Level: 66 29 95<br />
<li> Semantics: Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics: 81 31 112<br />
<li> Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining: 112 66 178<br />
<li> Speech and Multimodality: 38 27 65<br />
<li> Summarization: 90 37 127<br />
<li> Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing: 47 28 75<br />
<li> Theme: 67 26 93<br />
<li> Theory and Formalism in NLP (Linguistic and Mathematical): 11 3 14<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
'''Summary of Timelines'''<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Oct 15 - Nov 30: SACs invite ACs and reviewers <br />
<li>Nov 25: Reviewer profiles completed<br />
<li>Dec 09: ACL Paper Submission Deadline (long and short papers) <br />
<li>Dec 10 - Jan 14: initial submission reviews and desk rejects; automatic reviewer assignment and COI detection; manual adjustment of assignment; <br />
<li>Jan 17 - Feb 07: Review Period<br />
<li>Feb 08 - Feb 11: ACs chase late reviews <br />
<li>Feb 12 - Feb 17: Author Response<br />
<li>Feb 18 - Feb 25: Reviewer Discussion Period (ACs lead discussion), ACs provide feedback to mentees. <br />
<li>Feb 25 - Mar 03: ACs produce meta-reviews<br />
<li>Mar 03 - Mar 10: SACs rank papers based on meta-reviews and make recommendations to PC chairs<br />
<li>Mar 11 - Apr 02: PC chairs make decisions (they may consult SACs during this time); SACs and ACs recommend best reviewers<br />
<li>Apr 03 - Accept / Reject Notifications<br />
<li>Apr 24: Camera ready<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
'''List of SAC/ACs and recruitment'''<br />
<br />
Following ACL2019, we have adopted a hierarchical structure where each area is chaired by one or two senior ACs, who are supported by a group of area chairs. We have a total of 40 Senior Area Chairs and 299 Area Chairs. <br />
'''''Recruitment''''': We individually created preference lists for SACs, discussed these and made decisions. ACs were selected by SACs.<br />
<br />
Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Emily Prud’hommeaux<br />
<li>ACs: Cassandra L. Jacobs, Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Masoud Rouhizadeh, Serguei Pakhomov, Yevgeni Berzak<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Computational Social Science and Social Media<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Tim Baldwin, Nikolaos Aletras<br />
<li>ACs: A. Seza Dögruöz, Afshin Rahimi, Alice Oh, Brendan O'Connor, Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro, David Bamman, David Jurgens, David Mimno, Diana Inkpen, Diyi Yang, Eiji Aramaki, Jacob Eisenstein, Jonathan K. Kummerfeld, Kalina Bontcheva<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Dialogue and Interactive Systems<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Jason Williams, Mari Ostendorf<br />
<li>ACs: Alborz Geramifard, Amanda Stent, Asli Celikyilmaz, Casey Kennington, David Traum, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Gabriel Skantze, Helen Hastie, Heriberto Cuayahuitl, Kai Yu, Kallirroi Georgila, Luciana Benotti, Luis Fernando D'Haro, Nina Dethlefs, Ryuichiro Higashinaka, Stefan Ultes, Sungjin Lee, Tsung-Hsien Wen, Y-Lan Boureau, Yun-Nung Chen, Zhou Yu<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Discourse and Pragmatics<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Annie Louis (taking over for Diane Litman)<br />
<li>ACs: Chloé Braud, Junyi Jessy Li, Manfred Stede, Shafiq Joty, Sujian Li, Yangfeng Ji<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Ethics and NLP<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Dirk Hovy<br />
<li>ACs: Alan W Black, Emily M. Bender, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Yulia Tsvetkov<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Generation<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Wei Xu, Alexander Rush<br />
<li>ACs: John Wieting, Laura Perez-Beltrachini, Lu Wang, Miltiadis Allamanis, Mohit Iyyer, Nanyun Peng, Sam Wiseman, Shashi Narayan, Sudha Rao, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Xiaojun Wan, Xipeng Qiu<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Information Extraction<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Doug Downey, Hoifun Poon<br />
<li>ACs: Alan Ritter, Chandra Bhagavatula, Gerard de Melo, Kai-Wei Chang, Marius Pasca, Mo Yu, Radu Florian, Ruihong Huang, Sameer Singh, Satoshi Sekine, Snigdha Chaturvedi, Sumithra Velupillai, Timothy Miller, Vivek Srikumar, William Yang Wang, Yunyao Li<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Information Retrieval and Text Mining<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Chin-Yew Lin, Nazli Goharian<br />
<li>ACs: Andrew Yates, Arman Cohan, Bing Qin, Craig Macdonald, Danai Koutra, Elad Yom-Tov, Franco Maria Nardini, Kalliopi Zervanou, Luca Soldaini, Nicola Tonellotto, Pu-Jen Cheng, Seung-won Hwang, Yangqiu Song, Yansong Feng<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Yoav Goldberg<br />
<li>ACs: Adina Williams, Afra Alishahi, Douwe Kiela, Grzegorz Chrupała, Marco Baroni, Yonatan Belinkov, Zachary C. Lipton<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Yoav Artzi<br />
<li>ACs: Angeliki Lazaridou, Dan Goldwasser, Jason Baldridge, Jesse Thomason, Lisa Anne Hendricks, Parisa Kordjamshidi, Raffaella Bernardi, Vicente Ordonez, Yonatan Bisk<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Machine Learning for NLP<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Andre Martins, Isabelle Augenstein<br />
<li>ACs: Ankur Parikh, Anna Rumshisky, Bruno Martins, Caio Corro, Dani Yogatama, Daniel Beck, Dipanjan Das, Edouard Grave, Emma Strubell, Gholamreza Haffari, Ivan Titov, Joseph Le Roux, Jun Suzuki, Kevin Gimpel, Michael Auli, Ming-Wei Chang, Shay B. Cohen, Vlad Niculae, Waleed Ammar, Wilker Aziz, Yejin Choi, Zita Marinho, Zornitsa Kozareva<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Machine Translation<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Marine Carpuat, Alexandra Birch<br />
<li>ACs: Ann Clifton, Antonio Toral, Atsushi Fujita, Boxing Chen, Carolina Scarton, Chi-kiu Lo, Christian Hardmeier, Deyi Xiong, Franois Yvon, George Foster, Jiajun Zhang, Jrg Tiedemann, Maja Popovič, Marcello Federico, Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt, Marco Turchi, Marta R. Costa-jussà, Matt Post, Nadir Durrani, Qun Liu, Rico Sennrich, Taro Watanabe, Yuki Arase, Yvette Graham<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Multidisciplinary and Area Chair COI<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Michael Strube<br />
<li>ACs: Anders Søgaard, David Schlangen, Katrin Erk, Kentaro Inui, Kevin Duh, Massimo Poesio, Mausam, Pascal Denis<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
NLP Applications<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Preslav Nakov, Karin Verspoor<br />
<li>ACs: Alexander Fraser, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Aoife Cahill, Daniel Cer, Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha, Giovanni Da San Martino, Hassan Sajjad, Kevin Cohen, Marcos Zampieri, Michel Galley, Min Zhang, Pierre Zweigenbaum, Razvan Bunescu, Sara Rosenthal, Tristan Naumann, Vincent Ng, Wei Gao, Wei Lu<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Kemal Oflazer<br />
<li>ACs: Christo Kirov, David R. Mortensen, Kareem Darwish, Reut Tsarfaty, Yue Zhang, Özlem Çetinoğlu<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Question Answering<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Eugene Agichtein, Alessandro Moschitti<br />
<li>ACs: Avi Sil, Dina Demner-Fushman, Evangelos Kanoulas, Gerhard Weikum, Idan Szpektor, Jimmy Lin, Oleg Rokhlenko, Sanda Harabagiu, Wen-tau Yih, William Cohen<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Resources and Evaluation<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Nathan Schneider, Barbara Plank<br />
<li>ACs: Allyson Ettinger, Annemarie Friedrich, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Arianna Bisazza, Claire Bonial, Daniel Zeman, Emmanuele Chersoni, Ines Rehbein, Lonneke van der Plas, Maria Liakata, Sara Tonelli, Sarvnaz Karimi, Tim Van de Cruys, Vered Shwartz, Walid Magdy, Çağri Çöltekin<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Semantics: Lexical<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Ekaterina Shutova, Aline Villavicencio<br />
<li>ACs: Alessandro Lenci, Anna Feldman, Aurélie Herbelot, Beata Beigman Klebanov, Carlos Ramisch, Chris Biemann, Enrico Santus, Fabio Massimo Zanzotto, Helen Yannakoudakis, Ivan Vulič, Jose Camacho-Collados, Marianna Apidianaki, Paul Cook, Saif Mohammad<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Semantics: Sentence Level<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Mohit Bansal<br />
<li>ACs: Andreas Vlachos, Christopher Potts, Danqi Chen, Eunsol Choi, He He, Jonathan Berant, Kevin Small, Marek Rei, Sebastian Ruder, Siva Reddy, Swabha Swayamdipta, Thomas Wolf, Veselin Stoyanov<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Semantics: Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Sam Bowman<br />
<li>ACs: Anette Frank, Eduardo Blanco, Edward Grefenstette, Jacob Andreas, Jonathan May, Kenton Lee, Lasha Abzianidze, Luheng He, Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Rachel Rudinger, Roy Schwartz, Valeria de Paiva<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Smaranda Muresan, Swapna Somasundaran<br />
<li>ACs: Bing Liu, Claire Cardie, Elena Musi, Iryna Gurevych, Julian Brooke, Lun-Wei Ku, Marie-Francine Moens, Minlie Huang, Paolo Rosso, Roman Klinger, Serena Villata, Soujanya Poria, Thamar Solorio, Yulan He<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Speech and Multimodality<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Eric Fosler-Lussier<br />
<li>ACs: Bhuvana Ramabhadran, Florian Metze, Gerasimos Potamianos, Hamid Palangi, Martha Larson<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Summarization<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Fei Liu<br />
<li>ACs: Caiming Xiong, Giuseppe Carenini, Katja Markert, Manabu Okumura, Michael Elhadad, Ramesh Nallapati, Sebastian Gehrmann, Wenjie Li, Xiaodan Zhu, Yang Gao<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: David Chiang<br />
<li>ACs: Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez, Emily Pitler, Liang Huang, Miguel Ballesteros, Miryam de Lhoneux, Slav Petrov, Stephan Oepen, Weiwei Sun<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
THEME<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Marilyn Walker (taking over for Ellen Riloff)<br />
<li>ACs: Donia Scott, Johan Bos, Luke Zettlemoyer, Philipp Koehn, Raymond Mooney<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Theory and Formalism in NLP (Linguistic and Mathematical)<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Daniel Gildea<br />
<li>ACs: Alexander Koller, Laura Kallmeyer, Marco Kuhlmann<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
== Local Organisation Chairs ==<br />
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL<br />
<br />
With advice from:<br />
<br />
Jianfeng Gao, Microsoft Research<br />
<br />
Luke Zettlemoyer, University of Washington<br />
<br />
ACL 2020 in Seattle is shaping up nicely, with a very dedicated group of organizers working tirelessly and the Office is offering advice as well as acting as Local Arrangements Chair. Dan and others from some of the committees will be joining me in mid-March to make a site visit to Seattle so the GC, PCs, D&I chair, etc can envision the conference and flow and make adjustments as needed. This will also be valuable for planning the av and streaming into a second room for all plenary sessions and for making remote presentations. Here are some of the main items of progress being made:<br />
<br />
• Besides having the Hyatt Regency Hotel (the venue) contract signed quite a while ago, I am now negotiating with PSAV for a quotation to provide all audio/visual, sound systems and other AV needs<br />
<br />
• I have already negotiated a very reduced internet quote, with PSAV charging a 1-day rate for all 6 days of the conference<br />
<br />
• I am working with the hotel to develop the food/beverage menu for the conference but need to wait for their spring/summer menu to be available in a few weeks. The menu will be developed with vegan, vegetarian, halal, kosher, gluten-free, and allergies in mind and well identified.<br />
<br />
• I have successfully negotiated a limited number of rooms for $139 at a second hotel to serve as the Student Hotel (the conference hotel is $249). Both are excellent prices for the Seattle area.<br />
<br />
• I am working with the company who builds the registration form to get that started<br />
<br />
• I have created and shared a tentative space/internet/av spreadsheet, complete with all space assignments, and have been working closely with the D&I and other chairs to be sure their needs are met either within the meeting space floorplans or budgetarily.<br />
<br />
• Currently, I am amassing information to update the conference website with lots of Participant information as well as continually updating the webmaster with sponsorship commitments and other things.<br />
<br />
• In March, I will begin merging all quotes and estimates into a working budget which will be used to set registration fees.<br />
<br />
• The Museum of Pop Culture (MoPop), the social event venue, contract was signed long ago and recently, I have negotiated the catering contract with Wolfgang Puck, MoPop’s only accepted catering firm. The menu will mostly be vegetarian/vegan with salmon and a meat for those who want it.<br />
<br />
• Luke has found some suggested places for our Recognition Dinner; we are working on making a final decision<br />
<br />
• Luke and/or his students are beginning to pull together a Restaurant Guide for the app, website and handbook.<br />
<br />
My estimate is for up to 2800 attendees and we are preparing for about 3000, just in case. While some in our community are concerned that we may consider either cutting off or capping registrations, I do not think this will be necessary. Comparisons with other conference that are capping attendance are not well founded since we are not growing to the 5,000-10,000 attendance. <br />
I expect the next month or two will be extremely busy in setting all plans in place and opening registration.<br />
<br />
== Tutorial Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Agata Savary, University of Tours, France<br />
<br />
Yue Zhang, Westlake University, Hangzhou, China<br />
<br />
The call, submission, reviewing and selection of tutorials was coordinated jointly for 4 conferences: ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP. <br />
<br />
Before drafting the call, we collected lists of tutorials offered within the past 4 years. We analysed previous calls for tutorials and reports from tutorial chairs (from [https://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2016Q3_Reports:_Tutorial_Chairs 2016], [https://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2017Q3_Reports:_Tutorial_Chairs 2017], [https://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2018Q3_Reports:_Tutorial_Chairs 2018] and [http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2019Q1_Reports:_ACL_2019 2019]). We consulted previous tutorial chairs with a questionnaire including questions about: the number of submissions, encouraging submissions on specific topics or from specific lecturers, the review procedure, the evaluation criteria, the post-tutorial availability of the slides/codes, and lessons learned from tutorial coordination. We also discussed the publication of slides and video recordings from future tutorials with the persons in charge of the ACL Anthology. As a result of these steps, we created two new sections for the [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Conference_Handbook ACL Conference Handbook] (future chairs might consider updating these documents yearly): <br />
* the list of [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Past_tutorials past tutorials] at ACL, COLING, EACL, EMNLP, and NAACL in 2016-2019<br />
* a [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Tutorial_chair_handbook tutorial chair handbook]<br />
<br />
The final [https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/joint-call-tutorial-proposals-aclaacl-ijcnlpemnlpcoling-2020 call] differs from previous calls in several aspects: (i) the expectations about tutorial proposals were made clearer, (ii) following the central ACL decision, the teachers' payment policy was replaced by a fee-waiving policy, (iii) the required submission details include two new items: diversity considerations and agreement for open access publication of slides, codes, data and video recordings, (iv) the evaluation criteria (see below) are announced.<br />
<br />
We recruited a review committee of 19 members, including the 8 tutorial chairs and 11 external members selected for their large understanding of the NLP domain and a good experience in reviewing and/or tutorial teaching:<br />
<br />
'''Review Committee'''<br />
* Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne, Australia) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Daniel Beck (University of Melbourne, Australia) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Emily M. Bender (University of Washington, WA, USA)<br />
* Erik Cambria (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)<br />
* Gaël Dias (University of Caen Normandie, France)<br />
* Stefan Evert (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)<br />
* Yang Liu (Tsinghua University, Beijing, China)<br />
* Agata Savary (University of Tours, France) - ACL 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* João Sedoc (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA)<br />
* Lucia Specia (Sheffield University, UK) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair <br />
* Xu SUN (Peking University, China)<br />
* Yulia Tsvetkov (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA)<br />
* Benjamin Van Durme (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Aline Villavicencio (University of Sheffield, UK and Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Taro Watanabe (Google, Inc., Tokyo, Japan)<br />
* Aaron Steven White (University of Rochester, NY, USA)<br />
* Fei Xia (University of Washington, WA, USA) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Yue Zhang (Westlake University, Hangzhou, China) - ACL 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Meishan Zhang (Tianjin University, China)<br />
<br />
In total, we received 43 submissions for the 4 conferences. Each reviewer was assigned 6-7 proposals and each proposal received 3 reviews. The selection criteria included: clarity and preparedness, novelty or timely character of the topic, lecturers' experience, likely audience interest, open access of the teaching material, diversity aspects (multilingualism, gender, age and country of the lecturers), and compatibility with the preferred venues. <br />
We accepted 31 proposals. <br />
<br />
The decision making was handled via an online meeting of the 8 tutorial chairs. In particular, the selection of tutorials for each conference was done via the expression of interest of the tutorial chairs on a round-robin basis. Some slight adjustments were also performed after the meeting to better fit the authors' preferences. In total, 8, 8, 8 and 7 proposals were selected for ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP, respectively. Upon the announcement the results, 2 of the proposals accepted for AACL-IJCNLP were withdrawn.<br />
<br />
The submission, review, selection and collection of final material for all tutorials was handled via a dedicated SoftConf space, shared by the 4 coordinating conferences. After the selection of proposals, a separate track was created on SoftConf for each conference. The final submission page (one per conference) was set up so as to collect all the necessary data including notably: the tutorial slides, URLs for course material (if any), printable material (if any) and agreement for open access publication.<br />
<br />
The final selection for ACL 2020 consists of the following 8 tutorials of 3 hours each (each of them had ACL as the preferred or the second preferred venue):<br />
<br />
'''Morning Tutorials'''<br />
<br />
'''T1: Interpretability and Analysis in Neural NLP''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Yonatan Belinkov, Sebastian Gehrmann and Ellie Pavlick<br/><br />
While deep learning has transformed the NLP field and impacted the larger computational linguistics community, the rise of neural networks is stained by their opaque nature: It is challenging to interpret the inner workings of neural network models, and explicate their behavior. Therefore, in the last few years, an increasingly large body of work has been devoted to the analysis and interpretation of neural network models in NLP.<br/><br />
This body of work is so far lacking a common framework and methodology. Moreover, approaching the analysis of modern neural networks can be difficult for newcomers to the field. This tutorial aims to fill this gap and introduce the nascent field of interpretability and analysis of neural networks in NLP.<br/><br />
The tutorial covers the main lines of analysis work, such as probing classifier, behavior studies and test suites, psycholinguistic methods, visualizations, adversarial examples, and other methods. We highlight not only the most commonly applied analysis methods, but also the specific limitations and shortcomings of current approaches, in order to inform participants where to focus future efforts.<br />
<br />
'''T2: Multi-modal Information Extraction from Text, Semi-structured, and Tabular Data on the Web''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Xin Luna Dong, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Colin Lockard and Prashant Shiralkar<br/><br />
The World Wide Web contains vast quantities of textual information in several forms: unstructured text, template-based semi-structured webpages (which present data in key-value pairs and lists), and tables. Methods for extracting information from these sources and converting it to a structured form have been a target of research from the natural language processing (NLP), data mining, and database communities. While these researchers have largely separated extraction from web data into different problems based on the modality of the data, they have faced similar problems such as learning with limited labeled data, defining (or avoiding defining) ontologies, making use of prior knowledge, and scaling solutions to deal with the size of the Web.<br/><br />
In this tutorial we take a holistic view toward information extraction, exploring the commonalities in the challenges and solutions developed to address these different forms of text. We will explore the approaches targeted at unstructured text that largely rely on learning syntactic or semantic textual patterns, approaches targeted at semi-structured documents that learn to identify structural patterns in the template, and approaches targeting web tables which rely heavily on entity linking and type information.<br/><br />
While these different data modalities have largely been considered separately in the past, recent research has started taking a more inclusive approach toward textual extraction, in which the multiple signals offered by textual, layout, and visual clues are combined into a single extraction model made possible by new deep learning approaches. At the same time, trends within purely textual extraction have shifted toward full-document understanding rather than considering sentences as independent units. With this in mind, it is worth considering the information extraction problem as a whole to motivate solutions that harness textual semantics along with visual and semi-structured layout information. We will discuss these approaches and suggest avenues for future work.<br />
<br />
'''T3: Reviewing Natural Language Processing Research''' (introductory)<br/><br />
Kevin Cohen, Karën Fort, Margot Mieskes and Aurélie Névéol<br/><br />
As the demand for reviewing grows, so must the pool of reviewers. As the [http://www.livecongress.it/aol/indexSA.php?id=E2EAED7D&ticket= survey] presented by Graham Neubig at the 2019 ACL showed, a considerable number of reviewers are junior researchers, who might lack the experience and expertise necessary for high-quality reviews. Some of them might not have the environment or lack opportunities that allow them to learn the skills necessary. A tutorial on reviewing for the NLP community might increase reviewers’ confidence, as well as the quality of the reviews. This introductory tutorial will cover the goals, processes, and evaluation of reviewing research papers in natural language processing.<br />
<br />
'''T4: Stylized Text Generation: Approaches and Applications''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Lili Mou and Olga Vechtomova<br/><br />
Text generation has played an important role in various applications of natural language processing (NLP), and kn recent studies, researchers are paying increasing attention to modeling and manipulating the style of the generation text, which we call stylized text generation. In this tutorial, we will provide a comprehensive literature review in this direction. We start from the definition of style and different settings of stylized text generation, illustrated with various applications. Then, we present different settings of stylized generation, such as parallel supervised, style label-supervised, and unsupervised. In each setting, we delve deep into machine learning methods, including embedding learning techniques to represent style}, adversarial learning and reinforcement learning with cycle consistency to match content but to distinguish different styles. We also introduce current approaches of evaluating stylized text generation systems. We conclude our tutorial by presenting the challenges of stylized text generation and discussing future directions, such as small-data training, non-categorical style modeling, and a generalized scope of style transfer (e.g., controlling the syntax as a style).<br />
<br />
'''Afternoon Tutorials'''<br />
<br />
'''T5: Achieving Common Ground in Multi-modal Dialogue''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Malihe Alikhani and Matthew Stone<br/><br />
All communication aims at achieving common ground (grounding): interlocutors can work together effectively only with mutual beliefs about what the state of the world is, about what their goals are, and about how they plan to make their goals a reality. Computational dialogue research offers some classic results on grouding, which unfortunately offer scant guidance to the design of grounding modules and behaviors in cutting-edge systems. In this tutorial, we focus on three main topic areas: 1) grounding in human-human communication; 2) grounding in dialogue systems; and 3) grounding in multi-modal interactive systems, including image-oriented conversations and human-robot interactions. We highlight a number of achievements of recent computational research in coordinating complex content, show how these results lead to rich and challenging opportunities for doing grounding in more flexible and powerful ways, and canvass relevant insights from the literature on human--human conversation. We expect that the tutorial will be of interest to researchers in dialogue systems, computational semantics and cognitive modeling, and hope that it will catalyze research and system building that more directly explores the creative, strategic ways conversational agents might be able to seek and offer evidence about their understanding of their interlocutors.<br />
<br />
'''T6: Commonsense Reasoning for Natural Language Processing''' (introductory)<br/><br />
Maarten Sap, Vered Shwartz, Antoine Bosselut, Dan Roth and Yejin Choi<br/><br />
In our tutorial, we (1) outline the various types of commonsense (e.g., physical, social), and (2) discuss techniques to gather and represent commonsense knowledge, while highlighting the challenges specific to this type of knowledge (e.g., reporting bias). We will then (3) discuss the types of commonsense knowledge captured by modern NLP systems (e.g., large pretrained language models), and (4) present ways to measure systems' commonsense reasoning abilities. We finish with (5) a discussion of various ways in which commonsense reasoning can be used to improve performance on NLP tasks, exemplified by an (6) interactive session on integrating commonsense into a downstream task.<br />
<br />
'''T7: Integrating Ethics into the NLP Curriculum''' (introductory)<br/><br />
Emily M. Bender, Dirk Hovy and Alexandra Schofield<br/><br />
Our goal in this tutorial is to empower NLP researchers and practitioners with tools and resources to teach others about how to ethically apply NLP techniques. Our tutorial will present both high-level strategies for developing an ethics-oriented curriculum, based on experience and best practices, as well as specific sample exercises that can be brought to a classroom. We plan to make this a highly interactive work session culminating in a shared online resource page that pools lesson plans, assignments, exercise ideas, reading suggestions, and ideas from the attendees. We consider three primary topics with our session that frequently underlie ethical issues in NLP research: Dual use, bias and privacy.<br/><br />
In this setting, a key lesson is that there is no single approach to ethical NLP: each project requires thoughtful consideration about what steps can be taken to best support people affected by that project. However, we can learn (and teach) what kinds of issues to be aware of and what kinds of strategies are available for mitigating harm. To teach this process, we apply and promote interactive exercises that provide an opportunity to ideate, discuss, and reflect. We plan to facilitate this in a way that encourages positive discussion, emphasizing the creation of ideas for the future instead of negative opinions of previous work.<br />
<br />
'''T8: Recent Advances in Open-Domain Question Answering''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Danqi Chen and Scott Wen-tau Yih<br/><br />
Open-domain (textual) question answering (QA), the task of finding answers to open-domain questions by searching a large collection of documents, has been a long-standing problem in NLP, information retrieval (IR) and related fields (Voorhees et al., 1999; Moldovan et al., 2000; Brill et al.,2002; Ferrucci et al., 2010). Traditional QA systems were usually constructed as a pipeline, consisting of many different components such as question processing, document/passage retrieval and answer processing. With the rapid development of neural reading comprehension (Chen, 2018), modern open-domain QA systems have been restructured by combining traditional IR techniques and neural reading comprehension models (Chen et al., 2017; Yang et al., 2019) or even implemented in a fully end-to-end fashion (Lee et al., 2019; Seo et al., 2019). While the system architecture has been drastically simplified, two technical challenges remain critical:(1) “Retriever”: finding documents that (might)contain an answer from a large collection of documents; (2) “Reader”: finding the answer in a given paragraph or a document.<br/><br />
In this tutorial, we aim to provide a comprehensive and coherent overview of recent advances in this line of research. We will start by first giving a brief historical background of open-domain question answering, discussing the basic setup and core technical challenges of the research problem.The focus will then shift to modern techniques and resources proposed for open-domain QA, including the basics of latest neural reading comprehension systems, new datasets and models. The scope will also be broadened to cover the information retrieval component on how to effectively identify passages relevant to the questions. Moreover, in-depth discussions will be given on the use of traditional / neural IR modules, as well as the trade-offs between modular design and end-to-end training. If time permits, we also plan to discuss some hybrid approaches for answering questions using both text and large knowledge bases (e.g. (Sun et al., 2018)) and give a critical review on how structured data complements the information from unstructured text.<br/><br />
At the end of our tutorial, we will discuss some important questions, including (1) How much progress have we made compared to the QA systems developed in the last decade?(2) What are the main challenges and limitations of cur-rent approaches? (3) How to trade off the efficiency (computational time and memory requirements) and accuracy in the deep learning era? We hope that our tutorial will not only serve as a useful resource for the audience to efficiently acquire the up-to-date knowledge, but also provide new perspectives to stimulate the advances of open-domain QA research in the next phase.<br />
<br />
== Workshop Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Milica Gašić, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf<br />
<br />
Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Amazon Alexa AI<br />
<br />
Ves Stoyanov, Facebook AI<br />
<br />
<br />
This year the joint call for workshop proposals for ACL/EMNLP/COLING/AACL-IJCNLP received 95 proposals (compared to 84 in 2019 and 58 in 2018). Out of the 95, 71 were accepted between the four venues. ACL 2020 will feature 19 workshops.<br />
<br />
The workshops will be held on July 5th, 9th and 10th.<br />
<br />
The 19 ACL 2020 workshops were selected via a joint call and review committee comprised of all the workshop chairs of the 2020 editions of ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, EMNLP and COLING. The workshop review process followed the procedure of the previous year, namely: Each proposal was reviewed independently by at least two committee members via softconf. Each committee member reviewed 19 proposals this year. To aid the review process, we followed previous years’ process and the committee members conducted bidding to ensure expertise alignment as well as avoid COIs. <br />
<br />
After reviewing, we made a joint final acceptance/rejection decision. We discussed each proposal individually at an online meeting that included the workshop chairs from all conferences.<br />
<br />
Before considering the bulk of the submitted proposals, we note that there are some workshops and co-located events that the ACL organization pre-admits. This year that turned out to be only the Widening NLP, as the other such workshops selected other conferences. <br />
<br />
First choice allocation was particularly difficult, as 54% of the workshops indicated ACL as their first choice, see details below. <br />
<br />
The overall high number of submission resulted in extra work for local organizers and general chairs across all three major venues, who tried to get additional workshop rooms, while keeping a healthy growth rate. This meant that some workshops had to be admitted in different format to the one outlined in the proposal.<br />
<br />
Additionally, we performed an online survey and received more than 700 responses from past conference and workshop attendees. We designed the workshop program at each of the three conferences to optimize workshop location preferences as much as possible, as well as diversify topics and organizers. We used the information from the survey solely for workshop size allocation.<br />
<br />
Details on venue preference out of 95 submissions:<br />
<br />
First choice:<br />
<br />
54% (51 w) ACL 2020<br />
25% (24 w) COLING 2020<br />
16% (15 w) EMNLP-IJCNLP 2020<br />
4% (4 w) AACL-IJCNLP 2020<br />
1% (1 w) No Preference<br />
<br />
Second choice:<br />
<br />
51% (46 w) EMNLP 2020<br />
19% (19 w) ACL 2020<br />
15% (15 w) COLING 2020<br />
11% (11 w) No Preference<br />
4% (4 w) AACL-IJCNLP 2020<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Here are the 19 selected workshops / colocated conferences for ACL 2019. All links to the workshops webpages can be found in https://acl2020.org/program/workshops/<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Two day workshop (9th and 10th July):'''<br />
<br />
*International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT).<br />
**Marcello Federico, Alexander Waibel, Jiatao Gu, Kevin Knight, Will Lewis, Satoshi Nakamura, Hermann Ney, Jan Niehues, Sebastian Stüker and Marco Turchi<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Workshop to be held on 5th July:'''<br />
<br />
*''The Fourth Widening NLP Workshop focuses on efforts to promote and support ideas and voices of underrepresented groups in Natural Language Processing.''<br />
**Samira Shaikh, Rossana da Cunha Silva, Ann Clifton, Erika Doggett and Ryan Georgi<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Workshops to be held on 9th July:'''<br />
<br />
*''NLP for Conversational AI''<br />
**Tsung-Hsien Wen, Asli Celikyilmaz, Iñigo Casanueva, Mihail Eric, Anuj Kumar, Alexandros Papangelis, Rushin Shah and Zhou Yu<br />
<br />
*''BioNLP 2020''<br />
**Dina Demner-Fushman, Kevin Cohen, Sophia Ananiadou and Jun'ichi Tsujii<br />
<br />
*''The third workshop on Fact Extraction and VERification''<br />
**Christos Christodoulopoulos, James Thorne, Andreas Vlachos, Oana Cocarascu and Arpit Mittal<br />
<br />
*''IWPT 2020: The 16th International Conference on Parsing Technologies''<br />
**Yuji Matsumoto, Stephan Oepen, Kenji Sagae, Anders Søgaard, Weiwei Sun and Reut Tsarfaty<br />
<br />
*''2nd Workshop on Figurative Language Processing''<br />
**Beata Beigman Klebanov, Ekaterina Shutova, Patricia Lichtenstein, Smaranda Muresan, Anna Feldman, Chee Wee (Ben) Leong and Debanjan Ghosh<br />
<br />
*''The 1st Joint Workshop on Narrative Understanding, Storylines, and Events (NUSE)''<br />
**Claire Bonial, Tommaso Caselli, Snigdha Chaturvedi, Elizabeth Clark, Ruihong Huang, Ben Miller, Mohit Iyyer, Alejandro Jaimes, Heng Ji, Lara Martin, Teruko Mitamura, Nanyun Peng and Joel Tetreault<br />
<br />
*''Workshop on Advances in Language and Vision Research''<br />
**Xin Wang, Jesse Thomason, Ronghang Hu, Xinlei Chen, Peter Anderson, Qi Wu, Asli Celikyilmaz, Jason Baldridge and William Yang Wang<br />
<br />
*''5th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP-2020)''<br />
**Emma Strubell, Spandana Gella, Marek Rei, Johannes Welbl, Fabio Petroni, Patrick Lewis, NOTUSED NOTUSED, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Kyunghyun Cho, Edward Grefenstette, Karl Moritz Hermann, Laura Rimell, Chris Dyer and Isabelle Augenstein<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Workshops to be held on 10th July:<br />
'''<br />
<br />
*''Natural Language Interfaces: Challenges and Promises''<br />
**Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Yu Su, Huan Sun and Scott Wen-tau Yih<br />
<br />
*''The 4th Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation (WNGT)''<br />
**Alexandra Birch, Graham Neubig, Andrew Finch, Hiroaki Hayashi, Kenneth Heafield, Ioannis Konstas, Yusuke Oda and Xian Li<br />
<br />
*''The 15th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA15)''<br />
**Ekaterina Kochmar, Jill Burstein, Claudia Leacock, Nitin Madnani, Ildiko Pilan, Helen Yannakoudakis and Torsten Zesch<br />
<br />
*''SIGMORPHON 2020''<br />
**Garrett Nicolai and Kyle Gorman<br />
<br />
*''NLP for Medical Conversations''<br />
**Parminder Bhatia, Chaitanya Shivade, Mona Diab, byron wallace, Rashmi Gangadharaiah, nan du, Izhak Shafran and Steven Lin<br />
<br />
*''The Second Workshop on e-Commerce and NLP (ECNLP 2)''<br />
**Shervin Malmasi, Eugene Agichtein, Oleg Rokhlenko, Nicola Ueffing and Ido Guy<br />
<br />
*''Eighth International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media (SocialNLP 2020)''<br />
**Lun-Wei Ku and Cheng-Te Li<br />
<br />
*''The First Workshop on Simultaneous Translation (AutoSimTrans)''<br />
**Hua Wu, Colin Cherry, Jiatao Gu, Liang Huang, Zhongjun He, Mark Liberman and Yang Liu<br />
<br />
*''Second Grand-Challenge and Workshop on Human Multimodal Language (Challenge-HML)''<br />
**AmirAli Bagher Zadeh, Louis-Philippe Morency, Paul Pu Liang, Soujanya Poria and Ying Shen<br />
<br />
== Student Research Workshop Chairs and Faculty Advisors==<br />
<br />
'''Student Research Workshop Co-chairs'''<br />
<br />
Rotem Dror, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology<br />
<br />
Jiangming Liu, The University of Edinburgh<br />
<br />
Shruti Rijhwani, Carnegie Mellon University<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Student Research Workshop Faculty Advisors'''<br />
<br />
Omri Abend, Hebrew University of Jerusalem<br />
<br />
Sujian Li, Peking University <br />
<br />
Zhou Yu, University of California, Davis<br />
<br />
<br />
Information about the Student Research Workshop (SRW) has posted on the workshop's website: https://sites.google.com/view/acl20studentresearchworkshop/. The SRW Call for Papers has been distributed to ACL mailing lists, as well as on our official Twitter account (@acl_srw) and the ACL meeting's Twitter account (@acl_meeting).<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Pre-submission Mentoring Phase (completed mid-February 2020)'''<br />
<br />
Before submission to the main deadline, the SRW offered pre-submission mentoring by experienced researchers of the ACL community. The pre-submission mentoring primarily serves to provide feedback on the writing style, readability and presentation of the paper.<br />
<br />
We recruited 30 mentors for providing pre-submission feedback. The deadline for the pre-submission phase was January 17, 2020. We had 57 pre-submissions in total.<br />
