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2020Q3 Reports: Virtual Infrastructure Chairs

2020-07-21T16:08:54Z

Lianhuiq: /* Zoom attendees statistics */

The virtual conference infrastructure of ACL2020 consists of 4 major components:
* SlidesLive for pre-recorded talks & video live-streaming
* Zoom for live QA sessions
* RocketChat for async text-based discussions and announcements
* the [https://virtual.acl2020.org virtual conference website] as the central platform to present all information about the conference
Due to limited time, we follow the infrastructure setup of ICLR2020, with some necessary extensions including the plenary sessions, tutorials, virtual sponsor booths, etc. In the remaining sections of this report, we provide a high-level summary of each component and discuss potential improvement can be made in future. At the end, we provide some general advice for future virtual conferences based on our experience.

== SlidesLive ==

SlidesLive is a company that has helped with several previous conferences including ICLR, ICML, etc for recording the videos of the talks, post processing them and putting the slides and the presenter side by side. We initially negotiated with several companies including them for the physical conference in Seattle. The companies we discussed with with their Point Of Contact (POC) were:
* SlidesLive, POC: Katherine (Katie) Millar, katherine@slideslive.com
* Underline, POC: Sol Rosenberg, sol@underline.io
* GloCastLive, POC: Arran Moffat, arran@glocast.com
* BASH FILMS, POC: Mark Bashian, mbashian@bashfilms.com
* Freeman, POC: Brian Holm, Brian.Holm@freemanco.com
We have put all the information we collected from these companies including the quotes [https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1KYzLT-B5ZVIb3n_KDSRlMQnahoTuxxei?usp=sharing here] for your reference. Please note that these are for the time when the conference was supposed to be physical, nevertheless many of them also offer virtual experience.

After deciding to have the conference fully virtual we signed a contract with SlidesLive and relied on them for our keynotes and workshops besides the post processing of the videos. Below we list “our experience” working with them, noting these before signing a contract with them should be very helpful to have a great experience working with them, if you choose them as the company you want to work with.

=== General suggestions ===
Here we summarize our general suggestions, especially before signing a contract with them.

* We strongly suggest enforcing an early deadline for a finalized program of conference and '''specially workshops'''. This is very important as it helps to reduce communication overhead between SlidesLive and the rest of the conference.
* It is very important to clarify with SlidesLive “before signing the contract” how many live zoom QA sessions they are going to cover. For example, they did not cover “any” of the QA sessions for papers in main conference, demo sessions, sponsors or D&I events, and it was not clearly communicated to us pre-signing the contract. They also did not cover any of the parallel QA sessions happening in our workshops. We ended up creating our own zoom team to handle these. To prevent this from happening we suggest asking them to include a technical staff as well during discussions, marketing representatives might not be aware of these types of details.
* Slideslive does its best to be responsive and usually tries to answer our questions as much as they can. We recommend asking them to assign more number of “technical staff” especially during the conference. We sometimes felt having only two contacts from them is absolutely not enough especially given the fact that one of them was not as technically confident as the other one.
* There was a 8 sec delay in live presentations (the video in zoom vs the one streaming on the SlidesLive website) which our general chair (Dan) brought up during SlidesLive demo session. Please request them to resolve this.

=== Accessibility ===
Please note that they only provide captioning for the videos / live sessions they are handling, i.e., if you end up having to create your own zoom meetings they are not going to provide captioning for them. Another note, when we made the contract with Slideslive, it wasn’t clear in the contract that they only provided automatic captioning service instead of high quality human-edited captioning. Please make sure to go through all these details before signing a contract with them.

=== Non-profit discount ===
SlidesLive provides a 25% discount for Non-Profit Organizations, please make sure to ask for this if you are eligible to use it.

=== SlidesLive demo ===
We “strongly” advise to request a demo session from them “before signing the contract”. You can use part of the ACL 2020 schedule as an example if you do not have the full conference program yet. This is very helpful for you to get a sense of the experience you will have and gives you an opportunity to include your requests from them quite early on. It might take for them some time to include the features you need for your conference and this will give them a reasonable amount of time to address your requests in their framework pre-conference.

== Zoom ==

=== General suggestions ===

* (repeating as it is quite important) We strongly suggest enforcing an early deadline for a finalized program of conference and specially workshops. This is very important as it helps to reduce communication overhead for creating all virtual sessions beforehand.
* We strongly suggest generating Zoom meetings well ahead of time to make sure you have enough time to debug and verify them. We have provided detailed documentation on how to create bulk set of meetings in zoom in [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EYELyo5Yp3HESllBlqSis4aoAoxU6LQ0sRBwFAc5gMI/edit?usp=sharing this documentation]. We also have provided another step by step guide for users (authors/hosts of the meetings) [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OWCcxXm9mL7DgcSWgW0FC87KmOEq8lIU3CwcsMEPLiI/edit?usp=sharing here].
* You need to have several volunteers during the conference who are specifically trained for zoom to be on call during the conference in case any incident happens. We recommend at least 2 volunteers per time slot. Note that only these volunteers should have access to your master zoom account.
* Verifying separate accounts need to be crowdsourced pre-conference (it is a pretty quick process), we asked volunteers to do it pre-conference.
* We strongly advise to have a contact person for zoom meetings of each part of conference, e.g., having a couple of POCs for main papers track, demos track, sponsors, etc ahead of time. This will reduce the amount of communication overhead a lot.
We suggest having a separate team for zoom meetings of workshops, there are usually several workshops with a much more diverse set of programs (it is like a mini conference by itself).
* '''If a meeting got hacked in progress''', on-call volunteers should delete the meeting link and create a new link and announce it at rocketchat immediately.
* '''Each meeting should have a unique main host.''' If you are ‘host’ for a meeting and start that meeting, and then hop off and try to start another one, you will get an error message from Zoom stating that you already have a meeting in progress and you need to end the previous one in order to start this one. If you click yes, ZOOM WILL END THE PREVIOUS MEETING AND KICK EVERYONE OFF.
* Attendees can join a meeting on browser '''only when''' the meeting is not requiring registration.
* '''Do not share the master account''' outside of the virtual infrastructure team.
* Note that it is likely that '''API credentials will expire''' after a certain amount of time. If this happens, you need to follow the instruction to regenerate it. (Before you run the script to create Zoom Meeting, you need to login to the zoom account and create JWT credentials in Zoom App Marketplace.)
* Virtual infrastructure team can maintain a spreadsheet to store all the credentials of authors, so on-call volunteers will be able to access every meeting and offer help for all the meetings.
* Paid accounts: you can pay Zoom for a business level account and '''add phone dial-in plans'''. This is a good idea for anyone who may have a spotty internet, so that they can dial in via phone/audio as well as video -- that way, they will always have audio connection for Q&A and it won’t drop them.
* '''When a meeting link is broken''' during the conference, on-call volunteers can login ACL2020 Master Zoom account, and select a specific user from “User Management” -> “Users”, and then create a new meeting for that user (the user will be the host).

=== Zoom attendees statistics ===

We made an analysis of Zoom attendees statistics for the main conference Q&A Session. You can also find more detail and the script in the folder below [https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1WFU0oml-XUKNzuL_YOBnBJ8wX7BRHJrR?usp=sharing here].

* Total # of Unique Participants in Each Q&A Session:
[[File:Total.png|400px|center]]

* Distribution of participants over time 20 minutes after start
[[File:20.png|400px|center]]

* 35 minutes after start
[[File:35.png|400px|center]]

* 50 minutes after start
[[File:50.png|400px|center]]

== RocketChat ==
RocketChat is a platform (similar to Slack) that provides async text-based chat functionality. In our workspace (acl2020.rocket.chat), we can create channels for different purposes.

=== Channels ===
Here we provide a summary of channels we have created for ACL2020.

* '''#announcements''': This is a read-only channel which is used by organizers to make conference-wide announcements. Only authorized users can post messages in this channel. Other users can only react with emoji to individual threads.

* '''#general''': This channel is used to discuss general conference topics. The conversation can be about anything related to ACL2020. During the conference, this channel was used to promote their live sessions by authors, workshop organizers, social events organizers, etc.

* '''#live''': This channel is only used for live plenary sessions. It was read-only for the majority of the time. During the live plenary sessions, we lift the read-only setting and people can use this channel for live QA. People have also used this channel to congratulate award winners, etc.

* '''#firsttimers/#introduction''': We initially only created the #firsttimers for people who attend ACL for the first time to say Hi to each other. At the very beginning of the conference, someone created the #introduction channel and many people joined that channel instead to introduce themselves.

* '''#helpdesk''': This channel was used by all ACL2020 attendees to request tech support for the ACL2020 virtual conference. We ask people to prefix their questions with a topic, e.g., [Zoom], [RocketChat], etc. On-call volunteers always start a thread when responding to a question. And continue the conversation in the thread. Once the question is resolved, they will mark it with :checkmark: emoji. See the screenshot below for a demonstration.

* '''#presenter-helpdesk''': This channel is same as #helpdesk, except that it is dedicated to authors and sponsors. It turns out most attendee still ask questions in #helpdesk so this channel may not be necessary in future.

* '''#incidents''': This channel was used to report incidents in the conference. Conference attendees can request the on-call volunteer in the channel to join your Zoom meetings as a co-host to handle disruptions or delete messages in RocketChat. They can simply click “Reply” button to start a private conversation with the on-call volunteer.

* '''#professional-conduct-committee''': This channel was used to contact the Professional Conduct Committee if you need our assistance (e.g. related to a concern that might fall under the anti-harassment policy). PCC members will post a message in this channel to let people know which of them are available. Then the attendee can contact the PCC member via RocketChat private message (similar to the #incidents).

* '''#social-media-posts''': This channel contains cross-posted social media posts published on various platforms by our official live tweeters and microbloggers, managed by our publicity chairs.

* '''#new-channels''': This channel was used to announce new channels made by conference attendees. It turns out many people have created different channels during the conference, including some topic-based channels (eg., #bio-clinical-nlp), university-based channels (e.g., #uwnlp) to get to know different research groups, location-base channels (e.g., #singapore), etc.

* '''#job-listing''': This channel was used to post job opportunities. We only get 10 posts in this channel throughout the conference though.

* '''#oncall-volunteers''': This channel is dedicated to on-call volunteers for them to coordinate with each other during the conference.

* '''#sponsor-xxx''': For each sponsor, we create a dedicated channel for them to post announcements and interact with conference attendees. These are “broadcast” channels (similar to #incidents, #professional-conduct-committee), i.e., only the channel owner can post messages. Visitors can only start a private conversation with the message author. This setting is due to the privacy concerns -- we do not want to expose who has visited a specific sponsor booth.

* '''#sponsor-registration-desk''': This channel is used as the virtual registration desk for sponsors. We need this channel because we need to set the sponsor account as the owner of their channels, and we didn’t develop an automatic way to do this. Since there are only ~20 sponsors, we just ask them to post a message in this channel when they arrive, and we just manually add them to the #sponsor-xxx channel and set them as the owner. After we add the sponsor account to their channel, we post a message “@username Welcome! I have set you as the owner of the channel. You can delete this message with your owner’s permission” so that they can familiarize themselves with the RocketChat usage.

* '''#organizers-registration-desk''': Similar to #sponsor-registration-desk, this channel is dedicated to organizers who need to be the owner of specific channels.

* '''#paper-xxx''': For each paper, we create a channel where the author can interact with visitors to answer questions.

* '''#keynote-xxx/#workshop-xxx/#tutorial-xxx''': For each keynote/workshop/tutorial, we create a channel where attendees can interact with the keynote speaker and the workshop/tutorial organizers.

* '''#business-meeting/#review-meeting''': These two channels are used for discussions about the business meeting and the review meeting, respectively.

=== Other considerations ===

* Emoji: We figure this is a way to attract more engagement from conference attendees. We uploaded the ACL logo, together with some other emoji. The ACL logo is a must-have one as we (organizers) usually by default add this emoji reaction to an announcement.
* Bad word filtering: We initially enabled the default bad word filtering in RocketChat during the internal test. However, it turns out it blocks many words such as “queer”, “gay”, etc., and we disable this feature during the conference. It seems to be okay as we didn’t receive any report about profanity in RocketChat.
* Permission to @here and @all: We initially allow all users to @here (mention all online users in the channel) and @all (mention all users in the channel). But it turns out this makes the space very noisy as people have extensively used @here/@all to announce their QA sessions. Therefore, we disable this permission and only allow channel owners to @here/@all.

=== Other platforms ===
* Slack might be an alternative to RocketChat, which has a better UI. But it is more expensive. Also, we don’t have the scripts to batch create channels for 800+ papers. Furthermore, we didn’t have time to investigate whether there are some specific features (e.g., broadcast channels) in RocketChat that are not available in Slack. In particular, we need to embed the channel as an iframe on a webpage, which seems to be unsupported natively by Slack.
* [https://www.dory.app/ Dory.app] and [https://www.sli.do/ Slido] could be used in addition to RocketChat for collecting questions & votes. This is perhaps one of the major limitations of RocketChat, i.e., it is not very ergonomic to collect questions/votes, partially because all messages in a thread are also shown in the channel with a smaller font, making it hard to read. AKBC2020 has used Slido, and one of the tutorials in ACL2020 has used Dory.app. Both seem to work well in their scenarios. However, we have tried Dory.app for the live plenary sessions on July 7, and it turns out that their server cannot handle the large amount of traffic and it crashed during the conference. So we have to switch back to the #live channel for collecting questions.

=== Recommendations ===
In general, we have relatively good experience with RocketChat. It does have some issues but the support team is very responsive, so I would recommend it for future conferences. The Slack might be a better alternative if it can meet the necessary requirements.
I would highly recommend finding a better platform for collecting questions & votes to augment RocketChat. The co-founder of Dory.app (Ena ena.zheng@dory-4098177ab9b4.intercom-mail.com) has reached out to me and she explained the situation. They can easily increase the capacity of their server/database for a specific period if we can provide them an early notice. They are very happy to support the conference, so the EMNLP2020 organizers can directly reach out to Ena to discuss further details.

== Virtual Conference Website ==
The [https://virtual.acl2020.org virtual conference website] is the central platform to present all information about the conference. As pointed out by ICLR2020 organizers, a portal bringing together all the different tools needed for the virtual conference was not available, and they have developed their own website. Thus, we adopted their codebase Mini-Conf https://github.com/Mini-Conf/Mini-Conf and made some extensions in our own fork https://github.com/acl-org/acl-2020-virtual-conference to meet our specific needs.
After the conference, we have removed all RocketChat channels from the website, but you can check out the acl2020-v7.0 release of the repo and spin up the website locally to see the version we used during the conference. We also have an introduction [https://slideslive.com/38931552/acl-website-walkthrough video] that explains how to use the website.

=== Overall design ===
The website has 12 top-level pages.
* '''Home''': We explain how to use the website and embed the #announcement channel on this page.
* '''Schedule''': This page shows a calendar view of all events during the conference.
* '''Livestream''': This page is used for the livestream of plenary sessions.
* '''Plenary''': This page contains the information about plenary sessions. Each plenary session also has its own page to display the pre-recorded videos and optionally an associated RocketChat channel.
* '''Papers''': This page displays all main conference papers (including the demo papers and student research workshop papers). Users can browse papers by track, search by author/title, and use the visualization tool to find a cluster of papers. Each paper also has its own page, where we display the detailed information about the paper, the live session slots, the pre-recorded video, and the associated RocketChat channel.
* '''Tutorials''': This page displays all tutorials on July 5, using a calendar view. Each tutorial also has its own page.
* '''Workshops''': This page displays all workshops, and each workshop has its own webpage.
* '''Sponsors''': This page displays all sponsors by their levels. Most sponsors have their own dedicated page to display their video, downloadable content, contact, and a RocketChat channel #sponsor-xxx described in Section 3.
* '''Socials''': This page displays all social events, but each event does not have a dedicated page.
* '''Chat''': Here we simply embed the RocketChat workspace.
* '''Organizers''': Here we display all conference organizers with their photos.
* '''Help''': Here we show the FAQ and Code of Conduct.

=== Tutorials ===
* We found that each tutorial is different. It would be useful to consult with each tutorial organizer beforehand to understand their needs and customize their virtual tutorial page accordingly. This year we had a common template for all tutorials but in hindsight it could have been slightly different for each.
* Some tutorial teachers did not know that tutorial videos can be recorded in parts (using SlidesLive) and had to record their 2+ hours of videos in one go. We should let tutorial teachers know beforehand that video can be recorded in parts.
* Attendees were not clear on what was expected of them before the tutorial. It would have been useful if each tutorial teacher explained what preparation is required in this virtual setup.
* The tutorial chairs posted a great blog on different modalities of tutorials - https://acl2020.org/blog/detailed-modalities-of-tutorials/. It might have been more useful if posted even earlier.

=== Workshops ===
* There should be a separate team of workshop-virtual-chairs dedicated to only thinking about virtual infrastructure needs for workshops. With 20 workshops, some as big as a mini-conference, it becomes important to have someone think about the workshop infrastructure explicitly.
* Each workshop paper should have a page of its own (similar to main conference papers) with link to paper, pre-recorded talk, rocketchat and zoom link for Q&A
* With the new virtual format, each workshop should be asked to write a paragraph explaining their virtual setup. There was a lot of confusion this year since each workshop had a different setup. The paragraph should include
** Whether they have parallel Q&A session on different zoom links
** Whether the pre-recorded talks will be played again on the live stream OR do they expect attendees to watch them beforehand.
** If the pre-recorded talks are going to be played in the livestream, they should ask attendees to stay on the website for the talk part and enter the zoom meeting only after the talk for the Q&A session. This year, many attendees were waiting in the zoom room thinking the pre-recording talks can be seen there as well (not knowing that they should go to the website to watch it)
**Like the main conference, perhaps the keynote of workshops should also allow questions only on rocketchat. Because some workshop organizers had trouble fielding questions from different sources (zoom chat, zoom hand raising, rocketchat channel)
* It seems like workshops that were single track worked better than those that had multiple tracks and this was because with parallel poster sessions, it was confusing how to go to each paper Q&A session separately.
* Workshops organizers should be given a deadline after which they should not be able to update their schedule. Last minute schedule updates this year caused SlidesLive delay in preparing their livestream session.
* Setting such a deadline will also help infra chairs to create all zoom meetings using individual zoom accounts separately as they did for main conference papers.
* The main zoom meeting should have a dedicated moderator who can take care of assigning speakers to be co-hosts.
* Each workshop should have a separate read only rocketchat channel (similar to main conference #announcement channel) where organizers can make important announcements. This year, with a common channel for all communication, the announcements from organizers were getting drowned within other chat.
* Many attendees had questions about what material will be available before/during/after the conference. The tutorial chairs posted a great blog on this - https://acl2020.org/blog/detailed-modalities-of-tutorials/. It would be great if workshop chairs did something similarly.

=== Virtual booths for sponsors ===
* We already have a pretty good template for virtual booths. The hardest part is to communicate with the sponsors and collect information from them.
* In ACL 2020, we only communicate with the sponsors through email. It’s very hard to keep track of the changes sponsors make and sponsors always want to change information at the last minute. It would be great if we could automate some information collection process in the future. Here are some suggestions for future reference:
** Sponsors always want to change Zoom schedules at the last minute, and it would be inconvenient for them to email us every time they change their schedule. So, it would be great if we could ask them to input the information into a shared spreadsheet, so that they can change their schedule by modifying the spreadsheet. We can write a code to load the spreadsheet to the yml file so that we only need to do a refresh before the main conference, which will significantly reduce our effort.
** For all the files and resources, it’s better to ask sponsors to provide us a static url link to the file, so that as long as the link does not change, they can update their file anytime they want. We can also ask sponsors to put the <filename, url link> pair into a shared spreadsheet so that we don’t need to manually input the information based on emails.
** For some files, e.g. logos and pdfs, we can create a shared Google drive for them to update their logos. Again in this ACL we send all files through email which is very inconvenient.
* We should give sponsors a hard deadline on when they can not update the information. For this ACL, we got emails even after the main conference where the sponsors want to change schedules/materials in the virtual booth.
* This year we included the sponsors in the internal dry period, which turns out to be necessary since the sponsors will be able to check and test their virtual booths before the main conference. It’s very important since we can do one round of iteration to fix the information in the virtual booth based on the sponsors’ feedback before the main conference.
* This year we have 19 sponsors and only 2 volunteers to build the virtual booth, so each volunteer needs to build 9-10 sponsors. The workload is too heavy for each of the volunteers (each of them take around 4 days full time). I think the best balance would be 4-5 sponsors per volunteer. There should be one more volunteer that is available during the main conference to fix the website if there are urgent requests from the sponsors.
* We created one admin account for each sponsor that’s valid through the end of the conference, and a test visitor account that’s valid before the conference so that the sponsors can test the interaction between visitors and sponsors (especially on RocketChat). This is very important for the sponsors to learn how to make announcements and how to monitor the channel when visitors send questions.
* It’s important to provide sponsors with a step-by-step instruction on how to login, how to use Zoom, and how to use RocketChat. The direct contact for each module of the virtual booth should also be listed in the instruction, e.g. provide contact for login related issues, Zoom related issues, RocketChat related issues and wrong information in the virtual booth. This way we can significantly reduce the number of repeated questions from sponsors and save a lot of time. Link to the instruction this year: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1paG7hY7E9qKEBZrXZloyfnI3Uxt_723J23JNWBKOMCI/edit
* We should also decide on a date to stop getting new sponsors. It’s not realistic to build new virtual booths at the last minute (which happened a few times for ACL 2020).
* Double check the sponsors’ list with the list on the external website in case there are missed sponsors.

=== User login ===
* We basically follow [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/authorizationedge-using-cookies-protect-your-amazon-cloudfront-content-from-being-downloaded-by-unauthenticated-users/ this AWS solution] to do the login authentication. But we have used a slightly different version [https://github.com/opaquejacob/cloudfront-authorization-at-edge.git here] so we can use the customized auth domain https://signin.acl2020.org. See [https://github.com/aws-samples/cloudfront-authorization-at-edge/compare/master...opaquejacob:master here] for the changes from the original version in the blog post.
* This solution allows us to use OAuth to implement the sign-on for the website and RocketChat. See [https://github.com/acl-org/acl-2020-virtual-conference/issues/53 here] for instructions.
* By default, the AWS Cognito pool can only send 50 emails per day. Need to follow [https://github.com/acl-org/acl-2020-virtual-conference/issues/53#issuecomment-649327363 this instruction] to increase the limit and [https://github.com/acl-org/acl-2020-virtual-conference/issues/104#issuecomment-653592927 this instruction] to switch to use the Amazon SES.
* For people who registered before July 3, we create the accounts on July 3 using the excel file provided by Prisicilla.
* To handle registration during the conference, we use Zapier + AWS Lambda. See https://github.com/acl-org/acl-2020-virtual-conference/issues/55#issue-636817449 for more details.

Although this solution works reasonably well, it does have some issues. Actually, 95% questions sent to acl2020-virtual-helpdesk@googlegroups.com are about login problems, and we probably have handled around 200 such requests.
* The AWS Cognito sent out login emails on behalf of acl2020virtual@gmail.com. It turns out the emails are easily classified as spam. Also some university email server blocks it (e.g., we found consistent issues with @xxx.i.kyoto-u.ac.jp).
* Many people could not login because they have entered the wrong password. We have therefore updated several versions of our instruction https://acl2020.org/_pages/docs/ACL2020_virtual_website_login_steps.pdf with some common errors (see Step 1), which seems to be helpful.
* We announce that our website will be live on July 3, and we send out the login credentials on that day. It turns out to be a not very wise decision because we have to deal with all incoming inquiries about login issues without volunteers on July 3 & 4. (Our on-call volunteers can only start working on July 5).
* Some authors are confused with the account used for the website and the SoftConf account.
* For some unknown reason, there are many users who have registered but were not included in the excel files sent from Priscilla. We may need to check with the company who hosted the registration form about this.
* It would be helpful if we can have the registration company directly handle the login authentication, so that we don’t need to have two separate processes to create user accounts.

== General Advice for Future Virtual Conferences ==
* It would be nice if future conference organizers can find a vendor company to run the virtual conference if possible. Otherwise, the virtual infrastructure committee would definitely need much more people and figure out a way to distribute the work more. Since all organizer committee members are officially volunteers, we cannot rely on people to work full-time or even extra hours on this (which we have to do for ACL2020 given the limited resources and short timeline). Here is a potential organization of the virtual infrastructure committee.
** Pre-recorded videos & livestreaming (1-2 chairs + a vendor company)
** Zoom meetings (1-2 chairs + 5-8 volunteers)
** Captioning (1-2 chairs)
** RocketChat (1 chair + 3-4 code development volunteers)
** Main website development (1-2 chairs + N code development volunteers)
** Virtual sponsor booth (1 chair + 1 code development volunteers per 5 sponsors)
** Tutorials (1 chair + 2-3 code development volunteers)
** Workshops (probably better to have their own virtual infrastructure chairs to customize their webpages)
** Login authentication (1 chair + 2 code development volunteers + 5 helpdesk volunteers; or use a vendor company)
* The repo https://github.com/acl-org/acl-2020-virtual-conference should be a good start for future conferences. Due to the time limit, we didn’t maintain a very high code quality but it should not be very hard to spin up a new website. The most challenging part would be gathering all sitedata, including the paper basic information, QA session schedule, Zoom links, video URLs, etc.
* It would be useful to have a better pipeline for information collection. Currently we have to gather information from different chairs. It would be better if the website, the proceedings, the handbook, and the ACL Anthology all use the same information source such that everything is synchronized.
* GitHub Issue seems to be a good way to manage the tasks and distribute work to volunteers.
* It would be better to have volunteers to be involved earlier, and work with the volunteer coordinator on the timeline. It was not a very smooth transition because most volunteers can work either before or during the conference, not both. And there is a period that our chairs have to handle all emails in acl2020-virtual-helpdesk@googlegroups.com on our own on the first two days when there are lots of inquiries.
* There is many other useful information in the article [https://medium.com/@iclr_conf/gone-virtual-lessons-from-iclr2020-1743ce6164a3 “Gone Virtual: Lessons from ICLR2020"]. The section “Technical Systems and Support” is quite relevant to the virtual conference infrastructure.

