Program Chairs Report (Su, Jian and Wiebe, Jan)

This year, we received a record number of 925 valid paper submissions -- a 24% submission increase over ACL-08: HLT -- with 569 full papers and 356 short papers. The significant submission increase shows how vigorous our field is.

20 Area Chairs worked with 489 Program Committee members and 85 additional reviewers to come up with 2,551 reviews, in total, for the final paper selection. 21% of the full paper submissions are accepted; all of these will be presented orally. 26% of the short paper submissions are accepted; some of these will be presented orally and some will be given as poster presentations. While short papers are distinguished from full papers in the proceedings, there is no distinction in the proceedings between short papers presented orally and those presented as poster presentations. Furthermore, the short-paper posters are clustered together by topic and assigned poster numbers, to provide better information access for the audience and easier logistics for the Local Arrangements Committee.

Submissions and acceptances by areas are as following:

Full papers #sub #accepted
Phonology/morphology, POS tagging and chunking, Word Segmentation 31 8 (26%)
Syntax and Parsing 49 14(29%)
Semantics 67 14(21%)
Discourse, Dialogue and Pragmatics 43 9 (21%)
Summarization and Generation 44 8 (18%)
Statistical and Machine Learning Methods 40 6 (15%)
Machine Translation 82 23(28%)
Information Retrieval 28 4 (14%)
Information Extraction 49 10(20%)
Sentiment Analysis, Opinion Mining and Text Classification 45 7 (16%)
Spoken Language Processing 19 6 (32%)
Question Answering 25 3 (12%)
Text Mining and NLP Applications 21 4 (19%)
Language Resource 26 4 (15%)
Total 569 120(21%)

Short papers #sub #accepted
Phonology/morphology, POS tagging and chunking, Word Segmentation 16 4 (25%)
Syntax and Parsing 28 8 (29%)
Semantics 33 9 (27%)
Discourse, Dialogue and Pragmatics 21 7 (33%)
Summarization and Generation 24 8 (33%)
Statistical and Machine Learning Methods 21 7 (33%)
Machine Translation 57 13(23%)
Information Retrieval 26 4 (15%)
Information Extraction 26 5 (19%)
Sentiment Analysis, Opinion Mining and Text Classification 44 13(30%)
Spoken Language Processing 16 5 (31%)
Question Answering 25 3 (25%)
Text Mining and NLP Applications 16 3 (19%)
Language Resource 16 4 (25%)
Total 356 93(26%)

The geographical distribution of the first authors of all submissions is shown below. We received submissions from 41 countries: about 51% from 20 countries in Asia Pacific, 27% from Canada, Cuba and the United States, 22% from 15 countries in Europe, less than 1% from Argentina and one anonymous submission.

Distribution for Full Papers
# submission # accepted
Asia & Pacific 288 46
19 Countries, 288/569= 50.62% of submissions, 46/120 = 38.33% of accepted papers
Australia 12 2
China 98 15
Hong Kong S.A.R. 11 3
India 20 1
Indonesia 2 0
Iran 4 0
Israel 16 3
Japan 73 12
Malaysia 1 0
Oman 1 0
Pakistan 1 0
Philippines 2 0
Republic of Korea 15 2
Singapore 15 7
Sri Lanka 1 0
Taiwan 12 1
Thailand 1 0
Turkey 1 0
Vietnam 2 0

Europe 115 18
16 countries, 115/569 = 20.21% of submissions, 18/120 = 15.00% of accepted papers
Belgium 3 0
Czech Republic 4 0
Denmark 4 1
Finland 1 0
France 12 1
Germany 24 6
Isle of Man 3 0
Italy 10 1
Netherlands 2 1
Portugal 1 0
Romania 2 0
Russian Federation 2 0
Spain 12 2
Sweden 8 1
Switzerland 3 1
United Kindom 24 4

North America 163 56
2 countries, 163/569=28.65% of submissions, 56/120=46.67% of accepted papers
Canada 10 6
United States 153 50

South America 2 0
0.35% 0.00%
Argentina 2 0

Anonymous 1 0
0.18% 0.00%

Overall Total 569 120

Distribution for Short Papers
# submitted # accepted
Asia & Pacific 183 48
15 countries, 183/356=51.40% of submissions, 48/93=51.61% of accepted papers
Australia 6 2
China 51 9
Hong Kong S.A.R. 12 4
India 16 5
Japan 42 11
Malaysia 2 0
New Zealand 1 0
Republic of Korea 16 8
Singapore 7 2
Taiwan 15 3
Thailand 2 0
Vietnam 4 1
Iran 2 0
Israel 3 1
Turkey 4 2