<br />
Mentors were matched to pre-submissions according to their research areas. All mentors have already provided feedback for the submissions and it was sent to the authors mid-February 2020. The majority of mentors have also offered to participate in follow-up discussions with the authors via email until the main submission deadline. <br />
<br />
Vouchers for one month's free use of Grammarly Premium have been sent to all the pre-submission authors. These were provided by the ACL 2020 Diversity and Inclusion Committee.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Main submission'''<br />
<br />
For the main submission, the START (softconf) submission page has been set up. Currently, we have recruited 200 members of the ACL community (both students and senior researchers) to serve as the Program Committee for reviewing submissions to the SRW. We plan on inviting more PC members, as the number of submissions is likely to be larger than originally estimated. <br />
<br />
Submission deadlines for the SRW are as follows:<br />
<br />
* Paper submission deadline: March 6, 2020<br />
<br />
* Review deadline: April 10, 2020<br />
<br />
* Acceptance notification: April 15, 2020<br />
<br />
* Camera-ready deadline: May 6, 2020<br />
<br />
* Travel grant application deadline: to be decided.<br />
<br />
* Travel grant notification: to be decided.<br />
<br />
We also plan to have a post-acceptance mentoring process, for all papers accepted to the SRW.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Funding'''<br />
<br />
The SRW has applied for an NSF grant of $18,000. The Don and Betty Walker international fund will also be able to provide student support. The SRW organizers have made contact with a number of industry companies to obtain sponsorship, but not yet secured additional funding. Contact has been made with the ACL 2020 sponsorship chairs and with Priscilla to investigate other funding opportunities, as well as the Student Volunteer Program, which helps students cover registration fee to the main conference.<br />
<br />
== Audio-Video Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Hamid Palangi, Microsoft Research, Redmond <br />
<br />
Lianhui Qin, University of Washington<br />
<br />
<br />
We talked with 5 AV companies (Bashfiilm, Underline, Slideslive, Globalcast, Freeman), mainly optimizing for quality, past experience in previous conferences with similar or larger size than ACL, open access (not charging users for watching videos of talks), and price. We ended up with quotes from all these companies with one of them passing all criteria except being 20% more expensive than all other options. After requesting them to adjust the price due to different options we had and mentioning the fact that we are non-profit org, they gave us a 25% discount and we decided to proceed with them. They provide the following services:<br />
* Providing all the staff/equipment to perform the recording. This includes main conference & tutorials only, workshops should purchase the recording service by themselves.<br />
* Post-processing the video content.<br />
* Putting videos and slides side by side on the platform.<br />
* Making the videos available open-source.<br />
<br />
We are also looking for live-streaming for the plenary talks.<br />
<br />
== Conference Handbook Chair ==<br />
<br />
Nanyun Peng, University of Southern California<br />
<br />
== Demo Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Asli Celikyilmaz, Microsoft Research, Redmond<br />
<br />
Shawn Wen, PolyAI<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Details of Activities''':<br />
<br />
The web site for ACL 2020 Demonstrations Track is: https://acl2020.org/calls/demos/[https://acl2020.org/calls/demos/], which includes details about submissions, deadlines, reviewing policy and important dates.<br />
<br />
Compared to the last year, we have made a few changes to the track. Specifically, in the submission details, we encouraged the authors to include visual aids (e.g., screenshots, snapshots, or diagrams) in the paper. This year the submissions are single blind, in which the authors are allowed to disclose their names on their submitted manuscript. We kept the style files same as last year.<br />
<br />
The deadline for submissions was January 31, 2020.<br />
<br />
This year we have record number of demonstration paper submissions, over 130 submissions. After a few desk rejects, a total of 122 papers are reviewed. The technical Program Committee is in place. To accommodate minimum three reviewers for each paper, we have reached out close to 300 reviewers and 213 have accepted. We managed to assign 3 reviewers to all submitted papers, with no more than 3 papers per reviewer. Currently we have 152 technical program committee members. The program committee is scheduled to submit their reviews by March 10, 2020.<br />
<br />
'''Important Dates'''<br />
<br />
Paper submission deadline: Friday, January 31st, 2020<br />
<br />
Notification of acceptance: Friday, April 3rd, 2020<br />
<br />
Camera-ready submission: Friday, April 24th, 2020<br />
<br />
== Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Rochester Institute of Technology<br />
<br />
Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Google<br />
<br />
<br />
1. We created five different sub-committees (listed below) to address ACL D&I related activities. In the interest of transparency and institutional memory, we prepared a separate memorandum of understanding (MoU) for each sub-committee, which articulates a mission statement, five minimum tasks the sub-committee is responsible for (with the fifth task being a blog post), useful links, and detailed guidelines per task. In these guidelines, each task entry contains:<br />
* Task title<br />
* Interfaces (recommendations for whom to communicate with to address the task)<br />
* Sub tasks (an enumerated list of sub task descriptions) <br />
* Timeline (when to begin)<br />
In designing the tasks, we expanded on NAACL 2019 D&I activities and lessons learned. We will hand over the MoUs for future conferences; we hope that this resource will facilitate future D&I committees’ planning activities. <br />
<br />
2. For communication and teamwork, we set up:<br />
* An ACL 2020 D&I slack channel, facilitating keeping records of interactions.<br />
* A Google folder with designated subfolders for D&I subcommittees<br />
* An ACL 2020 D&I chairs google groups email handle: <acl2020-diversity-inclusion-chairs@googlegroups.com><br />
<br />
3. We recruited 13 volunteers across the 5 subcommittees, constituting the ACL 2020 D&I Team, recognized on the conference website: https://acl2020.org/committees/diversity-inclusion. <br />
<br />
'''Academic Inclusion Chairs'''<br />
''Mission: Ensure the venue is welcoming to researchers from diverse subdisciplines, conducive to building academic networks across disciplines and career stages.''<br />
* Aakanksha Naik, Carnegie Mellon University<br />
* Emily Prud’hommeaux, Boston College<br />
* Alla Rozovskaya, Queens College (City University of New York)<br />
<br />
'''Accessibility Chairs'''<br />
''Mission: Ensure the venue is accessible for researchers with any disability, including provision of requested access services.''<br />
* Sushant Kafle, Google/Rochester Institute of Technology<br />
* Masoud Rouhizadeh, Johns Hopkins University<br />
* Naomi Saphra, University of Edinburgh<br />
<br />
'''Childcare Chairs'''<br />
''Mission: Ensure adequate childcare provisions to help researchers who are caregivers of children to attend the conference.''<br />
* Khyathi Chandu, Carnegie Mellon University<br />
* Stephen Mayhew, Duolingo<br />
<br />
'''Financial Access Chairs'''<br />
''Mission: Ensure provision of financial access to researchers from underrepresented demographics and geographies to attend the conference.''<br />
* Allyson Ettinger, University of Chicago<br />
* Ryan Georgi, KPMG<br />
* Tirthankar Ghosal, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Patna<br />
<br />
'''Socio-cultural Inclusion Chairs'''<br />
''Mission: Ensure a welcoming and inclusive environment for researchers from various socio-cultural subgroups, accommodate for diverse needs for food and drinks at the conference, as well as support initiatives for groups to socialize and network.''<br />
* Shruti Palaskar, Carnegie Mellon University<br />
* Maarten Sap, University of Washington<br />
<br />
Kick-off meetings with all subcommittees took place in December before the winter holidays. Correspondence is mostly taking place on slack, alternatively by email.<br />
<br />
4. A message distributed on ACL2020 social media on September 17 2019 invited community members to share comments and suggestions with the D&I chairs. We received some important feedback.<br />
<br />
5. A blog post entitled The ACL 2020 Diversity and Inclusion Committee appeared on the ACL 2020 website and subsequently social media on February 4 2020. We received some important feedback as well as inquiries about D&I accommodations.<br />
<br />
6. The sponsorship booklet has been updated for D&I sponsorships. In consultation with Priscilla we added a third sponsor-ship level category. The resulting levels are Champion, Ally, and Contributor. The list of benefits is now also up-to-date. We alerted that multipacks may result in lower cost than single conference sponsorship. <br />
<br />
7. Grammarly has provided a generous in-kind donation in the form of writing support software licenses. Codes have been distributed to SRW and WiNLP for distribution among their authors, together with an outreach email template (adjusted from NAACL 2019). Joel Tetreault and Tirthankar Goshal (Financial Access subcommittee) were instrumental in this process. In this context, we also arrived at how to recognize in-kind sponsors by discussion and consensus.<br />
<br />
8. We coordinated a room request across subcommittees, submitted to Priscilla as a spreadsheet, detailing space and furniture requirements for subcommittees’ activities. <br />
<br />
9. We have submitted a request for a set of updates to D&I items in the registration form and are at work on updates to the D&I special request form.<br />
<br />
10. We recommended offering onsite childcare at ACL 2020. We illustrated with ten examples that provision of childcare is a standard feature at comparable conference venues (e.g., AAAI 2020, NeurIPS 2019, Interspeech 2019, CHI 2019). Childcare service is missing at ACL conferences and may especially impact junior researchers. Data shared by two comparable AI conferences indicate that onsite childcare usage can increase substantially (roughly quadrupled) from one year to another, such that a multiyear commitment should be made for establishing a meaningful utility assessment of onsite childcare. Data on ACL 2019 usage was retrieved by Priscilla (around 14 children on average during main conference; 9 children on average during workshop/tutorial days, with a total of 357.8 hours attended by children), while we obtained proposals from 3 providers. Based on reviewing these proposals, we recommend KiddieCorp as the first-choice vendor for this service. <br />
<br />
11. With help from the General Chair, we initiated a conversation about the need for a D&I budget. Subsequently, we prepared a detailed budget request, split into costs and back-stop costs (items that apply when there is a request), which was passed on to the ACL Exec. Sushant Kafle (Accessibility subcommittee) was instrumental in the process of obtaining proposals by vendors for access services. Our requested budget is detailed at the following link, which includes the onsite childcare cost estimates as well: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DaYX-MGHtd2CsezXNTkaPIXJ6lHewow1z08jQA2I-7E<br />
<br />
In conclusion, the D&I activities are progressing and awaiting a decision on budget. In addition, several of the resources we have prepared or enhanced may facilitate future D&I committees’ planning activities, for instance the MOUs, the coordinated room request, the revised sponsorship booklet section, the detailed budget request summary, the process for distributing the writing support software in-kind donation, and the onsite childcare proposal summary.<br />
<br />
== Local Sponsorship Chairs == <br />
<br />
Hoifung Poon, Microsoft <br />
<br />
Kristina Toutanova, Google<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Publication Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Steven Bethard, University of Arizona<br />
<br />
Ryan Cotterrell, University of Cambridge<br />
<br />
Rui Yan, Peking University<br />
<br />
Starting from the style files from ACL 2019, we have produced new LaTeX style files for ACL 2020. Most of the description was retained, but the order of sections was overhauled to make sure that important information wasn't scattered so haphazardly across the document. Other improvements were also made, like using the recommended citation style consistently throughout the LaTeX source, and separating out all the LaTeX-specific stuff into clearly marked sections. The MS Word version was derived from these LaTeX versions to match as closely as possible. The LaTeX version was also posted to the Overleaf gallery. The most recent .bib file for the entire ACL Anthology was included in the style file distribution to encourage authors to use the official citations for ACL Anthology publications. All style file changes were merged into https://github.com/acl-org/acl-pub/tree/gh-pages/paper_styles.<br />
<br />
== Publicity Chair ==<br />
<br />
Emily M. Bender, University of Washington<br />
<br />
=== Dissemination ===<br />
<br />
Durable accounts for the ACL meeting on Twitter and Facebook have been created: <br />
* https://twitter.com/aclmeeting<br />
* https://www.facebook.com/aclmeeting/<br />
<br />
These will be passed along to the ACL 2021 publicity chair(s) so that they don't have to build up followers separately. As of Feb 4, 2020 the Twitter account has 4,061 followers and the Facebook account has 181. We have not yet been making use of the Instagram account, but we have been using the Twitter and Facebook accounts to publicize important dates as well as blog posts. The Twitter account especially has been useful for fielding questions from the community. Calls for papers have also gone out over the ACL member portal and several mailing lists, as well as websites such as WikiCFP. (These are maintained in a spreadsheet which can be handed off to the ACL 2021 publicity chair(s)).<br />
<br />
=== Next Steps ===<br />
<br />
* Recruit co-chairs, especially to coordinate live-tweeting of the conference<br />
* Contact local media for coverage<br />
* Develop land acknowledgement in consultation with the Duwamish Tribe (on whose land the meeting will take place). The Duwamish publish this information about land acknowledgments: https://www.duwamishtribe.org/land-acknowledgement<br />
<br />
<br />
== Remote Presentation Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Hao Fang, Microsoft Semantic Machines <br />
<br />
Yi Luan, Google AI Language<br />
<br />
== Sustainability Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Ananya Ganesh, Educational Testing Service <br />
<br />
Klaus Zechner, Educational Testing Service<br />
<br />
Our main goal for this new focus area is to engage the ACL community in discussions about how best to reduce the carbon footprint of future ACL conferences in order to contribute to sustainable and livable conditions on this planet.<br />
One of the main directions we are currently envisioning is to encourage and support conference attendees in virtual participation using live streaming of conference events as air travel is the main contributor to the carbon footprint of international conferences.<br />
<br />
== Website & Conference App Chairs == <br />
<br />
Sudha Rao, Microsoft Research, Redmond <br />
<br />
Yizhe Zhang, Microsoft Research, Redmond<br />
<br />
We are hosting the conference website on GitHub using the easily adaptable website architecture built by Nitin Madnani for NAACL 2019: https://github.com/naacl-org/naacl-hlt-2019. <br/><br />
We are using the Whova event app for hosting the conference app this year similar to NAACL 2019.<br />
<br />
== Business Office ==<br />
<br />
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q1_Reports:_ACL_2020&diff=735402020Q1 Reports: ACL 20202020-02-26T18:43:49Z<p>Jurafsky: </p>
<hr />
<div><br />
== General Chair ==<br />
Dan Jurafsky, Stanford University<br />
<br />
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) will take place in Seattle, Washington at the Hyatt Regency Seattle in downtown Seattle from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
We have a great set of chairs! We are continuing 2019's new roles (Diversity and Inclusion chairs, Remote Presentation Chairs, AV Chairs) and adding new ones: (Sustainability chair), and we are doing well in demographic representation among our chairs (gender and region).<br />
<br />
Following advice from last year, we have been using Slack for most intra-committee communication (and we put the Slack channel into the ACL pro space, so it can be preserved for future years), and using email only when absolutely necessary.<br />
<br />
As usual, the growing size of the conference (both in papers and attendees) is a challenge, but both in papers and space we have been doing well (see the individual chair summaries below).<br />
<br />
Highlights include: <br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>The program chairs moved the submission date earlier (to Dec 9), and the notification date earlier (to April 3), to allow more time for attendees visa processing.<br />
<li> We received a record 3,429 submissions (~15% increase over ACL2019)<br />
<li>The program chairs removed the neutral 3 rating (requiring reviewers to choose 2.5 or 3.5), and asked reviewers to also evaluate the ethical implications of each submission.<br />
<li> As usual, the call, submission, reviewing and selection of tutorials and workshops was coordinated jointly for all the conferences including COLING; for this year<br />
that meant ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP. All tutorials and Workshops have been chosen and scheduled and announced.<br />
<li> We're asking the Exec to approve our D&I budget.<br />
<li>The D&I chairs propose to continue to do onsite child care (as used at ACL2019) rather than the voucher system (as used at NAACL2019), since onsite child care worked well for us at ACL 2019, makes it easier for parents to navigate in an unknown location, and is now the standard best practice used by our sister conferences (AAAI, NeurIPS, Interspeech, CHI, etc.).<br />
<li><br />
The committee found sections of the ACL Conference Handbook to be out of date and in some cases missing entirely.<br />
and I have asked all of the chairs to update their own relevant section of the handbook, and the chairs have begun to do this.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
On Mar 11, we will have a site visit at the hotel in Seattle which besides Priscilla will include the General Chair, and representatives from the Program Chairs, the D&I chairs, and the AV chairs. We will also use that occasion to have a committee mtg including those folks plus the relatively large number of ACL2020 organizing committee members who are local to Seattle.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Program Chairs == <br />
Joyce Chai, University of Michigan<br />
<br />
Natalie Schluter, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark<br />
<br />
Joel Tetreault, Dataminr, USA<br />
<br />
---<br />
<br />
'''New Initiatives This Year'''<br />
<br />
'''''Earlier Submission Deadline and Notification'''''<br />
<br />
To accommodate a more realistic workflow, given (1) the rapid growth in the number of submissions to ACL conferences, (2) together with avoiding the period for authors from Dec. 15-Jan. 15 while giving us more time to implement and test new implementations, we moved the submission deadline back to December 9. Specifically, previous PCs advised us to do this to set a precedent for future PCs, in accommodating a more realistic timeline. The timeline is still packed, but workable. We also plan notifications to be out earlier than normal, to provide an extra 1-2 weeks for visa applicants, as an inclusion measure.<br />
<br />
'''''Four New Tracks'''''<br />
<br />
ACL2020 introduced four new tracks:(1) Ethics and NLP. Ethical issues have become increasingly important as more advanced tools become available for NLP research and development. We dedicated a new track and explicitly invite contributions that study ethical issues and impact regarding NLP research and applications. (2) Interpretation and Analysis of Models for NLP. As the community strives for pushing performance boundaries, understanding behaviors of STOA models becomes critical. (3) Theory and Formalism. This track is designed to encourage submissions targeted to theoretical underpinning of NLP models which had little/small presence in the past ACL conferences. (4) Theme: Taking Stock of Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going. The last few years have witnessed an unprecedented growth in NLP since the field began over sixty years ago. This track is designed to invite submissions that can provide insight for the community to assess how much we have accomplished today with respect to the past and where the field should be heading to. The theme track is different from other tracks. We therefore made some modifications in the review form to reflect that.<br />
<br />
'''''Extended Automatic COI Detection/Automatic Reviewer-Paper Assignment'''''<br />
<br />
We carried out offline COI detection and automatic paper assignment for the first time for an *ACL conference. The code used were ACL2020-customised implementations of Amanda Stent’s COI detection software and Graham Neubig’s automatic reviewer-paper assignment software.<br />
<br />
'''''Mandatory Reviewer Duty and Recruitment'''''<br />
<br />
To meet the reviewer demands of a growing conference, we made reviewer volunteering mandatory for submission authors. This resulted in a record number of volunteer candidate reviewers (over 11K). We note that these volunteers were candidates and only a subset of them were actually given reviewing assignments.<br />
Using a Microsoft Reviewer/Author form, we collected a variety of information on potential reviewers like ACL anthology page, website, self-declared reviewer experience, 1st & 2nd track preferences, etc. to (1) provide information sheets on reviewers to SACs and ACs, as a tool when manually correcting the automatic reviewer-paper assignments,<br />
(2) to manually balance the reviewer pools among tracks, and (3) to filter the list of reviewers based on whether the reviewer (i) had superiority PhD-student or higher, (ii) had reviewed for at least 4 previous *ACL conference, and (iii) had a minimum number of ACL anthology publications.<br />
To counterbalance (3ii), we provided SACs with a list of novice reviewers and introduced our a Reviewer Mentoring Program (see below).<br />
<br />
'''''New Reviewer Mentoring Program'''''<br />
<br />
Given the rapid growth of NLP in terms of number of papers and new students, it is very important for our community to mentor and train our new reviewers. ACL2020 has launched a pilot program which calls for each AC to mentor at least one novice reviewer. Ultimately, the goal is to provide long-needed mentoring to new reviewers. At the very least, this process will inform ACL on constructing a reviewer mentoring program that is more scalable in the future. For most tracks, each AC was paired with at least a mentee (often a Ph.D. student, or a junior researcher who has just graduated). The AC would work with the mentee, provide feedback and help the mentee to improve the quality of his/her reviews. Close to 300 junior researchers were selected to participate in this program. We will put together a detailed report on this program after the conference. <br />
<br />
'''''Updated Review Form with New Rating Scale and Evaluation Item'''''<br />
<br />
We have separate review forms for regular tracks and the theme track. Our review forms were built upon the form from EMNLP-IJCNLP2019 and ACL2019 with '''''two new extensions'''''. <br />
(1) We have removed the rating 3 (ambivalent) from the overall recommendation as we would like reviewers to take a stand on whether the paper is above the borderline (3.5) or below the borderline (2.5). The reason for this change is that ambivalent cases often take a long time to discuss. By taking a stand, reviewers would provide more informative feedback for AC/SAC to make a recommendation. ICLR 2020 has adopted similar rating strategies (although with a different scale). <br />
(2) As ethical concerns and societal impacts are an important consideration for NLP research, we have explicitly ask reviewers to evaluate ethical implications of each submission. On the review form, we ask reviewers whether there are any ethical concerns about a submission that the area chairs and program chairs should be aware of. We also encourage reviewers to flag such concerns to the authors.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Other Efforts'''<br />
<br />
'''''Initial submission reviews and desk rejects'''''<br />
<br />
We have received a record number of 3,429 submissions (approximately a 15% increase over ACL2019). All papers were carefully inspected to check for violations of ACL policies (ranging from formatting to anonymization to use of supplementary material). Similar to ACL2019, we used assistants to speed up an otherwise long process. All issues identified by assistants were cross-examined by two PCs. We noticed that many papers did not strictly follow the ACL style sheet. We have thus been lenient in terms of margin, line numbers, fonts, etc formatting issues. As a result 29 submissions were desk rejected for violating ACL policies on anonymity, page length, double blind review, etc. <br />
<br />
'''''Manual adjustment of submission tracks'''''<br />
<br />
Many papers were not submitted to the right track where they could receive reviews from most relevant reviewers. SACs were instructed to flag the papers that should be moved to a different track. We went through every single suggestion and moved papers around if warranted. This turned out to be a major effort. In total, 500-600 papers were moved across tracks as a result. <br />
<br />
'''''Manual adjustment of AC and reviewer assignment'''''<br />
<br />
As the automatic reviewer assignment is not perfect, SACs did much manual work adjusting AC assignments as well as reviewer assignments. This effort varied among tracks. Given the current set up in Softconf, ACs’ roles are pretty limited. ACs are essentially meta-reviewers who do not have access to the reviewer accounts, and therefore, cannot add reviewers, nor make reviewer assignments, nor contact reviewers directly. We have given this feedback to softconf and hopefully the system will be updated to support extended AC roles for future conferences. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''''Communication'''''<br />
<br />
Because of several new initiatives implemented this year, extensive efforts have been made to communicate these changes to SACs, ACs, reviewers, as well as authors. Besides direct emails, we have used blog postings as well as twitters as our additional communication channels assisted by the publicity chair and the web chairs.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Submission Status'''<br />
<br />
We have received 3,429 papers (2244 long and 1185 short) have been submitted. Here is the distribution of long, short and total papers per track.<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics: 49 39 88<br />
<li> Computational Social Science and Social Media: 73 38 111<br />
<li> Dialogue and Interactive Systems: 204 71 275<br />
<li> Discourse and Pragmatics: 36 20 56<br />
<li> Ethics and NLP: 30 22 52<br />
<li> Generation: 142 71 213<br />
<li> Information Extraction: 159 83 242<br />
<li> Information Retrieval and Text Mining: 55 41 96<br />
<li> Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP: 110 54 164<br />
<li> Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond: 69 24 93<br />
<li> Machine Learning for NLP: 186 109 295<br />
<li> Machine Translation: 158 104 262<br />
<li> NLP Applications: 169 99 268<br />
<li> Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation: 38 15 53<br />
<li> Question Answering: 109 63 172<br />
<li> Resources and Evaluation: 88 48 136<br />
<li> Semantics: Lexical: 57 37 94<br />
<li> Semantics: Sentence Level: 66 29 95<br />
<li> Semantics: Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics: 81 31 112<br />
<li> Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining: 112 66 178<br />
<li> Speech and Multimodality: 38 27 65<br />
<li> Summarization: 90 37 127<br />
<li> Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing: 47 28 75<br />
<li> Theme: 67 26 93<br />
<li> Theory and Formalism in NLP (Linguistic and Mathematical): 11 3 14<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
'''Summary of Timelines'''<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Oct 15 - Nov 30: SACs invite ACs and reviewers <br />
<li>Nov 25: Reviewer profiles completed<br />
<li>Dec 09: ACL Paper Submission Deadline (long and short papers) <br />
<li>Dec 10 - Jan 14: initial submission reviews and desk rejects; automatic reviewer assignment and COI detection; manual adjustment of assignment; <br />
<li>Jan 17 - Feb 07: Review Period<br />
<li>Feb 08 - Feb 11: ACs chase late reviews <br />
<li>Feb 12 - Feb 17: Author Response<br />
<li>Feb 18 - Feb 25: Reviewer Discussion Period (ACs lead discussion), ACs provide feedback to mentees. <br />
<li>Feb 25 - Mar 03: ACs produce meta-reviews<br />
<li>Mar 03 - Mar 10: SACs rank papers based on meta-reviews and make recommendations to PC chairs<br />
<li>Mar 11 - Apr 02: PC chairs make decisions (they may consult SACs during this time); SACs and ACs recommend best reviewers<br />
<li>Apr 03 - Accept / Reject Notifications<br />
<li>Apr 24: Camera ready<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
'''List of SAC/ACs and recruitment'''<br />
<br />
Following ACL2019, we have adopted a hierarchical structure where each area is chaired by one or two senior ACs, who are supported by a group of area chairs. We have a total of 40 Senior Area Chairs and 299 Area Chairs. <br />
'''''Recruitment''''': We individually created preference lists for SACs, discussed these and made decisions. ACs were selected by SACs.<br />
<br />
Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Emily Prud’hommeaux<br />
<li>ACs: Cassandra L. Jacobs, Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Masoud Rouhizadeh, Serguei Pakhomov, Yevgeni Berzak<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Computational Social Science and Social Media<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Tim Baldwin, Nikolaos Aletras<br />
<li>ACs: A. Seza Dögruöz, Afshin Rahimi, Alice Oh, Brendan O'Connor, Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro, David Bamman, David Jurgens, David Mimno, Diana Inkpen, Diyi Yang, Eiji Aramaki, Jacob Eisenstein, Jonathan K. Kummerfeld, Kalina Bontcheva<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Dialogue and Interactive Systems<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Jason Williams, Mari Ostendorf<br />
<li>ACs: Alborz Geramifard, Amanda Stent, Asli Celikyilmaz, Casey Kennington, David Traum, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Gabriel Skantze, Helen Hastie, Heriberto Cuayahuitl, Kai Yu, Kallirroi Georgila, Luciana Benotti, Luis Fernando D'Haro, Nina Dethlefs, Ryuichiro Higashinaka, Stefan Ultes, Sungjin Lee, Tsung-Hsien Wen, Y-Lan Boureau, Yun-Nung Chen, Zhou Yu<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Discourse and Pragmatics<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Annie Louis (taking over for Diane Litman)<br />
<li>ACs: Chloé Braud, Junyi Jessy Li, Manfred Stede, Shafiq Joty, Sujian Li, Yangfeng Ji<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Ethics and NLP<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Dirk Hovy<br />
<li>ACs: Alan W Black, Emily M. Bender, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Yulia Tsvetkov<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Generation<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Wei Xu, Alexander Rush<br />
<li>ACs: John Wieting, Laura Perez-Beltrachini, Lu Wang, Miltiadis Allamanis, Mohit Iyyer, Nanyun Peng, Sam Wiseman, Shashi Narayan, Sudha Rao, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Xiaojun Wan, Xipeng Qiu<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Information Extraction<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Doug Downey, Hoifun Poon<br />
<li>ACs: Alan Ritter, Chandra Bhagavatula, Gerard de Melo, Kai-Wei Chang, Marius Pasca, Mo Yu, Radu Florian, Ruihong Huang, Sameer Singh, Satoshi Sekine, Snigdha Chaturvedi, Sumithra Velupillai, Timothy Miller, Vivek Srikumar, William Yang Wang, Yunyao Li<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Information Retrieval and Text Mining<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Chin-Yew Lin, Nazli Goharian<br />
<li>ACs: Andrew Yates, Arman Cohan, Bing Qin, Craig Macdonald, Danai Koutra, Elad Yom-Tov, Franco Maria Nardini, Kalliopi Zervanou, Luca Soldaini, Nicola Tonellotto, Pu-Jen Cheng, Seung-won Hwang, Yangqiu Song, Yansong Feng<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Yoav Goldberg<br />
<li>ACs: Adina Williams, Afra Alishahi, Douwe Kiela, Grzegorz Chrupała, Marco Baroni, Yonatan Belinkov, Zachary C. Lipton<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Yoav Artzi<br />
<li>ACs: Angeliki Lazaridou, Dan Goldwasser, Jason Baldridge, Jesse Thomason, Lisa Anne Hendricks, Parisa Kordjamshidi, Raffaella Bernardi, Vicente Ordonez, Yonatan Bisk<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Machine Learning for NLP<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Andre Martins, Isabelle Augenstein<br />
<li>ACs: Ankur Parikh, Anna Rumshisky, Bruno Martins, Caio Corro, Dani Yogatama, Daniel Beck, Dipanjan Das, Edouard Grave, Emma Strubell, Gholamreza Haffari, Ivan Titov, Joseph Le Roux, Jun Suzuki, Kevin Gimpel, Michael Auli, Ming-Wei Chang, Shay B. Cohen, Vlad Niculae, Waleed Ammar, Wilker Aziz, Yejin Choi, Zita Marinho, Zornitsa Kozareva<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Machine Translation<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Marine Carpuat, Alexandra Birch<br />
<li>ACs: Ann Clifton, Antonio Toral, Atsushi Fujita, Boxing Chen, Carolina Scarton, Chi-kiu Lo, Christian Hardmeier, Deyi Xiong, Franois Yvon, George Foster, Jiajun Zhang, Jrg Tiedemann, Maja Popovič, Marcello Federico, Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt, Marco Turchi, Marta R. Costa-jussà, Matt Post, Nadir Durrani, Qun Liu, Rico Sennrich, Taro Watanabe, Yuki Arase, Yvette Graham<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Multidisciplinary and Area Chair COI<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Michael Strube<br />
<li>ACs: Anders Søgaard, David Schlangen, Katrin Erk, Kentaro Inui, Kevin Duh, Massimo Poesio, Mausam, Pascal Denis<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
NLP Applications<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Preslav Nakov, Karin Verspoor<br />
<li>ACs: Alexander Fraser, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Aoife Cahill, Daniel Cer, Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha, Giovanni Da San Martino, Hassan Sajjad, Kevin Cohen, Marcos Zampieri, Michel Galley, Min Zhang, Pierre Zweigenbaum, Razvan Bunescu, Sara Rosenthal, Tristan Naumann, Vincent Ng, Wei Gao, Wei Lu<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Kemal Oflazer<br />
<li>ACs: Christo Kirov, David R. Mortensen, Kareem Darwish, Reut Tsarfaty, Yue Zhang, Özlem Çetinoğlu<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Question Answering<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Eugene Agichtein, Alessandro Moschitti<br />
<li>ACs: Avi Sil, Dina Demner-Fushman, Evangelos Kanoulas, Gerhard Weikum, Idan Szpektor, Jimmy Lin, Oleg Rokhlenko, Sanda Harabagiu, Wen-tau Yih, William Cohen<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Resources and Evaluation<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Nathan Schneider, Barbara Plank<br />
<li>ACs: Allyson Ettinger, Annemarie Friedrich, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Arianna Bisazza, Claire Bonial, Daniel Zeman, Emmanuele Chersoni, Ines Rehbein, Lonneke van der Plas, Maria Liakata, Sara Tonelli, Sarvnaz Karimi, Tim Van de Cruys, Vered Shwartz, Walid Magdy, Çağri Çöltekin<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Semantics: Lexical<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Ekaterina Shutova, Aline Villavicencio<br />
<li>ACs: Alessandro Lenci, Anna Feldman, Aurélie Herbelot, Beata Beigman Klebanov, Carlos Ramisch, Chris Biemann, Enrico Santus, Fabio Massimo Zanzotto, Helen Yannakoudakis, Ivan Vulič, Jose Camacho-Collados, Marianna Apidianaki, Paul Cook, Saif Mohammad<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Semantics: Sentence Level<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Mohit Bansal<br />
<li>ACs: Andreas Vlachos, Christopher Potts, Danqi Chen, Eunsol Choi, He He, Jonathan Berant, Kevin Small, Marek Rei, Sebastian Ruder, Siva Reddy, Swabha Swayamdipta, Thomas Wolf, Veselin Stoyanov<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Semantics: Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Sam Bowman<br />
<li>ACs: Anette Frank, Eduardo Blanco, Edward Grefenstette, Jacob Andreas, Jonathan May, Kenton Lee, Lasha Abzianidze, Luheng He, Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Rachel Rudinger, Roy Schwartz, Valeria de Paiva<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Smaranda Muresan, Swapna Somasundaran<br />
<li>ACs: Bing Liu, Claire Cardie, Elena Musi, Iryna Gurevych, Julian Brooke, Lun-Wei Ku, Marie-Francine Moens, Minlie Huang, Paolo Rosso, Roman Klinger, Serena Villata, Soujanya Poria, Thamar Solorio, Yulan He<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Speech and Multimodality<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Eric Fosler-Lussier<br />
<li>ACs: Bhuvana Ramabhadran, Florian Metze, Gerasimos Potamianos, Hamid Palangi, Martha Larson<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Summarization<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Fei Liu<br />
<li>ACs: Caiming Xiong, Giuseppe Carenini, Katja Markert, Manabu Okumura, Michael Elhadad, Ramesh Nallapati, Sebastian Gehrmann, Wenjie Li, Xiaodan Zhu, Yang Gao<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: David Chiang<br />
<li>ACs: Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez, Emily Pitler, Liang Huang, Miguel Ballesteros, Miryam de Lhoneux, Slav Petrov, Stephan Oepen, Weiwei Sun<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
THEME<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Marilyn Walker (taking over for Ellen Riloff)<br />
<li>ACs: Donia Scott, Johan Bos, Luke Zettlemoyer, Philipp Koehn, Raymond Mooney<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Theory and Formalism in NLP (Linguistic and Mathematical)<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Daniel Gildea<br />
<li>ACs: Alexander Koller, Laura Kallmeyer, Marco Kuhlmann<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
== Local Organisation Chairs ==<br />
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL<br />
<br />
With advice from:<br />
<br />
Jianfeng Gao, Microsoft Research<br />
<br />
Luke Zettlemoyer, University of Washington<br />
<br />
== Tutorial Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Agata Savary, University of Tours, France<br />
<br />
Yue Zhang, Westlake University, Hangzhou, China<br />
<br />
The call, submission, reviewing and selection of tutorials was coordinated jointly for 4 conferences: ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP. <br />
<br />
Before drafting the call, we collected lists of tutorials offered within the past 4 years. We analysed previous calls for tutorials and reports from tutorial chairs (from [https://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2016Q3_Reports:_Tutorial_Chairs 2016], [https://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2017Q3_Reports:_Tutorial_Chairs 2017], [https://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2018Q3_Reports:_Tutorial_Chairs 2018] and [http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2019Q1_Reports:_ACL_2019 2019]). We consulted previous tutorial chairs with a questionnaire including questions about: the number of submissions, encouraging submissions on specific topics or from specific lecturers, the review procedure, the evaluation criteria, the post-tutorial availability of the slides/codes, and lessons learned from tutorial coordination. We also discussed the publication of slides and video recordings from future tutorials with the persons in charge of the ACL Anthology. As a result of these steps, we created two new sections for the [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Conference_Handbook ACL Conference Handbook] (future chairs might consider updating these documents yearly): <br />
* the list of [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Past_tutorials past tutorials] at ACL, COLING, EACL, EMNLP, and NAACL in 2016-2019<br />