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2020-07-21T16:08:32Z

Lianhuiq:

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2020-07-21T16:08:15Z

Lianhuiq:

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2020-07-21T16:07:16Z

Lianhuiq:

2020Q3 Reports: Virtual Infrastructure Chairs

2020-07-21T16:04:57Z

Lianhuiq: /* Zoom attendees statistics */

The virtual conference infrastructure of ACL2020 consists of 4 major components:
* SlidesLive for pre-recorded talks & video live-streaming
* Zoom for live QA sessions
* RocketChat for async text-based discussions and announcements
* the [https://virtual.acl2020.org virtual conference website] as the central platform to present all information about the conference
Due to limited time, we follow the infrastructure setup of ICLR2020, with some necessary extensions including the plenary sessions, tutorials, virtual sponsor booths, etc. In the remaining sections of this report, we provide a high-level summary of each component and discuss potential improvement can be made in future. At the end, we provide some general advice for future virtual conferences based on our experience.

== SlidesLive ==

SlidesLive is a company that has helped with several previous conferences including ICLR, ICML, etc for recording the videos of the talks, post processing them and putting the slides and the presenter side by side. We initially negotiated with several companies including them for the physical conference in Seattle. The companies we discussed with with their Point Of Contact (POC) were:
* SlidesLive, POC: Katherine (Katie) Millar, katherine@slideslive.com
* Underline, POC: Sol Rosenberg, sol@underline.io
* GloCastLive, POC: Arran Moffat, arran@glocast.com
* BASH FILMS, POC: Mark Bashian, mbashian@bashfilms.com
* Freeman, POC: Brian Holm, Brian.Holm@freemanco.com
We have put all the information we collected from these companies including the quotes [https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1KYzLT-B5ZVIb3n_KDSRlMQnahoTuxxei?usp=sharing here] for your reference. Please note that these are for the time when the conference was supposed to be physical, nevertheless many of them also offer virtual experience.

After deciding to have the conference fully virtual we signed a contract with SlidesLive and relied on them for our keynotes and workshops besides the post processing of the videos. Below we list “our experience” working with them, noting these before signing a contract with them should be very helpful to have a great experience working with them, if you choose them as the company you want to work with.

=== General suggestions ===
Here we summarize our general suggestions, especially before signing a contract with them.

* We strongly suggest enforcing an early deadline for a finalized program of conference and '''specially workshops'''. This is very important as it helps to reduce communication overhead between SlidesLive and the rest of the conference.
* It is very important to clarify with SlidesLive “before signing the contract” how many live zoom QA sessions they are going to cover. For example, they did not cover “any” of the QA sessions for papers in main conference, demo sessions, sponsors or D&I events, and it was not clearly communicated to us pre-signing the contract. They also did not cover any of the parallel QA sessions happening in our workshops. We ended up creating our own zoom team to handle these. To prevent this from happening we suggest asking them to include a technical staff as well during discussions, marketing representatives might not be aware of these types of details.
* Slideslive does its best to be responsive and usually tries to answer our questions as much as they can. We recommend asking them to assign more number of “technical staff” especially during the conference. We sometimes felt having only two contacts from them is absolutely not enough especially given the fact that one of them was not as technically confident as the other one.
* There was a 8 sec delay in live presentations (the video in zoom vs the one streaming on the SlidesLive website) which our general chair (Dan) brought up during SlidesLive demo session. Please request them to resolve this.

=== Accessibility ===
Please note that they only provide captioning for the videos / live sessions they are handling, i.e., if you end up having to create your own zoom meetings they are not going to provide captioning for them. Another note, when we made the contract with Slideslive, it wasn’t clear in the contract that they only provided automatic captioning service instead of high quality human-edited captioning. Please make sure to go through all these details before signing a contract with them.

=== Non-profit discount ===
SlidesLive provides a 25% discount for Non-Profit Organizations, please make sure to ask for this if you are eligible to use it.

=== SlidesLive demo ===
We “strongly” advise to request a demo session from them “before signing the contract”. You can use part of the ACL 2020 schedule as an example if you do not have the full conference program yet. This is very helpful for you to get a sense of the experience you will have and gives you an opportunity to include your requests from them quite early on. It might take for them some time to include the features you need for your conference and this will give them a reasonable amount of time to address your requests in their framework pre-conference.

== Zoom ==

=== General suggestions ===

* (repeating as it is quite important) We strongly suggest enforcing an early deadline for a finalized program of conference and specially workshops. This is very important as it helps to reduce communication overhead for creating all virtual sessions beforehand.
* We strongly suggest generating Zoom meetings well ahead of time to make sure you have enough time to debug and verify them. We have provided detailed documentation on how to create bulk set of meetings in zoom in [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EYELyo5Yp3HESllBlqSis4aoAoxU6LQ0sRBwFAc5gMI/edit?usp=sharing this documentation]. We also have provided another step by step guide for users (authors/hosts of the meetings) [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OWCcxXm9mL7DgcSWgW0FC87KmOEq8lIU3CwcsMEPLiI/edit?usp=sharing here].
* You need to have several volunteers during the conference who are specifically trained for zoom to be on call during the conference in case any incident happens. We recommend at least 2 volunteers per time slot. Note that only these volunteers should have access to your master zoom account.
* Verifying separate accounts need to be crowdsourced pre-conference (it is a pretty quick process), we asked volunteers to do it pre-conference.
* We strongly advise to have a contact person for zoom meetings of each part of conference, e.g., having a couple of POCs for main papers track, demos track, sponsors, etc ahead of time. This will reduce the amount of communication overhead a lot.
We suggest having a separate team for zoom meetings of workshops, there are usually several workshops with a much more diverse set of programs (it is like a mini conference by itself).
* '''If a meeting got hacked in progress''', on-call volunteers should delete the meeting link and create a new link and announce it at rocketchat immediately.
* '''Each meeting should have a unique main host.''' If you are ‘host’ for a meeting and start that meeting, and then hop off and try to start another one, you will get an error message from Zoom stating that you already have a meeting in progress and you need to end the previous one in order to start this one. If you click yes, ZOOM WILL END THE PREVIOUS MEETING AND KICK EVERYONE OFF.
* Attendees can join a meeting on browser '''only when''' the meeting is not requiring registration.
* '''Do not share the master account''' outside of the virtual infrastructure team.
* Note that it is likely that '''API credentials will expire''' after a certain amount of time. If this happens, you need to follow the instruction to regenerate it. (Before you run the script to create Zoom Meeting, you need to login to the zoom account and create JWT credentials in Zoom App Marketplace.)
* Virtual infrastructure team can maintain a spreadsheet to store all the credentials of authors, so on-call volunteers will be able to access every meeting and offer help for all the meetings.
* Paid accounts: you can pay Zoom for a business level account and '''add phone dial-in plans'''. This is a good idea for anyone who may have a spotty internet, so that they can dial in via phone/audio as well as video -- that way, they will always have audio connection for Q&A and it won’t drop them.
* '''When a meeting link is broken''' during the conference, on-call volunteers can login ACL2020 Master Zoom account, and select a specific user from “User Management” -> “Users”, and then create a new meeting for that user (the user will be the host).

=== Zoom attendees statistics ===

We made an analysis of Zoom attendees statistics for the main conference Q&A Session. You can also find more detail and the script in the folder below [https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1WFU0oml-XUKNzuL_YOBnBJ8wX7BRHJrR?usp=sharing here].

* Total # of Unique Participants in Each Q&A Session:
[[File:Total.png|400px|center]]

* Distribution of participants over time 20 minutes after start
* 35 minutes after start
* 50 minutes after start

== RocketChat ==
RocketChat is a platform (similar to Slack) that provides async text-based chat functionality. In our workspace (acl2020.rocket.chat), we can create channels for different purposes.

=== Channels ===
Here we provide a summary of channels we have created for ACL2020.

* '''#announcements''': This is a read-only channel which is used by organizers to make conference-wide announcements. Only authorized users can post messages in this channel. Other users can only react with emoji to individual threads.

* '''#general''': This channel is used to discuss general conference topics. The conversation can be about anything related to ACL2020. During the conference, this channel was used to promote their live sessions by authors, workshop organizers, social events organizers, etc.

* '''#live''': This channel is only used for live plenary sessions. It was read-only for the majority of the time. During the live plenary sessions, we lift the read-only setting and people can use this channel for live QA. People have also used this channel to congratulate award winners, etc.

* '''#firsttimers/#introduction''': We initially only created the #firsttimers for people who attend ACL for the first time to say Hi to each other. At the very beginning of the conference, someone created the #introduction channel and many people joined that channel instead to introduce themselves.

* '''#helpdesk''': This channel was used by all ACL2020 attendees to request tech support for the ACL2020 virtual conference. We ask people to prefix their questions with a topic, e.g., [Zoom], [RocketChat], etc. On-call volunteers always start a thread when responding to a question. And continue the conversation in the thread. Once the question is resolved, they will mark it with :checkmark: emoji. See the screenshot below for a demonstration.

* '''#presenter-helpdesk''': This channel is same as #helpdesk, except that it is dedicated to authors and sponsors. It turns out most attendee still ask questions in #helpdesk so this channel may not be necessary in future.

* '''#incidents''': This channel was used to report incidents in the conference. Conference attendees can request the on-call volunteer in the channel to join your Zoom meetings as a co-host to handle disruptions or delete messages in RocketChat. They can simply click “Reply” button to start a private conversation with the on-call volunteer.

* '''#professional-conduct-committee''': This channel was used to contact the Professional Conduct Committee if you need our assistance (e.g. related to a concern that might fall under the anti-harassment policy). PCC members will post a message in this channel to let people know which of them are available. Then the attendee can contact the PCC member via RocketChat private message (similar to the #incidents).

* '''#social-media-posts''': This channel contains cross-posted social media posts published on various platforms by our official live tweeters and microbloggers, managed by our publicity chairs.

* '''#new-channels''': This channel was used to announce new channels made by conference attendees. It turns out many people have created different channels during the conference, including some topic-based channels (eg., #bio-clinical-nlp), university-based channels (e.g., #uwnlp) to get to know different research groups, location-base channels (e.g., #singapore), etc.

* '''#job-listing''': This channel was used to post job opportunities. We only get 10 posts in this channel throughout the conference though.

* '''#oncall-volunteers''': This channel is dedicated to on-call volunteers for them to coordinate with each other during the conference.

* '''#sponsor-xxx''': For each sponsor, we create a dedicated channel for them to post announcements and interact with conference attendees. These are “broadcast” channels (similar to #incidents, #professional-conduct-committee), i.e., only the channel owner can post messages. Visitors can only start a private conversation with the message author. This setting is due to the privacy concerns -- we do not want to expose who has visited a specific sponsor booth.

* '''#sponsor-registration-desk''': This channel is used as the virtual registration desk for sponsors. We need this channel because we need to set the sponsor account as the owner of their channels, and we didn’t develop an automatic way to do this. Since there are only ~20 sponsors, we just ask them to post a message in this channel when they arrive, and we just manually add them to the #sponsor-xxx channel and set them as the owner. After we add the sponsor account to their channel, we post a message “@username Welcome! I have set you as the owner of the channel. You can delete this message with your owner’s permission” so that they can familiarize themselves with the RocketChat usage.

* '''#organizers-registration-desk''': Similar to #sponsor-registration-desk, this channel is dedicated to organizers who need to be the owner of specific channels.

* '''#paper-xxx''': For each paper, we create a channel where the author can interact with visitors to answer questions.

* '''#keynote-xxx/#workshop-xxx/#tutorial-xxx''': For each keynote/workshop/tutorial, we create a channel where attendees can interact with the keynote speaker and the workshop/tutorial organizers.

* '''#business-meeting/#review-meeting''': These two channels are used for discussions about the business meeting and the review meeting, respectively.

=== Other considerations ===

* Emoji: We figure this is a way to attract more engagement from conference attendees. We uploaded the ACL logo, together with some other emoji. The ACL logo is a must-have one as we (organizers) usually by default add this emoji reaction to an announcement.
* Bad word filtering: We initially enabled the default bad word filtering in RocketChat during the internal test. However, it turns out it blocks many words such as “queer”, “gay”, etc., and we disable this feature during the conference. It seems to be okay as we didn’t receive any report about profanity in RocketChat.
* Permission to @here and @all: We initially allow all users to @here (mention all online users in the channel) and @all (mention all users in the channel). But it turns out this makes the space very noisy as people have extensively used @here/@all to announce their QA sessions. Therefore, we disable this permission and only allow channel owners to @here/@all.

=== Other platforms ===
* Slack might be an alternative to RocketChat, which has a better UI. But it is more expensive. Also, we don’t have the scripts to batch create channels for 800+ papers. Furthermore, we didn’t have time to investigate whether there are some specific features (e.g., broadcast channels) in RocketChat that are not available in Slack. In particular, we need to embed the channel as an iframe on a webpage, which seems to be unsupported natively by Slack.
* [https://www.dory.app/ Dory.app] and [https://www.sli.do/ Slido] could be used in addition to RocketChat for collecting questions & votes. This is perhaps one of the major limitations of RocketChat, i.e., it is not very ergonomic to collect questions/votes, partially because all messages in a thread are also shown in the channel with a smaller font, making it hard to read. AKBC2020 has used Slido, and one of the tutorials in ACL2020 has used Dory.app. Both seem to work well in their scenarios. However, we have tried Dory.app for the live plenary sessions on July 7, and it turns out that their server cannot handle the large amount of traffic and it crashed during the conference. So we have to switch back to the #live channel for collecting questions.

=== Recommendations ===
In general, we have relatively good experience with RocketChat. It does have some issues but the support team is very responsive, so I would recommend it for future conferences. The Slack might be a better alternative if it can meet the necessary requirements.
I would highly recommend finding a better platform for collecting questions & votes to augment RocketChat. The co-founder of Dory.app (Ena ena.zheng@dory-4098177ab9b4.intercom-mail.com) has reached out to me and she explained the situation. They can easily increase the capacity of their server/database for a specific period if we can provide them an early notice. They are very happy to support the conference, so the EMNLP2020 organizers can directly reach out to Ena to discuss further details.

== Virtual Conference Website ==
The [https://virtual.acl2020.org virtual conference website] is the central platform to present all information about the conference. As pointed out by ICLR2020 organizers, a portal bringing together all the different tools needed for the virtual conference was not available, and they have developed their own website. Thus, we adopted their codebase Mini-Conf https://github.com/Mini-Conf/Mini-Conf and made some extensions in our own fork https://github.com/acl-org/acl-2020-virtual-conference to meet our specific needs.
After the conference, we have removed all RocketChat channels from the website, but you can check out the acl2020-v7.0 release of the repo and spin up the website locally to see the version we used during the conference. We also have an introduction [https://slideslive.com/38931552/acl-website-walkthrough video] that explains how to use the website.

=== Overall design ===
The website has 12 top-level pages.
* '''Home''': We explain how to use the website and embed the #announcement channel on this page.
* '''Schedule''': This page shows a calendar view of all events during the conference.
* '''Livestream''': This page is used for the livestream of plenary sessions.
* '''Plenary''': This page contains the information about plenary sessions. Each plenary session also has its own page to display the pre-recorded videos and optionally an associated RocketChat channel.
* '''Papers''': This page displays all main conference papers (including the demo papers and student research workshop papers). Users can browse papers by track, search by author/title, and use the visualization tool to find a cluster of papers. Each paper also has its own page, where we display the detailed information about the paper, the live session slots, the pre-recorded video, and the associated RocketChat channel.
* '''Tutorials''': This page displays all tutorials on July 5, using a calendar view. Each tutorial also has its own page.
* '''Workshops''': This page displays all workshops, and each workshop has its own webpage.
* '''Sponsors''': This page displays all sponsors by their levels. Most sponsors have their own dedicated page to display their video, downloadable content, contact, and a RocketChat channel #sponsor-xxx described in Section 3.
* '''Socials''': This page displays all social events, but each event does not have a dedicated page.
* '''Chat''': Here we simply embed the RocketChat workspace.
* '''Organizers''': Here we display all conference organizers with their photos.
* '''Help''': Here we show the FAQ and Code of Conduct.

=== Tutorials ===
* We found that each tutorial is different. It would be useful to consult with each tutorial organizer beforehand to understand their needs and customize their virtual tutorial page accordingly. This year we had a common template for all tutorials but in hindsight it could have been slightly different for each.
* Some tutorial teachers did not know that tutorial videos can be recorded in parts (using SlidesLive) and had to record their 2+ hours of videos in one go. We should let tutorial teachers know beforehand that video can be recorded in parts.
* Attendees were not clear on what was expected of them before the tutorial. It would have been useful if each tutorial teacher explained what preparation is required in this virtual setup.
* The tutorial chairs posted a great blog on different modalities of tutorials - https://acl2020.org/blog/detailed-modalities-of-tutorials/. It might have been more useful if posted even earlier.

=== Workshops ===
* There should be a separate team of workshop-virtual-chairs dedicated to only thinking about virtual infrastructure needs for workshops. With 20 workshops, some as big as a mini-conference, it becomes important to have someone think about the workshop infrastructure explicitly.
* Each workshop paper should have a page of its own (similar to main conference papers) with link to paper, pre-recorded talk, rocketchat and zoom link for Q&A
* With the new virtual format, each workshop should be asked to write a paragraph explaining their virtual setup. There was a lot of confusion this year since each workshop had a different setup. The paragraph should include
** Whether they have parallel Q&A session on different zoom links
** Whether the pre-recorded talks will be played again on the live stream OR do they expect attendees to watch them beforehand.
** If the pre-recorded talks are going to be played in the livestream, they should ask attendees to stay on the website for the talk part and enter the zoom meeting only after the talk for the Q&A session. This year, many attendees were waiting in the zoom room thinking the pre-recording talks can be seen there as well (not knowing that they should go to the website to watch it)
**Like the main conference, perhaps the keynote of workshops should also allow questions only on rocketchat. Because some workshop organizers had trouble fielding questions from different sources (zoom chat, zoom hand raising, rocketchat channel)
* It seems like workshops that were single track worked better than those that had multiple tracks and this was because with parallel poster sessions, it was confusing how to go to each paper Q&A session separately.
* Workshops organizers should be given a deadline after which they should not be able to update their schedule. Last minute schedule updates this year caused SlidesLive delay in preparing their livestream session.
* Setting such a deadline will also help infra chairs to create all zoom meetings using individual zoom accounts separately as they did for main conference papers.
* The main zoom meeting should have a dedicated moderator who can take care of assigning speakers to be co-hosts.
* Each workshop should have a separate read only rocketchat channel (similar to main conference #announcement channel) where organizers can make important announcements. This year, with a common channel for all communication, the announcements from organizers were getting drowned within other chat.
* Many attendees had questions about what material will be available before/during/after the conference. The tutorial chairs posted a great blog on this - https://acl2020.org/blog/detailed-modalities-of-tutorials/. It would be great if workshop chairs did something similarly.

=== Virtual booths for sponsors ===
* We already have a pretty good template for virtual booths. The hardest part is to communicate with the sponsors and collect information from them.
* In ACL 2020, we only communicate with the sponsors through email. It’s very hard to keep track of the changes sponsors make and sponsors always want to change information at the last minute. It would be great if we could automate some information collection process in the future. Here are some suggestions for future reference:
** Sponsors always want to change Zoom schedules at the last minute, and it would be inconvenient for them to email us every time they change their schedule. So, it would be great if we could ask them to input the information into a shared spreadsheet, so that they can change their schedule by modifying the spreadsheet. We can write a code to load the spreadsheet to the yml file so that we only need to do a refresh before the main conference, which will significantly reduce our effort.
** For all the files and resources, it’s better to ask sponsors to provide us a static url link to the file, so that as long as the link does not change, they can update their file anytime they want. We can also ask sponsors to put the <filename, url link> pair into a shared spreadsheet so that we don’t need to manually input the information based on emails.
** For some files, e.g. logos and pdfs, we can create a shared Google drive for them to update their logos. Again in this ACL we send all files through email which is very inconvenient.
* We should give sponsors a hard deadline on when they can not update the information. For this ACL, we got emails even after the main conference where the sponsors want to change schedules/materials in the virtual booth.
* This year we included the sponsors in the internal dry period, which turns out to be necessary since the sponsors will be able to check and test their virtual booths before the main conference. It’s very important since we can do one round of iteration to fix the information in the virtual booth based on the sponsors’ feedback before the main conference.
* This year we have 19 sponsors and only 2 volunteers to build the virtual booth, so each volunteer needs to build 9-10 sponsors. The workload is too heavy for each of the volunteers (each of them take around 4 days full time). I think the best balance would be 4-5 sponsors per volunteer. There should be one more volunteer that is available during the main conference to fix the website if there are urgent requests from the sponsors.
* We created one admin account for each sponsor that’s valid through the end of the conference, and a test visitor account that’s valid before the conference so that the sponsors can test the interaction between visitors and sponsors (especially on RocketChat). This is very important for the sponsors to learn how to make announcements and how to monitor the channel when visitors send questions.
* It’s important to provide sponsors with a step-by-step instruction on how to login, how to use Zoom, and how to use RocketChat. The direct contact for each module of the virtual booth should also be listed in the instruction, e.g. provide contact for login related issues, Zoom related issues, RocketChat related issues and wrong information in the virtual booth. This way we can significantly reduce the number of repeated questions from sponsors and save a lot of time. Link to the instruction this year: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1paG7hY7E9qKEBZrXZloyfnI3Uxt_723J23JNWBKOMCI/edit
* We should also decide on a date to stop getting new sponsors. It’s not realistic to build new virtual booths at the last minute (which happened a few times for ACL 2020).
* Double check the sponsors’ list with the list on the external website in case there are missed sponsors.

=== User login ===
* We basically follow [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/authorizationedge-using-cookies-protect-your-amazon-cloudfront-content-from-being-downloaded-by-unauthenticated-users/ this AWS solution] to do the login authentication. But we have used a slightly different version [https://github.com/opaquejacob/cloudfront-authorization-at-edge.git here] so we can use the customized auth domain https://signin.acl2020.org. See [https://github.com/aws-samples/cloudfront-authorization-at-edge/compare/master...opaquejacob:master here] for the changes from the original version in the blog post.
* This solution allows us to use OAuth to implement the sign-on for the website and RocketChat. See [https://github.com/acl-org/acl-2020-virtual-conference/issues/53 here] for instructions.
* By default, the AWS Cognito pool can only send 50 emails per day. Need to follow [https://github.com/acl-org/acl-2020-virtual-conference/issues/53#issuecomment-649327363 this instruction] to increase the limit and [https://github.com/acl-org/acl-2020-virtual-conference/issues/104#issuecomment-653592927 this instruction] to switch to use the Amazon SES.
* For people who registered before July 3, we create the accounts on July 3 using the excel file provided by Prisicilla.
* To handle registration during the conference, we use Zapier + AWS Lambda. See https://github.com/acl-org/acl-2020-virtual-conference/issues/55#issue-636817449 for more details.

Although this solution works reasonably well, it does have some issues. Actually, 95% questions sent to acl2020-virtual-helpdesk@googlegroups.com are about login problems, and we probably have handled around 200 such requests.
* The AWS Cognito sent out login emails on behalf of acl2020virtual@gmail.com. It turns out the emails are easily classified as spam. Also some university email server blocks it (e.g., we found consistent issues with @xxx.i.kyoto-u.ac.jp).
* Many people could not login because they have entered the wrong password. We have therefore updated several versions of our instruction https://acl2020.org/_pages/docs/ACL2020_virtual_website_login_steps.pdf with some common errors (see Step 1), which seems to be helpful.
* We announce that our website will be live on July 3, and we send out the login credentials on that day. It turns out to be a not very wise decision because we have to deal with all incoming inquiries about login issues without volunteers on July 3 & 4. (Our on-call volunteers can only start working on July 5).
* Some authors are confused with the account used for the website and the SoftConf account.
* For some unknown reason, there are many users who have registered but were not included in the excel files sent from Priscilla. We may need to check with the company who hosted the registration form about this.
* It would be helpful if we can have the registration company directly handle the login authentication, so that we don’t need to have two separate processes to create user accounts.

== General Advice for Future Virtual Conferences ==
* It would be nice if future conference organizers can find a vendor company to run the virtual conference if possible. Otherwise, the virtual infrastructure committee would definitely need much more people and figure out a way to distribute the work more. Since all organizer committee members are officially volunteers, we cannot rely on people to work full-time or even extra hours on this (which we have to do for ACL2020 given the limited resources and short timeline). Here is a potential organization of the virtual infrastructure committee.
** Pre-recorded videos & livestreaming (1-2 chairs + a vendor company)
** Zoom meetings (1-2 chairs + 5-8 volunteers)
** Captioning (1-2 chairs)
** RocketChat (1 chair + 3-4 code development volunteers)
** Main website development (1-2 chairs + N code development volunteers)
** Virtual sponsor booth (1 chair + 1 code development volunteers per 5 sponsors)
** Tutorials (1 chair + 2-3 code development volunteers)
** Workshops (probably better to have their own virtual infrastructure chairs to customize their webpages)
** Login authentication (1 chair + 2 code development volunteers + 5 helpdesk volunteers; or use a vendor company)
* The repo https://github.com/acl-org/acl-2020-virtual-conference should be a good start for future conferences. Due to the time limit, we didn’t maintain a very high code quality but it should not be very hard to spin up a new website. The most challenging part would be gathering all sitedata, including the paper basic information, QA session schedule, Zoom links, video URLs, etc.
* It would be useful to have a better pipeline for information collection. Currently we have to gather information from different chairs. It would be better if the website, the proceedings, the handbook, and the ACL Anthology all use the same information source such that everything is synchronized.
* GitHub Issue seems to be a good way to manage the tasks and distribute work to volunteers.
* It would be better to have volunteers to be involved earlier, and work with the volunteer coordinator on the timeline. It was not a very smooth transition because most volunteers can work either before or during the conference, not both. And there is a period that our chairs have to handle all emails in acl2020-virtual-helpdesk@googlegroups.com on our own on the first two days when there are lots of inquiries.
* There is many other useful information in the article [https://medium.com/@iclr_conf/gone-virtual-lessons-from-iclr2020-1743ce6164a3 “Gone Virtual: Lessons from ICLR2020"]. The section “Technical Systems and Support” is quite relevant to the virtual conference infrastructure.