Europe 85 21
14 countries, 85/356=23.88% of submissions, 21/93=22.58% of accepted papers
Belgium 1 1
Czech Republic 4 2
Denmark 4 0
France 8 1
Germany 21 7
Isle of Man 4 0
Italy 8 1
Netherlands 3 0
Poland 1 0
Portugal 1 1
Spain 14 3
Sweden 2 0
Switzerland 2 0
United Kingdom 12 5

North America 88 24
3 countries, 88/356=24.72% of submissions, 24/93=25.81% of accepted papers
Canada 5 2
Cuba 1 0
United States 82 22

Overall Total 356 93

The best (student) papers will be announced at the end of the conference. This will allow time for the decision process, which involves soliciting suggestions from the area chairs, and forming a committee to read and judge the camera ready papers.

2009Q3 Reports: General Conference Chair

2009-07-09T02:17:44Z

Kysu: New page: General Chair Report (Su, Keh-Yih) ACL-IJCNLP-09 is the first joint conference sponsored by ACL and AFNLP. To mix the spirit from both ACL and AFNLP, we have one co-chair from Asia and on...

General Chair Report (Su, Keh-Yih)

ACL-IJCNLP-09 is the first joint conference sponsored by ACL and AFNLP. To mix the spirit from both ACL and AFNLP, we have one co-chair from Asia and one co-chair from US/Europe for each position (except the general chair).

Among our hard working organizers, I would like to thank the Program Chairs, Jan Wiebe and Jian Su, who has carefully selected papers from our record high submissions, and the Local Arrangements Chair, Haizhou Li, who has shown his excellent capability in smoothly organizing various events and details. My thanks will also go to other chairs for their competent and hard work: The Webmaster, Minghui Dong; the Demo Chairs, Gary Geunbae Lee and Sabine Schulte im Walde; the Exhibits Chairs, Timothy Baldwin and Philipp Koehn; the Mentoring Service Chairs, Hwee Tou Ng and Florence Reeder; the Publication Chairs, Jing-Shin Chang and Regina Barzilay; the Publicity Chairs, Min-Yen Kan and Andy Way; the Sponsorship Chairs, Hitoshi Isahara and Kim-Teng Lua; the Student Research Workshop Chairs, Davis Dimalen, Jenny Rose Finkel, and Blaise Thomson; also the Faculty Advisors, Grace Ngai and Brian Roark; the Tutorial Chairs, Diana McCarthy and Chengqing Zong; the Workshop Chairs, Jimmy Lin and Yuji Matsumoto; last, the ACL Business Manager, Priscilla Rasmussen, who not only provides useful advice but also helps to contact more sponsors and get their support. The reports from various chairs are compiled separately as follows.

Almost all working items, except that of Exhibits and Sponsorship, have progressed smoothly according to the schedule. On the other hand, due to the bad global economic situation, the sponsorship and the exhibition could not meet our original target. Which is beyond our control regardless of our effort. Furthermore, the publication chairs report that the paper size setting of the source PDF files remains the major problem in compiling the proceedings, and suggest the START system to detect incompatible paper size in advance (please refer the report given by the publication chairs below).

One particular thing that is worth to mention: To share and exchange information among various team members, a bulletin board has been set up this year in my own website (http://www.bdc.com.tw/kysu/ACL_IJCNLP-09_Bulletin_Board/index.htm), which includes a check list to trace the progress of working items that each chair is expected to complete (about 180 working items). The spreadsheet of the check list helps me greatly to monitor the progress of various chairs. According to the feedback from various chairs, this check list is also helpful for them to trace their own progress and that of other related chairs. It is suggested to have this set up in future conferences. Last, a few related statistics from some chairs are given as follows for your reference.

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(1) Program Chairs (Jan and Jian):

Total 925 submissions (record high!!): 569 submissions for full papers (99 + #ACL-08), 120 of them are accepted (21%); 356 submissions for short papers (81 + #ACL-08), 93 of them are accepted (26%).

Some other reference numbers:
CoLing-ACL 2006 has 618 submissions (no short papers category),
ACL-2007 has 588 submissions (no short papers category),
ACL 2008 has 470 full papers 275 short papers.

(2) Student Workshop Chairs (Brian and Grace):
25 submissions, 12 of them are accepted (48%)

(3) Demo Chairs (Gary and Sabine):
23 submissions, 11 of them are accepted (48%)

(4) Tutorial Chairs (Diana and Chengqing):
19 proposals received, 6 of them are accepted (30%)

(5) Workshop Chairs (Jimmy and Yuji):
18 Top-1 preference for us, 12 of them are accepted (67%)

(6) Mentoring Service Chairs (Hwee-Tou and Florence):
10 full papers and 2 short papers request for mentoring service.
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