* a [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Tutorial_chair_handbook tutorial chair handbook]<br />
<br />
The final [https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/joint-call-tutorial-proposals-aclaacl-ijcnlpemnlpcoling-2020 call] differs from previous calls in several aspects: (i) the expectations about tutorial proposals were made clearer, (ii) following the central ACL decision, the teachers' payment policy was replaced by a fee-waiving policy, (iii) the required submission details include two new items: diversity considerations and agreement for open access publication of slides, codes, data and video recordings, (iv) the evaluation criteria (see below) are announced.<br />
<br />
We recruited a review committee of 19 members, including the 8 tutorial chairs and 11 external members selected for their large understanding of the NLP domain and a good experience in reviewing and/or tutorial teaching:<br />
<br />
'''Review Committee'''<br />
* Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne, Australia) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Daniel Beck (University of Melbourne, Australia) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Emily M. Bender (University of Washington, WA, USA)<br />
* Erik Cambria (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)<br />
* Gaël Dias (University of Caen Normandie, France)<br />
* Stefan Evert (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)<br />
* Yang Liu (Tsinghua University, Beijing, China)<br />
* Agata Savary (University of Tours, France) - ACL 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* João Sedoc (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA)<br />
* Lucia Specia (Sheffield University, UK) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair <br />
* Xu SUN (Peking University, China)<br />
* Yulia Tsvetkov (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA)<br />
* Benjamin Van Durme (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Aline Villavicencio (University of Sheffield, UK and Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Taro Watanabe (Google, Inc., Tokyo, Japan)<br />
* Aaron Steven White (University of Rochester, NY, USA)<br />
* Fei Xia (University of Washington, WA, USA) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Yue Zhang (Westlake University, Hangzhou, China) - ACL 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Meishan Zhang (Tianjin University, China)<br />
<br />
In total, we received 43 submissions for the 4 conferences. Each reviewer was assigned 6-7 proposals and each proposal received 3 reviews. The selection criteria included: clarity and preparedness, novelty or timely character of the topic, lecturers' experience, likely audience interest, open access of the teaching material, diversity aspects (multilingualism, gender, age and country of the lecturers), and compatibility with the preferred venues. <br />
We accepted 31 proposals. <br />
<br />
The decision making was handled via an online meeting of the 8 tutorial chairs. In particular, the selection of tutorials for each conference was done via the expression of interest of the tutorial chairs on a round-robin basis. Some slight adjustments were also performed after the meeting to better fit the authors' preferences. In total, 8, 8, 8 and 7 proposals were selected for ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP, respectively. Upon the announcement the results, 2 of the proposals accepted for AACL-IJCNLP were withdrawn.<br />
<br />
The submission, review, selection and collection of final material for all tutorials was handled via a dedicated SoftConf space, shared by the 4 coordinating conferences. After the selection of proposals, a separate track was created on SoftConf for each conference. The final submission page (one per conference) was set up so as to collect all the necessary data including notably: the tutorial slides, URLs for course material (if any), printable material (if any) and agreement for open access publication.<br />
<br />
The final selection for ACL 2020 consists of the following 8 tutorials of 3 hours each (each of them had ACL as the preferred or the second preferred venue):<br />
<br />
'''Morning Tutorials'''<br />
<br />
'''T1: Interpretability and Analysis in Neural NLP''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Yonatan Belinkov, Sebastian Gehrmann and Ellie Pavlick<br/><br />
While deep learning has transformed the NLP field and impacted the larger computational linguistics community, the rise of neural networks is stained by their opaque nature: It is challenging to interpret the inner workings of neural network models, and explicate their behavior. Therefore, in the last few years, an increasingly large body of work has been devoted to the analysis and interpretation of neural network models in NLP.<br/><br />
This body of work is so far lacking a common framework and methodology. Moreover, approaching the analysis of modern neural networks can be difficult for newcomers to the field. This tutorial aims to fill this gap and introduce the nascent field of interpretability and analysis of neural networks in NLP.<br/><br />
The tutorial covers the main lines of analysis work, such as probing classifier, behavior studies and test suites, psycholinguistic methods, visualizations, adversarial examples, and other methods. We highlight not only the most commonly applied analysis methods, but also the specific limitations and shortcomings of current approaches, in order to inform participants where to focus future efforts.<br />
<br />
'''T2: Multi-modal Information Extraction from Text, Semi-structured, and Tabular Data on the Web''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Xin Luna Dong, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Colin Lockard and Prashant Shiralkar<br/><br />
The World Wide Web contains vast quantities of textual information in several forms: unstructured text, template-based semi-structured webpages (which present data in key-value pairs and lists), and tables. Methods for extracting information from these sources and converting it to a structured form have been a target of research from the natural language processing (NLP), data mining, and database communities. While these researchers have largely separated extraction from web data into different problems based on the modality of the data, they have faced similar problems such as learning with limited labeled data, defining (or avoiding defining) ontologies, making use of prior knowledge, and scaling solutions to deal with the size of the Web.<br/><br />
In this tutorial we take a holistic view toward information extraction, exploring the commonalities in the challenges and solutions developed to address these different forms of text. We will explore the approaches targeted at unstructured text that largely rely on learning syntactic or semantic textual patterns, approaches targeted at semi-structured documents that learn to identify structural patterns in the template, and approaches targeting web tables which rely heavily on entity linking and type information.<br/><br />
While these different data modalities have largely been considered separately in the past, recent research has started taking a more inclusive approach toward textual extraction, in which the multiple signals offered by textual, layout, and visual clues are combined into a single extraction model made possible by new deep learning approaches. At the same time, trends within purely textual extraction have shifted toward full-document understanding rather than considering sentences as independent units. With this in mind, it is worth considering the information extraction problem as a whole to motivate solutions that harness textual semantics along with visual and semi-structured layout information. We will discuss these approaches and suggest avenues for future work.<br />
<br />
'''T3: Reviewing Natural Language Processing Research''' (introductory)<br/><br />
Kevin Cohen, Karën Fort, Margot Mieskes and Aurélie Névéol<br/><br />
As the demand for reviewing grows, so must the pool of reviewers. As the [http://www.livecongress.it/aol/indexSA.php?id=E2EAED7D&ticket= survey] presented by Graham Neubig at the 2019 ACL showed, a considerable number of reviewers are junior researchers, who might lack the experience and expertise necessary for high-quality reviews. Some of them might not have the environment or lack opportunities that allow them to learn the skills necessary. A tutorial on reviewing for the NLP community might increase reviewers’ confidence, as well as the quality of the reviews. This introductory tutorial will cover the goals, processes, and evaluation of reviewing research papers in natural language processing.<br />
<br />
'''T4: Stylized Text Generation: Approaches and Applications''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Lili Mou and Olga Vechtomova<br/><br />
Text generation has played an important role in various applications of natural language processing (NLP), and kn recent studies, researchers are paying increasing attention to modeling and manipulating the style of the generation text, which we call stylized text generation. In this tutorial, we will provide a comprehensive literature review in this direction. We start from the definition of style and different settings of stylized text generation, illustrated with various applications. Then, we present different settings of stylized generation, such as parallel supervised, style label-supervised, and unsupervised. In each setting, we delve deep into machine learning methods, including embedding learning techniques to represent style}, adversarial learning and reinforcement learning with cycle consistency to match content but to distinguish different styles. We also introduce current approaches of evaluating stylized text generation systems. We conclude our tutorial by presenting the challenges of stylized text generation and discussing future directions, such as small-data training, non-categorical style modeling, and a generalized scope of style transfer (e.g., controlling the syntax as a style).<br />
<br />
'''Afternoon Tutorials'''<br />
<br />
'''T5: Achieving Common Ground in Multi-modal Dialogue''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Malihe Alikhani and Matthew Stone<br/><br />
All communication aims at achieving common ground (grounding): interlocutors can work together effectively only with mutual beliefs about what the state of the world is, about what their goals are, and about how they plan to make their goals a reality. Computational dialogue research offers some classic results on grouding, which unfortunately offer scant guidance to the design of grounding modules and behaviors in cutting-edge systems. In this tutorial, we focus on three main topic areas: 1) grounding in human-human communication; 2) grounding in dialogue systems; and 3) grounding in multi-modal interactive systems, including image-oriented conversations and human-robot interactions. We highlight a number of achievements of recent computational research in coordinating complex content, show how these results lead to rich and challenging opportunities for doing grounding in more flexible and powerful ways, and canvass relevant insights from the literature on human--human conversation. We expect that the tutorial will be of interest to researchers in dialogue systems, computational semantics and cognitive modeling, and hope that it will catalyze research and system building that more directly explores the creative, strategic ways conversational agents might be able to seek and offer evidence about their understanding of their interlocutors.<br />
<br />
'''T6: Commonsense Reasoning for Natural Language Processing''' (introductory)<br/><br />
Maarten Sap, Vered Shwartz, Antoine Bosselut, Dan Roth and Yejin Choi<br/><br />
In our tutorial, we (1) outline the various types of commonsense (e.g., physical, social), and (2) discuss techniques to gather and represent commonsense knowledge, while highlighting the challenges specific to this type of knowledge (e.g., reporting bias). We will then (3) discuss the types of commonsense knowledge captured by modern NLP systems (e.g., large pretrained language models), and (4) present ways to measure systems' commonsense reasoning abilities. We finish with (5) a discussion of various ways in which commonsense reasoning can be used to improve performance on NLP tasks, exemplified by an (6) interactive session on integrating commonsense into a downstream task.<br />
<br />
'''T7: Integrating Ethics into the NLP Curriculum''' (introductory)<br/><br />
Emily M. Bender, Dirk Hovy and Alexandra Schofield<br/><br />
Our goal in this tutorial is to empower NLP researchers and practitioners with tools and resources to teach others about how to ethically apply NLP techniques. Our tutorial will present both high-level strategies for developing an ethics-oriented curriculum, based on experience and best practices, as well as specific sample exercises that can be brought to a classroom. We plan to make this a highly interactive work session culminating in a shared online resource page that pools lesson plans, assignments, exercise ideas, reading suggestions, and ideas from the attendees. We consider three primary topics with our session that frequently underlie ethical issues in NLP research: Dual use, bias and privacy.<br/><br />
In this setting, a key lesson is that there is no single approach to ethical NLP: each project requires thoughtful consideration about what steps can be taken to best support people affected by that project. However, we can learn (and teach) what kinds of issues to be aware of and what kinds of strategies are available for mitigating harm. To teach this process, we apply and promote interactive exercises that provide an opportunity to ideate, discuss, and reflect. We plan to facilitate this in a way that encourages positive discussion, emphasizing the creation of ideas for the future instead of negative opinions of previous work.<br />
<br />
'''T8: Recent Advances in Open-Domain Question Answering''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Danqi Chen and Scott Wen-tau Yih<br/><br />
Open-domain (textual) question answering (QA), the task of finding answers to open-domain questions by searching a large collection of documents, has been a long-standing problem in NLP, information retrieval (IR) and related fields (Voorhees et al., 1999; Moldovan et al., 2000; Brill et al.,2002; Ferrucci et al., 2010). Traditional QA systems were usually constructed as a pipeline, consisting of many different components such as question processing, document/passage retrieval and answer processing. With the rapid development of neural reading comprehension (Chen, 2018), modern open-domain QA systems have been restructured by combining traditional IR techniques and neural reading comprehension models (Chen et al., 2017; Yang et al., 2019) or even implemented in a fully end-to-end fashion (Lee et al., 2019; Seo et al., 2019). While the system architecture has been drastically simplified, two technical challenges remain critical:(1) “Retriever”: finding documents that (might)contain an answer from a large collection of documents; (2) “Reader”: finding the answer in a given paragraph or a document.<br/><br />
In this tutorial, we aim to provide a comprehensive and coherent overview of recent advances in this line of research. We will start by first giving a brief historical background of open-domain question answering, discussing the basic setup and core technical challenges of the research problem.The focus will then shift to modern techniques and resources proposed for open-domain QA, including the basics of latest neural reading comprehension systems, new datasets and models. The scope will also be broadened to cover the information retrieval component on how to effectively identify passages relevant to the questions. Moreover, in-depth discussions will be given on the use of traditional / neural IR modules, as well as the trade-offs between modular design and end-to-end training. If time permits, we also plan to discuss some hybrid approaches for answering questions using both text and large knowledge bases (e.g. (Sun et al., 2018)) and give a critical review on how structured data complements the information from unstructured text.<br/><br />
At the end of our tutorial, we will discuss some important questions, including (1) How much progress have we made compared to the QA systems developed in the last decade?(2) What are the main challenges and limitations of cur-rent approaches? (3) How to trade off the efficiency (computational time and memory requirements) and accuracy in the deep learning era? We hope that our tutorial will not only serve as a useful resource for the audience to efficiently acquire the up-to-date knowledge, but also provide new perspectives to stimulate the advances of open-domain QA research in the next phase.<br />
<br />
== Workshop Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Milica Gašić, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf<br />
<br />
Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Amazon Alexa AI<br />
<br />
Saif M. Mohammad, National Research Council Canada<br />
<br />
Ves Stoyanov, Facebook AI<br />
<br />
== Student Research Workshop Chairs and Faculty Advisors==<br />
<br />
'''Student Research Workshop Co-chairs'''<br />
<br />
Rotem Dror, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology<br />
<br />
Jiangming Liu, The University of Edinburgh<br />
<br />
Shruti Rijhwani, Carnegie Mellon University<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Student Research Workshop Faculty Advisors'''<br />
<br />
Omri Abend, Hebrew University of Jerusalem<br />
<br />
Sujian Li, Peking University <br />
<br />
Zhou Yu, University of California, Davis<br />
<br />
<br />
Information about the Student Research Workshop (SRW) has posted on the workshop's website: https://sites.google.com/view/acl20studentresearchworkshop/. The SRW Call for Papers has been distributed to ACL mailing lists, as well as on our official Twitter account (@acl_srw) and the ACL meeting's Twitter account (@acl_meeting).<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Pre-submission Mentoring Phase (completed mid-February 2020)'''<br />
<br />
Before submission to the main deadline, the SRW offered pre-submission mentoring by experienced researchers of the ACL community. The pre-submission mentoring primarily serves to provide feedback on the writing style, readability and presentation of the paper.<br />
<br />
We recruited 30 mentors for providing pre-submission feedback. The deadline for the pre-submission phase was January 17, 2020. We had 57 pre-submissions in total.<br />
<br />
Mentors were matched to pre-submissions according to their research areas. All mentors have already provided feedback for the submissions and it was sent to the authors mid-February 2020. The majority of mentors have also offered to participate in follow-up discussions with the authors via email until the main submission deadline. <br />
<br />
Vouchers for one month's free use of Grammarly Premium have been sent to all the pre-submission authors. These were provided by the ACL 2020 Diversity and Inclusion Committee.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Main submission'''<br />
<br />
For the main submission, the START (softconf) submission page has been set up. Currently, we have recruited 200 members of the ACL community (both students and senior researchers) to serve as the Program Committee for reviewing submissions to the SRW. We plan on inviting more PC members, as the number of submissions is likely to be larger than originally estimated. <br />
<br />
Submission deadlines for the SRW are as follows:<br />
<br />
* Paper submission deadline: March 6, 2020<br />
<br />
* Review deadline: April 10, 2020<br />
<br />
* Acceptance notification: April 15, 2020<br />
<br />
* Camera-ready deadline: May 6, 2020<br />
<br />
* Travel grant application deadline: to be decided.<br />
<br />
* Travel grant notification: to be decided.<br />
<br />
We also plan to have a post-acceptance mentoring process, for all papers accepted to the SRW.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Funding'''<br />
<br />
The SRW has applied for an NSF grant of $18,000. The Don and Betty Walker international fund will also be able to provide student support. The SRW organizers have made contact with a number of industry companies to obtain sponsorship, but not yet secured additional funding. Contact has been made with the ACL 2020 sponsorship chairs and with Priscilla to investigate other funding opportunities, as well as the Student Volunteer Program, which helps students cover registration fee to the main conference.<br />
<br />
== Audio-Video Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Hamid Palangi, Microsoft Research, Redmond <br />
<br />
Lianhui Qin, University of Washington<br />
<br />
== Conference Handbook Chair ==<br />
<br />
Nanyun Peng, University of Southern California<br />
<br />
== Demo Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Asli Celikyilmaz, Microsoft Research, Redmond<br />
<br />
Shawn Wen, PolyAI<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Details of Activities''':<br />
<br />
The web site for ACL 2020 Demonstrations Track is: https://acl2020.org/calls/demos/[https://acl2020.org/calls/demos/], which includes details about submissions, deadlines, reviewing policy and important dates.<br />
<br />
Compared to the last year, we have made a few changes to the track. Specifically, in the submission details, we encouraged the authors to include visual aids (e.g., screenshots, snapshots, or diagrams) in the paper. This year the submissions are single blind, in which the authors are allowed to disclose their names on their submitted manuscript. We kept the style files same as last year.<br />
<br />
The deadline for submissions was January 31, 2020.<br />
<br />
This year we have record number of demonstration paper submissions, over 130 submissions. After a few desk rejects, a total of 122 papers are reviewed. The technical Program Committee is in place. To accommodate minimum three reviewers for each paper, we have reached out close to 300 reviewers and 213 have accepted. We managed to assign 3 reviewers to all submitted papers, with no more than 3 papers per reviewer. Currently we have 152 technical program committee members. The program committee is scheduled to submit their reviews by March 10, 2020.<br />
<br />
'''Important Dates'''<br />
<br />
Paper submission deadline: Friday, January 31st, 2020<br />
<br />
Notification of acceptance: Friday, April 3rd, 2020<br />
<br />
Camera-ready submission: Friday, April 24th, 2020<br />
<br />
== Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Rochester Institute of Technology<br />
<br />
Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Google<br />
<br />
<br />
1. We created five different sub-committees (listed below) to address ACL D&I related activities. In the interest of transparency and institutional memory, we prepared a separate memorandum of understanding (MoU) for each sub-committee, which articulates a mission statement, five minimum tasks the sub-committee is responsible for (with the fifth task being a blog post), useful links, and detailed guidelines per task. In these guidelines, each task entry contains:<br />
* Task title<br />
* Interfaces (recommendations for whom to communicate with to address the task)<br />
* Sub tasks (an enumerated list of sub task descriptions) <br />
* Timeline (when to begin)<br />
In designing the tasks, we expanded on NAACL 2019 D&I activities and lessons learned. We will hand over the MoUs for future conferences; we hope that this resource will facilitate future D&I committees’ planning activities. <br />
<br />
2. For communication and teamwork, we set up:<br />
* An ACL 2020 D&I slack channel, facilitating keeping records of interactions.<br />
* A Google folder with designated subfolders for D&I subcommittees<br />
* An ACL 2020 D&I chairs google groups email handle: <acl2020-diversity-inclusion-chairs@googlegroups.com><br />
<br />
3. We recruited 13 volunteers across the 5 subcommittees, constituting the ACL 2020 D&I Team, recognized on the conference website: https://acl2020.org/committees/diversity-inclusion. <br />
<br />
'''Academic Inclusion Chairs'''<br />
''Mission: Ensure the venue is welcoming to researchers from diverse subdisciplines, conducive to building academic networks across disciplines and career stages.''<br />
* Aakanksha Naik, Carnegie Mellon University<br />
* Emily Prud’hommeaux, Boston College<br />
* Alla Rozovskaya, Queens College (City University of New York)<br />
<br />
'''Accessibility Chairs'''<br />
''Mission: Ensure the venue is accessible for researchers with any disability, including provision of requested access services.''<br />
* Sushant Kafle, Google/Rochester Institute of Technology<br />
* Masoud Rouhizadeh, Johns Hopkins University<br />
* Naomi Saphra, University of Edinburgh<br />
<br />
'''Childcare Chairs'''<br />
''Mission: Ensure adequate childcare provisions to help researchers who are caregivers of children to attend the conference.''<br />
* Khyathi Chandu, Carnegie Mellon University<br />
* Stephen Mayhew, Duolingo<br />
<br />
'''Financial Access Chairs'''<br />
''Mission: Ensure provision of financial access to researchers from underrepresented demographics and geographies to attend the conference.''<br />
* Allyson Ettinger, University of Chicago<br />
* Ryan Georgi, KPMG<br />
* Tirthankar Ghosal, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Patna<br />
<br />
'''Socio-cultural Inclusion Chairs'''<br />
''Mission: Ensure a welcoming and inclusive environment for researchers from various socio-cultural subgroups, accommodate for diverse needs for food and drinks at the conference, as well as support initiatives for groups to socialize and network.''<br />
* Shruti Palaskar, Carnegie Mellon University<br />
* Maarten Sap, University of Washington<br />
<br />
Kick-off meetings with all subcommittees took place in December before the winter holidays. Correspondence is mostly taking place on slack, alternatively by email.<br />
<br />
4. A message distributed on ACL2020 social media on September 17 2019 invited community members to share comments and suggestions with the D&I chairs. We received some important feedback.<br />
<br />
5. A blog post entitled The ACL 2020 Diversity and Inclusion Committee appeared on the ACL 2020 website and subsequently social media on February 4 2020. We received some important feedback as well as inquiries about D&I accommodations.<br />
<br />
6. The sponsorship booklet has been updated for D&I sponsorships. In consultation with Priscilla we added a third sponsor-ship level category. The resulting levels are Champion, Ally, and Contributor. The list of benefits is now also up-to-date. We alerted that multipacks may result in lower cost than single conference sponsorship. <br />
<br />
7. Grammarly has provided a generous in-kind donation in the form of writing support software licenses. Codes have been distributed to SRW and WiNLP for distribution among their authors, together with an outreach email template (adjusted from NAACL 2019). Joel Tetreault and Tirthankar Goshal (Financial Access subcommittee) were instrumental in this process. In this context, we also arrived at how to recognize in-kind sponsors by discussion and consensus.<br />
<br />
8. We coordinated a room request across subcommittees, submitted to Priscilla as a spreadsheet, detailing space and furniture requirements for subcommittees’ activities. <br />
<br />
9. We have submitted a request for a set of updates to D&I items in the registration form and are at work on updates to the D&I special request form.<br />
<br />
10. We recommended offering onsite childcare at ACL 2020. We illustrated with ten examples that provision of childcare is a standard feature at comparable conference venues (e.g., AAAI 2020, NeurIPS 2019, Interspeech 2019, CHI 2019). Childcare service is missing at ACL conferences and may especially impact junior researchers. Data shared by two comparable AI conferences indicate that onsite childcare usage can increase substantially (roughly quadrupled) from one year to another, such that a multiyear commitment should be made for establishing a meaningful utility assessment of onsite childcare. Data on ACL 2019 usage was retrieved by Priscilla (around 14 children on average during main conference; 9 children on average during workshop/tutorial days, with a total of 357.8 hours attended by children), while we obtained proposals from 3 providers. Based on reviewing these proposals, we recommend KiddieCorp as the first-choice vendor for this service. <br />
<br />
11. With help from the General Chair, we initiated a conversation about the need for a D&I budget. Subsequently, we prepared a detailed budget request, split into costs and back-stop costs (items that apply when there is a request), which was passed on to the ACL Exec. Sushant Kafle (Accessibility subcommittee) was instrumental in the process of obtaining proposals by vendors for access services. Our requested budget is detailed at the following link, which includes the onsite childcare cost estimates as well: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DaYX-MGHtd2CsezXNTkaPIXJ6lHewow1z08jQA2I-7E<br />
<br />
In conclusion, the D&I activities are progressing and awaiting a decision on budget. In addition, several of the resources we have prepared or enhanced may facilitate future D&I committees’ planning activities, for instance the MOUs, the coordinated room request, the revised sponsorship booklet section, the detailed budget request summary, the process for distributing the writing support software in-kind donation, and the onsite childcare proposal summary.<br />
<br />
== Local Sponsorship Chairs == <br />
<br />
Hoifung Poon, Microsoft <br />
<br />
Kristina Toutanova, Google<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Publication Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Steven Bethard, University of Arizona<br />
<br />
Ryan Cotterrell, University of Cambridge<br />
<br />
Rui Yan, Peking University<br />
<br />
Starting from the style files from ACL 2019, we have produced new LaTeX style files for ACL 2020. Most of the description was retained, but the order of sections was overhauled to make sure that important information wasn't scattered so haphazardly across the document. Other improvements were also made, like using the recommended citation style consistently throughout the LaTeX source, and separating out all the LaTeX-specific stuff into clearly marked sections. The MS Word version was derived from these LaTeX versions to match as closely as possible. The LaTeX version was also posted to the Overleaf gallery. The most recent .bib file for the entire ACL Anthology was included in the style file distribution to encourage authors to use the official citations for ACL Anthology publications. All style file changes were merged into https://github.com/acl-org/acl-pub/tree/gh-pages/paper_styles.<br />
<br />
== Publicity Chair ==<br />
<br />
Emily M. Bender, University of Washington<br />
<br />
=== Dissemination ===<br />
<br />
Durable accounts for the ACL meeting on Twitter and Facebook have been created: <br />
* https://twitter.com/aclmeeting<br />
* https://www.facebook.com/aclmeeting/<br />
<br />
These will be passed along to the ACL 2021 publicity chair(s) so that they don't have to build up followers separately. As of Feb 4, 2020 the Twitter account has 4,061 followers and the Facebook account has 181. We have not yet been making use of the Instagram account, but we have been using the Twitter and Facebook accounts to publicize important dates as well as blog posts. The Twitter account especially has been useful for fielding questions from the community. Calls for papers have also gone out over the ACL member portal and several mailing lists, as well as websites such as WikiCFP. (These are maintained in a spreadsheet which can be handed off to the ACL 2021 publicity chair(s)).<br />
<br />
=== Next Steps ===<br />
<br />
* Recruit co-chairs, especially to coordinate live-tweeting of the conference<br />
* Contact local media for coverage<br />
* Develop land acknowledgement in consultation with the Duwamish Tribe (on whose land the meeting will take place). The Duwamish publish this information about land acknowledgments: https://www.duwamishtribe.org/land-acknowledgement<br />
<br />
<br />
== Remote Presentation Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Hao Fang, Microsoft Semantic Machines <br />
<br />
Yi Luan, Google AI Language<br />
<br />
== Sustainability Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Ananya Ganesh, Educational Testing Service <br />
<br />
Klaus Zechner, Educational Testing Service<br />
<br />
Our main goal for this new focus area is to engage the ACL community in discussions about how best to reduce the carbon footprint of future ACL conferences in order to contribute to sustainable and livable conditions on this planet.<br />
One of the main directions we are currently envisioning is to encourage and support conference attendees in virtual participation using live streaming of conference events as air travel is the main contributor to the carbon footprint of international conferences.<br />
<br />
== Website & Conference App Chairs == <br />
<br />
Sudha Rao, Microsoft Research, Redmond <br />
<br />
Yizhe Zhang, Microsoft Research, Redmond<br />
<br />
We are hosting the conference website on GitHub using the easily adaptable website architecture built by Nitin Madnani for NAACL 2019: https://github.com/naacl-org/naacl-hlt-2019. <br/><br />
We are using the Whova event app for hosting the conference app this year similar to NAACL 2019.<br />
<br />
== Business Office ==<br />
<br />
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q1_Reports:_ACL_2020&diff=735392020Q1 Reports: ACL 20202020-02-26T18:31:40Z<p>Jurafsky: </p>
<hr />
<div><br />
== General Chair ==<br />
Dan Jurafsky, Stanford University<br />
<br />
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) will take place in Seattle, Washington at the Hyatt Regency Seattle in downtown Seattle from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
We have a great set of chairs! We are continuing 2019's new roles (Diversity and Inclusion chairs, Remote Presentation Chairs, AV Chairs) and adding new ones: (Sustainability chair), and we are doing well in demographic representation among our chairs (gender and region).<br />
<br />
Following advice from last year, we have been using Slack for most intra-committee communication (and we put the Slack channel into the ACL pro space, so it can be preserved for future years), and using email only when absolutely necessary.<br />
<br />
As usual, the growing size of the conference (both in papers and attendees) is a challenge, but both in papers and space we have been doing well (see the individual chair summaries below).<br />
<br />
Highlights include: <br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>The program chairs moved the submission date earlier (to Dec 9), and the notification date earlier (to April 3), to allow more time for attendees visa processing.<br />
<li> We received a record 3,429 submissions (~15% increase over ACL2019)<br />
<li>The program chairs removed the neutral 3 rating (requiring reviewers to choose 2.5 or 3.5), and asked reviewers to also evaluate the ethical implications of each submission.<br />
<li> As usual, the call, submission, reviewing and selection of tutorials and workshops was coordinated jointly for all the conferences including COLING; for this year<br />
that meant ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP. All tutorials and Workshops have been chosen and scheduled and announced.<br />
<li> The D&I chairs propose to continue to do onsite child care (as used at ACL2019) rather than the voucher system (as used at NAACL2019), since onsite child care worked well for us at ACL 2019, makes it easier for parents to navigate in an unknown location, and is now the standard best practice used by our sister conferences (AAAI, NeurIPS, Interspeech, CHI, etc.).<br />
<li><br />
The committee found sections of the ACL Conference Handbook to be out of date and in some cases missing entirely.<br />
and I have asked all of the chairs to update their own relevant section of the handbook, and the chairs have begun to do this.<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
On Mar 11, we will have a site visit at the hotel in Seattle which besides Priscilla will include the General Chair, and representatives from the Program Chairs, the D&I chairs, and the AV chairs. We will also use that occasion to have a committee mtg including those folks plus the relatively large number of ACL2020 organizing committee members who are local to Seattle.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Program Chairs == <br />
Joyce Chai, University of Michigan<br />
<br />
Natalie Schluter, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark<br />
<br />
Joel Tetreault, Dataminr, USA<br />
<br />
---<br />
<br />
'''New Initiatives This Year'''<br />
<br />
'''''Earlier Submission Deadline and Notification'''''<br />
<br />
To accommodate a more realistic workflow, given (1) the rapid growth in the number of submissions to ACL conferences, (2) together with avoiding the period for authors from Dec. 15-Jan. 15 while giving us more time to implement and test new implementations, we moved the submission deadline back to December 9. Specifically, previous PCs advised us to do this to set a precedent for future PCs, in accommodating a more realistic timeline. The timeline is still packed, but workable. We also plan notifications to be out earlier than normal, to provide an extra 1-2 weeks for visa applicants, as an inclusion measure.<br />
<br />
'''''Four New Tracks'''''<br />
<br />
ACL2020 introduced four new tracks:(1) Ethics and NLP. Ethical issues have become increasingly important as more advanced tools become available for NLP research and development. We dedicated a new track and explicitly invite contributions that study ethical issues and impact regarding NLP research and applications. (2) Interpretation and Analysis of Models for NLP. As the community strives for pushing performance boundaries, understanding behaviors of STOA models becomes critical. (3) Theory and Formalism. This track is designed to encourage submissions targeted to theoretical underpinning of NLP models which had little/small presence in the past ACL conferences. (4) Theme: Taking Stock of Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going. The last few years have witnessed an unprecedented growth in NLP since the field began over sixty years ago. This track is designed to invite submissions that can provide insight for the community to assess how much we have accomplished today with respect to the past and where the field should be heading to. The theme track is different from other tracks. We therefore made some modifications in the review form to reflect that.<br />
<br />
'''''Extended Automatic COI Detection/Automatic Reviewer-Paper Assignment'''''<br />
<br />
We carried out offline COI detection and automatic paper assignment for the first time for an *ACL conference. The code used were ACL2020-customised implementations of Amanda Stent’s COI detection software and Graham Neubig’s automatic reviewer-paper assignment software.<br />
<br />
'''''Mandatory Reviewer Duty and Recruitment'''''<br />
<br />
To meet the reviewer demands of a growing conference, we made reviewer volunteering mandatory for submission authors. This resulted in a record number of volunteer candidate reviewers (over 11K). We note that these volunteers were candidates and only a subset of them were actually given reviewing assignments.<br />
Using a Microsoft Reviewer/Author form, we collected a variety of information on potential reviewers like ACL anthology page, website, self-declared reviewer experience, 1st & 2nd track preferences, etc. to (1) provide information sheets on reviewers to SACs and ACs, as a tool when manually correcting the automatic reviewer-paper assignments,<br />
(2) to manually balance the reviewer pools among tracks, and (3) to filter the list of reviewers based on whether the reviewer (i) had superiority PhD-student or higher, (ii) had reviewed for at least 4 previous *ACL conference, and (iii) had a minimum number of ACL anthology publications.<br />
To counterbalance (3ii), we provided SACs with a list of novice reviewers and introduced our a Reviewer Mentoring Program (see below).<br />
<br />
'''''New Reviewer Mentoring Program'''''<br />
<br />
Given the rapid growth of NLP in terms of number of papers and new students, it is very important for our community to mentor and train our new reviewers. ACL2020 has launched a pilot program which calls for each AC to mentor at least one novice reviewer. Ultimately, the goal is to provide long-needed mentoring to new reviewers. At the very least, this process will inform ACL on constructing a reviewer mentoring program that is more scalable in the future. For most tracks, each AC was paired with at least a mentee (often a Ph.D. student, or a junior researcher who has just graduated). The AC would work with the mentee, provide feedback and help the mentee to improve the quality of his/her reviews. Close to 300 junior researchers were selected to participate in this program. We will put together a detailed report on this program after the conference. <br />
<br />
'''''Updated Review Form with New Rating Scale and Evaluation Item'''''<br />