2020Q3 Reports: Virtual Infrastructure Chairs

2020-07-21T15:59:15Z

Lianhuiq: /* Zoom attendees statistics */

The virtual conference infrastructure of ACL2020 consists of 4 major components:
* SlidesLive for pre-recorded talks & video live-streaming
* Zoom for live QA sessions
* RocketChat for async text-based discussions and announcements
* the [https://virtual.acl2020.org virtual conference website] as the central platform to present all information about the conference
Due to limited time, we follow the infrastructure setup of ICLR2020, with some necessary extensions including the plenary sessions, tutorials, virtual sponsor booths, etc. In the remaining sections of this report, we provide a high-level summary of each component and discuss potential improvement can be made in future. At the end, we provide some general advice for future virtual conferences based on our experience.

== SlidesLive ==

SlidesLive is a company that has helped with several previous conferences including ICLR, ICML, etc for recording the videos of the talks, post processing them and putting the slides and the presenter side by side. We initially negotiated with several companies including them for the physical conference in Seattle. The companies we discussed with with their Point Of Contact (POC) were:
* SlidesLive, POC: Katherine (Katie) Millar, katherine@slideslive.com
* Underline, POC: Sol Rosenberg, sol@underline.io
* GloCastLive, POC: Arran Moffat, arran@glocast.com
* BASH FILMS, POC: Mark Bashian, mbashian@bashfilms.com
* Freeman, POC: Brian Holm, Brian.Holm@freemanco.com
We have put all the information we collected from these companies including the quotes [https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1KYzLT-B5ZVIb3n_KDSRlMQnahoTuxxei?usp=sharing here] for your reference. Please note that these are for the time when the conference was supposed to be physical, nevertheless many of them also offer virtual experience.

After deciding to have the conference fully virtual we signed a contract with SlidesLive and relied on them for our keynotes and workshops besides the post processing of the videos. Below we list “our experience” working with them, noting these before signing a contract with them should be very helpful to have a great experience working with them, if you choose them as the company you want to work with.

=== General suggestions ===
Here we summarize our general suggestions, especially before signing a contract with them.

* We strongly suggest enforcing an early deadline for a finalized program of conference and '''specially workshops'''. This is very important as it helps to reduce communication overhead between SlidesLive and the rest of the conference.
* It is very important to clarify with SlidesLive “before signing the contract” how many live zoom QA sessions they are going to cover. For example, they did not cover “any” of the QA sessions for papers in main conference, demo sessions, sponsors or D&I events, and it was not clearly communicated to us pre-signing the contract. They also did not cover any of the parallel QA sessions happening in our workshops. We ended up creating our own zoom team to handle these. To prevent this from happening we suggest asking them to include a technical staff as well during discussions, marketing representatives might not be aware of these types of details.
* Slideslive does its best to be responsive and usually tries to answer our questions as much as they can. We recommend asking them to assign more number of “technical staff” especially during the conference. We sometimes felt having only two contacts from them is absolutely not enough especially given the fact that one of them was not as technically confident as the other one.
* There was a 8 sec delay in live presentations (the video in zoom vs the one streaming on the SlidesLive website) which our general chair (Dan) brought up during SlidesLive demo session. Please request them to resolve this.

=== Accessibility ===
Please note that they only provide captioning for the videos / live sessions they are handling, i.e., if you end up having to create your own zoom meetings they are not going to provide captioning for them. Another note, when we made the contract with Slideslive, it wasn’t clear in the contract that they only provided automatic captioning service instead of high quality human-edited captioning. Please make sure to go through all these details before signing a contract with them.

=== Non-profit discount ===
SlidesLive provides a 25% discount for Non-Profit Organizations, please make sure to ask for this if you are eligible to use it.

=== SlidesLive demo ===
We “strongly” advise to request a demo session from them “before signing the contract”. You can use part of the ACL 2020 schedule as an example if you do not have the full conference program yet. This is very helpful for you to get a sense of the experience you will have and gives you an opportunity to include your requests from them quite early on. It might take for them some time to include the features you need for your conference and this will give them a reasonable amount of time to address your requests in their framework pre-conference.

== Zoom ==

=== General suggestions ===

* (repeating as it is quite important) We strongly suggest enforcing an early deadline for a finalized program of conference and specially workshops. This is very important as it helps to reduce communication overhead for creating all virtual sessions beforehand.
* We strongly suggest generating Zoom meetings well ahead of time to make sure you have enough time to debug and verify them. We have provided detailed documentation on how to create bulk set of meetings in zoom in [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EYELyo5Yp3HESllBlqSis4aoAoxU6LQ0sRBwFAc5gMI/edit?usp=sharing this documentation]. We also have provided another step by step guide for users (authors/hosts of the meetings) [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OWCcxXm9mL7DgcSWgW0FC87KmOEq8lIU3CwcsMEPLiI/edit?usp=sharing here].
* You need to have several volunteers during the conference who are specifically trained for zoom to be on call during the conference in case any incident happens. We recommend at least 2 volunteers per time slot. Note that only these volunteers should have access to your master zoom account.
* Verifying separate accounts need to be crowdsourced pre-conference (it is a pretty quick process), we asked volunteers to do it pre-conference.
* We strongly advise to have a contact person for zoom meetings of each part of conference, e.g., having a couple of POCs for main papers track, demos track, sponsors, etc ahead of time. This will reduce the amount of communication overhead a lot.
We suggest having a separate team for zoom meetings of workshops, there are usually several workshops with a much more diverse set of programs (it is like a mini conference by itself).
* '''If a meeting got hacked in progress''', on-call volunteers should delete the meeting link and create a new link and announce it at rocketchat immediately.
* '''Each meeting should have a unique main host.''' If you are ‘host’ for a meeting and start that meeting, and then hop off and try to start another one, you will get an error message from Zoom stating that you already have a meeting in progress and you need to end the previous one in order to start this one. If you click yes, ZOOM WILL END THE PREVIOUS MEETING AND KICK EVERYONE OFF.
* Attendees can join a meeting on browser '''only when''' the meeting is not requiring registration.
* '''Do not share the master account''' outside of the virtual infrastructure team.
* Note that it is likely that '''API credentials will expire''' after a certain amount of time. If this happens, you need to follow the instruction to regenerate it. (Before you run the script to create Zoom Meeting, you need to login to the zoom account and create JWT credentials in Zoom App Marketplace.)
* Virtual infrastructure team can maintain a spreadsheet to store all the credentials of authors, so on-call volunteers will be able to access every meeting and offer help for all the meetings.
* Paid accounts: you can pay Zoom for a business level account and '''add phone dial-in plans'''. This is a good idea for anyone who may have a spotty internet, so that they can dial in via phone/audio as well as video -- that way, they will always have audio connection for Q&A and it won’t drop them.
* '''When a meeting link is broken''' during the conference, on-call volunteers can login ACL2020 Master Zoom account, and select a specific user from “User Management” -> “Users”, and then create a new meeting for that user (the user will be the host).

=== Zoom attendees statistics ===

We made an analysis of Zoom attendees statistics for the main conference Q&A Session. You can also find more detail and the script in the folder below [https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1WFU0oml-XUKNzuL_YOBnBJ8wX7BRHJrR?usp=sharing here].

* Total # of Unique Participants in Each Q&A Session:
[[File:Total.png]]
* Distribution of participants over time 20 minutes after start
* 35 minutes after start
* 50 minutes after start

== RocketChat ==
RocketChat is a platform (similar to Slack) that provides async text-based chat functionality. In our workspace (acl2020.rocket.chat), we can create channels for different purposes.

=== Channels ===
Here we provide a summary of channels we have created for ACL2020.

* '''#announcements''': This is a read-only channel which is used by organizers to make conference-wide announcements. Only authorized users can post messages in this channel. Other users can only react with emoji to individual threads.

* '''#general''': This channel is used to discuss general conference topics. The conversation can be about anything related to ACL2020. During the conference, this channel was used to promote their live sessions by authors, workshop organizers, social events organizers, etc.

* '''#live''': This channel is only used for live plenary sessions. It was read-only for the majority of the time. During the live plenary sessions, we lift the read-only setting and people can use this channel for live QA. People have also used this channel to congratulate award winners, etc.

* '''#firsttimers/#introduction''': We initially only created the #firsttimers for people who attend ACL for the first time to say Hi to each other. At the very beginning of the conference, someone created the #introduction channel and many people joined that channel instead to introduce themselves.

* '''#helpdesk''': This channel was used by all ACL2020 attendees to request tech support for the ACL2020 virtual conference. We ask people to prefix their questions with a topic, e.g., [Zoom], [RocketChat], etc. On-call volunteers always start a thread when responding to a question. And continue the conversation in the thread. Once the question is resolved, they will mark it with :checkmark: emoji. See the screenshot below for a demonstration.

* '''#presenter-helpdesk''': This channel is same as #helpdesk, except that it is dedicated to authors and sponsors. It turns out most attendee still ask questions in #helpdesk so this channel may not be necessary in future.

* '''#incidents''': This channel was used to report incidents in the conference. Conference attendees can request the on-call volunteer in the channel to join your Zoom meetings as a co-host to handle disruptions or delete messages in RocketChat. They can simply click “Reply” button to start a private conversation with the on-call volunteer.

* '''#professional-conduct-committee''': This channel was used to contact the Professional Conduct Committee if you need our assistance (e.g. related to a concern that might fall under the anti-harassment policy). PCC members will post a message in this channel to let people know which of them are available. Then the attendee can contact the PCC member via RocketChat private message (similar to the #incidents).

* '''#social-media-posts''': This channel contains cross-posted social media posts published on various platforms by our official live tweeters and microbloggers, managed by our publicity chairs.

* '''#new-channels''': This channel was used to announce new channels made by conference attendees. It turns out many people have created different channels during the conference, including some topic-based channels (eg., #bio-clinical-nlp), university-based channels (e.g., #uwnlp) to get to know different research groups, location-base channels (e.g., #singapore), etc.

* '''#job-listing''': This channel was used to post job opportunities. We only get 10 posts in this channel throughout the conference though.

* '''#oncall-volunteers''': This channel is dedicated to on-call volunteers for them to coordinate with each other during the conference.

* '''#sponsor-xxx''': For each sponsor, we create a dedicated channel for them to post announcements and interact with conference attendees. These are “broadcast” channels (similar to #incidents, #professional-conduct-committee), i.e., only the channel owner can post messages. Visitors can only start a private conversation with the message author. This setting is due to the privacy concerns -- we do not want to expose who has visited a specific sponsor booth.

* '''#sponsor-registration-desk''': This channel is used as the virtual registration desk for sponsors. We need this channel because we need to set the sponsor account as the owner of their channels, and we didn’t develop an automatic way to do this. Since there are only ~20 sponsors, we just ask them to post a message in this channel when they arrive, and we just manually add them to the #sponsor-xxx channel and set them as the owner. After we add the sponsor account to their channel, we post a message “@username Welcome! I have set you as the owner of the channel. You can delete this message with your owner’s permission” so that they can familiarize themselves with the RocketChat usage.

* '''#organizers-registration-desk''': Similar to #sponsor-registration-desk, this channel is dedicated to organizers who need to be the owner of specific channels.

* '''#paper-xxx''': For each paper, we create a channel where the author can interact with visitors to answer questions.

* '''#keynote-xxx/#workshop-xxx/#tutorial-xxx''': For each keynote/workshop/tutorial, we create a channel where attendees can interact with the keynote speaker and the workshop/tutorial organizers.

* '''#business-meeting/#review-meeting''': These two channels are used for discussions about the business meeting and the review meeting, respectively.

=== Other considerations ===

* Emoji: We figure this is a way to attract more engagement from conference attendees. We uploaded the ACL logo, together with some other emoji. The ACL logo is a must-have one as we (organizers) usually by default add this emoji reaction to an announcement.
* Bad word filtering: We initially enabled the default bad word filtering in RocketChat during the internal test. However, it turns out it blocks many words such as “queer”, “gay”, etc., and we disable this feature during the conference. It seems to be okay as we didn’t receive any report about profanity in RocketChat.
* Permission to @here and @all: We initially allow all users to @here (mention all online users in the channel) and @all (mention all users in the channel). But it turns out this makes the space very noisy as people have extensively used @here/@all to announce their QA sessions. Therefore, we disable this permission and only allow channel owners to @here/@all.

=== Other platforms ===
* Slack might be an alternative to RocketChat, which has a better UI. But it is more expensive. Also, we don’t have the scripts to batch create channels for 800+ papers. Furthermore, we didn’t have time to investigate whether there are some specific features (e.g., broadcast channels) in RocketChat that are not available in Slack. In particular, we need to embed the channel as an iframe on a webpage, which seems to be unsupported natively by Slack.
* [https://www.dory.app/ Dory.app] and [https://www.sli.do/ Slido] could be used in addition to RocketChat for collecting questions & votes. This is perhaps one of the major limitations of RocketChat, i.e., it is not very ergonomic to collect questions/votes, partially because all messages in a thread are also shown in the channel with a smaller font, making it hard to read. AKBC2020 has used Slido, and one of the tutorials in ACL2020 has used Dory.app. Both seem to work well in their scenarios. However, we have tried Dory.app for the live plenary sessions on July 7, and it turns out that their server cannot handle the large amount of traffic and it crashed during the conference. So we have to switch back to the #live channel for collecting questions.

=== Recommendations ===
In general, we have relatively good experience with RocketChat. It does have some issues but the support team is very responsive, so I would recommend it for future conferences. The Slack might be a better alternative if it can meet the necessary requirements.
I would highly recommend finding a better platform for collecting questions & votes to augment RocketChat. The co-founder of Dory.app (Ena ena.zheng@dory-4098177ab9b4.intercom-mail.com) has reached out to me and she explained the situation. They can easily increase the capacity of their server/database for a specific period if we can provide them an early notice. They are very happy to support the conference, so the EMNLP2020 organizers can directly reach out to Ena to discuss further details.

== Virtual Conference Website ==
The [https://virtual.acl2020.org virtual conference website] is the central platform to present all information about the conference. As pointed out by ICLR2020 organizers, a portal bringing together all the different tools needed for the virtual conference was not available, and they have developed their own website. Thus, we adopted their codebase Mini-Conf https://github.com/Mini-Conf/Mini-Conf and made some extensions in our own fork https://github.com/acl-org/acl-2020-virtual-conference to meet our specific needs.
After the conference, we have removed all RocketChat channels from the website, but you can check out the acl2020-v7.0 release of the repo and spin up the website locally to see the version we used during the conference. We also have an introduction [https://slideslive.com/38931552/acl-website-walkthrough video] that explains how to use the website.

=== Overall design ===
The website has 12 top-level pages.
* '''Home''': We explain how to use the website and embed the #announcement channel on this page.
* '''Schedule''': This page shows a calendar view of all events during the conference.
* '''Livestream''': This page is used for the livestream of plenary sessions.
* '''Plenary''': This page contains the information about plenary sessions. Each plenary session also has its own page to display the pre-recorded videos and optionally an associated RocketChat channel.
* '''Papers''': This page displays all main conference papers (including the demo papers and student research workshop papers). Users can browse papers by track, search by author/title, and use the visualization tool to find a cluster of papers. Each paper also has its own page, where we display the detailed information about the paper, the live session slots, the pre-recorded video, and the associated RocketChat channel.
* '''Tutorials''': This page displays all tutorials on July 5, using a calendar view. Each tutorial also has its own page.
* '''Workshops''': This page displays all workshops, and each workshop has its own webpage.
* '''Sponsors''': This page displays all sponsors by their levels. Most sponsors have their own dedicated page to display their video, downloadable content, contact, and a RocketChat channel #sponsor-xxx described in Section 3.
* '''Socials''': This page displays all social events, but each event does not have a dedicated page.
* '''Chat''': Here we simply embed the RocketChat workspace.
* '''Organizers''': Here we display all conference organizers with their photos.
* '''Help''': Here we show the FAQ and Code of Conduct.

=== Tutorials ===
* We found that each tutorial is different. It would be useful to consult with each tutorial organizer beforehand to understand their needs and customize their virtual tutorial page accordingly. This year we had a common template for all tutorials but in hindsight it could have been slightly different for each.
* Some tutorial teachers did not know that tutorial videos can be recorded in parts (using SlidesLive) and had to record their 2+ hours of videos in one go. We should let tutorial teachers know beforehand that video can be recorded in parts.
* Attendees were not clear on what was expected of them before the tutorial. It would have been useful if each tutorial teacher explained what preparation is required in this virtual setup.
* The tutorial chairs posted a great blog on different modalities of tutorials - https://acl2020.org/blog/detailed-modalities-of-tutorials/. It might have been more useful if posted even earlier.

=== Workshops ===
* There should be a separate team of workshop-virtual-chairs dedicated to only thinking about virtual infrastructure needs for workshops. With 20 workshops, some as big as a mini-conference, it becomes important to have someone think about the workshop infrastructure explicitly.
* Each workshop paper should have a page of its own (similar to main conference papers) with link to paper, pre-recorded talk, rocketchat and zoom link for Q&A
* With the new virtual format, each workshop should be asked to write a paragraph explaining their virtual setup. There was a lot of confusion this year since each workshop had a different setup. The paragraph should include
** Whether they have parallel Q&A session on different zoom links
** Whether the pre-recorded talks will be played again on the live stream OR do they expect attendees to watch them beforehand.
** If the pre-recorded talks are going to be played in the livestream, they should ask attendees to stay on the website for the talk part and enter the zoom meeting only after the talk for the Q&A session. This year, many attendees were waiting in the zoom room thinking the pre-recording talks can be seen there as well (not knowing that they should go to the website to watch it)
**Like the main conference, perhaps the keynote of workshops should also allow questions only on rocketchat. Because some workshop organizers had trouble fielding questions from different sources (zoom chat, zoom hand raising, rocketchat channel)
* It seems like workshops that were single track worked better than those that had multiple tracks and this was because with parallel poster sessions, it was confusing how to go to each paper Q&A session separately.
* Workshops organizers should be given a deadline after which they should not be able to update their schedule. Last minute schedule updates this year caused SlidesLive delay in preparing their livestream session.
* Setting such a deadline will also help infra chairs to create all zoom meetings using individual zoom accounts separately as they did for main conference papers.
* The main zoom meeting should have a dedicated moderator who can take care of assigning speakers to be co-hosts.
* Each workshop should have a separate read only rocketchat channel (similar to main conference #announcement channel) where organizers can make important announcements. This year, with a common channel for all communication, the announcements from organizers were getting drowned within other chat.
* Many attendees had questions about what material will be available before/during/after the conference. The tutorial chairs posted a great blog on this - https://acl2020.org/blog/detailed-modalities-of-tutorials/. It would be great if workshop chairs did something similarly.

=== Virtual booths for sponsors ===
* We already have a pretty good template for virtual booths. The hardest part is to communicate with the sponsors and collect information from them.
* In ACL 2020, we only communicate with the sponsors through email. It’s very hard to keep track of the changes sponsors make and sponsors always want to change information at the last minute. It would be great if we could automate some information collection process in the future. Here are some suggestions for future reference:
** Sponsors always want to change Zoom schedules at the last minute, and it would be inconvenient for them to email us every time they change their schedule. So, it would be great if we could ask them to input the information into a shared spreadsheet, so that they can change their schedule by modifying the spreadsheet. We can write a code to load the spreadsheet to the yml file so that we only need to do a refresh before the main conference, which will significantly reduce our effort.
** For all the files and resources, it’s better to ask sponsors to provide us a static url link to the file, so that as long as the link does not change, they can update their file anytime they want. We can also ask sponsors to put the <filename, url link> pair into a shared spreadsheet so that we don’t need to manually input the information based on emails.
** For some files, e.g. logos and pdfs, we can create a shared Google drive for them to update their logos. Again in this ACL we send all files through email which is very inconvenient.
* We should give sponsors a hard deadline on when they can not update the information. For this ACL, we got emails even after the main conference where the sponsors want to change schedules/materials in the virtual booth.
* This year we included the sponsors in the internal dry period, which turns out to be necessary since the sponsors will be able to check and test their virtual booths before the main conference. It’s very important since we can do one round of iteration to fix the information in the virtual booth based on the sponsors’ feedback before the main conference.
* This year we have 19 sponsors and only 2 volunteers to build the virtual booth, so each volunteer needs to build 9-10 sponsors. The workload is too heavy for each of the volunteers (each of them take around 4 days full time). I think the best balance would be 4-5 sponsors per volunteer. There should be one more volunteer that is available during the main conference to fix the website if there are urgent requests from the sponsors.
* We created one admin account for each sponsor that’s valid through the end of the conference, and a test visitor account that’s valid before the conference so that the sponsors can test the interaction between visitors and sponsors (especially on RocketChat). This is very important for the sponsors to learn how to make announcements and how to monitor the channel when visitors send questions.
* It’s important to provide sponsors with a step-by-step instruction on how to login, how to use Zoom, and how to use RocketChat. The direct contact for each module of the virtual booth should also be listed in the instruction, e.g. provide contact for login related issues, Zoom related issues, RocketChat related issues and wrong information in the virtual booth. This way we can significantly reduce the number of repeated questions from sponsors and save a lot of time. Link to the instruction this year: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1paG7hY7E9qKEBZrXZloyfnI3Uxt_723J23JNWBKOMCI/edit
* We should also decide on a date to stop getting new sponsors. It’s not realistic to build new virtual booths at the last minute (which happened a few times for ACL 2020).
* Double check the sponsors’ list with the list on the external website in case there are missed sponsors.

=== User login ===
* We basically follow [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/authorizationedge-using-cookies-protect-your-amazon-cloudfront-content-from-being-downloaded-by-unauthenticated-users/ this AWS solution] to do the login authentication. But we have used a slightly different version [https://github.com/opaquejacob/cloudfront-authorization-at-edge.git here] so we can use the customized auth domain https://signin.acl2020.org. See [https://github.com/aws-samples/cloudfront-authorization-at-edge/compare/master...opaquejacob:master here] for the changes from the original version in the blog post.
* This solution allows us to use OAuth to implement the sign-on for the website and RocketChat. See [https://github.com/acl-org/acl-2020-virtual-conference/issues/53 here] for instructions.
* By default, the AWS Cognito pool can only send 50 emails per day. Need to follow [https://github.com/acl-org/acl-2020-virtual-conference/issues/53#issuecomment-649327363 this instruction] to increase the limit and [https://github.com/acl-org/acl-2020-virtual-conference/issues/104#issuecomment-653592927 this instruction] to switch to use the Amazon SES.
* For people who registered before July 3, we create the accounts on July 3 using the excel file provided by Prisicilla.
* To handle registration during the conference, we use Zapier + AWS Lambda. See https://github.com/acl-org/acl-2020-virtual-conference/issues/55#issue-636817449 for more details.

Although this solution works reasonably well, it does have some issues. Actually, 95% questions sent to acl2020-virtual-helpdesk@googlegroups.com are about login problems, and we probably have handled around 200 such requests.
* The AWS Cognito sent out login emails on behalf of acl2020virtual@gmail.com. It turns out the emails are easily classified as spam. Also some university email server blocks it (e.g., we found consistent issues with @xxx.i.kyoto-u.ac.jp).
* Many people could not login because they have entered the wrong password. We have therefore updated several versions of our instruction https://acl2020.org/_pages/docs/ACL2020_virtual_website_login_steps.pdf with some common errors (see Step 1), which seems to be helpful.
* We announce that our website will be live on July 3, and we send out the login credentials on that day. It turns out to be a not very wise decision because we have to deal with all incoming inquiries about login issues without volunteers on July 3 & 4. (Our on-call volunteers can only start working on July 5).
* Some authors are confused with the account used for the website and the SoftConf account.
* For some unknown reason, there are many users who have registered but were not included in the excel files sent from Priscilla. We may need to check with the company who hosted the registration form about this.
* It would be helpful if we can have the registration company directly handle the login authentication, so that we don’t need to have two separate processes to create user accounts.

== General Advice for Future Virtual Conferences ==
* It would be nice if future conference organizers can find a vendor company to run the virtual conference if possible. Otherwise, the virtual infrastructure committee would definitely need much more people and figure out a way to distribute the work more. Since all organizer committee members are officially volunteers, we cannot rely on people to work full-time or even extra hours on this (which we have to do for ACL2020 given the limited resources and short timeline). Here is a potential organization of the virtual infrastructure committee.
** Pre-recorded videos & livestreaming (1-2 chairs + a vendor company)
** Zoom meetings (1-2 chairs + 5-8 volunteers)
** Captioning (1-2 chairs)
** RocketChat (1 chair + 3-4 code development volunteers)
** Main website development (1-2 chairs + N code development volunteers)
** Virtual sponsor booth (1 chair + 1 code development volunteers per 5 sponsors)
** Tutorials (1 chair + 2-3 code development volunteers)
** Workshops (probably better to have their own virtual infrastructure chairs to customize their webpages)
** Login authentication (1 chair + 2 code development volunteers + 5 helpdesk volunteers; or use a vendor company)
* The repo https://github.com/acl-org/acl-2020-virtual-conference should be a good start for future conferences. Due to the time limit, we didn’t maintain a very high code quality but it should not be very hard to spin up a new website. The most challenging part would be gathering all sitedata, including the paper basic information, QA session schedule, Zoom links, video URLs, etc.
* It would be useful to have a better pipeline for information collection. Currently we have to gather information from different chairs. It would be better if the website, the proceedings, the handbook, and the ACL Anthology all use the same information source such that everything is synchronized.
* GitHub Issue seems to be a good way to manage the tasks and distribute work to volunteers.
* It would be better to have volunteers to be involved earlier, and work with the volunteer coordinator on the timeline. It was not a very smooth transition because most volunteers can work either before or during the conference, not both. And there is a period that our chairs have to handle all emails in acl2020-virtual-helpdesk@googlegroups.com on our own on the first two days when there are lots of inquiries.
* There is many other useful information in the article [https://medium.com/@iclr_conf/gone-virtual-lessons-from-iclr2020-1743ce6164a3 “Gone Virtual: Lessons from ICLR2020"]. The section “Technical Systems and Support” is quite relevant to the virtual conference infrastructure.

File:Total.png

2020-07-21T15:56:47Z

Lianhuiq:

2020Q1 Reports: ACL 2020

2020-03-03T01:25:30Z

Lianhuiq: /* Audio-Video Chairs */

== General Chair ==
Dan Jurafsky, Stanford University

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.

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).

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.

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).

Highlights include:
<ul>

<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.
<li> We received a record 3,429 submissions (~15% increase over ACL2019)
<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.
<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
that meant ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP. All tutorials and Workshops have been chosen and scheduled and announced.
<li> We're asking the Exec to approve our D&I budget.
<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.).
<li>
The committee found sections of the ACL Conference Handbook to be out of date and in some cases missing entirely.
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.
</ul>

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.

== Program Chairs ==
Joyce Chai, University of Michigan

Natalie Schluter, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Joel Tetreault, Dataminr, USA

---

'''New Initiatives This Year'''

'''''Earlier Submission Deadline and Notification'''''

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.

'''''Four New Tracks'''''

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.

'''''Extended Automatic COI Detection/Automatic Reviewer-Paper Assignment'''''

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.

'''''Mandatory Reviewer Duty and Recruitment'''''

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.
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,
(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.
To counterbalance (3ii), we provided SACs with a list of novice reviewers and introduced our a Reviewer Mentoring Program (see below).

'''''New Reviewer Mentoring Program'''''

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.

'''''Updated Review Form with New Rating Scale and Evaluation Item'''''

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'''''.
(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).
(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.

'''Other Efforts'''

'''''Initial submission reviews and desk rejects'''''

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.

'''''Manual adjustment of submission tracks'''''

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.

'''''Manual adjustment of AC and reviewer assignment'''''

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.

'''''Communication'''''

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.

'''Submission Status'''

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.
<ul>
<li> Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics: 49 39 88
<li> Computational Social Science and Social Media: 73 38 111
<li> Dialogue and Interactive Systems: 204 71 275
<li> Discourse and Pragmatics: 36 20 56
<li> Ethics and NLP: 30 22 52
<li> Generation: 142 71 213
<li> Information Extraction: 159 83 242
<li> Information Retrieval and Text Mining: 55 41 96
<li> Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP: 110 54 164
<li> Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond: 69 24 93
<li> Machine Learning for NLP: 186 109 295
<li> Machine Translation: 158 104 262
<li> NLP Applications: 169 99 268
<li> Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation: 38 15 53
<li> Question Answering: 109 63 172
<li> Resources and Evaluation: 88 48 136
<li> Semantics: Lexical: 57 37 94
<li> Semantics: Sentence Level: 66 29 95
<li> Semantics: Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics: 81 31 112
<li> Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining: 112 66 178
<li> Speech and Multimodality: 38 27 65
<li> Summarization: 90 37 127
<li> Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing: 47 28 75
<li> Theme: 67 26 93
<li> Theory and Formalism in NLP (Linguistic and Mathematical): 11 3 14
</ul>

'''Summary of Timelines'''

<ul>
<li>Oct 15 - Nov 30: SACs invite ACs and reviewers
<li>Nov 25: Reviewer profiles completed
<li>Dec 09: ACL Paper Submission Deadline (long and short papers)
<li>Dec 10 - Jan 14: initial submission reviews and desk rejects; automatic reviewer assignment and COI detection; manual adjustment of assignment;
<li>Jan 17 - Feb 07: Review Period
<li>Feb 08 - Feb 11: ACs chase late reviews
<li>Feb 12 - Feb 17: Author Response
<li>Feb 18 - Feb 25: Reviewer Discussion Period (ACs lead discussion), ACs provide feedback to mentees.
<li>Feb 25 - Mar 03: ACs produce meta-reviews
<li>Mar 03 - Mar 10: SACs rank papers based on meta-reviews and make recommendations to PC chairs
<li>Mar 11 - Apr 02: PC chairs make decisions (they may consult SACs during this time); SACs and ACs recommend best reviewers
<li>Apr 03 - Accept / Reject Notifications
<li>Apr 24: Camera ready
</ul>

'''List of SAC/ACs and recruitment'''

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.
'''''Recruitment''''': We individually created preference lists for SACs, discussed these and made decisions. ACs were selected by SACs.

Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics
<ul>
<li>SACs: Emily Prud’hommeaux
<li>ACs: Cassandra L. Jacobs, Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Masoud Rouhizadeh, Serguei Pakhomov, Yevgeni Berzak
</ul>

Computational Social Science and Social Media
<ul>
<li>SACs: Tim Baldwin, Nikolaos Aletras
<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
</ul>

Dialogue and Interactive Systems
<ul>
<li>SACs: Jason Williams, Mari Ostendorf
<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
</ul>

Discourse and Pragmatics
<ul>
<li>SACs: Annie Louis (taking over for Diane Litman)
<li>ACs: Chloé Braud, Junyi Jessy Li, Manfred Stede, Shafiq Joty, Sujian Li, Yangfeng Ji
</ul>

Ethics and NLP
<ul>
<li>SACs: Dirk Hovy
<li>ACs: Alan W Black, Emily M. Bender, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Yulia Tsvetkov
</ul>

Generation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Wei Xu, Alexander Rush
<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
</ul>

Information Extraction
<ul>
<li>SACs: Doug Downey, Hoifun Poon
<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
</ul>

Information Retrieval and Text Mining
<ul>
<li>SACs: Chin-Yew Lin, Nazli Goharian
<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
</ul>

Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP
<ul>
<li>SACs: Yoav Goldberg
<li>ACs: Adina Williams, Afra Alishahi, Douwe Kiela, Grzegorz Chrupała, Marco Baroni, Yonatan Belinkov, Zachary C. Lipton
</ul>

Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond
<ul>
<li>SACs: Yoav Artzi
<li>ACs: Angeliki Lazaridou, Dan Goldwasser, Jason Baldridge, Jesse Thomason, Lisa Anne Hendricks, Parisa Kordjamshidi, Raffaella Bernardi, Vicente Ordonez, Yonatan Bisk
</ul>

Machine Learning for NLP
<ul>
<li>SACs: Andre Martins, Isabelle Augenstein
<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
</ul>

Machine Translation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Marine Carpuat, Alexandra Birch
<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
</ul>

Multidisciplinary and Area Chair COI
<ul>
<li>SACs: Michael Strube
<li>ACs: Anders Søgaard, David Schlangen, Katrin Erk, Kentaro Inui, Kevin Duh, Massimo Poesio, Mausam, Pascal Denis
</ul>

NLP Applications
<ul>
<li>SACs: Preslav Nakov, Karin Verspoor
<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
</ul>

Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Kemal Oflazer
<li>ACs: Christo Kirov, David R. Mortensen, Kareem Darwish, Reut Tsarfaty, Yue Zhang, Özlem Çetinoğlu
</ul>

Question Answering
<ul>
<li>SACs: Eugene Agichtein, Alessandro Moschitti
<li>ACs: Avi Sil, Dina Demner-Fushman, Evangelos Kanoulas, Gerhard Weikum, Idan Szpektor, Jimmy Lin, Oleg Rokhlenko, Sanda Harabagiu, Wen-tau Yih, William Cohen
</ul>

Resources and Evaluation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Nathan Schneider, Barbara Plank
<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
</ul>

Semantics: Lexical
<ul>
<li>SACs: Ekaterina Shutova, Aline Villavicencio
<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
</ul>

Semantics: Sentence Level
<ul>
<li>SACs: Mohit Bansal
<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
</ul>

Semantics: Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics
<ul>
<li>SACs: Sam Bowman
<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
</ul>

Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
<ul>
<li>SACs: Smaranda Muresan, Swapna Somasundaran
<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
</ul>

Speech and Multimodality
<ul>
<li>SACs: Eric Fosler-Lussier
<li>ACs: Bhuvana Ramabhadran, Florian Metze, Gerasimos Potamianos, Hamid Palangi, Martha Larson
</ul>

Summarization
<ul>
<li>SACs: Fei Liu
<li>ACs: Caiming Xiong, Giuseppe Carenini, Katja Markert, Manabu Okumura, Michael Elhadad, Ramesh Nallapati, Sebastian Gehrmann, Wenjie Li, Xiaodan Zhu, Yang Gao
</ul>

Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing
<ul>
<li>SACs: David Chiang
<li>ACs: Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez, Emily Pitler, Liang Huang, Miguel Ballesteros, Miryam de Lhoneux, Slav Petrov, Stephan Oepen, Weiwei Sun
</ul>

THEME
<ul>
<li>SACs: Marilyn Walker (taking over for Ellen Riloff)
<li>ACs: Donia Scott, Johan Bos, Luke Zettlemoyer, Philipp Koehn, Raymond Mooney
</ul>

Theory and Formalism in NLP (Linguistic and Mathematical)
<ul>
<li>SACs: Daniel Gildea
<li>ACs: Alexander Koller, Laura Kallmeyer, Marco Kuhlmann
</ul>

== Local Organisation Chairs ==
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL

With advice from:

Jianfeng Gao, Microsoft Research

Luke Zettlemoyer, University of Washington

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:

• 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

• I have already negotiated a very reduced internet quote, with PSAV charging a 1-day rate for all 6 days of the conference

• 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.

• 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.

• I am working with the company who builds the registration form to get that started

• 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.

• 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.

• In March, I will begin merging all quotes and estimates into a working budget which will be used to set registration fees.

• 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.

• Luke has found some suggested places for our Recognition Dinner; we are working on making a final decision

• Luke and/or his students are beginning to pull together a Restaurant Guide for the app, website and handbook.

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.
I expect the next month or two will be extremely busy in setting all plans in place and opening registration.

== Tutorial Chairs ==

Agata Savary, University of Tours, France

Yue Zhang, Westlake University, Hangzhou, China

The call, submission, reviewing and selection of tutorials was coordinated jointly for 4 conferences: ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP.

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):
* 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
* a [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Tutorial_chair_handbook tutorial chair handbook]

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.

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:

'''Review Committee'''
* Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne, Australia) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Daniel Beck (University of Melbourne, Australia) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair
* Emily M. Bender (University of Washington, WA, USA)
* Erik Cambria (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
* Gaël Dias (University of Caen Normandie, France)
* Stefan Evert (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)
* Yang Liu (Tsinghua University, Beijing, China)
* Agata Savary (University of Tours, France) - ACL 2020 tutorial chair
* João Sedoc (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA)
* Lucia Specia (Sheffield University, UK) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair
* Xu SUN (Peking University, China)
* Yulia Tsvetkov (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA)
* Benjamin Van Durme (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Aline Villavicencio (University of Sheffield, UK and Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Taro Watanabe (Google, Inc., Tokyo, Japan)
* Aaron Steven White (University of Rochester, NY, USA)
* Fei Xia (University of Washington, WA, USA) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Yue Zhang (Westlake University, Hangzhou, China) - ACL 2020 tutorial chair
* Meishan Zhang (Tianjin University, China)

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.
We accepted 31 proposals.

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.

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.

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):

'''Morning Tutorials'''

'''T1: Interpretability and Analysis in Neural NLP''' (cutting-edge) 
Yonatan Belinkov, Sebastian Gehrmann and Ellie Pavlick 
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. 
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. 
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.

'''T2: Multi-modal Information Extraction from Text, Semi-structured, and Tabular Data on the Web''' (cutting-edge) 
Xin Luna Dong, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Colin Lockard and Prashant Shiralkar 
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. 
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. 
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.

'''T3: Reviewing Natural Language Processing Research''' (introductory) 
Kevin Cohen, Karën Fort, Margot Mieskes and Aurélie Névéol 
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.

'''T4: Stylized Text Generation: Approaches and Applications''' (cutting-edge) 
Lili Mou and Olga Vechtomova 
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).

'''Afternoon Tutorials'''

'''T5: Achieving Common Ground in Multi-modal Dialogue''' (cutting-edge) 
Malihe Alikhani and Matthew Stone 
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.

'''T6: Commonsense Reasoning for Natural Language Processing''' (introductory) 
Maarten Sap, Vered Shwartz, Antoine Bosselut, Dan Roth and Yejin Choi 
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.

'''T7: Integrating Ethics into the NLP Curriculum''' (introductory) 
Emily M. Bender, Dirk Hovy and Alexandra Schofield 
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. 
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.

'''T8: Recent Advances in Open-Domain Question Answering''' (cutting-edge) 
Danqi Chen and Scott Wen-tau Yih 
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. 
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. 
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.

== Workshop Chairs ==

Milica Gašić, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf

Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Amazon Alexa AI

Ves Stoyanov, Facebook AI

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.

The workshops will be held on July 5th, 9th and 10th.

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.

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.

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.

First choice allocation was particularly difficult, as 54% of the workshops indicated ACL as their first choice, see details below.

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.

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.

Details on venue preference out of 95 submissions:

First choice:

54% (51 w) ACL 2020
25% (24 w) COLING 2020
16% (15 w) EMNLP-IJCNLP 2020
4% (4 w) AACL-IJCNLP 2020
1% (1 w) No Preference

Second choice:

51% (46 w) EMNLP 2020
19% (19 w) ACL 2020
15% (15 w) COLING 2020
11% (11 w) No Preference
4% (4 w) AACL-IJCNLP 2020

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/

'''Two day workshop (9th and 10th July):'''

*International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT).
**Marcello Federico, Alexander Waibel, Jiatao Gu, Kevin Knight, Will Lewis, Satoshi Nakamura, Hermann Ney, Jan Niehues, Sebastian Stüker and Marco Turchi

'''Workshop to be held on 5th July:'''

*''The Fourth Widening NLP Workshop focuses on efforts to promote and support ideas and voices of underrepresented groups in Natural Language Processing.''
**Samira Shaikh, Rossana da Cunha Silva, Ann Clifton, Erika Doggett and Ryan Georgi

'''Workshops to be held on 9th July:'''

*''NLP for Conversational AI''
**Tsung-Hsien Wen, Asli Celikyilmaz, IÃ±igo Casanueva, Mihail Eric, Anuj Kumar, Alexandros Papangelis, Rushin Shah and Zhou Yu

*T''he Fourth Widening NLP Workshop (WiNLP 2020)''
**Samira Shaikh, Rossana da Cunha Silva, Ann Clifton, Erika Doggett and Ryan Georgi

*''BioNLP 2020''
**Dina Demner-Fushman, Kevin Cohen, Sophia Ananiadou and Jun'ichi Tsujii

*''The third workshop on Fact Extraction and VERification''
**Christos Christodoulopoulos, James Thorne, Andreas Vlachos, Oana Cocarascu and Arpit Mittal

*''IWPT 2020: The 16th International Conference on Parsing Technologies''
**Yuji Matsumoto, Stephan Oepen, Kenji Sagae, Anders SÃ¸gaard, Weiwei Sun and Reut Tsarfaty

*''2nd Workshop on Figurative Language Processing''
**Beata Beigman Klebanov, Ekaterina Shutova, Patricia Lichtenstein, Smaranda Muresan, Anna Feldman, Chee Wee (Ben) Leong and Debanjan Ghosh

*''The 1st Joint Workshop on Narrative Understanding, Storylines, and Events (NUSE)''
**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

*''Workshop on Advances in Language and Vision Research''
**Xin Wang, Jesse Thomason, Ronghang Hu, Xinlei Chen, Peter Anderson, Qi Wu, Asli Celikyilmaz, Jason Baldridge and William Yang Wang

*''5th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP-2020)''
**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

'''Workshops to be held on 10th July:
'''

*''Natural Language Interfaces: Challenges and Promises''
**Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Yu Su, Huan Sun and Scott Wen-tau Yih

*''The 4th Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation (WNGT)''
**Alexandra Birch, Graham Neubig, Andrew Finch, Hiroaki Hayashi, Kenneth Heafield, Ioannis Konstas, Yusuke Oda and Xian Li

*''The 15th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA15)''
**Ekaterina Kochmar, Jill Burstein, Claudia Leacock, Nitin Madnani, Ildiko Pilan, Helen Yannakoudakis and Torsten Zesch

*''SIGMORPHON 2020''
**Garrett Nicolai and Kyle Gorman

*''NLP for Medical Conversations''
**Parminder Bhatia, Chaitanya Shivade, Mona Diab, byron wallace, Rashmi Gangadharaiah, nan du, Izhak Shafran and Steven Lin

*''The Second Workshop on e-Commerce and NLP (ECNLP 2)''
**Shervin Malmasi, Eugene Agichtein, Oleg Rokhlenko, Nicola Ueffing and Ido Guy

*''Eighth International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media (SocialNLP 2020)''
**Lun-Wei Ku and Cheng-Te Li

*''The First Workshop on Simultaneous Translation (AutoSimTrans)''
**Hua Wu, Colin Cherry, Jiatao Gu, Liang Huang, Zhongjun He, Mark Liberman and Yang Liu

*''Second Grand-Challenge and Workshop on Human Multimodal Language (Challenge-HML)''
**AmirAli Bagher Zadeh, Louis-Philippe Morency, Paul Pu Liang, Soujanya Poria and Ying Shen

== Student Research Workshop Chairs and Faculty Advisors==

'''Student Research Workshop Co-chairs'''

Rotem Dror, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

Jiangming Liu, The University of Edinburgh

Shruti Rijhwani, Carnegie Mellon University

'''Student Research Workshop Faculty Advisors'''

Omri Abend, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Sujian Li, Peking University

Zhou Yu, University of California, Davis

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).

'''Pre-submission Mentoring Phase (completed mid-February 2020)'''

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.

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.

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.

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.

'''Main submission'''

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.

Submission deadlines for the SRW are as follows:

* Paper submission deadline: March 6, 2020

* Review deadline: April 10, 2020

* Acceptance notification: April 15, 2020

* Camera-ready deadline: May 6, 2020

* Travel grant application deadline: to be decided.

* Travel grant notification: to be decided.

We also plan to have a post-acceptance mentoring process, for all papers accepted to the SRW.

'''Funding'''

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.

== Audio-Video Chairs ==

Hamid Palangi, Microsoft Research, Redmond

Lianhui Qin, University of Washington

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:
* Providing all the staff/equipment to perform the recording. This includes main conference & tutorials only, workshops should purchase the recording service by themselves.
* Post-processing the video content.
* Putting videos and slides side by side on the platform.
* Making the videos available open-source.

We are also looking for live-streaming for the plenary talks.

== Conference Handbook Chair ==

Nanyun Peng, University of Southern California

== Demo Chairs ==

Asli Celikyilmaz, Microsoft Research, Redmond

Shawn Wen, PolyAI

'''Details of Activities''':

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.

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.

The deadline for submissions was January 31, 2020.

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.

'''Important Dates'''

Paper submission deadline: Friday, January 31st, 2020

Notification of acceptance: Friday, April 3rd, 2020

Camera-ready submission: Friday, April 24th, 2020

== Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs ==

Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Rochester Institute of Technology

Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Google

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:
* Task title
* Interfaces (recommendations for whom to communicate with to address the task)
* Sub tasks (an enumerated list of sub task descriptions)
* Timeline (when to begin)
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.

2. For communication and teamwork, we set up:
* An ACL 2020 D&I slack channel, facilitating keeping records of interactions.
* A Google folder with designated subfolders for D&I subcommittees
* An ACL 2020 D&I chairs google groups email handle: <acl2020-diversity-inclusion-chairs@googlegroups.com>

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.

'''Academic Inclusion Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure the venue is welcoming to researchers from diverse subdisciplines, conducive to building academic networks across disciplines and career stages.''
* Aakanksha Naik, Carnegie Mellon University
* Emily Prud’hommeaux, Boston College
* Alla Rozovskaya, Queens College (City University of New York)

'''Accessibility Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure the venue is accessible for researchers with any disability, including provision of requested access services.''
* Sushant Kafle, Google/Rochester Institute of Technology
* Masoud Rouhizadeh, Johns Hopkins University
* Naomi Saphra, University of Edinburgh

'''Childcare Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure adequate childcare provisions to help researchers who are caregivers of children to attend the conference.''
* Khyathi Chandu, Carnegie Mellon University
* Stephen Mayhew, Duolingo

'''Financial Access Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure provision of financial access to researchers from underrepresented demographics and geographies to attend the conference.''
* Allyson Ettinger, University of Chicago
* Ryan Georgi, KPMG
* Tirthankar Ghosal, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Patna

'''Socio-cultural Inclusion Chairs'''
''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.''
* Shruti Palaskar, Carnegie Mellon University
* Maarten Sap, University of Washington

Kick-off meetings with all subcommittees took place in December before the winter holidays. Correspondence is mostly taking place on slack, alternatively by email.

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.

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.

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.

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.

8. We coordinated a room request across subcommittees, submitted to Priscilla as a spreadsheet, detailing space and furniture requirements for subcommittees’ activities.

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.

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.

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

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.

== Local Sponsorship Chairs ==

Hoifung Poon, Microsoft

Kristina Toutanova, Google

== Publication Chairs ==

Steven Bethard, University of Arizona

Ryan Cotterrell, University of Cambridge

Rui Yan, Peking University

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.

== Publicity Chair ==

Emily M. Bender, University of Washington

=== Dissemination ===

Durable accounts for the ACL meeting on Twitter and Facebook have been created:
* https://twitter.com/aclmeeting
* https://www.facebook.com/aclmeeting/

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)).

=== Next Steps ===

* Recruit co-chairs, especially to coordinate live-tweeting of the conference
* Contact local media for coverage
* 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

== Remote Presentation Chairs ==

Hao Fang, Microsoft Semantic Machines

Yi Luan, Google AI Language

== Sustainability Chairs ==

Ananya Ganesh, Educational Testing Service

Klaus Zechner, Educational Testing Service

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.
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.

== Website & Conference App Chairs ==

Sudha Rao, Microsoft Research, Redmond

Yizhe Zhang, Microsoft Research, Redmond

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. 
We are using the Whova event app for hosting the conference app this year similar to NAACL 2019.

== Business Office ==

Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL

2020Q1 Reports: ACL 2020

2020-03-03T01:25:13Z

Lianhuiq: /* Audio-Video Chairs */

== General Chair ==
Dan Jurafsky, Stanford University

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.

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).

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.

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).

Highlights include:
<ul>

<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.
<li> We received a record 3,429 submissions (~15% increase over ACL2019)
<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.
<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
that meant ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP. All tutorials and Workshops have been chosen and scheduled and announced.
<li> We're asking the Exec to approve our D&I budget.
<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.).
<li>
The committee found sections of the ACL Conference Handbook to be out of date and in some cases missing entirely.
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.
</ul>

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.

== Program Chairs ==
Joyce Chai, University of Michigan

Natalie Schluter, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Joel Tetreault, Dataminr, USA

---

'''New Initiatives This Year'''

'''''Earlier Submission Deadline and Notification'''''

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.

'''''Four New Tracks'''''

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.

'''''Extended Automatic COI Detection/Automatic Reviewer-Paper Assignment'''''

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.

'''''Mandatory Reviewer Duty and Recruitment'''''

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.
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,
(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.
To counterbalance (3ii), we provided SACs with a list of novice reviewers and introduced our a Reviewer Mentoring Program (see below).

'''''New Reviewer Mentoring Program'''''

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.

'''''Updated Review Form with New Rating Scale and Evaluation Item'''''

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'''''.
(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).
(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.

'''Other Efforts'''

'''''Initial submission reviews and desk rejects'''''

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.

'''''Manual adjustment of submission tracks'''''

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.

'''''Manual adjustment of AC and reviewer assignment'''''

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.

'''''Communication'''''

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.

'''Submission Status'''

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.
<ul>
<li> Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics: 49 39 88
<li> Computational Social Science and Social Media: 73 38 111
<li> Dialogue and Interactive Systems: 204 71 275
<li> Discourse and Pragmatics: 36 20 56
<li> Ethics and NLP: 30 22 52
<li> Generation: 142 71 213
<li> Information Extraction: 159 83 242
<li> Information Retrieval and Text Mining: 55 41 96
<li> Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP: 110 54 164
<li> Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond: 69 24 93
<li> Machine Learning for NLP: 186 109 295
<li> Machine Translation: 158 104 262
<li> NLP Applications: 169 99 268
<li> Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation: 38 15 53
<li> Question Answering: 109 63 172
<li> Resources and Evaluation: 88 48 136
<li> Semantics: Lexical: 57 37 94
<li> Semantics: Sentence Level: 66 29 95
<li> Semantics: Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics: 81 31 112
<li> Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining: 112 66 178
<li> Speech and Multimodality: 38 27 65
<li> Summarization: 90 37 127
<li> Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing: 47 28 75
<li> Theme: 67 26 93
<li> Theory and Formalism in NLP (Linguistic and Mathematical): 11 3 14
</ul>

'''Summary of Timelines'''

<ul>
<li>Oct 15 - Nov 30: SACs invite ACs and reviewers
<li>Nov 25: Reviewer profiles completed
<li>Dec 09: ACL Paper Submission Deadline (long and short papers)
<li>Dec 10 - Jan 14: initial submission reviews and desk rejects; automatic reviewer assignment and COI detection; manual adjustment of assignment;
<li>Jan 17 - Feb 07: Review Period
<li>Feb 08 - Feb 11: ACs chase late reviews
<li>Feb 12 - Feb 17: Author Response
<li>Feb 18 - Feb 25: Reviewer Discussion Period (ACs lead discussion), ACs provide feedback to mentees.
<li>Feb 25 - Mar 03: ACs produce meta-reviews
<li>Mar 03 - Mar 10: SACs rank papers based on meta-reviews and make recommendations to PC chairs
<li>Mar 11 - Apr 02: PC chairs make decisions (they may consult SACs during this time); SACs and ACs recommend best reviewers
<li>Apr 03 - Accept / Reject Notifications
<li>Apr 24: Camera ready
</ul>

'''List of SAC/ACs and recruitment'''

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.
'''''Recruitment''''': We individually created preference lists for SACs, discussed these and made decisions. ACs were selected by SACs.

Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics
<ul>
<li>SACs: Emily Prud’hommeaux
<li>ACs: Cassandra L. Jacobs, Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Masoud Rouhizadeh, Serguei Pakhomov, Yevgeni Berzak
</ul>

Computational Social Science and Social Media
<ul>
<li>SACs: Tim Baldwin, Nikolaos Aletras
<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
</ul>

Dialogue and Interactive Systems
<ul>
<li>SACs: Jason Williams, Mari Ostendorf
<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
</ul>

Discourse and Pragmatics
<ul>
<li>SACs: Annie Louis (taking over for Diane Litman)
<li>ACs: Chloé Braud, Junyi Jessy Li, Manfred Stede, Shafiq Joty, Sujian Li, Yangfeng Ji
</ul>

Ethics and NLP
<ul>
<li>SACs: Dirk Hovy
<li>ACs: Alan W Black, Emily M. Bender, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Yulia Tsvetkov
</ul>

Generation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Wei Xu, Alexander Rush
<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
</ul>

Information Extraction
<ul>
<li>SACs: Doug Downey, Hoifun Poon
<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
</ul>

Information Retrieval and Text Mining
<ul>
<li>SACs: Chin-Yew Lin, Nazli Goharian
<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
</ul>

Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP
<ul>
<li>SACs: Yoav Goldberg
<li>ACs: Adina Williams, Afra Alishahi, Douwe Kiela, Grzegorz Chrupała, Marco Baroni, Yonatan Belinkov, Zachary C. Lipton
</ul>

Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond
<ul>
<li>SACs: Yoav Artzi
<li>ACs: Angeliki Lazaridou, Dan Goldwasser, Jason Baldridge, Jesse Thomason, Lisa Anne Hendricks, Parisa Kordjamshidi, Raffaella Bernardi, Vicente Ordonez, Yonatan Bisk
</ul>

Machine Learning for NLP
<ul>
<li>SACs: Andre Martins, Isabelle Augenstein
<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
</ul>

Machine Translation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Marine Carpuat, Alexandra Birch
<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
</ul>

Multidisciplinary and Area Chair COI
<ul>
<li>SACs: Michael Strube
<li>ACs: Anders Søgaard, David Schlangen, Katrin Erk, Kentaro Inui, Kevin Duh, Massimo Poesio, Mausam, Pascal Denis
</ul>

NLP Applications
<ul>
<li>SACs: Preslav Nakov, Karin Verspoor
<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
</ul>

Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Kemal Oflazer
<li>ACs: Christo Kirov, David R. Mortensen, Kareem Darwish, Reut Tsarfaty, Yue Zhang, Özlem Çetinoğlu
</ul>

Question Answering
<ul>
<li>SACs: Eugene Agichtein, Alessandro Moschitti
<li>ACs: Avi Sil, Dina Demner-Fushman, Evangelos Kanoulas, Gerhard Weikum, Idan Szpektor, Jimmy Lin, Oleg Rokhlenko, Sanda Harabagiu, Wen-tau Yih, William Cohen
</ul>

Resources and Evaluation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Nathan Schneider, Barbara Plank
<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
</ul>

Semantics: Lexical
<ul>
<li>SACs: Ekaterina Shutova, Aline Villavicencio
<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
</ul>

Semantics: Sentence Level
<ul>
<li>SACs: Mohit Bansal
<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
</ul>

Semantics: Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics
<ul>
<li>SACs: Sam Bowman
<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
</ul>

Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
<ul>
<li>SACs: Smaranda Muresan, Swapna Somasundaran
<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
</ul>

Speech and Multimodality
<ul>
<li>SACs: Eric Fosler-Lussier
<li>ACs: Bhuvana Ramabhadran, Florian Metze, Gerasimos Potamianos, Hamid Palangi, Martha Larson
</ul>

Summarization
<ul>
<li>SACs: Fei Liu
<li>ACs: Caiming Xiong, Giuseppe Carenini, Katja Markert, Manabu Okumura, Michael Elhadad, Ramesh Nallapati, Sebastian Gehrmann, Wenjie Li, Xiaodan Zhu, Yang Gao
</ul>

Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing
<ul>
<li>SACs: David Chiang
<li>ACs: Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez, Emily Pitler, Liang Huang, Miguel Ballesteros, Miryam de Lhoneux, Slav Petrov, Stephan Oepen, Weiwei Sun
</ul>

THEME
<ul>
<li>SACs: Marilyn Walker (taking over for Ellen Riloff)
<li>ACs: Donia Scott, Johan Bos, Luke Zettlemoyer, Philipp Koehn, Raymond Mooney
</ul>

Theory and Formalism in NLP (Linguistic and Mathematical)
<ul>
<li>SACs: Daniel Gildea
<li>ACs: Alexander Koller, Laura Kallmeyer, Marco Kuhlmann
</ul>

== Local Organisation Chairs ==
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL

With advice from:

Jianfeng Gao, Microsoft Research

Luke Zettlemoyer, University of Washington

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:

• 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

• I have already negotiated a very reduced internet quote, with PSAV charging a 1-day rate for all 6 days of the conference

• 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.

• 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.

• I am working with the company who builds the registration form to get that started

• 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.

• 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.

• In March, I will begin merging all quotes and estimates into a working budget which will be used to set registration fees.

• 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.

• Luke has found some suggested places for our Recognition Dinner; we are working on making a final decision

• Luke and/or his students are beginning to pull together a Restaurant Guide for the app, website and handbook.

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.
I expect the next month or two will be extremely busy in setting all plans in place and opening registration.

== Tutorial Chairs ==

Agata Savary, University of Tours, France

Yue Zhang, Westlake University, Hangzhou, China

The call, submission, reviewing and selection of tutorials was coordinated jointly for 4 conferences: ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP.

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):
* 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
* a [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Tutorial_chair_handbook tutorial chair handbook]

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.

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:

'''Review Committee'''
* Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne, Australia) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Daniel Beck (University of Melbourne, Australia) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair
* Emily M. Bender (University of Washington, WA, USA)
* Erik Cambria (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
* Gaël Dias (University of Caen Normandie, France)
* Stefan Evert (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)
* Yang Liu (Tsinghua University, Beijing, China)
* Agata Savary (University of Tours, France) - ACL 2020 tutorial chair
* João Sedoc (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA)
* Lucia Specia (Sheffield University, UK) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair
* Xu SUN (Peking University, China)
* Yulia Tsvetkov (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA)
* Benjamin Van Durme (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Aline Villavicencio (University of Sheffield, UK and Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Taro Watanabe (Google, Inc., Tokyo, Japan)
* Aaron Steven White (University of Rochester, NY, USA)
* Fei Xia (University of Washington, WA, USA) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Yue Zhang (Westlake University, Hangzhou, China) - ACL 2020 tutorial chair
* Meishan Zhang (Tianjin University, China)

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.
We accepted 31 proposals.

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.

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.

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):

'''Morning Tutorials'''

'''T1: Interpretability and Analysis in Neural NLP''' (cutting-edge) 
Yonatan Belinkov, Sebastian Gehrmann and Ellie Pavlick 
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. 
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. 
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.

'''T2: Multi-modal Information Extraction from Text, Semi-structured, and Tabular Data on the Web''' (cutting-edge) 
Xin Luna Dong, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Colin Lockard and Prashant Shiralkar 
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. 
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. 
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.

'''T3: Reviewing Natural Language Processing Research''' (introductory) 
Kevin Cohen, Karën Fort, Margot Mieskes and Aurélie Névéol 
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.

'''T4: Stylized Text Generation: Approaches and Applications''' (cutting-edge) 
Lili Mou and Olga Vechtomova 
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).

'''Afternoon Tutorials'''

'''T5: Achieving Common Ground in Multi-modal Dialogue''' (cutting-edge) 
Malihe Alikhani and Matthew Stone 
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.

'''T6: Commonsense Reasoning for Natural Language Processing''' (introductory) 
Maarten Sap, Vered Shwartz, Antoine Bosselut, Dan Roth and Yejin Choi 
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.

'''T7: Integrating Ethics into the NLP Curriculum''' (introductory) 
Emily M. Bender, Dirk Hovy and Alexandra Schofield 
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. 
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.

'''T8: Recent Advances in Open-Domain Question Answering''' (cutting-edge) 
Danqi Chen and Scott Wen-tau Yih 
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. 
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. 
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.

== Workshop Chairs ==

Milica Gašić, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf

Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Amazon Alexa AI

Ves Stoyanov, Facebook AI

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.

The workshops will be held on July 5th, 9th and 10th.

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.

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.

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.

First choice allocation was particularly difficult, as 54% of the workshops indicated ACL as their first choice, see details below.

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.

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.

Details on venue preference out of 95 submissions:

First choice:

54% (51 w) ACL 2020
25% (24 w) COLING 2020
16% (15 w) EMNLP-IJCNLP 2020
4% (4 w) AACL-IJCNLP 2020
1% (1 w) No Preference

Second choice:

51% (46 w) EMNLP 2020
19% (19 w) ACL 2020
15% (15 w) COLING 2020
11% (11 w) No Preference
4% (4 w) AACL-IJCNLP 2020

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/

'''Two day workshop (9th and 10th July):'''

*International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT).
**Marcello Federico, Alexander Waibel, Jiatao Gu, Kevin Knight, Will Lewis, Satoshi Nakamura, Hermann Ney, Jan Niehues, Sebastian Stüker and Marco Turchi

'''Workshop to be held on 5th July:'''

*''The Fourth Widening NLP Workshop focuses on efforts to promote and support ideas and voices of underrepresented groups in Natural Language Processing.''
**Samira Shaikh, Rossana da Cunha Silva, Ann Clifton, Erika Doggett and Ryan Georgi

'''Workshops to be held on 9th July:'''

*''NLP for Conversational AI''
**Tsung-Hsien Wen, Asli Celikyilmaz, IÃ±igo Casanueva, Mihail Eric, Anuj Kumar, Alexandros Papangelis, Rushin Shah and Zhou Yu

*T''he Fourth Widening NLP Workshop (WiNLP 2020)''
**Samira Shaikh, Rossana da Cunha Silva, Ann Clifton, Erika Doggett and Ryan Georgi

*''BioNLP 2020''
**Dina Demner-Fushman, Kevin Cohen, Sophia Ananiadou and Jun'ichi Tsujii

*''The third workshop on Fact Extraction and VERification''
**Christos Christodoulopoulos, James Thorne, Andreas Vlachos, Oana Cocarascu and Arpit Mittal

*''IWPT 2020: The 16th International Conference on Parsing Technologies''
**Yuji Matsumoto, Stephan Oepen, Kenji Sagae, Anders SÃ¸gaard, Weiwei Sun and Reut Tsarfaty

*''2nd Workshop on Figurative Language Processing''
**Beata Beigman Klebanov, Ekaterina Shutova, Patricia Lichtenstein, Smaranda Muresan, Anna Feldman, Chee Wee (Ben) Leong and Debanjan Ghosh

*''The 1st Joint Workshop on Narrative Understanding, Storylines, and Events (NUSE)''
**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

*''Workshop on Advances in Language and Vision Research''
**Xin Wang, Jesse Thomason, Ronghang Hu, Xinlei Chen, Peter Anderson, Qi Wu, Asli Celikyilmaz, Jason Baldridge and William Yang Wang

*''5th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP-2020)''
**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

'''Workshops to be held on 10th July:
'''

*''Natural Language Interfaces: Challenges and Promises''
**Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Yu Su, Huan Sun and Scott Wen-tau Yih

*''The 4th Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation (WNGT)''
**Alexandra Birch, Graham Neubig, Andrew Finch, Hiroaki Hayashi, Kenneth Heafield, Ioannis Konstas, Yusuke Oda and Xian Li

*''The 15th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA15)''
**Ekaterina Kochmar, Jill Burstein, Claudia Leacock, Nitin Madnani, Ildiko Pilan, Helen Yannakoudakis and Torsten Zesch

*''SIGMORPHON 2020''
**Garrett Nicolai and Kyle Gorman

*''NLP for Medical Conversations''
**Parminder Bhatia, Chaitanya Shivade, Mona Diab, byron wallace, Rashmi Gangadharaiah, nan du, Izhak Shafran and Steven Lin

*''The Second Workshop on e-Commerce and NLP (ECNLP 2)''
**Shervin Malmasi, Eugene Agichtein, Oleg Rokhlenko, Nicola Ueffing and Ido Guy

*''Eighth International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media (SocialNLP 2020)''
**Lun-Wei Ku and Cheng-Te Li

*''The First Workshop on Simultaneous Translation (AutoSimTrans)''
**Hua Wu, Colin Cherry, Jiatao Gu, Liang Huang, Zhongjun He, Mark Liberman and Yang Liu

*''Second Grand-Challenge and Workshop on Human Multimodal Language (Challenge-HML)''
**AmirAli Bagher Zadeh, Louis-Philippe Morency, Paul Pu Liang, Soujanya Poria and Ying Shen

== Student Research Workshop Chairs and Faculty Advisors==

'''Student Research Workshop Co-chairs'''

Rotem Dror, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

Jiangming Liu, The University of Edinburgh

Shruti Rijhwani, Carnegie Mellon University

'''Student Research Workshop Faculty Advisors'''

Omri Abend, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Sujian Li, Peking University

Zhou Yu, University of California, Davis

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).

'''Pre-submission Mentoring Phase (completed mid-February 2020)'''

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.

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.

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.

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.

'''Main submission'''

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.

Submission deadlines for the SRW are as follows:

* Paper submission deadline: March 6, 2020

* Review deadline: April 10, 2020

* Acceptance notification: April 15, 2020

* Camera-ready deadline: May 6, 2020

* Travel grant application deadline: to be decided.

* Travel grant notification: to be decided.

We also plan to have a post-acceptance mentoring process, for all papers accepted to the SRW.

'''Funding'''

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.

== Audio-Video Chairs ==

Hamid Palangi, Microsoft Research, Redmond

Lianhui Qin, University of Washington

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: contains:
* Providing all the staff/equipment to perform the recording. This includes main conference & tutorials only, workshops should purchase the recording service by themselves.
* Post-processing the video content.
* Putting videos and slides side by side on the platform.
* Making the videos available open-source.

We are also looking for live-streaming for the plenary talks.

== Conference Handbook Chair ==

Nanyun Peng, University of Southern California

== Demo Chairs ==

Asli Celikyilmaz, Microsoft Research, Redmond

Shawn Wen, PolyAI

'''Details of Activities''':

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.

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.

The deadline for submissions was January 31, 2020.

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.

'''Important Dates'''

Paper submission deadline: Friday, January 31st, 2020

Notification of acceptance: Friday, April 3rd, 2020

Camera-ready submission: Friday, April 24th, 2020

== Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs ==

Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Rochester Institute of Technology

Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Google

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:
* Task title
* Interfaces (recommendations for whom to communicate with to address the task)
* Sub tasks (an enumerated list of sub task descriptions)
* Timeline (when to begin)
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.

2. For communication and teamwork, we set up:
* An ACL 2020 D&I slack channel, facilitating keeping records of interactions.
* A Google folder with designated subfolders for D&I subcommittees
* An ACL 2020 D&I chairs google groups email handle: <acl2020-diversity-inclusion-chairs@googlegroups.com>

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.

'''Academic Inclusion Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure the venue is welcoming to researchers from diverse subdisciplines, conducive to building academic networks across disciplines and career stages.''
* Aakanksha Naik, Carnegie Mellon University
* Emily Prud’hommeaux, Boston College
* Alla Rozovskaya, Queens College (City University of New York)

'''Accessibility Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure the venue is accessible for researchers with any disability, including provision of requested access services.''
* Sushant Kafle, Google/Rochester Institute of Technology
* Masoud Rouhizadeh, Johns Hopkins University
* Naomi Saphra, University of Edinburgh

'''Childcare Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure adequate childcare provisions to help researchers who are caregivers of children to attend the conference.''
* Khyathi Chandu, Carnegie Mellon University
* Stephen Mayhew, Duolingo

'''Financial Access Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure provision of financial access to researchers from underrepresented demographics and geographies to attend the conference.''
* Allyson Ettinger, University of Chicago
* Ryan Georgi, KPMG
* Tirthankar Ghosal, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Patna

'''Socio-cultural Inclusion Chairs'''
''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.''
* Shruti Palaskar, Carnegie Mellon University
* Maarten Sap, University of Washington

Kick-off meetings with all subcommittees took place in December before the winter holidays. Correspondence is mostly taking place on slack, alternatively by email.

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.

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.

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.

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.

8. We coordinated a room request across subcommittees, submitted to Priscilla as a spreadsheet, detailing space and furniture requirements for subcommittees’ activities.

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.

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.

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

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.

== Local Sponsorship Chairs ==

Hoifung Poon, Microsoft

Kristina Toutanova, Google

== Publication Chairs ==

Steven Bethard, University of Arizona

Ryan Cotterrell, University of Cambridge

Rui Yan, Peking University

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.

== Publicity Chair ==

Emily M. Bender, University of Washington

=== Dissemination ===

Durable accounts for the ACL meeting on Twitter and Facebook have been created:
* https://twitter.com/aclmeeting
* https://www.facebook.com/aclmeeting/

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)).

=== Next Steps ===

* Recruit co-chairs, especially to coordinate live-tweeting of the conference
* Contact local media for coverage
* 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

== Remote Presentation Chairs ==

Hao Fang, Microsoft Semantic Machines

Yi Luan, Google AI Language

== Sustainability Chairs ==

Ananya Ganesh, Educational Testing Service

Klaus Zechner, Educational Testing Service

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.
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.

== Website & Conference App Chairs ==

Sudha Rao, Microsoft Research, Redmond

Yizhe Zhang, Microsoft Research, Redmond

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. 
We are using the Whova event app for hosting the conference app this year similar to NAACL 2019.

== Business Office ==

Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL

2020Q1 Reports: ACL 2020

2020-03-03T01:23:55Z

Lianhuiq: /* Audio-Video Chairs */

== General Chair ==
Dan Jurafsky, Stanford University

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.

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).

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.

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).

Highlights include:
<ul>

<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.
<li> We received a record 3,429 submissions (~15% increase over ACL2019)
<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.
<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
that meant ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP. All tutorials and Workshops have been chosen and scheduled and announced.
<li> We're asking the Exec to approve our D&I budget.
<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.).
<li>
The committee found sections of the ACL Conference Handbook to be out of date and in some cases missing entirely.
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.
</ul>

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.

== Program Chairs ==
Joyce Chai, University of Michigan

Natalie Schluter, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Joel Tetreault, Dataminr, USA

---

'''New Initiatives This Year'''

'''''Earlier Submission Deadline and Notification'''''

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.

'''''Four New Tracks'''''

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.

'''''Extended Automatic COI Detection/Automatic Reviewer-Paper Assignment'''''

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.

'''''Mandatory Reviewer Duty and Recruitment'''''

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.
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,
(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.
To counterbalance (3ii), we provided SACs with a list of novice reviewers and introduced our a Reviewer Mentoring Program (see below).

'''''New Reviewer Mentoring Program'''''

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.

'''''Updated Review Form with New Rating Scale and Evaluation Item'''''

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'''''.
(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).
(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.

'''Other Efforts'''

'''''Initial submission reviews and desk rejects'''''

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.

'''''Manual adjustment of submission tracks'''''

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.

'''''Manual adjustment of AC and reviewer assignment'''''

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.

'''''Communication'''''

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.

'''Submission Status'''

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.
<ul>
<li> Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics: 49 39 88
<li> Computational Social Science and Social Media: 73 38 111
<li> Dialogue and Interactive Systems: 204 71 275
<li> Discourse and Pragmatics: 36 20 56
<li> Ethics and NLP: 30 22 52
<li> Generation: 142 71 213
<li> Information Extraction: 159 83 242
<li> Information Retrieval and Text Mining: 55 41 96
<li> Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP: 110 54 164
<li> Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond: 69 24 93
<li> Machine Learning for NLP: 186 109 295
<li> Machine Translation: 158 104 262
<li> NLP Applications: 169 99 268
<li> Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation: 38 15 53
<li> Question Answering: 109 63 172
<li> Resources and Evaluation: 88 48 136
<li> Semantics: Lexical: 57 37 94
<li> Semantics: Sentence Level: 66 29 95
<li> Semantics: Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics: 81 31 112
<li> Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining: 112 66 178
<li> Speech and Multimodality: 38 27 65
<li> Summarization: 90 37 127
<li> Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing: 47 28 75
<li> Theme: 67 26 93
<li> Theory and Formalism in NLP (Linguistic and Mathematical): 11 3 14
</ul>

'''Summary of Timelines'''

<ul>
<li>Oct 15 - Nov 30: SACs invite ACs and reviewers
<li>Nov 25: Reviewer profiles completed
<li>Dec 09: ACL Paper Submission Deadline (long and short papers)
<li>Dec 10 - Jan 14: initial submission reviews and desk rejects; automatic reviewer assignment and COI detection; manual adjustment of assignment;
<li>Jan 17 - Feb 07: Review Period
<li>Feb 08 - Feb 11: ACs chase late reviews
<li>Feb 12 - Feb 17: Author Response
<li>Feb 18 - Feb 25: Reviewer Discussion Period (ACs lead discussion), ACs provide feedback to mentees.
<li>Feb 25 - Mar 03: ACs produce meta-reviews
<li>Mar 03 - Mar 10: SACs rank papers based on meta-reviews and make recommendations to PC chairs
<li>Mar 11 - Apr 02: PC chairs make decisions (they may consult SACs during this time); SACs and ACs recommend best reviewers
<li>Apr 03 - Accept / Reject Notifications
<li>Apr 24: Camera ready
</ul>

'''List of SAC/ACs and recruitment'''

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.
'''''Recruitment''''': We individually created preference lists for SACs, discussed these and made decisions. ACs were selected by SACs.

Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics
<ul>
<li>SACs: Emily Prud’hommeaux
<li>ACs: Cassandra L. Jacobs, Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Masoud Rouhizadeh, Serguei Pakhomov, Yevgeni Berzak
</ul>

Computational Social Science and Social Media
<ul>
<li>SACs: Tim Baldwin, Nikolaos Aletras
<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
</ul>

Dialogue and Interactive Systems
<ul>
<li>SACs: Jason Williams, Mari Ostendorf
<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
</ul>

Discourse and Pragmatics
<ul>
<li>SACs: Annie Louis (taking over for Diane Litman)
<li>ACs: Chloé Braud, Junyi Jessy Li, Manfred Stede, Shafiq Joty, Sujian Li, Yangfeng Ji
</ul>

Ethics and NLP
<ul>
<li>SACs: Dirk Hovy
<li>ACs: Alan W Black, Emily M. Bender, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Yulia Tsvetkov
</ul>

Generation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Wei Xu, Alexander Rush
<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
</ul>

Information Extraction
<ul>
<li>SACs: Doug Downey, Hoifun Poon
<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
</ul>

Information Retrieval and Text Mining
<ul>
<li>SACs: Chin-Yew Lin, Nazli Goharian
<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
</ul>

Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP
<ul>
<li>SACs: Yoav Goldberg
<li>ACs: Adina Williams, Afra Alishahi, Douwe Kiela, Grzegorz Chrupała, Marco Baroni, Yonatan Belinkov, Zachary C. Lipton
</ul>

Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond
<ul>
<li>SACs: Yoav Artzi
<li>ACs: Angeliki Lazaridou, Dan Goldwasser, Jason Baldridge, Jesse Thomason, Lisa Anne Hendricks, Parisa Kordjamshidi, Raffaella Bernardi, Vicente Ordonez, Yonatan Bisk
</ul>

Machine Learning for NLP
<ul>
<li>SACs: Andre Martins, Isabelle Augenstein
<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
</ul>

Machine Translation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Marine Carpuat, Alexandra Birch
<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
</ul>

Multidisciplinary and Area Chair COI
<ul>
<li>SACs: Michael Strube
<li>ACs: Anders Søgaard, David Schlangen, Katrin Erk, Kentaro Inui, Kevin Duh, Massimo Poesio, Mausam, Pascal Denis
</ul>

NLP Applications
<ul>
<li>SACs: Preslav Nakov, Karin Verspoor
<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
</ul>

Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Kemal Oflazer
<li>ACs: Christo Kirov, David R. Mortensen, Kareem Darwish, Reut Tsarfaty, Yue Zhang, Özlem Çetinoğlu
</ul>

Question Answering
<ul>
<li>SACs: Eugene Agichtein, Alessandro Moschitti
<li>ACs: Avi Sil, Dina Demner-Fushman, Evangelos Kanoulas, Gerhard Weikum, Idan Szpektor, Jimmy Lin, Oleg Rokhlenko, Sanda Harabagiu, Wen-tau Yih, William Cohen
</ul>

Resources and Evaluation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Nathan Schneider, Barbara Plank
<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
</ul>

Semantics: Lexical
<ul>
<li>SACs: Ekaterina Shutova, Aline Villavicencio
<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
</ul>

Semantics: Sentence Level
<ul>
<li>SACs: Mohit Bansal
<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
</ul>

Semantics: Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics
<ul>
<li>SACs: Sam Bowman
<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
</ul>

Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
<ul>
<li>SACs: Smaranda Muresan, Swapna Somasundaran
<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
</ul>

Speech and Multimodality
<ul>
<li>SACs: Eric Fosler-Lussier
<li>ACs: Bhuvana Ramabhadran, Florian Metze, Gerasimos Potamianos, Hamid Palangi, Martha Larson
</ul>

Summarization
<ul>
<li>SACs: Fei Liu
<li>ACs: Caiming Xiong, Giuseppe Carenini, Katja Markert, Manabu Okumura, Michael Elhadad, Ramesh Nallapati, Sebastian Gehrmann, Wenjie Li, Xiaodan Zhu, Yang Gao
</ul>

Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing
<ul>
<li>SACs: David Chiang
<li>ACs: Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez, Emily Pitler, Liang Huang, Miguel Ballesteros, Miryam de Lhoneux, Slav Petrov, Stephan Oepen, Weiwei Sun
</ul>

THEME
<ul>
<li>SACs: Marilyn Walker (taking over for Ellen Riloff)
<li>ACs: Donia Scott, Johan Bos, Luke Zettlemoyer, Philipp Koehn, Raymond Mooney
</ul>

Theory and Formalism in NLP (Linguistic and Mathematical)
<ul>
<li>SACs: Daniel Gildea
<li>ACs: Alexander Koller, Laura Kallmeyer, Marco Kuhlmann
</ul>

== Local Organisation Chairs ==
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL

With advice from:

Jianfeng Gao, Microsoft Research

Luke Zettlemoyer, University of Washington

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:

• 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

• I have already negotiated a very reduced internet quote, with PSAV charging a 1-day rate for all 6 days of the conference

• 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.