<br />
We have separate review forms for regular tracks and the theme track. Our review forms were built upon the form from EMNLP-IJCNLP2019 and ACL2019 with '''''two new extensions'''''. <br />
(1) We have removed the rating 3 (ambivalent) from the overall recommendation as we would like reviewers to take a stand on whether the paper is above the borderline (3.5) or below the borderline (2.5). The reason for this change is that ambivalent cases often take a long time to discuss. By taking a stand, reviewers would provide more informative feedback for AC/SAC to make a recommendation. ICLR 2020 has adopted similar rating strategies (although with a different scale). <br />
(2) As ethical concerns and societal impacts are an important consideration for NLP research, we have explicitly ask reviewers to evaluate ethical implications of each submission. On the review form, we ask reviewers whether there are any ethical concerns about a submission that the area chairs and program chairs should be aware of. We also encourage reviewers to flag such concerns to the authors.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Other Efforts'''<br />
<br />
'''''Initial submission reviews and desk rejects'''''<br />
<br />
We have received a record number of 3,429 submissions (approximately a 15% increase over ACL2019). All papers were carefully inspected to check for violations of ACL policies (ranging from formatting to anonymization to use of supplementary material). Similar to ACL2019, we used assistants to speed up an otherwise long process. All issues identified by assistants were cross-examined by two PCs. We noticed that many papers did not strictly follow the ACL style sheet. We have thus been lenient in terms of margin, line numbers, fonts, etc formatting issues. As a result 29 submissions were desk rejected for violating ACL policies on anonymity, page length, double blind review, etc. <br />
<br />
'''''Manual adjustment of submission tracks'''''<br />
<br />
Many papers were not submitted to the right track where they could receive reviews from most relevant reviewers. SACs were instructed to flag the papers that should be moved to a different track. We went through every single suggestion and moved papers around if warranted. This turned out to be a major effort. In total, 500-600 papers were moved across tracks as a result. <br />
<br />
'''''Manual adjustment of AC and reviewer assignment'''''<br />
<br />
As the automatic reviewer assignment is not perfect, SACs did much manual work adjusting AC assignments as well as reviewer assignments. This effort varied among tracks. Given the current set up in Softconf, ACs’ roles are pretty limited. ACs are essentially meta-reviewers who do not have access to the reviewer accounts, and therefore, cannot add reviewers, nor make reviewer assignments, nor contact reviewers directly. We have given this feedback to softconf and hopefully the system will be updated to support extended AC roles for future conferences. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''''Communication'''''<br />
<br />
Because of several new initiatives implemented this year, extensive efforts have been made to communicate these changes to SACs, ACs, reviewers, as well as authors. Besides direct emails, we have used blog postings as well as twitters as our additional communication channels assisted by the publicity chair and the web chairs.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Submission Status'''<br />
<br />
We have received 3,429 papers (2244 long and 1185 short) have been submitted. Here is the distribution of long, short and total papers per track.<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics: 49 39 88<br />
<li> Computational Social Science and Social Media: 73 38 111<br />
<li> Dialogue and Interactive Systems: 204 71 275<br />
<li> Discourse and Pragmatics: 36 20 56<br />
<li> Ethics and NLP: 30 22 52<br />
<li> Generation: 142 71 213<br />
<li> Information Extraction: 159 83 242<br />
<li> Information Retrieval and Text Mining: 55 41 96<br />
<li> Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP: 110 54 164<br />
<li> Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond: 69 24 93<br />
<li> Machine Learning for NLP: 186 109 295<br />
<li> Machine Translation: 158 104 262<br />
<li> NLP Applications: 169 99 268<br />
<li> Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation: 38 15 53<br />
<li> Question Answering: 109 63 172<br />
<li> Resources and Evaluation: 88 48 136<br />
<li> Semantics: Lexical: 57 37 94<br />
<li> Semantics: Sentence Level: 66 29 95<br />
<li> Semantics: Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics: 81 31 112<br />
<li> Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining: 112 66 178<br />
<li> Speech and Multimodality: 38 27 65<br />
<li> Summarization: 90 37 127<br />
<li> Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing: 47 28 75<br />
<li> Theme: 67 26 93<br />
<li> Theory and Formalism in NLP (Linguistic and Mathematical): 11 3 14<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
'''Summary of Timelines'''<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Oct 15 - Nov 30: SACs invite ACs and reviewers <br />
<li>Nov 25: Reviewer profiles completed<br />
<li>Dec 09: ACL Paper Submission Deadline (long and short papers) <br />
<li>Dec 10 - Jan 14: initial submission reviews and desk rejects; automatic reviewer assignment and COI detection; manual adjustment of assignment; <br />
<li>Jan 17 - Feb 07: Review Period<br />
<li>Feb 08 - Feb 11: ACs chase late reviews <br />
<li>Feb 12 - Feb 17: Author Response<br />
<li>Feb 18 - Feb 25: Reviewer Discussion Period (ACs lead discussion), ACs provide feedback to mentees. <br />
<li>Feb 25 - Mar 03: ACs produce meta-reviews<br />
<li>Mar 03 - Mar 10: SACs rank papers based on meta-reviews and make recommendations to PC chairs<br />
<li>Mar 11 - Apr 02: PC chairs make decisions (they may consult SACs during this time); SACs and ACs recommend best reviewers<br />
<li>Apr 03 - Accept / Reject Notifications<br />
<li>Apr 24: Camera ready<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
'''List of SAC/ACs and recruitment'''<br />
<br />
Following ACL2019, we have adopted a hierarchical structure where each area is chaired by one or two senior ACs, who are supported by a group of area chairs. We have a total of 40 Senior Area Chairs and 299 Area Chairs. <br />
'''''Recruitment''''': We individually created preference lists for SACs, discussed these and made decisions. ACs were selected by SACs.<br />
<br />
Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Emily Prud’hommeaux<br />
<li>ACs: Cassandra L. Jacobs, Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Masoud Rouhizadeh, Serguei Pakhomov, Yevgeni Berzak<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Computational Social Science and Social Media<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Tim Baldwin, Nikolaos Aletras<br />
<li>ACs: A. Seza Dögruöz, Afshin Rahimi, Alice Oh, Brendan O'Connor, Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro, David Bamman, David Jurgens, David Mimno, Diana Inkpen, Diyi Yang, Eiji Aramaki, Jacob Eisenstein, Jonathan K. Kummerfeld, Kalina Bontcheva<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Dialogue and Interactive Systems<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Jason Williams, Mari Ostendorf<br />
<li>ACs: Alborz Geramifard, Amanda Stent, Asli Celikyilmaz, Casey Kennington, David Traum, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Gabriel Skantze, Helen Hastie, Heriberto Cuayahuitl, Kai Yu, Kallirroi Georgila, Luciana Benotti, Luis Fernando D'Haro, Nina Dethlefs, Ryuichiro Higashinaka, Stefan Ultes, Sungjin Lee, Tsung-Hsien Wen, Y-Lan Boureau, Yun-Nung Chen, Zhou Yu<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Discourse and Pragmatics<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Annie Louis (taking over for Diane Litman)<br />
<li>ACs: Chloé Braud, Junyi Jessy Li, Manfred Stede, Shafiq Joty, Sujian Li, Yangfeng Ji<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Ethics and NLP<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Dirk Hovy<br />
<li>ACs: Alan W Black, Emily M. Bender, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Yulia Tsvetkov<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Generation<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Wei Xu, Alexander Rush<br />
<li>ACs: John Wieting, Laura Perez-Beltrachini, Lu Wang, Miltiadis Allamanis, Mohit Iyyer, Nanyun Peng, Sam Wiseman, Shashi Narayan, Sudha Rao, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Xiaojun Wan, Xipeng Qiu<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Information Extraction<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Doug Downey, Hoifun Poon<br />
<li>ACs: Alan Ritter, Chandra Bhagavatula, Gerard de Melo, Kai-Wei Chang, Marius Pasca, Mo Yu, Radu Florian, Ruihong Huang, Sameer Singh, Satoshi Sekine, Snigdha Chaturvedi, Sumithra Velupillai, Timothy Miller, Vivek Srikumar, William Yang Wang, Yunyao Li<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Information Retrieval and Text Mining<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Chin-Yew Lin, Nazli Goharian<br />
<li>ACs: Andrew Yates, Arman Cohan, Bing Qin, Craig Macdonald, Danai Koutra, Elad Yom-Tov, Franco Maria Nardini, Kalliopi Zervanou, Luca Soldaini, Nicola Tonellotto, Pu-Jen Cheng, Seung-won Hwang, Yangqiu Song, Yansong Feng<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Yoav Goldberg<br />
<li>ACs: Adina Williams, Afra Alishahi, Douwe Kiela, Grzegorz Chrupała, Marco Baroni, Yonatan Belinkov, Zachary C. Lipton<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Yoav Artzi<br />
<li>ACs: Angeliki Lazaridou, Dan Goldwasser, Jason Baldridge, Jesse Thomason, Lisa Anne Hendricks, Parisa Kordjamshidi, Raffaella Bernardi, Vicente Ordonez, Yonatan Bisk<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Machine Learning for NLP<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Andre Martins, Isabelle Augenstein<br />
<li>ACs: Ankur Parikh, Anna Rumshisky, Bruno Martins, Caio Corro, Dani Yogatama, Daniel Beck, Dipanjan Das, Edouard Grave, Emma Strubell, Gholamreza Haffari, Ivan Titov, Joseph Le Roux, Jun Suzuki, Kevin Gimpel, Michael Auli, Ming-Wei Chang, Shay B. Cohen, Vlad Niculae, Waleed Ammar, Wilker Aziz, Yejin Choi, Zita Marinho, Zornitsa Kozareva<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Machine Translation<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Marine Carpuat, Alexandra Birch<br />
<li>ACs: Ann Clifton, Antonio Toral, Atsushi Fujita, Boxing Chen, Carolina Scarton, Chi-kiu Lo, Christian Hardmeier, Deyi Xiong, Franois Yvon, George Foster, Jiajun Zhang, Jrg Tiedemann, Maja Popovič, Marcello Federico, Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt, Marco Turchi, Marta R. Costa-jussà, Matt Post, Nadir Durrani, Qun Liu, Rico Sennrich, Taro Watanabe, Yuki Arase, Yvette Graham<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Multidisciplinary and Area Chair COI<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Michael Strube<br />
<li>ACs: Anders Søgaard, David Schlangen, Katrin Erk, Kentaro Inui, Kevin Duh, Massimo Poesio, Mausam, Pascal Denis<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
NLP Applications<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Preslav Nakov, Karin Verspoor<br />
<li>ACs: Alexander Fraser, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Aoife Cahill, Daniel Cer, Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha, Giovanni Da San Martino, Hassan Sajjad, Kevin Cohen, Marcos Zampieri, Michel Galley, Min Zhang, Pierre Zweigenbaum, Razvan Bunescu, Sara Rosenthal, Tristan Naumann, Vincent Ng, Wei Gao, Wei Lu<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Kemal Oflazer<br />
<li>ACs: Christo Kirov, David R. Mortensen, Kareem Darwish, Reut Tsarfaty, Yue Zhang, Özlem Çetinoğlu<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Question Answering<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Eugene Agichtein, Alessandro Moschitti<br />
<li>ACs: Avi Sil, Dina Demner-Fushman, Evangelos Kanoulas, Gerhard Weikum, Idan Szpektor, Jimmy Lin, Oleg Rokhlenko, Sanda Harabagiu, Wen-tau Yih, William Cohen<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Resources and Evaluation<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Nathan Schneider, Barbara Plank<br />
<li>ACs: Allyson Ettinger, Annemarie Friedrich, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Arianna Bisazza, Claire Bonial, Daniel Zeman, Emmanuele Chersoni, Ines Rehbein, Lonneke van der Plas, Maria Liakata, Sara Tonelli, Sarvnaz Karimi, Tim Van de Cruys, Vered Shwartz, Walid Magdy, Çağri Çöltekin<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Semantics: Lexical<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Ekaterina Shutova, Aline Villavicencio<br />
<li>ACs: Alessandro Lenci, Anna Feldman, Aurélie Herbelot, Beata Beigman Klebanov, Carlos Ramisch, Chris Biemann, Enrico Santus, Fabio Massimo Zanzotto, Helen Yannakoudakis, Ivan Vulič, Jose Camacho-Collados, Marianna Apidianaki, Paul Cook, Saif Mohammad<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Semantics: Sentence Level<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Mohit Bansal<br />
<li>ACs: Andreas Vlachos, Christopher Potts, Danqi Chen, Eunsol Choi, He He, Jonathan Berant, Kevin Small, Marek Rei, Sebastian Ruder, Siva Reddy, Swabha Swayamdipta, Thomas Wolf, Veselin Stoyanov<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Semantics: Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Sam Bowman<br />
<li>ACs: Anette Frank, Eduardo Blanco, Edward Grefenstette, Jacob Andreas, Jonathan May, Kenton Lee, Lasha Abzianidze, Luheng He, Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Rachel Rudinger, Roy Schwartz, Valeria de Paiva<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Smaranda Muresan, Swapna Somasundaran<br />
<li>ACs: Bing Liu, Claire Cardie, Elena Musi, Iryna Gurevych, Julian Brooke, Lun-Wei Ku, Marie-Francine Moens, Minlie Huang, Paolo Rosso, Roman Klinger, Serena Villata, Soujanya Poria, Thamar Solorio, Yulan He<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Speech and Multimodality<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Eric Fosler-Lussier<br />
<li>ACs: Bhuvana Ramabhadran, Florian Metze, Gerasimos Potamianos, Hamid Palangi, Martha Larson<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Summarization<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Fei Liu<br />
<li>ACs: Caiming Xiong, Giuseppe Carenini, Katja Markert, Manabu Okumura, Michael Elhadad, Ramesh Nallapati, Sebastian Gehrmann, Wenjie Li, Xiaodan Zhu, Yang Gao<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: David Chiang<br />
<li>ACs: Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez, Emily Pitler, Liang Huang, Miguel Ballesteros, Miryam de Lhoneux, Slav Petrov, Stephan Oepen, Weiwei Sun<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
THEME<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Marilyn Walker (taking over for Ellen Riloff)<br />
<li>ACs: Donia Scott, Johan Bos, Luke Zettlemoyer, Philipp Koehn, Raymond Mooney<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Theory and Formalism in NLP (Linguistic and Mathematical)<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Daniel Gildea<br />
<li>ACs: Alexander Koller, Laura Kallmeyer, Marco Kuhlmann<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
== Local Organisation Chairs ==<br />
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL<br />
<br />
With advice from:<br />
<br />
Jianfeng Gao, Microsoft Research<br />
<br />
Luke Zettlemoyer, University of Washington<br />
<br />
== Tutorial Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Agata Savary, University of Tours, France<br />
<br />
Yue Zhang, Westlake University, Hangzhou, China<br />
<br />
The call, submission, reviewing and selection of tutorials was coordinated jointly for 4 conferences: ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP. <br />
<br />
Before drafting the call, we collected lists of tutorials offered within the past 4 years. We analysed previous calls for tutorials and reports from tutorial chairs (from [https://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2016Q3_Reports:_Tutorial_Chairs 2016], [https://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2017Q3_Reports:_Tutorial_Chairs 2017], [https://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2018Q3_Reports:_Tutorial_Chairs 2018] and [http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2019Q1_Reports:_ACL_2019 2019]). We consulted previous tutorial chairs with a questionnaire including questions about: the number of submissions, encouraging submissions on specific topics or from specific lecturers, the review procedure, the evaluation criteria, the post-tutorial availability of the slides/codes, and lessons learned from tutorial coordination. We also discussed the publication of slides and video recordings from future tutorials with the persons in charge of the ACL Anthology. As a result of these steps, we created two new sections for the [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Conference_Handbook ACL Conference Handbook] (future chairs might consider updating these documents yearly): <br />
* the list of [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Past_tutorials past tutorials] at ACL, COLING, EACL, EMNLP, and NAACL in 2016-2019<br />
* a [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Tutorial_chair_handbook tutorial chair handbook]<br />
<br />
The final [https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/joint-call-tutorial-proposals-aclaacl-ijcnlpemnlpcoling-2020 call] differs from previous calls in several aspects: (i) the expectations about tutorial proposals were made clearer, (ii) following the central ACL decision, the teachers' payment policy was replaced by a fee-waiving policy, (iii) the required submission details include two new items: diversity considerations and agreement for open access publication of slides, codes, data and video recordings, (iv) the evaluation criteria (see below) are announced.<br />
<br />
We recruited a review committee of 19 members, including the 8 tutorial chairs and 11 external members selected for their large understanding of the NLP domain and a good experience in reviewing and/or tutorial teaching:<br />
<br />
'''Review Committee'''<br />
* Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne, Australia) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Daniel Beck (University of Melbourne, Australia) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Emily M. Bender (University of Washington, WA, USA)<br />
* Erik Cambria (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)<br />
* Gaël Dias (University of Caen Normandie, France)<br />
* Stefan Evert (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)<br />
* Yang Liu (Tsinghua University, Beijing, China)<br />
* Agata Savary (University of Tours, France) - ACL 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* João Sedoc (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA)<br />
* Lucia Specia (Sheffield University, UK) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair <br />
* Xu SUN (Peking University, China)<br />
* Yulia Tsvetkov (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA)<br />
* Benjamin Van Durme (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Aline Villavicencio (University of Sheffield, UK and Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Taro Watanabe (Google, Inc., Tokyo, Japan)<br />
* Aaron Steven White (University of Rochester, NY, USA)<br />
* Fei Xia (University of Washington, WA, USA) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Yue Zhang (Westlake University, Hangzhou, China) - ACL 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Meishan Zhang (Tianjin University, China)<br />
<br />
In total, we received 43 submissions for the 4 conferences. Each reviewer was assigned 6-7 proposals and each proposal received 3 reviews. The selection criteria included: clarity and preparedness, novelty or timely character of the topic, lecturers' experience, likely audience interest, open access of the teaching material, diversity aspects (multilingualism, gender, age and country of the lecturers), and compatibility with the preferred venues. <br />
We accepted 31 proposals. <br />
<br />
The decision making was handled via an online meeting of the 8 tutorial chairs. In particular, the selection of tutorials for each conference was done via the expression of interest of the tutorial chairs on a round-robin basis. Some slight adjustments were also performed after the meeting to better fit the authors' preferences. In total, 8, 8, 8 and 7 proposals were selected for ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP, respectively. Upon the announcement the results, 2 of the proposals accepted for AACL-IJCNLP were withdrawn.<br />
<br />
The submission, review, selection and collection of final material for all tutorials was handled via a dedicated SoftConf space, shared by the 4 coordinating conferences. After the selection of proposals, a separate track was created on SoftConf for each conference. The final submission page (one per conference) was set up so as to collect all the necessary data including notably: the tutorial slides, URLs for course material (if any), printable material (if any) and agreement for open access publication.<br />
<br />
The final selection for ACL 2020 consists of the following 8 tutorials of 3 hours each (each of them had ACL as the preferred or the second preferred venue):<br />
<br />
'''Morning Tutorials'''<br />
<br />
'''T1: Interpretability and Analysis in Neural NLP''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Yonatan Belinkov, Sebastian Gehrmann and Ellie Pavlick<br/><br />
While deep learning has transformed the NLP field and impacted the larger computational linguistics community, the rise of neural networks is stained by their opaque nature: It is challenging to interpret the inner workings of neural network models, and explicate their behavior. Therefore, in the last few years, an increasingly large body of work has been devoted to the analysis and interpretation of neural network models in NLP.<br/><br />
This body of work is so far lacking a common framework and methodology. Moreover, approaching the analysis of modern neural networks can be difficult for newcomers to the field. This tutorial aims to fill this gap and introduce the nascent field of interpretability and analysis of neural networks in NLP.<br/><br />
The tutorial covers the main lines of analysis work, such as probing classifier, behavior studies and test suites, psycholinguistic methods, visualizations, adversarial examples, and other methods. We highlight not only the most commonly applied analysis methods, but also the specific limitations and shortcomings of current approaches, in order to inform participants where to focus future efforts.<br />
<br />
'''T2: Multi-modal Information Extraction from Text, Semi-structured, and Tabular Data on the Web''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Xin Luna Dong, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Colin Lockard and Prashant Shiralkar<br/><br />
The World Wide Web contains vast quantities of textual information in several forms: unstructured text, template-based semi-structured webpages (which present data in key-value pairs and lists), and tables. Methods for extracting information from these sources and converting it to a structured form have been a target of research from the natural language processing (NLP), data mining, and database communities. While these researchers have largely separated extraction from web data into different problems based on the modality of the data, they have faced similar problems such as learning with limited labeled data, defining (or avoiding defining) ontologies, making use of prior knowledge, and scaling solutions to deal with the size of the Web.<br/><br />
In this tutorial we take a holistic view toward information extraction, exploring the commonalities in the challenges and solutions developed to address these different forms of text. We will explore the approaches targeted at unstructured text that largely rely on learning syntactic or semantic textual patterns, approaches targeted at semi-structured documents that learn to identify structural patterns in the template, and approaches targeting web tables which rely heavily on entity linking and type information.<br/><br />
While these different data modalities have largely been considered separately in the past, recent research has started taking a more inclusive approach toward textual extraction, in which the multiple signals offered by textual, layout, and visual clues are combined into a single extraction model made possible by new deep learning approaches. At the same time, trends within purely textual extraction have shifted toward full-document understanding rather than considering sentences as independent units. With this in mind, it is worth considering the information extraction problem as a whole to motivate solutions that harness textual semantics along with visual and semi-structured layout information. We will discuss these approaches and suggest avenues for future work.<br />
<br />
'''T3: Reviewing Natural Language Processing Research''' (introductory)<br/><br />
Kevin Cohen, Karën Fort, Margot Mieskes and Aurélie Névéol<br/><br />
As the demand for reviewing grows, so must the pool of reviewers. As the [http://www.livecongress.it/aol/indexSA.php?id=E2EAED7D&ticket= survey] presented by Graham Neubig at the 2019 ACL showed, a considerable number of reviewers are junior researchers, who might lack the experience and expertise necessary for high-quality reviews. Some of them might not have the environment or lack opportunities that allow them to learn the skills necessary. A tutorial on reviewing for the NLP community might increase reviewers’ confidence, as well as the quality of the reviews. This introductory tutorial will cover the goals, processes, and evaluation of reviewing research papers in natural language processing.<br />
<br />
'''T4: Stylized Text Generation: Approaches and Applications''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Lili Mou and Olga Vechtomova<br/><br />
Text generation has played an important role in various applications of natural language processing (NLP), and kn recent studies, researchers are paying increasing attention to modeling and manipulating the style of the generation text, which we call stylized text generation. In this tutorial, we will provide a comprehensive literature review in this direction. We start from the definition of style and different settings of stylized text generation, illustrated with various applications. Then, we present different settings of stylized generation, such as parallel supervised, style label-supervised, and unsupervised. In each setting, we delve deep into machine learning methods, including embedding learning techniques to represent style}, adversarial learning and reinforcement learning with cycle consistency to match content but to distinguish different styles. We also introduce current approaches of evaluating stylized text generation systems. We conclude our tutorial by presenting the challenges of stylized text generation and discussing future directions, such as small-data training, non-categorical style modeling, and a generalized scope of style transfer (e.g., controlling the syntax as a style).<br />
<br />
'''Afternoon Tutorials'''<br />
<br />
'''T5: Achieving Common Ground in Multi-modal Dialogue''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Malihe Alikhani and Matthew Stone<br/><br />
All communication aims at achieving common ground (grounding): interlocutors can work together effectively only with mutual beliefs about what the state of the world is, about what their goals are, and about how they plan to make their goals a reality. Computational dialogue research offers some classic results on grouding, which unfortunately offer scant guidance to the design of grounding modules and behaviors in cutting-edge systems. In this tutorial, we focus on three main topic areas: 1) grounding in human-human communication; 2) grounding in dialogue systems; and 3) grounding in multi-modal interactive systems, including image-oriented conversations and human-robot interactions. We highlight a number of achievements of recent computational research in coordinating complex content, show how these results lead to rich and challenging opportunities for doing grounding in more flexible and powerful ways, and canvass relevant insights from the literature on human--human conversation. We expect that the tutorial will be of interest to researchers in dialogue systems, computational semantics and cognitive modeling, and hope that it will catalyze research and system building that more directly explores the creative, strategic ways conversational agents might be able to seek and offer evidence about their understanding of their interlocutors.<br />
<br />
'''T6: Commonsense Reasoning for Natural Language Processing''' (introductory)<br/><br />
Maarten Sap, Vered Shwartz, Antoine Bosselut, Dan Roth and Yejin Choi<br/><br />
In our tutorial, we (1) outline the various types of commonsense (e.g., physical, social), and (2) discuss techniques to gather and represent commonsense knowledge, while highlighting the challenges specific to this type of knowledge (e.g., reporting bias). We will then (3) discuss the types of commonsense knowledge captured by modern NLP systems (e.g., large pretrained language models), and (4) present ways to measure systems' commonsense reasoning abilities. We finish with (5) a discussion of various ways in which commonsense reasoning can be used to improve performance on NLP tasks, exemplified by an (6) interactive session on integrating commonsense into a downstream task.<br />
<br />
'''T7: Integrating Ethics into the NLP Curriculum''' (introductory)<br/><br />
Emily M. Bender, Dirk Hovy and Alexandra Schofield<br/><br />
Our goal in this tutorial is to empower NLP researchers and practitioners with tools and resources to teach others about how to ethically apply NLP techniques. Our tutorial will present both high-level strategies for developing an ethics-oriented curriculum, based on experience and best practices, as well as specific sample exercises that can be brought to a classroom. We plan to make this a highly interactive work session culminating in a shared online resource page that pools lesson plans, assignments, exercise ideas, reading suggestions, and ideas from the attendees. We consider three primary topics with our session that frequently underlie ethical issues in NLP research: Dual use, bias and privacy.<br/><br />
In this setting, a key lesson is that there is no single approach to ethical NLP: each project requires thoughtful consideration about what steps can be taken to best support people affected by that project. However, we can learn (and teach) what kinds of issues to be aware of and what kinds of strategies are available for mitigating harm. To teach this process, we apply and promote interactive exercises that provide an opportunity to ideate, discuss, and reflect. We plan to facilitate this in a way that encourages positive discussion, emphasizing the creation of ideas for the future instead of negative opinions of previous work.<br />
<br />
'''T8: Recent Advances in Open-Domain Question Answering''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Danqi Chen and Scott Wen-tau Yih<br/><br />
Open-domain (textual) question answering (QA), the task of finding answers to open-domain questions by searching a large collection of documents, has been a long-standing problem in NLP, information retrieval (IR) and related fields (Voorhees et al., 1999; Moldovan et al., 2000; Brill et al.,2002; Ferrucci et al., 2010). Traditional QA systems were usually constructed as a pipeline, consisting of many different components such as question processing, document/passage retrieval and answer processing. With the rapid development of neural reading comprehension (Chen, 2018), modern open-domain QA systems have been restructured by combining traditional IR techniques and neural reading comprehension models (Chen et al., 2017; Yang et al., 2019) or even implemented in a fully end-to-end fashion (Lee et al., 2019; Seo et al., 2019). While the system architecture has been drastically simplified, two technical challenges remain critical:(1) “Retriever”: finding documents that (might)contain an answer from a large collection of documents; (2) “Reader”: finding the answer in a given paragraph or a document.<br/><br />
In this tutorial, we aim to provide a comprehensive and coherent overview of recent advances in this line of research. We will start by first giving a brief historical background of open-domain question answering, discussing the basic setup and core technical challenges of the research problem.The focus will then shift to modern techniques and resources proposed for open-domain QA, including the basics of latest neural reading comprehension systems, new datasets and models. The scope will also be broadened to cover the information retrieval component on how to effectively identify passages relevant to the questions. Moreover, in-depth discussions will be given on the use of traditional / neural IR modules, as well as the trade-offs between modular design and end-to-end training. If time permits, we also plan to discuss some hybrid approaches for answering questions using both text and large knowledge bases (e.g. (Sun et al., 2018)) and give a critical review on how structured data complements the information from unstructured text.<br/><br />
At the end of our tutorial, we will discuss some important questions, including (1) How much progress have we made compared to the QA systems developed in the last decade?(2) What are the main challenges and limitations of cur-rent approaches? (3) How to trade off the efficiency (computational time and memory requirements) and accuracy in the deep learning era? We hope that our tutorial will not only serve as a useful resource for the audience to efficiently acquire the up-to-date knowledge, but also provide new perspectives to stimulate the advances of open-domain QA research in the next phase.<br />
<br />
== Workshop Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Milica Gašić, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf<br />
<br />
Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Amazon Alexa AI<br />
<br />
Saif M. Mohammad, National Research Council Canada<br />
<br />
Ves Stoyanov, Facebook AI<br />
<br />
== Student Research Workshop Chairs and Faculty Advisors==<br />
<br />
'''Student Research Workshop Co-chairs'''<br />
<br />
Rotem Dror, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology<br />
<br />
Jiangming Liu, The University of Edinburgh<br />
<br />
Shruti Rijhwani, Carnegie Mellon University<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Student Research Workshop Faculty Advisors'''<br />
<br />
Omri Abend, Hebrew University of Jerusalem<br />
<br />
Sujian Li, Peking University <br />
<br />
Zhou Yu, University of California, Davis<br />
<br />
<br />
Information about the Student Research Workshop (SRW) has posted on the workshop's website: https://sites.google.com/view/acl20studentresearchworkshop/. The SRW Call for Papers has been distributed to ACL mailing lists, as well as on our official Twitter account (@acl_srw) and the ACL meeting's Twitter account (@acl_meeting).<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Pre-submission Mentoring Phase (completed mid-February 2020)'''<br />
<br />
Before submission to the main deadline, the SRW offered pre-submission mentoring by experienced researchers of the ACL community. The pre-submission mentoring primarily serves to provide feedback on the writing style, readability and presentation of the paper.<br />
<br />
We recruited 30 mentors for providing pre-submission feedback. The deadline for the pre-submission phase was January 17, 2020. We had 57 pre-submissions in total.<br />
<br />
Mentors were matched to pre-submissions according to their research areas. All mentors have already provided feedback for the submissions and it was sent to the authors mid-February 2020. The majority of mentors have also offered to participate in follow-up discussions with the authors via email until the main submission deadline. <br />
<br />
Vouchers for one month's free use of Grammarly Premium have been sent to all the pre-submission authors. These were provided by the ACL 2020 Diversity and Inclusion Committee.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Main submission'''<br />
<br />
For the main submission, the START (softconf) submission page has been set up. Currently, we have recruited 200 members of the ACL community (both students and senior researchers) to serve as the Program Committee for reviewing submissions to the SRW. We plan on inviting more PC members, as the number of submissions is likely to be larger than originally estimated. <br />
<br />
Submission deadlines for the SRW are as follows:<br />
<br />
* Paper submission deadline: March 6, 2020<br />
<br />
* Review deadline: April 10, 2020<br />
<br />
* Acceptance notification: April 15, 2020<br />
<br />
* Camera-ready deadline: May 6, 2020<br />
<br />
* Travel grant application deadline: to be decided.<br />
<br />
* Travel grant notification: to be decided.<br />
<br />
We also plan to have a post-acceptance mentoring process, for all papers accepted to the SRW.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Funding'''<br />
<br />
The SRW has applied for an NSF grant of $18,000. The Don and Betty Walker international fund will also be able to provide student support. The SRW organizers have made contact with a number of industry companies to obtain sponsorship, but not yet secured additional funding. Contact has been made with the ACL 2020 sponsorship chairs and with Priscilla to investigate other funding opportunities, as well as the Student Volunteer Program, which helps students cover registration fee to the main conference.<br />
<br />
== Audio-Video Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Hamid Palangi, Microsoft Research, Redmond <br />
<br />
Lianhui Qin, University of Washington<br />
<br />
== Conference Handbook Chair ==<br />
<br />
Nanyun Peng, University of Southern California<br />
<br />
== Demo Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Asli Celikyilmaz, Microsoft Research, Redmond<br />
<br />
Shawn Wen, PolyAI<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Details of Activities''':<br />
<br />
The web site for ACL 2020 Demonstrations Track is: https://acl2020.org/calls/demos/[https://acl2020.org/calls/demos/], which includes details about submissions, deadlines, reviewing policy and important dates.<br />
<br />
Compared to the last year, we have made a few changes to the track. Specifically, in the submission details, we encouraged the authors to include visual aids (e.g., screenshots, snapshots, or diagrams) in the paper. This year the submissions are single blind, in which the authors are allowed to disclose their names on their submitted manuscript. We kept the style files same as last year.<br />
<br />
The deadline for submissions was January 31, 2020.<br />
<br />
This year we have record number of demonstration paper submissions, over 130 submissions. After a few desk rejects, a total of 122 papers are reviewed. The technical Program Committee is in place. To accommodate minimum three reviewers for each paper, we have reached out close to 300 reviewers and 213 have accepted. We managed to assign 3 reviewers to all submitted papers, with no more than 3 papers per reviewer. Currently we have 152 technical program committee members. The program committee is scheduled to submit their reviews by March 10, 2020.<br />
<br />
'''Important Dates'''<br />
<br />
Paper submission deadline: Friday, January 31st, 2020<br />
<br />
Notification of acceptance: Friday, April 3rd, 2020<br />
<br />
Camera-ready submission: Friday, April 24th, 2020<br />
<br />
== Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Rochester Institute of Technology<br />
<br />
Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Google<br />
<br />
<br />
1. We created five different sub-committees (listed below) to address ACL D&I related activities. In the interest of transparency and institutional memory, we prepared a separate memorandum of understanding (MoU) for each sub-committee, which articulates a mission statement, five minimum tasks the sub-committee is responsible for (with the fifth task being a blog post), useful links, and detailed guidelines per task. In these guidelines, each task entry contains:<br />
* Task title<br />
* Interfaces (recommendations for whom to communicate with to address the task)<br />
* Sub tasks (an enumerated list of sub task descriptions) <br />
* Timeline (when to begin)<br />
In designing the tasks, we expanded on NAACL 2019 D&I activities and lessons learned. We will hand over the MoUs for future conferences; we hope that this resource will facilitate future D&I committees’ planning activities. <br />
<br />
2. For communication and teamwork, we set up:<br />
* An ACL 2020 D&I slack channel, facilitating keeping records of interactions.<br />
* A Google folder with designated subfolders for D&I subcommittees<br />
* An ACL 2020 D&I chairs google groups email handle: <acl2020-diversity-inclusion-chairs@googlegroups.com><br />
<br />
3. We recruited 13 volunteers across the 5 subcommittees, constituting the ACL 2020 D&I Team, recognized on the conference website: https://acl2020.org/committees/diversity-inclusion. <br />
<br />
'''Academic Inclusion Chairs'''<br />
''Mission: Ensure the venue is welcoming to researchers from diverse subdisciplines, conducive to building academic networks across disciplines and career stages.''<br />
* Aakanksha Naik, Carnegie Mellon University<br />
* Emily Prud’hommeaux, Boston College<br />
* Alla Rozovskaya, Queens College (City University of New York)<br />
<br />
'''Accessibility Chairs'''<br />
''Mission: Ensure the venue is accessible for researchers with any disability, including provision of requested access services.''<br />
* Sushant Kafle, Google/Rochester Institute of Technology<br />
* Masoud Rouhizadeh, Johns Hopkins University<br />
* Naomi Saphra, University of Edinburgh<br />
<br />
'''Childcare Chairs'''<br />
''Mission: Ensure adequate childcare provisions to help researchers who are caregivers of children to attend the conference.''<br />
* Khyathi Chandu, Carnegie Mellon University<br />
* Stephen Mayhew, Duolingo<br />
<br />
'''Financial Access Chairs'''<br />
''Mission: Ensure provision of financial access to researchers from underrepresented demographics and geographies to attend the conference.''<br />
* Allyson Ettinger, University of Chicago<br />
* Ryan Georgi, KPMG<br />
* Tirthankar Ghosal, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Patna<br />
<br />
'''Socio-cultural Inclusion Chairs'''<br />
''Mission: Ensure a welcoming and inclusive environment for researchers from various socio-cultural subgroups, accommodate for diverse needs for food and drinks at the conference, as well as support initiatives for groups to socialize and network.''<br />
* Shruti Palaskar, Carnegie Mellon University<br />
* Maarten Sap, University of Washington<br />
<br />
Kick-off meetings with all subcommittees took place in December before the winter holidays. Correspondence is mostly taking place on slack, alternatively by email.<br />
<br />
4. A message distributed on ACL2020 social media on September 17 2019 invited community members to share comments and suggestions with the D&I chairs. We received some important feedback.<br />
<br />
5. A blog post entitled The ACL 2020 Diversity and Inclusion Committee appeared on the ACL 2020 website and subsequently social media on February 4 2020. We received some important feedback as well as inquiries about D&I accommodations.<br />
<br />
6. The sponsorship booklet has been updated for D&I sponsorships. In consultation with Priscilla we added a third sponsor-ship level category. The resulting levels are Champion, Ally, and Contributor. The list of benefits is now also up-to-date. We alerted that multipacks may result in lower cost than single conference sponsorship. <br />
<br />
7. Grammarly has provided a generous in-kind donation in the form of writing support software licenses. Codes have been distributed to SRW and WiNLP for distribution among their authors, together with an outreach email template (adjusted from NAACL 2019). Joel Tetreault and Tirthankar Goshal (Financial Access subcommittee) were instrumental in this process. In this context, we also arrived at how to recognize in-kind sponsors by discussion and consensus.<br />
<br />
8. We coordinated a room request across subcommittees, submitted to Priscilla as a spreadsheet, detailing space and furniture requirements for subcommittees’ activities. <br />
<br />
9. We have submitted a request for a set of updates to D&I items in the registration form and are at work on updates to the D&I special request form.<br />
<br />
10. We recommended offering onsite childcare at ACL 2020. We illustrated with ten examples that provision of childcare is a standard feature at comparable conference venues (e.g., AAAI 2020, NeurIPS 2019, Interspeech 2019, CHI 2019). Childcare service is missing at ACL conferences and may especially impact junior researchers. Data shared by two comparable AI conferences indicate that onsite childcare usage can increase substantially (roughly quadrupled) from one year to another, such that a multiyear commitment should be made for establishing a meaningful utility assessment of onsite childcare. Data on ACL 2019 usage was retrieved by Priscilla (around 14 children on average during main conference; 9 children on average during workshop/tutorial days, with a total of 357.8 hours attended by children), while we obtained proposals from 3 providers. Based on reviewing these proposals, we recommend KiddieCorp as the first-choice vendor for this service. <br />
<br />
11. With help from the General Chair, we initiated a conversation about the need for a D&I budget. Subsequently, we prepared a detailed budget request, split into costs and back-stop costs (items that apply when there is a request), which was passed on to the ACL Exec. Sushant Kafle (Accessibility subcommittee) was instrumental in the process of obtaining proposals by vendors for access services. Our requested budget is detailed at the following link, which includes the onsite childcare cost estimates as well: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DaYX-MGHtd2CsezXNTkaPIXJ6lHewow1z08jQA2I-7E<br />
<br />
In conclusion, the D&I activities are progressing and awaiting a decision on budget. In addition, several of the resources we have prepared or enhanced may facilitate future D&I committees’ planning activities, for instance the MOUs, the coordinated room request, the revised sponsorship booklet section, the detailed budget request summary, the process for distributing the writing support software in-kind donation, and the onsite childcare proposal summary.<br />
<br />
== Local Sponsorship Chairs == <br />
<br />
Hoifung Poon, Microsoft <br />
<br />
Kristina Toutanova, Google<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Publication Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Steven Bethard, University of Arizona<br />
<br />
Ryan Cotterrell, University of Cambridge<br />
<br />
Rui Yan, Peking University<br />
<br />
Starting from the style files from ACL 2019, we have produced new LaTeX style files for ACL 2020. Most of the description was retained, but the order of sections was overhauled to make sure that important information wasn't scattered so haphazardly across the document. Other improvements were also made, like using the recommended citation style consistently throughout the LaTeX source, and separating out all the LaTeX-specific stuff into clearly marked sections. The MS Word version was derived from these LaTeX versions to match as closely as possible. The LaTeX version was also posted to the Overleaf gallery. The most recent .bib file for the entire ACL Anthology was included in the style file distribution to encourage authors to use the official citations for ACL Anthology publications. All style file changes were merged into https://github.com/acl-org/acl-pub/tree/gh-pages/paper_styles.<br />
<br />
== Publicity Chair ==<br />
<br />
Emily M. Bender, University of Washington<br />
<br />
=== Dissemination ===<br />
<br />
Durable accounts for the ACL meeting on Twitter and Facebook have been created: <br />
* https://twitter.com/aclmeeting<br />
* https://www.facebook.com/aclmeeting/<br />
<br />
These will be passed along to the ACL 2021 publicity chair(s) so that they don't have to build up followers separately. As of Feb 4, 2020 the Twitter account has 4,061 followers and the Facebook account has 181. We have not yet been making use of the Instagram account, but we have been using the Twitter and Facebook accounts to publicize important dates as well as blog posts. The Twitter account especially has been useful for fielding questions from the community. Calls for papers have also gone out over the ACL member portal and several mailing lists, as well as websites such as WikiCFP. (These are maintained in a spreadsheet which can be handed off to the ACL 2021 publicity chair(s)).<br />
<br />
=== Next Steps ===<br />
<br />
* Recruit co-chairs, especially to coordinate live-tweeting of the conference<br />
* Contact local media for coverage<br />
* Develop land acknowledgement in consultation with the Duwamish Tribe (on whose land the meeting will take place). The Duwamish publish this information about land acknowledgments: https://www.duwamishtribe.org/land-acknowledgement<br />
<br />
<br />
== Remote Presentation Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Hao Fang, Microsoft Semantic Machines <br />
<br />
Yi Luan, Google AI Language<br />
<br />
== Sustainability Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Ananya Ganesh, Educational Testing Service <br />
<br />
Klaus Zechner, Educational Testing Service<br />
<br />
Our main goal for this new focus area is to engage the ACL community in discussions about how best to reduce the carbon footprint of future ACL conferences in order to contribute to sustainable and livable conditions on this planet.<br />
One of the main directions we are currently envisioning is to encourage and support conference attendees in virtual participation using live streaming of conference events as air travel is the main contributor to the carbon footprint of international conferences.<br />
<br />
== Website & Conference App Chairs == <br />
<br />
Sudha Rao, Microsoft Research, Redmond <br />
<br />
Yizhe Zhang, Microsoft Research, Redmond<br />
<br />
We are hosting the conference website on GitHub using the easily adaptable website architecture built by Nitin Madnani for NAACL 2019: https://github.com/naacl-org/naacl-hlt-2019. <br/><br />
We are using the Whova event app for hosting the conference app this year similar to NAACL 2019.<br />
<br />
== Business Office ==<br />
<br />
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q1_Reports:_ACL_2020&diff=735382020Q1 Reports: ACL 20202020-02-26T18:22:13Z<p>Jurafsky: </p>
<hr />
<div><br />
== General Chair ==<br />
Dan Jurafsky, Stanford University<br />
<br />
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) will take place in Seattle, Washington at the Hyatt Regency Seattle in downtown Seattle from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
We have a great set of chairs! We are continuing 2019's new roles (Diversity and Inclusion chairs, Remote Presentation Chairs, AV Chairs) and adding new ones: (Sustainability chair), and we are doing well in demographic representation among our chairs (gender and region).<br />
<br />
Following advice from last year, we have been using Slack for most intra-committee communication (and we put the Slack channel into the ACL pro space, so it can be preserved for future years), and using email only when absolutely necessary.<br />
<br />
As usual, the growing size of the conference (both in papers and attendees) is a challenge, but both in papers and space we have been doing well (see the individual chair summaries below).<br />
<br />
Highlights include: <br />
<ul><br />
<br />
<li>The program chairs moved the submission date earlier, and the notification date earlier, to allow more time for attendees visa processing.<br />
<li>The program chairs removed the neutral 3 rating (requiring reviewers to choose 2.5 or 3.5), and asked reviewers to also evaluate the ethical implications of each submission<br />
<li> The D&I chairs propose to continue to do onsite child care (as used at ACL2019) rather than the voucher system (as used at NAACL2019), since onsite child care worked well for us at ACL 2019 and this is the system used by AAAI, NuerIPS, Interspeech, CHI, etc.).<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
On Mar 11, we will have a site visit at the hotel in Seattle which besides Priscilla will include the General Chair, and representatives from the Program Chairs, the D&I chairs, and the AV chairs. We will also use that occasion to have a committee mtg including those folks plus the relatively large number of ACL2020 organizing committee members who are local to Seattle.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Program Chairs == <br />
Joyce Chai, University of Michigan<br />
<br />
Natalie Schluter, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark<br />
<br />
Joel Tetreault, Dataminr, USA<br />
<br />
---<br />
<br />
'''New Initiatives This Year'''<br />
<br />
'''''Earlier Submission Deadline and Notification'''''<br />
<br />
To accommodate a more realistic workflow, given (1) the rapid growth in the number of submissions to ACL conferences, (2) together with avoiding the period for authors from Dec. 15-Jan. 15 while giving us more time to implement and test new implementations, we moved the submission deadline back to December 9. Specifically, previous PCs advised us to do this to set a precedent for future PCs, in accommodating a more realistic timeline. The timeline is still packed, but workable. We also plan notifications to be out earlier than normal, to provide an extra 1-2 weeks for visa applicants, as an inclusion measure.<br />
<br />
'''''Four New Tracks'''''<br />
<br />
ACL2020 introduced four new tracks:(1) Ethics and NLP. Ethical issues have become increasingly important as more advanced tools become available for NLP research and development. We dedicated a new track and explicitly invite contributions that study ethical issues and impact regarding NLP research and applications. (2) Interpretation and Analysis of Models for NLP. As the community strives for pushing performance boundaries, understanding behaviors of STOA models becomes critical. (3) Theory and Formalism. This track is designed to encourage submissions targeted to theoretical underpinning of NLP models which had little/small presence in the past ACL conferences. (4) Theme: Taking Stock of Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going. The last few years have witnessed an unprecedented growth in NLP since the field began over sixty years ago. This track is designed to invite submissions that can provide insight for the community to assess how much we have accomplished today with respect to the past and where the field should be heading to. The theme track is different from other tracks. We therefore made some modifications in the review form to reflect that.<br />
<br />
'''''Extended Automatic COI Detection/Automatic Reviewer-Paper Assignment'''''<br />
<br />
We carried out offline COI detection and automatic paper assignment for the first time for an *ACL conference. The code used were ACL2020-customised implementations of Amanda Stent’s COI detection software and Graham Neubig’s automatic reviewer-paper assignment software.<br />
<br />
'''''Mandatory Reviewer Duty and Recruitment'''''<br />
<br />
To meet the reviewer demands of a growing conference, we made reviewer volunteering mandatory for submission authors. This resulted in a record number of volunteer candidate reviewers (over 11K). We note that these volunteers were candidates and only a subset of them were actually given reviewing assignments.<br />
Using a Microsoft Reviewer/Author form, we collected a variety of information on potential reviewers like ACL anthology page, website, self-declared reviewer experience, 1st & 2nd track preferences, etc. to (1) provide information sheets on reviewers to SACs and ACs, as a tool when manually correcting the automatic reviewer-paper assignments,<br />
(2) to manually balance the reviewer pools among tracks, and (3) to filter the list of reviewers based on whether the reviewer (i) had superiority PhD-student or higher, (ii) had reviewed for at least 4 previous *ACL conference, and (iii) had a minimum number of ACL anthology publications.<br />
To counterbalance (3ii), we provided SACs with a list of novice reviewers and introduced our a Reviewer Mentoring Program (see below).<br />
<br />
'''''New Reviewer Mentoring Program'''''<br />
<br />
Given the rapid growth of NLP in terms of number of papers and new students, it is very important for our community to mentor and train our new reviewers. ACL2020 has launched a pilot program which calls for each AC to mentor at least one novice reviewer. Ultimately, the goal is to provide long-needed mentoring to new reviewers. At the very least, this process will inform ACL on constructing a reviewer mentoring program that is more scalable in the future. For most tracks, each AC was paired with at least a mentee (often a Ph.D. student, or a junior researcher who has just graduated). The AC would work with the mentee, provide feedback and help the mentee to improve the quality of his/her reviews. Close to 300 junior researchers were selected to participate in this program. We will put together a detailed report on this program after the conference. <br />
<br />
'''''Updated Review Form with New Rating Scale and Evaluation Item'''''<br />
<br />
We have separate review forms for regular tracks and the theme track. Our review forms were built upon the form from EMNLP-IJCNLP2019 and ACL2019 with '''''two new extensions'''''. <br />
(1) We have removed the rating 3 (ambivalent) from the overall recommendation as we would like reviewers to take a stand on whether the paper is above the borderline (3.5) or below the borderline (2.5). The reason for this change is that ambivalent cases often take a long time to discuss. By taking a stand, reviewers would provide more informative feedback for AC/SAC to make a recommendation. ICLR 2020 has adopted similar rating strategies (although with a different scale). <br />
(2) As ethical concerns and societal impacts are an important consideration for NLP research, we have explicitly ask reviewers to evaluate ethical implications of each submission. On the review form, we ask reviewers whether there are any ethical concerns about a submission that the area chairs and program chairs should be aware of. We also encourage reviewers to flag such concerns to the authors.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Other Efforts'''<br />
<br />
'''''Initial submission reviews and desk rejects'''''<br />
<br />
We have received a record number of 3,429 submissions (approximately a 15% increase over ACL2019). All papers were carefully inspected to check for violations of ACL policies (ranging from formatting to anonymization to use of supplementary material). Similar to ACL2019, we used assistants to speed up an otherwise long process. All issues identified by assistants were cross-examined by two PCs. We noticed that many papers did not strictly follow the ACL style sheet. We have thus been lenient in terms of margin, line numbers, fonts, etc formatting issues. As a result 29 submissions were desk rejected for violating ACL policies on anonymity, page length, double blind review, etc. <br />
<br />
'''''Manual adjustment of submission tracks'''''<br />
<br />
Many papers were not submitted to the right track where they could receive reviews from most relevant reviewers. SACs were instructed to flag the papers that should be moved to a different track. We went through every single suggestion and moved papers around if warranted. This turned out to be a major effort. In total, 500-600 papers were moved across tracks as a result. <br />
<br />
'''''Manual adjustment of AC and reviewer assignment'''''<br />
<br />
As the automatic reviewer assignment is not perfect, SACs did much manual work adjusting AC assignments as well as reviewer assignments. This effort varied among tracks. Given the current set up in Softconf, ACs’ roles are pretty limited. ACs are essentially meta-reviewers who do not have access to the reviewer accounts, and therefore, cannot add reviewers, nor make reviewer assignments, nor contact reviewers directly. We have given this feedback to softconf and hopefully the system will be updated to support extended AC roles for future conferences. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''''Communication'''''<br />
<br />
Because of several new initiatives implemented this year, extensive efforts have been made to communicate these changes to SACs, ACs, reviewers, as well as authors. Besides direct emails, we have used blog postings as well as twitters as our additional communication channels assisted by the publicity chair and the web chairs.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Submission Status'''<br />
<br />
We have received 3,429 papers (2244 long and 1185 short) have been submitted. Here is the distribution of long, short and total papers per track.<br />
<ul><br />
<li> Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics: 49 39 88<br />
<li> Computational Social Science and Social Media: 73 38 111<br />
<li> Dialogue and Interactive Systems: 204 71 275<br />
<li> Discourse and Pragmatics: 36 20 56<br />
<li> Ethics and NLP: 30 22 52<br />
<li> Generation: 142 71 213<br />
<li> Information Extraction: 159 83 242<br />
<li> Information Retrieval and Text Mining: 55 41 96<br />
<li> Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP: 110 54 164<br />
<li> Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond: 69 24 93<br />
<li> Machine Learning for NLP: 186 109 295<br />
<li> Machine Translation: 158 104 262<br />
<li> NLP Applications: 169 99 268<br />
<li> Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation: 38 15 53<br />
<li> Question Answering: 109 63 172<br />
<li> Resources and Evaluation: 88 48 136<br />
<li> Semantics: Lexical: 57 37 94<br />
<li> Semantics: Sentence Level: 66 29 95<br />
<li> Semantics: Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics: 81 31 112<br />
<li> Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining: 112 66 178<br />
<li> Speech and Multimodality: 38 27 65<br />
<li> Summarization: 90 37 127<br />
<li> Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing: 47 28 75<br />
<li> Theme: 67 26 93<br />
<li> Theory and Formalism in NLP (Linguistic and Mathematical): 11 3 14<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
'''Summary of Timelines'''<br />
<br />
<ul><br />
<li>Oct 15 - Nov 30: SACs invite ACs and reviewers <br />
<li>Nov 25: Reviewer profiles completed<br />
<li>Dec 09: ACL Paper Submission Deadline (long and short papers) <br />
<li>Dec 10 - Jan 14: initial submission reviews and desk rejects; automatic reviewer assignment and COI detection; manual adjustment of assignment; <br />
<li>Jan 17 - Feb 07: Review Period<br />
<li>Feb 08 - Feb 11: ACs chase late reviews <br />
<li>Feb 12 - Feb 17: Author Response<br />
<li>Feb 18 - Feb 25: Reviewer Discussion Period (ACs lead discussion), ACs provide feedback to mentees. <br />
<li>Feb 25 - Mar 03: ACs produce meta-reviews<br />
<li>Mar 03 - Mar 10: SACs rank papers based on meta-reviews and make recommendations to PC chairs<br />
<li>Mar 11 - Apr 02: PC chairs make decisions (they may consult SACs during this time); SACs and ACs recommend best reviewers<br />
<li>Apr 03 - Accept / Reject Notifications<br />
<li>Apr 24: Camera ready<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
<br />
'''List of SAC/ACs and recruitment'''<br />
<br />
Following ACL2019, we have adopted a hierarchical structure where each area is chaired by one or two senior ACs, who are supported by a group of area chairs. We have a total of 40 Senior Area Chairs and 299 Area Chairs. <br />
'''''Recruitment''''': We individually created preference lists for SACs, discussed these and made decisions. ACs were selected by SACs.<br />
<br />
Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Emily Prud’hommeaux<br />
<li>ACs: Cassandra L. Jacobs, Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Masoud Rouhizadeh, Serguei Pakhomov, Yevgeni Berzak<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Computational Social Science and Social Media<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Tim Baldwin, Nikolaos Aletras<br />
<li>ACs: A. Seza Dögruöz, Afshin Rahimi, Alice Oh, Brendan O'Connor, Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro, David Bamman, David Jurgens, David Mimno, Diana Inkpen, Diyi Yang, Eiji Aramaki, Jacob Eisenstein, Jonathan K. Kummerfeld, Kalina Bontcheva<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Dialogue and Interactive Systems<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Jason Williams, Mari Ostendorf<br />
<li>ACs: Alborz Geramifard, Amanda Stent, Asli Celikyilmaz, Casey Kennington, David Traum, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Gabriel Skantze, Helen Hastie, Heriberto Cuayahuitl, Kai Yu, Kallirroi Georgila, Luciana Benotti, Luis Fernando D'Haro, Nina Dethlefs, Ryuichiro Higashinaka, Stefan Ultes, Sungjin Lee, Tsung-Hsien Wen, Y-Lan Boureau, Yun-Nung Chen, Zhou Yu<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Discourse and Pragmatics<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Annie Louis (taking over for Diane Litman)<br />
<li>ACs: Chloé Braud, Junyi Jessy Li, Manfred Stede, Shafiq Joty, Sujian Li, Yangfeng Ji<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Ethics and NLP<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Dirk Hovy<br />
<li>ACs: Alan W Black, Emily M. Bender, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Yulia Tsvetkov<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Generation<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Wei Xu, Alexander Rush<br />
<li>ACs: John Wieting, Laura Perez-Beltrachini, Lu Wang, Miltiadis Allamanis, Mohit Iyyer, Nanyun Peng, Sam Wiseman, Shashi Narayan, Sudha Rao, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Xiaojun Wan, Xipeng Qiu<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Information Extraction<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Doug Downey, Hoifun Poon<br />
<li>ACs: Alan Ritter, Chandra Bhagavatula, Gerard de Melo, Kai-Wei Chang, Marius Pasca, Mo Yu, Radu Florian, Ruihong Huang, Sameer Singh, Satoshi Sekine, Snigdha Chaturvedi, Sumithra Velupillai, Timothy Miller, Vivek Srikumar, William Yang Wang, Yunyao Li<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Information Retrieval and Text Mining<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Chin-Yew Lin, Nazli Goharian<br />
<li>ACs: Andrew Yates, Arman Cohan, Bing Qin, Craig Macdonald, Danai Koutra, Elad Yom-Tov, Franco Maria Nardini, Kalliopi Zervanou, Luca Soldaini, Nicola Tonellotto, Pu-Jen Cheng, Seung-won Hwang, Yangqiu Song, Yansong Feng<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Yoav Goldberg<br />
<li>ACs: Adina Williams, Afra Alishahi, Douwe Kiela, Grzegorz Chrupała, Marco Baroni, Yonatan Belinkov, Zachary C. Lipton<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Yoav Artzi<br />
<li>ACs: Angeliki Lazaridou, Dan Goldwasser, Jason Baldridge, Jesse Thomason, Lisa Anne Hendricks, Parisa Kordjamshidi, Raffaella Bernardi, Vicente Ordonez, Yonatan Bisk<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Machine Learning for NLP<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Andre Martins, Isabelle Augenstein<br />
<li>ACs: Ankur Parikh, Anna Rumshisky, Bruno Martins, Caio Corro, Dani Yogatama, Daniel Beck, Dipanjan Das, Edouard Grave, Emma Strubell, Gholamreza Haffari, Ivan Titov, Joseph Le Roux, Jun Suzuki, Kevin Gimpel, Michael Auli, Ming-Wei Chang, Shay B. Cohen, Vlad Niculae, Waleed Ammar, Wilker Aziz, Yejin Choi, Zita Marinho, Zornitsa Kozareva<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Machine Translation<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Marine Carpuat, Alexandra Birch<br />
<li>ACs: Ann Clifton, Antonio Toral, Atsushi Fujita, Boxing Chen, Carolina Scarton, Chi-kiu Lo, Christian Hardmeier, Deyi Xiong, Franois Yvon, George Foster, Jiajun Zhang, Jrg Tiedemann, Maja Popovič, Marcello Federico, Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt, Marco Turchi, Marta R. Costa-jussà, Matt Post, Nadir Durrani, Qun Liu, Rico Sennrich, Taro Watanabe, Yuki Arase, Yvette Graham<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Multidisciplinary and Area Chair COI<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Michael Strube<br />
<li>ACs: Anders Søgaard, David Schlangen, Katrin Erk, Kentaro Inui, Kevin Duh, Massimo Poesio, Mausam, Pascal Denis<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
NLP Applications<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Preslav Nakov, Karin Verspoor<br />
<li>ACs: Alexander Fraser, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Aoife Cahill, Daniel Cer, Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha, Giovanni Da San Martino, Hassan Sajjad, Kevin Cohen, Marcos Zampieri, Michel Galley, Min Zhang, Pierre Zweigenbaum, Razvan Bunescu, Sara Rosenthal, Tristan Naumann, Vincent Ng, Wei Gao, Wei Lu<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Kemal Oflazer<br />
<li>ACs: Christo Kirov, David R. Mortensen, Kareem Darwish, Reut Tsarfaty, Yue Zhang, Özlem Çetinoğlu<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Question Answering<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Eugene Agichtein, Alessandro Moschitti<br />
<li>ACs: Avi Sil, Dina Demner-Fushman, Evangelos Kanoulas, Gerhard Weikum, Idan Szpektor, Jimmy Lin, Oleg Rokhlenko, Sanda Harabagiu, Wen-tau Yih, William Cohen<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Resources and Evaluation<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Nathan Schneider, Barbara Plank<br />
<li>ACs: Allyson Ettinger, Annemarie Friedrich, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Arianna Bisazza, Claire Bonial, Daniel Zeman, Emmanuele Chersoni, Ines Rehbein, Lonneke van der Plas, Maria Liakata, Sara Tonelli, Sarvnaz Karimi, Tim Van de Cruys, Vered Shwartz, Walid Magdy, Çağri Çöltekin<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Semantics: Lexical<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Ekaterina Shutova, Aline Villavicencio<br />
<li>ACs: Alessandro Lenci, Anna Feldman, Aurélie Herbelot, Beata Beigman Klebanov, Carlos Ramisch, Chris Biemann, Enrico Santus, Fabio Massimo Zanzotto, Helen Yannakoudakis, Ivan Vulič, Jose Camacho-Collados, Marianna Apidianaki, Paul Cook, Saif Mohammad<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Semantics: Sentence Level<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Mohit Bansal<br />
<li>ACs: Andreas Vlachos, Christopher Potts, Danqi Chen, Eunsol Choi, He He, Jonathan Berant, Kevin Small, Marek Rei, Sebastian Ruder, Siva Reddy, Swabha Swayamdipta, Thomas Wolf, Veselin Stoyanov<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Semantics: Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Sam Bowman<br />
<li>ACs: Anette Frank, Eduardo Blanco, Edward Grefenstette, Jacob Andreas, Jonathan May, Kenton Lee, Lasha Abzianidze, Luheng He, Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Rachel Rudinger, Roy Schwartz, Valeria de Paiva<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Smaranda Muresan, Swapna Somasundaran<br />
<li>ACs: Bing Liu, Claire Cardie, Elena Musi, Iryna Gurevych, Julian Brooke, Lun-Wei Ku, Marie-Francine Moens, Minlie Huang, Paolo Rosso, Roman Klinger, Serena Villata, Soujanya Poria, Thamar Solorio, Yulan He<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Speech and Multimodality<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Eric Fosler-Lussier<br />
<li>ACs: Bhuvana Ramabhadran, Florian Metze, Gerasimos Potamianos, Hamid Palangi, Martha Larson<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Summarization<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Fei Liu<br />
<li>ACs: Caiming Xiong, Giuseppe Carenini, Katja Markert, Manabu Okumura, Michael Elhadad, Ramesh Nallapati, Sebastian Gehrmann, Wenjie Li, Xiaodan Zhu, Yang Gao<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: David Chiang<br />
<li>ACs: Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez, Emily Pitler, Liang Huang, Miguel Ballesteros, Miryam de Lhoneux, Slav Petrov, Stephan Oepen, Weiwei Sun<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
THEME<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Marilyn Walker (taking over for Ellen Riloff)<br />
<li>ACs: Donia Scott, Johan Bos, Luke Zettlemoyer, Philipp Koehn, Raymond Mooney<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
Theory and Formalism in NLP (Linguistic and Mathematical)<br />
<ul><br />
<li>SACs: Daniel Gildea<br />
<li>ACs: Alexander Koller, Laura Kallmeyer, Marco Kuhlmann<br />
</ul><br />
<br />
== Local Organisation Chairs ==<br />
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL<br />
<br />
With advice from:<br />
<br />
Jianfeng Gao, Microsoft Research<br />
<br />
Luke Zettlemoyer, University of Washington<br />
<br />
== Tutorial Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Agata Savary, University of Tours, France<br />
<br />
Yue Zhang, Westlake University, Hangzhou, China<br />
<br />
The call, submission, reviewing and selection of tutorials was coordinated jointly for 4 conferences: ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP. <br />
<br />
Before drafting the call, we collected lists of tutorials offered within the past 4 years. We analysed previous calls for tutorials and reports from tutorial chairs (from [https://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2016Q3_Reports:_Tutorial_Chairs 2016], [https://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2017Q3_Reports:_Tutorial_Chairs 2017], [https://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2018Q3_Reports:_Tutorial_Chairs 2018] and [http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2019Q1_Reports:_ACL_2019 2019]). We consulted previous tutorial chairs with a questionnaire including questions about: the number of submissions, encouraging submissions on specific topics or from specific lecturers, the review procedure, the evaluation criteria, the post-tutorial availability of the slides/codes, and lessons learned from tutorial coordination. We also discussed the publication of slides and video recordings from future tutorials with the persons in charge of the ACL Anthology. As a result of these steps, we created two new sections for the [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Conference_Handbook ACL Conference Handbook] (future chairs might consider updating these documents yearly): <br />
* the list of [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Past_tutorials past tutorials] at ACL, COLING, EACL, EMNLP, and NAACL in 2016-2019<br />
* a [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Tutorial_chair_handbook tutorial chair handbook]<br />
<br />
The final [https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/joint-call-tutorial-proposals-aclaacl-ijcnlpemnlpcoling-2020 call] differs from previous calls in several aspects: (i) the expectations about tutorial proposals were made clearer, (ii) following the central ACL decision, the teachers' payment policy was replaced by a fee-waiving policy, (iii) the required submission details include two new items: diversity considerations and agreement for open access publication of slides, codes, data and video recordings, (iv) the evaluation criteria (see below) are announced.<br />
<br />
We recruited a review committee of 19 members, including the 8 tutorial chairs and 11 external members selected for their large understanding of the NLP domain and a good experience in reviewing and/or tutorial teaching:<br />
<br />
'''Review Committee'''<br />
* Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne, Australia) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Daniel Beck (University of Melbourne, Australia) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Emily M. Bender (University of Washington, WA, USA)<br />
* Erik Cambria (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)<br />
* Gaël Dias (University of Caen Normandie, France)<br />
* Stefan Evert (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)<br />
* Yang Liu (Tsinghua University, Beijing, China)<br />
* Agata Savary (University of Tours, France) - ACL 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* João Sedoc (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA)<br />
* Lucia Specia (Sheffield University, UK) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair <br />
* Xu SUN (Peking University, China)<br />
* Yulia Tsvetkov (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA)<br />
* Benjamin Van Durme (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Aline Villavicencio (University of Sheffield, UK and Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Taro Watanabe (Google, Inc., Tokyo, Japan)<br />
* Aaron Steven White (University of Rochester, NY, USA)<br />
* Fei Xia (University of Washington, WA, USA) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Yue Zhang (Westlake University, Hangzhou, China) - ACL 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Meishan Zhang (Tianjin University, China)<br />
<br />
In total, we received 43 submissions for the 4 conferences. Each reviewer was assigned 6-7 proposals and each proposal received 3 reviews. The selection criteria included: clarity and preparedness, novelty or timely character of the topic, lecturers' experience, likely audience interest, open access of the teaching material, diversity aspects (multilingualism, gender, age and country of the lecturers), and compatibility with the preferred venues. <br />
We accepted 31 proposals. <br />
<br />
The decision making was handled via an online meeting of the 8 tutorial chairs. In particular, the selection of tutorials for each conference was done via the expression of interest of the tutorial chairs on a round-robin basis. Some slight adjustments were also performed after the meeting to better fit the authors' preferences. In total, 8, 8, 8 and 7 proposals were selected for ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP, respectively. Upon the announcement the results, 2 of the proposals accepted for AACL-IJCNLP were withdrawn.<br />
<br />
The submission, review, selection and collection of final material for all tutorials was handled via a dedicated SoftConf space, shared by the 4 coordinating conferences. After the selection of proposals, a separate track was created on SoftConf for each conference. The final submission page (one per conference) was set up so as to collect all the necessary data including notably: the tutorial slides, URLs for course material (if any), printable material (if any) and agreement for open access publication.<br />
<br />
The final selection for ACL 2020 consists of the following 8 tutorials of 3 hours each (each of them had ACL as the preferred or the second preferred venue):<br />
<br />
'''Morning Tutorials'''<br />
<br />
'''T1: Interpretability and Analysis in Neural NLP''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Yonatan Belinkov, Sebastian Gehrmann and Ellie Pavlick<br/><br />
While deep learning has transformed the NLP field and impacted the larger computational linguistics community, the rise of neural networks is stained by their opaque nature: It is challenging to interpret the inner workings of neural network models, and explicate their behavior. Therefore, in the last few years, an increasingly large body of work has been devoted to the analysis and interpretation of neural network models in NLP.<br/><br />
This body of work is so far lacking a common framework and methodology. Moreover, approaching the analysis of modern neural networks can be difficult for newcomers to the field. This tutorial aims to fill this gap and introduce the nascent field of interpretability and analysis of neural networks in NLP.<br/><br />
The tutorial covers the main lines of analysis work, such as probing classifier, behavior studies and test suites, psycholinguistic methods, visualizations, adversarial examples, and other methods. We highlight not only the most commonly applied analysis methods, but also the specific limitations and shortcomings of current approaches, in order to inform participants where to focus future efforts.<br />
<br />
'''T2: Multi-modal Information Extraction from Text, Semi-structured, and Tabular Data on the Web''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Xin Luna Dong, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Colin Lockard and Prashant Shiralkar<br/><br />
The World Wide Web contains vast quantities of textual information in several forms: unstructured text, template-based semi-structured webpages (which present data in key-value pairs and lists), and tables. Methods for extracting information from these sources and converting it to a structured form have been a target of research from the natural language processing (NLP), data mining, and database communities. While these researchers have largely separated extraction from web data into different problems based on the modality of the data, they have faced similar problems such as learning with limited labeled data, defining (or avoiding defining) ontologies, making use of prior knowledge, and scaling solutions to deal with the size of the Web.<br/><br />
In this tutorial we take a holistic view toward information extraction, exploring the commonalities in the challenges and solutions developed to address these different forms of text. We will explore the approaches targeted at unstructured text that largely rely on learning syntactic or semantic textual patterns, approaches targeted at semi-structured documents that learn to identify structural patterns in the template, and approaches targeting web tables which rely heavily on entity linking and type information.<br/><br />
While these different data modalities have largely been considered separately in the past, recent research has started taking a more inclusive approach toward textual extraction, in which the multiple signals offered by textual, layout, and visual clues are combined into a single extraction model made possible by new deep learning approaches. At the same time, trends within purely textual extraction have shifted toward full-document understanding rather than considering sentences as independent units. With this in mind, it is worth considering the information extraction problem as a whole to motivate solutions that harness textual semantics along with visual and semi-structured layout information. We will discuss these approaches and suggest avenues for future work.<br />
<br />
'''T3: Reviewing Natural Language Processing Research''' (introductory)<br/><br />
Kevin Cohen, Karën Fort, Margot Mieskes and Aurélie Névéol<br/><br />
As the demand for reviewing grows, so must the pool of reviewers. As the [http://www.livecongress.it/aol/indexSA.php?id=E2EAED7D&ticket= survey] presented by Graham Neubig at the 2019 ACL showed, a considerable number of reviewers are junior researchers, who might lack the experience and expertise necessary for high-quality reviews. Some of them might not have the environment or lack opportunities that allow them to learn the skills necessary. A tutorial on reviewing for the NLP community might increase reviewers’ confidence, as well as the quality of the reviews. This introductory tutorial will cover the goals, processes, and evaluation of reviewing research papers in natural language processing.<br />
<br />
'''T4: Stylized Text Generation: Approaches and Applications''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Lili Mou and Olga Vechtomova<br/><br />
Text generation has played an important role in various applications of natural language processing (NLP), and kn recent studies, researchers are paying increasing attention to modeling and manipulating the style of the generation text, which we call stylized text generation. In this tutorial, we will provide a comprehensive literature review in this direction. We start from the definition of style and different settings of stylized text generation, illustrated with various applications. Then, we present different settings of stylized generation, such as parallel supervised, style label-supervised, and unsupervised. In each setting, we delve deep into machine learning methods, including embedding learning techniques to represent style}, adversarial learning and reinforcement learning with cycle consistency to match content but to distinguish different styles. We also introduce current approaches of evaluating stylized text generation systems. We conclude our tutorial by presenting the challenges of stylized text generation and discussing future directions, such as small-data training, non-categorical style modeling, and a generalized scope of style transfer (e.g., controlling the syntax as a style).<br />
<br />
'''Afternoon Tutorials'''<br />
<br />
'''T5: Achieving Common Ground in Multi-modal Dialogue''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Malihe Alikhani and Matthew Stone<br/><br />
All communication aims at achieving common ground (grounding): interlocutors can work together effectively only with mutual beliefs about what the state of the world is, about what their goals are, and about how they plan to make their goals a reality. Computational dialogue research offers some classic results on grouding, which unfortunately offer scant guidance to the design of grounding modules and behaviors in cutting-edge systems. In this tutorial, we focus on three main topic areas: 1) grounding in human-human communication; 2) grounding in dialogue systems; and 3) grounding in multi-modal interactive systems, including image-oriented conversations and human-robot interactions. We highlight a number of achievements of recent computational research in coordinating complex content, show how these results lead to rich and challenging opportunities for doing grounding in more flexible and powerful ways, and canvass relevant insights from the literature on human--human conversation. We expect that the tutorial will be of interest to researchers in dialogue systems, computational semantics and cognitive modeling, and hope that it will catalyze research and system building that more directly explores the creative, strategic ways conversational agents might be able to seek and offer evidence about their understanding of their interlocutors.<br />
<br />
'''T6: Commonsense Reasoning for Natural Language Processing''' (introductory)<br/><br />
Maarten Sap, Vered Shwartz, Antoine Bosselut, Dan Roth and Yejin Choi<br/><br />
In our tutorial, we (1) outline the various types of commonsense (e.g., physical, social), and (2) discuss techniques to gather and represent commonsense knowledge, while highlighting the challenges specific to this type of knowledge (e.g., reporting bias). We will then (3) discuss the types of commonsense knowledge captured by modern NLP systems (e.g., large pretrained language models), and (4) present ways to measure systems' commonsense reasoning abilities. We finish with (5) a discussion of various ways in which commonsense reasoning can be used to improve performance on NLP tasks, exemplified by an (6) interactive session on integrating commonsense into a downstream task.<br />
<br />
'''T7: Integrating Ethics into the NLP Curriculum''' (introductory)<br/><br />
Emily M. Bender, Dirk Hovy and Alexandra Schofield<br/><br />
Our goal in this tutorial is to empower NLP researchers and practitioners with tools and resources to teach others about how to ethically apply NLP techniques. Our tutorial will present both high-level strategies for developing an ethics-oriented curriculum, based on experience and best practices, as well as specific sample exercises that can be brought to a classroom. We plan to make this a highly interactive work session culminating in a shared online resource page that pools lesson plans, assignments, exercise ideas, reading suggestions, and ideas from the attendees. We consider three primary topics with our session that frequently underlie ethical issues in NLP research: Dual use, bias and privacy.<br/><br />
In this setting, a key lesson is that there is no single approach to ethical NLP: each project requires thoughtful consideration about what steps can be taken to best support people affected by that project. However, we can learn (and teach) what kinds of issues to be aware of and what kinds of strategies are available for mitigating harm. To teach this process, we apply and promote interactive exercises that provide an opportunity to ideate, discuss, and reflect. We plan to facilitate this in a way that encourages positive discussion, emphasizing the creation of ideas for the future instead of negative opinions of previous work.<br />
<br />
'''T8: Recent Advances in Open-Domain Question Answering''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Danqi Chen and Scott Wen-tau Yih<br/><br />
Open-domain (textual) question answering (QA), the task of finding answers to open-domain questions by searching a large collection of documents, has been a long-standing problem in NLP, information retrieval (IR) and related fields (Voorhees et al., 1999; Moldovan et al., 2000; Brill et al.,2002; Ferrucci et al., 2010). Traditional QA systems were usually constructed as a pipeline, consisting of many different components such as question processing, document/passage retrieval and answer processing. With the rapid development of neural reading comprehension (Chen, 2018), modern open-domain QA systems have been restructured by combining traditional IR techniques and neural reading comprehension models (Chen et al., 2017; Yang et al., 2019) or even implemented in a fully end-to-end fashion (Lee et al., 2019; Seo et al., 2019). While the system architecture has been drastically simplified, two technical challenges remain critical:(1) “Retriever”: finding documents that (might)contain an answer from a large collection of documents; (2) “Reader”: finding the answer in a given paragraph or a document.<br/><br />
In this tutorial, we aim to provide a comprehensive and coherent overview of recent advances in this line of research. We will start by first giving a brief historical background of open-domain question answering, discussing the basic setup and core technical challenges of the research problem.The focus will then shift to modern techniques and resources proposed for open-domain QA, including the basics of latest neural reading comprehension systems, new datasets and models. The scope will also be broadened to cover the information retrieval component on how to effectively identify passages relevant to the questions. Moreover, in-depth discussions will be given on the use of traditional / neural IR modules, as well as the trade-offs between modular design and end-to-end training. If time permits, we also plan to discuss some hybrid approaches for answering questions using both text and large knowledge bases (e.g. (Sun et al., 2018)) and give a critical review on how structured data complements the information from unstructured text.<br/><br />
At the end of our tutorial, we will discuss some important questions, including (1) How much progress have we made compared to the QA systems developed in the last decade?(2) What are the main challenges and limitations of cur-rent approaches? (3) How to trade off the efficiency (computational time and memory requirements) and accuracy in the deep learning era? We hope that our tutorial will not only serve as a useful resource for the audience to efficiently acquire the up-to-date knowledge, but also provide new perspectives to stimulate the advances of open-domain QA research in the next phase.<br />
<br />
== Workshop Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Milica Gašić, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf<br />
<br />
Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Amazon Alexa AI<br />
<br />
Saif M. Mohammad, National Research Council Canada<br />
<br />
Ves Stoyanov, Facebook AI<br />
<br />
== Student Research Workshop Chairs and Faculty Advisors==<br />
<br />
'''Student Research Workshop Co-chairs'''<br />
<br />
Rotem Dror, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology<br />
<br />
Jiangming Liu, The University of Edinburgh<br />
<br />
Shruti Rijhwani, Carnegie Mellon University<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Student Research Workshop Faculty Advisors'''<br />
<br />
Omri Abend, Hebrew University of Jerusalem<br />
<br />
Sujian Li, Peking University <br />
<br />
Zhou Yu, University of California, Davis<br />
<br />
<br />
Information about the Student Research Workshop (SRW) has posted on the workshop's website: https://sites.google.com/view/acl20studentresearchworkshop/. The SRW Call for Papers has been distributed to ACL mailing lists, as well as on our official Twitter account (@acl_srw) and the ACL meeting's Twitter account (@acl_meeting).<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Pre-submission Mentoring Phase (completed mid-February 2020)'''<br />
<br />
Before submission to the main deadline, the SRW offered pre-submission mentoring by experienced researchers of the ACL community. The pre-submission mentoring primarily serves to provide feedback on the writing style, readability and presentation of the paper.<br />
<br />
We recruited 30 mentors for providing pre-submission feedback. The deadline for the pre-submission phase was January 17, 2020. We had 57 pre-submissions in total.<br />
<br />
Mentors were matched to pre-submissions according to their research areas. All mentors have already provided feedback for the submissions and it was sent to the authors mid-February 2020. The majority of mentors have also offered to participate in follow-up discussions with the authors via email until the main submission deadline. <br />
<br />
Vouchers for one month's free use of Grammarly Premium have been sent to all the pre-submission authors. These were provided by the ACL 2020 Diversity and Inclusion Committee.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Main submission'''<br />
<br />
For the main submission, the START (softconf) submission page has been set up. Currently, we have recruited 200 members of the ACL community (both students and senior researchers) to serve as the Program Committee for reviewing submissions to the SRW. We plan on inviting more PC members, as the number of submissions is likely to be larger than originally estimated. <br />
<br />
Submission deadlines for the SRW are as follows:<br />
<br />
* Paper submission deadline: March 6, 2020<br />
<br />
* Review deadline: April 10, 2020<br />
<br />
* Acceptance notification: April 15, 2020<br />
<br />
* Camera-ready deadline: May 6, 2020<br />
<br />
* Travel grant application deadline: to be decided.<br />
<br />
* Travel grant notification: to be decided.<br />
<br />
We also plan to have a post-acceptance mentoring process, for all papers accepted to the SRW.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Funding'''<br />
<br />
The SRW has applied for an NSF grant of $18,000. The Don and Betty Walker international fund will also be able to provide student support. The SRW organizers have made contact with a number of industry companies to obtain sponsorship, but not yet secured additional funding. Contact has been made with the ACL 2020 sponsorship chairs and with Priscilla to investigate other funding opportunities, as well as the Student Volunteer Program, which helps students cover registration fee to the main conference.<br />
<br />
== Audio-Video Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Hamid Palangi, Microsoft Research, Redmond <br />
<br />
Lianhui Qin, University of Washington<br />
<br />
== Conference Handbook Chair ==<br />
<br />
Nanyun Peng, University of Southern California<br />
<br />
== Demo Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Asli Celikyilmaz, Microsoft Research, Redmond<br />
<br />
Shawn Wen, PolyAI<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Details of Activities''':<br />
<br />
The web site for ACL 2020 Demonstrations Track is: https://acl2020.org/calls/demos/[https://acl2020.org/calls/demos/], which includes details about submissions, deadlines, reviewing policy and important dates.<br />
<br />
Compared to the last year, we have made a few changes to the track. Specifically, in the submission details, we encouraged the authors to include visual aids (e.g., screenshots, snapshots, or diagrams) in the paper. This year the submissions are single blind, in which the authors are allowed to disclose their names on their submitted manuscript. We kept the style files same as last year.<br />
<br />
The deadline for submissions was January 31, 2020.<br />
<br />
This year we have record number of demonstration paper submissions, over 130 submissions. After a few desk rejects, a total of 122 papers are reviewed. The technical Program Committee is in place. To accommodate minimum three reviewers for each paper, we have reached out close to 300 reviewers and 213 have accepted. We managed to assign 3 reviewers to all submitted papers, with no more than 3 papers per reviewer. Currently we have 152 technical program committee members. The program committee is scheduled to submit their reviews by March 10, 2020.<br />
<br />
'''Important Dates'''<br />
<br />
Paper submission deadline: Friday, January 31st, 2020<br />
<br />
Notification of acceptance: Friday, April 3rd, 2020<br />
<br />
Camera-ready submission: Friday, April 24th, 2020<br />
<br />
== Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Rochester Institute of Technology<br />
<br />
Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Google<br />
<br />
<br />
1. We created five different sub-committees (listed below) to address ACL D&I related activities. In the interest of transparency and institutional memory, we prepared a separate memorandum of understanding (MoU) for each sub-committee, which articulates a mission statement, five minimum tasks the sub-committee is responsible for (with the fifth task being a blog post), useful links, and detailed guidelines per task. In these guidelines, each task entry contains:<br />
* Task title<br />
* Interfaces (recommendations for whom to communicate with to address the task)<br />
* Sub tasks (an enumerated list of sub task descriptions) <br />
* Timeline (when to begin)<br />
In designing the tasks, we expanded on NAACL 2019 D&I activities and lessons learned. We will hand over the MoUs for future conferences; we hope that this resource will facilitate future D&I committees’ planning activities. <br />
<br />
2. For communication and teamwork, we set up:<br />
* An ACL 2020 D&I slack channel, facilitating keeping records of interactions.<br />
* A Google folder with designated subfolders for D&I subcommittees<br />
* An ACL 2020 D&I chairs google groups email handle: <acl2020-diversity-inclusion-chairs@googlegroups.com><br />
<br />
3. We recruited 13 volunteers across the 5 subcommittees, constituting the ACL 2020 D&I Team, recognized on the conference website: https://acl2020.org/committees/diversity-inclusion. <br />
<br />
'''Academic Inclusion Chairs'''<br />
''Mission: Ensure the venue is welcoming to researchers from diverse subdisciplines, conducive to building academic networks across disciplines and career stages.''<br />
* Aakanksha Naik, Carnegie Mellon University<br />
* Emily Prud’hommeaux, Boston College<br />
* Alla Rozovskaya, Queens College (City University of New York)<br />
<br />
'''Accessibility Chairs'''<br />
''Mission: Ensure the venue is accessible for researchers with any disability, including provision of requested access services.''<br />
* Sushant Kafle, Google/Rochester Institute of Technology<br />
* Masoud Rouhizadeh, Johns Hopkins University<br />
* Naomi Saphra, University of Edinburgh<br />
<br />
'''Childcare Chairs'''<br />
''Mission: Ensure adequate childcare provisions to help researchers who are caregivers of children to attend the conference.''<br />
* Khyathi Chandu, Carnegie Mellon University<br />
* Stephen Mayhew, Duolingo<br />
<br />
'''Financial Access Chairs'''<br />
''Mission: Ensure provision of financial access to researchers from underrepresented demographics and geographies to attend the conference.''<br />
* Allyson Ettinger, University of Chicago<br />
* Ryan Georgi, KPMG<br />
* Tirthankar Ghosal, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Patna<br />
<br />
'''Socio-cultural Inclusion Chairs'''<br />
''Mission: Ensure a welcoming and inclusive environment for researchers from various socio-cultural subgroups, accommodate for diverse needs for food and drinks at the conference, as well as support initiatives for groups to socialize and network.''<br />
* Shruti Palaskar, Carnegie Mellon University<br />
* Maarten Sap, University of Washington<br />
<br />
Kick-off meetings with all subcommittees took place in December before the winter holidays. Correspondence is mostly taking place on slack, alternatively by email.<br />
<br />
4. A message distributed on ACL2020 social media on September 17 2019 invited community members to share comments and suggestions with the D&I chairs. We received some important feedback.<br />
<br />
5. A blog post entitled The ACL 2020 Diversity and Inclusion Committee appeared on the ACL 2020 website and subsequently social media on February 4 2020. We received some important feedback as well as inquiries about D&I accommodations.<br />
<br />
6. The sponsorship booklet has been updated for D&I sponsorships. In consultation with Priscilla we added a third sponsor-ship level category. The resulting levels are Champion, Ally, and Contributor. The list of benefits is now also up-to-date. We alerted that multipacks may result in lower cost than single conference sponsorship. <br />
<br />
7. Grammarly has provided a generous in-kind donation in the form of writing support software licenses. Codes have been distributed to SRW and WiNLP for distribution among their authors, together with an outreach email template (adjusted from NAACL 2019). Joel Tetreault and Tirthankar Goshal (Financial Access subcommittee) were instrumental in this process. In this context, we also arrived at how to recognize in-kind sponsors by discussion and consensus.<br />
<br />
8. We coordinated a room request across subcommittees, submitted to Priscilla as a spreadsheet, detailing space and furniture requirements for subcommittees’ activities. <br />
<br />
9. We have submitted a request for a set of updates to D&I items in the registration form and are at work on updates to the D&I special request form.<br />
<br />
10. We recommended offering onsite childcare at ACL 2020. We illustrated with ten examples that provision of childcare is a standard feature at comparable conference venues (e.g., AAAI 2020, NeurIPS 2019, Interspeech 2019, CHI 2019). Childcare service is missing at ACL conferences and may especially impact junior researchers. Data shared by two comparable AI conferences indicate that onsite childcare usage can increase substantially (roughly quadrupled) from one year to another, such that a multiyear commitment should be made for establishing a meaningful utility assessment of onsite childcare. Data on ACL 2019 usage was retrieved by Priscilla (around 14 children on average during main conference; 9 children on average during workshop/tutorial days, with a total of 357.8 hours attended by children), while we obtained proposals from 3 providers. Based on reviewing these proposals, we recommend KiddieCorp as the first-choice vendor for this service. <br />
<br />
11. With help from the General Chair, we initiated a conversation about the need for a D&I budget. Subsequently, we prepared a detailed budget request, split into costs and back-stop costs (items that apply when there is a request), which was passed on to the ACL Exec. Sushant Kafle (Accessibility subcommittee) was instrumental in the process of obtaining proposals by vendors for access services. Our requested budget is detailed at the following link, which includes the onsite childcare cost estimates as well: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DaYX-MGHtd2CsezXNTkaPIXJ6lHewow1z08jQA2I-7E<br />
<br />
In conclusion, the D&I activities are progressing and awaiting a decision on budget. In addition, several of the resources we have prepared or enhanced may facilitate future D&I committees’ planning activities, for instance the MOUs, the coordinated room request, the revised sponsorship booklet section, the detailed budget request summary, the process for distributing the writing support software in-kind donation, and the onsite childcare proposal summary.<br />
<br />
== Local Sponsorship Chairs == <br />
<br />
Hoifung Poon, Microsoft <br />
<br />
Kristina Toutanova, Google<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Publication Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Steven Bethard, University of Arizona<br />
<br />
Ryan Cotterrell, University of Cambridge<br />
<br />
Rui Yan, Peking University<br />
<br />
Starting from the style files from ACL 2019, we have produced new LaTeX style files for ACL 2020. Most of the description was retained, but the order of sections was overhauled to make sure that important information wasn't scattered so haphazardly across the document. Other improvements were also made, like using the recommended citation style consistently throughout the LaTeX source, and separating out all the LaTeX-specific stuff into clearly marked sections. The MS Word version was derived from these LaTeX versions to match as closely as possible. The LaTeX version was also posted to the Overleaf gallery. The most recent .bib file for the entire ACL Anthology was included in the style file distribution to encourage authors to use the official citations for ACL Anthology publications. All style file changes were merged into https://github.com/acl-org/acl-pub/tree/gh-pages/paper_styles.<br />
<br />
== Publicity Chair ==<br />
<br />
Emily M. Bender, University of Washington<br />
<br />
=== Dissemination ===<br />
<br />
Durable accounts for the ACL meeting on Twitter and Facebook have been created: <br />
* https://twitter.com/aclmeeting<br />
* https://www.facebook.com/aclmeeting/<br />
<br />
These will be passed along to the ACL 2021 publicity chair(s) so that they don't have to build up followers separately. As of Feb 4, 2020 the Twitter account has 4,061 followers and the Facebook account has 181. We have not yet been making use of the Instagram account, but we have been using the Twitter and Facebook accounts to publicize important dates as well as blog posts. The Twitter account especially has been useful for fielding questions from the community. Calls for papers have also gone out over the ACL member portal and several mailing lists, as well as websites such as WikiCFP. (These are maintained in a spreadsheet which can be handed off to the ACL 2021 publicity chair(s)).<br />
<br />
=== Next Steps ===<br />
<br />
* Recruit co-chairs, especially to coordinate live-tweeting of the conference<br />
* Contact local media for coverage<br />
* Develop land acknowledgement in consultation with the Duwamish Tribe (on whose land the meeting will take place). The Duwamish publish this information about land acknowledgments: https://www.duwamishtribe.org/land-acknowledgement<br />
<br />
<br />
== Remote Presentation Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Hao Fang, Microsoft Semantic Machines <br />
<br />
Yi Luan, Google AI Language<br />
<br />
== Sustainability Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Ananya Ganesh, Educational Testing Service <br />
<br />
Klaus Zechner, Educational Testing Service<br />
<br />
Our main goal for this new focus area is to engage the ACL community in discussions about how best to reduce the carbon footprint of future ACL conferences in order to contribute to sustainable and livable conditions on this planet.<br />
One of the main directions we are currently envisioning is to encourage and support conference attendees in virtual participation using live streaming of conference events as air travel is the main contributor to the carbon footprint of international conferences.<br />
<br />
== Website & Conference App Chairs == <br />
<br />
Sudha Rao, Microsoft Research, Redmond <br />
<br />
Yizhe Zhang, Microsoft Research, Redmond<br />
<br />
We are hosting the conference website on GitHub using the easily adaptable website architecture built by Nitin Madnani for NAACL 2019: https://github.com/naacl-org/naacl-hlt-2019. <br/><br />
We are using the Whova event app for hosting the conference app this year similar to NAACL 2019.<br />
<br />
== Business Office ==<br />
<br />
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q1_Reports:_ACL_2020&diff=734942020Q1 Reports: ACL 20202020-02-22T22:33:54Z<p>Jurafsky: </p>
<hr />
<div><br />
== General Chair ==<br />
Dan Jurafsky, Stanford University<br />
<br />
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) will take place in Seattle, Washington at the Hyatt Regency Seattle in downtown Seattle from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
We have a great set of chairs! We are continuing 2019's new roles (Diversity and Inclusion chairs, Remote Presentation Chairs, AV Chairs) and adding new ones: (Sustainability chair), and we are doing well in demographic representation among our chairs (gender and region).<br />
<br />
Following advice from last year, we have been using Slack for most intra-committee communication (and we put the Slack channel into the ACL pro space, so it can be preserved for future years), and using email only when absolutely necessary.<br />
<br />
As usual, the growing size of the conference (both in papers and attendees) is a challenge, but both in papers and space we have been doing well (see the individual chair summaries below).<br />
<br />
On Mar 11, we will have a site visit at the hotel in Seattle which besides Priscilla will include the General Chair, and representatives from the Program Chairs, the D&I chairs, and the AV chairs. We will also use that occasion to have a committee mtg including those folks plus the relatively large number of ACL2020 organizing committee members who are local to Seattle.<br />
<br />
<br />
[some highlights from the below chair summaries to be added here]<br />
<br />
== Program Chairs == <br />
Joyce Chai, University of Michigan<br />
<br />
Natalie Schluter, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark<br />
<br />
Joel Tetreault, Dataminr, USA<br />
<br />
<br />
== Local Organisation Chairs ==<br />
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL<br />
<br />
With advice from:<br />
<br />
Jianfeng Gao, Microsoft Research<br />
<br />
Luke Zettlemoyer, University of Washington<br />
<br />
== Tutorial Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Agata Savary, University of Tours, France<br />
<br />
Yue Zhang, Westlake University, Hangzhou, China<br />
<br />
The call, submission, reviewing and selection of tutorials was coordinated jointly for 4 conferences: ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP. <br />
<br />
Before drafting the call, we collected lists of tutorials offered within the past 4 years. We analysed previous calls for tutorials and reports from tutorial chairs (from [https://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2016Q3_Reports:_Tutorial_Chairs 2016], [https://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2017Q3_Reports:_Tutorial_Chairs 2017], [https://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2018Q3_Reports:_Tutorial_Chairs 2018] and [http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2019Q1_Reports:_ACL_2019 2019]). We consulted previous tutorial chairs with a questionnaire including questions about: the number of submissions, encouraging submissions on specific topics or from specific lecturers, the review procedure, the evaluation criteria, the post-tutorial availability of the slides/codes, and lessons learned from tutorial coordination. We also discussed the publication of slides and video recordings from future tutorials with the persons in charge of the ACL Anthology. As a result of these steps, we created two new sections for the [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Conference_Handbook ACL Conference Handbook] (future chairs might consider updating these documents yearly): <br />
* the list of [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Past_tutorials past tutorials] at ACL, COLING, EACL, EMNLP, and NAACL in 2016-2019<br />
* a [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Tutorial_chair_handbook tutorial chair handbook]<br />
<br />
The final [https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/joint-call-tutorial-proposals-aclaacl-ijcnlpemnlpcoling-2020 call] differs from previous calls in several aspects: (i) the expectations about tutorial proposals were made clearer, (ii) following the central ACL decision, the teachers' payment policy was replaced by a fee-waiving policy, (iii) the required submission details include two new items: diversity considerations and agreement for open access publication of slides, codes, data and video recordings, (iv) the evaluation criteria (see below) are announced.<br />
<br />
We recruited a review committee of 19 members, including the 8 tutorial chairs and 11 external members selected for their large understanding of the NLP domain and a good experience in reviewing and/or tutorial teaching:<br />
<br />
'''Review Committee'''<br />
* Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne, Australia) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Daniel Beck (University of Melbourne, Australia) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Emily M. Bender (University of Washington, WA, USA)<br />
* Erik Cambria (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)<br />
* Gaël Dias (University of Caen Normandie, France)<br />
* Stefan Evert (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)<br />
* Yang Liu (Tsinghua University, Beijing, China)<br />
* Agata Savary (University of Tours, France) - ACL 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* João Sedoc (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA)<br />
* Lucia Specia (Sheffield University, UK) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair <br />
* Xu SUN (Peking University, China)<br />
* Yulia Tsvetkov (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA)<br />
* Benjamin Van Durme (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Aline Villavicencio (University of Sheffield, UK and Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Taro Watanabe (Google, Inc., Tokyo, Japan)<br />
* Aaron Steven White (University of Rochester, NY, USA)<br />
* Fei Xia (University of Washington, WA, USA) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Yue Zhang (Westlake University, Hangzhou, China) - ACL 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Meishan Zhang (Tianjin University, China)<br />
<br />
In total, we received 43 submissions for the 4 conferences. Each reviewer was assigned 6-7 proposals and each proposal received 3 reviews. The selection criteria included: clarity and preparedness, novelty or timely character of the topic, lecturers' experience, likely audience interest, open access of the teaching material, diversity aspects (multilingualism, gender, age and country of the lecturers), and compatibility with the preferred venues. <br />
We accepted 31 proposals. <br />
<br />
The decision making was handled via an online meeting of the 8 tutorial chairs. In particular, the selection of tutorials for each conference was done via the expression of interest of the tutorial chairs on a round-robin basis. Some slight adjustments were also performed after the meeting to better fit the authors' preferences. In total, 8, 8, 8 and 7 proposals were selected for ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP, respectively. Upon the announcement the results, 2 of the proposals accepted for AACL-IJCNLP were withdrawn.<br />
<br />
The submission, review, selection and collection of final material for all tutorials was handled via a dedicated SoftConf space, shared by the 4 coordinating conferences. After the selection of proposals, a separate track was created on SoftConf for each conference. The final submission page (one per conference) was set up so as to collect all the necessary data including notably: the tutorial slides, URLs for course material (if any), printable material (if any) and agreement for open access publication.<br />
<br />
The final selection for ACL 2020 consists of the following 8 tutorials of 3 hours each (each of them had ACL as the preferred or the second preferred venue):<br />
<br />
'''Morning Tutorials'''<br />
<br />
'''T1: Interpretability and Analysis in Neural NLP''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Yonatan Belinkov, Sebastian Gehrmann and Ellie Pavlick<br/><br />
While deep learning has transformed the NLP field and impacted the larger computational linguistics community, the rise of neural networks is stained by their opaque nature: It is challenging to interpret the inner workings of neural network models, and explicate their behavior. Therefore, in the last few years, an increasingly large body of work has been devoted to the analysis and interpretation of neural network models in NLP.<br/><br />
This body of work is so far lacking a common framework and methodology. Moreover, approaching the analysis of modern neural networks can be difficult for newcomers to the field. This tutorial aims to fill this gap and introduce the nascent field of interpretability and analysis of neural networks in NLP.<br/><br />
The tutorial covers the main lines of analysis work, such as probing classifier, behavior studies and test suites, psycholinguistic methods, visualizations, adversarial examples, and other methods. We highlight not only the most commonly applied analysis methods, but also the specific limitations and shortcomings of current approaches, in order to inform participants where to focus future efforts.<br />
<br />
'''T2: Multi-modal Information Extraction from Text, Semi-structured, and Tabular Data on the Web''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Xin Luna Dong, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Colin Lockard and Prashant Shiralkar<br/><br />
The World Wide Web contains vast quantities of textual information in several forms: unstructured text, template-based semi-structured webpages (which present data in key-value pairs and lists), and tables. Methods for extracting information from these sources and converting it to a structured form have been a target of research from the natural language processing (NLP), data mining, and database communities. While these researchers have largely separated extraction from web data into different problems based on the modality of the data, they have faced similar problems such as learning with limited labeled data, defining (or avoiding defining) ontologies, making use of prior knowledge, and scaling solutions to deal with the size of the Web.<br/><br />
In this tutorial we take a holistic view toward information extraction, exploring the commonalities in the challenges and solutions developed to address these different forms of text. We will explore the approaches targeted at unstructured text that largely rely on learning syntactic or semantic textual patterns, approaches targeted at semi-structured documents that learn to identify structural patterns in the template, and approaches targeting web tables which rely heavily on entity linking and type information.<br/><br />
While these different data modalities have largely been considered separately in the past, recent research has started taking a more inclusive approach toward textual extraction, in which the multiple signals offered by textual, layout, and visual clues are combined into a single extraction model made possible by new deep learning approaches. At the same time, trends within purely textual extraction have shifted toward full-document understanding rather than considering sentences as independent units. With this in mind, it is worth considering the information extraction problem as a whole to motivate solutions that harness textual semantics along with visual and semi-structured layout information. We will discuss these approaches and suggest avenues for future work.<br />
<br />
'''T3: Reviewing Natural Language Processing Research''' (introductory)<br/><br />
Kevin Cohen, Karën Fort, Margot Mieskes and Aurélie Névéol<br/><br />
As the demand for reviewing grows, so must the pool of reviewers. As the [http://www.livecongress.it/aol/indexSA.php?id=E2EAED7D&ticket= survey] presented by Graham Neubig at the 2019 ACL showed, a considerable number of reviewers are junior researchers, who might lack the experience and expertise necessary for high-quality reviews. Some of them might not have the environment or lack opportunities that allow them to learn the skills necessary. A tutorial on reviewing for the NLP community might increase reviewers’ confidence, as well as the quality of the reviews. This introductory tutorial will cover the goals, processes, and evaluation of reviewing research papers in natural language processing.<br />
<br />
'''T4: Stylized Text Generation: Approaches and Applications''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Lili Mou and Olga Vechtomova<br/><br />
Text generation has played an important role in various applications of natural language processing (NLP), and kn recent studies, researchers are paying increasing attention to modeling and manipulating the style of the generation text, which we call stylized text generation. In this tutorial, we will provide a comprehensive literature review in this direction. We start from the definition of style and different settings of stylized text generation, illustrated with various applications. Then, we present different settings of stylized generation, such as parallel supervised, style label-supervised, and unsupervised. In each setting, we delve deep into machine learning methods, including embedding learning techniques to represent style}, adversarial learning and reinforcement learning with cycle consistency to match content but to distinguish different styles. We also introduce current approaches of evaluating stylized text generation systems. We conclude our tutorial by presenting the challenges of stylized text generation and discussing future directions, such as small-data training, non-categorical style modeling, and a generalized scope of style transfer (e.g., controlling the syntax as a style).<br />
<br />
'''Afternoon Tutorials'''<br />
<br />
'''T5: Achieving Common Ground in Multi-modal Dialogue''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Malihe Alikhani and Matthew Stone<br/><br />
All communication aims at achieving common ground (grounding): interlocutors can work together effectively only with mutual beliefs about what the state of the world is, about what their goals are, and about how they plan to make their goals a reality. Computational dialogue research offers some classic results on grouding, which unfortunately offer scant guidance to the design of grounding modules and behaviors in cutting-edge systems. In this tutorial, we focus on three main topic areas: 1) grounding in human-human communication; 2) grounding in dialogue systems; and 3) grounding in multi-modal interactive systems, including image-oriented conversations and human-robot interactions. We highlight a number of achievements of recent computational research in coordinating complex content, show how these results lead to rich and challenging opportunities for doing grounding in more flexible and powerful ways, and canvass relevant insights from the literature on human--human conversation. We expect that the tutorial will be of interest to researchers in dialogue systems, computational semantics and cognitive modeling, and hope that it will catalyze research and system building that more directly explores the creative, strategic ways conversational agents might be able to seek and offer evidence about their understanding of their interlocutors.<br />
<br />
'''T6: Commonsense Reasoning for Natural Language Processing''' (introductory)<br/><br />
Maarten Sap, Vered Shwartz, Antoine Bosselut, Dan Roth and Yejin Choi<br/><br />
In our tutorial, we (1) outline the various types of commonsense (e.g., physical, social), and (2) discuss techniques to gather and represent commonsense knowledge, while highlighting the challenges specific to this type of knowledge (e.g., reporting bias). We will then (3) discuss the types of commonsense knowledge captured by modern NLP systems (e.g., large pretrained language models), and (4) present ways to measure systems' commonsense reasoning abilities. We finish with (5) a discussion of various ways in which commonsense reasoning can be used to improve performance on NLP tasks, exemplified by an (6) interactive session on integrating commonsense into a downstream task.<br />
<br />
'''T7: Integrating Ethics into the NLP Curriculum''' (introductory)<br/><br />
Emily M. Bender, Dirk Hovy and Alexandra Schofield<br/><br />
Our goal in this tutorial is to empower NLP researchers and practitioners with tools and resources to teach others about how to ethically apply NLP techniques. Our tutorial will present both high-level strategies for developing an ethics-oriented curriculum, based on experience and best practices, as well as specific sample exercises that can be brought to a classroom. We plan to make this a highly interactive work session culminating in a shared online resource page that pools lesson plans, assignments, exercise ideas, reading suggestions, and ideas from the attendees. We consider three primary topics with our session that frequently underlie ethical issues in NLP research: Dual use, bias and privacy.<br/><br />
In this setting, a key lesson is that there is no single approach to ethical NLP: each project requires thoughtful consideration about what steps can be taken to best support people affected by that project. However, we can learn (and teach) what kinds of issues to be aware of and what kinds of strategies are available for mitigating harm. To teach this process, we apply and promote interactive exercises that provide an opportunity to ideate, discuss, and reflect. We plan to facilitate this in a way that encourages positive discussion, emphasizing the creation of ideas for the future instead of negative opinions of previous work.<br />
<br />
'''T8: Recent Advances in Open-Domain Question Answering''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Danqi Chen and Scott Wen-tau Yih<br/><br />
Open-domain (textual) question answering (QA), the task of finding answers to open-domain questions by searching a large collection of documents, has been a long-standing problem in NLP, information retrieval (IR) and related fields (Voorhees et al., 1999; Moldovan et al., 2000; Brill et al.,2002; Ferrucci et al., 2010). Traditional QA systems were usually constructed as a pipeline, consisting of many different components such as question processing, document/passage retrieval and answer processing. With the rapid development of neural reading comprehension (Chen, 2018), modern open-domain QA systems have been restructured by combining traditional IR techniques and neural reading comprehension models (Chen et al., 2017; Yang et al., 2019) or even implemented in a fully end-to-end fashion (Lee et al., 2019; Seo et al., 2019). While the system architecture has been drastically simplified, two technical challenges remain critical:(1) “Retriever”: finding documents that (might)contain an answer from a large collection of documents; (2) “Reader”: finding the answer in a given paragraph or a document.<br/><br />
In this tutorial, we aim to provide a comprehensive and coherent overview of recent advances in this line of research. We will start by first giving a brief historical background of open-domain question answering, discussing the basic setup and core technical challenges of the research problem.The focus will then shift to modern techniques and resources proposed for open-domain QA, including the basics of latest neural reading comprehension systems, new datasets and models. The scope will also be broadened to cover the information retrieval component on how to effectively identify passages relevant to the questions. Moreover, in-depth discussions will be given on the use of traditional / neural IR modules, as well as the trade-offs between modular design and end-to-end training. If time permits, we also plan to discuss some hybrid approaches for answering questions using both text and large knowledge bases (e.g. (Sun et al., 2018)) and give a critical review on how structured data complements the information from unstructured text.<br/><br />
At the end of our tutorial, we will discuss some important questions, including (1) How much progress have we made compared to the QA systems developed in the last decade?(2) What are the main challenges and limitations of cur-rent approaches? (3) How to trade off the efficiency (computational time and memory requirements) and accuracy in the deep learning era? We hope that our tutorial will not only serve as a useful resource for the audience to efficiently acquire the up-to-date knowledge, but also provide new perspectives to stimulate the advances of open-domain QA research in the next phase.<br />
<br />
== Workshop Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Milica Gašić, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf<br />
<br />
Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Amazon Alexa AI<br />
<br />
Saif M. Mohammad, National Research Council Canada<br />
<br />
Ves Stoyanov, Facebook AI<br />
<br />
== Student Research Workshop Chairs and Faculty Advisors==<br />
<br />
'''Student Research Workshop Co-chairs'''<br />
<br />
Rotem Dror, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology<br />
<br />
Jiangming Liu, The University of Edinburgh<br />
<br />
Shruti Rijhwani, Carnegie Mellon University<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Student Research Workshop Faculty Advisors'''<br />
<br />
Omri Abend, Hebrew University of Jerusalem<br />
<br />
Sujian Li, Peking University <br />
<br />
Zhou Yu, University of California, Davis<br />
<br />
<br />
Information about the Student Research Workshop (SRW) has posted on the workshop's website: https://sites.google.com/view/acl20studentresearchworkshop/. The SRW Call for Papers has been distributed to ACL mailing lists, as well as on our official Twitter account (@acl_srw) and the ACL meeting's Twitter account (@acl_meeting).<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Pre-submission Mentoring Phase (completed mid-February 2020)'''<br />
<br />
Before submission to the main deadline, the SRW offered pre-submission mentoring by experienced researchers of the ACL community. The pre-submission mentoring primarily serves to provide feedback on the writing style, readability and presentation of the paper.<br />
<br />
We recruited 30 mentors for providing pre-submission feedback. The deadline for the pre-submission phase was January 17, 2020. We had 57 pre-submissions in total.<br />
<br />
Mentors were matched to pre-submissions according to their research areas. All mentors have already provided feedback for the submissions and it was sent to the authors mid-February 2020. The majority of mentors have also offered to participate in follow-up discussions with the authors via email until the main submission deadline. <br />
<br />
Vouchers for one month's free use of Grammarly Premium have been sent to all the pre-submission authors. These were provided by the ACL 2020 Diversity and Inclusion Committee.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Main submission'''<br />
<br />
For the main submission, the START (softconf) submission page has been set up. Currently, we have recruited 200 members of the ACL community (both students and senior researchers) to serve as the Program Committee for reviewing submissions to the SRW. We plan on inviting more PC members, as the number of submissions is likely to be larger than originally estimated. <br />
<br />
Submission deadlines for the SRW are as follows:<br />
<br />
* Paper submission deadline: March 6, 2020<br />
<br />
* Review deadline: April 10, 2020<br />
<br />
* Acceptance notification: April 15, 2020<br />
<br />
* Camera-ready deadline: May 6, 2020<br />
<br />
* Travel grant application deadline: to be decided.<br />
<br />
* Travel grant notification: to be decided.<br />
<br />
We also plan to have a post-acceptance mentoring process, for all papers accepted to the SRW.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Funding'''<br />
<br />
The SRW has applied for an NSF grant of $18,000. The Don and Betty Walker international fund will also be able to provide student support. The SRW organizers have made contact with a number of industry companies to obtain sponsorship, but not yet secured additional funding. Contact has been made with the ACL 2020 sponsorship chairs and with Priscilla to investigate other funding opportunities, as well as the Student Volunteer Program, which helps students cover registration fee to the main conference.<br />
<br />
== Audio-Video Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Hamid Palangi, Microsoft Research, Redmond <br />
<br />
Lianhui Qin, University of Washington<br />
<br />
== Conference Handbook Chair ==<br />
<br />
Nanyun Peng, University of Southern California<br />
<br />
== Demo Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Asli Celikyilmaz, Microsoft Research, Redmond<br />
<br />
Shawn Wen, PolyAI<br />
<br />
<br />
== Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Rochester Institute of Technology<br />
<br />
Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Google<br />
<br />
== Local Sponsorship Chairs == <br />
<br />
Hoifung Poon, Microsoft <br />
<br />
Kristina Toutanova, Google<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Publication Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Steven Bethard, University of Arizona<br />
<br />
Ryan Cotterrell, University of Cambridge<br />
<br />
Rui Yan, Peking University<br />
<br />
Starting from the style files from ACL 2019, we have produced new LaTeX style files for ACL 2020. Most of the description was retained, but the order of sections was overhauled to make sure that important information wasn't scattered so haphazardly across the document. Other improvements were also made, like using the recommended citation style consistently throughout the LaTeX source, and separating out all the LaTeX-specific stuff into clearly marked sections. The MS Word version was derived from these LaTeX versions to match as closely as possible. The LaTeX version was also posted to the Overleaf gallery. The most recent .bib file for the entire ACL Anthology was included in the style file distribution to encourage authors to use the official citations for ACL Anthology publications. All style file changes were merged into https://github.com/acl-org/acl-pub/tree/gh-pages/paper_styles.<br />
<br />
== Publicity Chair ==<br />
<br />
Emily M. Bender, University of Washington<br />
<br />
=== Dissemination ===<br />
<br />
Durable accounts for the ACL meeting on Twitter and Facebook have been created: <br />
* https://twitter.com/aclmeeting<br />
* https://www.facebook.com/aclmeeting/<br />
<br />
These will be passed along to the ACL 2021 publicity chair(s) so that they don't have to build up followers separately. As of Feb 4, 2020 the Twitter account has 4,061 followers and the Facebook account has 181. We have not yet been making use of the Instagram account, but we have been using the Twitter and Facebook accounts to publicize important dates as well as blog posts. The Twitter account especially has been useful for fielding questions from the community. Calls for papers have also gone out over the ACL member portal and several mailing lists, as well as websites such as WikiCFP. (These are maintained in a spreadsheet which can be handed off to the ACL 2021 publicity chair(s)).<br />
<br />
=== Next Steps ===<br />
<br />
* Recruit co-chairs, especially to coordinate live-tweeting of the conference<br />
* Contact local media for coverage<br />
* Develop land acknowledgement in consultation with the Duwamish Tribe (on whose land the meeting will take place). The Duwamish publish this information about land acknowledgments: https://www.duwamishtribe.org/land-acknowledgement<br />
<br />
<br />
== Remote Presentation Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Hao Fang, Microsoft Semantic Machines <br />
<br />
Yi Luan, Google AI Language<br />
<br />
== Sustainability Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Ananya Ganesh, Educational Testing Service <br />
<br />
Klaus Zechner, Educational Testing Service<br />
<br />
Our main goal for this new focus area is to engage the ACL community in discussions about how best to reduce the carbon footprint of future ACL conferences in order to contribute to sustainable and livable conditions on this planet.<br />
One of the main directions we are currently envisioning is to encourage and support conference attendees in virtual participation using live streaming of conference events as air travel is the main contributor to the carbon footprint of international conferences.<br />
<br />
== Website & Conference App Chairs == <br />
<br />
Sudha Rao, Microsoft Research, Redmond <br />
<br />
Yizhe Zhang, Microsoft Research, Redmond<br />
<br />
== Business Office ==<br />
<br />
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q1_Reports:_ACL_2020&diff=734932020Q1 Reports: ACL 20202020-02-22T22:28:35Z<p>Jurafsky: /* General Chair */</p>
<hr />
<div><br />
== General Chair ==<br />
Dan Jurafsky, Stanford University<br />
<br />
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) will take place in Seattle, Washington at the Hyatt Regency Seattle in downtown Seattle from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
We have a great set of chairs! We are continuing 2019's new roles (Diversity and Inclusion chairs, Remote Presentation Chairs, AV Chairs) and adding new ones: (Sustainability chair), and we are doing well in demographic representation among our chairs (gender and region).<br />
<br />
Following advice from last year, we have been using Slack for most intra-committee communication (and we put the Slack channel into the ACL pro space, so it can be preserved for future years), and using email only when absolutely necessary.<br />
<br />
As usual, the growing size of the conference (both in papers and attendees) is a challenge, but both in papers and space we have been doing well (see the individual chair summaries below).<br />
<br />
On Mar 11, we will have a site visit at the hotel in Seattle which besides Priscilla will include the General Chair, and representatives from the Program Chairs, the D&I chairs, and the AV chairs. We will also use that occasion to have a committee mtg including those folks plus the relatively large number of ACL2020 organizing committee members who are local to Seattle.<br />
<br />
<br />
[this summary in progress]<br />
<br />
== Program Chairs == <br />
Joyce Chai, University of Michigan<br />
<br />
Natalie Schluter, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark<br />
<br />
Joel Tetreault, Dataminr, USA<br />
<br />
<br />
== Local Organisation Chairs ==<br />
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL<br />
<br />
With advice from:<br />
<br />
Jianfeng Gao, Microsoft Research<br />
<br />
Luke Zettlemoyer, University of Washington<br />
<br />
== Tutorial Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Agata Savary, University of Tours, France<br />
<br />
Yue Zhang, Westlake University, Hangzhou, China<br />
<br />
The call, submission, reviewing and selection of tutorials was coordinated jointly for 4 conferences: ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP. <br />
<br />
Before drafting the call, we collected lists of tutorials offered within the past 4 years. We analysed previous calls for tutorials and reports from tutorial chairs (from [https://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2016Q3_Reports:_Tutorial_Chairs 2016], [https://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2017Q3_Reports:_Tutorial_Chairs 2017], [https://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2018Q3_Reports:_Tutorial_Chairs 2018] and [http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2019Q1_Reports:_ACL_2019 2019]). We consulted previous tutorial chairs with a questionnaire including questions about: the number of submissions, encouraging submissions on specific topics or from specific lecturers, the review procedure, the evaluation criteria, the post-tutorial availability of the slides/codes, and lessons learned from tutorial coordination. We also discussed the publication of slides and video recordings from future tutorials with the persons in charge of the ACL Anthology. As a result of these steps, we created two new sections for the [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Conference_Handbook ACL Conference Handbook] (future chairs might consider updating these documents yearly): <br />
* the list of [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Past_tutorials past tutorials] at ACL, COLING, EACL, EMNLP, and NAACL in 2016-2019<br />
* a [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Tutorial_chair_handbook tutorial chair handbook]<br />
<br />
The final [https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/joint-call-tutorial-proposals-aclaacl-ijcnlpemnlpcoling-2020 call] differs from previous calls in several aspects: (i) the expectations about tutorial proposals were made clearer, (ii) following the central ACL decision, the teachers' payment policy was replaced by a fee-waiving policy, (iii) the required submission details include two new items: diversity considerations and agreement for open access publication of slides, codes, data and video recordings, (iv) the evaluation criteria (see below) are announced.<br />
<br />
We recruited a review committee of 19 members, including the 8 tutorial chairs and 11 external members selected for their large understanding of the NLP domain and a good experience in reviewing and/or tutorial teaching:<br />
<br />
'''Review Committee'''<br />
* Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne, Australia) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Daniel Beck (University of Melbourne, Australia) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Emily M. Bender (University of Washington, WA, USA)<br />
* Erik Cambria (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)<br />
* Gaël Dias (University of Caen Normandie, France)<br />
* Stefan Evert (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)<br />
* Yang Liu (Tsinghua University, Beijing, China)<br />
* Agata Savary (University of Tours, France) - ACL 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* João Sedoc (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA)<br />
* Lucia Specia (Sheffield University, UK) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair <br />
* Xu SUN (Peking University, China)<br />
* Yulia Tsvetkov (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA)<br />
* Benjamin Van Durme (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Aline Villavicencio (University of Sheffield, UK and Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Taro Watanabe (Google, Inc., Tokyo, Japan)<br />
* Aaron Steven White (University of Rochester, NY, USA)<br />
* Fei Xia (University of Washington, WA, USA) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Yue Zhang (Westlake University, Hangzhou, China) - ACL 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Meishan Zhang (Tianjin University, China)<br />
<br />
In total, we received 43 submissions for the 4 conferences. Each reviewer was assigned 6-7 proposals and each proposal received 3 reviews. The selection criteria included: clarity and preparedness, novelty or timely character of the topic, lecturers' experience, likely audience interest, open access of the teaching material, diversity aspects (multilingualism, gender, age and country of the lecturers), and compatibility with the preferred venues. <br />
We accepted 31 proposals. <br />
<br />
The decision making was handled via an online meeting of the 8 tutorial chairs. In particular, the selection of tutorials for each conference was done via the expression of interest of the tutorial chairs on a round-robin basis. Some slight adjustments were also performed after the meeting to better fit the authors' preferences. In total, 8, 8, 8 and 7 proposals were selected for ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP, respectively. Upon the announcement the results, 2 of the proposals accepted for AACL-IJCNLP were withdrawn.<br />
<br />
The submission, review, selection and collection of final material for all tutorials was handled via a dedicated SoftConf space, shared by the 4 coordinating conferences. After the selection of proposals, a separate track was created on SoftConf for each conference. The final submission page (one per conference) was set up so as to collect all the necessary data including notably: the tutorial slides, URLs for course material (if any), printable material (if any) and agreement for open access publication.<br />
<br />
The final selection for ACL 2020 consists of the following 8 tutorials of 3 hours each (each of them had ACL as the preferred or the second preferred venue):<br />
<br />
'''Morning Tutorials'''<br />
<br />
'''T1: Interpretability and Analysis in Neural NLP''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Yonatan Belinkov, Sebastian Gehrmann and Ellie Pavlick<br/><br />
While deep learning has transformed the NLP field and impacted the larger computational linguistics community, the rise of neural networks is stained by their opaque nature: It is challenging to interpret the inner workings of neural network models, and explicate their behavior. Therefore, in the last few years, an increasingly large body of work has been devoted to the analysis and interpretation of neural network models in NLP.<br/><br />
This body of work is so far lacking a common framework and methodology. Moreover, approaching the analysis of modern neural networks can be difficult for newcomers to the field. This tutorial aims to fill this gap and introduce the nascent field of interpretability and analysis of neural networks in NLP.<br/><br />
The tutorial covers the main lines of analysis work, such as probing classifier, behavior studies and test suites, psycholinguistic methods, visualizations, adversarial examples, and other methods. We highlight not only the most commonly applied analysis methods, but also the specific limitations and shortcomings of current approaches, in order to inform participants where to focus future efforts.<br />
<br />
'''T2: Multi-modal Information Extraction from Text, Semi-structured, and Tabular Data on the Web''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Xin Luna Dong, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Colin Lockard and Prashant Shiralkar<br/><br />
The World Wide Web contains vast quantities of textual information in several forms: unstructured text, template-based semi-structured webpages (which present data in key-value pairs and lists), and tables. Methods for extracting information from these sources and converting it to a structured form have been a target of research from the natural language processing (NLP), data mining, and database communities. While these researchers have largely separated extraction from web data into different problems based on the modality of the data, they have faced similar problems such as learning with limited labeled data, defining (or avoiding defining) ontologies, making use of prior knowledge, and scaling solutions to deal with the size of the Web.<br/><br />
In this tutorial we take a holistic view toward information extraction, exploring the commonalities in the challenges and solutions developed to address these different forms of text. We will explore the approaches targeted at unstructured text that largely rely on learning syntactic or semantic textual patterns, approaches targeted at semi-structured documents that learn to identify structural patterns in the template, and approaches targeting web tables which rely heavily on entity linking and type information.<br/><br />
While these different data modalities have largely been considered separately in the past, recent research has started taking a more inclusive approach toward textual extraction, in which the multiple signals offered by textual, layout, and visual clues are combined into a single extraction model made possible by new deep learning approaches. At the same time, trends within purely textual extraction have shifted toward full-document understanding rather than considering sentences as independent units. With this in mind, it is worth considering the information extraction problem as a whole to motivate solutions that harness textual semantics along with visual and semi-structured layout information. We will discuss these approaches and suggest avenues for future work.<br />
<br />
'''T3: Reviewing Natural Language Processing Research''' (introductory)<br/><br />
Kevin Cohen, Karën Fort, Margot Mieskes and Aurélie Névéol<br/><br />
As the demand for reviewing grows, so must the pool of reviewers. As the [http://www.livecongress.it/aol/indexSA.php?id=E2EAED7D&ticket= survey] presented by Graham Neubig at the 2019 ACL showed, a considerable number of reviewers are junior researchers, who might lack the experience and expertise necessary for high-quality reviews. Some of them might not have the environment or lack opportunities that allow them to learn the skills necessary. A tutorial on reviewing for the NLP community might increase reviewers’ confidence, as well as the quality of the reviews. This introductory tutorial will cover the goals, processes, and evaluation of reviewing research papers in natural language processing.<br />
<br />
'''T4: Stylized Text Generation: Approaches and Applications''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Lili Mou and Olga Vechtomova<br/><br />
Text generation has played an important role in various applications of natural language processing (NLP), and kn recent studies, researchers are paying increasing attention to modeling and manipulating the style of the generation text, which we call stylized text generation. In this tutorial, we will provide a comprehensive literature review in this direction. We start from the definition of style and different settings of stylized text generation, illustrated with various applications. Then, we present different settings of stylized generation, such as parallel supervised, style label-supervised, and unsupervised. In each setting, we delve deep into machine learning methods, including embedding learning techniques to represent style}, adversarial learning and reinforcement learning with cycle consistency to match content but to distinguish different styles. We also introduce current approaches of evaluating stylized text generation systems. We conclude our tutorial by presenting the challenges of stylized text generation and discussing future directions, such as small-data training, non-categorical style modeling, and a generalized scope of style transfer (e.g., controlling the syntax as a style).<br />
<br />
'''Afternoon Tutorials'''<br />
<br />
'''T5: Achieving Common Ground in Multi-modal Dialogue''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Malihe Alikhani and Matthew Stone<br/><br />
All communication aims at achieving common ground (grounding): interlocutors can work together effectively only with mutual beliefs about what the state of the world is, about what their goals are, and about how they plan to make their goals a reality. Computational dialogue research offers some classic results on grouding, which unfortunately offer scant guidance to the design of grounding modules and behaviors in cutting-edge systems. In this tutorial, we focus on three main topic areas: 1) grounding in human-human communication; 2) grounding in dialogue systems; and 3) grounding in multi-modal interactive systems, including image-oriented conversations and human-robot interactions. We highlight a number of achievements of recent computational research in coordinating complex content, show how these results lead to rich and challenging opportunities for doing grounding in more flexible and powerful ways, and canvass relevant insights from the literature on human--human conversation. We expect that the tutorial will be of interest to researchers in dialogue systems, computational semantics and cognitive modeling, and hope that it will catalyze research and system building that more directly explores the creative, strategic ways conversational agents might be able to seek and offer evidence about their understanding of their interlocutors.<br />
<br />
'''T6: Commonsense Reasoning for Natural Language Processing''' (introductory)<br/><br />
Maarten Sap, Vered Shwartz, Antoine Bosselut, Dan Roth and Yejin Choi<br/><br />
In our tutorial, we (1) outline the various types of commonsense (e.g., physical, social), and (2) discuss techniques to gather and represent commonsense knowledge, while highlighting the challenges specific to this type of knowledge (e.g., reporting bias). We will then (3) discuss the types of commonsense knowledge captured by modern NLP systems (e.g., large pretrained language models), and (4) present ways to measure systems' commonsense reasoning abilities. We finish with (5) a discussion of various ways in which commonsense reasoning can be used to improve performance on NLP tasks, exemplified by an (6) interactive session on integrating commonsense into a downstream task.<br />
<br />
'''T7: Integrating Ethics into the NLP Curriculum''' (introductory)<br/><br />
Emily M. Bender, Dirk Hovy and Alexandra Schofield<br/><br />
Our goal in this tutorial is to empower NLP researchers and practitioners with tools and resources to teach others about how to ethically apply NLP techniques. Our tutorial will present both high-level strategies for developing an ethics-oriented curriculum, based on experience and best practices, as well as specific sample exercises that can be brought to a classroom. We plan to make this a highly interactive work session culminating in a shared online resource page that pools lesson plans, assignments, exercise ideas, reading suggestions, and ideas from the attendees. We consider three primary topics with our session that frequently underlie ethical issues in NLP research: Dual use, bias and privacy.<br/><br />
In this setting, a key lesson is that there is no single approach to ethical NLP: each project requires thoughtful consideration about what steps can be taken to best support people affected by that project. However, we can learn (and teach) what kinds of issues to be aware of and what kinds of strategies are available for mitigating harm. To teach this process, we apply and promote interactive exercises that provide an opportunity to ideate, discuss, and reflect. We plan to facilitate this in a way that encourages positive discussion, emphasizing the creation of ideas for the future instead of negative opinions of previous work.<br />
<br />
'''T8: Recent Advances in Open-Domain Question Answering''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Danqi Chen and Scott Wen-tau Yih<br/><br />
Open-domain (textual) question answering (QA), the task of finding answers to open-domain questions by searching a large collection of documents, has been a long-standing problem in NLP, information retrieval (IR) and related fields (Voorhees et al., 1999; Moldovan et al., 2000; Brill et al.,2002; Ferrucci et al., 2010). Traditional QA systems were usually constructed as a pipeline, consisting of many different components such as question processing, document/passage retrieval and answer processing. With the rapid development of neural reading comprehension (Chen, 2018), modern open-domain QA systems have been restructured by combining traditional IR techniques and neural reading comprehension models (Chen et al., 2017; Yang et al., 2019) or even implemented in a fully end-to-end fashion (Lee et al., 2019; Seo et al., 2019). While the system architecture has been drastically simplified, two technical challenges remain critical:(1) “Retriever”: finding documents that (might)contain an answer from a large collection of documents; (2) “Reader”: finding the answer in a given paragraph or a document.<br/><br />
In this tutorial, we aim to provide a comprehensive and coherent overview of recent advances in this line of research. We will start by first giving a brief historical background of open-domain question answering, discussing the basic setup and core technical challenges of the research problem.The focus will then shift to modern techniques and resources proposed for open-domain QA, including the basics of latest neural reading comprehension systems, new datasets and models. The scope will also be broadened to cover the information retrieval component on how to effectively identify passages relevant to the questions. Moreover, in-depth discussions will be given on the use of traditional / neural IR modules, as well as the trade-offs between modular design and end-to-end training. If time permits, we also plan to discuss some hybrid approaches for answering questions using both text and large knowledge bases (e.g. (Sun et al., 2018)) and give a critical review on how structured data complements the information from unstructured text.<br/><br />
At the end of our tutorial, we will discuss some important questions, including (1) How much progress have we made compared to the QA systems developed in the last decade?(2) What are the main challenges and limitations of cur-rent approaches? (3) How to trade off the efficiency (computational time and memory requirements) and accuracy in the deep learning era? We hope that our tutorial will not only serve as a useful resource for the audience to efficiently acquire the up-to-date knowledge, but also provide new perspectives to stimulate the advances of open-domain QA research in the next phase.<br />
<br />
== Workshop Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Milica Gašić, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf<br />
<br />
Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Amazon Alexa AI<br />
<br />
Saif M. Mohammad, National Research Council Canada<br />
<br />
Ves Stoyanov, Facebook AI<br />
<br />
== Student Research Workshop Chairs and Faculty Advisors==<br />
<br />
'''Student Research Workshop Co-chairs'''<br />
<br />
Rotem Dror, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology<br />
<br />
Jiangming Liu, The University of Edinburgh<br />
<br />
Shruti Rijhwani, Carnegie Mellon University<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Student Research Workshop Faculty Advisors'''<br />
<br />
Omri Abend, Hebrew University of Jerusalem<br />
<br />
Sujian Li, Peking University <br />
<br />
Zhou Yu, University of California, Davis<br />
<br />
<br />
Information about the Student Research Workshop (SRW) has posted on the workshop's website: https://sites.google.com/view/acl20studentresearchworkshop/. The SRW Call for Papers has been distributed to ACL mailing lists, as well as on our official Twitter account (@acl_srw) and the ACL meeting's Twitter account (@acl_meeting).<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Pre-submission Mentoring Phase (completed mid-February 2020)'''<br />
<br />
Before submission to the main deadline, the SRW offered pre-submission mentoring by experienced researchers of the ACL community. The pre-submission mentoring primarily serves to provide feedback on the writing style, readability and presentation of the paper.<br />
<br />
We recruited 30 mentors for providing pre-submission feedback. The deadline for the pre-submission phase was January 17, 2020. We had 57 pre-submissions in total.<br />
<br />
Mentors were matched to pre-submissions according to their research areas. All mentors have already provided feedback for the submissions and it was sent to the authors mid-February 2020. The majority of mentors have also offered to participate in follow-up discussions with the authors via email until the main submission deadline. <br />
<br />
Vouchers for one month's free use of Grammarly Premium have been sent to all the pre-submission authors. These were provided by the ACL 2020 Diversity and Inclusion Committee.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Main submission'''<br />
<br />
For the main submission, the START (softconf) submission page has been set up. Currently, we have recruited 200 members of the ACL community (both students and senior researchers) to serve as the Program Committee for reviewing submissions to the SRW. We plan on inviting more PC members, as the number of submissions is likely to be larger than originally estimated. <br />
<br />
Submission deadlines for the SRW are as follows:<br />
<br />
* Paper submission deadline: March 6, 2020<br />
<br />
* Review deadline: April 10, 2020<br />
<br />
* Acceptance notification: April 15, 2020<br />
<br />
* Camera-ready deadline: May 6, 2020<br />
<br />
* Travel grant application deadline: to be decided.<br />
<br />
* Travel grant notification: to be decided.<br />
<br />
We also plan to have a post-acceptance mentoring process, for all papers accepted to the SRW.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Funding'''<br />
<br />
The SRW has applied for an NSF grant of $18,000. The Don and Betty Walker international fund will also be able to provide student support. The SRW organizers have made contact with a number of industry companies to obtain sponsorship, but not yet secured additional funding. Contact has been made with the ACL 2020 sponsorship chairs and with Priscilla to investigate other funding opportunities, as well as the Student Volunteer Program, which helps students cover registration fee to the main conference.<br />
<br />
== Audio-Video Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Hamid Palangi, Microsoft Research, Redmond <br />
<br />
Lianhui Qin, University of Washington<br />
<br />
== Conference Handbook Chair ==<br />
<br />
Nanyun Peng, University of Southern California<br />
<br />
== Demo Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Asli Celikyilmaz, Microsoft Research, Redmond<br />
<br />
Shawn Wen, PolyAI<br />
<br />
<br />
== Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Rochester Institute of Technology<br />
<br />
Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Google<br />
<br />
== Local Sponsorship Chairs == <br />
<br />
Hoifung Poon, Microsoft <br />
<br />
Kristina Toutanova, Google<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Publication Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Steven Bethard, University of Arizona<br />
<br />
Ryan Cotterrell, University of Cambridge<br />
<br />
Rui Yan, Peking University<br />
<br />
Starting from the style files from ACL 2019, we have produced new LaTeX style files for ACL 2020. Most of the description was retained, but the order of sections was overhauled to make sure that important information wasn't scattered so haphazardly across the document. Other improvements were also made, like using the recommended citation style consistently throughout the LaTeX source, and separating out all the LaTeX-specific stuff into clearly marked sections. The MS Word version was derived from these LaTeX versions to match as closely as possible. The LaTeX version was also posted to the Overleaf gallery. The most recent .bib file for the entire ACL Anthology was included in the style file distribution to encourage authors to use the official citations for ACL Anthology publications. All style file changes were merged into https://github.com/acl-org/acl-pub/tree/gh-pages/paper_styles.<br />
<br />
== Publicity Chair ==<br />
<br />
Emily M. Bender, University of Washington<br />
<br />
=== Dissemination ===<br />
<br />
Durable accounts for the ACL meeting on Twitter and Facebook have been created: <br />
* https://twitter.com/aclmeeting<br />
* https://www.facebook.com/aclmeeting/<br />
<br />
These will be passed along to the ACL 2021 publicity chair(s) so that they don't have to build up followers separately. As of Feb 4, 2020 the Twitter account has 4,061 followers and the Facebook account has 181. We have not yet been making use of the Instagram account, but we have been using the Twitter and Facebook accounts to publicize important dates as well as blog posts. The Twitter account especially has been useful for fielding questions from the community. Calls for papers have also gone out over the ACL member portal and several mailing lists, as well as websites such as WikiCFP. (These are maintained in a spreadsheet which can be handed off to the ACL 2021 publicity chair(s)).<br />
<br />
=== Next Steps ===<br />
<br />
* Recruit co-chairs, especially to coordinate live-tweeting of the conference<br />
* Contact local media for coverage<br />
* Develop land acknowledgement in consultation with the Duwamish Tribe (on whose land the meeting will take place). The Duwamish publish this information about land acknowledgments: https://www.duwamishtribe.org/land-acknowledgement<br />
<br />
<br />
== Remote Presentation Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Hao Fang, Microsoft Semantic Machines <br />
<br />
Yi Luan, Google AI Language<br />
<br />
== Sustainability Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Ananya Ganesh, Educational Testing Service <br />
<br />
Klaus Zechner, Educational Testing Service<br />
<br />
Our main goal for this new focus area is to engage the ACL community in discussions about how best to reduce the carbon footprint of future ACL conferences in order to contribute to sustainable and livable conditions on this planet.<br />
One of the main directions we are currently envisioning is to encourage and support conference attendees in virtual participation using live streaming of conference events as air travel is the main contributor to the carbon footprint of international conferences.<br />
<br />
== Website & Conference App Chairs == <br />
<br />
Sudha Rao, Microsoft Research, Redmond <br />
<br />
Yizhe Zhang, Microsoft Research, Redmond<br />
<br />
== Business Office ==<br />
<br />
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q1_Reports:_ACL_2020&diff=734922020Q1 Reports: ACL 20202020-02-22T22:28:05Z<p>Jurafsky: </p>
<hr />
<div><br />
== General Chair ==<br />
Dan Jurafsky, Stanford University<br />
<br />
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) will take place in Seattle, Washington at the Hyatt Regency Seattle in downtown Seattle from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
We have a great set of chairs! We are continuing 2019's new roles (Diversity and Inclusion chairs, Remote Presentation Chairs, AV Chairs) and adding new ones: (Sustainability chair), and we are doing well in demographic representation among our chairs (gender and region).<br />
<br />
Following advice from last year, we have been using Slack for most intra-committee communication (and we put the Slack channel into the ACL pro space, so it can be preserved for future years), and using email only when absolutely necessary.<br />
<br />
As usual, the growing size of the conference (both in papers and attendees) is a challenge, but both in papers and space we have been doing well (see the individual chair summaries below).<br />
<br />
On Mar 11, we will have a site visit, which besides Priscilla will include the General Chair, and representatives from the Program Chairs, the D&I chairs, and the AV chairs. We will also use that occasion to have a committee mtg including those folks plus the relatively large number of ACL2020 organizing committee members who are local to Seattle.<br />
<br />
[this summary in progress]<br />
<br />
== Program Chairs == <br />
Joyce Chai, University of Michigan<br />
<br />
Natalie Schluter, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark<br />
<br />
Joel Tetreault, Dataminr, USA<br />
<br />
<br />
== Local Organisation Chairs ==<br />
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL<br />
<br />
With advice from:<br />
<br />
Jianfeng Gao, Microsoft Research<br />
<br />
Luke Zettlemoyer, University of Washington<br />
<br />
== Tutorial Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Agata Savary, University of Tours, France<br />
<br />
Yue Zhang, Westlake University, Hangzhou, China<br />
<br />
The call, submission, reviewing and selection of tutorials was coordinated jointly for 4 conferences: ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP. <br />
<br />
Before drafting the call, we collected lists of tutorials offered within the past 4 years. We analysed previous calls for tutorials and reports from tutorial chairs (from [https://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2016Q3_Reports:_Tutorial_Chairs 2016], [https://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2017Q3_Reports:_Tutorial_Chairs 2017], [https://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2018Q3_Reports:_Tutorial_Chairs 2018] and [http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2019Q1_Reports:_ACL_2019 2019]). We consulted previous tutorial chairs with a questionnaire including questions about: the number of submissions, encouraging submissions on specific topics or from specific lecturers, the review procedure, the evaluation criteria, the post-tutorial availability of the slides/codes, and lessons learned from tutorial coordination. We also discussed the publication of slides and video recordings from future tutorials with the persons in charge of the ACL Anthology. As a result of these steps, we created two new sections for the [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Conference_Handbook ACL Conference Handbook] (future chairs might consider updating these documents yearly): <br />
* the list of [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Past_tutorials past tutorials] at ACL, COLING, EACL, EMNLP, and NAACL in 2016-2019<br />
* a [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Tutorial_chair_handbook tutorial chair handbook]<br />
<br />
The final [https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/joint-call-tutorial-proposals-aclaacl-ijcnlpemnlpcoling-2020 call] differs from previous calls in several aspects: (i) the expectations about tutorial proposals were made clearer, (ii) following the central ACL decision, the teachers' payment policy was replaced by a fee-waiving policy, (iii) the required submission details include two new items: diversity considerations and agreement for open access publication of slides, codes, data and video recordings, (iv) the evaluation criteria (see below) are announced.<br />
<br />
We recruited a review committee of 19 members, including the 8 tutorial chairs and 11 external members selected for their large understanding of the NLP domain and a good experience in reviewing and/or tutorial teaching:<br />
<br />
'''Review Committee'''<br />
* Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne, Australia) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Daniel Beck (University of Melbourne, Australia) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Emily M. Bender (University of Washington, WA, USA)<br />
* Erik Cambria (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)<br />
* Gaël Dias (University of Caen Normandie, France)<br />
* Stefan Evert (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)<br />
* Yang Liu (Tsinghua University, Beijing, China)<br />
* Agata Savary (University of Tours, France) - ACL 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* João Sedoc (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA)<br />
* Lucia Specia (Sheffield University, UK) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair <br />
* Xu SUN (Peking University, China)<br />
* Yulia Tsvetkov (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA)<br />
* Benjamin Van Durme (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Aline Villavicencio (University of Sheffield, UK and Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Taro Watanabe (Google, Inc., Tokyo, Japan)<br />
* Aaron Steven White (University of Rochester, NY, USA)<br />
* Fei Xia (University of Washington, WA, USA) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Yue Zhang (Westlake University, Hangzhou, China) - ACL 2020 tutorial chair<br />
* Meishan Zhang (Tianjin University, China)<br />
<br />
In total, we received 43 submissions for the 4 conferences. Each reviewer was assigned 6-7 proposals and each proposal received 3 reviews. The selection criteria included: clarity and preparedness, novelty or timely character of the topic, lecturers' experience, likely audience interest, open access of the teaching material, diversity aspects (multilingualism, gender, age and country of the lecturers), and compatibility with the preferred venues. <br />
We accepted 31 proposals. <br />
<br />
The decision making was handled via an online meeting of the 8 tutorial chairs. In particular, the selection of tutorials for each conference was done via the expression of interest of the tutorial chairs on a round-robin basis. Some slight adjustments were also performed after the meeting to better fit the authors' preferences. In total, 8, 8, 8 and 7 proposals were selected for ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP, respectively. Upon the announcement the results, 2 of the proposals accepted for AACL-IJCNLP were withdrawn.<br />
<br />
The submission, review, selection and collection of final material for all tutorials was handled via a dedicated SoftConf space, shared by the 4 coordinating conferences. After the selection of proposals, a separate track was created on SoftConf for each conference. The final submission page (one per conference) was set up so as to collect all the necessary data including notably: the tutorial slides, URLs for course material (if any), printable material (if any) and agreement for open access publication.<br />
<br />
The final selection for ACL 2020 consists of the following 8 tutorials of 3 hours each (each of them had ACL as the preferred or the second preferred venue):<br />
<br />
'''Morning Tutorials'''<br />
<br />
'''T1: Interpretability and Analysis in Neural NLP''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Yonatan Belinkov, Sebastian Gehrmann and Ellie Pavlick<br/><br />
While deep learning has transformed the NLP field and impacted the larger computational linguistics community, the rise of neural networks is stained by their opaque nature: It is challenging to interpret the inner workings of neural network models, and explicate their behavior. Therefore, in the last few years, an increasingly large body of work has been devoted to the analysis and interpretation of neural network models in NLP.<br/><br />
This body of work is so far lacking a common framework and methodology. Moreover, approaching the analysis of modern neural networks can be difficult for newcomers to the field. This tutorial aims to fill this gap and introduce the nascent field of interpretability and analysis of neural networks in NLP.<br/><br />
The tutorial covers the main lines of analysis work, such as probing classifier, behavior studies and test suites, psycholinguistic methods, visualizations, adversarial examples, and other methods. We highlight not only the most commonly applied analysis methods, but also the specific limitations and shortcomings of current approaches, in order to inform participants where to focus future efforts.<br />
<br />
'''T2: Multi-modal Information Extraction from Text, Semi-structured, and Tabular Data on the Web''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Xin Luna Dong, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Colin Lockard and Prashant Shiralkar<br/><br />
The World Wide Web contains vast quantities of textual information in several forms: unstructured text, template-based semi-structured webpages (which present data in key-value pairs and lists), and tables. Methods for extracting information from these sources and converting it to a structured form have been a target of research from the natural language processing (NLP), data mining, and database communities. While these researchers have largely separated extraction from web data into different problems based on the modality of the data, they have faced similar problems such as learning with limited labeled data, defining (or avoiding defining) ontologies, making use of prior knowledge, and scaling solutions to deal with the size of the Web.<br/><br />
In this tutorial we take a holistic view toward information extraction, exploring the commonalities in the challenges and solutions developed to address these different forms of text. We will explore the approaches targeted at unstructured text that largely rely on learning syntactic or semantic textual patterns, approaches targeted at semi-structured documents that learn to identify structural patterns in the template, and approaches targeting web tables which rely heavily on entity linking and type information.<br/><br />
While these different data modalities have largely been considered separately in the past, recent research has started taking a more inclusive approach toward textual extraction, in which the multiple signals offered by textual, layout, and visual clues are combined into a single extraction model made possible by new deep learning approaches. At the same time, trends within purely textual extraction have shifted toward full-document understanding rather than considering sentences as independent units. With this in mind, it is worth considering the information extraction problem as a whole to motivate solutions that harness textual semantics along with visual and semi-structured layout information. We will discuss these approaches and suggest avenues for future work.<br />
<br />
'''T3: Reviewing Natural Language Processing Research''' (introductory)<br/><br />
Kevin Cohen, Karën Fort, Margot Mieskes and Aurélie Névéol<br/><br />
As the demand for reviewing grows, so must the pool of reviewers. As the [http://www.livecongress.it/aol/indexSA.php?id=E2EAED7D&ticket= survey] presented by Graham Neubig at the 2019 ACL showed, a considerable number of reviewers are junior researchers, who might lack the experience and expertise necessary for high-quality reviews. Some of them might not have the environment or lack opportunities that allow them to learn the skills necessary. A tutorial on reviewing for the NLP community might increase reviewers’ confidence, as well as the quality of the reviews. This introductory tutorial will cover the goals, processes, and evaluation of reviewing research papers in natural language processing.<br />
<br />
'''T4: Stylized Text Generation: Approaches and Applications''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Lili Mou and Olga Vechtomova<br/><br />
Text generation has played an important role in various applications of natural language processing (NLP), and kn recent studies, researchers are paying increasing attention to modeling and manipulating the style of the generation text, which we call stylized text generation. In this tutorial, we will provide a comprehensive literature review in this direction. We start from the definition of style and different settings of stylized text generation, illustrated with various applications. Then, we present different settings of stylized generation, such as parallel supervised, style label-supervised, and unsupervised. In each setting, we delve deep into machine learning methods, including embedding learning techniques to represent style}, adversarial learning and reinforcement learning with cycle consistency to match content but to distinguish different styles. We also introduce current approaches of evaluating stylized text generation systems. We conclude our tutorial by presenting the challenges of stylized text generation and discussing future directions, such as small-data training, non-categorical style modeling, and a generalized scope of style transfer (e.g., controlling the syntax as a style).<br />
<br />
'''Afternoon Tutorials'''<br />
<br />
'''T5: Achieving Common Ground in Multi-modal Dialogue''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Malihe Alikhani and Matthew Stone<br/><br />
All communication aims at achieving common ground (grounding): interlocutors can work together effectively only with mutual beliefs about what the state of the world is, about what their goals are, and about how they plan to make their goals a reality. Computational dialogue research offers some classic results on grouding, which unfortunately offer scant guidance to the design of grounding modules and behaviors in cutting-edge systems. In this tutorial, we focus on three main topic areas: 1) grounding in human-human communication; 2) grounding in dialogue systems; and 3) grounding in multi-modal interactive systems, including image-oriented conversations and human-robot interactions. We highlight a number of achievements of recent computational research in coordinating complex content, show how these results lead to rich and challenging opportunities for doing grounding in more flexible and powerful ways, and canvass relevant insights from the literature on human--human conversation. We expect that the tutorial will be of interest to researchers in dialogue systems, computational semantics and cognitive modeling, and hope that it will catalyze research and system building that more directly explores the creative, strategic ways conversational agents might be able to seek and offer evidence about their understanding of their interlocutors.<br />
<br />
'''T6: Commonsense Reasoning for Natural Language Processing''' (introductory)<br/><br />
Maarten Sap, Vered Shwartz, Antoine Bosselut, Dan Roth and Yejin Choi<br/><br />
In our tutorial, we (1) outline the various types of commonsense (e.g., physical, social), and (2) discuss techniques to gather and represent commonsense knowledge, while highlighting the challenges specific to this type of knowledge (e.g., reporting bias). We will then (3) discuss the types of commonsense knowledge captured by modern NLP systems (e.g., large pretrained language models), and (4) present ways to measure systems' commonsense reasoning abilities. We finish with (5) a discussion of various ways in which commonsense reasoning can be used to improve performance on NLP tasks, exemplified by an (6) interactive session on integrating commonsense into a downstream task.<br />
<br />
'''T7: Integrating Ethics into the NLP Curriculum''' (introductory)<br/><br />
Emily M. Bender, Dirk Hovy and Alexandra Schofield<br/><br />
Our goal in this tutorial is to empower NLP researchers and practitioners with tools and resources to teach others about how to ethically apply NLP techniques. Our tutorial will present both high-level strategies for developing an ethics-oriented curriculum, based on experience and best practices, as well as specific sample exercises that can be brought to a classroom. We plan to make this a highly interactive work session culminating in a shared online resource page that pools lesson plans, assignments, exercise ideas, reading suggestions, and ideas from the attendees. We consider three primary topics with our session that frequently underlie ethical issues in NLP research: Dual use, bias and privacy.<br/><br />
In this setting, a key lesson is that there is no single approach to ethical NLP: each project requires thoughtful consideration about what steps can be taken to best support people affected by that project. However, we can learn (and teach) what kinds of issues to be aware of and what kinds of strategies are available for mitigating harm. To teach this process, we apply and promote interactive exercises that provide an opportunity to ideate, discuss, and reflect. We plan to facilitate this in a way that encourages positive discussion, emphasizing the creation of ideas for the future instead of negative opinions of previous work.<br />
<br />
'''T8: Recent Advances in Open-Domain Question Answering''' (cutting-edge)<br/><br />
Danqi Chen and Scott Wen-tau Yih<br/><br />
Open-domain (textual) question answering (QA), the task of finding answers to open-domain questions by searching a large collection of documents, has been a long-standing problem in NLP, information retrieval (IR) and related fields (Voorhees et al., 1999; Moldovan et al., 2000; Brill et al.,2002; Ferrucci et al., 2010). Traditional QA systems were usually constructed as a pipeline, consisting of many different components such as question processing, document/passage retrieval and answer processing. With the rapid development of neural reading comprehension (Chen, 2018), modern open-domain QA systems have been restructured by combining traditional IR techniques and neural reading comprehension models (Chen et al., 2017; Yang et al., 2019) or even implemented in a fully end-to-end fashion (Lee et al., 2019; Seo et al., 2019). While the system architecture has been drastically simplified, two technical challenges remain critical:(1) “Retriever”: finding documents that (might)contain an answer from a large collection of documents; (2) “Reader”: finding the answer in a given paragraph or a document.<br/><br />
In this tutorial, we aim to provide a comprehensive and coherent overview of recent advances in this line of research. We will start by first giving a brief historical background of open-domain question answering, discussing the basic setup and core technical challenges of the research problem.The focus will then shift to modern techniques and resources proposed for open-domain QA, including the basics of latest neural reading comprehension systems, new datasets and models. The scope will also be broadened to cover the information retrieval component on how to effectively identify passages relevant to the questions. Moreover, in-depth discussions will be given on the use of traditional / neural IR modules, as well as the trade-offs between modular design and end-to-end training. If time permits, we also plan to discuss some hybrid approaches for answering questions using both text and large knowledge bases (e.g. (Sun et al., 2018)) and give a critical review on how structured data complements the information from unstructured text.<br/><br />
At the end of our tutorial, we will discuss some important questions, including (1) How much progress have we made compared to the QA systems developed in the last decade?(2) What are the main challenges and limitations of cur-rent approaches? (3) How to trade off the efficiency (computational time and memory requirements) and accuracy in the deep learning era? We hope that our tutorial will not only serve as a useful resource for the audience to efficiently acquire the up-to-date knowledge, but also provide new perspectives to stimulate the advances of open-domain QA research in the next phase.<br />
<br />
== Workshop Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Milica Gašić, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf<br />
<br />
Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Amazon Alexa AI<br />
<br />
Saif M. Mohammad, National Research Council Canada<br />
<br />
Ves Stoyanov, Facebook AI<br />
<br />
== Student Research Workshop Chairs and Faculty Advisors==<br />
<br />
'''Student Research Workshop Co-chairs'''<br />
<br />
Rotem Dror, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology<br />
<br />
Jiangming Liu, The University of Edinburgh<br />
<br />
Shruti Rijhwani, Carnegie Mellon University<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Student Research Workshop Faculty Advisors'''<br />
<br />
Omri Abend, Hebrew University of Jerusalem<br />
<br />
Sujian Li, Peking University <br />
<br />
Zhou Yu, University of California, Davis<br />
<br />
<br />
Information about the Student Research Workshop (SRW) has posted on the workshop's website: https://sites.google.com/view/acl20studentresearchworkshop/. The SRW Call for Papers has been distributed to ACL mailing lists, as well as on our official Twitter account (@acl_srw) and the ACL meeting's Twitter account (@acl_meeting).<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Pre-submission Mentoring Phase (completed mid-February 2020)'''<br />
<br />
Before submission to the main deadline, the SRW offered pre-submission mentoring by experienced researchers of the ACL community. The pre-submission mentoring primarily serves to provide feedback on the writing style, readability and presentation of the paper.<br />
<br />
We recruited 30 mentors for providing pre-submission feedback. The deadline for the pre-submission phase was January 17, 2020. We had 57 pre-submissions in total.<br />
<br />
Mentors were matched to pre-submissions according to their research areas. All mentors have already provided feedback for the submissions and it was sent to the authors mid-February 2020. The majority of mentors have also offered to participate in follow-up discussions with the authors via email until the main submission deadline. <br />
<br />
Vouchers for one month's free use of Grammarly Premium have been sent to all the pre-submission authors. These were provided by the ACL 2020 Diversity and Inclusion Committee.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Main submission'''<br />
<br />
For the main submission, the START (softconf) submission page has been set up. Currently, we have recruited 200 members of the ACL community (both students and senior researchers) to serve as the Program Committee for reviewing submissions to the SRW. We plan on inviting more PC members, as the number of submissions is likely to be larger than originally estimated. <br />
<br />
Submission deadlines for the SRW are as follows:<br />
<br />
* Paper submission deadline: March 6, 2020<br />
<br />
* Review deadline: April 10, 2020<br />
<br />
* Acceptance notification: April 15, 2020<br />
<br />
* Camera-ready deadline: May 6, 2020<br />
<br />
* Travel grant application deadline: to be decided.<br />
<br />
* Travel grant notification: to be decided.<br />
<br />
We also plan to have a post-acceptance mentoring process, for all papers accepted to the SRW.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Funding'''<br />
<br />
The SRW has applied for an NSF grant of $18,000. The Don and Betty Walker international fund will also be able to provide student support. The SRW organizers have made contact with a number of industry companies to obtain sponsorship, but not yet secured additional funding. Contact has been made with the ACL 2020 sponsorship chairs and with Priscilla to investigate other funding opportunities, as well as the Student Volunteer Program, which helps students cover registration fee to the main conference.<br />
<br />
== Audio-Video Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Hamid Palangi, Microsoft Research, Redmond <br />
<br />
Lianhui Qin, University of Washington<br />
<br />
== Conference Handbook Chair ==<br />
<br />
Nanyun Peng, University of Southern California<br />
<br />
== Demo Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Asli Celikyilmaz, Microsoft Research, Redmond<br />
<br />
Shawn Wen, PolyAI<br />
<br />
<br />
== Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Rochester Institute of Technology<br />
<br />
Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Google<br />
<br />
== Local Sponsorship Chairs == <br />
<br />
Hoifung Poon, Microsoft <br />
<br />
Kristina Toutanova, Google<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Publication Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Steven Bethard, University of Arizona<br />
<br />
Ryan Cotterrell, University of Cambridge<br />
<br />
Rui Yan, Peking University<br />
<br />
Starting from the style files from ACL 2019, we have produced new LaTeX style files for ACL 2020. Most of the description was retained, but the order of sections was overhauled to make sure that important information wasn't scattered so haphazardly across the document. Other improvements were also made, like using the recommended citation style consistently throughout the LaTeX source, and separating out all the LaTeX-specific stuff into clearly marked sections. The MS Word version was derived from these LaTeX versions to match as closely as possible. The LaTeX version was also posted to the Overleaf gallery. The most recent .bib file for the entire ACL Anthology was included in the style file distribution to encourage authors to use the official citations for ACL Anthology publications. All style file changes were merged into https://github.com/acl-org/acl-pub/tree/gh-pages/paper_styles.<br />
<br />
== Publicity Chair ==<br />
<br />
Emily M. Bender, University of Washington<br />
<br />
=== Dissemination ===<br />
<br />
Durable accounts for the ACL meeting on Twitter and Facebook have been created: <br />
* https://twitter.com/aclmeeting<br />
* https://www.facebook.com/aclmeeting/<br />
<br />
These will be passed along to the ACL 2021 publicity chair(s) so that they don't have to build up followers separately. As of Feb 4, 2020 the Twitter account has 4,061 followers and the Facebook account has 181. We have not yet been making use of the Instagram account, but we have been using the Twitter and Facebook accounts to publicize important dates as well as blog posts. The Twitter account especially has been useful for fielding questions from the community. Calls for papers have also gone out over the ACL member portal and several mailing lists, as well as websites such as WikiCFP. (These are maintained in a spreadsheet which can be handed off to the ACL 2021 publicity chair(s)).<br />
<br />
=== Next Steps ===<br />
<br />
* Recruit co-chairs, especially to coordinate live-tweeting of the conference<br />
* Contact local media for coverage<br />
* Develop land acknowledgement in consultation with the Duwamish Tribe (on whose land the meeting will take place). The Duwamish publish this information about land acknowledgments: https://www.duwamishtribe.org/land-acknowledgement<br />
<br />
<br />
== Remote Presentation Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Hao Fang, Microsoft Semantic Machines <br />
<br />
Yi Luan, Google AI Language<br />
<br />
== Sustainability Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Ananya Ganesh, Educational Testing Service <br />
<br />
Klaus Zechner, Educational Testing Service<br />
<br />
Our main goal for this new focus area is to engage the ACL community in discussions about how best to reduce the carbon footprint of future ACL conferences in order to contribute to sustainable and livable conditions on this planet.<br />
One of the main directions we are currently envisioning is to encourage and support conference attendees in virtual participation using live streaming of conference events as air travel is the main contributor to the carbon footprint of international conferences.<br />
<br />
== Website & Conference App Chairs == <br />
<br />
Sudha Rao, Microsoft Research, Redmond <br />
<br />
Yizhe Zhang, Microsoft Research, Redmond<br />
<br />
== Business Office ==<br />
<br />
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q1_Reports:_ACL_2020&diff=733912020Q1 Reports: ACL 20202020-02-01T22:58:57Z<p>Jurafsky: /* General Chair */</p>
<hr />
<div><br />
== General Chair ==<br />
Dan Jurafsky, Stanford University<br />
<br />
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) will take place in Seattle, Washington at the Hyatt Regency Seattle in downtown Seattle from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
We have a great set of chairs! We are continuing 2019's new roles (Diversity and Inclusion chairs, Remote Presentation Chairs, AV Chairs) and adding new ones: (Sustainability chair), and we are doing well in demographic representation among our chairs (gender and region).<br />
<br />
Following advice from last year, we have been using Slack for most intra-committee communication (and we put the Slack channel into the ACL pro space, so it can be preserved for future years), and using email only when absolutely necessary.<br />
<br />
As usual, the growing size of the conference (both in papers and attendees) is a challenge, but both in papers and space we have been doing well (see the individual chair summaries below).<br />
<br />
[this summary in progress]<br />
<br />
== Program Chairs ==<br />
Joyce Chai, University of Michigan<br />
<br />
Natalie Schluter, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark<br />
<br />
Joel Tetreault, Dataminr, USA<br />
<br />
<br />
== Local Organisation Chairs ==<br />
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL<br />
<br />
With advice from:<br />
<br />
Jianfeng Gao, Microsoft Research<br />
<br />
Luke Zettlemoyer, University of Washington<br />
<br />
== Tutorial Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Agata Savary, University of Tours, France<br />
<br />
Yue Zhang, Westlake University<br />
<br />
== Workshop Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Milica Gašić, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf<br />
<br />
Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Amazon Alexa AI<br />
<br />
Saif M. Mohammad, National Research Council Canada<br />
<br />
Ves Stoyanov, Facebook AI<br />
<br />
== Student Research Workshop Chairs and Faculty Advisors==<br />
<br />
Rotem Dror, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology<br />
<br />
Jiangming Liu, The University of Edinburgh<br />
<br />
Shruti Rijhwani, Carnegie Mellon University<br />
<br />
Omri Abend, Hebrew University of Jerusalem<br />
<br />
Sujian Li, Peking University <br />
<br />
Zhou Yu, University of California, Davis<br />
<br />
<br />
== Audio-Video Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Hamid Palangi, Microsoft Research, Redmond <br />
<br />
Lianhui Qin, University of Washington<br />
<br />
== Conference Handbook Chair ==<br />
<br />
Nanyun Peng, University of Southern California<br />
<br />
== Demo Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Asli Celikyilmaz, Microsoft Research, Redmond<br />
<br />
Shawn Wen, PolyAI<br />
<br />
<br />
== Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Rochester Institute of Technology<br />
<br />
Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Google<br />
<br />
== Local Sponsorship Chairs == <br />
<br />
Hoifung Poon, Microsoft <br />
<br />
Kristina Toutanova, Google<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Publication Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Steven Bethard, University of Arizona<br />
<br />
Ryan Cotterrell, University of Cambridge<br />
<br />
Rui Yan, Peking University<br />
<br />
<br />
== Publicity Chair ==<br />
<br />
Emily M. Bender, University of Washington<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Remote Presentation Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Hao Fang, Microsoft Semantic Machines <br />
<br />
Yi Luan, Google AI Language<br />
<br />
== Sustainability Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Ananya Ganesh, Educational Testing Service <br />
<br />
Klaus Zechner, Educational Testing Service<br />
<br />
== Website & Conference App Chairs == <br />
<br />
Sudha Rao, Microsoft Research, Redmond <br />
<br />
Yizhe Zhang, Microsoft Research, Redmond<br />
<br />
== Business Office ==<br />
<br />
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q1_Reports:_ACL_2020&diff=733902020Q1 Reports: ACL 20202020-02-01T22:58:35Z<p>Jurafsky: /* General Chair */</p>
<hr />
<div><br />
== General Chair ==<br />
Dan Jurafsky, Stanford University<br />
<br />
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) will take place in Seattle, Washington at the Hyatt Regency Seattle in downtown Seattle from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.<br />
<br />
We have a great set of chairs! We are continuing 2019's new roles (Diversity and Inclusion chairs, Remote Presentation Chairs, AV Chairs) and adding new ones: (Sustainability chair), and we are doing well in demographic representation among our chairs (gender and region).<br />
<br />
Following advice from last year, we have been using Slack for most intra-committee communication (and we put the Slack channel into the ACL pro space, so it can be preserved for future years), and using email only when absolutely necessary.<br />
<br />
As usual, the growing size of the conference (both in papers and attendees) is a challenge, but both in papers and space we have been doing well (see the individual chair summaries below).<br />
<br />
== Program Chairs ==<br />
Joyce Chai, University of Michigan<br />
<br />
Natalie Schluter, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark<br />
<br />
Joel Tetreault, Dataminr, USA<br />
<br />
<br />
== Local Organisation Chairs ==<br />
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL<br />
<br />
With advice from:<br />
<br />
Jianfeng Gao, Microsoft Research<br />
<br />
Luke Zettlemoyer, University of Washington<br />
<br />
== Tutorial Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Agata Savary, University of Tours, France<br />
<br />
Yue Zhang, Westlake University<br />
<br />
== Workshop Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Milica Gašić, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf<br />
<br />
Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Amazon Alexa AI<br />
<br />
Saif M. Mohammad, National Research Council Canada<br />
<br />
Ves Stoyanov, Facebook AI<br />
<br />
== Student Research Workshop Chairs and Faculty Advisors==<br />
<br />
Rotem Dror, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology<br />
<br />
Jiangming Liu, The University of Edinburgh<br />
<br />
Shruti Rijhwani, Carnegie Mellon University<br />
<br />
Omri Abend, Hebrew University of Jerusalem<br />
<br />
Sujian Li, Peking University <br />
<br />
Zhou Yu, University of California, Davis<br />
<br />
<br />
== Audio-Video Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Hamid Palangi, Microsoft Research, Redmond <br />
<br />
Lianhui Qin, University of Washington<br />
<br />
== Conference Handbook Chair ==<br />
<br />
Nanyun Peng, University of Southern California<br />
<br />
== Demo Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Asli Celikyilmaz, Microsoft Research, Redmond<br />
<br />
Shawn Wen, PolyAI<br />
<br />
<br />
== Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Rochester Institute of Technology<br />
<br />
Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Google<br />
<br />
== Local Sponsorship Chairs == <br />
<br />
Hoifung Poon, Microsoft <br />
<br />
Kristina Toutanova, Google<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Publication Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Steven Bethard, University of Arizona<br />
<br />
Ryan Cotterrell, University of Cambridge<br />
<br />
Rui Yan, Peking University<br />
<br />
<br />
== Publicity Chair ==<br />
<br />
Emily M. Bender, University of Washington<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Remote Presentation Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Hao Fang, Microsoft Semantic Machines <br />
<br />
Yi Luan, Google AI Language<br />
<br />
== Sustainability Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Ananya Ganesh, Educational Testing Service <br />
<br />
Klaus Zechner, Educational Testing Service<br />
<br />
== Website & Conference App Chairs == <br />
<br />
Sudha Rao, Microsoft Research, Redmond <br />
<br />
Yizhe Zhang, Microsoft Research, Redmond<br />
<br />
== Business Office ==<br />
<br />
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL</div>Jurafskyhttps://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q1_Reports:_ACL_2020&diff=733892020Q1 Reports: ACL 20202020-02-01T22:46:47Z<p>Jurafsky: </p>
<hr />
<div><br />
== General Chair ==<br />
Dan Jurafsky, Stanford University<br />
<br />
<br />
== Program Chairs ==<br />
Joyce Chai, University of Michigan<br />
<br />
Natalie Schluter, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark<br />
<br />
Joel Tetreault, Dataminr, USA<br />
<br />
<br />
== Local Organisation Chairs ==<br />
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL<br />
<br />
With advice from:<br />
<br />
Jianfeng Gao, Microsoft Research<br />
<br />
Luke Zettlemoyer, University of Washington<br />
<br />
== Tutorial Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Agata Savary, University of Tours, France<br />
<br />
Yue Zhang, Westlake University<br />
<br />
== Workshop Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Milica Gašić, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf<br />
<br />
Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Amazon Alexa AI<br />
<br />
Saif M. Mohammad, National Research Council Canada<br />
<br />
Ves Stoyanov, Facebook AI<br />
<br />
== Student Research Workshop Chairs and Faculty Advisors==<br />
<br />
Rotem Dror, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology<br />
<br />
Jiangming Liu, The University of Edinburgh<br />
<br />
Shruti Rijhwani, Carnegie Mellon University<br />
<br />
Omri Abend, Hebrew University of Jerusalem<br />
<br />
Sujian Li, Peking University <br />
<br />
Zhou Yu, University of California, Davis<br />
<br />
<br />
== Audio-Video Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Hamid Palangi, Microsoft Research, Redmond <br />
<br />
Lianhui Qin, University of Washington<br />
<br />
== Conference Handbook Chair ==<br />
<br />
Nanyun Peng, University of Southern California<br />
<br />
== Demo Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Asli Celikyilmaz, Microsoft Research, Redmond<br />
<br />
Shawn Wen, PolyAI<br />
<br />
<br />
== Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Rochester Institute of Technology<br />
<br />
Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Google<br />
<br />
== Local Sponsorship Chairs == <br />
<br />
Hoifung Poon, Microsoft <br />
<br />
Kristina Toutanova, Google<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Publication Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Steven Bethard, University of Arizona<br />
<br />
Ryan Cotterrell, University of Cambridge<br />
<br />
Rui Yan, Peking University<br />
<br />
<br />
== Publicity Chair ==<br />
<br />
Emily M. Bender, University of Washington<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Remote Presentation Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Hao Fang, Microsoft Semantic Machines <br />
<br />
Yi Luan, Google AI Language<br />
<br />
== Sustainability Chairs ==<br />
<br />
Ananya Ganesh, Educational Testing Service <br />
<br />
Klaus Zechner, Educational Testing Service<br />
<br />
== Website & Conference App Chairs == <br />
<br />
Sudha Rao, Microsoft Research, Redmond <br />
<br />
Yizhe Zhang, Microsoft Research, Redmond<br />
<br />
== Business Office ==<br />
<br />
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL</div>Jurafsky