• 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.

• I am working with the company who builds the registration form to get that started

• 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.

• 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.

• In March, I will begin merging all quotes and estimates into a working budget which will be used to set registration fees.

• 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.

• Luke has found some suggested places for our Recognition Dinner; we are working on making a final decision

• Luke and/or his students are beginning to pull together a Restaurant Guide for the app, website and handbook.

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.
I expect the next month or two will be extremely busy in setting all plans in place and opening registration.

== Tutorial Chairs ==

Agata Savary, University of Tours, France

Yue Zhang, Westlake University, Hangzhou, China

The call, submission, reviewing and selection of tutorials was coordinated jointly for 4 conferences: ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP.

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):
* 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
* a [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Tutorial_chair_handbook tutorial chair handbook]

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.

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:

'''Review Committee'''
* Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne, Australia) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Daniel Beck (University of Melbourne, Australia) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair
* Emily M. Bender (University of Washington, WA, USA)
* Erik Cambria (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
* Gaël Dias (University of Caen Normandie, France)
* Stefan Evert (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)
* Yang Liu (Tsinghua University, Beijing, China)
* Agata Savary (University of Tours, France) - ACL 2020 tutorial chair
* João Sedoc (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA)
* Lucia Specia (Sheffield University, UK) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair
* Xu SUN (Peking University, China)
* Yulia Tsvetkov (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA)
* Benjamin Van Durme (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Aline Villavicencio (University of Sheffield, UK and Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Taro Watanabe (Google, Inc., Tokyo, Japan)
* Aaron Steven White (University of Rochester, NY, USA)
* Fei Xia (University of Washington, WA, USA) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Yue Zhang (Westlake University, Hangzhou, China) - ACL 2020 tutorial chair
* Meishan Zhang (Tianjin University, China)

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.
We accepted 31 proposals.

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.

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.

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):

'''Morning Tutorials'''

'''T1: Interpretability and Analysis in Neural NLP''' (cutting-edge) 
Yonatan Belinkov, Sebastian Gehrmann and Ellie Pavlick 
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. 
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. 
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.

'''T2: Multi-modal Information Extraction from Text, Semi-structured, and Tabular Data on the Web''' (cutting-edge) 
Xin Luna Dong, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Colin Lockard and Prashant Shiralkar 
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. 
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. 
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.

'''T3: Reviewing Natural Language Processing Research''' (introductory) 
Kevin Cohen, Karën Fort, Margot Mieskes and Aurélie Névéol 
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.

'''T4: Stylized Text Generation: Approaches and Applications''' (cutting-edge) 
Lili Mou and Olga Vechtomova 
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).

'''Afternoon Tutorials'''

'''T5: Achieving Common Ground in Multi-modal Dialogue''' (cutting-edge) 
Malihe Alikhani and Matthew Stone 
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.

'''T6: Commonsense Reasoning for Natural Language Processing''' (introductory) 
Maarten Sap, Vered Shwartz, Antoine Bosselut, Dan Roth and Yejin Choi 
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.

'''T7: Integrating Ethics into the NLP Curriculum''' (introductory) 
Emily M. Bender, Dirk Hovy and Alexandra Schofield 
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. 
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.

'''T8: Recent Advances in Open-Domain Question Answering''' (cutting-edge) 
Danqi Chen and Scott Wen-tau Yih 
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. 
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. 
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.

== Workshop Chairs ==

Milica Gašić, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf

Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Amazon Alexa AI

Ves Stoyanov, Facebook AI

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.

The workshops will be held on July 5th, 9th and 10th.

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.

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.

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.

First choice allocation was particularly difficult, as 54% of the workshops indicated ACL as their first choice, see details below.

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.

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.

Details on venue preference out of 95 submissions:

First choice:

54% (51 w) ACL 2020
25% (24 w) COLING 2020
16% (15 w) EMNLP-IJCNLP 2020
4% (4 w) AACL-IJCNLP 2020
1% (1 w) No Preference

Second choice:

51% (46 w) EMNLP 2020
19% (19 w) ACL 2020
15% (15 w) COLING 2020
11% (11 w) No Preference
4% (4 w) AACL-IJCNLP 2020

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/

'''Two day workshop (9th and 10th July):'''

*International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT).
**Marcello Federico, Alexander Waibel, Jiatao Gu, Kevin Knight, Will Lewis, Satoshi Nakamura, Hermann Ney, Jan Niehues, Sebastian Stüker and Marco Turchi

'''Workshop to be held on 5th July:'''

*''The Fourth Widening NLP Workshop focuses on efforts to promote and support ideas and voices of underrepresented groups in Natural Language Processing.''
**Samira Shaikh, Rossana da Cunha Silva, Ann Clifton, Erika Doggett and Ryan Georgi

'''Workshops to be held on 9th July:'''

*''NLP for Conversational AI''
**Tsung-Hsien Wen, Asli Celikyilmaz, IÃ±igo Casanueva, Mihail Eric, Anuj Kumar, Alexandros Papangelis, Rushin Shah and Zhou Yu

*T''he Fourth Widening NLP Workshop (WiNLP 2020)''
**Samira Shaikh, Rossana da Cunha Silva, Ann Clifton, Erika Doggett and Ryan Georgi

*''BioNLP 2020''
**Dina Demner-Fushman, Kevin Cohen, Sophia Ananiadou and Jun'ichi Tsujii

*''The third workshop on Fact Extraction and VERification''
**Christos Christodoulopoulos, James Thorne, Andreas Vlachos, Oana Cocarascu and Arpit Mittal

*''IWPT 2020: The 16th International Conference on Parsing Technologies''
**Yuji Matsumoto, Stephan Oepen, Kenji Sagae, Anders SÃ¸gaard, Weiwei Sun and Reut Tsarfaty

*''2nd Workshop on Figurative Language Processing''
**Beata Beigman Klebanov, Ekaterina Shutova, Patricia Lichtenstein, Smaranda Muresan, Anna Feldman, Chee Wee (Ben) Leong and Debanjan Ghosh

*''The 1st Joint Workshop on Narrative Understanding, Storylines, and Events (NUSE)''
**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

*''Workshop on Advances in Language and Vision Research''
**Xin Wang, Jesse Thomason, Ronghang Hu, Xinlei Chen, Peter Anderson, Qi Wu, Asli Celikyilmaz, Jason Baldridge and William Yang Wang

*''5th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP-2020)''
**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

'''Workshops to be held on 10th July:
'''

*''Natural Language Interfaces: Challenges and Promises''
**Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Yu Su, Huan Sun and Scott Wen-tau Yih

*''The 4th Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation (WNGT)''
**Alexandra Birch, Graham Neubig, Andrew Finch, Hiroaki Hayashi, Kenneth Heafield, Ioannis Konstas, Yusuke Oda and Xian Li

*''The 15th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA15)''
**Ekaterina Kochmar, Jill Burstein, Claudia Leacock, Nitin Madnani, Ildiko Pilan, Helen Yannakoudakis and Torsten Zesch

*''SIGMORPHON 2020''
**Garrett Nicolai and Kyle Gorman

*''NLP for Medical Conversations''
**Parminder Bhatia, Chaitanya Shivade, Mona Diab, byron wallace, Rashmi Gangadharaiah, nan du, Izhak Shafran and Steven Lin

*''The Second Workshop on e-Commerce and NLP (ECNLP 2)''
**Shervin Malmasi, Eugene Agichtein, Oleg Rokhlenko, Nicola Ueffing and Ido Guy

*''Eighth International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media (SocialNLP 2020)''
**Lun-Wei Ku and Cheng-Te Li

*''The First Workshop on Simultaneous Translation (AutoSimTrans)''
**Hua Wu, Colin Cherry, Jiatao Gu, Liang Huang, Zhongjun He, Mark Liberman and Yang Liu

*''Second Grand-Challenge and Workshop on Human Multimodal Language (Challenge-HML)''
**AmirAli Bagher Zadeh, Louis-Philippe Morency, Paul Pu Liang, Soujanya Poria and Ying Shen

== Student Research Workshop Chairs and Faculty Advisors==

'''Student Research Workshop Co-chairs'''

Rotem Dror, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

Jiangming Liu, The University of Edinburgh

Shruti Rijhwani, Carnegie Mellon University

'''Student Research Workshop Faculty Advisors'''

Omri Abend, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Sujian Li, Peking University

Zhou Yu, University of California, Davis

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).

'''Pre-submission Mentoring Phase (completed mid-February 2020)'''

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.

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.

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.

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.

'''Main submission'''

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.

Submission deadlines for the SRW are as follows:

* Paper submission deadline: March 6, 2020

* Review deadline: April 10, 2020

* Acceptance notification: April 15, 2020

* Camera-ready deadline: May 6, 2020

* Travel grant application deadline: to be decided.

* Travel grant notification: to be decided.

We also plan to have a post-acceptance mentoring process, for all papers accepted to the SRW.

'''Funding'''

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.

== Audio-Video Chairs ==

Hamid Palangi, Microsoft Research, Redmond

Lianhui Qin, University of Washington

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:
1. Providing all the staff/equipment to perform the recording. This includes main conference & tutorials only, workshops should purchase the recording service by themselves.
2. Post-processing the video content.
3. Putting videos and slides side by side on the platform.
4. Making the videos available open-source.

We are also looking for live-streaming for the plenary talks.

== Conference Handbook Chair ==

Nanyun Peng, University of Southern California

== Demo Chairs ==

Asli Celikyilmaz, Microsoft Research, Redmond

Shawn Wen, PolyAI

'''Details of Activities''':

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.

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.

The deadline for submissions was January 31, 2020.

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.

'''Important Dates'''

Paper submission deadline: Friday, January 31st, 2020

Notification of acceptance: Friday, April 3rd, 2020

Camera-ready submission: Friday, April 24th, 2020

== Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs ==

Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Rochester Institute of Technology

Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Google

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:
* Task title
* Interfaces (recommendations for whom to communicate with to address the task)
* Sub tasks (an enumerated list of sub task descriptions)
* Timeline (when to begin)
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.

2. For communication and teamwork, we set up:
* An ACL 2020 D&I slack channel, facilitating keeping records of interactions.
* A Google folder with designated subfolders for D&I subcommittees
* An ACL 2020 D&I chairs google groups email handle: <acl2020-diversity-inclusion-chairs@googlegroups.com>

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.

'''Academic Inclusion Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure the venue is welcoming to researchers from diverse subdisciplines, conducive to building academic networks across disciplines and career stages.''
* Aakanksha Naik, Carnegie Mellon University
* Emily Prud’hommeaux, Boston College
* Alla Rozovskaya, Queens College (City University of New York)

'''Accessibility Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure the venue is accessible for researchers with any disability, including provision of requested access services.''
* Sushant Kafle, Google/Rochester Institute of Technology
* Masoud Rouhizadeh, Johns Hopkins University
* Naomi Saphra, University of Edinburgh

'''Childcare Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure adequate childcare provisions to help researchers who are caregivers of children to attend the conference.''
* Khyathi Chandu, Carnegie Mellon University
* Stephen Mayhew, Duolingo

'''Financial Access Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure provision of financial access to researchers from underrepresented demographics and geographies to attend the conference.''
* Allyson Ettinger, University of Chicago
* Ryan Georgi, KPMG
* Tirthankar Ghosal, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Patna

'''Socio-cultural Inclusion Chairs'''
''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.''
* Shruti Palaskar, Carnegie Mellon University
* Maarten Sap, University of Washington

Kick-off meetings with all subcommittees took place in December before the winter holidays. Correspondence is mostly taking place on slack, alternatively by email.

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.

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.

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.

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.

8. We coordinated a room request across subcommittees, submitted to Priscilla as a spreadsheet, detailing space and furniture requirements for subcommittees’ activities.

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.

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.

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

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.

== Local Sponsorship Chairs ==

Hoifung Poon, Microsoft

Kristina Toutanova, Google

== Publication Chairs ==

Steven Bethard, University of Arizona

Ryan Cotterrell, University of Cambridge

Rui Yan, Peking University

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.

== Publicity Chair ==

Emily M. Bender, University of Washington

=== Dissemination ===

Durable accounts for the ACL meeting on Twitter and Facebook have been created:
* https://twitter.com/aclmeeting
* https://www.facebook.com/aclmeeting/

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)).

=== Next Steps ===

* Recruit co-chairs, especially to coordinate live-tweeting of the conference
* Contact local media for coverage
* 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

== Remote Presentation Chairs ==

Hao Fang, Microsoft Semantic Machines

Yi Luan, Google AI Language

== Sustainability Chairs ==

Ananya Ganesh, Educational Testing Service

Klaus Zechner, Educational Testing Service

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.
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.

== Website & Conference App Chairs ==

Sudha Rao, Microsoft Research, Redmond

Yizhe Zhang, Microsoft Research, Redmond

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. 
We are using the Whova event app for hosting the conference app this year similar to NAACL 2019.

== Business Office ==

Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL

2020Q1 Reports: ACL 2020

2020-03-02T20:30:21Z

Lianhuiq: /* Audio-Video Chairs */

== General Chair ==
Dan Jurafsky, Stanford University

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.

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).

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.

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).

Highlights include:
<ul>

<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.
<li> We received a record 3,429 submissions (~15% increase over ACL2019)
<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.
<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
that meant ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP. All tutorials and Workshops have been chosen and scheduled and announced.
<li> We're asking the Exec to approve our D&I budget.
<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.).
<li>
The committee found sections of the ACL Conference Handbook to be out of date and in some cases missing entirely.
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.
</ul>

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.

== Program Chairs ==
Joyce Chai, University of Michigan

Natalie Schluter, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Joel Tetreault, Dataminr, USA

---

'''New Initiatives This Year'''

'''''Earlier Submission Deadline and Notification'''''

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.

'''''Four New Tracks'''''

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.

'''''Extended Automatic COI Detection/Automatic Reviewer-Paper Assignment'''''

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.

'''''Mandatory Reviewer Duty and Recruitment'''''

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.
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,
(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.
To counterbalance (3ii), we provided SACs with a list of novice reviewers and introduced our a Reviewer Mentoring Program (see below).

'''''New Reviewer Mentoring Program'''''

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.

'''''Updated Review Form with New Rating Scale and Evaluation Item'''''

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'''''.
(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).
(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.

'''Other Efforts'''

'''''Initial submission reviews and desk rejects'''''

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.

'''''Manual adjustment of submission tracks'''''

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.

'''''Manual adjustment of AC and reviewer assignment'''''

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.

'''''Communication'''''

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.

'''Submission Status'''

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.
<ul>
<li> Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics: 49 39 88
<li> Computational Social Science and Social Media: 73 38 111
<li> Dialogue and Interactive Systems: 204 71 275
<li> Discourse and Pragmatics: 36 20 56
<li> Ethics and NLP: 30 22 52
<li> Generation: 142 71 213
<li> Information Extraction: 159 83 242
<li> Information Retrieval and Text Mining: 55 41 96
<li> Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP: 110 54 164
<li> Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond: 69 24 93
<li> Machine Learning for NLP: 186 109 295
<li> Machine Translation: 158 104 262
<li> NLP Applications: 169 99 268
<li> Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation: 38 15 53
<li> Question Answering: 109 63 172
<li> Resources and Evaluation: 88 48 136
<li> Semantics: Lexical: 57 37 94
<li> Semantics: Sentence Level: 66 29 95
<li> Semantics: Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics: 81 31 112
<li> Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining: 112 66 178
<li> Speech and Multimodality: 38 27 65
<li> Summarization: 90 37 127
<li> Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing: 47 28 75
<li> Theme: 67 26 93
<li> Theory and Formalism in NLP (Linguistic and Mathematical): 11 3 14
</ul>

'''Summary of Timelines'''

<ul>
<li>Oct 15 - Nov 30: SACs invite ACs and reviewers
<li>Nov 25: Reviewer profiles completed
<li>Dec 09: ACL Paper Submission Deadline (long and short papers)
<li>Dec 10 - Jan 14: initial submission reviews and desk rejects; automatic reviewer assignment and COI detection; manual adjustment of assignment;
<li>Jan 17 - Feb 07: Review Period
<li>Feb 08 - Feb 11: ACs chase late reviews
<li>Feb 12 - Feb 17: Author Response
<li>Feb 18 - Feb 25: Reviewer Discussion Period (ACs lead discussion), ACs provide feedback to mentees.
<li>Feb 25 - Mar 03: ACs produce meta-reviews
<li>Mar 03 - Mar 10: SACs rank papers based on meta-reviews and make recommendations to PC chairs
<li>Mar 11 - Apr 02: PC chairs make decisions (they may consult SACs during this time); SACs and ACs recommend best reviewers
<li>Apr 03 - Accept / Reject Notifications
<li>Apr 24: Camera ready
</ul>

'''List of SAC/ACs and recruitment'''

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.
'''''Recruitment''''': We individually created preference lists for SACs, discussed these and made decisions. ACs were selected by SACs.

Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics
<ul>
<li>SACs: Emily Prud’hommeaux
<li>ACs: Cassandra L. Jacobs, Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Masoud Rouhizadeh, Serguei Pakhomov, Yevgeni Berzak
</ul>

Computational Social Science and Social Media
<ul>
<li>SACs: Tim Baldwin, Nikolaos Aletras
<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
</ul>

Dialogue and Interactive Systems
<ul>
<li>SACs: Jason Williams, Mari Ostendorf
<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
</ul>

Discourse and Pragmatics
<ul>
<li>SACs: Annie Louis (taking over for Diane Litman)
<li>ACs: Chloé Braud, Junyi Jessy Li, Manfred Stede, Shafiq Joty, Sujian Li, Yangfeng Ji
</ul>

Ethics and NLP
<ul>
<li>SACs: Dirk Hovy
<li>ACs: Alan W Black, Emily M. Bender, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Yulia Tsvetkov
</ul>

Generation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Wei Xu, Alexander Rush
<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
</ul>

Information Extraction
<ul>
<li>SACs: Doug Downey, Hoifun Poon
<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
</ul>

Information Retrieval and Text Mining
<ul>
<li>SACs: Chin-Yew Lin, Nazli Goharian
<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
</ul>

Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP
<ul>
<li>SACs: Yoav Goldberg
<li>ACs: Adina Williams, Afra Alishahi, Douwe Kiela, Grzegorz Chrupała, Marco Baroni, Yonatan Belinkov, Zachary C. Lipton
</ul>

Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond
<ul>
<li>SACs: Yoav Artzi
<li>ACs: Angeliki Lazaridou, Dan Goldwasser, Jason Baldridge, Jesse Thomason, Lisa Anne Hendricks, Parisa Kordjamshidi, Raffaella Bernardi, Vicente Ordonez, Yonatan Bisk
</ul>

Machine Learning for NLP
<ul>
<li>SACs: Andre Martins, Isabelle Augenstein
<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
</ul>

Machine Translation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Marine Carpuat, Alexandra Birch
<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
</ul>

Multidisciplinary and Area Chair COI
<ul>
<li>SACs: Michael Strube
<li>ACs: Anders Søgaard, David Schlangen, Katrin Erk, Kentaro Inui, Kevin Duh, Massimo Poesio, Mausam, Pascal Denis
</ul>

NLP Applications
<ul>
<li>SACs: Preslav Nakov, Karin Verspoor
<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
</ul>

Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Kemal Oflazer
<li>ACs: Christo Kirov, David R. Mortensen, Kareem Darwish, Reut Tsarfaty, Yue Zhang, Özlem Çetinoğlu
</ul>

Question Answering
<ul>
<li>SACs: Eugene Agichtein, Alessandro Moschitti
<li>ACs: Avi Sil, Dina Demner-Fushman, Evangelos Kanoulas, Gerhard Weikum, Idan Szpektor, Jimmy Lin, Oleg Rokhlenko, Sanda Harabagiu, Wen-tau Yih, William Cohen
</ul>

Resources and Evaluation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Nathan Schneider, Barbara Plank
<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
</ul>

Semantics: Lexical
<ul>
<li>SACs: Ekaterina Shutova, Aline Villavicencio
<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
</ul>

Semantics: Sentence Level
<ul>
<li>SACs: Mohit Bansal
<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
</ul>

Semantics: Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics
<ul>
<li>SACs: Sam Bowman
<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
</ul>

Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
<ul>
<li>SACs: Smaranda Muresan, Swapna Somasundaran
<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
</ul>

Speech and Multimodality
<ul>
<li>SACs: Eric Fosler-Lussier
<li>ACs: Bhuvana Ramabhadran, Florian Metze, Gerasimos Potamianos, Hamid Palangi, Martha Larson
</ul>

Summarization
<ul>
<li>SACs: Fei Liu
<li>ACs: Caiming Xiong, Giuseppe Carenini, Katja Markert, Manabu Okumura, Michael Elhadad, Ramesh Nallapati, Sebastian Gehrmann, Wenjie Li, Xiaodan Zhu, Yang Gao
</ul>

Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing
<ul>
<li>SACs: David Chiang
<li>ACs: Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez, Emily Pitler, Liang Huang, Miguel Ballesteros, Miryam de Lhoneux, Slav Petrov, Stephan Oepen, Weiwei Sun
</ul>

THEME
<ul>
<li>SACs: Marilyn Walker (taking over for Ellen Riloff)
<li>ACs: Donia Scott, Johan Bos, Luke Zettlemoyer, Philipp Koehn, Raymond Mooney
</ul>

Theory and Formalism in NLP (Linguistic and Mathematical)
<ul>
<li>SACs: Daniel Gildea
<li>ACs: Alexander Koller, Laura Kallmeyer, Marco Kuhlmann
</ul>

== Local Organisation Chairs ==
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL

With advice from:

Jianfeng Gao, Microsoft Research

Luke Zettlemoyer, University of Washington

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:

• 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

• I have already negotiated a very reduced internet quote, with PSAV charging a 1-day rate for all 6 days of the conference

• 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.

• 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.

• I am working with the company who builds the registration form to get that started

• 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.

• 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.

• In March, I will begin merging all quotes and estimates into a working budget which will be used to set registration fees.

• 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.

• Luke has found some suggested places for our Recognition Dinner; we are working on making a final decision

• Luke and/or his students are beginning to pull together a Restaurant Guide for the app, website and handbook.

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.
I expect the next month or two will be extremely busy in setting all plans in place and opening registration.

== Tutorial Chairs ==

Agata Savary, University of Tours, France

Yue Zhang, Westlake University, Hangzhou, China

The call, submission, reviewing and selection of tutorials was coordinated jointly for 4 conferences: ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP.

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):
* 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
* a [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Tutorial_chair_handbook tutorial chair handbook]

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.

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:

'''Review Committee'''
* Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne, Australia) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Daniel Beck (University of Melbourne, Australia) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair
* Emily M. Bender (University of Washington, WA, USA)
* Erik Cambria (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
* Gaël Dias (University of Caen Normandie, France)
* Stefan Evert (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)
* Yang Liu (Tsinghua University, Beijing, China)
* Agata Savary (University of Tours, France) - ACL 2020 tutorial chair
* João Sedoc (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA)
* Lucia Specia (Sheffield University, UK) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair
* Xu SUN (Peking University, China)
* Yulia Tsvetkov (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA)
* Benjamin Van Durme (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Aline Villavicencio (University of Sheffield, UK and Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Taro Watanabe (Google, Inc., Tokyo, Japan)
* Aaron Steven White (University of Rochester, NY, USA)
* Fei Xia (University of Washington, WA, USA) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Yue Zhang (Westlake University, Hangzhou, China) - ACL 2020 tutorial chair
* Meishan Zhang (Tianjin University, China)

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.
We accepted 31 proposals.

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.

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.

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):

'''Morning Tutorials'''

'''T1: Interpretability and Analysis in Neural NLP''' (cutting-edge) 
Yonatan Belinkov, Sebastian Gehrmann and Ellie Pavlick 
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. 
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. 
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.

'''T2: Multi-modal Information Extraction from Text, Semi-structured, and Tabular Data on the Web''' (cutting-edge) 
Xin Luna Dong, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Colin Lockard and Prashant Shiralkar 
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. 
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. 
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.

'''T3: Reviewing Natural Language Processing Research''' (introductory) 
Kevin Cohen, Karën Fort, Margot Mieskes and Aurélie Névéol 
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.

'''T4: Stylized Text Generation: Approaches and Applications''' (cutting-edge) 
Lili Mou and Olga Vechtomova 
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).

'''Afternoon Tutorials'''

'''T5: Achieving Common Ground in Multi-modal Dialogue''' (cutting-edge) 
Malihe Alikhani and Matthew Stone 
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.

'''T6: Commonsense Reasoning for Natural Language Processing''' (introductory) 
Maarten Sap, Vered Shwartz, Antoine Bosselut, Dan Roth and Yejin Choi 
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.

'''T7: Integrating Ethics into the NLP Curriculum''' (introductory) 
Emily M. Bender, Dirk Hovy and Alexandra Schofield 
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. 
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.

'''T8: Recent Advances in Open-Domain Question Answering''' (cutting-edge) 
Danqi Chen and Scott Wen-tau Yih 
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. 
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. 
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.

== Workshop Chairs ==

Milica Gašić, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf

Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Amazon Alexa AI

Ves Stoyanov, Facebook AI

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.

The workshops will be held on July 5th, 9th and 10th.

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.

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.

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.

First choice allocation was particularly difficult, as 54% of the workshops indicated ACL as their first choice, see details below.

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.

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.

Details on venue preference out of 95 submissions:

First choice:

54% (51 w) ACL 2020
25% (24 w) COLING 2020
16% (15 w) EMNLP-IJCNLP 2020
4% (4 w) AACL-IJCNLP 2020
1% (1 w) No Preference

Second choice:

51% (46 w) EMNLP 2020
19% (19 w) ACL 2020
15% (15 w) COLING 2020
11% (11 w) No Preference
4% (4 w) AACL-IJCNLP 2020

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/

'''Two day workshop (9th and 10th July):'''

*International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT).
**Marcello Federico, Alexander Waibel, Jiatao Gu, Kevin Knight, Will Lewis, Satoshi Nakamura, Hermann Ney, Jan Niehues, Sebastian Stüker and Marco Turchi

'''Workshop to be held on 5th July:'''

*''The Fourth Widening NLP Workshop focuses on efforts to promote and support ideas and voices of underrepresented groups in Natural Language Processing.''
**Samira Shaikh, Rossana da Cunha Silva, Ann Clifton, Erika Doggett and Ryan Georgi

'''Workshops to be held on 9th July:'''

*''NLP for Conversational AI''
**Tsung-Hsien Wen, Asli Celikyilmaz, IÃ±igo Casanueva, Mihail Eric, Anuj Kumar, Alexandros Papangelis, Rushin Shah and Zhou Yu

*T''he Fourth Widening NLP Workshop (WiNLP 2020)''
**Samira Shaikh, Rossana da Cunha Silva, Ann Clifton, Erika Doggett and Ryan Georgi

*''BioNLP 2020''
**Dina Demner-Fushman, Kevin Cohen, Sophia Ananiadou and Jun'ichi Tsujii

*''The third workshop on Fact Extraction and VERification''
**Christos Christodoulopoulos, James Thorne, Andreas Vlachos, Oana Cocarascu and Arpit Mittal

*''IWPT 2020: The 16th International Conference on Parsing Technologies''
**Yuji Matsumoto, Stephan Oepen, Kenji Sagae, Anders SÃ¸gaard, Weiwei Sun and Reut Tsarfaty

*''2nd Workshop on Figurative Language Processing''
**Beata Beigman Klebanov, Ekaterina Shutova, Patricia Lichtenstein, Smaranda Muresan, Anna Feldman, Chee Wee (Ben) Leong and Debanjan Ghosh

*''The 1st Joint Workshop on Narrative Understanding, Storylines, and Events (NUSE)''
**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

*''Workshop on Advances in Language and Vision Research''
**Xin Wang, Jesse Thomason, Ronghang Hu, Xinlei Chen, Peter Anderson, Qi Wu, Asli Celikyilmaz, Jason Baldridge and William Yang Wang

*''5th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP-2020)''
**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

'''Workshops to be held on 10th July:
'''

*''Natural Language Interfaces: Challenges and Promises''
**Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Yu Su, Huan Sun and Scott Wen-tau Yih

*''The 4th Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation (WNGT)''
**Alexandra Birch, Graham Neubig, Andrew Finch, Hiroaki Hayashi, Kenneth Heafield, Ioannis Konstas, Yusuke Oda and Xian Li

*''The 15th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA15)''
**Ekaterina Kochmar, Jill Burstein, Claudia Leacock, Nitin Madnani, Ildiko Pilan, Helen Yannakoudakis and Torsten Zesch

*''SIGMORPHON 2020''
**Garrett Nicolai and Kyle Gorman

*''NLP for Medical Conversations''
**Parminder Bhatia, Chaitanya Shivade, Mona Diab, byron wallace, Rashmi Gangadharaiah, nan du, Izhak Shafran and Steven Lin

*''The Second Workshop on e-Commerce and NLP (ECNLP 2)''
**Shervin Malmasi, Eugene Agichtein, Oleg Rokhlenko, Nicola Ueffing and Ido Guy

*''Eighth International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media (SocialNLP 2020)''
**Lun-Wei Ku and Cheng-Te Li

*''The First Workshop on Simultaneous Translation (AutoSimTrans)''
**Hua Wu, Colin Cherry, Jiatao Gu, Liang Huang, Zhongjun He, Mark Liberman and Yang Liu

*''Second Grand-Challenge and Workshop on Human Multimodal Language (Challenge-HML)''
**AmirAli Bagher Zadeh, Louis-Philippe Morency, Paul Pu Liang, Soujanya Poria and Ying Shen

== Student Research Workshop Chairs and Faculty Advisors==

'''Student Research Workshop Co-chairs'''

Rotem Dror, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

Jiangming Liu, The University of Edinburgh

Shruti Rijhwani, Carnegie Mellon University

'''Student Research Workshop Faculty Advisors'''

Omri Abend, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Sujian Li, Peking University

Zhou Yu, University of California, Davis

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).

'''Pre-submission Mentoring Phase (completed mid-February 2020)'''

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.

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.

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.

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.

'''Main submission'''

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.

Submission deadlines for the SRW are as follows:

* Paper submission deadline: March 6, 2020

* Review deadline: April 10, 2020

* Acceptance notification: April 15, 2020

* Camera-ready deadline: May 6, 2020

* Travel grant application deadline: to be decided.

* Travel grant notification: to be decided.

We also plan to have a post-acceptance mentoring process, for all papers accepted to the SRW.

'''Funding'''

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.

== Audio-Video Chairs ==

Hamid Palangi, Microsoft Research, Redmond

Lianhui Qin, University of Washington

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:

1. Providing all the staff/equipment to perform the recording. This includes main conference & tutorials only, workshops should purchase the recording service by themselves.
2. Post-processing the video content.
3. Putting videos and slides side by side on the platform.
4. Making the videos available open-source.

We are also looking for live-streaming for the plenary talks.

== Conference Handbook Chair ==

Nanyun Peng, University of Southern California

== Demo Chairs ==

Asli Celikyilmaz, Microsoft Research, Redmond

Shawn Wen, PolyAI

'''Details of Activities''':

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.

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.

The deadline for submissions was January 31, 2020.

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.

'''Important Dates'''

Paper submission deadline: Friday, January 31st, 2020

Notification of acceptance: Friday, April 3rd, 2020

Camera-ready submission: Friday, April 24th, 2020

== Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs ==

Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Rochester Institute of Technology

Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Google

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:
* Task title
* Interfaces (recommendations for whom to communicate with to address the task)
* Sub tasks (an enumerated list of sub task descriptions)
* Timeline (when to begin)
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.

2. For communication and teamwork, we set up:
* An ACL 2020 D&I slack channel, facilitating keeping records of interactions.
* A Google folder with designated subfolders for D&I subcommittees
* An ACL 2020 D&I chairs google groups email handle: <acl2020-diversity-inclusion-chairs@googlegroups.com>

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.

'''Academic Inclusion Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure the venue is welcoming to researchers from diverse subdisciplines, conducive to building academic networks across disciplines and career stages.''
* Aakanksha Naik, Carnegie Mellon University
* Emily Prud’hommeaux, Boston College
* Alla Rozovskaya, Queens College (City University of New York)

'''Accessibility Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure the venue is accessible for researchers with any disability, including provision of requested access services.''
* Sushant Kafle, Google/Rochester Institute of Technology
* Masoud Rouhizadeh, Johns Hopkins University
* Naomi Saphra, University of Edinburgh

'''Childcare Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure adequate childcare provisions to help researchers who are caregivers of children to attend the conference.''
* Khyathi Chandu, Carnegie Mellon University
* Stephen Mayhew, Duolingo

'''Financial Access Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure provision of financial access to researchers from underrepresented demographics and geographies to attend the conference.''
* Allyson Ettinger, University of Chicago
* Ryan Georgi, KPMG
* Tirthankar Ghosal, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Patna

'''Socio-cultural Inclusion Chairs'''
''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.''
* Shruti Palaskar, Carnegie Mellon University
* Maarten Sap, University of Washington

Kick-off meetings with all subcommittees took place in December before the winter holidays. Correspondence is mostly taking place on slack, alternatively by email.

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.

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.

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.

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.

8. We coordinated a room request across subcommittees, submitted to Priscilla as a spreadsheet, detailing space and furniture requirements for subcommittees’ activities.

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.

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.

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

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.

== Local Sponsorship Chairs ==

Hoifung Poon, Microsoft

Kristina Toutanova, Google

== Publication Chairs ==

Steven Bethard, University of Arizona

Ryan Cotterrell, University of Cambridge

Rui Yan, Peking University

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.

== Publicity Chair ==

Emily M. Bender, University of Washington

=== Dissemination ===

Durable accounts for the ACL meeting on Twitter and Facebook have been created:
* https://twitter.com/aclmeeting
* https://www.facebook.com/aclmeeting/

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)).

=== Next Steps ===

* Recruit co-chairs, especially to coordinate live-tweeting of the conference
* Contact local media for coverage
* 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

== Remote Presentation Chairs ==

Hao Fang, Microsoft Semantic Machines

Yi Luan, Google AI Language

== Sustainability Chairs ==

Ananya Ganesh, Educational Testing Service

Klaus Zechner, Educational Testing Service

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.
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.

== Website & Conference App Chairs ==

Sudha Rao, Microsoft Research, Redmond

Yizhe Zhang, Microsoft Research, Redmond

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. 
We are using the Whova event app for hosting the conference app this year similar to NAACL 2019.

== Business Office ==

Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL

2020Q1 Reports: ACL 2020

2020-03-02T20:29:57Z

Lianhuiq: /* Audio-Video Chairs */

== General Chair ==
Dan Jurafsky, Stanford University

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.

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).

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.

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).

Highlights include:
<ul>

<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.
<li> We received a record 3,429 submissions (~15% increase over ACL2019)
<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.
<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
that meant ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP. All tutorials and Workshops have been chosen and scheduled and announced.
<li> We're asking the Exec to approve our D&I budget.
<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.).
<li>
The committee found sections of the ACL Conference Handbook to be out of date and in some cases missing entirely.
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.
</ul>

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.

== Program Chairs ==
Joyce Chai, University of Michigan

Natalie Schluter, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Joel Tetreault, Dataminr, USA

---

'''New Initiatives This Year'''

'''''Earlier Submission Deadline and Notification'''''

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.

'''''Four New Tracks'''''

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.

'''''Extended Automatic COI Detection/Automatic Reviewer-Paper Assignment'''''

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.

'''''Mandatory Reviewer Duty and Recruitment'''''

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.
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,
(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.
To counterbalance (3ii), we provided SACs with a list of novice reviewers and introduced our a Reviewer Mentoring Program (see below).

'''''New Reviewer Mentoring Program'''''

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.

'''''Updated Review Form with New Rating Scale and Evaluation Item'''''

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'''''.
(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).
(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.

'''Other Efforts'''

'''''Initial submission reviews and desk rejects'''''

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.

'''''Manual adjustment of submission tracks'''''

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.

'''''Manual adjustment of AC and reviewer assignment'''''

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.

'''''Communication'''''

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.

'''Submission Status'''

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.
<ul>
<li> Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics: 49 39 88
<li> Computational Social Science and Social Media: 73 38 111
<li> Dialogue and Interactive Systems: 204 71 275
<li> Discourse and Pragmatics: 36 20 56
<li> Ethics and NLP: 30 22 52
<li> Generation: 142 71 213
<li> Information Extraction: 159 83 242
<li> Information Retrieval and Text Mining: 55 41 96
<li> Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP: 110 54 164
<li> Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond: 69 24 93
<li> Machine Learning for NLP: 186 109 295
<li> Machine Translation: 158 104 262
<li> NLP Applications: 169 99 268
<li> Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation: 38 15 53
<li> Question Answering: 109 63 172
<li> Resources and Evaluation: 88 48 136
<li> Semantics: Lexical: 57 37 94
<li> Semantics: Sentence Level: 66 29 95
<li> Semantics: Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics: 81 31 112
<li> Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining: 112 66 178
<li> Speech and Multimodality: 38 27 65
<li> Summarization: 90 37 127
<li> Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing: 47 28 75
<li> Theme: 67 26 93
<li> Theory and Formalism in NLP (Linguistic and Mathematical): 11 3 14
</ul>

'''Summary of Timelines'''

<ul>
<li>Oct 15 - Nov 30: SACs invite ACs and reviewers
<li>Nov 25: Reviewer profiles completed
<li>Dec 09: ACL Paper Submission Deadline (long and short papers)
<li>Dec 10 - Jan 14: initial submission reviews and desk rejects; automatic reviewer assignment and COI detection; manual adjustment of assignment;
<li>Jan 17 - Feb 07: Review Period
<li>Feb 08 - Feb 11: ACs chase late reviews
<li>Feb 12 - Feb 17: Author Response
<li>Feb 18 - Feb 25: Reviewer Discussion Period (ACs lead discussion), ACs provide feedback to mentees.
<li>Feb 25 - Mar 03: ACs produce meta-reviews
<li>Mar 03 - Mar 10: SACs rank papers based on meta-reviews and make recommendations to PC chairs
<li>Mar 11 - Apr 02: PC chairs make decisions (they may consult SACs during this time); SACs and ACs recommend best reviewers
<li>Apr 03 - Accept / Reject Notifications
<li>Apr 24: Camera ready
</ul>

'''List of SAC/ACs and recruitment'''

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.
'''''Recruitment''''': We individually created preference lists for SACs, discussed these and made decisions. ACs were selected by SACs.

Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics
<ul>
<li>SACs: Emily Prud’hommeaux
<li>ACs: Cassandra L. Jacobs, Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Masoud Rouhizadeh, Serguei Pakhomov, Yevgeni Berzak
</ul>

Computational Social Science and Social Media
<ul>
<li>SACs: Tim Baldwin, Nikolaos Aletras
<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
</ul>

Dialogue and Interactive Systems
<ul>
<li>SACs: Jason Williams, Mari Ostendorf
<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
</ul>

Discourse and Pragmatics
<ul>
<li>SACs: Annie Louis (taking over for Diane Litman)
<li>ACs: Chloé Braud, Junyi Jessy Li, Manfred Stede, Shafiq Joty, Sujian Li, Yangfeng Ji
</ul>

Ethics and NLP
<ul>
<li>SACs: Dirk Hovy
<li>ACs: Alan W Black, Emily M. Bender, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Yulia Tsvetkov
</ul>

Generation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Wei Xu, Alexander Rush
<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
</ul>

Information Extraction
<ul>
<li>SACs: Doug Downey, Hoifun Poon
<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
</ul>

Information Retrieval and Text Mining
<ul>
<li>SACs: Chin-Yew Lin, Nazli Goharian
<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
</ul>

Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP
<ul>
<li>SACs: Yoav Goldberg
<li>ACs: Adina Williams, Afra Alishahi, Douwe Kiela, Grzegorz Chrupała, Marco Baroni, Yonatan Belinkov, Zachary C. Lipton
</ul>

Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond
<ul>
<li>SACs: Yoav Artzi
<li>ACs: Angeliki Lazaridou, Dan Goldwasser, Jason Baldridge, Jesse Thomason, Lisa Anne Hendricks, Parisa Kordjamshidi, Raffaella Bernardi, Vicente Ordonez, Yonatan Bisk
</ul>

Machine Learning for NLP
<ul>
<li>SACs: Andre Martins, Isabelle Augenstein
<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
</ul>

Machine Translation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Marine Carpuat, Alexandra Birch
<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
</ul>

Multidisciplinary and Area Chair COI
<ul>
<li>SACs: Michael Strube
<li>ACs: Anders Søgaard, David Schlangen, Katrin Erk, Kentaro Inui, Kevin Duh, Massimo Poesio, Mausam, Pascal Denis
</ul>

NLP Applications
<ul>
<li>SACs: Preslav Nakov, Karin Verspoor
<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
</ul>

Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Kemal Oflazer
<li>ACs: Christo Kirov, David R. Mortensen, Kareem Darwish, Reut Tsarfaty, Yue Zhang, Özlem Çetinoğlu
</ul>

Question Answering
<ul>
<li>SACs: Eugene Agichtein, Alessandro Moschitti
<li>ACs: Avi Sil, Dina Demner-Fushman, Evangelos Kanoulas, Gerhard Weikum, Idan Szpektor, Jimmy Lin, Oleg Rokhlenko, Sanda Harabagiu, Wen-tau Yih, William Cohen
</ul>

Resources and Evaluation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Nathan Schneider, Barbara Plank
<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
</ul>

Semantics: Lexical
<ul>
<li>SACs: Ekaterina Shutova, Aline Villavicencio
<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
</ul>

Semantics: Sentence Level
<ul>
<li>SACs: Mohit Bansal
<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
</ul>

Semantics: Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics
<ul>
<li>SACs: Sam Bowman
<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
</ul>

Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
<ul>
<li>SACs: Smaranda Muresan, Swapna Somasundaran
<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
</ul>

Speech and Multimodality
<ul>
<li>SACs: Eric Fosler-Lussier
<li>ACs: Bhuvana Ramabhadran, Florian Metze, Gerasimos Potamianos, Hamid Palangi, Martha Larson
</ul>

Summarization
<ul>
<li>SACs: Fei Liu
<li>ACs: Caiming Xiong, Giuseppe Carenini, Katja Markert, Manabu Okumura, Michael Elhadad, Ramesh Nallapati, Sebastian Gehrmann, Wenjie Li, Xiaodan Zhu, Yang Gao
</ul>

Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing
<ul>
<li>SACs: David Chiang
<li>ACs: Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez, Emily Pitler, Liang Huang, Miguel Ballesteros, Miryam de Lhoneux, Slav Petrov, Stephan Oepen, Weiwei Sun
</ul>

THEME
<ul>
<li>SACs: Marilyn Walker (taking over for Ellen Riloff)
<li>ACs: Donia Scott, Johan Bos, Luke Zettlemoyer, Philipp Koehn, Raymond Mooney
</ul>

Theory and Formalism in NLP (Linguistic and Mathematical)
<ul>
<li>SACs: Daniel Gildea
<li>ACs: Alexander Koller, Laura Kallmeyer, Marco Kuhlmann
</ul>

== Local Organisation Chairs ==
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL

With advice from:

Jianfeng Gao, Microsoft Research

Luke Zettlemoyer, University of Washington

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:

• 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

• I have already negotiated a very reduced internet quote, with PSAV charging a 1-day rate for all 6 days of the conference

• 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.

• 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.

• I am working with the company who builds the registration form to get that started

• 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.

• 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.

• In March, I will begin merging all quotes and estimates into a working budget which will be used to set registration fees.

• 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.

• Luke has found some suggested places for our Recognition Dinner; we are working on making a final decision

• Luke and/or his students are beginning to pull together a Restaurant Guide for the app, website and handbook.

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.
I expect the next month or two will be extremely busy in setting all plans in place and opening registration.

== Tutorial Chairs ==

Agata Savary, University of Tours, France

Yue Zhang, Westlake University, Hangzhou, China

The call, submission, reviewing and selection of tutorials was coordinated jointly for 4 conferences: ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP.

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):
* 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
* a [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Tutorial_chair_handbook tutorial chair handbook]

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.

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:

'''Review Committee'''
* Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne, Australia) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Daniel Beck (University of Melbourne, Australia) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair
* Emily M. Bender (University of Washington, WA, USA)
* Erik Cambria (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
* Gaël Dias (University of Caen Normandie, France)
* Stefan Evert (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)
* Yang Liu (Tsinghua University, Beijing, China)
* Agata Savary (University of Tours, France) - ACL 2020 tutorial chair
* João Sedoc (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA)
* Lucia Specia (Sheffield University, UK) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair
* Xu SUN (Peking University, China)
* Yulia Tsvetkov (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA)
* Benjamin Van Durme (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Aline Villavicencio (University of Sheffield, UK and Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Taro Watanabe (Google, Inc., Tokyo, Japan)
* Aaron Steven White (University of Rochester, NY, USA)
* Fei Xia (University of Washington, WA, USA) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Yue Zhang (Westlake University, Hangzhou, China) - ACL 2020 tutorial chair
* Meishan Zhang (Tianjin University, China)

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.
We accepted 31 proposals.

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.

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.

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):

'''Morning Tutorials'''

'''T1: Interpretability and Analysis in Neural NLP''' (cutting-edge) 
Yonatan Belinkov, Sebastian Gehrmann and Ellie Pavlick 
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. 
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. 
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.

'''T2: Multi-modal Information Extraction from Text, Semi-structured, and Tabular Data on the Web''' (cutting-edge) 
Xin Luna Dong, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Colin Lockard and Prashant Shiralkar 
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. 
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. 
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.

'''T3: Reviewing Natural Language Processing Research''' (introductory) 
Kevin Cohen, Karën Fort, Margot Mieskes and Aurélie Névéol 
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.

'''T4: Stylized Text Generation: Approaches and Applications''' (cutting-edge) 
Lili Mou and Olga Vechtomova 
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).

'''Afternoon Tutorials'''

'''T5: Achieving Common Ground in Multi-modal Dialogue''' (cutting-edge) 
Malihe Alikhani and Matthew Stone 
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.

'''T6: Commonsense Reasoning for Natural Language Processing''' (introductory) 
Maarten Sap, Vered Shwartz, Antoine Bosselut, Dan Roth and Yejin Choi 
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.

'''T7: Integrating Ethics into the NLP Curriculum''' (introductory) 
Emily M. Bender, Dirk Hovy and Alexandra Schofield 
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. 
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.

'''T8: Recent Advances in Open-Domain Question Answering''' (cutting-edge) 
Danqi Chen and Scott Wen-tau Yih 
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. 
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. 
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.

== Workshop Chairs ==

Milica Gašić, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf

Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Amazon Alexa AI

Ves Stoyanov, Facebook AI

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.

The workshops will be held on July 5th, 9th and 10th.

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.

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.

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.

First choice allocation was particularly difficult, as 54% of the workshops indicated ACL as their first choice, see details below.

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.

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.

Details on venue preference out of 95 submissions:

First choice:

54% (51 w) ACL 2020
25% (24 w) COLING 2020
16% (15 w) EMNLP-IJCNLP 2020
4% (4 w) AACL-IJCNLP 2020
1% (1 w) No Preference

Second choice:

51% (46 w) EMNLP 2020
19% (19 w) ACL 2020
15% (15 w) COLING 2020
11% (11 w) No Preference
4% (4 w) AACL-IJCNLP 2020

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/

'''Two day workshop (9th and 10th July):'''

*International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT).
**Marcello Federico, Alexander Waibel, Jiatao Gu, Kevin Knight, Will Lewis, Satoshi Nakamura, Hermann Ney, Jan Niehues, Sebastian Stüker and Marco Turchi

'''Workshop to be held on 5th July:'''

*''The Fourth Widening NLP Workshop focuses on efforts to promote and support ideas and voices of underrepresented groups in Natural Language Processing.''
**Samira Shaikh, Rossana da Cunha Silva, Ann Clifton, Erika Doggett and Ryan Georgi

'''Workshops to be held on 9th July:'''

*''NLP for Conversational AI''
**Tsung-Hsien Wen, Asli Celikyilmaz, IÃ±igo Casanueva, Mihail Eric, Anuj Kumar, Alexandros Papangelis, Rushin Shah and Zhou Yu

*T''he Fourth Widening NLP Workshop (WiNLP 2020)''
**Samira Shaikh, Rossana da Cunha Silva, Ann Clifton, Erika Doggett and Ryan Georgi

*''BioNLP 2020''
**Dina Demner-Fushman, Kevin Cohen, Sophia Ananiadou and Jun'ichi Tsujii

*''The third workshop on Fact Extraction and VERification''
**Christos Christodoulopoulos, James Thorne, Andreas Vlachos, Oana Cocarascu and Arpit Mittal

*''IWPT 2020: The 16th International Conference on Parsing Technologies''
**Yuji Matsumoto, Stephan Oepen, Kenji Sagae, Anders SÃ¸gaard, Weiwei Sun and Reut Tsarfaty

*''2nd Workshop on Figurative Language Processing''
**Beata Beigman Klebanov, Ekaterina Shutova, Patricia Lichtenstein, Smaranda Muresan, Anna Feldman, Chee Wee (Ben) Leong and Debanjan Ghosh

*''The 1st Joint Workshop on Narrative Understanding, Storylines, and Events (NUSE)''
**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

*''Workshop on Advances in Language and Vision Research''
**Xin Wang, Jesse Thomason, Ronghang Hu, Xinlei Chen, Peter Anderson, Qi Wu, Asli Celikyilmaz, Jason Baldridge and William Yang Wang

*''5th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP-2020)''
**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

'''Workshops to be held on 10th July:
'''

*''Natural Language Interfaces: Challenges and Promises''
**Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Yu Su, Huan Sun and Scott Wen-tau Yih

*''The 4th Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation (WNGT)''
**Alexandra Birch, Graham Neubig, Andrew Finch, Hiroaki Hayashi, Kenneth Heafield, Ioannis Konstas, Yusuke Oda and Xian Li

*''The 15th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA15)''
**Ekaterina Kochmar, Jill Burstein, Claudia Leacock, Nitin Madnani, Ildiko Pilan, Helen Yannakoudakis and Torsten Zesch

*''SIGMORPHON 2020''
**Garrett Nicolai and Kyle Gorman

*''NLP for Medical Conversations''
**Parminder Bhatia, Chaitanya Shivade, Mona Diab, byron wallace, Rashmi Gangadharaiah, nan du, Izhak Shafran and Steven Lin

*''The Second Workshop on e-Commerce and NLP (ECNLP 2)''
**Shervin Malmasi, Eugene Agichtein, Oleg Rokhlenko, Nicola Ueffing and Ido Guy

*''Eighth International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media (SocialNLP 2020)''
**Lun-Wei Ku and Cheng-Te Li

*''The First Workshop on Simultaneous Translation (AutoSimTrans)''
**Hua Wu, Colin Cherry, Jiatao Gu, Liang Huang, Zhongjun He, Mark Liberman and Yang Liu

*''Second Grand-Challenge and Workshop on Human Multimodal Language (Challenge-HML)''
**AmirAli Bagher Zadeh, Louis-Philippe Morency, Paul Pu Liang, Soujanya Poria and Ying Shen

== Student Research Workshop Chairs and Faculty Advisors==

'''Student Research Workshop Co-chairs'''

Rotem Dror, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

Jiangming Liu, The University of Edinburgh

Shruti Rijhwani, Carnegie Mellon University

'''Student Research Workshop Faculty Advisors'''

Omri Abend, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Sujian Li, Peking University

Zhou Yu, University of California, Davis

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).

'''Pre-submission Mentoring Phase (completed mid-February 2020)'''

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.

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.

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.

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.

'''Main submission'''

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.

Submission deadlines for the SRW are as follows:

* Paper submission deadline: March 6, 2020

* Review deadline: April 10, 2020

* Acceptance notification: April 15, 2020

* Camera-ready deadline: May 6, 2020

* Travel grant application deadline: to be decided.

* Travel grant notification: to be decided.

We also plan to have a post-acceptance mentoring process, for all papers accepted to the SRW.

'''Funding'''

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.

== Audio-Video Chairs ==

Hamid Palangi, Microsoft Research, Redmond

Lianhui Qin, University of Washington

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:
1. Providing all the staff/equipment to perform the recording. This includes main conference & tutorials only, workshops should purchase the recording service by themselves.
2. Post-processing the video content.
3. Putting videos and slides side by side on the platform.
4. Making the videos available open-source.

We are also looking for live-streaming for the plenary talks.

== Conference Handbook Chair ==

Nanyun Peng, University of Southern California

== Demo Chairs ==

Asli Celikyilmaz, Microsoft Research, Redmond

Shawn Wen, PolyAI

'''Details of Activities''':

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.

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.

The deadline for submissions was January 31, 2020.

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.

'''Important Dates'''

Paper submission deadline: Friday, January 31st, 2020

Notification of acceptance: Friday, April 3rd, 2020

Camera-ready submission: Friday, April 24th, 2020

== Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs ==

Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Rochester Institute of Technology

Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Google

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:
* Task title
* Interfaces (recommendations for whom to communicate with to address the task)
* Sub tasks (an enumerated list of sub task descriptions)
* Timeline (when to begin)
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.

2. For communication and teamwork, we set up:
* An ACL 2020 D&I slack channel, facilitating keeping records of interactions.
* A Google folder with designated subfolders for D&I subcommittees
* An ACL 2020 D&I chairs google groups email handle: <acl2020-diversity-inclusion-chairs@googlegroups.com>

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.

'''Academic Inclusion Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure the venue is welcoming to researchers from diverse subdisciplines, conducive to building academic networks across disciplines and career stages.''
* Aakanksha Naik, Carnegie Mellon University
* Emily Prud’hommeaux, Boston College
* Alla Rozovskaya, Queens College (City University of New York)

'''Accessibility Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure the venue is accessible for researchers with any disability, including provision of requested access services.''
* Sushant Kafle, Google/Rochester Institute of Technology
* Masoud Rouhizadeh, Johns Hopkins University
* Naomi Saphra, University of Edinburgh

'''Childcare Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure adequate childcare provisions to help researchers who are caregivers of children to attend the conference.''
* Khyathi Chandu, Carnegie Mellon University
* Stephen Mayhew, Duolingo

'''Financial Access Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure provision of financial access to researchers from underrepresented demographics and geographies to attend the conference.''
* Allyson Ettinger, University of Chicago
* Ryan Georgi, KPMG
* Tirthankar Ghosal, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Patna

'''Socio-cultural Inclusion Chairs'''
''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.''
* Shruti Palaskar, Carnegie Mellon University
* Maarten Sap, University of Washington

Kick-off meetings with all subcommittees took place in December before the winter holidays. Correspondence is mostly taking place on slack, alternatively by email.

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.

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.

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.

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.

8. We coordinated a room request across subcommittees, submitted to Priscilla as a spreadsheet, detailing space and furniture requirements for subcommittees’ activities.

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.

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.

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

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.

== Local Sponsorship Chairs ==

Hoifung Poon, Microsoft

Kristina Toutanova, Google

== Publication Chairs ==

Steven Bethard, University of Arizona

Ryan Cotterrell, University of Cambridge

Rui Yan, Peking University

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.

== Publicity Chair ==

Emily M. Bender, University of Washington

=== Dissemination ===

Durable accounts for the ACL meeting on Twitter and Facebook have been created:
* https://twitter.com/aclmeeting
* https://www.facebook.com/aclmeeting/

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)).

=== Next Steps ===

* Recruit co-chairs, especially to coordinate live-tweeting of the conference
* Contact local media for coverage
* 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

== Remote Presentation Chairs ==

Hao Fang, Microsoft Semantic Machines

Yi Luan, Google AI Language

== Sustainability Chairs ==

Ananya Ganesh, Educational Testing Service

Klaus Zechner, Educational Testing Service

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.
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.

== Website & Conference App Chairs ==

Sudha Rao, Microsoft Research, Redmond

Yizhe Zhang, Microsoft Research, Redmond

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. 
We are using the Whova event app for hosting the conference app this year similar to NAACL 2019.

== Business Office ==

Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL

2020Q1 Reports: ACL 2020

2020-03-02T20:29:08Z

Lianhuiq: /* Audio-Video Chairs */

== General Chair ==
Dan Jurafsky, Stanford University

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.

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).

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.

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).

Highlights include:
<ul>

<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.
<li> We received a record 3,429 submissions (~15% increase over ACL2019)
<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.
<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
that meant ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP. All tutorials and Workshops have been chosen and scheduled and announced.
<li> We're asking the Exec to approve our D&I budget.
<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.).
<li>
The committee found sections of the ACL Conference Handbook to be out of date and in some cases missing entirely.
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.
</ul>

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.

== Program Chairs ==
Joyce Chai, University of Michigan

Natalie Schluter, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Joel Tetreault, Dataminr, USA

---

'''New Initiatives This Year'''

'''''Earlier Submission Deadline and Notification'''''

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.

'''''Four New Tracks'''''

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.

'''''Extended Automatic COI Detection/Automatic Reviewer-Paper Assignment'''''

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.

'''''Mandatory Reviewer Duty and Recruitment'''''

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.
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,
(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.
To counterbalance (3ii), we provided SACs with a list of novice reviewers and introduced our a Reviewer Mentoring Program (see below).

'''''New Reviewer Mentoring Program'''''

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.

'''''Updated Review Form with New Rating Scale and Evaluation Item'''''

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'''''.
(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).
(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.

'''Other Efforts'''

'''''Initial submission reviews and desk rejects'''''

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.

'''''Manual adjustment of submission tracks'''''

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.

'''''Manual adjustment of AC and reviewer assignment'''''

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.

'''''Communication'''''

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.

'''Submission Status'''

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.
<ul>
<li> Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics: 49 39 88
<li> Computational Social Science and Social Media: 73 38 111
<li> Dialogue and Interactive Systems: 204 71 275
<li> Discourse and Pragmatics: 36 20 56
<li> Ethics and NLP: 30 22 52
<li> Generation: 142 71 213
<li> Information Extraction: 159 83 242
<li> Information Retrieval and Text Mining: 55 41 96
<li> Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP: 110 54 164
<li> Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond: 69 24 93
<li> Machine Learning for NLP: 186 109 295
<li> Machine Translation: 158 104 262
<li> NLP Applications: 169 99 268
<li> Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation: 38 15 53
<li> Question Answering: 109 63 172
<li> Resources and Evaluation: 88 48 136
<li> Semantics: Lexical: 57 37 94
<li> Semantics: Sentence Level: 66 29 95
<li> Semantics: Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics: 81 31 112
<li> Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining: 112 66 178
<li> Speech and Multimodality: 38 27 65
<li> Summarization: 90 37 127
<li> Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing: 47 28 75
<li> Theme: 67 26 93
<li> Theory and Formalism in NLP (Linguistic and Mathematical): 11 3 14
</ul>

'''Summary of Timelines'''

<ul>
<li>Oct 15 - Nov 30: SACs invite ACs and reviewers
<li>Nov 25: Reviewer profiles completed
<li>Dec 09: ACL Paper Submission Deadline (long and short papers)
<li>Dec 10 - Jan 14: initial submission reviews and desk rejects; automatic reviewer assignment and COI detection; manual adjustment of assignment;
<li>Jan 17 - Feb 07: Review Period
<li>Feb 08 - Feb 11: ACs chase late reviews
<li>Feb 12 - Feb 17: Author Response
<li>Feb 18 - Feb 25: Reviewer Discussion Period (ACs lead discussion), ACs provide feedback to mentees.
<li>Feb 25 - Mar 03: ACs produce meta-reviews
<li>Mar 03 - Mar 10: SACs rank papers based on meta-reviews and make recommendations to PC chairs
<li>Mar 11 - Apr 02: PC chairs make decisions (they may consult SACs during this time); SACs and ACs recommend best reviewers
<li>Apr 03 - Accept / Reject Notifications
<li>Apr 24: Camera ready
</ul>

'''List of SAC/ACs and recruitment'''

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.
'''''Recruitment''''': We individually created preference lists for SACs, discussed these and made decisions. ACs were selected by SACs.

Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics
<ul>
<li>SACs: Emily Prud’hommeaux
<li>ACs: Cassandra L. Jacobs, Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Masoud Rouhizadeh, Serguei Pakhomov, Yevgeni Berzak
</ul>

Computational Social Science and Social Media
<ul>
<li>SACs: Tim Baldwin, Nikolaos Aletras
<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
</ul>

Dialogue and Interactive Systems
<ul>
<li>SACs: Jason Williams, Mari Ostendorf
<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
</ul>

Discourse and Pragmatics
<ul>
<li>SACs: Annie Louis (taking over for Diane Litman)
<li>ACs: Chloé Braud, Junyi Jessy Li, Manfred Stede, Shafiq Joty, Sujian Li, Yangfeng Ji
</ul>

Ethics and NLP
<ul>
<li>SACs: Dirk Hovy
<li>ACs: Alan W Black, Emily M. Bender, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Yulia Tsvetkov
</ul>

Generation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Wei Xu, Alexander Rush
<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
</ul>

Information Extraction
<ul>
<li>SACs: Doug Downey, Hoifun Poon
<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
</ul>

Information Retrieval and Text Mining
<ul>
<li>SACs: Chin-Yew Lin, Nazli Goharian
<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
</ul>

Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP
<ul>
<li>SACs: Yoav Goldberg
<li>ACs: Adina Williams, Afra Alishahi, Douwe Kiela, Grzegorz Chrupała, Marco Baroni, Yonatan Belinkov, Zachary C. Lipton
</ul>

Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond
<ul>
<li>SACs: Yoav Artzi
<li>ACs: Angeliki Lazaridou, Dan Goldwasser, Jason Baldridge, Jesse Thomason, Lisa Anne Hendricks, Parisa Kordjamshidi, Raffaella Bernardi, Vicente Ordonez, Yonatan Bisk
</ul>

Machine Learning for NLP
<ul>
<li>SACs: Andre Martins, Isabelle Augenstein
<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
</ul>

Machine Translation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Marine Carpuat, Alexandra Birch
<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
</ul>

Multidisciplinary and Area Chair COI
<ul>
<li>SACs: Michael Strube
<li>ACs: Anders Søgaard, David Schlangen, Katrin Erk, Kentaro Inui, Kevin Duh, Massimo Poesio, Mausam, Pascal Denis
</ul>

NLP Applications
<ul>
<li>SACs: Preslav Nakov, Karin Verspoor
<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
</ul>

Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Kemal Oflazer
<li>ACs: Christo Kirov, David R. Mortensen, Kareem Darwish, Reut Tsarfaty, Yue Zhang, Özlem Çetinoğlu
</ul>

Question Answering
<ul>
<li>SACs: Eugene Agichtein, Alessandro Moschitti
<li>ACs: Avi Sil, Dina Demner-Fushman, Evangelos Kanoulas, Gerhard Weikum, Idan Szpektor, Jimmy Lin, Oleg Rokhlenko, Sanda Harabagiu, Wen-tau Yih, William Cohen
</ul>

Resources and Evaluation
<ul>
<li>SACs: Nathan Schneider, Barbara Plank
<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
</ul>

Semantics: Lexical
<ul>
<li>SACs: Ekaterina Shutova, Aline Villavicencio
<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
</ul>

Semantics: Sentence Level
<ul>
<li>SACs: Mohit Bansal
<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
</ul>

Semantics: Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics
<ul>
<li>SACs: Sam Bowman
<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
</ul>

Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
<ul>
<li>SACs: Smaranda Muresan, Swapna Somasundaran
<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
</ul>

Speech and Multimodality
<ul>
<li>SACs: Eric Fosler-Lussier
<li>ACs: Bhuvana Ramabhadran, Florian Metze, Gerasimos Potamianos, Hamid Palangi, Martha Larson
</ul>

Summarization
<ul>
<li>SACs: Fei Liu
<li>ACs: Caiming Xiong, Giuseppe Carenini, Katja Markert, Manabu Okumura, Michael Elhadad, Ramesh Nallapati, Sebastian Gehrmann, Wenjie Li, Xiaodan Zhu, Yang Gao
</ul>

Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing
<ul>
<li>SACs: David Chiang
<li>ACs: Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez, Emily Pitler, Liang Huang, Miguel Ballesteros, Miryam de Lhoneux, Slav Petrov, Stephan Oepen, Weiwei Sun
</ul>

THEME
<ul>
<li>SACs: Marilyn Walker (taking over for Ellen Riloff)
<li>ACs: Donia Scott, Johan Bos, Luke Zettlemoyer, Philipp Koehn, Raymond Mooney
</ul>

Theory and Formalism in NLP (Linguistic and Mathematical)
<ul>
<li>SACs: Daniel Gildea
<li>ACs: Alexander Koller, Laura Kallmeyer, Marco Kuhlmann
</ul>

== Local Organisation Chairs ==
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL

With advice from:

Jianfeng Gao, Microsoft Research

Luke Zettlemoyer, University of Washington

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:

• 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

• I have already negotiated a very reduced internet quote, with PSAV charging a 1-day rate for all 6 days of the conference

• 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.

• 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.

• I am working with the company who builds the registration form to get that started

• 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.

• 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.

• In March, I will begin merging all quotes and estimates into a working budget which will be used to set registration fees.

• 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.

• Luke has found some suggested places for our Recognition Dinner; we are working on making a final decision

• Luke and/or his students are beginning to pull together a Restaurant Guide for the app, website and handbook.

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.
I expect the next month or two will be extremely busy in setting all plans in place and opening registration.

== Tutorial Chairs ==

Agata Savary, University of Tours, France

Yue Zhang, Westlake University, Hangzhou, China

The call, submission, reviewing and selection of tutorials was coordinated jointly for 4 conferences: ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP.

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):
* 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
* a [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Tutorial_chair_handbook tutorial chair handbook]

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.

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:

'''Review Committee'''
* Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne, Australia) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Daniel Beck (University of Melbourne, Australia) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair
* Emily M. Bender (University of Washington, WA, USA)
* Erik Cambria (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
* Gaël Dias (University of Caen Normandie, France)
* Stefan Evert (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)
* Yang Liu (Tsinghua University, Beijing, China)
* Agata Savary (University of Tours, France) - ACL 2020 tutorial chair
* João Sedoc (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA)
* Lucia Specia (Sheffield University, UK) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair
* Xu SUN (Peking University, China)
* Yulia Tsvetkov (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA)
* Benjamin Van Durme (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Aline Villavicencio (University of Sheffield, UK and Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Taro Watanabe (Google, Inc., Tokyo, Japan)
* Aaron Steven White (University of Rochester, NY, USA)
* Fei Xia (University of Washington, WA, USA) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair
* Yue Zhang (Westlake University, Hangzhou, China) - ACL 2020 tutorial chair
* Meishan Zhang (Tianjin University, China)

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.
We accepted 31 proposals.

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.

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.

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):

'''Morning Tutorials'''

'''T1: Interpretability and Analysis in Neural NLP''' (cutting-edge) 
Yonatan Belinkov, Sebastian Gehrmann and Ellie Pavlick 
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. 
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. 
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.

'''T2: Multi-modal Information Extraction from Text, Semi-structured, and Tabular Data on the Web''' (cutting-edge) 
Xin Luna Dong, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Colin Lockard and Prashant Shiralkar 
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. 
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. 
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.

'''T3: Reviewing Natural Language Processing Research''' (introductory) 
Kevin Cohen, Karën Fort, Margot Mieskes and Aurélie Névéol 
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.

'''T4: Stylized Text Generation: Approaches and Applications''' (cutting-edge) 
Lili Mou and Olga Vechtomova 
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).

'''Afternoon Tutorials'''

'''T5: Achieving Common Ground in Multi-modal Dialogue''' (cutting-edge) 
Malihe Alikhani and Matthew Stone 
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.

'''T6: Commonsense Reasoning for Natural Language Processing''' (introductory) 
Maarten Sap, Vered Shwartz, Antoine Bosselut, Dan Roth and Yejin Choi 
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.

'''T7: Integrating Ethics into the NLP Curriculum''' (introductory) 
Emily M. Bender, Dirk Hovy and Alexandra Schofield 
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. 
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.

'''T8: Recent Advances in Open-Domain Question Answering''' (cutting-edge) 
Danqi Chen and Scott Wen-tau Yih 
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. 
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. 
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.

== Workshop Chairs ==

Milica Gašić, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf

Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Amazon Alexa AI

Ves Stoyanov, Facebook AI

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.

The workshops will be held on July 5th, 9th and 10th.

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.

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.

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.

First choice allocation was particularly difficult, as 54% of the workshops indicated ACL as their first choice, see details below.

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.

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.

Details on venue preference out of 95 submissions:

First choice:

54% (51 w) ACL 2020
25% (24 w) COLING 2020
16% (15 w) EMNLP-IJCNLP 2020
4% (4 w) AACL-IJCNLP 2020
1% (1 w) No Preference

Second choice:

51% (46 w) EMNLP 2020
19% (19 w) ACL 2020
15% (15 w) COLING 2020
11% (11 w) No Preference
4% (4 w) AACL-IJCNLP 2020

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/

'''Two day workshop (9th and 10th July):'''

*International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT).
**Marcello Federico, Alexander Waibel, Jiatao Gu, Kevin Knight, Will Lewis, Satoshi Nakamura, Hermann Ney, Jan Niehues, Sebastian Stüker and Marco Turchi

'''Workshop to be held on 5th July:'''

*''The Fourth Widening NLP Workshop focuses on efforts to promote and support ideas and voices of underrepresented groups in Natural Language Processing.''
**Samira Shaikh, Rossana da Cunha Silva, Ann Clifton, Erika Doggett and Ryan Georgi

'''Workshops to be held on 9th July:'''

*''NLP for Conversational AI''
**Tsung-Hsien Wen, Asli Celikyilmaz, IÃ±igo Casanueva, Mihail Eric, Anuj Kumar, Alexandros Papangelis, Rushin Shah and Zhou Yu

*T''he Fourth Widening NLP Workshop (WiNLP 2020)''
**Samira Shaikh, Rossana da Cunha Silva, Ann Clifton, Erika Doggett and Ryan Georgi

*''BioNLP 2020''
**Dina Demner-Fushman, Kevin Cohen, Sophia Ananiadou and Jun'ichi Tsujii

*''The third workshop on Fact Extraction and VERification''
**Christos Christodoulopoulos, James Thorne, Andreas Vlachos, Oana Cocarascu and Arpit Mittal

*''IWPT 2020: The 16th International Conference on Parsing Technologies''
**Yuji Matsumoto, Stephan Oepen, Kenji Sagae, Anders SÃ¸gaard, Weiwei Sun and Reut Tsarfaty

*''2nd Workshop on Figurative Language Processing''
**Beata Beigman Klebanov, Ekaterina Shutova, Patricia Lichtenstein, Smaranda Muresan, Anna Feldman, Chee Wee (Ben) Leong and Debanjan Ghosh

*''The 1st Joint Workshop on Narrative Understanding, Storylines, and Events (NUSE)''
**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

*''Workshop on Advances in Language and Vision Research''
**Xin Wang, Jesse Thomason, Ronghang Hu, Xinlei Chen, Peter Anderson, Qi Wu, Asli Celikyilmaz, Jason Baldridge and William Yang Wang

*''5th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP-2020)''
**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

'''Workshops to be held on 10th July:
'''

*''Natural Language Interfaces: Challenges and Promises''
**Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Yu Su, Huan Sun and Scott Wen-tau Yih

*''The 4th Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation (WNGT)''
**Alexandra Birch, Graham Neubig, Andrew Finch, Hiroaki Hayashi, Kenneth Heafield, Ioannis Konstas, Yusuke Oda and Xian Li

*''The 15th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA15)''
**Ekaterina Kochmar, Jill Burstein, Claudia Leacock, Nitin Madnani, Ildiko Pilan, Helen Yannakoudakis and Torsten Zesch

*''SIGMORPHON 2020''
**Garrett Nicolai and Kyle Gorman

*''NLP for Medical Conversations''
**Parminder Bhatia, Chaitanya Shivade, Mona Diab, byron wallace, Rashmi Gangadharaiah, nan du, Izhak Shafran and Steven Lin

*''The Second Workshop on e-Commerce and NLP (ECNLP 2)''
**Shervin Malmasi, Eugene Agichtein, Oleg Rokhlenko, Nicola Ueffing and Ido Guy

*''Eighth International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media (SocialNLP 2020)''
**Lun-Wei Ku and Cheng-Te Li

*''The First Workshop on Simultaneous Translation (AutoSimTrans)''
**Hua Wu, Colin Cherry, Jiatao Gu, Liang Huang, Zhongjun He, Mark Liberman and Yang Liu

*''Second Grand-Challenge and Workshop on Human Multimodal Language (Challenge-HML)''
**AmirAli Bagher Zadeh, Louis-Philippe Morency, Paul Pu Liang, Soujanya Poria and Ying Shen

== Student Research Workshop Chairs and Faculty Advisors==

'''Student Research Workshop Co-chairs'''

Rotem Dror, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

Jiangming Liu, The University of Edinburgh

Shruti Rijhwani, Carnegie Mellon University

'''Student Research Workshop Faculty Advisors'''

Omri Abend, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Sujian Li, Peking University

Zhou Yu, University of California, Davis

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).

'''Pre-submission Mentoring Phase (completed mid-February 2020)'''

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.

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.

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.

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.

'''Main submission'''

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.

Submission deadlines for the SRW are as follows:

* Paper submission deadline: March 6, 2020

* Review deadline: April 10, 2020

* Acceptance notification: April 15, 2020

* Camera-ready deadline: May 6, 2020

* Travel grant application deadline: to be decided.

* Travel grant notification: to be decided.

We also plan to have a post-acceptance mentoring process, for all papers accepted to the SRW.

'''Funding'''

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.

== Audio-Video Chairs ==

Hamid Palangi, Microsoft Research, Redmond

Lianhui Qin, University of Washington

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:
1. Providing all the staff/equipment to perform the recording. This includes main conference & tutorials only, workshops should purchase the recording service by themselves.
2. Post-processing the video content.
3. Putting videos and slides side by side on the platform.
4. Making the videos available open-source.

We are also looking for live-streaming for the plenary talks.

== Conference Handbook Chair ==

Nanyun Peng, University of Southern California

== Demo Chairs ==

Asli Celikyilmaz, Microsoft Research, Redmond

Shawn Wen, PolyAI

'''Details of Activities''':

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.

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.

The deadline for submissions was January 31, 2020.

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.

'''Important Dates'''

Paper submission deadline: Friday, January 31st, 2020

Notification of acceptance: Friday, April 3rd, 2020

Camera-ready submission: Friday, April 24th, 2020

== Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs ==

Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Rochester Institute of Technology

Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Google

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:
* Task title
* Interfaces (recommendations for whom to communicate with to address the task)
* Sub tasks (an enumerated list of sub task descriptions)
* Timeline (when to begin)
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.

2. For communication and teamwork, we set up:
* An ACL 2020 D&I slack channel, facilitating keeping records of interactions.
* A Google folder with designated subfolders for D&I subcommittees
* An ACL 2020 D&I chairs google groups email handle: <acl2020-diversity-inclusion-chairs@googlegroups.com>

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.

'''Academic Inclusion Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure the venue is welcoming to researchers from diverse subdisciplines, conducive to building academic networks across disciplines and career stages.''
* Aakanksha Naik, Carnegie Mellon University
* Emily Prud’hommeaux, Boston College
* Alla Rozovskaya, Queens College (City University of New York)

'''Accessibility Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure the venue is accessible for researchers with any disability, including provision of requested access services.''
* Sushant Kafle, Google/Rochester Institute of Technology
* Masoud Rouhizadeh, Johns Hopkins University
* Naomi Saphra, University of Edinburgh

'''Childcare Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure adequate childcare provisions to help researchers who are caregivers of children to attend the conference.''
* Khyathi Chandu, Carnegie Mellon University
* Stephen Mayhew, Duolingo

'''Financial Access Chairs'''
''Mission: Ensure provision of financial access to researchers from underrepresented demographics and geographies to attend the conference.''
* Allyson Ettinger, University of Chicago
* Ryan Georgi, KPMG
* Tirthankar Ghosal, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Patna

'''Socio-cultural Inclusion Chairs'''
''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.''
* Shruti Palaskar, Carnegie Mellon University
* Maarten Sap, University of Washington

Kick-off meetings with all subcommittees took place in December before the winter holidays. Correspondence is mostly taking place on slack, alternatively by email.

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.

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.

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.

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.

8. We coordinated a room request across subcommittees, submitted to Priscilla as a spreadsheet, detailing space and furniture requirements for subcommittees’ activities.

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.

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.

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

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.

== Local Sponsorship Chairs ==

Hoifung Poon, Microsoft

Kristina Toutanova, Google

== Publication Chairs ==

Steven Bethard, University of Arizona

Ryan Cotterrell, University of Cambridge

Rui Yan, Peking University

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.

== Publicity Chair ==

Emily M. Bender, University of Washington

=== Dissemination ===

Durable accounts for the ACL meeting on Twitter and Facebook have been created:
* https://twitter.com/aclmeeting
* https://www.facebook.com/aclmeeting/

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)).

=== Next Steps ===

* Recruit co-chairs, especially to coordinate live-tweeting of the conference
* Contact local media for coverage
* 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

== Remote Presentation Chairs ==

Hao Fang, Microsoft Semantic Machines

Yi Luan, Google AI Language

== Sustainability Chairs ==

Ananya Ganesh, Educational Testing Service

Klaus Zechner, Educational Testing Service

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.
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.

== Website & Conference App Chairs ==

Sudha Rao, Microsoft Research, Redmond

Yizhe Zhang, Microsoft Research, Redmond

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. 
We are using the Whova event app for hosting the conference app this year similar to NAACL 2019.

== Business Office ==

Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL