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2022Q1 Reports: Office

2022-03-04T22:25:01Z

PriscillaRasmussen:

Priscilla Rasmussen
1st Quarter 2022 Executive Board Meeting

5 March 2022

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

With March 31st (the mark of a full year since I advised the Board of my intent to retire) fast
approaching, my plans are to use April as the winding down period. I have told the landlord of the
office closing at the end of April so plans for mail and phone forwarding, sale or other disposal of
office furniture and the office contents, etc. must be put in place by April 1st. I am using March
as the month to try to put as many plans in place as possible for both ACL and NAACL 2022. For
ACL 2022, there is a very competent PCO to manage most plans and I will remain available to
advise and will be onsite in Dublin. It is NAACL 2022 that is of major concern since I will not be
acting as the PCO as I used to do. It is therefore imperative that a Conference Manager be found
and hired well before this July meeting. To this end, an [Office-working-group] for Priscilla's
retirement and replacement plan has been formed and will hopefully very quickly develop workable
plans. Again, I will be available for advising but the bulk of the work will need to be covered by
someone yet to be hired.

With an increase in attendance at each conference, the registrations, registrant questions and
being overrun with requests for invoices and more proper receipts takes a substantial amount of
time each day. I believe the need is immediate for Nitin and Pranav to come up with an automated
application process, similar to the visa letter requests, for paid-in-full invoices/receipts and
certificates of attendance unable to be handled individually, as was done in the past. This is most
important for the upcoming ACL 2022 conference registration now being built.

And, Pat Kirby, my always indispensable right arm, will be leaving us at the end of April, after
helping me with the close of the office. We should wish her well as she looks to warmer climates
to build her own retirement future.

'''Publications, Journals and Royalties''':

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates handling print-on-demand of our publications,
I typically receive no requests for hardcopy publications in the office. The Curran Associates
agreement has been good for both them and the ACL. We have received $2,464.86 covering the
2nd, 3rd, and 4th Q 2021.

MIT Press Journals has been paid for their invoice covering the 2020-2021 academic year for
services supporting both the CL and TACL journals. These invoices totaled $89,483.23. As usual,
we can expect the 2021-2022 invoice sometime this summer for a similar amount.

Our journals pay editorial assistants to help with the process. The CL Journal’s assistant has not
submitted an invoice for work in 2021, nor so far in 2022. The TACL Journal’s assistant was paid
$18,436.25 for July-December 2021 and January 2022.

'''Membership''':

We ended 2021 with a total of 7,173 members which is an increase of 927 members over the
close of 2020. So far in 2022, we have 654 through the end of February, made up mostly of
members in the midst of their multi-year memberships. As is becoming more standard, most
memberships come from conference registrations. This includes the EACL, NAACL, ACL, and
EMNLP 2021 members who renewed or joined along with their conference registrations. This
indicates the continuing growth of our field and conferences...At the close of 2017, only four years
ago, membership was under 3,000. Additionally, it appears that holding virtual conferences allows
more people, especially students, to be able to afford and attend conferences and pay
memberships. Typically, regular vs student memberships had been 60/40% or even 65/35% but
for 2021, the numbers are 47/53% regular vs student and this trend seems to be continuing,
possibly because the student virtual fees for all 2021 conferences were so very affordable and this
also allowed the D&I conference funding to stretch further to cover more people. This may indicate
that there will be a continuing need/desire for some portion of our future conferences to be virtual
or hybrid to broaden the possibilities for people who may be under-funded or for other reasons
cannot travel to in-person meetings to still be able to benefit from our conferences and
membership. However, since people are forced to join as part of their registrations, when a lot of
CFP announcements are sent out, a much larger than usual number of new members asked to be
removed, thus making the high membership number actually a bit less.

The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year
depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be
representing 70-80 or more countries on a regular basis. Countries represented so far in 2021
totaled 96, reflecting the increasingly successful WiNLP and Diversity & Inclusion outreach efforts.
Please refer to the Membership Report and Members By Country report for full details.

Occasionally inquiries come to the Office about what the benefits of ACL membership are and
whether a particular country qualifies for the hard currency discount. It would be good to 1) update
and more prominently post member benefits at the portal and 2) annually update the countries
qualifying for hard currency discounts. I would also recommend making the location for posting
job announcement more prominent at the portal.

[[File:membership-report-2012-2021-Statistics.xlsx]]

[[File: Memberships-2021-by-Country.xlsx]]

'''Fellows Program''':

The only involvement the Office now has in the Fellowship nomination and selection process is to
verify nominated members’ eligibility according to our new policy for future years.

'''Conferences''':

As was reported last summer, for the 2021 conferences (ACL, EMNLP, and NAACL), the Office focus
was on advising, helping select virtual platforms for the conference, creating and monitoring the
working budget, creating and managing registrations as usual, working with sponsors and
exhibitors to ensure they receive the promised promotion and recognition of their support, working
with the Organizing Committee members (especially the general, program, tutorial, workshop
chairs and D&I chairs). In addition, for EACL, close coordination with the PCO and General Chair
were particularly important. Moving to 100% virtual meetings for EACL, NAACL and ACL
dramatically changed my role, in particular in that I did not have to be concerned with the physical
conference setup, space requirements, av and catering contracts and arrangements, exhibits’
physical setups, etc. However, EMNLP 2021 presented an entirely new set of challenges being the
first hybrid meeting ACL has had. This was more like holding two separate but coordinated
meetings, one virtual and one in-person.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021, intended to be in Bangkok, was held 100% virtually due to the COVD-19
pandemic. We were successful in avoiding very large penalties for cancelling the in-person meeting
and hope to be able to reschedule in Bangkok sometime soon. I worked very closely with
Chengqing Zong as General Chair and the marvelous program chairs, infrastructure team and other
organizers. With this team, one of my ongoing interactions is coordinating various aspects of the
conference with Underline, especially working with the PCs and sponsors. The Office is always
available to offer advice and registration lists and statistics, track and approve the budget
expenditures, monitor registrations and work with the tutorial and workshop chairs and organizers.
The more successful D&I initiatives (mentoring, preferred names, accessibility/assistance,
registration payment assistance, helping to purchase greater bandwidth for some attendees,
coordination for time zones and scheduling, etc.) were incorporated into this and the other
conferences this year. ACL-IJCNLP 2021 ended with 3,531 total virtual attendees.

EACL 2021 was also successful as a 100% virtual meeting rather than being in-person in Kiev and
ended with 1,328 attendees, an increase of over 400 attendees from the last EACL held. Paola
Merlo, as General Chair, plus her committee and the selected PCO have been an excellent team.
The Office acted as advisor when questions of practice, policies, and procedures came up. The
hope, I think, is to possibly hold an in-person meeting in Kiev in the future.

NAACL 2021, led by Kristina Toutanova, was contracted to be held in-person in Mexico City but,
again due to COVID-19 instability, we were fortunate to be able to renegotiate the contracts to
now be NAACL 2024 in Mexico City in June with no penalties for these changes. It was a pleasure
to work with Kristina and her able team of Organizing Committee members on this 100% virtual
conference. This was the first conference to use Underline as the platform for the virtual meeting,
all presentation recordings, all sponsors’ exhibiting, all D&I special arrangements and requirements,
etc. So this was a learning process for all involved as the Underline team got to know ACL and its
practices and processes and visa versa. Weekly virtual meetings were held to keep the planning
moving forward without slippage and focusing on different aspects or issues each week. This was
a very good exercise and has continued for the later conferences. NAACL 2021 ended with a total
of 2,682 virtual attendees.

EMNLP 2021, being our first hybrid, held in November in the Dominican Republic, was actually a
success with in-person attendees expressing their happiness in being somewhat back to normal
and being able to see each other. Extra precautions were taken to help assure attendees of the
safety of the venue and that COVID-19 vaccination proof was required from all attendees. And,
with little reason to leave the resort, people mostly stayed in the resort and were safely catered to
without going outside “the bubble”. The largest issue was with the local AV crew who did not have
up-to-date equipment, most did not know how to run the equipment, and some slept in the back
of the rooms, etc. So, having a 4 person team from Underline onsite (meant to be there for
coordination purposes only) who worked 20 hour days, taking over much that should have been
handled by the local AV team, was what saved the AV portion of the in-person conference. Other
than the AV issues, the in-person conference went pretty well, with only minor adjustments needed
from day to day. And, as with both NAACL and ACL 2021 conferences, the weekly virtual planning
meetings were invaluable as both Underline and ACL/EMNLP learned what is involved in making
hybrid meetings work. EMNLP 2021 ended with a combined total of 3,760 attendees, 485 onsite
and 3,275 virtual.

I expect future hybrid meetings to have larger in-person components as people
become more comfortable travelling and hopefully COVID and all its variants are better controlled.
While it is always difficult to project attendance at conferences, we now face the difficulty of having
to negotiate and enter into venue contracts at least two years in advance for in-person meetings
but cannot predict whether our conferences will continue to grow substantially or if the numbers
will level out. And having held five virtual conferences plus our first hybrid meeting, it is more
difficult to predict future needs. This is compounded with the unpredictability of the number of
attendees at each conference as overall attendance numbers are increasing and what portions will
be in-person vs virtual.

It seems that the more conferences there are in a given year, the more
our attendance is spread out over all conferences in potentially unpredictable ways.
This has implications in how much space we contract and, if too much, be locked into space we
may not need at a convention center with very high costs. Also, whatever space is contracted for
a particular conference tends to lock the Program Chairs into presenting the posters in a certain
way and removes their flexibility in planning the overall program. With a future of hybrid
conferences, we could run the danger of defaulting on contractual commitments we have made or
may negotiate and then find our predictions to be off. The space/catering/av may not be required
at the amounts contracted, placing us in a position of not meeting contracted amounts. Or,
conversely, we may need to pay space rental if our catering and guest rooms are not at a high
enough level to gain complimentary space as we do now. Or, optimistically, we may find there are
more registrations than anticipated and have to scurry to find adequate space, possibly at higher
cost.

'''Conference Sponsorship''':

Thanks to Chris Callison-Burch, our (global) Sponsorship Director, who has taken over much of
the sponsoring and exhibiting communications and management, this area of tasks will be well
managed after my retirement and I continue to work with and advise Chris as requested. As of
March 4, 2022 we have secured the following confirmed sponsors:

ACL: Amazon (Diamond), Apple (Diamond), LivePerson (Diamond), Meta (Diamond), Grammarly
(Platinum), IBM (Platinum), Megagon (Platinum), Bosch (Gold), ServiceNow (Gold), Relativity
(Gold), Adobe (Bronze), Babelscape (Bronze)

NAACL: Amazon (Diamond), LivePerson (Diamond), Meta (Diamond), Apple (Platinum),
Grammarly (Platinum), Megagon (Platinum), Nuveen (Gold), ServiceNow (Gold), Relativity (Gold),
Adobe (Bronze), Babelscape (Bronze)

EMNLP: Amazon (Diamond), Apple (Diamond), LivePerson (Diamond), Meta (Diamond), Megagon
(Platinum), Adobe (Bronze), Babelscape (Bronze)

AACL: Adobe (Bronze)

D&I Sponsorship: Microsoft (D&I Champion) for all 4 conferences.

The total sponsorship commitments for the main conferences as of March 4, 2022 amount of
$440,610. Additionally, we have $48,575 for workshop sponsorships and colocated conferences
($20k for IWSLT, plus $30k for miscellaneous other workshops).

It is wonderful to see the return of so many faithful sponsors. The idea of offering 2-Pack or 3-
Pack options and including EMNLP allows sponsors to make one payment to support multiple
events in a given year rather than one at a time. This has made sponsoring easier, especially for
our continuing sponsors.

2022Q1 Reports: Office

2022-03-04T22:23:18Z

PriscillaRasmussen:

Priscilla Rasmussen
1st Quarter 2022 Executive Board Meeting

5 March 2022

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

With March 31st (the mark of a full year since I advised the Board of my intent to retire) fast
approaching, my plans are to use April as the winding down period. I have told the landlord of the
office closing at the end of April so plans for mail and phone forwarding, sale or other disposal of
office furniture and the office contents, etc. must be put in place by April 1st. I am using March
as the month to try to put as many plans in place as possible for both ACL and NAACL 2022. For
ACL 2022, there is a very competent PCO to manage most plans and I will remain available to
advise and will be onsite in Dublin. It is NAACL 2022 that is of major concern since I will not be
acting as the PCO as I used to do. It is therefore imperative that a Conference Manager be found
and hired well before this July meeting. To this end, an [Office-working-group] for Priscilla's
retirement and replacement plan has been formed and will hopefully very quickly develop workable
plans. Again, I will be available for advising but the bulk of the work will need to be covered by
someone yet to be hired.

With an increase in attendance at each conference, the registrations, registrant questions and
being overrun with requests for invoices and more proper receipts takes a substantial amount of
time each day. I believe the need is immediate for Nitin and Pranav to come up with an automated
application process, similar to the visa letter requests, for paid-in-full invoices/receipts and
certificates of attendance unable to be handled individually, as was done in the past. This is most
important for the upcoming ACL 2022 conference registration now being built.

And, Pat Kirby, my always indispensable right arm, will be leaving us at the end of April, after
helping me with the close of the office. We should wish her well as she looks to warmer climates
to build her own retirement future.

'''Publications, Journals and Royalties''':

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates handling print-on-demand of our publications,
I typically receive no requests for hardcopy publications in the office. The Curran Associates
agreement has been good for both them and the ACL. We have received $2,464.86 covering the
2nd, 3rd, and 4th Q 2021.

MIT Press Journals has been paid for their invoice covering the 2020-2021 academic year for
services supporting both the CL and TACL journals. These invoices totaled $89,483.23. As usual,
we can expect the 2021-2022 invoice sometime this summer for a similar amount.

Our journals pay editorial assistants to help with the process. The CL Journal’s assistant has not
submitted an invoice for work in 2021, nor so far in 2022. The TACL Journal’s assistant was paid
$18,436.25 for July-December 2021 and January 2022.

'''Membership''':

We ended 2021 with a total of 7,173 members which is an increase of 927 members over the
close of 2020. So far in 2022, we have 654 through the end of February, made up mostly of
members in the midst of their multi-year memberships. As is becoming more standard, most
memberships come from conference registrations. This includes the EACL, NAACL, ACL, and
EMNLP 2021 members who renewed or joined along with their conference registrations. This
indicates the continuing growth of our field and conferences...At the close of 2017, only four years
ago, membership was under 3,000. Additionally, it appears that holding virtual conferences allows
more people, especially students, to be able to afford and attend conferences and pay
memberships. Typically, regular vs student memberships had been 60/40% or even 65/35% but
for 2021, the numbers are 47/53% regular vs student and this trend seems to be continuing,
possibly because the student virtual fees for all 2021 conferences were so very affordable and this
also allowed the D&I conference funding to stretch further to cover more people. This may indicate
that there will be a continuing need/desire for some portion of our future conferences to be virtual
or hybrid to broaden the possibilities for people who may be under-funded or for other reasons
cannot travel to in-person meetings to still be able to benefit from our conferences and
membership. However, since people are forced to join as part of their registrations, when a lot of
CFP announcements are sent out, a much larger than usual number of new members asked to be
removed, thus making the high membership number actually a bit less.

The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year
depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be
representing 70-80 or more countries on a regular basis. Countries represented so far in 2021
totaled 96, reflecting the increasingly successful WiNLP and Diversity & Inclusion outreach efforts.
Please refer to the Membership Report and Members By Country report for full details.
Occasionally inquiries come to the Office about what the benefits of ACL membership are and
whether a particular country qualifies for the hard currency discount. It would be good to 1) update
and more prominently post member benefits at the portal and 2) annually update the countries
qualifying for hard currency discounts. I would also recommend making the location for posting
job announcement more prominent at the portal.

[[File:membership-report-2012-2021-Statistics.xlsx]]

[[File: Memberships-2021-by-Country.xlsx]]

'''Fellows Program''':

The only involvement the Office now has in the Fellowship nomination and selection process is to
verify nominated members’ eligibility according to our new policy for future years.

'''Conferences''':

As was reported last summer, for the 2021 conferences (ACL, EMNLP, and NAACL), the Office focus
was on advising, helping select virtual platforms for the conference, creating and monitoring the
working budget, creating and managing registrations as usual, working with sponsors and
exhibitors to ensure they receive the promised promotion and recognition of their support, working
with the Organizing Committee members (especially the general, program, tutorial, workshop
chairs and D&I chairs). In addition, for EACL, close coordination with the PCO and General Chair
were particularly important. Moving to 100% virtual meetings for EACL, NAACL and ACL
dramatically changed my role, in particular in that I did not have to be concerned with the physical
conference setup, space requirements, av and catering contracts and arrangements, exhibits’
physical setups, etc. However, EMNLP 2021 presented an entirely new set of challenges being the
first hybrid meeting ACL has had. This was more like holding two separate but coordinated
meetings, one virtual and one in-person.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021, intended to be in Bangkok, was held 100% virtually due to the COVD-19
pandemic. We were successful in avoiding very large penalties for cancelling the in-person meeting
and hope to be able to reschedule in Bangkok sometime soon. I worked very closely with
Chengqing Zong as General Chair and the marvelous program chairs, infrastructure team and other
organizers. With this team, one of my ongoing interactions is coordinating various aspects of the
conference with Underline, especially working with the PCs and sponsors. The Office is always
available to offer advice and registration lists and statistics, track and approve the budget
expenditures, monitor registrations and work with the tutorial and workshop chairs and organizers.
The more successful D&I initiatives (mentoring, preferred names, accessibility/assistance,
registration payment assistance, helping to purchase greater bandwidth for some attendees,
coordination for time zones and scheduling, etc.) were incorporated into this and the other
conferences this year. ACL-IJCNLP 2021 ended with 3,531 total virtual attendees.

EACL 2021 was also successful as a 100% virtual meeting rather than being in-person in Kiev and
ended with 1,328 attendees, an increase of over 400 attendees from the last EACL held. Paola
Merlo, as General Chair, plus her committee and the selected PCO have been an excellent team.
The Office acted as advisor when questions of practice, policies, and procedures came up. The
hope, I think, is to possibly hold an in-person meeting in Kiev in the future.

NAACL 2021, led by Kristina Toutanova, was contracted to be held in-person in Mexico City but,
again due to COVID-19 instability, we were fortunate to be able to renegotiate the contracts to
now be NAACL 2024 in Mexico City in June with no penalties for these changes. It was a pleasure
to work with Kristina and her able team of Organizing Committee members on this 100% virtual
conference. This was the first conference to use Underline as the platform for the virtual meeting,
all presentation recordings, all sponsors’ exhibiting, all D&I special arrangements and requirements,
etc. So this was a learning process for all involved as the Underline team got to know ACL and its
practices and processes and visa versa. Weekly virtual meetings were held to keep the planning
moving forward without slippage and focusing on different aspects or issues each week. This was
a very good exercise and has continued for the later conferences. NAACL 2021 ended with a total
of 2,682 virtual attendees.

EMNLP 2021, being our first hybrid, held in November in the Dominican Republic, was actually a
success with in-person attendees expressing their happiness in being somewhat back to normal
and being able to see each other. Extra precautions were taken to help assure attendees of the
safety of the venue and that COVID-19 vaccination proof was required from all attendees. And,
with little reason to leave the resort, people mostly stayed in the resort and were safely catered to
without going outside “the bubble”. The largest issue was with the local AV crew who did not have
up-to-date equipment, most did not know how to run the equipment, and some slept in the back
of the rooms, etc. So, having a 4 person team from Underline onsite (meant to be there for
coordination purposes only) who worked 20 hour days, taking over much that should have been
handled by the local AV team, was what saved the AV portion of the in-person conference. Other
than the AV issues, the in-person conference went pretty well, with only minor adjustments needed
from day to day. And, as with both NAACL and ACL 2021 conferences, the weekly virtual planning
meetings were invaluable as both Underline and ACL/EMNLP learned what is involved in making
hybrid meetings work. EMNLP 2021 ended with a combined total of 3,760 attendees, 485 onsite
and 3,275 virtual.

I expect future hybrid meetings to have larger in-person components as people
become more comfortable travelling and hopefully COVID and all its variants are better controlled.
While it is always difficult to project attendance at conferences, we now face the difficulty of having
to negotiate and enter into venue contracts at least two years in advance for in-person meetings
but cannot predict whether our conferences will continue to grow substantially or if the numbers
will level out. And having held five virtual conferences plus our first hybrid meeting, it is more
difficult to predict future needs. This is compounded with the unpredictability of the number of
attendees at each conference as overall attendance numbers are increasing and what portions will
be in-person vs virtual.

It seems that the more conferences there are in a given year, the more
our attendance is spread out over all conferences in potentially unpredictable ways.
This has implications in how much space we contract and, if too much, be locked into space we
may not need at a convention center with very high costs. Also, whatever space is contracted for
a particular conference tends to lock the Program Chairs into presenting the posters in a certain
way and removes their flexibility in planning the overall program. With a future of hybrid
conferences, we could run the danger of defaulting on contractual commitments we have made or
may negotiate and then find our predictions to be off. The space/catering/av may not be required
at the amounts contracted, placing us in a position of not meeting contracted amounts. Or,
conversely, we may need to pay space rental if our catering and guest rooms are not at a high
enough level to gain complimentary space as we do now. Or, optimistically, we may find there are
more registrations than anticipated and have to scurry to find adequate space, possibly at higher
cost.

'''Conference Sponsorship''':

Thanks to Chris Callison-Burch, our (global) Sponsorship Director, who has taken over much of
the sponsoring and exhibiting communications and management, this area of tasks will be well
managed after my retirement and I continue to work with and advise Chris as requested. As of
March 4, 2022 we have secured the following confirmed sponsors:

ACL: Amazon (Diamond), Apple (Diamond), LivePerson (Diamond), Meta (Diamond), Grammarly
(Platinum), IBM (Platinum), Megagon (Platinum), Bosch (Gold), ServiceNow (Gold), Relativity
(Gold), Adobe (Bronze), Babelscape (Bronze)

NAACL: Amazon (Diamond), LivePerson (Diamond), Meta (Diamond), Apple (Platinum),
Grammarly (Platinum), Megagon (Platinum), Nuveen (Gold), ServiceNow (Gold), Relativity (Gold),
Adobe (Bronze), Babelscape (Bronze)

EMNLP: Amazon (Diamond), Apple (Diamond), LivePerson (Diamond), Meta (Diamond), Megagon
(Platinum), Adobe (Bronze), Babelscape (Bronze)

AACL: Adobe (Bronze)

D&I Sponsorship: Microsoft (D&I Champion) for all 4 conferences.

The total sponsorship commitments for the main conferences as of March 4, 2022 amount of
$440,610. Additionally, we have $48,575 for workshop sponsorships and colocated conferences
($20k for IWSLT, plus $30k for miscellaneous other workshops).

It is wonderful to see the return of so many faithful sponsors. The idea of offering 2-Pack or 3-
Pack options and including EMNLP allows sponsors to make one payment to support multiple
events in a given year rather than one at a time. This has made sponsoring easier, especially for
our continuing sponsors.

2022Q1 Reports: Office

2022-03-04T22:22:57Z

PriscillaRasmussen:

Priscilla Rasmussen
1st Quarter 2022 Executive Board Meeting

5 March 2022

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

With March 31st (the mark of a full year since I advised the Board of my intent to retire) fast
approaching, my plans are to use April as the winding down period. I have told the landlord of the
office closing at the end of April so plans for mail and phone forwarding, sale or other disposal of
office furniture and the office contents, etc. must be put in place by April 1st. I am using March
as the month to try to put as many plans in place as possible for both ACL and NAACL 2022. For
ACL 2022, there is a very competent PCO to manage most plans and I will remain available to
advise and will be onsite in Dublin. It is NAACL 2022 that is of major concern since I will not be
acting as the PCO as I used to do. It is therefore imperative that a Conference Manager be found
and hired well before this July meeting. To this end, an [Office-working-group] for Priscilla's
retirement and replacement plan has been formed and will hopefully very quickly develop workable
plans. Again, I will be available for advising but the bulk of the work will need to be covered by
someone yet to be hired.

With an increase in attendance at each conference, the registrations, registrant questions and
being overrun with requests for invoices and more proper receipts takes a substantial amount of
time each day. I believe the need is immediate for Nitin and Pranav to come up with an automated
application process, similar to the visa letter requests, for paid-in-full invoices/receipts and
certificates of attendance unable to be handled individually, as was done in the past. This is most
important for the upcoming ACL 2022 conference registration now being built.
And, Pat Kirby, my always indispensable right arm, will be leaving us at the end of April, after
helping me with the close of the office. We should wish her well as she looks to warmer climates
to build her own retirement future.

'''Publications, Journals and Royalties''':

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates handling print-on-demand of our publications,
I typically receive no requests for hardcopy publications in the office. The Curran Associates
agreement has been good for both them and the ACL. We have received $2,464.86 covering the
2nd, 3rd, and 4th Q 2021.

MIT Press Journals has been paid for their invoice covering the 2020-2021 academic year for
services supporting both the CL and TACL journals. These invoices totaled $89,483.23. As usual,
we can expect the 2021-2022 invoice sometime this summer for a similar amount.

Our journals pay editorial assistants to help with the process. The CL Journal’s assistant has not
submitted an invoice for work in 2021, nor so far in 2022. The TACL Journal’s assistant was paid
$18,436.25 for July-December 2021 and January 2022.

'''Membership''':

We ended 2021 with a total of 7,173 members which is an increase of 927 members over the
close of 2020. So far in 2022, we have 654 through the end of February, made up mostly of
members in the midst of their multi-year memberships. As is becoming more standard, most
memberships come from conference registrations. This includes the EACL, NAACL, ACL, and
EMNLP 2021 members who renewed or joined along with their conference registrations. This
indicates the continuing growth of our field and conferences...At the close of 2017, only four years
ago, membership was under 3,000. Additionally, it appears that holding virtual conferences allows
more people, especially students, to be able to afford and attend conferences and pay
memberships. Typically, regular vs student memberships had been 60/40% or even 65/35% but
for 2021, the numbers are 47/53% regular vs student and this trend seems to be continuing,
possibly because the student virtual fees for all 2021 conferences were so very affordable and this
also allowed the D&I conference funding to stretch further to cover more people. This may indicate
that there will be a continuing need/desire for some portion of our future conferences to be virtual
or hybrid to broaden the possibilities for people who may be under-funded or for other reasons
cannot travel to in-person meetings to still be able to benefit from our conferences and
membership. However, since people are forced to join as part of their registrations, when a lot of
CFP announcements are sent out, a much larger than usual number of new members asked to be
removed, thus making the high membership number actually a bit less.

The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year
depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be
representing 70-80 or more countries on a regular basis. Countries represented so far in 2021
totaled 96, reflecting the increasingly successful WiNLP and Diversity & Inclusion outreach efforts.
Please refer to the Membership Report and Members By Country report for full details.
Occasionally inquiries come to the Office about what the benefits of ACL membership are and
whether a particular country qualifies for the hard currency discount. It would be good to 1) update
and more prominently post member benefits at the portal and 2) annually update the countries
qualifying for hard currency discounts. I would also recommend making the location for posting
job announcement more prominent at the portal.

[[File:membership-report-2012-2021-Statistics.xlsx]]

[[File: Memberships-2021-by-Country.xlsx]]

'''Fellows Program''':

The only involvement the Office now has in the Fellowship nomination and selection process is to
verify nominated members’ eligibility according to our new policy for future years.

'''Conferences''':

As was reported last summer, for the 2021 conferences (ACL, EMNLP, and NAACL), the Office focus
was on advising, helping select virtual platforms for the conference, creating and monitoring the
working budget, creating and managing registrations as usual, working with sponsors and
exhibitors to ensure they receive the promised promotion and recognition of their support, working
with the Organizing Committee members (especially the general, program, tutorial, workshop
chairs and D&I chairs). In addition, for EACL, close coordination with the PCO and General Chair
were particularly important. Moving to 100% virtual meetings for EACL, NAACL and ACL
dramatically changed my role, in particular in that I did not have to be concerned with the physical
conference setup, space requirements, av and catering contracts and arrangements, exhibits’
physical setups, etc. However, EMNLP 2021 presented an entirely new set of challenges being the
first hybrid meeting ACL has had. This was more like holding two separate but coordinated
meetings, one virtual and one in-person.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021, intended to be in Bangkok, was held 100% virtually due to the COVD-19
pandemic. We were successful in avoiding very large penalties for cancelling the in-person meeting
and hope to be able to reschedule in Bangkok sometime soon. I worked very closely with
Chengqing Zong as General Chair and the marvelous program chairs, infrastructure team and other
organizers. With this team, one of my ongoing interactions is coordinating various aspects of the
conference with Underline, especially working with the PCs and sponsors. The Office is always
available to offer advice and registration lists and statistics, track and approve the budget
expenditures, monitor registrations and work with the tutorial and workshop chairs and organizers.
The more successful D&I initiatives (mentoring, preferred names, accessibility/assistance,
registration payment assistance, helping to purchase greater bandwidth for some attendees,
coordination for time zones and scheduling, etc.) were incorporated into this and the other
conferences this year. ACL-IJCNLP 2021 ended with 3,531 total virtual attendees.

EACL 2021 was also successful as a 100% virtual meeting rather than being in-person in Kiev and
ended with 1,328 attendees, an increase of over 400 attendees from the last EACL held. Paola
Merlo, as General Chair, plus her committee and the selected PCO have been an excellent team.
The Office acted as advisor when questions of practice, policies, and procedures came up. The
hope, I think, is to possibly hold an in-person meeting in Kiev in the future.

NAACL 2021, led by Kristina Toutanova, was contracted to be held in-person in Mexico City but,
again due to COVID-19 instability, we were fortunate to be able to renegotiate the contracts to
now be NAACL 2024 in Mexico City in June with no penalties for these changes. It was a pleasure
to work with Kristina and her able team of Organizing Committee members on this 100% virtual
conference. This was the first conference to use Underline as the platform for the virtual meeting,
all presentation recordings, all sponsors’ exhibiting, all D&I special arrangements and requirements,
etc. So this was a learning process for all involved as the Underline team got to know ACL and its
practices and processes and visa versa. Weekly virtual meetings were held to keep the planning
moving forward without slippage and focusing on different aspects or issues each week. This was
a very good exercise and has continued for the later conferences. NAACL 2021 ended with a total
of 2,682 virtual attendees.

EMNLP 2021, being our first hybrid, held in November in the Dominican Republic, was actually a
success with in-person attendees expressing their happiness in being somewhat back to normal
and being able to see each other. Extra precautions were taken to help assure attendees of the
safety of the venue and that COVID-19 vaccination proof was required from all attendees. And,
with little reason to leave the resort, people mostly stayed in the resort and were safely catered to
without going outside “the bubble”. The largest issue was with the local AV crew who did not have
up-to-date equipment, most did not know how to run the equipment, and some slept in the back
of the rooms, etc. So, having a 4 person team from Underline onsite (meant to be there for
coordination purposes only) who worked 20 hour days, taking over much that should have been
handled by the local AV team, was what saved the AV portion of the in-person conference. Other
than the AV issues, the in-person conference went pretty well, with only minor adjustments needed
from day to day. And, as with both NAACL and ACL 2021 conferences, the weekly virtual planning
meetings were invaluable as both Underline and ACL/EMNLP learned what is involved in making
hybrid meetings work. EMNLP 2021 ended with a combined total of 3,760 attendees, 485 onsite
and 3,275 virtual.

I expect future hybrid meetings to have larger in-person components as people
become more comfortable travelling and hopefully COVID and all its variants are better controlled.
While it is always difficult to project attendance at conferences, we now face the difficulty of having
to negotiate and enter into venue contracts at least two years in advance for in-person meetings
but cannot predict whether our conferences will continue to grow substantially or if the numbers
will level out. And having held five virtual conferences plus our first hybrid meeting, it is more
difficult to predict future needs. This is compounded with the unpredictability of the number of
attendees at each conference as overall attendance numbers are increasing and what portions will
be in-person vs virtual.

It seems that the more conferences there are in a given year, the more
our attendance is spread out over all conferences in potentially unpredictable ways.
This has implications in how much space we contract and, if too much, be locked into space we
may not need at a convention center with very high costs. Also, whatever space is contracted for
a particular conference tends to lock the Program Chairs into presenting the posters in a certain
way and removes their flexibility in planning the overall program. With a future of hybrid
conferences, we could run the danger of defaulting on contractual commitments we have made or
may negotiate and then find our predictions to be off. The space/catering/av may not be required
at the amounts contracted, placing us in a position of not meeting contracted amounts. Or,
conversely, we may need to pay space rental if our catering and guest rooms are not at a high
enough level to gain complimentary space as we do now. Or, optimistically, we may find there are
more registrations than anticipated and have to scurry to find adequate space, possibly at higher
cost.

'''Conference Sponsorship''':

Thanks to Chris Callison-Burch, our (global) Sponsorship Director, who has taken over much of
the sponsoring and exhibiting communications and management, this area of tasks will be well
managed after my retirement and I continue to work with and advise Chris as requested. As of
March 4, 2022 we have secured the following confirmed sponsors:

ACL: Amazon (Diamond), Apple (Diamond), LivePerson (Diamond), Meta (Diamond), Grammarly
(Platinum), IBM (Platinum), Megagon (Platinum), Bosch (Gold), ServiceNow (Gold), Relativity
(Gold), Adobe (Bronze), Babelscape (Bronze)

NAACL: Amazon (Diamond), LivePerson (Diamond), Meta (Diamond), Apple (Platinum),
Grammarly (Platinum), Megagon (Platinum), Nuveen (Gold), ServiceNow (Gold), Relativity (Gold),
Adobe (Bronze), Babelscape (Bronze)

EMNLP: Amazon (Diamond), Apple (Diamond), LivePerson (Diamond), Meta (Diamond), Megagon
(Platinum), Adobe (Bronze), Babelscape (Bronze)

AACL: Adobe (Bronze)

D&I Sponsorship: Microsoft (D&I Champion) for all 4 conferences.

The total sponsorship commitments for the main conferences as of March 4, 2022 amount of
$440,610. Additionally, we have $48,575 for workshop sponsorships and colocated conferences
($20k for IWSLT, plus $30k for miscellaneous other workshops).

It is wonderful to see the return of so many faithful sponsors. The idea of offering 2-Pack or 3-
Pack options and including EMNLP allows sponsors to make one payment to support multiple
events in a given year rather than one at a time. This has made sponsoring easier, especially for
our continuing sponsors.

2022Q1 Reports: Office

2022-03-04T22:19:50Z

PriscillaRasmussen:

Priscilla Rasmussen
1st Quarter 2022 Executive Board Meeting

5 March 2022

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

With March 31st (the mark of a full year since I advised the Board of my intent to retire) fast
approaching, my plans are to use April as the winding down period. I have told the landlord of the
office closing at the end of April so plans for mail and phone forwarding, sale or other disposal of
office furniture and the office contents, etc. must be put in place by April 1st. I am using March
as the month to try to put as many plans in place as possible for both ACL and NAACL 2022. For
ACL 2022, there is a very competent PCO to manage most plans and I will remain available to
advise and will be onsite in Dublin. It is NAACL 2022 that is of major concern since I will not be
acting as the PCO as I used to do. It is therefore imperative that a Conference Manager be found
and hired well before this July meeting. To this end, an [Office-working-group] for Priscilla's
retirement and replacement plan has been formed and will hopefully very quickly develop workable
plans. Again, I will be available for advising but the bulk of the work will need to be covered by
someone yet to be hired.

With an increase in attendance at each conference, the registrations, registrant questions and
being overrun with requests for invoices and more proper receipts takes a substantial amount of
time each day. I believe the need is immediate for Nitin and Pranav to come up with an automated
application process, similar to the visa letter requests, for paid-in-full invoices/receipts and
certificates of attendance unable to be handled individually, as was done in the past. This is most
important for the upcoming ACL 2022 conference registration now being built.
And, Pat Kirby, my always indispensable right arm, will be leaving us at the end of April, after
helping me with the close of the office. We should wish her well as she looks to warmer climates
to build her own retirement future.

Publications, Journals and Royalties:

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates handling print-on-demand of our publications,
I typically receive no requests for hardcopy publications in the office. The Curran Associates
agreement has been good for both them and the ACL. We have received $2,464.86 covering the
2nd, 3rd, and 4th Q 2021.

MIT Press Journals has been paid for their invoice covering the 2020-2021 academic year for
services supporting both the CL and TACL journals. These invoices totaled $89,483.23. As usual,
we can expect the 2021-2022 invoice sometime this summer for a similar amount.

Our journals pay editorial assistants to help with the process. The CL Journal’s assistant has not
submitted an invoice for work in 2021, nor so far in 2022. The TACL Journal’s assistant was paid
$18,436.25 for July-December 2021 and January 2022.

Membership:

We ended 2021 with a total of 7,173 members which is an increase of 927 members over the
close of 2020. So far in 2022, we have 654 through the end of February, made up mostly of
members in the midst of their multi-year memberships. As is becoming more standard, most
memberships come from conference registrations. This includes the EACL, NAACL, ACL, and
EMNLP 2021 members who renewed or joined along with their conference registrations. This
indicates the continuing growth of our field and conferences...At the close of 2017, only four years
ago, membership was under 3,000. Additionally, it appears that holding virtual conferences allows
more people, especially students, to be able to afford and attend conferences and pay
memberships. Typically, regular vs student memberships had been 60/40% or even 65/35% but
for 2021, the numbers are 47/53% regular vs student and this trend seems to be continuing,
possibly because the student virtual fees for all 2021 conferences were so very affordable and this
also allowed the D&I conference funding to stretch further to cover more people. This may indicate
that there will be a continuing need/desire for some portion of our future conferences to be virtual
or hybrid to broaden the possibilities for people who may be under-funded or for other reasons
cannot travel to in-person meetings to still be able to benefit from our conferences and
membership. However, since people are forced to join as part of their registrations, when a lot of
CFP announcements are sent out, a much larger than usual number of new members asked to be
removed, thus making the high membership number actually a bit less.

The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year
depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be
representing 70-80 or more countries on a regular basis. Countries represented so far in 2021
totaled 96, reflecting the increasingly successful WiNLP and Diversity & Inclusion outreach efforts.
Please refer to the Membership Report and Members By Country report for full details.
Occasionally inquiries come to the Office about what the benefits of ACL membership are and
whether a particular country qualifies for the hard currency discount. It would be good to 1) update
and more prominently post member benefits at the portal and 2) annually update the countries
qualifying for hard currency discounts. I would also recommend making the location for posting
job announcement more prominent at the portal.

[[File:membership-report-2012-2021-Statistics.xlsx]]

[[File: Memberships-2021-by-Country.xlsx]]

Fellows Program:

The only involvement the Office now has in the Fellowship nomination and selection process is to
verify nominated members’ eligibility according to our new policy for future years.

Conferences:

As was reported last summer, for the 2021 conferences (ACL, EMNLP, and NAACL), the Office focus
was on advising, helping select virtual platforms for the conference, creating and monitoring the
working budget, creating and managing registrations as usual, working with sponsors and
exhibitors to ensure they receive the promised promotion and recognition of their support, working
with the Organizing Committee members (especially the general, program, tutorial, workshop
chairs and D&I chairs). In addition, for EACL, close coordination with the PCO and General Chair
were particularly important. Moving to 100% virtual meetings for EACL, NAACL and ACL
dramatically changed my role, in particular in that I did not have to be concerned with the physical
conference setup, space requirements, av and catering contracts and arrangements, exhibits’
physical setups, etc. However, EMNLP 2021 presented an entirely new set of challenges being the
first hybrid meeting ACL has had. This was more like holding two separate but coordinated
meetings, one virtual and one in-person.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021, intended to be in Bangkok, was held 100% virtually due to the COVD-19
pandemic. We were successful in avoiding very large penalties for cancelling the in-person meeting
and hope to be able to reschedule in Bangkok sometime soon. I worked very closely with
Chengqing Zong as General Chair and the marvelous program chairs, infrastructure team and other
organizers. With this team, one of my ongoing interactions is coordinating various aspects of the
conference with Underline, especially working with the PCs and sponsors. The Office is always
available to offer advice and registration lists and statistics, track and approve the budget
expenditures, monitor registrations and work with the tutorial and workshop chairs and organizers.
The more successful D&I initiatives (mentoring, preferred names, accessibility/assistance,
registration payment assistance, helping to purchase greater bandwidth for some attendees,
coordination for time zones and scheduling, etc.) were incorporated into this and the other
conferences this year. ACL-IJCNLP 2021 ended with 3,531 total virtual attendees.

EACL 2021 was also successful as a 100% virtual meeting rather than being in-person in Kiev and
ended with 1,328 attendees, an increase of over 400 attendees from the last EACL held. Paola
Merlo, as General Chair, plus her committee and the selected PCO have been an excellent team.
The Office acted as advisor when questions of practice, policies, and procedures came up. The
hope, I think, is to possibly hold an in-person meeting in Kiev in the future.

NAACL 2021, led by Kristina Toutanova, was contracted to be held in-person in Mexico City but,
again due to COVID-19 instability, we were fortunate to be able to renegotiate the contracts to
now be NAACL 2024 in Mexico City in June with no penalties for these changes. It was a pleasure
to work with Kristina and her able team of Organizing Committee members on this 100% virtual
conference. This was the first conference to use Underline as the platform for the virtual meeting,
all presentation recordings, all sponsors’ exhibiting, all D&I special arrangements and requirements,
etc. So this was a learning process for all involved as the Underline team got to know ACL and its
practices and processes and visa versa. Weekly virtual meetings were held to keep the planning
moving forward without slippage and focusing on different aspects or issues each week. This was
a very good exercise and has continued for the later conferences. NAACL 2021 ended with a total
of 2,682 virtual attendees.

EMNLP 2021, being our first hybrid, held in November in the Dominican Republic, was actually a
success with in-person attendees expressing their happiness in being somewhat back to normal
and being able to see each other. Extra precautions were taken to help assure attendees of the
safety of the venue and that COVID-19 vaccination proof was required from all attendees. And,
with little reason to leave the resort, people mostly stayed in the resort and were safely catered to
without going outside “the bubble”. The largest issue was with the local AV crew who did not have
up-to-date equipment, most did not know how to run the equipment, and some slept in the back
of the rooms, etc. So, having a 4 person team from Underline onsite (meant to be there for
coordination purposes only) who worked 20 hour days, taking over much that should have been
handled by the local AV team, was what saved the AV portion of the in-person conference. Other
than the AV issues, the in-person conference went pretty well, with only minor adjustments needed
from day to day. And, as with both NAACL and ACL 2021 conferences, the weekly virtual planning
meetings were invaluable as both Underline and ACL/EMNLP learned what is involved in making
hybrid meetings work. EMNLP 2021 ended with a combined total of 3,760 attendees, 485 onsite
and 3,275 virtual. I expect future hybrid meetings to have larger in-person components as people
become more comfortable travelling and hopefully COVID and all its variants are better controlled.
While it is always difficult to project attendance at conferences, we now face the difficulty of having
to negotiate and enter into venue contracts at least two years in advance for in-person meetings
but cannot predict whether our conferences will continue to grow substantially or if the numbers
will level out. And having held five virtual conferences plus our first hybrid meeting, it is more
difficult to predict future needs. This is compounded with the unpredictability of the number of
attendees at each conference as overall attendance numbers are increasing and what portions will
be in-person vs virtual. It seems that the more conferences there are in a given year, the more
our attendance is spread out over all conferences in potentially unpredictable ways.
This has implications in how much space we contract and, if too much, be locked into space we
may not need at a convention center with very high costs. Also, whatever space is contracted for
a particular conference tends to lock the Program Chairs into presenting the posters in a certain
way and removes their flexibility in planning the overall program. With a future of hybrid
conferences, we could run the danger of defaulting on contractual commitments we have made or
may negotiate and then find our predictions to be off. The space/catering/av may not be required
at the amounts contracted, placing us in a position of not meeting contracted amounts. Or,
conversely, we may need to pay space rental if our catering and guest rooms are not at a high
enough level to gain complimentary space as we do now. Or, optimistically, we may find there are
more registrations than anticipated and have to scurry to find adequate space, possibly at higher
cost.

Conference Sponsorship:

Thanks to Chris Callison-Burch, our (global) Sponsorship Director, who has taken over much of
the sponsoring and exhibiting communications and management, this area of tasks will be well
managed after my retirement and I continue to work with and advise Chris as requested. As of
March 4, 2022 we have secured the following confirmed sponsors:

ACL: Amazon (Diamond), Apple (Diamond), LivePerson (Diamond), Meta (Diamond), Grammarly
(Platinum), IBM (Platinum), Megagon (Platinum), Bosch (Gold), ServiceNow (Gold), Relativity
(Gold), Adobe (Bronze), Babelscape (Bronze)

NAACL: Amazon (Diamond), LivePerson (Diamond), Meta (Diamond), Apple (Platinum),
Grammarly (Platinum), Megagon (Platinum), Nuveen (Gold), ServiceNow (Gold), Relativity (Gold),
Adobe (Bronze), Babelscape (Bronze)

EMNLP: Amazon (Diamond), Apple (Diamond), LivePerson (Diamond), Meta (Diamond), Megagon
(Platinum), Adobe (Bronze), Babelscape (Bronze)

AACL: Adobe (Bronze)

D&I Sponsorship: Microsoft (D&I Champion) for all 4 conferences.

The total sponsorship commitments for the main conferences as of March 4, 2022 amount of
$440,610. Additionally, we have $48,575 for workshop sponsorships and colocated conferences
($20k for IWSLT, plus $30k for miscellaneous other workshops).

It is wonderful to see the return of so many faithful sponsors. The idea of offering 2-Pack or 3-
Pack options and including EMNLP allows sponsors to make one payment to support multiple
events in a given year rather than one at a time. This has made sponsoring easier, especially for
our continuing sponsors.

2021Q3 Reports: Office Manager

2021-07-24T20:08:45Z

PriscillaRasmussen: Created page with "Priscilla Rasmussen 3rd Quarter 2021 Executive Board Meeting ACL Business Office Report 19 July 2021 It seems surprising but, with three of the four 2021 conferences bei..."

Priscilla Rasmussen
3rd Quarter 2021 Executive Board Meeting

ACL Business Office Report

19 July 2021

It seems surprising but, with three of the four 2021 conferences being virtual, there seems to be just as much demand on the Office staff as in past years, but in different ways. With an increase in attendance at each conference, the registrations, registrant questions and requests for invoices and more formal receipts has more than doubled. Similarly, more of the sponsors are supporting multiple conferences in greater numbers and, for each conference and each company, there are greatly increased numbers of questions and requests, especially given the virtual nature of their exhibiting. And, I am very much involved with the coordination between the virtual platform company and the individual conference organizing committees. All of this takes a substantial amount of Pat’s, Cathy’s and (especially) my time each day.

With the tremendous growth of our conferences and holding more conferences in one year than usual, we have been overrun with requests for invoices and more proper receipts. I am still hoping that when Nitin and Pranav are able, they might come up with an automated application process, similar to the visa letter requests, for paid-in-full invoices/receipts and certificates of attendance to reduce the hundreds of requests currently handled individually. Nitin and I have also been talking about bringing the registration form building inhouse where Pranav might build and maintain the registration form so we can have more immediate and reliable access to the registration process. It would be ideal if this could happen fore EMNLP 2021 or definitely for the 2022 conference year.

We decided to continue more formally with Young Associates as the accountant firm and will be renewing their contract for August 2021 to August 2022. Over this period, we will be looking to new and different ways of managing our bookkeeping efforts in coordination with them.

Pat Kirby continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations regarding membership entries, managing conference registrations as well as working with me in preparation for and during our conferences. Plus she continues to do more of the bank statement reconciliations and expenditure posting. Cathy Magnusson, my more part-time second assistant, continues communicating with the sponsors and exhibitors (who take a lot of our time and have lots of questions) and she seems to excel in following up on sponsorship delinquent payments and registrations that are declined or invalid, chasing registrants for their membership payments, etc. She is doing a great job in financial recovery.

For the ACL diversity & inclusion (D&I) initiative, we have continued to include most items requested to be included on the registration form, with refinements as we learned what works best. For D&I, the highly successful mentoring option has been included for the 2021 conferences as well as the questions about needing assistance, etc. Overall, some very good and well received initiatives resulted from the D&I efforts over the past two years and are continuing in 2021 and the dedication shown by the committees and leaders are impressive.

My hope is that we will be better equipped to handle the ever-increasing numbers of conference attendees and there will be more time for me to offer the always-called-upon advice, attend the multitude of zoom meetings, identify and pre-negotiate future conference venues, conduct site visits, pre-negotiate catering/av/social event and other contracts, develop and monitor working budgets, review bids, make initial approaches to potential sponsors, oversee Office operations, etc. The office has reopened completely as of late February.

I have not yet connected with anyone to formulate some ideas which may include engaging a Professional Conference Organizer (PCO) to work on all conferences in a coordinated way, as and when needed. After I am able to discuss this idea and expand it into something more concrete that I can propose, I will come back to this.

Publications, Journals and Royalties:

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates handling print-on-demand of our publications, I typically receive no requests for hardcopy publications in the office. The Curran Associates agreement has been good for both them and the ACL. We have received $1,365.70 covering the 4th Q of 2020 and 1st Q 2021.

MIT Press Journals has been paid for their invoice covering the 2019-2020 academic year for services supporting both the CL and TACL journals. These invoices totaled $82,379.07. As usual, we can expect the 2020-2021 invoice sometime this summer for a similar amount.

Our journals pay editorial assistants to help with the process. The CL Journal’s assistant has not submitted an invoice for work in 2020, nor so far in 2021. The TACL Journal’s assistant was paid $13,641.25 for January through June 2021.

Membership:

We ended 2020 with a total of 6,246 members which is an increase of 1,101 members over the close of 2019. So far in 2021, we have 3,699 through the end of June. As is becoming more standard, most memberships come from conference registrations. This includes the EACL and NAACL 2021 members who renewed or joined along with their conference registrations. A very small number of ACL 2021 registrations resulting in memberships are also included here but the bulk of ACL and all of EMNLP 2021 resulting memberships will be reported later this year. This indicates the continuing growth of our field and conferences...Only three years ago, membership was under 3,000. Additionally, it appears that holding virtual conferences allows more people, especially students, to be able to afford and attend conferences and pay memberships. Typically, regular vs student memberships had been 60/40% or even 65/35% but for 2020, the numbers are 49/51% regular vs student and this trend seems to be continuing in 2021, with 47/53% regular vs student. This may indicate that there will be a continuing need/desire for some portion of our future conferences to be virtual or hybrid to broaden the possibilities for people who may be under-funded or for other reasons cannot travel to in-person meetings to still be able to benefit from our conferences and membership.

The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be representing 70 or more countries on a regular basis. Countries represented so far in 2021 totaled 89, reflecting the increasingly successful WiNLP and Diversity & Inclusion outreach efforts. Please refer to the Membership Report and Members By Country report for full details.

Occasionally inquiries come to the Office about what the benefits of ACL membership are and whether a particular country qualifies for the hard currency discount. It would be good to 1) update and more prominently post member benefits at the portal and 2) annually update the countries qualifying for hard currency discounts. I would also recommend making the location for posting job announcement more prominent at the portal.

Fellows Program:

The only involvement the Office now has in the Fellowship nomination and selection process is to verify nominated members’ eligibility according to our new policy for future years.

Conferences:

For the 2021 conferences (ACL, EMNLP, and NAACL) as well as the upcoming 2022 conferences, the Office focus is on advising, helping select virtual platforms for the conference, creating and monitoring the working budget, creating and managing registrations as usual, working with sponsors and exhibitors to ensure they receive the promised promotion and recognition of their support, working with the Organizing Committee members (especially the general, program, tutorial, workshop chairs and D&I chairs). In addition, for EACL, close coordination with the PCO and General Chair were particularly important. Moving to 100% virtual meetings for EACL, NAACL and ACL dramatically changed my role, in particular in that I did not have to be concerned with the physical conference setup, space requirements, av and catering contracts and arrangements, exhibits’ physical setups, etc.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021, intended to be in Bangkok, will be held 100% virtually due to the COVD-19 pandemic. We were successful in avoiding very large penalties for cancelling the in-person meeting and hope to be able to reschedule in Bangkok sometime soon. I am currently working very closely with Chengqing Zong as General Chair and the marvelous program chairs, infrastructure team and other organizers. With this team, one of my ongoing interactions is coordinating various aspects of the conference with Underline, especially working with the PCs and sponsors. The Office is always available to offer advice and registration lists and statistics, track and approve the budget expenditures, monitor registrations and work with the tutorial and workshop chairs and organizers. The more successful D&I initiatives (mentoring, preferred names, accessibility/assistance, registration payment assistance, helping to purchase greater bandwidth for some attendees, coordination for time zones and scheduling, etc.) were incorporated into the conferences this year.

ACL 2019 in Italy ended with 3,283 registrations; Virtual ACL 2020 ended with a total of 4,973 registrations; so far, ACL-IJCNLP 2021 has 2,511 registrations and seems on track for a final total of around 3,000-3,100 attendees. I believe a part of the 2020 large increase was due to our need for 250-300 volunteers rather than the normal 75-100. This increase in volunteer awards and the much lower cost of registration allowed for many more students and younger researchers to attend. But, the ACL-IJCNLP 2021 conference is competing with three other ACL conferences this year (EACL and NAACL before ACL 2021 and EMNLP afterward) for a portion of the same overall NLP pool of researchers and students. This is having an effect on each conference’s final attendance numbers.

NAACL 2019 in Minneapolis ended with 1,635 registrations and Virtual NAACL 2021 that just ended in June, had a total of 2,682 registrations, making an increase of over 1,000 additional attendees. The much lower cost of registration allowing many more students and younger researchers as well as those from disadvantaged countries made this conference more accessible. Kristina Toutanova was impressive as General Chair, with hands-on coordination of every part of the conference. Being our first experience with using Underline as the main conference platform, she made sure to know how everything works and what pitfalls could be avoided. To this end, I worked closely with the GC, PCs and the rest of the organizing committee members as well as managing registrations and coordination of sponsorships. The one challenge was that AgoraNet, who has built our registration forms for many years now, will no longer be supporting us or building our registration forms. After being persuaded to build the NAACL 2021 form, it was agreed this would be the last conference we would work on together. So, for ACL-IJCNLP 2021, a different company was engaged and, depending on how this agreement works out, we may or may not continue with them.

EMNLP 2019 numbered 1,939 final registrations and for Virtual EMNLP 2020, the conference ended with 4,069 attendees. With EMNLP 2021 being planned as our first attempt at a hybrid meeting, it is difficult to project attendance numbers although we are prepared for about 2,000 or more in-person attendees plus possibly another 1500 or more virtual attendees. Having been fortunate enough to be able to negotiate moving the in-person meeting to 2021 at the same all-inclusive resort, the Barcelo Bavaro Resort in Punta Cana, without large penalties, we expect the safe, self-contained nature of an all-inclusive resort to actually be desirable, given the ongoing threat of COVID-19. But, it is hoped that COVID-19 might be less threatening and people will mostly be vaccinated so it will be safe enough by November to travel. The other reason to be somewhat optimistic is that, once there, there is little reason to leave the resort. With many restaurants, beaches, nightclub, bowling alley, theaters, etc. there are ample things to keep people occupied and safely catered to without going outside “the bubble”. I am working closely with Sien Moens and Underline as well as her organizing committee in making all the plans for this hybrid meeting. As Local Arrangements Chair I will be doing the same sort of things as for EMNLP 2019 (in-person) and EMNLP 2020 (virtual), working with the sponsors and exhibitors, managing registrations, maintaining the working budget, managing onsite space, av, and catering, etc. and coordinating the virtual aspects as well.

EACL 2021 was also successful as a 100% virtual meeting rather than being in-person in Kiev and ended with 1,328 attendees, an increase of over 400 attendees from the last EACL held. Paola Merlo, as General Chair, plus her committee and the selected PCO have been an excellent team. The Office acted as advisor when questions of practice, policies, and procedures came up. The hope, I think, is to possibly hold an in-person meeting in Kiev in the future.

While it is always difficult to project attendance at conferences, we now face the difficulty of having to negotiate and enter into venue contracts at least two years in advance for in-person meetings but cannot predict whether our conferences will continue to grow substantially or if the numbers will level out. And having held five virtual conferences plus our first hybrid this fall, it is more difficult to predict future needs. This is compounded with the unpredictability of numbers attending each conference, especially as in 2021, where the numbers at EACL and NAACL were considerably higher than in the past and, so far, ACL 2021 looks like it will be up to a quarter smaller than expected. It seems that the more conferences there are in a given year, the more our attendance is spread out over all conferences in potentially unpredictable ways.

This has implications in how much space we contract and, if too much, be locked into space we may not need at a convention center with very high costs. Also, whatever space is contracted for a particular conference tends to lock the Program Chairs into presenting the posters in a certain way and removes their flexibility in planning the program. And, if hybrid conferences are desired, we could run the danger of defaulting on contract commitments we have made or may negotiate before this decision is reached. The space/catering/av may not be required at the amounts contracted, placing us in a position of not meeting contracted amounts. Or, conversely, we may need to pay space rental if our catering and guest rooms are not at a high enough level to gain complimentary space as we do now.

Conference Sponsorship:

ACL-IJCNLP 2021 has commitments of $289,744 in main conference sponsorships, with $38,400 of this being dedicated to Diversity & Inclusion efforts. Also committed to particular ACL workshops is $14,698. EACL 2021 ended their conference with $27,366 in main conference sponsorships paid through the ACL Office, with $3,200 earmarked for D&I efforts. Other sponsorships may have been awarded directly through the PCO to the EACL Treasurer. NAACL 2021 ended their meeting with a main conference total commitment of $107,025 with $13,200 of this dedicated to the D&I effort; plus $12,600 in support of some of the NAACL workshops. And so far, EMNLP 2021 enjoys a total main conference commitment of $183,581, with $35,520 to be dedicated to the D&I efforts and $35,000 in various workshop sponsorships (mostly $30,000 supporting WiNLP).

These donations were from many of our faithful continuing sponsors such as Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Bablelcape, Baidu, Bloomberg, Bytedance, Deep Mind, Facebook, G-Research, Google, Grammarly, HLTCOE, IBM, Megagon, Microsoft, Naver Labs Corporation, Naver Labs Europe, Tencent, Two Sigma, and Vanguard plus newly returning sponsors including Alibaba, Bosch, Duolingo and ETS. A new addition to our sponsor family is Legal Force. It is possible a few more sponsors will make commitments, especially for EMNLP 2021. It is encouraging to note that many of the returning sponsors remarked positively on their 2020 sponsor/exhibit virtual experiences.

The idea of offering 2-Pack or 3-Pack options and including EMNLP allows sponsors to make one payment to support multiple events in a given year rather than one at a time. This has made sponsoring easier, especially for our ongoing sponsors. For the 2021 Sponsorship Booklet we continued to offer these multi-pack options including ACL-IJCNLP 2021, EACL 2021, NAACL 2021 and EMNLP 2021, which has resulted in some first-time as well as repeating commitments and sometimes at higher levels. With the new Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) initiative continuing since NAACL 2019, we kept and updated the section giving options to sponsor this effort. Due to COVD-19 and our conferences being virtual, about half of the benefits assured to sponsors could no longer be promised since they were in-person benefits (exhibit space, inserts into conference bags, logos emblazoned on conference bags, ads in conference handbooks, etc.). To encourage sponsors to continue their support, the benefits were adjusted to include what could be offered from the in-person Sponsorship Booklet and add the additional benefits of free virtual exhibit space to all but Bronze, Supporter and Publisher levels, ability to receive a list of registrants who indicated they were looking for employment and wanted their information shared, full Participant List (with those who expressed not wanting to share contact information culled from the list), and exhibiting allowed for the full 6 days rather than just the main conference 3 days.

Chris Callison-Burch, our new Sponsorship Director, has already had an impact on our sponsorship efforts. We now have a sleek new and updated 2021 Sponsorship Booklet which looks more professional and appealing. Most all of the levels and benefit remain the same except, even for virtual meetings, only Diamond and Platinum levels receive complimentary exhibiting and all others must pay for this option. And, he has taken a good part of the growing demands of working with the individual sponsors off of the Office’s list of duties. We have been working closely and very successfully to gather sponsors for all ACL conferences in 2021.

2021Q1 Reports: Office

2021-03-20T00:41:52Z

PriscillaRasmussen: Created page with "Priscilla Rasmussen, 19 March 2021 '''1st Quarter 2021 Executive Board Meeting''' '''ACL Business Office Report''' Although we have moved into the virtual world for 202..."

Priscilla Rasmussen, 19 March 2021

'''1st Quarter 2021 Executive Board Meeting'''

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

Although we have moved into the virtual world for 2020 and 2021 conferences, there is still a lot of work to be managed by the Office. Both Pat and I have been consumed with both ACL and EMNLP 2020, especially regarding registrations, memberships and sponsorships. It is a lighter load than when holding in-person conferences because the physical setup aspects are not needed but, to a lesser extent they have been replaced with a different set of questions and concerns.

And, with the tremendous growth of our conferences, we have been overrun with requests for invoices and more proper receipts. I hope that when Nitin has some free time, between the registration form builders and Nitin, they might come up with an automated application process, similar to the visa letter requests, for paid-in-full invoices/receipts and certificates of attendance to reduce the hundreds of requests currently handled individually.

We decided to continue more formally with Young Associates as the accountant and this means a fairly high learning curve for both Pat and me to learn Quickbooks and the process of working effectively with the Young Associates team. The teaching of Pat and me has not happened yet but, after the 2020 taxes are filed, we will turn our attention to this. In the long term, this should improve and expedite our accounting and payment functions. .

Pat Kirby continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations regarding membership entries, managing conference registrations as well as working with me in preparation for and during our conferences. Plus she continues to do more of the bank statement reconciliations and expenditure posting. She will be important for our conversion to Quickbooks. Cathy Magnusson, my more part-time second assistant, continues communicating with the sponsors and exhibitors (who take a lot of our time and have lots of questions) and she seems to excel in following up on sponsorship delinquent payments and registrations that are declined or invalid and is doing a great job in financial recovery.

For the ACL initiatives on anti-harassment and diversity & inclusion (D&I), we have continued to include most items requested to be included on the registration form, with refinements as we learned what works best. The anti-harassment effort is working quite well. For the D&I initiative, the highly successful mentoring option has been included for the ACL and EMNLP 2020 conferences as well as the question about needing assistance, etc. Overall, some very good and well received initiatives resulted from the D&I efforts in 2019 and are continuing in 2020 and 2021 and the dedication shown by the committees and leaders are impressive.

My hope is that by making the accounting move to Quickbooks, we will be better equipped to handle the ever-increasing numbers of conference attendees and there will be more time for me to offer the always-called-upon advice, attend and organize meetings, identify and pre-negotiate future conference venues, conduct site visits, pre-negotiate catering/av/social event and other contracts, develop and monitor working budgets, review bids, make initial approaches to potential sponsors, oversee Office operations, etc. As previously explained, very cyclical employees are difficult to find and/or retain and, with the COVD-19 pandemic, it is fortunate that additional employees were not hired. The office has been closed since early March except for bi-weekly visits I have made to check on things. Going to 100% virtual conferences for 2020 has shifted more of the complex planning and pre-conference management from the Office (planning space utilization, catering, and all onsite in-person arrangements) to the Organizing Committee and especially the General Chair and Infrastructure Team.

I am beginning to formulate some ideas which may include engaging a Professional Conference Organizer (PCO) to work on all conferences to greater or lesser extent, as needed. After I am able to discuss this idea and expand it into something more complete that I can propose, I will come back to this.

And, in November, I completed about 10 hours of being interviewed by a professional ethnographer. I believe Hinrich has the final report from her.

'''Publications, Journals and Royalties:'''

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates handling print-on-demand of our publications, I typically receive no requests for hardcopy publications in the office. The Curran Associates agreement has been good for both them and the ACL. We have received $1,937.27 covering the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th quarters of 2020.

MIT Press Journals has been paid for their invoices covering the 2019-2020 academic year for services supporting both the CL and TACL journals. These invoices totaled $82,379.07.

Our journals pay editorial assistants to help with the process. The CL Journal’s assistant has not submitted an invoice for work in 2020. The TACL Journal’s assistant was paid $13,755.00 for August 2020 through January 2021.

'''Membership:'''

We began 2020 with 94 members who were in a multi-year membership and about 274 members renewed on their own. I am very happy to report we ended 2020 with a total of 6,246 members which is an increase of 1,101 members over the close of 2019. As is becoming more standard, most memberships come from conference registrations. This includes most of the ACL and EMNLP 2020 members who renewed or joined along with their conference registrations. I believe the AACL-IJCNLP 2020 registrants were instructed to visit the ACL Member Portal to make their memberships. This indicates the continuing growth of our field and conferences...Only three years ago, membership was under 3,000. Additionally, it appears that holding virtual conferences allows more people, especially students, to be able to afford and attend conferences and pay memberships. Typically, regular vs student memberships had been 60/40% or even 65/35% but for 2020, the numbers are 49/51% regular vs student. This may indicate that there will be a continuing need/desire for some portion of our future conferences to be virtual or hybrid to broaden the possibilities for people who may be under-funded or for other reasons cannot travel to in-person meetings to still be able to benefit from our conferences.

The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be representing 70 or more countries on a regular basis. Countries represented in 2020 totaled 86, reflecting the increasingly successful WiNLP and Diversity & Inclusion outreach efforts. Please refer to the Membership Report and Members By Country report for full details.

Occasionally inquiries come to the Office about what the benefits of ACL membership are and whether a particular country qualifies for the hard currency discount. It would be good to 1) update and more prominently post member benefits at the portal and 2) annually update the countries qualifying for hard currency discounts. I would also recommend making the location for posting job announcement more prominent at the portal.

'''Fellows Program:'''

The only involvement the Office now has in the Fellowship nomination and selection process is to verify nominated members’ eligibility according to our new policy for future years.

'''Conferences:'''

For the 2020 conferences as well as the upcoming 2021 conferences, the Office focus is on advising, helping select virtual platforms for the conference, creating and monitoring the working budget, creating and managing registrations as usual, working with sponsors and exhibitors to ensure they still received promotion and recognition of their support, working with the Organizing Committee members (especially the general, program, tutorial, workshop chairs and D&I chairs).

ACL 2020, intended to be in Seattle, was held 100% virtually due to the COVD-19 pandemic and was a difficult decision. We were successful in avoiding very large penalties by negotiating the contracts to reschedule both the hotels and the social event space and caterers to now be NAACL 2022 This dramatically changed my role in particular in that I did not have to be concerned with the physical conference setup, space requirements, av and catering contracts and arrangements, exhibits’ physical setups, etc. I worked very closely with Dan Jurafsky as General Chair and the marvelous infrastructure team and other organizers. With this team, one of my largest ongoing interactions was in providing lists of the registrants so they could be sent individualized conference access information. Overall, this went well but there were a couple of snags which were overcome and will hopefully be avoided for upcoming meetings. The Office was always available to offer advice and registration lists and statistics, track and approve the budget expenditures, monitor registrations and work with the tutorial and workshop chairs and organizers; these became the primary roles of the Local Arrangements Chair. The more successful D&I initiatives (mentoring, preferred names, accessibility/assistance, registration payment assistance, helping to purchase greater bandwidth for some attendees in Africa, coordination for time zones and scheduling, etc.) were incorporated into this conference.

ACL 2019 in Italy ended with 3,283 registrations and Virtual ACL 2020 ended with a total of 4,973 registrations, with regulars accounting for 47% and students numbering 51% of all registrations (the 2% was staff, organizers, sponsors and exhibitors). I believe a part of this increase was due to our need for 250-300 volunteers rather than the normal 75-100. This large increase in volunteer awards and the much lower cost of registration allowed for many more students and younger attendees.

For Virtual EMNLP 2020, Bonnie Webber as General Chair, and her team of Program Chairs seemed to have managed almost all parts of the conference with little outreach to the Office. Again, due to COVD-19, the decision was made to hold this as a 100% virtual meeting and we were fortunate enough to be able to negotiate moving the in-person meeting to 2021 at the same all-inclusive resort, the Barcelo Bavaro Resort in Punta Cana, thereby avoiding large penalties. Bonnie and her team have been communicating with Dan and watching closely what was involved in holding our first virtual meeting of ACL 2020. And, I acted as Local Arrangements Chair in doing the same sort of things as for ACL 2020, working with the sponsors and exhibitors, managing registrations, maintaining the working budget, but with little overall involvement. EMNLP 2019 numbered 1,939 final registrations and EMNLP 2020 closed with a total of 4,069, of which 46% were regular and 52% were students (the other 2% were sponsors, exhibitors, etc.).

EACL 2021 is well under way as a 100% virtual meeting rather than being in-person in Kiev. Paola Merlo, as General Chair, plus her team are expecting to open registration any day now. Paola had consulted with both Bonnie Webber and Dan Jurafsky to learn what worked well and what to avoid and, of course, has been in close communication with the Office for ideas, answers and making payments when necessary. They have brought in close to $19,000 in sponsorships so far and more is expected. The hope, I think, is to possibly hold an in-person meeting in Kiev in the future.

NAACL 2021, led by Kristina Toutanova, was contracted to be held in-person in Mexico City but, again due to COVID-19 instability, the contracts are being negotiated to now be NAACL 2024 in Mexico City in June with no penalties for these changes. The negotiations and NAACL Board’s decision were only made this week and being 100% virtual will be announced within a few days. Kristina and her team are beginning to put the virtual plan in place and the Office is coordinating the building of the registration form and working budget.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021 was decided this week to be 100% virtual rather than in-person or hybrid in Bangkok, with no apparent penalties being incurred. The virtual planning will now begin. It is hoped that a future ACL meeting can take place in Bangkok. And, the Office stands ready to help in any way, the first thing being to pull together registration fees, expenses (especially virtual platforms costs) and contracts to help guide both NAACL and ACL-IJCNLP 2021 organizers in their planning.

So far, it seems that EMNLP 2021, November in Dominican Republic, may stay as an in-person event or at least as a hybrid. No decisions have been made yet but it is hoped that COVID-19 might be less threatening and people will mostly be vaccinated so it may be safe enough by November to travel. The other reason to be somewhat optimistic is that, once there, there is little reason to leave the resort. With many restaurants, beaches, nightclub, bowling alley, theaters, etc. there are ample things to keep people occupied and safely catered to without going outside “the bubble”.

While it is always difficult to project attendance at conferences, we now face the difficulty of having to negotiate and enter into venue contracts at least two years in advance for in-person meetings but cannot predict whether our conferences will continue to grow substantially or if the numbers will level out. Now that we have held our first virtual conference, there may be a demand for fully virtual or hybrid conferences in the future. This has implications in how much space we contract and, if too much, be locked into space we may not need at a convention center with very high costs. Also, whatever space is contracted for a particular conference tends to lock the Program Chairs into presenting the posters in a certain way and removes their flexibility in planning the program. And, if hybrid conferences are desired, we could run the danger of defaulting on contracts we are in or may negotiate before this decision is made. The space/catering/av may not be required at the amounts contracted, placing us in a position of not meeting contracted amounts. Or, conversely, we may need to pay space rental if our catering and guest rooms are not at a high enough level to gain complimentary space as we do now.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

ACL 2020 ended their conference with $260,440 in main conference sponsorships plus WiNLP 2020 with $57,500 and other workshops had a combined total of $6,000 and the D&I received $17,247. EMNLP 2020 ended their conference with $152,270 in main conference sponsorships plus $13,600 brought in by various workshops. These donations were from many of our faithful continuing sponsors such as Amazon, Apple, Bablelcape, Baidu, Bloomberg, Bytedance, Deep Mind, Facebook, G-Research, Google, Grammarly, IBM, ISI, Johns Hopkins, Megagon, Microsoft, Naver Labs Europe, Poly AI, and Two Sigma plus newly returning sponsors including Adobe and Alibaba. We did lose one sponsor at the Platinum level (Duolingo) and one Exhibitor (Flitto) due to COVD-19 but, given the pandemic, we were fortunate that our sponsors stayed with us and contributed at similar levels to what they had done in the past.

AACL-IJCNLP had two main conference sponsors totaling $8,500 from Baidu and Bloomberg. There may have been other sponsorships donated directly to the local organizing team. A report of this conference’s registrations and financials has been requested.

The idea of offering 2-Pack or 3-Pack options and including EMNLP allows sponsors to make one payment to support multiple events in a given year rather than one at a time. This has made sponsoring easier, especially for our ongoing sponsors. For the 2020 Sponsorship Booklet we continued to offer these multi-pack options including AACL 2020, ACL 2020, and EMNLP 2020, which has resulted in some first-time as well as repeating commitments and sometimes at higher levels. With the new Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) initiative continuing since NAACL 2019, we kept and updated the section giving options to sponsor this. However, once it was decided that, due to COVD-19, both ACL and EMNLP 2020 would be 100% virtual, about half of the benefits assured to sponsors could no longer be promised since they were in-person benefits (exhibit space, inserts into conference bags, logos emblazoned on conference bags, ads in conference handbooks, etc.). To encourage sponsors to continue their support, the benefits were adjusted to include what could be offered from the in-person Sponsorship Booklet and add the additional benefits of free virtual exhibit space to all but Bronze, Supporter and Publisher levels, ability to receive a list of registrants who indicated they were looking for employment and wanted their information shared, full Participant List (with those who expressed not wanting to share contact information culled from the list), and exhibiting allowed for the full 6 days rather than just the main conference 3 days.

Chris Callison-Burch, our new Sponsorship Director, has already had an impact on our sponsorship efforts. We now have a sleek new and updated 2021 Sponsorship Booklet which looks more professional and appealing. Most all of the levels and benefit remain the same except, even for virtual meetings, only Diamond and Platinum levels receive complimentary exhibiting and all others must pay for this option. Chris has also been very successful in finding and getting commitments for regional sponsor co-chairs to serve (there should be 2 from Asia, 2 from Europe and 2 from the Americas, plus Chris and Priscilla rounding out the full committee). And, he has taken a good part of the growing demands of working with the individual sponsors off of the Office’s list of duties. We have been working closely and very successfully to gather 2021 sponsors for all ACL conferences in 2021.

2020Q3 Reports: Office Manager

2020-07-20T21:18:47Z

PriscillaRasmussen:

Priscilla Rasmussen,
Summer 2020

13 July 2020

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

First let me say that, although we have moved into the virtual world for 2020 conferences, there is still a lot of work to be managed by the Office. Both Pat and I have been consumed with ACL 2020 and now that it has ended, we turn our attention to helping in a similar way with EMNLP 2020. Within Memberships, Conferences, and Sponsorships sections below you will find descriptions of what we have been doing. It is a lighter load than when holding in-person conferences because the physical setup aspects are not needed but, to a lesser extent they have been replaced with a different set of questions and concerns (time zones posing a lot of issues and need to think differently, for example).

Following on the previously reported potential move to using Quickbooks as our Office accounting system, David and I have discussed the benefits and drawbacks of continuing to use Young Associates (our longtime Canadian accountants) or engaging Nisivoccia to serve as our accountant rather than (currently as) our auditor. We decided to continue more formally with Young Associates as the accountant and this means a fairly high learning curve for both Pat and me to learn Quickbooks and the process of working effectively with the Young Associates team. In the long term, this should improve and expedite our accounting and payment functions. David may speak more on this topic.

Pat Kirby continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations regarding membership entries, managing conference registrations as well as working with me in preparation for and during our conferences. Plus she continues to do more of the bank statement reconciliations and expenditure posting. She will be indispensable in our conversion to Quickbooks. Cathy Magnusson, my more part-time second assistant, continues communicating with the sponsors and exhibitors (who take a lot of our time and have lots of questions) and she seems to excel in following up on sponsorship delinquent payments and registrations that are declined or invalid and is doing a great job in financial recovery.

And, with the tremendous growth of our conferences, we have been overrun with requests for invoices and more proper receipts. I asked the registration form builders to make a receipt on our letterhead to hopefully satisfy these requests which they did but people are still not happy. I hope that, when Nitin has some free time, he may be able to help come up with an automated application process, similar to the visa letter requests, for paid-in-full invoices/receipts and certificates of attendance to reduce the hundreds of requests currently handled individually.

For the ACL initiatives on anti-harassment and diversity & inclusion (D&I), we have continued to include most items requested to be included on the registration form, with refinements as we learned what works best. The anti-harassment effort is working quite well. For the D&I initiative, the highly successful mentoring option has been included for the ACL 2020 conference as well as the question about needing assistance, etc. Overall, some very good and well received initiatives resulted from the D&I efforts in 2019 and are continuing in 2020 and the dedication shown by the committee and its leaders is impressive.

My hope is that by making the above suggested accounting adjustments we will be better equipped to handle the ever-increasing numbers of conference attendees and there will be more time for me to offer the always-called-upon advice, attend and organize meetings, identify and pre-negotiate future conference venues, conduct site visits, pre-negotiate catering/av/social event and other contracts, develop and monitor working budgets, review bids, make initial approaches to potential sponsors, oversee Office operations, etc. As previously explained, very cyclical employees are difficult to find and/or retain and, with the COVID-19 pandemic, it is fortunate that additional employees were not hired. The office has been closed since early March except for a few visits I have made to check on things. Going to a 100% virtual conference for ACL 2020 has shifted more of the complex planning and pre-conference management from the Office (planning space utilization, catering, and all onsite in-person arrangements) to the Organizing Committee and especially the amazingly excellent Infrastructure Team Dan Jurafsky pulled together. The office focused on advising, helping select virtual platforms for the conference, creating and monitoring the working budget, creating and managing registrations as usual, working with sponsors and exhibitors to ensure they still received promotion and recognition of their support, working with the Organizing Committee members (especially the general, program, tutorial, and workshop chairs).

I am beginning to formulate some ideas which may include engaging a Professional Conference Organizer (PCO) to work on all conferences to greater or lesser extent, as needed. After I am able to discuss this idea and expand it into something more complete that I can propose, I will come back to this.

'''Publications, Journals and Royalties:'''

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates handling print-on-demand of our publications, I typically receive no requests for hardcopy publications in the office.

The Curran Associates agreement has been good for both them and the ACL. In the first half of 2020, we have received $1,521.76 covering the 4th quarter 2019 and the 1st quarter 2020.

MIT Press Journals has not yet sent invoices for their 2019-2020 year for services supporting both the CL and TACL journals. These invoices generally are submitted in September and total $70-80,000.

Our journals pay editorial assistants to help with the process. The CL Journal’s assistant has not submitted an invoice in the first half of 2020. The TACL Journal’s assistant was paid $3,858.43 covering the 4th quarter of 2019 and $9,911.97 for the 1st and 2nd quarters of 2020.

'''Membership:'''

For the previous report, I was pleased to say that we finished CY 2019 with 5,145 members and I can now report that we currently have 4,186 current 2020 members. We began 2020 with 94 members who were in a multi-year membership and about 274 members renewed on their own. As is becoming more standard, most memberships come from conference registrations. This includes most of the ACL 2020 members who renewed or joined along with their conference registrations. It indicates the continuing growth of our field and conferences...Only three years ago, membership was under 3,000. Additionally, it appears that holding virtual conferences allows more people, especially students, to be able to afford and attend conferences and pay memberships. Typically, regular vs student memberships had been 60/40% or even 65/35% but so far this year we are running at almost 50/50, regular vs student. And, I expect many more memberships to come in with the virtual EMNLP 2020 later this year, most likely bringing memberships up to 6,000 or so by year’s end. The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be representing 70 or more countries on a regular basis. Countries represented in the first half of 2020 are 78, reflecting the WiNLP and Diversity & Inclusion outreach efforts. Please refer to the Membership Report and Members By Country report for full details.

[[File: Membership-report-2011-2020-Summer-Statistics.xlsx]]

[[File: Memberships-2020-by-Country-SUMMER.xlsx]]

Occasionally inquiries come to the Office about what the benefits of ACL membership are and whether a particular country qualifies for the hard currency discount. It would be good to 1) update and more prominently post member benefits at the portal and 2) annually update the countries qualifying for hard currency discounts. I would also recommend making the location for posting job announcement more prominent at the portal.

'''Fellows Program:'''

The only involvement the Office now has in the Fellowship nomination and selection process is to verify nominated members’ eligibility according to our new policy for future years.

'''Conferences:'''

ACL 2020, intended to be in Seattle, was held 100% virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This was a difficult decision in part because it had to be made early enough to educate ourselves on the best ways of producing a virtual conference and also to renegotiate our contractual commitments and avoid huge cancellation penalties. We were successful in avoiding very large penalties by negotiating the rescheduling of both the hotels and the social event space and caterers to now be NAACL 2022. The decision was made to learn from ICLR 2020 which was about the same size and complexity as ACL 2020 and they were a big help in sharing information to get us started in the right direction. This dramatically changed my role in particular in that I did not have to be concerned with the physical conference setup, space requirements, av and catering contracts and arrangements, exhibits’ physical setups, etc. I worked very closely with Dan Jurafsky as General Chair and the marvelous infrastructure team he pulled together, led by Hao Fang, Sudha Rao and Yizhe Zhang on selecting the various platforms/systems to use, negotiating and paying the contracts, and sitting in on presentations. With this team, one of my largest ongoing interactions was in providing lists of the registrants so they could be sent individualized conference access information. Overall, this went well but there were a couple of snags when, the day before the conference, all downloading stopped working from the registration system and, being a holiday weekend, it was difficult to find someone at the company to fix the problem…but it was fixed. Some people wrote requesting the access information, claiming not having gotten it so there was a bit of communication between Pat, me, the team and the requestors but, there are always some questions and issues that possibly the team did not expect. I was disappointed that the registration form building company closed for the weekend, leaving us with no one to help if something went wrong. I will be speaking to them so this does not happen again. The Office was always available to offer advice and registration lists and statistics, track and approve the budget expenditures, monitor registrations and work with the tutorial and workshop chairs and organizers; these became the primary roles of the Local Arrangements Chair. Many innovations suggested by the D&I Committee were implemented. The more successful D&I initiatives (mentoring, preferred names, accessibility/assistance, registration payment assistance, helping to purchase greater bandwidth for some attendees in Africa, coordination for time zones and scheduling, etc.) were incorporated into this conference.

ACL 2019 in Italy ended with 3,283 registrations and Virtual ACL 2020 ended with a total of 4,959 registrations, with regulars accounting for 49% and students numbering 50% of all registrations (the 1% was staff, organizers, sponsors and exhibitors). I believe a part of this increase was due to our need for 250-300 volunteers rather than the normal 75-100. This large increase in volunteer awards and the much lower cost of registration allowed more student and younger attendees.

While it is always difficult to project attendance at conferences, we now face the difficulty of having to negotiate and enter into venue contracts at least two years in advance for in-person meetings but cannot predict whether our conferences will continue to grow substantially or if the numbers will level out. Now that we have held our first virtual conference, there may be a demand for fully virtual or hybrid conferences in the future. This has implications in how much space we contract and, if too much, be locked into space we may not need at a convention center with very high costs. Also, whatever space is contracted for a particular conference tends to lock the Program Chairs into presenting the posters in a certain way and removes their flexibility in planning the program (for example, they could not revert to evening poster sessions with dinners because that type of meeting space might not be available once the contract is set with meeting space to accommodate daytime parallel poster sessions). And, if hybrid conferences are desired, we could run the danger of defaulting on contracts we are in or may negotiate before this decision is made. The space/catering/av may not be required at the amounts contracted, placing us in a position of not meeting contracted amounts. Or, conversely, we may need to pay space rental if our catering and guest rooms are not at a high enough level to gain complimentary space as we do now.

Workshops continue to be more challenging for in-person meetings in finding adequate space for the growing attendance at some workshops plus the many poster sessions they plan to present. Careful advance planning is essential for these events.

EMNLP 2020 planning is underway, led by Bonnie Webber. Again, due to COVID-19, the decision has been made to hold this as a 100% virtual meeting and we were fortunate enough to be able to negotiate moving the in-person meeting to 2021 at the same all-inclusive resort, the Barcelo Bavaro Resort in Punta Cana, thereby avoiding large penalties. Bonnie and her team have been communicating with Dan and watching closely what was involved in holding our first virtual meeting of ACL 2020. And, I will be acting as Local Arrangements Chair in doing the same sort of things as for ACL 2020, working with the sponsors and exhibitors, managing registrations, maintaining the working budget, etc. With EMNLP 2018 numbering 2,458 registrations and EMNLP 2019 numbering 1,939 final registrations, I expect a minimum of 3,000-3,500 registrations for EMNLP 2020.

We will now begin to consider more closely what our options will be for ACL 2021 in Bangkok and EACL 2021 in Kiev. NAACL 2021 is already planned for Mexico City. For all of these future meetings, we now need to decide the sort of conference each one will be…completely in-person or a 50/50 hybrid or fully virtual…so the planning can begin in earnest.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

ACL 2020 ended with $267,084 in main conference sponsorships from many of our faithful continuing sponsors such as Amazon, Apple, Bablelcape, Baidu, Bloomberg, Bytedance, Deep Mind, Facebook, G-Research, Google, Grammarly, IBM, ISI, Johns Hopkins, Megagon, Microsoft, Naver Labs Europe, Poly AI, and Two Sigma plus newly returning sponsors including Adobe and Alibaba. WiNLP 2020 brought in $57,500 and the other workshops who found sponsorships had a combined total of $6,000. And the D&I received $17,247 from two sponsors. We did lose one sponsor at the Platinum level, Duolingo, due to COVID-19 but, given the pandemic, we were fortunate that our sponsors stayed with us.

EMNLP 2020 has received $128,901 in sponsorships so far. All were the result of 2-Pack sponsorship agreements so many of the same companies that were listed above generously donated. Additionally, there are commitments of $8,500 sponsoring specific workshops.

Although I do not have the complete list of sponsorships committed for AACL-IJCNLP 2020, I can report that, from the International Sponsorship Committee call for 2020 sponsors, we have a Diamond level commitment from Baidu for $6,000 and a $2,500 D&I commitment from Bloomberg. I believe the Local Sponsorship Chairs may have obtained more commitments.

The idea of offering 2-Pack or 3-Pack options and including EMNLP allows sponsors to make one payment to support two or all three events rather than one at a time. This has made sponsoring easier, especially for our ongoing sponsors. For the 2020 Sponsorship Booklet we continue to offer these multi-pack options including AACL 2020, ACL 2020, and EMNLP 2020, which will hopefully result in some first-time as well as repeating commitments and sometimes at higher levels. With the new Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) initiative continuing since NAACL 2019, we kept and updated the section giving options to sponsor this. However, once it was decided that, due to COVID-19, both ACL and EMNLP 2020 would be 100% virtual, about half of the benefits assured to sponsors could no longer be promised since they were in-person benefits (exhibit space, inserts into conference bags, logos emblazoned on conference bags, ads in conference handbooks, etc.). To encourage sponsors to continue their support, the benefits were adjusted to include what could be offered from the “old” Sponsorship Booklet and add the additional benefits of free virtual exhibit space to all but Bronze, Supporter and Publisher levels, ability to receive a list of registrants who indicated they were looking for employment and wanted their information shared, full Participant List (with those who expressed not wanting to share contact information culled from the list), and exhibiting allowed for the full 6 days rather than just the main conference 3 days.

'''Proposal to Add a New Sponsorship Director or Point Person:'''

I would ask that you consider appointing an overall Sponsorship Chair, along the lines of Nitin’s and Matt’s roles or, if more appropriate, a Point Person similar to Tim’s sustainability role.

Although I do include the status of our sponsorship outreach in each of my Office Reports, it may be unclear what a large role sponsorships play in keeping our registration fees affordable while offering more and more complex conferences. This is our largest solicitation and requires more attention to attract and keep our faithful supporters. Please refer to the attached “Sponsorships for 2010 – 2020” to see the growth in support over the years.

[[File: Sponsorships-for-2011-2020.xlsx]]

As I understand and remember, the International Sponsorship Committee (ISC) was established back around 2010 by Owen Rambow and others as a way of “standardizing” our requests for sponsorships from the various companies. This was a follow-up to the initial ideas proposed by Robert Dale, Alex Lascarides, Martha Palmer, Owen Rambow, and Priscilla Rasmussen in June 2007. It had been the case that different conferences were setting their own rates and companies were being approached by multiple people, each representing their own conference and with very different requests and promises. So, the annually updated sponsorship booklet was created and, each year, the conferences of that year have been included, allowing a company to plan once to support 1, 2, or 3 conferences (multiples becoming package deals). ACL, EACL when it takes place, EMNLP and NAACL when it takes place have all been represented in years they hosted conferences. So, for 2020, I had included AACL, ACL and EMNLP as the conferences to share in the ISC efforts and created 2-Pack and 3-Pack sponsor options in addition to sponsoring just one meeting. For 2021, we will offer up to a 4-Pack which would include ACL, EACL, EMNLP and NAACL. In future years, there may be up to a 5-Pack option. A benefit to the sponsoring companies is that they can apply just once to their internal financial team to support one or up to all ACL conferences in a given year. This has proved to be a successful strategy for the ACL.

But, I believe we have come to a point where we should revisit the sponsorship booklet, arrangements and benefits to companies which are outlined in the booklet and how to better structure our solicitation efforts. Additionally, it has been suggested by some that we do not charge enough to the sponsors and at the top levels, we should be charging double, if not more. I believe possibly raising the pricing a bit would be alright but, our top long-term sponsors already support multiple conferences and workshops at well over $50-75,000 each. Having a Sponsorship Director or Point Person would not only help with updating pricing and benefits (to make sponsoring more appealing), keeping consistency across all conferences, but may also have better insight into new or different companies to approach (Citibank, Disney, 3M, come to mind as examples), and whether the apportioning of multi-packs between conferences should change. Or possibly there should be an entire rethinking of coordination across conferences.

The pandemic has led to an immediate need to restructure sponsoring benefits by removing anything to do with in-person conference bags, handouts, advertising in hardcopy handbooks, delineating exhibit space/booth building/staffing/etc. and so on. In trying to maintain the sponsor commitments already made, I gave each sponsor additional benefits such as exhibiting for 6 days rather than just the three main conference days and helping them in their recruiting efforts by providing contact information of attendees who expressed interest in employment opportunities. But, while this seemed to work in retaining companies, it also highlighted the possible need for a revamping of the booklet.

Additionally, a Sponsorship Director or Point Person may have better knowledge of people in the community who might be interested in representing the various parts of the world and be more effective in finding new companies to add to our amazing list of sponsors.

2020Q3 Reports: Office Manager

2020-07-14T06:15:34Z

PriscillaRasmussen: Created page with "Priscilla Rasmussen, Summer 2020 13 July 2020 '''ACL Business Office Report''' First let me say that, although we have moved into the virtual world for 2020 conferences,..."

Priscilla Rasmussen,
Summer 2020

13 July 2020

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

First let me say that, although we have moved into the virtual world for 2020 conferences, there is still a lot of work to be managed by the Office. Both Pat and I have been consumed with ACL 2020 and now that it has ended, we turn our attention to helping in a similar way with EMNLP 2020. Within Memberships, Conferences, and Sponsorships sections below you will find descriptions of what we have been doing. It is a lighter load than when holding in-person conferences because the physical setup aspects are not needed but, to a lesser extent they have been replaced with a different set of questions and concerns (time zones posing a lot of issues and need to think differently, for example).

Following on the previously reported potential move to using Quickbooks as our Office accounting system, David and I have discussed the benefits and drawbacks of continuing to use Young Associates (our longtime Canadian accountants) or engaging Nisivoccia to serve as our accountant rather than (currently as) our auditor. We decided to continue more formally with Young Associates as the accountant and this means a fairly high learning curve for both Pat and me to learn Quickbooks and the process of working effectively with the Young Associates team. In the long term, this should improve and expedite our accounting and payment functions. David may speak more on this topic.

Pat Kirby continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations regarding membership entries, managing conference registrations as well as working with me in preparation for and during our conferences. Plus she continues to do more of the bank statement reconciliations and expenditure posting. She will be indispensable in our conversion to Quickbooks. Cathy Magnusson, my more part-time second assistant, continues communicating with the sponsors and exhibitors (who take a lot of our time and have lots of questions) and she seems to excel in following up on sponsorship delinquent payments and registrations that are declined or invalid and is doing a great job in financial recovery.

And, with the tremendous growth of our conferences, we have been overrun with requests for invoices and more proper receipts. I asked the registration form builders to make a receipt on our letterhead to hopefully satisfy these requests which they did but people are still not happy. I hope that, when Nitin has some free time, he may be able to help come up with an automated application process, similar to the visa letter requests, for paid-in-full invoices/receipts and certificates of attendance to reduce the hundreds of requests currently handled individually.

For the ACL initiatives on anti-harassment and diversity & inclusion (D&I), we have continued to include most items requested to be included on the registration form, with refinements as we learned what works best. The anti-harassment effort is working quite well. For the D&I initiative, the highly successful mentoring option has been included for the ACL 2020 conference as well as the question about needing assistance, etc. Overall, some very good and well received initiatives resulted from the D&I efforts in 2019 and are continuing in 2020 and the dedication shown by the committee and its leaders is impressive.

My hope is that by making the above suggested accounting adjustments we will be better equipped to handle the ever-increasing numbers of conference attendees and there will be more time for me to offer the always-called-upon advice, attend and organize meetings, identify and pre-negotiate future conference venues, conduct site visits, pre-negotiate catering/av/social event and other contracts, develop and monitor working budgets, review bids, make initial approaches to potential sponsors, oversee Office operations, etc. As previously explained, very cyclical employees are difficult to find and/or retain and, with the COVD-19 pandemic, it is fortunate that additional employees were not hired. The office has been closed since early March except for a few visits I have made to check on things. Going to a 100% virtual conference for ACL 2020 has shifted more of the complex planning and pre-conference management from the Office (planning space utilization, catering, and all onsite in-person arrangements) to the Organizing Committee and especially the amazingly excellent Infrastructure Team Dan Jurafsky pulled together. The office focused on advising, helping select virtual platforms for the conference, creating and monitoring the working budget, creating and managing registrations as usual, working with sponsors and exhibitors to ensure they still received promotion and recognition of their support, working with the Organizing Committee members (especially the general, program, tutorial, and workshop chairs).

I am beginning to formulate some ideas which may include engaging a Professional Conference Organizer (PCO) to work on all conferences to greater or lesser extent, as needed. After I am able to discuss this idea and expand it into something more complete that I can propose, I will come back to this.

'''Publications, Journals and Royalties:'''

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates handling print-on-demand of our publications, I typically receive no requests for hardcopy publications in the office.

The Curran Associates agreement has been good for both them and the ACL. In the first half of 2020, we have received $1,521.76 covering the 4th quarter 2019 and the 1st quarter 2020.

MIT Press Journals has not yet sent invoices for their 2019-2020 year for services supporting both the CL and TACL journals. These invoices generally are submitted in September and total $70-80,000.

Our journals pay editorial assistants to help with the process. The CL Journal’s assistant has not submitted an invoice in the first half of 2020. The TACL Journal’s assistant was paid $3,858.43 covering the 4th quarter of 2019 and $9,911.97 for the 1st and 2nd quarters of 2020.

'''Membership:'''

For the previous report, I was pleased to say that we finished CY 2019 with 5,145 members and I can now report that we currently have 4,186 current 2020 members. We began 2020 with 94 members who were in a multi-year membership and about 274 members renewed on their own. As is becoming more standard, most memberships come from conference registrations. This includes most of the ACL 2020 members who renewed or joined along with their conference registrations. It indicates the continuing growth of our field and conferences...Only three years ago, membership was under 3,000. Additionally, it appears that holding virtual conferences allows more people, especially students, to be able to afford and attend conferences and pay memberships. Typically, regular vs student memberships had been 60/40% or even 65/35% but so far this year we are running at almost 50/50, regular vs student. And, I expect many more memberships to come in with the virtual EMNLP 2020 later this year, most likely bringing memberships up to 6,000 or so by year’s end. The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be representing 70 or more countries on a regular basis. Countries represented in the first half of 2020 are 78, reflecting the WiNLP and Diversity & Inclusion outreach efforts. Please refer to the Membership Report and Members By Country report for full details.

Occasionally inquiries come to the Office about what the benefits of ACL membership are and whether a particular country qualifies for the hard currency discount. It would be good to 1) update and more prominently post member benefits at the portal and 2) annually update the countries qualifying for hard currency discounts. I would also recommend making the location for posting job announcement more prominent at the portal.

'''Fellows Program:'''

The only involvement the Office now has in the Fellowship nomination and selection process is to verify nominated members’ eligibility according to our new policy for future years.

'''Conferences:'''

ACL 2020, intended to be in Seattle, was held 100% virtually due to the COVD-19 pandemic. This was a difficult decision in part because it had to be made early enough to educate ourselves on the best ways of producing a virtual conference and also to renegotiate our contractual commitments and avoid huge cancellation penalties. We were successful in avoiding very large penalties by negotiating the rescheduling of both the hotels and the social event space and caterers to now be NAACL 2022. The decision was made to learn from ICLR 2020 which was about the same size and complexity as ACL 2020 and they were a big help in sharing information to get us started in the right direction. This dramatically changed my role in particular in that I did not have to be concerned with the physical conference setup, space requirements, av and catering contracts and arrangements, exhibits’ physical setups, etc. I worked very closely with Dan Jurafsky as General Chair and the marvelous infrastructure team he pulled together, led by Hao Fang, Sudha Rao and Yizhe Zhang on selecting the various platforms/systems to use, negotiating and paying the contracts, and sitting in on presentations. With this team, one of my largest ongoing interactions was in providing lists of the registrants so they could be sent individualized conference access information. Overall, this went well but there were a couple of snags when, the day before the conference, all downloading stopped working from the registration system and, being a holiday weekend, it was difficult to find someone at the company to fix the problem…but it was fixed. Some people wrote requesting the access information, claiming not having gotten it so there was a bit of communication between Pat, me, the team and the requestors but, there are always some questions and issues that possibly the team did not expect. I was disappointed that the registration form building company closed for the weekend, leaving us with no one to help if something went wrong. I will be speaking to them so this does not happen again. The Office was always available to offer advice and registration lists and statistics, track and approve the budget expenditures, monitor registrations and work with the tutorial and workshop chairs and organizers; these became the primary roles of the Local Arrangements Chair. Many innovations suggested by the D&I Committee were implemented. The more successful D&I initiatives (mentoring, preferred names, accessibility/assistance, registration payment assistance, helping to purchase greater bandwidth for some attendees in Africa, coordination for time zones and scheduling, etc.) were incorporated into this conference.

ACL 2019 in Italy ended with 3,283 registrations and Virtual ACL 2020 ended with a total of 4,959 registrations, with regulars accounting for 49% and students numbering 50% of all registrations (the 1% was staff, organizers, sponsors and exhibitors). I believe a part of this increase was due to our need for 250-300 volunteers rather than the normal 75-100. This large increase in volunteer awards and the much lower cost of registration allowed more student and younger attendees.

While it is always difficult to project attendance at conferences, we now face the difficulty of having to negotiate and enter into venue contracts at least two years in advance for in-person meetings but cannot predict whether our conferences will continue to grow substantially or if the numbers will level out. Now that we have held our first virtual conference, there may be a demand for fully virtual or hybrid conferences in the future. This has implications in how much space we contract and, if too much, be locked into space we may not need at a convention center with very high costs. Also, whatever space is contracted for a particular conference tends to lock the Program Chairs into presenting the posters in a certain way and removes their flexibility in planning the program (for example, they could not revert to evening poster sessions with dinners because that type of meeting space might not be available once the contract is set with meeting space to accommodate daytime parallel poster sessions). And, if hybrid conferences are desired, we could run the danger of defaulting on contracts we are in or may negotiate before this decision is made. The space/catering/av may not be required at the amounts contracted, placing us in a position of not meeting contracted amounts. Or, conversely, we may need to pay space rental if our catering and guest rooms are not at a high enough level to gain complimentary space as we do now.

Workshops continue to be more challenging for in-person meetings in finding adequate space for the growing attendance at some workshops plus the many poster sessions they plan to present. Careful advance planning is essential for these events.

EMNLP 2020 planning is underway, led by Bonnie Webber. Again, due to COVD-19, the decision has been made to hold this as a 100% virtual meeting and we were fortunate enough to be able to negotiate moving the in-person meeting to 2021 at the same all-inclusive resort, the Barcelo Bavaro Resort in Punta Cana, thereby avoiding large penalties. Bonnie and her team have been communicating with Dan and watching closely what was involved in holding our first virtual meeting of ACL 2020. And, I will be acting as Local Arrangements Chair in doing the same sort of things as for ACL 2020, working with the sponsors and exhibitors, managing registrations, maintaining the working budget, etc. With EMNLP 2018 numbering 2,458 registrations and EMNLP 2019 numbering 1,939 final registrations, I expect a minimum of 3,000-3,500 registrations for EMNLP 2020.

We will now begin to consider more closely what our options will be for ACL 2021 in Bangkok and EACL 2021 in Kiev. NAACL 2021 is already planned for Mexico City. For all of these future meetings, we now need to decide the sort of conference each one will be…completely in-person or a 50/50 hybrid or fully virtual…so the planning can begin in earnest.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

ACL 2020 ended with $267,084 in main conference sponsorships from many of our faithful continuing sponsors such as Amazon, Apple, Bablelcape, Baidu, Bloomberg, Bytedance, Deep Mind, Facebook, G-Research, Google, Grammarly, IBM, ISI, Johns Hopkins, Megagon, Microsoft, Naver Labs Europe, Poly AI, and Two Sigma plus newly returning sponsors including Adobe and Alibaba. WiNLP 2020 brought in $57,500 and the other workshops who found sponsorships had a combined total of $6,000. And the D&I received $17,247 from two sponsors. We did lose one sponsor at the Platinum level, Duolingo, due to COVD-19 but, given the pandemic, we were fortunate that our sponsors stayed with us.

EMNLP 2020 has received $128,901 in sponsorships so far. All were the result of 2-Pack sponsorship agreements so many of the same companies that were listed above generously donated. Additionally, there are commitments of $8,500 sponsoring specific workshops.

Although I do not have the complete list of sponsorships committed for AACL-IJCNLP 2020, I can report that, from the International Sponsorship Committee call for 2020 sponsors, we have a Diamond level commitment from Baidu for $and a D&I commitment from Bloomberg. I believe the Local Sponsorship Chairs may have obtained more commitments.

The idea of offering 2-Pack or 3-Pack options and including EMNLP allows sponsors to make one payment to support two or all three events rather than one at a time. This has made sponsoring easier, especially for our ongoing sponsors. For the 2020 Sponsorship Booklet we continue to offer these multi-pack options including AACL 2020, ACL 2020, and EMNLP 2020, which will hopefully result in some first-time as well as repeating commitments and sometimes at higher levels. With the new Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) initiative continuing since NAACL 2019, we kept and updated the section giving options to sponsor this. However, once it was decided that, due to COVD-19, both ACL and EMNLP 2020 would be 100% virtual, about half of the benefits assured to sponsors could no longer be promised since they were in-person benefits (exhibit space, inserts into conference bags, logos emblazoned on conference bags, ads in conference handbooks, etc.). To encourage sponsors to continue their support, the benefits were adjusted to include what could be offered from the “old” Sponsorship Booklet and add the additional benefits of free virtual exhibit space to all but Bronze, Supporter and Publisher levels, ability to receive a list of registrants who indicated they were looking for employment and wanted their information shared, full Participant List (with those who expressed not wanting to share contact information culled from the list), and exhibiting allowed for the full 6 days rather than just the main conference 3 days.

'''Proposal to Add a New Sponsorship Director or Point Person:'''

I would ask that you consider appointing an overall Sponsorship Chair, along the lines of Nitin’s and Matt’s roles or, if more appropriate, a Point Person similar to Tim’s sustainability role.

Although I do include the status of our sponsorship outreach in each of my Office Reports, it may be unclear what a large role sponsorships play in keeping our registration fees affordable while offering more and more complex conferences. This is our largest solicitation and requires more attention to attract and keep our faithful supporters. Please refer to the attached “Sponsorships for 2010 – 2020” to see the growth in support over the years.

As I understand and remember, the International Sponsorship Committee (ISC) was established back around 2010 by Owen Rambow and others as a way of “standardizing” our requests for sponsorships from the various companies. This was a follow-up to the initial ideas proposed by Robert Dale, Alex Lascarides, Martha Palmer, Owen Rambow, and Priscilla Rasmussen in June 2007. It had been the case that different conferences were setting their own rates and companies were being approached by multiple people, each representing their own conference and with very different requests and promises. So, the annually updated sponsorship booklet was created and, each year, the conferences of that year have been included, allowing a company to plan once to support 1, 2, or 3 conferences (multiples becoming package deals). ACL, EACL when it takes place, EMNLP and NAACL when it takes place have all been represented in years they hosted conferences. So, for 2020, I had included AACL, ACL and EMNLP as the conferences to share in the ISC efforts and created 2-Pack and 3-Pack sponsor options in addition to sponsoring just one meeting. For 2021, we will offer up to a 4-Pack which would include ACL, EACL, EMNLP and NAACL. In future years, there may be up to a 5-Pack option. A benefit to the sponsoring companies is that they can apply just once to their internal financial team to support one or up to all ACL conferences in a given year. This has proved to be a successful strategy for the ACL.

But, I believe we have come to a point where we should revisit the sponsorship booklet, arrangements and benefits to companies which are outlined in the booklet and how to better structure our solicitation efforts. Additionally, it has been suggested by some that we do not charge enough to the sponsors and at the top levels, we should be charging double, if not more. I believe possibly raising the pricing a bit would be alright but, our top long-term sponsors already support multiple conferences and workshops at well over $50-75,000 each. Having a Sponsorship Director or Point Person would not only help with updating pricing and benefits (to make sponsoring more appealing), keeping consistency across all conferences, but may also have better insight into new or different companies to approach (Citibank, Disney, 3M, come to mind as examples), and whether the apportioning of multi-packs between conferences should change. Or possibly there should be an entire rethinking of coordination across conferences.

The pandemic has led to an immediate need to restructure sponsoring benefits by removing anything to do with in-person conference bags, handouts, advertising in hardcopy handbooks, delineating exhibit space/booth building/staffing/etc. and so on. In trying to maintain the sponsor commitments already made, I gave each sponsor additional benefits such as exhibiting for 6 days rather than just the three main conference days and helping them in their recruiting efforts by providing contact information of attendees who expressed interest in employment opportunities. But, while this seemed to work in retaining companies, it also highlighted the possible need for a revamping of the booklet.

Additionally, a Sponsorship Director or Point Person may have better knowledge of people in the community who might be interested in representing the various parts of the world and be more effective in finding new companies to add to our amazing list of sponsors.

2020Q1 Reports: Office

2020-02-27T23:14:15Z

PriscillaRasmussen: Created page with "Priscilla Rasmussen Winter 2020 Executive Board Meeting 26 February 2020 '''ACL Business Office Report''' Even with the addition of an extra part-time staff person, the..."

Priscilla Rasmussen

Winter 2020 Executive Board Meeting

26 February 2020

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

Even with the addition of an extra part-time staff person, the Office is becoming busier than in past years for each conference’s planning, organizing, onsite management and especially lately, post-conference financial wrap-ups. With the usual student travel and SRW awards and volunteers refunds we have always made, we now have WiNLP and Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) travel awards which, all combined, totaled in the hundreds this past year. And, these days, checks are not accepted or carry huge cashing fees in most countries outside the United States. This means relying much more heavily on making wire transfers for both the smaller travel awards and the quite large venue and catering conference expenses. I have worked with the bank to raise my wire transfer limit to $50,000 and this helps but it is still very time consuming to get the correct and complete information from the awardees. I am working with the WiNLP and D&I organizers so that they will get this information when making the awards and be able to pass the information on to me to hopefully ease this process.

Having passed the audit with flying colors once again in November 2019, the auditors and I had discussed moving to Quickbooks as our Office accounting system and also possibly moving to a US-based accounting firm to compile our reporting and IRS filing requirements. David and I recently had a lengthy conference call with our auditors where we discussed possibly hiring them as our accountants since they are nearby in New Jersey (where ACL is incorporated) and hiring a different auditor since they could not do both. The current auditors are now preparing a proposal for them to move into the accountant role. David will probably speak more on this topic. What this means for the Office is that I have enrolled both Pat and myself in introductory and intermediary Quickbooks courses in preparation for a very positive but large, time consuming change in how our financials are recorded and managed. This should also help save time in the long run by automating check and wire payments. After talking with the auditors and getting their description of what Quickbooks can do, I am now thinking there may be a way to coordinate input of all online conference registration payments directly into Quickbooks, making for more timely accounting of income and expenses generated by each conference.

Pat Kirby continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations (especially handling most of the membership entries into the portal), managing all conference registrations as well as managing the conference student housing and working with me in preparation for and onsite at our conferences. She continues to do more of the expenditure and monthly bank statement reconciliations. Cathy Magnusson, my more part-time second assistant, continues communicating with the sponsors and exhibitors (who take a lot of our time and have lots of questions), and works with Pat in sending out participant receipts and invoices, allowing more time for Pat to focus on the financials. Cathy has been following up on sponsorship delinquent payments and onsite registrations that are declined or invalid and is doing a great job in financial recovery.
And, with the tremendous growth of our conferences, we have been overrun with requests for invoices and more proper receipts. I asked the registration form builders to make a receipt on our letterhead to hopefully satisfy these requests which they did but people are still not happy. I am hoping Nitin may be able to help come up with an automated application process for these, too, where people can specify what they need the receipts/invoices to state.

For the ACL initiatives on anti-harassment and diversity & inclusion (D&I), we have continued to include most items requested to be included on the registration form, with a few refinements as we learned what worked best: 1) put an anti-harassment checkbox directly on the registration forms, just above the payment options, which prevents people from completing their registration until they check the box saying that they have read and agree to abide by our policy (and there is a link to the policy itself) and 2) incorporating suggestions coming from the D&I committee such as adding a nickname field, adding pronoun question, adding/adjusting gender questions, adding childcare and travel assistance questions and links, adjusting the dietary restriction/preference question, adding mentoring options, and adding a question of whether a person needs assistance of any kind. The anti-harassment effort is working quite well. For the D&I initiative, the highly successful mentoring and childcare options have been included for all 2019 conferences as well as the question about needing assistance, etc. So, overall, some very good and well received initiatives resulted from the D&I efforts in 2019 which we intend to continue in 2020 and the dedication shown by the committee and its leaders was and is impressive.

My hope is that by making the above suggested financials and staffing adjustments we will be better equipped to handle the ever-increasing numbers of conference attendees and there will be more time for me to offer the always-called-upon advice, attend and organize meetings, identify and pre-negotiate future conference venues, conduct site visits, pre-negotiate catering/av/social event and other contracts, develop working budgets, review bids, make initial approaches to potential sponsors, oversee Office operations, etc. The difficulty in hiring additional staff is that there is not enough work in the Office to keep even one person (Pat) occupied 4-5 part-time days a week in December, January and February. It is not until conference “season” is in full swing that we grow from needing one full-time person to needing up to 3-4 close to full-time people. Very cyclical employees are difficult to find and/or retain. But, I am beginning to formulate some ideas which may include engaging a Professional Conference Organizer (PCO) to work on all conferences to greater and lesser extent, as needed. After I am able to discuss this idea and expand it into something more complete that I can propose, I will come back to this.

'''Publications, Journals and Royalties:'''

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates handling print-on-demand of our publications, I typically receive no requests for hardcopy publications in the office.

The Curran Associates agreement has been good for both them and the ACL. In the last half of 2019, we have received $1,153.90.

MIT Press Journals sent two invoices in September for their fiscal year, July 2018 - June 2019, for their services related to the Computational Linguistics (CL) and TACL Journals. The CL invoice was for a total of $40,120.07 and the TACL invoice was for $34,362.42.

Our journals pay editorial assistants to help with the process. The CL Journal’s assistant was paid $508.00 for her services for the 3rd and 4th quarters of the 2019. The TACL Journal’s assistant was paid $6,123.68 covering the 2nd and $6,546.65 covering the 3rd quarters of 2019.

'''Membership:'''

For the previous report, I was pleased to say that we had 4,172 members at the end of the CY 2018 year but the even better news is that we finished CY 2019 with 5,145 members. This is higher than my end-of-year prediction of between 4,500 and 4.800 members. It indicates the continuing growth of our field and conferences...Only two years ago, membership was under 3,000. The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be representing around 70 countries on a regular basis. Countries represented at year-end of 2019 are 78, reflecting the WiNLP and Diversity & Inclusion outreach efforts. Please refer to the Membership Report and Members By Country report for full details.

We began 2019 with 94 members who were in a multi-year membership and about 274 members renewed on their own. As is becoming more standard, most memberships come from conference registrations. The NAACL 2019 attendees’ registrations included 1,268 new and renewing memberships, ACL 2019 resulted in 2,316 memberships, and EMNLP 2019 resulted in 1,193 memberships, especially from the Asian communities. Between the growth in overall memberships and the increased number resulting from conference registrations, the portal’s automated input process seems to be working well and allows us to keep up with memberships very easily and quickly and have more time for other endeavors.

Occasionally inquiries come to the Office about what the benefits of ACL membership are and whether a particular country qualifies for the hard currency discount. It would be good to 1) update and more prominently post member benefits at the portal and 2) annually update the countries qualifying for hard currency discounts. I would also recommend making the location for posting job announcement more prominent at the portal. It currently resides within the wiki as “Employment opportunities, postdoctoral positions, summer jobs” which is harder for people to find and there is much confusion as people want and prefer to post their job announcements under conference events instead.

'''Fellows Program:'''

The only involvement the Office now has in the Fellowship nomination and selection process is to verify nominated members’ eligibility according to our new policy for future years.

'''Conferences:'''

NAACL 2019 was held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Minneapolis, June 2-7. The final number of attendees was 1,635 after removing all cancellations and unpaid no-shows, which is a record of over 300 more attendees than the record set in 2018. This year we continued the successful innovations of adding both an Industrial (parallel) Track and holding the poster sessions in parallel with the other main conference sessions as well as lowering the food/beverage orders by 1/3 to keep costs down and avoid wasting leftover food. Many innovations suggested by the D&I Committee were implemented. A few were not so successful and others were standout winners. For NAACLs (and possibly other conferences) in the future, it is advisable to continue with the lower food amounts, parallel Industry Track (NAACLs) and poster sessions and the more successful D&I initiatives (mentoring, nicknames, childcare, accessibility/assistance, better food labeling and attention to dietary needs, travel assistance when/if possible financially, new to ACL/I am Hiring/ I am looking for Employment/etc stickers for badges, quiet/prayer/mothers/childcare rooms, gender neutral bathroom, etc.). The hotel changed audio visual companies in January just before our meeting, replacing PSAV (the company I used for many years with great success) with Encore, who seemed fine contractually honoring the previously entered into PSAV contract and in planning emails and phone calls. However, onsite, Encore was less than competent in many ways. Encore is a company to be wary of or avoided in the future. The Social Event at the Minneapolis Institute of Art was a great success, with the themed food stations offered to compliment the subject matter in the various galleries. However, the failure of the Recruitment Lunch was a surprise. Although over 500 people signed up on their registration forms to attend the lunch, we expected 400 students and up to 20 recruiters. About 14-16 recruiters showed up, representing 7 companies but only about 50 students showed up. No one came to the registration desk asking about the Lunch and it seemed to be out of everyone’s mind and attendees did not seem to miss not attending this event. The lesson learned is to be very careful that this is well advertised if we are to continue offering these lunches and to evaluate whether it is useful to continue.

ACL 2019 was very successful, with 3,283 people registered and attending. This is more than double ACL 2018 and 44% more than ACL 2017 final numbers. Between the Local Arrangements Chairs, the PCO, the Local Sponsorship Chairs, and myself, we communicated on a regular basis, especially regarding sponsors and exhibitors, registration, venue setup and other key policy questions and this has been extraordinarily important with the increased conference size. It was decided not to include a Recruitment Lunch and no one seemed to miss it or inquire about having one. We were quite fortunate to have an excellent PCO guiding the physical setup, catering and av of the venue as well as assisting with the other logistics. Having 32 or more exhibitors adds an entire extra level of work for the PCO but I might recommend not making full exhibit booth builds in the future. They are costly and more demanding both to satisfy each exhibitor and in having enough space. Exhibitors can easily rent their own exhibit furniture and setup as is done at NAACLs. Many thanks must be given to the Local Arrangements team who scrambled more than once to revise the venue space and usage to accommodate the ever increasing registration predictions. Having worked closely with this particular PCO and knowing they are a part of 50-60 offices worldwide, I would strongly recommend using them again.

EMNLP 2019 was also very successful, especially given the social unrest in downtown Hong Kong. We only had one person cancel attendance specifically due to the unrest but we, as the organizing committee, worried about attendance, making appropriate final confirmations to hotels, conference venue and social event venue and posting updates for participants to assure them of the safety in coming to the conference. In the end, with 1938 attendees, the conference was a success and ran smoothly. Possibly making better use of the very large space available for the poster sessions and catered lunches would be something to keep in mind for the future but, otherwise, the space was more than adequate. And, while it was expensive for our budgeting, people seemed to very much enjoy the social event at Disneyland Hong Kong and there were few other options without going downtown where the unrest might have been problematic.

Given the current concerns about possible travel restrictions going into the future, it may be interesting to note that NAACL 2019, with 1635 registrations, had 13 cancellations specifically due to visas being denied compared to NAACL 2018 which had 8 cancellations out of 1322 registrations. There were many more cancellations, due to illness and work obligations, but these numbers represent the ones that were identified as being specifically visa issues. There are no records kept or requested of authors who did not register and could not attend due to visa problems. Comparing the NAACL experience to ACL 2019 in Italy, with almost double the registrations at 3283, for ACL 2019 there were 49 cancellations specifically due to visa denials. And, for EMNLP 2019, with 27 cancellations due to visa denials and 1939 total registrations, it seems that there are more issues of visa denials elsewhere than with NAACL conferences.

While it is always difficult to project attendance at conferences, we now face the difficulty of having to negotiate and enter into venue contracts at least two years in advance but cannot predict whether our conferences will continue to grow substantially or if the numbers will level out. This has implications in how much space we contract and, if too much, be locked into space we may not need at a convention center with very high costs. Also, whatever space is contracted for a particular conference tends to lock the Program Chairs into presenting the posters in a certain way and removes their flexibility in planning the program (for example, they could not revert to evening poster sessions with dinners because that type of meeting space might not be available once the contract is set with meeting space to accommodate daytime parallel poster sessions).

Workshops continue to be more challenging in finding adequate space for the growing attendance at some workshops plus the many poster sessions they plan to present. Careful advance planning is essential for these events.

ACL 2020 in Seattle is shaping up nicely, with a very dedicated group of organizers working tirelessly to get quotes for various things (video recording, childcare, and many other aspects of the meeting) and the Office is offering advice as well as acting as Local Arrangements Chair. As such, the PSAV audio/visual quotation should be submitted to me within the next few days; PSAV has already given a one-day total price for the six days of conference internet; food and beverage estimates cannot be done until the hotel produces their spring/summer menu in the next couple of weeks; and other contracting/negotiating is underway (poster board rentals, etc.). With these quotes and estimations I can make, coupled with the quotes the other Organizers are receiving, I plan to create a working budget to set registration fees in the later half of March and open registration in early April. The Museum of Pop Culture (MoPop) will be the social event venue and it is a great, fun experience which we hope people will enjoy.

EMNLP 2020 planning is underway, led by Bonnie Webber. This will be our first experiment with holding a conference at an all-inclusive resort and the contract has been signed for this. The Barcelo Bavaro Resort in Punta Cana offers many day and night activities and plenty of all-you-can-eat restaurants as well as more upscale dining and, of course, lovely beaches and pools. The meeting space is quite nice and large enough to accommodate our expected attendance of up to 2000 or more. The tricky part is encouraging everyone to stay onsite at the resort to avoid awkward and complicated local travel, onsite dining and resort entrance. Planning is in the early stages but everyone staying at the resort should have a wonderful experience.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

ACL 2019 had the high level of sponsorship commitments of $399,505 from 40 sponsors through the International Sponsorship Committee (ISC). Our faithful sponsors (Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Bloomberg, ByteDance, ebay, Facebook, Deep Mind/Google, Google, Grammarly, Huawei/Noah's Ark Lab, IBM Research, Megagon Labs, Microsoft, NAVER Labs, Tencent, Yandex) plus sponsors we have not seen before or are returning (Almaware, ASAPP, Babelscape, BBN, BMW, Bosch, Cisco, DiDi Research, Duolingo, Expert System Iberia, G-Research, ISI, Jingdong, PolyAI, SAP, Salesforce, Shannon AI, Verisk) continue to help us thrive. There were also companies supporting individual workshops: WiNLP with 14 sponsors for $71,426, BEA Workshop for $2,350, Blackbox Workshop for $5,000, the ArgMining Workshop for $500, the Workshop on Detecting Abusive Language for $6,750, the Rep4NLP Workshop for $5,262, TYP-NLP Workshop for $500 and SIGMORPHON for $1,000 in total contributions.

EMNLP 2019 received $208,796 in sponsorships. Many were the result of 2-Pack or 3-Pack sponsorship agreements so many of the same companies as were listed in the Summer Office Report for EMNLP and above generously donated. This also includes $16,500 sponsoring specific workshops.

NAACL 2019 received a total of $163,193 in main conference commitments. As with ACL and EMNLP 2019, many were the result of 2-Pack or 3-Pack sponsorship agreements so many of the same companies as listed above generously donated. Additionally, a total of $32,784 workshop-specific donations were made to various workshops.

The idea of offering 2-Pack or 3-Pack options and including EMNLP allows sponsors to make one payment to support two or all three events rather than one at a time. This has made sponsoring easier, especially for our ongoing sponsors. For the 2020 Sponsorship Booklet we continue to offer these multi-pack options including AACL 2020, ACL 2020, and EMNLP 2020, which will hopefully result in some first-time as well as repeating commitments and sometimes at higher levels. With the new Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) initiative continuing since NAACL 2019, we kept and updated the section giving options to sponsor this. The D&I includes Accessibility (for mobility, hearing and visually impaired), Childcare, Travel Assistance, Mentoring, etc. While we have accommodated an individual who requested accessibility assistance in the past, it is a positive step to more clearly and openly offer such assistance.

For 2020, we are just beginning to receive firm commitments from companies. So far, AACL 2020 has received $10,180 from 2 sponsors and 1 exhibitor; ACL has received $123,198 from 9 sponsors and 1 exhibitor, $37,500 for WiNLP and $3,500 for other workshops. EMNLP 2020 has received $83,617 from 7 sponsors and 1 exhibitor plus $5,000 toward various workshops. Most companies need to get management approvals and most Asian companies require formal agreements before firm commitments can be made so we are in the process of building our sponsorship base for each conference now.

I believe an idea was floated at one of the last couple of Executive meetings to consider appointing an overall Sponsorship Chair, along the lines of Nitin’s and Matt’s roles. This may be a good idea. As I understand and remember, the International Sponsorship Committee (ISC) was established back around 2012 by Owen Rambow and others as a way of “standardizing” our requests for sponsorships from the various companies. It had been thee case that different conferences were setting their own rates and companies were being approached by multiple people, each representing their own conference and with very different requests and promises. So, the annually updated sponsorship booklet was created and, each year, the conferences of that year were included, allowing a company to support 1, 2, or 3 conferences (multiples becoming package deals). ACL, EACL when it takes place, EMNLP and NAACL when it takes place have all been represented. So, for 2020, I had included AACL, ACL and EMNLP as the conferences to share in the ISC efforts. Perhaps AACL was unaware of this sponsorship arrangement and have created their own sponsorship levels/pricing, although requests for Asian & Pacific Rim Co-Chairs had been sent. Possibly having an Executive Board approved Sponsorship Coordinating Chair would not only help with consistency but may also have better insight into new or different companies to approach.

2020Q1 Reports: ACL 2020

2020-02-27T19:19:23Z

PriscillaRasmussen: /* Local Organisation 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)<br/>
Yonatan Belinkov, Sebastian Gehrmann and Ellie Pavlick<br/>
While deep learning has transformed the NLP field and impacted the larger computational linguistics community, the rise of neural networks is stained by their opaque nature: It is challenging to interpret the inner workings of neural network models, and explicate their behavior. Therefore, in the last few years, an increasingly large body of work has been devoted to the analysis and interpretation of neural network models in NLP.<br/>
This body of work is so far lacking a common framework and methodology. Moreover, approaching the analysis of modern neural networks can be difficult for newcomers to the field. This tutorial aims to fill this gap and introduce the nascent field of interpretability and analysis of neural networks in NLP.<br/>
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)<br/>
Xin Luna Dong, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Colin Lockard and Prashant Shiralkar<br/>
The World Wide Web contains vast quantities of textual information in several forms: unstructured text, template-based semi-structured webpages (which present data in key-value pairs and lists), and tables. Methods for extracting information from these sources and converting it to a structured form have been a target of research from the natural language processing (NLP), data mining, and database communities. While these researchers have largely separated extraction from web data into different problems based on the modality of the data, they have faced similar problems such as learning with limited labeled data, defining (or avoiding defining) ontologies, making use of prior knowledge, and scaling solutions to deal with the size of the Web.<br/>
In this tutorial we take a holistic view toward information extraction, exploring the commonalities in the challenges and solutions developed to address these different forms of text. We will explore the approaches targeted at unstructured text that largely rely on learning syntactic or semantic textual patterns, approaches targeted at semi-structured documents that learn to identify structural patterns in the template, and approaches targeting web tables which rely heavily on entity linking and type information.<br/>
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)<br/>
Kevin Cohen, Karën Fort, Margot Mieskes and Aurélie Névéol<br/>
As the demand for reviewing grows, so must the pool of reviewers. As the [http://www.livecongress.it/aol/indexSA.php?id=E2EAED7D&ticket= survey] presented by Graham Neubig at the 2019 ACL showed, a considerable number of reviewers are junior researchers, who might lack the experience and expertise necessary for high-quality reviews. Some of them might not have the environment or lack opportunities that allow them to learn the skills necessary. A tutorial on reviewing for the NLP community might increase reviewers’ confidence, as well as the quality of the reviews. This introductory tutorial will cover the goals, processes, and evaluation of reviewing research papers in natural language processing.

'''T4: Stylized Text Generation: Approaches and Applications''' (cutting-edge)<br/>
Lili Mou and Olga Vechtomova<br/>
Text generation has played an important role in various applications of natural language processing (NLP), and kn recent studies, researchers are paying increasing attention to modeling and manipulating the style of the generation text, which we call stylized text generation. In this tutorial, we will provide a comprehensive literature review in this direction. We start from the definition of style and different settings of stylized text generation, illustrated with various applications. Then, we present different settings of stylized generation, such as parallel supervised, style label-supervised, and unsupervised. In each setting, we delve deep into machine learning methods, including embedding learning techniques to represent style}, adversarial learning and reinforcement learning with cycle consistency to match content but to distinguish different styles. We also introduce current approaches of evaluating stylized text generation systems. We conclude our tutorial by presenting the challenges of stylized text generation and discussing future directions, such as small-data training, non-categorical style modeling, and a generalized scope of style transfer (e.g., controlling the syntax as a style).

'''Afternoon Tutorials'''

'''T5: Achieving Common Ground in Multi-modal Dialogue''' (cutting-edge)<br/>
Malihe Alikhani and Matthew Stone<br/>
All communication aims at achieving common ground (grounding): interlocutors can work together effectively only with mutual beliefs about what the state of the world is, about what their goals are, and about how they plan to make their goals a reality. Computational dialogue research offers some classic results on grouding, which unfortunately offer scant guidance to the design of grounding modules and behaviors in cutting-edge systems. In this tutorial, we focus on three main topic areas: 1) grounding in human-human communication; 2) grounding in dialogue systems; and 3) grounding in multi-modal interactive systems, including image-oriented conversations and human-robot interactions. We highlight a number of achievements of recent computational research in coordinating complex content, show how these results lead to rich and challenging opportunities for doing grounding in more flexible and powerful ways, and canvass relevant insights from the literature on human--human conversation. We expect that the tutorial will be of interest to researchers in dialogue systems, computational semantics and cognitive modeling, and hope that it will catalyze research and system building that more directly explores the creative, strategic ways conversational agents might be able to seek and offer evidence about their understanding of their interlocutors.

'''T6: Commonsense Reasoning for Natural Language Processing''' (introductory)<br/>
Maarten Sap, Vered Shwartz, Antoine Bosselut, Dan Roth and Yejin Choi<br/>
In our tutorial, we (1) outline the various types of commonsense (e.g., physical, social), and (2) discuss techniques to gather and represent commonsense knowledge, while highlighting the challenges specific to this type of knowledge (e.g., reporting bias). We will then (3) discuss the types of commonsense knowledge captured by modern NLP systems (e.g., large pretrained language models), and (4) present ways to measure systems' commonsense reasoning abilities. We finish with (5) a discussion of various ways in which commonsense reasoning can be used to improve performance on NLP tasks, exemplified by an (6) interactive session on integrating commonsense into a downstream task.

'''T7: Integrating Ethics into the NLP Curriculum''' (introductory)<br/>
Emily M. Bender, Dirk Hovy and Alexandra Schofield<br/>
Our goal in this tutorial is to empower NLP researchers and practitioners with tools and resources to teach others about how to ethically apply NLP techniques. Our tutorial will present both high-level strategies for developing an ethics-oriented curriculum, based on experience and best practices, as well as specific sample exercises that can be brought to a classroom. We plan to make this a highly interactive work session culminating in a shared online resource page that pools lesson plans, assignments, exercise ideas, reading suggestions, and ideas from the attendees. We consider three primary topics with our session that frequently underlie ethical issues in NLP research: Dual use, bias and privacy.<br/>
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)<br/>
Danqi Chen and Scott Wen-tau Yih<br/>
Open-domain (textual) question answering (QA), the task of finding answers to open-domain questions by searching a large collection of documents, has been a long-standing problem in NLP, information retrieval (IR) and related fields (Voorhees et al., 1999; Moldovan et al., 2000; Brill et al.,2002; Ferrucci et al., 2010). Traditional QA systems were usually constructed as a pipeline, consisting of many different components such as question processing, document/passage retrieval and answer processing. With the rapid development of neural reading comprehension (Chen, 2018), modern open-domain QA systems have been restructured by combining traditional IR techniques and neural reading comprehension models (Chen et al., 2017; Yang et al., 2019) or even implemented in a fully end-to-end fashion (Lee et al., 2019; Seo et al., 2019). While the system architecture has been drastically simplified, two technical challenges remain critical:(1) “Retriever”: finding documents that (might)contain an answer from a large collection of documents; (2) “Reader”: finding the answer in a given paragraph or a document.<br/>
In this tutorial, we aim to provide a comprehensive and coherent overview of recent advances in this line of research. We will start by first giving a brief historical background of open-domain question answering, discussing the basic setup and core technical challenges of the research problem.The focus will then shift to modern techniques and resources proposed for open-domain QA, including the basics of latest neural reading comprehension systems, new datasets and models. The scope will also be broadened to cover the information retrieval component on how to effectively identify passages relevant to the questions. Moreover, in-depth discussions will be given on the use of traditional / neural IR modules, as well as the trade-offs between modular design and end-to-end training. If time permits, we also plan to discuss some hybrid approaches for answering questions using both text and large knowledge bases (e.g. (Sun et al., 2018)) and give a critical review on how structured data complements the information from unstructured text.<br/>
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

== 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. <br/>
We are using the Whova event app for hosting the conference app this year similar to NAACL 2019.

== Business Office ==

Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL

2019Q3 Reports: Office Manager

2019-07-24T18:13:19Z

PriscillaRasmussen: Created page with "Priscilla Rasmussen 24 July 2019 '''ACL Business Office Report''' Even with the addition of an extra part-time staff person, the Office is becoming busier than in past yea..."

Priscilla Rasmussen
24 July 2019

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

Even with the addition of an extra part-time staff person, the Office is becoming busier than in past years for each conference’s planning, organizing and onsite management.

Pat Kirby continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations (especially handling most of the membership entries into the portal), managing all conference registrations as well as managing the conference student housing and working with me in preparation for and onsite at our conferences. I have had her begin to do more of the expenditures and monthly bank statement oversight as well. I had not remembered how much time is taken in training new people and getting them up to speed. But now my new additional staff person, Cathy Magnusson, is settling into her main duties of communicating with the sponsors and exhibitors (who take a lot of our time and have lots of questions), manage the exhibits onsite and also assist with the main conference and workshop poster sessions. Cathy is following up on sponsorships payments and onsite registrations that are declined or invalid and is doing a great job in financial recovery. To a lesser extent now and with greater focus after our “conference season” ends, I am starting to see Cathy as an additional support to what Pat has been doing so Pat can be relieved of some of the more routine duties and I can work with Pat on more and better financial controls and oversight.

In addition to looking forward to working with Nitin Madnani on some of his plans to update the Member Portal and possibly streamline that part of the ACL website, I am now thinking there may be some potential coordination that we might look into to help with the online conference registration system. Possibly something similar to what Nitin had created as a program for people to apply for visa invitation letters which was a great time saver for the Office. Now, with the tremendous growth of our conferences, we have, especially for ACL 2019, been overrun with requests for invoices and more proper receipts. I am hoping Nitin may come up with an automated application process for these, too. I look forward to working with Nitin.

To help with the new ACL initiatives on anti-harassment and diversity & inclusion (D&I), we have: 1) put an anti-harassment checkbox directly on the NAACL, ACL and EMNLP2019 registration forms, just above the payment options, which prevents people from completing their registration until they check the box saying that they have read and agree to abide by our policy (and there is a link to the policy itself) and 2) For NAACL 2019, we incorporated almost all of the suggestions coming from the D&I committee such as changing the name fields, adding a nickname field, adding pronoun question, adding/adjusting gender questions, adding visa and childcare and travel assistance questions and links, adjusting the dietary restriction/preference question, adding mentoring options, and adding directly on the form (rather than just helping when requested) a question of whether a person needs assistance of any kind. The anti-harassment effort is working quite well. For the D&I initiative, we learned many lessons from our first attempt with NAACL 2019. Although most questions/fields had extensive explanations, a great many people put the wrong information in the name and affiliation fields so, for ACL and EMNLP, we are going back to the standard questions we had asked in all previous years. We also found that people made a joke of the pronoun question and only two people answered anything other than he/him or she/her so we did not include this for ACL or EMNLP. Similarly, there are other avenues for people to apply for visa invitation letters and travel awards so these are not included. But the highly successful mentoring and childcare options have been included for the upcoming conferences as well as the question about needing assistance. So, overall, some very good and well received initiatives resulted from the D&I effort and the dedication shown by the committee and its leaders was impressive.

This year, with NAACL, ACL and EMNLP following closely after each other, the overlap for planning, management and registrations, especially for NAACL and ACL, has proven to be much more intense than expected. This is, in part, due to the growth of each conference (25%+ growth in NAACL and almost double growth for ACL). My hope is that by making the above suggested staffing and other adjustments we will be better equipped to handle the ever-increasing numbers of conference attendees and there will be more time for me to offer the always-called-upon advice, attend and organize meetings, identify and pre-negotiate future conference venues, conduct site visits, pre-negotiate catering/av/social event and other contracts, develop working budgets, review bids, make initial approaches to potential sponsors, oversee Office operations, etc.

'''Publications, Journals and Royalties:'''

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates handling print-on-demand of our publications, I typically receive no requests for hardcopy publications in the office.

The Curran Associates agreement has turned out to be a good one for both them and the ACL.
So far in 2019, we have received $1,017.13 covering the 4th quarter of 2018 and $759.70 for the 1st and 2nd quarters of 2019. Copyright Clearance Center has not sent any earnings to ACL for CY 2018 or a portion of 2019, nor has MIT Press Journals.

MIT Press Journals has not sent an invoice for their fiscal year, July 2018 - June 2019, for their services related to the Computational Linguistics Journal. This invoice is expected within the next month or so and should be for a total of just over $40,000 which is typical.

Our journals pay editorial assistants to help with the process. The CL Journal’s assistant was paid $1,841 for her services for the 3rd and 4th quarters of the 2018 calendar year and $1,177 in July for January-June, 2019. The TACL Journal’s assistant was paid $4,609 covering the 4th quarter of 2018 and 1st quarter of 2019.

'''Membership:'''

For the last report, I was pleased to say that we had 4,172 members at the end of the CY 2018 year but the even better news is that we have 3,704 members at just over the half-way mark in 2019. This is with only a portion of the ACL 2019 registration members included and none of the upcoming EMNLP-generated members. The end-of-year total is expected to be between 4,500 and 4.800 members. This indicates the continuing growth of our field and conferences. The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be representing close to 70 countries on a regular basis. Please refer to the Membership Report and Members By Country report for full details.

We began 2019 with 94 members who were in a multi-year membership and about 152 members renewed on their own. As is becoming more standard, most memberships come from conference registrations. The NAACL 2019 attendees’ registrations included 1,267 new and renewing memberships and ACL 2019 resulted so far in 2,191 memberships. EMNLP 2019 will certainly generate more memberships, especially among the Asian communities. Between the growth in overall memberships and the increased number resulting from conference registrations, the portal’s automated input process seems to be working well and allows us to keep up with memberships very easily and quickly and have more time for other endeavors.

Occasionally inquiries come to the Office about what the benefits of ACL membership are and whether a particular country qualifies for the hard currency discount. It would be good to 1) update and more prominently post member benefits at the portal and 2) annually update the countries qualifying for hard currency discounts. I would also recommend making the location for posting job announcement more prominent at the portal. It currently resides within the wiki as “Employment opportunities, postdoctoral positions, summer jobs” which is harder for people to find and there is much confusion as people want and prefer to post their job announcements under conference events instead.

'''Fellows Program:'''

The only involvement the Office now has in the Fellowship nomination and selection process is to verify nominated members’ eligibility according to our new policy for future years.

'''Conferences:'''

NAACL 2019 was held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Minneapolis, June 2-7. The final number of attendees was 1,635 after removing all cancellations and unpaid no-shows, which is a record of over 300 more attendees than the record set in 2018. This year we continued the successful innovations of adding both an Industrial (parallel) Track and holding the poster sessions in parallel with the other main conference sessions as well as lowering the food/beverage orders by 1/3 to keep costs down and avoid wasting leftover food. And, as discussed in the beginning of the Office Report, many innovations suggested by the D&I Committee were implemented. A few were not so successful and others were standout winners. For NAACLs (and possibly other conferences) in the future, it is advisable to continue with the lower food amounts, parallel Industry Track (NAACLs) and poster sessions and the more successful D&I initiatives (mentoring, nicknames, childcare, accessibility/assistance, better food labeling and attention to dietary needs, travel assistance when/if possible financially, new to ACL/I am Hiring/ I am looking for Employment/etc stickers for badges, quiet/prayer/mothers/childcare rooms, gender neutral bathroom, etc.). The hotel changed audio visual companies in January just before our meeting. This meant that PSAV (the company I used for many years with great success) was replaced by Encore, who seemed fine contractually honoring the previously entered into PSAV contract and in planning emails and phone calls. However, onsite, Encore was less than competent in many ways and it was difficult to keep after them to do what we needed or provide what we ordered as equipment. It is unclear whether our bad experience was due to their “growing pains” of just taking over this particular hotel or whether we must be very cautious about using Encore in the future. The Social Event at the Minneapolis Institute of Art was a great success, with the themed food stations offered to compliment the subject matter in the various galleries. The unfortunate thing was that there seemed to be little interest in the DJ and dancing so, possibly, when holding a Social Event where there is so much to do and see, there is no need to also provide music/dancing. The one true surprise and concern from NAACL 2019 was the failure of the Recruitment Lunch. Although over 500 people signed up on their registration forms to attend the lunch and we notified the non-students and late registrants that we were limited to 400 students and they could not attend, we did expect 400 students and up to 20 recruiters. About 14-16 recruiters showed up, representing 7 companies but only about 50 students showed up. The Recruitment Lunch was announced in various places but it seems not everywhere it should have been and there may have been some confusion since it is usually held the first conference day but was pushed to the second day. No one came to the registration desk asking about the Lunch and it seemed to be out of everyone’s mind and attendees did not seem to miss not attending this event. The lesson learned is to be very careful that this is well advertised if we are to continue offering these lunches and to evaluate whether it is useful to continue. The one fortunate thing is that this particular hotel is very green and community friendly/involved so all the food went to homeless shelters (if possible) and a local pig farm (food that spoiled and could not be served to the homeless).

Given the current concerns about possible travel restrictions going into the future, it may be interesting to note that NAACL 2019 had 13 cancellations specifically due to visas being denied compared to NAACL 2018 which had 8 cancellations. There were many more cancellations, due to illness and work obligations, but these numbers represent the ones that were identified as being specifically visa issues. There are no records kept or requested of authors who did not register and could not attend due to visa problems. Compare the NAACL experience to what we know so far about ACL 2019 in Italy, and with almost double the registrations, for ACL 2019 there have been 28 cancellations specifically due to visa denials and a few emails that people are still trying to get their interviews. It seems that the San Francisco Office was particularly backed up and offered appointments well after the beginning of the conference.

ACL 2019 will be incredibly successful, with 3,160 people already pre-registered at the close of late registration. This is more than double ACL 2018 and 44% more than ACL 2017 final numbers. Between the Local Arrangements Chairs, the PCO, the Local Sponsorship Chairs, and myself, we communicated on a regular basis, especially regarding sponsors and exhibitors as well as registration, venue setup and other key policy questions and this has been extraordinarily important with the increased conference size. We are fortunate to have an excellent PCO guiding the physical setup, catering and av of the venue as well as assisting with the other logistics. Having 32 or more exhibitors adds an entire extra level of work for the PCO but I might recommend not making full exhibit booth builds in the future. They are costly and more demanding to satisfy each exhibitor when exhibitors can easily rent their own exhibit furniture and setup as is done at NAACLs.
Many thanks must be given to the Local Arrangements team who scrambled more than once to revise the venue space and usage to accommodate the ever increasing registration predictions. In the end, we should have about 3,300 attendees and an excellent event.

EMNLP 2019 venue at Asia World Expo has been contracted and the Social Event will most likely be held at Tomorrowland in Disney World. Kentaro and the entire organizing team are working hard right now on finalizing contracts and venue plans/options to be able to begin making a working budget. Between the Local team and the Office, we hope to have a complete working budget agreed upon by the end of August and be able to open registration in early September.

While it is always difficult to project attendance at conferences, we now face the difficulty of having to negotiate and enter into venue contracts at least two years in advance but cannot predict whether our conferences will continue to grow substantially or if the numbers will level out. This has implications in how much space we contract and, if too much, be locked into space we may not need at a convention center with very high costs.

Workshops continue to be more challenging in finding adequate space for the growing attendance at some workshops plus the many poster sessions they plan to present. Careful advance planning is essential for these events.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

ACL 2019 has a high level of sponsorship commitments of $410,256 from 41 sponsors through the International Sponsorship Committee (ISC). Our faithful sponsors (Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Bloomberg, ByteDance, ebay, Facebook, Deep Mind/Google, Google, Grammarly, Huawei/Noah's Ark Lab, IBM Research, Megagon Labs, Microsoft, NAVER Labs, Tencent, Yandex) plus sponsors we have not seen before or are returning (Almaware, ASAPP, Babelscape, BBN, BMW, Bosch, Cisco, DiDi Research, Duolingo, Expert System Iberia, G-Research, ISI, Jingdong, PolyAI, SAP, Salesforce, Shannon AI, Verisk) continue to help us thrive. There were also companies supporting individual workshops: WiNLP with 12 sponsors for $66,426, BEA Workshop for $2,350, Blackbox Workshop for $5,000, the ArgMining Workshop for $500, the Workshop on Detecting Abusive Language for $4,750, the Rep4NLP Workshop for $5,262, TYP-NLP Workshop for $500 and SIGMORPHON for $1,000 in total contributions.

EMNLP 2019 so far has $211,135 in sponsorship. Many were the result of 2-Pack or 3-Pack sponsorship agreements so many of the same companies as listed above for ACL (Apple, Amazon, ASAPP, Babelscape, Baidu, BBN, ByteDance, Cisco, DeepMind/Google, Duolingo, ebay, Facebook, Google, Huawei/Noah's Ark Labs, Megagon, Naver Labs, Poly AI, Salesforce, SAP, Shannon AI, Verisk, Yandex) plus GT COM, Xiaomi, Zhuiyi Company and others generously donated. Additionally, the MRQA Workshop received $3,000, the W-NUT received $500, and CoNLL has $3,000 in sponsor commitments.

NAACL 2019 received a total of $162,218 in main conference commitments. As with ACL and EMNLP 2019, many were the result of 2-Pack or 3-Pack sponsorship agreements so many of the same companies as listed above (ASAPP, BBN, Bloomberg, Cisco, DeepMind/Google, Duolingo, ebay, Facebook, Google, Grammarly, IBM, ISI, Megagon, PolyAI, SAP) plus Amazon, Capital One, Capital Group, Clinc, ETS, Grammarly, Interactions, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, Two Sigma and Vanguard generously donated. Additional workshop-specific donations were made to SemEval for $3,000, to NLP+CSS workshop for $4,000, to Neural Language Generation workshop for $4,000, to CLPsych for $8,000, to ESSP for $1,784, to WNU for $500, to Narrative Understanding Workshop for $3,500 and to SpLU-RoboNLP for $1,500.

The idea of offering 2-Pack or 3-Pack options and including EMNLP allowed sponsors to make one payment to support two or all three events rather than one at a time. This has made sponsoring easier, especially for our ongoing sponsors. For the 2019 Sponsorship Booklet that the International Sponsorship Committee and the Office pulled together, we continue to offer these multi-pack options, resulting in some first-time as well as repeating commitments and sometimes at higher levels. We made a few changes to the Sponsorship booklet for 2019. With the new Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) initiative being tried for the first time at NAACL 2019, we added a section to sponsor this. The D&I includes Accessibility (for mobility, hearing and visually impaired), Childcare, Travel Assistance, Mentoring, etc. While we have accommodated an individual who requested accessibility assistance in the past, it is a positive step to more clearly and openly offer such assistance.

The area Sponsorship Chairs and the Local Arrangement Sponsorship Chairs are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them. And, many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!

2019Q1 Reports: Office

2019-03-12T19:19:41Z

PriscillaRasmussen: Created page with "Priscilla Rasmussen 11 March 2019 '''ACL Business Office Report''' As usual, the Office is beginning to become busier as planning for the conferences and opening registrat..."

Priscilla Rasmussen
11 March 2019

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

As usual, the Office is beginning to become busier as planning for the conferences and opening registration for NAACL 2019 is now happening.

Pat Kirby continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations (especially handling most of the membership entries into the portal) as well as managing the conference student housing and working with me in preparation for and onsite at our conferences, mainly with registrations. I have had her begin to do more of the expenditures and monthly bank statement oversight. I have now added a second, more part-time person, Cathy Magnusson, to communicate with the sponsors and exhibitors who take a lot of our time and have a lot of questions, manage the exhibits onsite and possibly also manage the main conference and workshop poster sessions. I also plan for Cathy to do most of the expenditure postings and following up on sponsorships payments. We will see how Cathy fits in and what sort of things she can best help with to relieve some of my burden.

Nitin Madnani and I had a lengthy phone conversation about some of his plans to update the Member Portal and possibly do other things to streamline that part of the ACL website. I am excited to work with Nitin since some of what we discussed will have a positive impact on certain Office procedures as well as our members’ experiences.

And, we have put an anti-harassment checkbox directly on the NAACL 2019 registration form, just above the payment options, which prevents people from completing their registration until they check the box saying that they have read and agree to abide by our policy (and there is a link to the policy itself). This will also be included on the ACL and EMNLP 2019 registration forms to promote and educate our conference attendees on the existence of the PCC.

This year, with NAACL, ACL and EMNLP following closely on each other, the overlap for planning, management and registrations, especially for NAACL and ACL, will be challenging but has been handled successfully many times before. My hope is that by making the above suggested staffing adjustments we will be better equipped to handle the ever-increasing numbers of conference attendees and there will be more time for me to offer the always-called-upon advice, attend and organize meetings, identify and pre-negotiate future conference venues, conduct site visits, pre-negotiate catering/av/social event and other contracts, develop working budgets, review bids, make initial approaches to potential sponsors, oversee Office operations, etc.

'''Publications, Journals and Royalties:'''

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates handling print-on-demand of our publications, I typically receive no requests for hardcopy publications in the office.

The Curran Associates agreement has turned out to be a good one for both them and the ACL.
In 2018, we have received a total of $3,230.24 in royalties from them, covering the 4th quarter of 2017 through the 3rd quarter of 2018. Copyright Clearance Center has not sent any earnings to ACL for CY 2017 or 2018, nor has MIT Press Journals.

MIT Press Journals sent an invoice for their fiscal year, July 2017 - June 2018, for their services related to the Computational Linguistics Journal. This invoice totaled $40,509.62.

Our journals pay editorial assistants to help with the process. The CL Journal’s assistant was paid $2,365 in January 2018 for her services for the fourth quarter of the 2017 calendar year and $3,311 in July for January-June, 2018. The TACL Journal’s assistant was paid $13,277.36 in April covering the 3rd and 4th quarters of 2017 and 1st quarter of 2018. She was also paid $7,339.75 for the 2nd quarter and $6,850.57 for the 3rd quarter of 2018.

'''Membership:'''

I am extremely pleased to report that we now have 4,172 members at the end of the year. This indicates the continuing growth of our field and conferences. The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be representing between 60 and 70 countries on a regular basis and ended this year with 70 countries being represented by our membership. Please refer to the Membership Report and Members By Country report for full details.

We began 2018 with 162 members who were in a multi-year membership and about 443 members renewed on their own. As is becoming more standard, most memberships come from conference registrations. The NAACL 2018 attendees’ registrations included 991 total memberships, ACL 2018 resulted in 886 memberships and EMNLP 2018 brought in 1,690 memberships. SIGdial 2018 instructed their attendees to pay memberships directly online at the portal so I do not have exact numbers for them. Between the growth in overall memberships and the increased number resulting from conference registrations, the portal automated input process seems to be working well and allows us to keep up with memberships very easily and quickly and have more time for other endeavors.

Occasionally inquiries come to the Office about what the benefits of ACL membership are and whether a particular country qualifies for the hard currency discount. It would be good to 1) update and more prominently post member benefits at the portal and 2) annually update the countries qualifying for hard currency discounts. I would also recommend making the location for posting job announcement more prominent at the portal. It currently resides within the wiki as “Employment opportunities, postdoctoral positions, summer jobs” which is harder for people to find and there is much confusion as people post their job announcements under conference events instead.

'''Fellows Program:'''

The only involvement the Office now has in the Fellowship nomination and selection process is to verify nominated members’ eligibility according to our new policy for future years.

'''Conferences:'''

NAACL 2018 was at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in New Orleans, June 1-6. The final number of attendees was 1,323 after removing all cancellations, which is a record high for NAACLs. This year a couple of innovations seem to have been successful. The organizers decided to add both an Industrial (parallel) Track and hold the poster sessions in parallel with the other main conference sessions. We also experimented with lowering the food/beverage orders by 1/3 to keep costs lower and avoid wasting leftover food. This seemed to work well and no complaints regarding a shortage of food were received, although a lack of water seemed to be a common complaint. For NAACLs (and possibly other conferences) in the future, trying to order food for breakfasts and breaks for about 50% of the expected attendance and requiring water be readily available may help the budget and be more pleasing to attendees. Internet seemed okay during the main conference and tutorials but, when we moved to the workshops area, the internet became more problematic. We need better assurances of adequate and reliable internet in the future. The Social Event seemed to be a success (although, again, a lack of water was an issue) and the dancing attendees seemed to enjoy the band.

Given the current concerns about possible travel restrictions going into the future, it may be interesting to note that NAACL 2018 had 8 cancellations specifically due to visas being denied compared to (NA)ACL 2017 which had 22 cancellations. There were many more cancellations, due to illness and work obligations, but these numbers represent the ones that were identified as being specifically visa issues. There are no records kept or requested of authors who did not register and could not attend due to visa problems.

ACL 2018 was also successful although much lower attended (1,322 registered) than usual. It was agreed to be more fiscally reasonable to have the local professional conference organizers (PCO) manage registrations to avoid complicated and costly taxation. Between the Local Arrangements Chairs, the PCO, the Local Sponsorship Chairs, and myself, we communicated on a regular basis, especially regarding sponsors and exhibitors as well as registration and other key policy questions. It seemed that the Local Arrangements team did more than their share of work to make the conference successful, taking over where the PCO left off. Tim, Karen, and Trevor deserve applause for this conference. And, we were given no statistics on reasons for cancellation so we are unaware of the possible number of people who could not attend due to visa issues.

EMNLP 2018 was a major surprise and a great success, with an increase of 35-40% in attendees above our highest prediction, with a final total of 2,458. Ellen Riloff (the General Chair), Sien Moens and the local team, and I were in frequent communication reallocating and adding space as it became apparent the conference was growing rapidly. We were fortunate to be able to manage this surge in participants by livestreaming sessions into other rooms both during the main conference and for the highly subscribed tutorials and workshops. Adding a second museum at the last minute saved the social event, as well. Ellen, Sien and the local team succeeded in a major way without having to impose registration cutoffs or otherwise limiting participation to any part of the conference. And, there were 13 cancellations/refunds specifically identified as being due to visas being declined.

While it is always difficult to project attendance at conferences, we now face the difficulty of having to negotiate and enter into venue contracts at least two years in advance but cannot predict whether our conferences will continue to grow substantially or if the numbers will level out. This has implications in how much space we contract and, if too much, be locked into space we may not need at a convention center with very high costs.

NAACL 2019 is well under way and registration has just opened. NAACL will again offer the usual three main conference session tracks plus an industry track. And, NAACL has accepted a somewhat higher number of workshops this year (20). The Social Event at the Minneapolis Institute of Art museum promises to be wonderful. A question came up in light of our recent growth, especially with EMNLP 2018’s experience, of whether registrations should be cut off at some number. We have decided against doing this unless the registrations soar out of control. This year, NAACL will be trying a couple of new initiatives. A Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) Committee has been formed to provide assistance to the visual, hearing and mobility impaired as well as providing travel and childcare assistance and gender neutral restrooms. You will notice questions on the registration form to help the D&I committee in making arrangements as needed. They have other ideas to possibly put in place onsite. Dovetailing with the D&I efforts, the General Chair and I are making much more concerted efforts to provided food/beverage options to suit the myriad of dietary restriction and preferences.

ACL 2019 preparations are well under way, with an expected attendance of 3,000. The Local Arrangements team have been revising plans for venue usage to accommodate these higher numbers. So far, they have what seems to be workable solutions and the conference should be excellent. I expect to have the working budget settled and be able to open registration around early May.

EMNLP 2019 venue at Asia World Expo has been contracted, the Organizing Committee members have been appointed and planning the details are now taking place.

Workshops continue to be more challenging in finding adequate space for the growing attendance at some workshops and the many poster sessions and numbers of posters within a workshop that they plan to present. Careful advance planning is essential for these events and may be something Cathy Magnusson can handle while attending the conferences to manage the exhibits.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

ACL 2018, although having low registration numbers, maintained a high level of sponsorship commitments of $264,660 through the International Sponsorship Committee (ISC) plus local sponsorships gathered within Australia of $11,3655. Our faithful sponsors (Amazon, Apple, Baidu, ByteDance, Facebook, Google, Huawei Technologies, IBM Research, Microsoft, NAVER, Nuance, Recruit Technologies, Tencent, Yandex) plus sponsors we have not seen before or are returning (CVTE, Duolingo, Elsevier, ISI, Jingdong, Roam Analytics, SAP, Samsung Electronics, Uber) continue to help us thrive. The local team pursued companies to participate in the Recruitment Lunch and the Office received one $500 payment. There were also companies supporting individual workshops: Representation Workshop for $12,500, Neural MT and Generation Workshop for $1,000, CALCS Workshop for $4,000, the NLP-OSS Workshop for $11,000 and the MQRA Workshop for $6,000 in total contributions.

EMNLP 2018 had $236,953 in sponsorship. Many were the result of 2-Pack or 3-Pack sponsorship agreements so many of the same companies as listed above for ACL (Amazon, Baidu, Facebook, Google, Huawei Technologies, Microsoft, NAVER, Nuance, Tencent, Yandex) plus Bloomberg, CVTE, Duolingo, ebay, Figure 8, Grammarly, Jingdong, Megagon, NEXT Canada, Oracle, PolyAI, Salesforce, Sogou, YITU Technologies, and others generously donated. Additionally, the Abusive Language Workshop had received $11,000, the Argument Mining Workshop received $3,000, the Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks Workshop had $4,422 and CoNLL had $1,175 in sponsor commitments.

NAACL 2018 received a total of $131,319 in main conference commitments. As with ACL and EMNLP 2018, many were the result of 2-Pack or 3-Pack sponsorship agreements so many of the same companies as listed above (Amazon, Bloomberg, ByteDance, ebay, Facebook, Google, Grammarly, IBM, ISI, Nuance, Oracle, PolyAI) plus Capital One, Duolingo, Figure 8, iMerit, KPMG, Tulane University, and Two Sigma generously donated. A childcare donation was made by Airbnb. Additional workshop-specific donations were made to WiNLP for $49,421, BEA for $2,700, Ethics for $12,500, CLPsych for $3,000, TextGraphs for $600 and *SEM for $1,000.

For 2019, sponsorships are coming in almost daily for single conferences or workshops and many 2-Packs and 3-Packs. ACL 2019 has $182,056 in main conference sponsorships from Apple, Babblescape, Baidu, BBN (Raytheon) Technologies, Bloomberg, BMW, Bosch Center for AI, DIDI Research, Duolingo, Facebook, Google, Jingdong, Megagon Labs, PolyAI, and SAP. Plus some workshops have received their own funding commitments: WiNLP with $15,000, SemEval with $3,000, BEA with $1,350, BlackBox with $4,000 and ArgMining with $500. NAACL 2019 currently has main conference commitments totaling $76,995 (with Amazon and Two Sigma being strictly NAACL sponsors) plus workshop commitments of $2,000 for the NLP+CSS Workshop and $4,000 for the Neural Language Generation Workshop. EMNLP 2019 has $80,463 in main conference sponsorships and the W-NUT Workshop has $500. Clearly, not only are more attendees keen on coming to ACL 2019 but so are the sponsors and exhibitors!

The idea of offering 2-Pack or 3-Pack options and including EMNLP allowed sponsors to make one payment to support two or all three events rather than one at a time. This made sponsoring easier, especially for our ongoing sponsors. For the 2019 Sponsorship Booklet that the International Sponsorship Committee and the Office pulled together, we continue to offer these multi-pack options, resulting in some first-time as well as repeating commitments and sometimes at higher levels. We made a few changes to the Sponsorship booklet for 2019. With the new Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) initiative being tried for the first time for NAACL 2019, we added a section to sponsor this. The D&I includes Accessibility (for mobility, hearing and visually impaired), Childcare, Travel Assistance, etc. While we have accommodated an individual who requested accessibility assistance in the past, it may be a positive step to more clearly and openly offer such assistance. My one ongoing concern is that it seems some companies are opting for a 2-Pack for ACL and EMNLP and fewer seem to be opting to support NAACL 2019.

The area Sponsorship Chairs and the Local Arrangement Sponsorship Chairs are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them. And, many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!

2018Q3 Reports: Office Manager

2018-07-08T19:12:26Z

PriscillaRasmussen: Created page with "Priscilla Rasmussen 6 July 2018 '''ACL Business Office Report''' As usual, the Office becomes extremely busy as conferences grow near. In an effort to better distribute..."

Priscilla Rasmussen
6 July 2018

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

As usual, the Office becomes extremely busy as conferences grow near.

In an effort to better distribute our efforts in the Office, I have decided to increase Pat Kirby’s time, when needed, and she has agreed. Pat continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations (especially handling most of the membership entries into the portal) as well as managing the conference student housing and working with me in preparation for and onsite at our conferences, especially with registrations. Since she enjoys anything financial and is great at doggedly reconciling any entries and discrepancies, I especially want her to begin to do more of the expenditure postings, monthly bank statement oversight, and following up on sponsorships. I have approached East Stroudsburg University to arrange interviews in August/September to add a more part-time position to communicate with the sponsors and exhibitors who take a lot of time and have a lot of questions, manage the exhibits onsite and possibly also manage the main conference and workshop poster sessions. I may have this second person also helping with other more standard communications in the Office since I seem to be spending over half of each day just handling emails (most of which I cannot hand off to others since these are advisory sorts of questions).

This year, with NAACL and EMNLP so far apart, the overlap for planning, management and registrations is a bit more minimal, especially since ACL is mostly managed by the local team and the PCO in Melbourne. Nevertheless, there has been quite a lot of questions and oversight required between the Melbourne local arrangements team, PCO and the ACL Office.

My hope is that by making the above suggested staffing adjustments there will be more time for me to offer the always-called-upon advice, attend and organize meetings, identify and pre-negotiate future conference venues, conduct site visits, pre-negotiate catering/av/social event and other contracts, develop working budgets, review bids, make initial approaches to potential sponsors, oversee Office operations, etc. I hope to have the second person in place sometime this fall to learn the division of duties so that we can start the new year with this new staffing scheme.

'''Publications, Journals and Royalties:'''

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates handling print-on-demand of our publications, I typically receive no requests for hardcopy publications in the office.

The Curran Associates agreement has turned out to be a good one for both them and the ACL.
So far in 2018, we have received a total of $1,598.99 in royalties from them, covering the 4th quarter of 2017 and the 1st quarter of 2018. Copyright Clearance Center has not sent any earnings to ACL for CY 2017 or 2018, nor has MIT Press Journals.

MIT Press Journals should be sending us an invoice sometime in July for their fiscal year, July 2017 - June 2018, for their services related to the Computational Linguistics Journal. I expect this invoice to be a little less than $40,000.

Our journals pay editorial assistants to help with the process. The CL Journal’s assistant was paid $2,365 in January 2018 for her services for the fourth quarter of the 2017 calendar year and $3,311 in July for January-June, 2018. The TACL Journal’s assistant was paid $13,277.36 in April covering the 3rd and 4th quarters of 2017 and 1st quarter of 2018.

'''Membership:'''

I am pleased to report that we now have 1,540 members and should be on track to exceed 3,000 members by the end of the year. This indicates the continuing growth of our field and conferences. The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be representing between 60 and 70 countries on a regular basis and currently have a total of 49 countries being represented by our membership (prior to ACL 2018 and EMNLP 2018 being held).

We began 2018 with 162 members who were in a multi-year membership and about 157 members renewed on their own. As is becoming more standard, most memberships come from conference registrations. The NAACL 2018 attendees’ registrations included 1,019 total memberships. Both the upcoming ACL and EMNLP 2018 conferences are expected to generate an estimated 1,500 additional members, bringing the total for the year to around 3,000. SIGdial 2018 will instruct their attendees to pay memberships directly online at the portal so I will not have exact numbers for them. Between the growth in overall memberships and the increased number resulting from conference registrations, the newly automated input process now allows us to keep up with memberships very easily and quickly and have more time for other endeavors.

Occasionally inquiries come to the Office about what the benefits of ACL membership are and whether a particular country qualifies for the hard currency discount. It would be good to 1) update and more prominently post member benefits at the portal and 2) annually update the countries qualifying for hard currency discounts.

'''Fellows Program:'''

The only involvement the Office now has in the Fellowship nomination and selection process is to verify nominated members’ eligibility according to our new policy for future years.

'''Conferences:'''

NAACL 2018 was at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in New Orleans, June 1-6. The final number of attendees was 1,323 after removing all cancellations, which is a record high for NAACLs. This year a couple of innovations seem to have been successful. The organizers decided to add both an Industrial (parallel) Track and hold the poster sessions in parallel with the other main conference sessions. We also experimented with lowering the food/beverage orders by 1/3 to keep costs lower and avoid wasting leftover food. This seemed to work well and no complaints regarding a shortage of food were received, although a lack of water seemed to be a common complaint. For NAACLs (and possibly other conferences) in the future, trying to order food for breakfasts and breaks for about 50% of the expected attendance and requiring water be readily available may help the budget and be more pleasing to attendees. Internet seemed okay during the main conference and tutorials but, when we moved to the workshops area, the internet became more problematic. We need better assurances of adequate and reliable internet in the future. The Social Event seemed to be a success (although, again, a lack of water was an issue) and the dancing attendees seemed to enjoy the band.

Given the current concerns about possible travel restrictions going into the future, it may be interesting to note that NAACL 2018 had 8 cancellations specifically due to visas being denied compared to (NA)ACL 2017 which had 22 cancellations. There were many more cancellations, due to illness and work obligations, but these numbers represent the ones that were identified as being specifically visa issues. There are no records of authors who did not register and could not attend due to visa problems.

ACL 2018 promises to be a success. The Office continues to offer advice as needed. It was agreed to be more fiscally reasonable to have the local professional conference organizers (PCO) manage registrations to avoid complicated and costly taxation. Between the Local Arrangements Chairs, the PCO, the Local Sponsorship Chairs, and myself, we have been communicating on a regular basis, especially regarding sponsors and exhibitors as well as registration and other policy questions. And, while at NAACL 2018, Tim Baldwin and I met to go over a great many questions so the local team could move forward with their plans. Post-conference, reports on registration numbers and breakdowns will be sent to the Office for our records and memberships captured through conference registrations will also be sent so we can add these memberships to the portal.

EMNLP 2018 is moving along well. Ellen Riloff (the General Chair), Sien Moens and the local team, and I are in frequent communication and planning is moving forward. This venue will also be able to handle an increase in participation if needed—we currently are expecting close to 1,400 total attendees. The local team is currently working on their portion of the budget to set registration fees and we are hoping to open registration in early August.

While it is always difficult to project attendance at conferences, we seem to be settling into a new higher level of attendance, after a growth spurt the last 2-3 years. Being prepared for more than expected numbers is extremely important for the next couple of years until we can again trust our newly-adjusted predictions. We may be at a point where most conference hotels no longer are large enough and we will have to specifically consider convention centers for future conferences.

ACL, NAACL and EMNLP 2018 are keeping in mind Michael Strube’s schema to optimally lay out the posters, demos and food/beverages for the poster sessions to allow ample walk space and overall comfort. However, for NAACL, it was decided to move to EMNLP’s recent model of holding the poster sessions throughout the main conference days as a parallel session. It will be interesting to see the survey results to know whether this is the preferred model for the future.

Workshops continue to be more challenging in finding adequate space for the growing attendance at some workshops and the many poster sessions and numbers of posters within a workshop that they plan to present. Careful advance planning is essential for these events and may be something the new second Office person can handle while attending the conferences to manage the exhibits.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

ACL 2018 has proven to be quite popular, with sponsorship commitments of $264,660 through the International Sponsorship Committee (ISC) plus local sponsorships gathered within Australia and reported elsewhere. Our faithful sponsors (Amazon, Apple, Baidu, ByteDance, Facebook, Google, Huawei Technologies, IBM Research, Microsoft, NAVER, Nuance, Recruit Technologies, Tencent, Yandex) plus sponsors we have not seen before or are returning (CVTE, Duolingo, Elsevier, ISI, Jingdong, Roam Analytics, SAP, Samsung Electronics, Uber) continue to help us thrive. The local team is actively pursuing companies to participate in the Recruitment Lunch.
There are also companies supporting individual workshops: Representation Workshop for $10,500, Neural MT and Generation Workshop for $1,000, CALCS Workshop for $4,000 and the NLP-OSS Workshop for $11,000.

EMNLP 2018 has $149,342 in sponsorship commitments so far. Many were the result of 2-Pack or 3-Pack sponsorship agreements so many of the same companies as listed above for ACL (Amazon, Baidu, Facebook, Google, Huawei Technologies, Microsoft, NAVER, Nuance, Tencent, Yandex) plus Bloomberg, CVTE, Duolingo, ebay, Figure 8, Grammarly, Jingdong, NEXT Canada, Oracle, and PolyAI generously donated. Additionally, the Abusive Language Workshop has received $9,500, the Argument Mining Workshop received $4,000 and the Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks Workshop has $1,500 in sponsor commitments.

NAACL 2018 received a total of $128,758.92 in main conference commitments. As with ACL and EMNLP 2018, many were the result of 2-Pack or 3-Pack sponsorship agreements so many of the same companies as listed above (Amazon, Bloomberg, ByteDance, ebay, Facebook, Google, Grammarly, IBM, ISI, Nuance, Oracle, PolyAI) plus Capital One, Duolingo, Figure 8, iMerit, KPMG, Tulane University, and Two Sigma generously donated. A childcare donation was also made by Airbnb. Additional workshop-specific donations were made to WiNLP for $43,500, BEA for $2,600, Ethics for $12,500, CLPsych for $3,000, TextGraphs for $600 and *SEM for $1,000.

The idea of offering 2-Pack or 3-Pack options and including EMNLP allowed sponsors to make one payment to support two or all three events rather than one at a time. This made sponsoring easier, especially for our ongoing sponsors. For the 2018 Sponsorship Booklet that the International Sponsorship Committee and the Office pulled together, we continue to offer these multi-pack options, resulting in some first-time as well as repeating commitments and at higher levels (Amazon and Baidu at Platinum, last year for example). We made a few changes to the Sponsorship booklet for 2018, partially based on ideas I gathered while sitting in on the various executive board meetings and having been an officer for ICML for a few years. We added a higher “Diamond” level which includes exhibiting. Apple, ByteDance, Google, Facebook, and Samsung have chosen to be at the Diamond level. Now the Platinum and Gold levels pay a discounted per-day “Manned Exhibit” fee (much as many other conferences would do) and Silver and below as well as non-sponsors would pay the full per-day “Manned Exhibit” fees as before. And, for the first time, we received a Social Event sponsor (Jingdong at $6,000 in support of ACL and EMNLP). We also added an option to sponsor Childcare. My one concern is that it seems some companies are opting for a 2-Pack for ACL and EMNLP and fewer have opted for NAACL 2018.

The area Sponsorship Chairs and the Local Arrangement Sponsorship Chairs are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them. And, many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!

2018Q1 Reports: Office

2018-03-04T22:55:23Z

PriscillaRasmussen: Created page with "Priscilla Rasmussen 4 March 2018 '''ACL Business Office Report''' As usual, the Office becomes extremely busy as conferences grow near. In an effort to better distribut..."

Priscilla Rasmussen
4 March 2018

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

As usual, the Office becomes extremely busy as conferences grow near.

In an effort to better distribute our efforts in the Office, I have decided to increase Pat Kirby’s time, when needed, and she has agreed. Pat continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations (especially handling most of the membership entries into the portal) as well as managing the conference student housing and working with me in preparation for and onsite at our conferences, especially with registrations. Since she enjoys anything financial and is great at doggedly reconciling any entries and discrepancies, I especially want her to begin to do more of the expenditure postings, monthly bank statement oversight, and following up on sponsorships. I would also like to add a more part-time position to communicate with the sponsors and exhibitors who take a lot of time and have many, many questions. I have a local person in mind who managed a few Chico’s apparel stores before moving to our area. She is on vacation at the moment but, when she returns, I hope to engage her if the Board approves.

The Office was pressured much more than usual last year, mainly in having two conferences so very close to each other. The overlap of ACL and EMNLP increased the day-to-day workload and is one more reason (besides paper reviewing/acceptances) to be mindful of spacing the conferences as far apart as possible. This year, with NAACL and EMNLP so far apart, the overlap for planning, management and registrations will be minimal and ACL will be mostly managed by the local team and the PCO in Melbourne. Nevertheless, making the above suggested staffing adjustments will allow more time for me to offer the always-called-upon advice, attend and organize meetings, identify and pre-negotiate future conference venues, conduct site visits, pre-negotiate catering/av/social event and other contracts, develop working budgets, review bids, make initial approaches to potential sponsors, oversee Office operations, etc.

It may not be well understood the time it takes to sift through many, many venues looking for appropriately sized space and then doing pre-negotiations before making a list of acceptable possibilities for a Board’s consideration. It is encouraged that all larger conferences, especially ACLs, EMNLPs, and NAACLs lock in contracts close to two years out (before appropriate venues are otherwise booked).

'''Publications, Journals and Royalties:'''

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates handling print-on-demand of our publications, I typically receive no requests for hardcopy publications in the office.

The Curran Associates agreement has turned out to be a good one for both them and the ACL.
In 2017, we have received a total of $3,885.48 in royalties from them, covering the 4th quarter of 2016 through the 3rd quarter of 2017 plus $683.27 paid to us in February 2018 covering the 4th quarter of 2017. Copyright Clearance Center has not sent any earnings to ACL for CY 2017, nor has MIT Press Journals.

MIT Press Journals has sent us an invoice for their fiscal year, July 2015 - June 2016 for their services related to the Computational Linguistics Journal. The invoice, for $35,968.50 was paid in February. And, in September, the July 2016-June 2017 invoice for $38,505.82 was also paid.

Our journals pay editorial assistants to help with the process. The CL Journal’s assistant was paid $4,730 in January 2017 for her services for the remainder of the 2016 calendar year. The CL Journal’s assistant was also paid $2,322.00 for January-April 2017 in May, $3,354.00 in September for May-August 2017 and $2,365.00 for September-December 2017. The TACL Journal’s assistant was paid $11,019.56 in February covering April-December 2016 and $7,975.33 covering January through June 2017 in July.

'''Membership:'''

I am pleased to report that we now have 2,949 members. This indicates the continuing growth of our field and conferences. The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be representing between 55 and 60 countries on a regular basis and currently have a total of 66 countries being represented by our membership.

We began 2017 with 177 members who were in a multi-year membership, added a little more than 350 members from EACL 2017 directly through portal membership payments, and about 260 members who renewed on their own. As is becoming more standard, most memberships come from conference registrations. The ACL 2017 attendees’ registrations included 1,327 total memberships. EMNLP 2017’s resulting memberships were 752 and both SIGdial 2017 and INLG 2017 instructed their attendees to pay memberships directly online at the portal so I do not have exact numbers for them. Between the growth in overall memberships and the increased number resulting from conference registrations, a larger burden is on the office to input new and renewing members into the portal but, with Jing-Shin’s and (especially) Pranav’s help in automating the input process, we are now able to keep up with memberships very easily and quickly and have more time for other endeavors. So, at the end of the year, conferences made up the bulk of members as follows: EACL 2017 memberships (11.9%), ACL 2017 memberships (45%), and EMNLP 2017 memberships (25.5%).

'''Fellows Program:'''

The only involvement the Office now has in the Fellowship nomination and selection process is to verify nominated members’ eligibility according to our old policy for this year and our new policy for future years.

'''Conferences:'''

EACL 2017 was held in Valencia, Spain, at the Valencia Conference Center, April 3-7. This conference set the highest attendance for EACLs with about 690 final attendees. Although the Office is not typically involved in this conference’s planning, the organizers and General Chair had requested much more guidance than in years past. There was some confusion between the local organizers, PCO, and the Office about collection of membership fees, sponsorships, and other things. Better communication or more explicit division of duties might be recommended for future EACLs with the Office.

The ACL 2017, held in Vancouver, July 30-August 4 was a bit larger than ACL 2016 in Berlin (which set an all-time record at 1,650 attendees), with 1772 total attendees. While growth of our ACL conference is a great thing, this year the venue became overcrowded for some sessions and workshops and especially during the common break events. Adding to the crowding this year was up to 24 exhibitors, most of whom are also our sponsors. This is an increase of almost 10 exhibitors over previous years. After our site visit, we knew this venue would be tight but did not quite expect it to be as bad as it was, showing that a larger-than-necessary and possibly cold, impersonal and boring convention center may be what we must look at in the future to be sure to accommodate our growing needs. We repeated the Recruitment Lunch which was very successful, charging a $500 fee for each recruiting company to help defray some part of the lunch costs. We had 17 companies signed up for the lunch. Also, although we offered childcare as a first-time experiment, very few children (9 from last report) were signed up for this and yet there seemed to be many families coming to Vancouver as shown by the 150 accompanying people registered and paid for the Social Event at the Aquarium. Nevertheless, we received positive feedback on offering childcare and should offer it again in the future. Adding a Handbook Chair this year was a great idea.

EMNLP 2017, was held in Copenhagen, Denmark, September 7-11. The venue, in the old meat packing district offered ample space (Øksnehallen) but it was awkward to plan the arrangements to maximize the limited soundproofing. Overall, the meeting space was conveniently located and the attendees seemed to enjoy themselves and the conference. EMNLP 2017 ended with 1,233 total registrants, making it even larger than Lisbon and Austin and any NAACL. The Office provided advice, general support, and registration management.

Given the current concerns about possible travel restrictions going into the future, it may be interesting to note that ACL 2017 had 22 cancellations specifically due to visas being denied and EMNLP 2017 had only 4 visa problems. There were many more cancellations to both conferences but these numbers represent the ones that were identified as being visa issues.

Planning for NAACL 2018 and 2019 has begun with the signing of two contracts. NAACL 2018 will be at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in New Orleans, June 1-6 and NAACL 2019 will be at the Hyatt Regency in Minneapolis, June 2-7. Bundling the negotiations and using the same hotel chain produced extra leverage in obtaining better pricing and concessions for both conferences. As Local Arrangements Chair for NAACL 2018, I am planning a site visit to New Orleans in April to make sure all of our planning is correct for the venue space and that the Social Event/Dinner on the steamboats will work well. This year, the organizers have decided to add a poster track in parallel with the other main conference sessions rather than having an evening poster/dinner on two nights. There will also be an experimental fourth parallel track on two of the three main conference days for an Industrial Track. We are expecting about 1,200 attendees but, if it grows larger, the hotel can easily handle higher numbers.

ACL 2018 planning is under way. Venue and Social Event (Aquarium) contracts have been signed, with special care given to assuring the proper space for all possible conference events. I will continue to offer advice as needed but it was agreed to be more fiscally reasonable to have the local professional conference organizers (PCO) manage registrations to avoid complicated and costly taxation. Between the Local Arrangements Chairs, the PCO, the Local Sponsorship Chairs, and myself, we are all in good communication and moving along quite well. This should be a lovely conference and venue!

EMNLP 2018 is also moving along well. It helped that a site visit had been conducted earlier to Brussels and the recommended PCO was also met at that time. The office is and will be working closely with Ellen Riloff (the General Chair) and the PCO and will manage the registrations. The venue is quite good and modern and is adjacent to the old district of Brussels. This venue will also be able to handle an increase in participation if needed—we currently are expecting 1,200-1,400 total attendees.

While it is always difficult to project attendance at conferences, we seem to be settling into a new higher level of attendance, after a growth spurt the last 2-3 years. Being prepared for more than expected numbers is extremely important for the next couple of years until we can again trust our newly-adjusted predictions. We may be at a point where most conference hotels no longer are large enough and we will have to specifically consider convention centers for future conferences.

ACL, NAACL and EMNLP 2018 are keeping in mind Michael Strube’s schema to optimally lay out the posters, demos and food/beverages for the poster sessions to allow ample walk space and overall comfort. Workshops continue to be more challenging in finding adequate space for the growing attendance at some workshops and the many poster sessions and numbers of posters within a workshop that they plan to present. Careful advance planning is essential for these events.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

EACL 2017 had sponsorships through the Office totaling $18,259 plus $3,500 from Google sponsoring the Ethics in NLP workshop. The Office has no record of local sponsorships obtained and kept within Europe.

ACL 2017 has proven to be quite popular, not only in numbers of registrations but also in having an all-time record breaking $306,912 in conference sponsorship commitments. Our faithful sponsors (Amazon, Baidu, Bloomberg, Brandeis University, ebay, Facebook, Google, Huawei Technologies, IBM Research, Microsoft, Nuance, Recruit Technologies, University of Washington, Yandex) plus sponsors we have not seen before or are returning (Adobe, Alibaba, Apple, Columbia University, CVTE, Duolingo, Elsevier, Grammarly, KPMG LLC, Maluuba/Microsoft, NAVER Corporation, NEC, NYU, Oracle, Robert Bosch LLC, SAP, Samsung Electronics, Sogou, Tencent, Textkernel, Toutiao, VoiceBox, @Newsela) continue to help us thrive. We also have $66,200 in sponsorships supporting workshops (primarily $50,000 to the WiNLP). Exciting commitments are from seventeen companies who each promised $500 for the Recruitment Lunch, for a total of $8,500. Five of these companies, including Twitter, are not also sponsors of the main conference. Special thanks to the General Chair, Chris Callison-Burch, and the Asian International Sponsorship Committee representative, Wanxiang Che, for eagerly pursuing additional and often new sponsors!

$124,955.80 in EMNLP 2017 sponsorships were committed. Many were the result of 2-Pack or 3-Pack sponsorship agreements so the same companies as listed above (Apple, Amazon, Baidu, Bloomberg, Brandeis University, CVTE, Duolingo, ebay, Facebook, Google, Grammarly, Huawei Technologies, IBM, Maluuba/Microsoft, Microsoft, Nuance, Oracle, Recruit Institute of Technology, SAP, Sogou, Textkernel, Yandex) plus deloitte, NEXT Canada, Siteimprove, SnapChat, Trust Pilot and Wizkids (mostly local companies) generously donated. Additionally, the BEA Workshop and W-NUT have $4,100 in sponsor commitments.

The idea of offering 2-Pack or 3-Pack options and including EMNLP allowed sponsors to make one payment to support two or all three events rather than one at a time. This made sponsoring easier, especially for our ongoing sponsors. For the 2018 Sponsorship Booklet that the International Sponsorship Committee and the Office pulled together, we continue to offer these multi-pack options, resulting in some of the first commitments and at higher levels (Amazon and Baidu at Platinum, last year for example) to come in. We made a few changes to the Sponsorship booklet for 2018, partially based on ideas I gathered while sitting in on the various executive board meetings and having been an officer for ICML for a few years. We added a higher “Diamond” level which includes exhibiting (so far, Google has chosen to be at the Diamond level). Now the Platinum and Gold levels pay a discounted per-day “Manned Exhibit” fee (much as many other conferences would do) and Silver and below as well as non-sponsors would pay the full per-day “Manned Exhibit” fees as before. We also added an option to sponsor Childcare. To date, we have $84,205.75 sponsorship for ACL 2018 plus $7,500 toward workshops; $45,020.45 sponsorship for EMNLP 2018 plus $1,500 toward workshops; and $29,913.80 sponsorship for NAACL 2018 plus $6,100 toward workshops. This may seem low compared to ACL 2017 but, that was an exceptionally high amount and I am currently talking with a few of our repeat/large sponsors (Tencent, Samsung, Baidu, Alibaba, etc.) which I am sure will turn into firm commitments. My one concern is that it seems some companies are opting for a 2-Pack for ACL and EMNLP and fewer are opting for NAACL 2018.

The area Sponsorship Chairs and the Local Arrangement Sponsorship Chairs are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them. And, many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!

2017Q3 Reports: Local Organizing Committee

2017-07-26T20:20:49Z

PriscillaRasmussen:

== '''Local Organizing Committee''' ==
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL<br />
Anoop Sarkar, Simon Fraser University<br />

===Registration Numbers===

Our total registration count at the close of late registration is 1,710. Of this, 159 are attending only tutorials and/or workshops and about 30+ are exhibitors not attending the program sessions. Two tutorials are especially popular (T3 Deep Learning for Semantic Composition and T4 Deep Learning for Dialogue Systems). The most popular workshops (each well over 150 attendees) are CoNLL, Repl4NLP and NMT: 1st Workshop on Neural Machine Translation.

We also have first time high number of exhibitors, at about 25. This includes many of our sponsors but also a couple of publishers and non-sponsoring exhibitors.

The Social Event for all main conference attendees will be at the Vancouver Aquarium. In addition to our attendees, just over 150 accompanying person tickets have been purchased. Adding Accompanying person optional poster dinners (34 & 37), breakfasts (20-25), and social event (150) has resulted in additional income so should be continued in the future.

===Hotels===

With all the events going on in Vancouver the week of our conference and cheap hotels being expensive, we engaged spill-over hotels, the Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre and the Marriott Vancouver Pinnacle Downtown for additional blocks of rooms for non-students and for students, we were able to get 10 rooms at a super discounted rate at the Westin Bayshore plus a small block of rooms at the YWCA (actually a hotel) and at the Georgian Court Hotel. Unfortunately, with the early cutoff dates at the Sheraton and Marriott, most rooms were released without bookings. We managed the student requests for housing and filled all available space. I have not heard complaints from people not finding hotels.

===Various===

Workshop Chairs have been extremely helpful and conscientious in coordinating the workshops’ needs with Priscilla for space and poster planning. One workshop, however, was quite late in letting people know their plans, making it quite difficult to accommodate all of their unique requirements. The poster sessions will be tricky to get set up since we have to reuse some of the parallel session rooms rather than having a separate space (as in NAACL and ACL 2016) but it is more our burden than anything the attendees will see (hopefully!). The Recruitment Lunch has 16 companies signed up, many of which are our conference sponsors but some, including Twitter, are new to us.

Kostadin Cholakov, who helped both Valia and Priscilla immensely in Berlin, had to step down from the Student Volunteer Coordinator position. Maryam Siabani kindly agreed to take over this position and has done a great job. And, Nitin Madnani, as the conference webmaster, has been a major support in his timeliness in responding to all requests. One exceptional thing he did was to automate the visa request letters which saved so much time, especially this year with over 500 requests for letters of invitation.

Our experiment of offering childcare has resulted in less children being signed up than we had hoped. Possibly it takes time to catch on or maybe there is not quite the demand we thought there would be. In any case, this is an expensive endeavor, given the number of families assisted. We are fortunate that ACL 2017 is held in a conference hotel where the 4 rooms for childcare are at no additional charge. At ACL 2018, for example, when using a convention center each room has a daily rental fee (often quite high) that would be a cost on top of the childcare contract, the per-child per-hour sitter subsidy, and miscellaneous shipping and rental fees.

'''Tasks undertaken:'''

Here is a list summarizing the tasks undertaken by the Local Arrangements so far:

- Contract venues for tutorials, main conference, and workshops along with the ACL Treasurer

-Contract with spill-over hotels for both regular attendees and students, along with ACL Treasurer

-Manage all student housing reservation requests at three low-cost student hotels

- Created a detailed working budget, used to track costs vs income and set registration fees, getting approval from the ACL Treasurer

-Work with the registration form builder to make the registration form, test the payment system, open registration, and manage the registrations and requested cancellations or changes or questions from attendees

- Coordinate sponsorship and exhibitor acquisition, setting ACL up as vendor, issuing invoices, and coordinating exhibit arrangements and ensuring sponsorship benefits are fulfilled

- Create and coordinate input to the conference website, working closely with the webmaster

- Make the necessary arrangements for the meetings of the CL Journal Board, ACL and NAACL Exec, the Recognition and Thank You Dinner, and the post-conference breakfast

- Handle all the invitation letter requirements for visa application processing (over 500 this year)

- Make arrangements for the social event of the conference which is at the Vancouver Aquarium

-Ongoing coordination with the hotel and PSAV on internet and audio/visual requirements and setup

-Development of menus to be served throughout the conference and ongoing coordination with hotel on numbers of people to serve

- Liaise with the workshops chairs so that all the special requirements of workshop organizers are met (extra poster boards, receptions, lunches, etc., especially, for the WiNLP and Repl4NLP workshops)

- Liaise with the representatives of the recruiters, hotel and others for the Recruitment Lunch (limited to 400 attendees and 20-25 recruitment institutions)

- Liaise with the event promotion departments of Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook, supporting them in the organization of their private satellite social events

- Design and order the conference bags

-Design and create all signage and banners for the conference and arrange local printing

-Make room assignments for all parts of the conference and update or change these assignments based on registration numbers. Provide this to the Handbook Chair and App Coordinator as well as to the Conference Webmaster.

-Coordination with KiddieCorp for onsite childcare, reserving rooms, fulfilling setup and other requests

-Miscellaneous: Creating award certificates, arranging engraving of LTA award and hosting the awardee

'''Ongoing work:'''

- Make final arrangements for and coordinate with the hotel on all space usage and final layout and setup of posters, specialty lunches and other non-standard requests, menus and a/v
-Make registration refunds to those who could not get visas and other cancellations

- Collect or creation of all materials for conference bags (poster session guide, sponsorship materials, arranged for local maps and tourist guide through Tourism Office, conference handbook, etc.) in preparation for the bag stuffing to be done the day before the conference begins. Production of badges, admission and complimentary drink tickets for badge stuffing the day before the conference begins

-Meet and supervise Student Volunteers onsite

-Be available for behind-the-scene repair of anything that might go wrong

'''Post-Conference work:'''

-Make registration refunds to those who could not get visas and other cancellations

-Reimburse invited speakers’ travel, make student travel awards, pay tutorial presenters’ honoraria, etc.

-Pay final bills

2017Q3 Reports: Office Manager

2017-07-24T19:55:58Z

PriscillaRasmussen: Created page with "'''Priscilla Rasmussen 23 July 2017''' '''ACL Business Office Report''' As usual, the Office is running smoothly. Last week a financial audit was successfully conducted..."

'''Priscilla Rasmussen
23 July 2017'''

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

As usual, the Office is running smoothly.

Last week a financial audit was successfully conducted by Nisivoccia, LLP, both in the office and through emails with Graeme and me. This is in preparation for an earlier-than-usual filing of our 2016 annual taxes.

Pat Kirby continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations (especially handling most of the membership entries into the portal) as well as managing the conference student housing and working with me in preparation for and onsite at our conferences, especially with registrations.

The Office was pressured much more than usual this year, though, mainly in having two conferences so very close to each other. This meant barely ending involvement in EACL 2017 and immediately managing ACL 2017’s logistics, sponsorships, budgeting, registrations, general advising, etc. and midway through this, beginning the serious daily planning of EMNLP 2017, developing the working budget, setting registration fees and opening registration, advising and other duties. The overlap of ACL and EMNLP increased the day-to-day workload and is one more reason (besides paper reviewing/acceptances) to be mindful of spacing the conferences as far apart as possible. It can be especially noted that, with a large increase in sponsorships and exhibitors, each requiring a lot of time, it may be useful in the future to have a person specifically named to manage sponsor and exhibitor questions and planning.

Adding to the above increased workload was searching for appropriate venues for both NAACL 2018 and 2019 and negotiating these contracts. It may not be well understood the time it takes to sift through many, many venues looking for appropriately sized space and then doing pre-negotiations before making a list of acceptable possibilities for a Board’s consideration. It is encouraged that all larger conferences, especially ACLs, EMNLPs, and NAACLs lock in contracts close to two years out (before good venues are otherwise booked).

'''Publications, Journals and Royalties:'''

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates handling print-on-demand of our publications, I typically receive no requests for hardcopy publications in the office. However, one long-time member has asked to fill in gaps in his personal CL Journal library and will pay for the long list of journals, proceedings and shipping costs. After much digging, this order has now been filled.

The Curran Associates agreement has turned out to be a good one for both them and the ACL.
In 2017, we have received a total of $2,731.40 in royalties from them, covering the 4th quarter of 2015 through the 3rd quarter of 2016 plus $1,371.16 paid to us in February covering the 4th quarter of 2016. Copyright Clearance Center has not sent any earnings to ACL for CY 2017, nor has MIT Press Journals.

MIT Press Journals has sent us an invoice for their fiscal year, July 2015 - June 2016 for their services related to the Computational Linguistics Journal. The invoice, for $35,968.50 was paid in February.

Our journals pay editorial assistants to help with the process. The CL Journal’s assistant was paid $4,730 for her services for the remainder of the 2016 calendar year. No additional billing has been received yet for 2017. The TACL Journal’s assistant was paid $7,975.33 covering January through June 2017.

'''Membership:'''

Since 2007 we have been growing, especially last year with ACL 2016 in Berlin when we recorded almost 3,000 members. I am pleased to report that, at the half year mark, we have 2,015 members and many more can be expected through onsite ACL 2017 and all EMNLP 2017 registrations plus some resulting from both SIGdial and INLG 2017 conferences. This indicates the continuing growth of our field and conferences. The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be representing between 55 and 60 countries on a regular basis and currently have a total of 57 countries being represented by our membership.

We began 2017 with 177 members who were in a multi-year membership, added a little more than 350 members from EACL 2017 directly through portal membership payments, and about 260 members who renewed on their own. As is becoming more standard, most memberships come from conference registrations. As of June 30th, of the 2017 memberships, EACL 2017 attendance (17.4%) and ACL 2017 attendance (60.9%) made up the bulk of memberships. There are over 200 ACL 2017 attendees still owing memberships and they will be caught onsite as well as adding any onsite registrations. Additional memberships are expected to come from EMNLP 2017, SIGdial 2017 and INLG 2017 this fall. Between the growth in overall memberships and the increased number resulting from conference registrations, a larger burden is on the office to input new and renewing members into the portal but, with Jing-Shin’s and (especially) Pranav’s help in automating the input process, we should be able to keep up with memberships much better and have more time for other endeavors.

'''Fellows Program:'''

We have not begun the new nomination and recommendation process but it will be implemented for the fall nomination “season”.

'''Conferences:'''

EACL 2017 was held in Valencia, Spain, at the Valencia Conference Center, April 3-7. This conference set the highest attendance for EACLs with about 690 final attendees. Although the Office is not typically involved in this conference’s planning, the organizers and General Chair have been requesting much more guidance than in years past. There was some confusion between the local organizers, PCO, and the Office about collection of membership fees, sponsorships, and other things. Better or more explicit division of duties might be recommended for future EACLs with the Office.

The ACL 2017, to be held in Vancouver next week, July 30-August 4 promises to be equal to or a bit larger than ACL 2016 in Berlin which set an all-time record at 1,650 attendees. The current registration count for Vancouver is 1,712 but this includes all exhibitors and recruiters and does not include cancellations we may still receive. While growth of our ACL conference is a great thing, this year the venue may be crowded for some sessions and workshops. Adding to the crowding this year will be up to 24 exhibitors, most of whom are also our sponsors. This is an increase of almost 10 exhibitors over previous years. We decided repeat the Recruitment Lunch which was very successful in Berlin, charging a $500 fee for each recruiting company to help defray some part of the lunch costs. We have 16 companies signed up for the lunch, 4 more than in Berlin. One problem that arose with the Recruitment Lunch was that over 700 people registered indicating they would attend the lunch and about half were regular attendees, many of which thought they could just show up and recruit people. Lesson learned that we need to be more explicit about the intentions of the lunch – that it is mainly meant for students to attend and that recruiters must reserve a space and pay for the event. Also, although we offered childcare as a first-time experiment, very few children (5 from last report) are signed up for this and yet there seem to be many families coming to Vancouver as shown by the 150 accompanying people registered and paid for the Social Event at the Aquarium. Adding a Handbook Chair this year was a great idea.

EMNLP 2017, to be held in Copenhagen, Denmark, September 7-11, is well along in the planning and registration opened last week. The venue will be in the old meat packing district which has been turned into shops, restaurants, bars and a meeting space (Øksnehallen). It is a lively area with many other restaurants and hotels in the vicinity. We expect EMNLP 2017 to end with over 1,000 total registrants, making it even larger than Lisbon and Austin. The Office is providing advice, general support, and registration management.

Given the current concerns about possible travel restrictions going into the future, it may be interesting to note that, so far, ACL 2017 has had 6 cancellations specifically due to visas being denied.

Planning for NAACL 2018 and 2019 has begun with the signing of two contracts. NAACL 2018 will be at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in New Orleans, June 1-6 and NAACL 2019 will be at the Hyatt Regency in Minneapolis, June 2-7. Bundling the negotiations and using the same hotel chain produced extra leverage in obtaining better pricing and concessions for both conferences.

ACL 2018 planning is under way. Venue and Social Event (Aquarium) contracts have been signed, with special care given to assuring the proper space for all possible conference events. I will continue to offer advice as needed but it was agreed to be more fiscally reasonable to have the local professional conference organizers manage registrations to avoid complicated and costly taxation.

While it is always difficult to project attendance at conferences, we seem to be settling into a new higher level of attendance, after a growth spurt the last 2-3 years. Being prepared for more than expected numbers is extremely important for the next couple of years until we can again trust our newly-adjusted predictions. We may be at a point where most conference hotels no longer are large enough and we will have to specifically consider convention centers for future conferences.

Both ACL and EMNLP 2017 are keeping in mind Michael Strube’s schema to optimally lay out the posters, demos and food/beverages for the poster/dinner sessions to allow ample walk space and overall comfort. Workshops continue to be more challenging in finding adequate space for the growing attendance at some workshops and the many poster sessions and numbers of posters within a workshop that they plan to present. Careful advance planning is essential for these events.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

EACL 2017 had sponsorships through the Office totaling $18,259 plus $3,500 from Google sponsoring the Ethics in NLP workshop. The Office has no record of local sponsorships obtained and kept within Europe.

ACL 2017 has proven to be quite popular, not only in numbers of registrations but also in having an all-time record breaking $303,237 in conference sponsorship commitments. Our faithful sponsors (Amazon, Baidu, Bloomberg, Brandeis University, ebay, Facebook, Google, Huawei Technologies, IBM Research, Microsoft, Nuance, Recruit Technologies, University of Washington, Yandex) plus sponsors we have not seen before or are returning (Adobe, Alibaba, Apple, Columbia University, CVTE, Duolingo, Elsevier, Grammarly, KPMG LLC, Maluuba/Microsoft, NAVER Corporation, NEC, NYU, Oracle, Robert Bosch LLC, SAP, Samsung Electronics, Sogou, Tencent, Textkernel, Toutiao, VoiceBox, @Newsela) continue to help us thrive. We also have $44,100 in sponsorships supporting workshops (primarily $40,000 to the WiNLP). Exciting commitments are from sixteen companies who each promised $500 for the Recruitment Lunch, for a total of $8,000. Five of these companies, including Twitter, are not also sponsors of the main conference. Special thanks to the General Chair, Chris Callison-Burch, and the Asian International Sponsorship Committee representative, Wanxiang Che, for eagerly pursuing additional and often new sponsors!

$108,473.80 in EMNLP 2017 sponsorships were committed so far. Many were the result of 2-Pack or 3-Pack sponsorship agreements so the same companies as listed above (Apple, Amazon, Baidu, Bloomberg, Brandeis University, CVTE, Duolingo, ebay, Facebook, Google, Grammarly, Huawei Technologies, IBM, Maluuba/Microsoft, Microsoft, Nuance, Oracle, Recruit Institute of Technology, SAP, Sogou, Textkernel, Yandex) plus deloitte, NEXT Canada, Siteimprove, SnapChat, Trust Pilot and Wizkids (mostly local companies) generously donated. Additionally, the BEA Workshop and W-NUT have $3,600 in sponsor commitments.

The idea of offering 2-Pack or 3-Pack options and including EMNLP allowed sponsors to make one payment to support two or all three events rather than one at a time. This made sponsoring easier, especially for our ongoing sponsors. For the 2017 Sponsorship Booklet that the International Sponsorship Committee and the Office pulled together, we continue to offer these multi-pack options, resulting in some of the first commitments and at higher levels (Amazon and Baidu at Platinum, for example) to come in.

The area Sponsorship Chairs and the Local Arrangement Sponsorship Chairs are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them. And, many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!

2017Q1 Reports: Office

2017-02-14T00:12:00Z

PriscillaRasmussen:

Priscilla Rasmussen
12 February 2017

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

As usual, the Office is running smoothly.

In the fall, another financial audit was successfully conducted by Nisivoccia, LLP, both in the office and through emails with Graeme and me. Our tax forms were completed and filed in November.

In late December, our Directors/Officers insurance was renewed for the 2017 calendar year and our Office insurance was automatically renewed in January. As of April 1st, my office 3-year lease is due for renewal so in early February the lease was renewed for April 2017 through March 2020 at a 2% per year increase. For those of you who are new to the Board, this lease is under ARCS (my company) and ACL pays 70% of the rent, AMTA pays 10% and I pay the remainder so that both ACL and AMTA can use this office address as their place of business.

Pat Kirby continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations (especially handling most of the membership entries into the portal) as well as managing the student housing and working with me in preparation for and onsite at our conferences.

'''Publications, Journals and Royalties''':

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates handling print-on-demand of our publications, I typically receive no requests for hardcopy publications in the office. However, one long-time member has asked to fill in gaps in his personal CL Journal library and will pay for the long list of journals, proceedings and shipping costs. This order is beginning to be filled.

The Curran Associates agreement has turned out to be a good one for both them and the ACL.
In 2016, we have received a total of $2,731.40 in royalties from them, covering the 4th quarter of 2015 through the 3rd quarter of 2016 plus $1,371.16 paid to us this month covering the 4th quarter of 2016. Copyright Clearance Center has not sent any earnings to ACL for CY 2015, nor has MIT Press Journals.

MIT Press Journals has now sent us an invoice for their fiscal year, July 2015 - June 2016 for their services related to the Computational Linguistics Journal. The invoice, for $35,968.50 was paid this month.

Our journals pay editorial assistants to help with the process. The CL Journal’s assistant was paid $2,634 for November 2015 through February 2016 in 2016 and in January 2017 an additional $4,730 was paid for her services for the remainder of the 2016 calendar year. And just over $1,000 was spent to upgrade their online reviewing system. The TACL Journal’s assistant was paid $11,019.56 covering April through December 2016.

'''Membership:'''

Since 2007 we have consistently numbered slightly over or under 2000 members and exceeded any previous final year numbers by ending 2015 with 2,536 members. I am pleased to report we have 2,901 members which indicates the growth of our field and conferences. The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be representing between 55 and 60 countries on a regular basis and currently exceed this with a total of 62 countries being represented by our membership.

We began 2016 with 195 members who were in a multi-year membership and added 316 members directly through portal membership payments for a total of 511 members who renewed on their own. As is becoming more standard, most memberships come from conference registrations. At the end of 2016, about 82.4% of the 2016 memberships were generated by NAACL 2016 attendance (23.4%), ACL 2016 attendance (43.4%), and EMNLP 2016 (15.6%). Between the growth in overall memberships and the increased number resulting from conference registrations, a larger burden was on the office to input new and renewing members into the portal.

As always, Min, Jing-Shin and Pranav (our current webmaster) have been extremely responsive to and helpful with any requests I have. I am not sure anyone realized that all memberships resulting from conferences had to be manually input into the portal or how very long this manual process took. While we had discussed eventually figuring out how to make this process more automated, given that there is no way to tie the registration process to the membership portion of the portal, it became more urgent this winter to automate our input process since the office was falling behind in updating the increased number of renewing memberships and creating new membership records. Over December and January, Pranav and I worked on a new, more automated input system that captures all the information I need in each membership record and provides a report on the few that failed so we can manually check and update just those few records. This is now working wonderfully and is a huge improvement. This will also free Pat Kirby to do other, more useful projects for me.

'''Fellows Program:'''

A selection committee has been formed, headed by Joakim Nivre, which used the current selection process. Four new Fellows were chosen for 2016. Fellowship award certificates were made, sent to Pushpak Bhattacharrya for signature and then sent to each of the new fellows.

'''Conferences:'''

NAACL 2016 was held in San Diego, California, at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina, June 12-17. This conference set the second highest attendance for NAACLs with 877 final attendees (just under the 908 attendees achieved in 2015) after taking out people who did not show up and others who cancelled. Having such a large number of attendees has caused some additional work in planning and communications (over 125 visa invitations issued, re-planning both catering and space configurations, etc.). Acting as Local Arrangements Chair means that both the organizational work and registrations were managed by the Office. One thing that worked out well was that the hotel was willing to give a small number of rooms at a deeper discount to be used for students. After those rooms were filled, we were able to get a small number of rooms at the nearby Hilton to also serve as student housing. The Office managed a list of student reservations for each hotel plus facilitated student room sharing. I expect this conference to make a surplus but the exact amount will not be determined until the accountant finishes reviewing the records.

The ACL 2016, was held in Berlin, August 7-12 and has been managed quite well by Valia Kordoni and her local team plus an excellent PCO (professional conference organizer company), along with Antal van den Bosch as General Chair stepping in when needed. The office had worked closely with the local organizers in Berlin on all aspects of the organization. The final registration count is 1650, setting a new all-time high (2014, in Baltimore, being the previous high at 1439 registered). Last year it was decided to eliminate the Student Lunch. We decided, instead, to hold a Recruitment Lunch, charging a $500 fee for each recruiting company to help defray some part of the lunch costs. There were 12 companies at the lunch, making this first-time experiment a success that we recommend being tried again. One problem that arose was that no one seemed to know their job included the production of the Conference Handbook, creating a last minute scramble to find someone willing to manage this project. This has led to the creation going forward of a Conference Handbook Chair to avoid confusion.

EMNLP 2016, held in Austin, Texas, November 1-5 was co-located with AMTA 2016 which immediately preceded EMNLP. Due to difficulties with the hotel, both AMTA and EMNLP were forced to shift their conferences one day earlier than previously advertised which, along with a great many failures and issues with the hotel during the conference itself, lead to organizational difficulties I hope were not too noticeable to the attendees. For example, the last day of AMTA and first day of EMNLP were supposed to purposely overlap with workshops, one of which (SSST) was to be co-located with AMTA to foster cross-over attendance but this did not happen in the end and SSST was rescheduled to the last day of EMNLP instead. These difficulties, though, allowed me to negotiate further discounts in our final billing. EMNLP 2016 ended with 804 total registrants, making it slightly larger than the previous record of 775 in Lisbon in 2015. The Office acted as Local Arrangements Chair as well as providing advice, general support, and registration management.

Given the current concerns about possible travel restrictions going into the future, it may be interesting to note that NAACL 2016 had a total of 18 No Shows (people who had registered but did not attend the conference) and 3 cancellations due to visas not being issued. ACL 2016 had 32 No Shows (10 of which registered but did not pay) and 10 cancellations due to visa problems. EMNLP 2016 had 19 No Shows with only 1 reported cancellation due to a visa application being declined. The No Shows did not explain why they did not attend.

Planning for (NA)ACL 2017 has begun and Graeme, Anoop and I conducted a second site visit in December to be sure the Westin Bayshore Hotel (the conference venue) would be able to handle the potentially higher number of attendees. Of concern was that some of the parallel session rooms will have to be turned over quickly for the two evening poster/dinner sessions but we have been assured the hotel will make it work. The venue contract has been signed and initial plans are in place. Anoop Sarkar has agreed to be co-Local Arrangements Chair to help with the more local aspects of our planning, including helping to find local sponsors and possibly some sort of childcare. One great concern is having found out during the second site visit that Vancouver will be overrun with tourists and locals coming out for the Gay Pride Week beginning the weekend following our conference and a fireworks competition beginning the weekend before our conference and running through the week. This means hotels are charging much higher rates and finding relatively inexpensive accommodations may be more difficult. To help with this potential problem, we looked at other hotels and have now signed non-penalty contracts with both the Sheraton Wall Centre and the Marriott for a limited number of guest rooms at similar price points to the Westin for our regular attendees. We also contracted small blocks of rooms at the YWCA and Georgian Court hotels which, in addition to 10 super-discounted rooms at the Westin, will provided some much less expensive rooms for some of our students. We also visited a few options for both the Social Event (for all attendees) and the Recognition Dinner (for the LTA awardee and ACL key volunteers). Contracts are now in place for the Social Event to be at the Vancouver Aquarium (at our expected high numbers of attendees, there are few places which are large enough and interesting for holding such an event) and a Harbour Cruise is contracted for the Recognition Dinner Wednesday evening (which happens to coincide with one of the evening fireworks competitions). We will begin now to advertise our Recruitment Lunch to our sponsors and others who might be interested. I expect to spend much of March collecting quotes for all aspects of the conference and setting up the working budget which we will then use to set registration fees. My hope is to open registration in early April.

SIGDAT 2017 will be held in Copenhagen, Denmark, September 7-11, 2017. On my way home from ACL 2016 in Berlin, I met Dirk Hovy and Anders Søgaard (the Local Arrangements Chairs) to conduct a site visit of the proposed conference venues, hotels and social event locations. Contracts have been signed with DGI-byen for both the conference venues and the nearby hotel. The venue will be in the old meat packing district which has been turned into shops, restaurants, bars and a meeting space (Øksnehallen). It is a lively area with many other restaurants and hotels in the vicinity. No-penalty contracts are being negotiated with a couple of other hotels and Dirk and Anders will be working on setting up an exciting Social Event in the courtyard adjacent to the Øksnehallen. The office will continue to provide advice and will manage registrations.

EACL 2017 will be held in Valencia, Spain, April 3-7, 2017 and, although the Office is not typically involved in this conference’s planning, the organizers and General Chair have been requesting much more guidance than in years past.

ACL 2018 planning is under way. Venue and Social Event (Aquarium) contracts have been signed, with special care given to assuring the proper space for all possible conference events. I will continue to offer advice as needed but it was agreed to be more fiscally reasonable to have the local professional conference organizers manage registrations to avoid complicated and costly taxation.

NAACL has requested that I begin searching for two years (2018 and 2019) potential venues and SIGDAT has asked that I also search for a 2018 venue for EMNLP. This search has just begun and I am hoping the three-conference leverage can work to our advantage. Sometimes, negotiating a two or three year contract with the same hotel chain can result in better pricing so this will be my goal.

While it is always difficult to project attendance at conferences, we seem to be settling into a new higher level of attendance, after a growth spurt the last couple of years. Being prepared for more than expected numbers is extremely important for the next couple of years until we can again trust our newly-adjusted predictions.

Using Michael Strube’s schema to optimally lay out the posters, demos and food/beverages for the poster/dinner sessions worked very well for all three conferences in 2016, allowing ample walk space and overall comfort. And, workshops continue to be more challenging in finding adequate space for the growing attendance at some workshops and the many poster sessions they plan to present. Careful advance planning is essential for these events.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

NAACL 2016 had sponsorships totaling $70,012 plus $6,700 sponsoring the BEA and CLPsych workshops. Once again, our usual sponsors (Amazon, Baidu, Baobab, Bloomberg, ebay, Facebook, Google, IBM Research, Microsoft, Nuance, Yahoo and the University of Washington) plus newer sponsors (Adobe, Brandeis University, Civis Analytics, Grammarly, Huawei Technologies, Maluuba, Open Table, United Health Group, VoiceBox, @newsela) lent their support. Quite a few sponsors also opted to be exhibitors in addition to KITT.AI and Quora who exhibited but were not sponsors.

ACL 2016 has proven to be quite popular, not only in numbers of registrations but also in having $100,786 in conference sponsorship commitments. Our faithful sponsors (Amazon, Baidu, ebay, Facebook, Google, IBM Research, Microsoft, Nuance, Yandex) plus sponsors we have not seen before or are returning (Elsevier, Grammarly, Maluuba, Textkernel, VoiceBox, Zalando) continue to help us thrive. We also have $9,120 in sponsorships supporting workshops and $1,000 specifically committed to the SRW. The most exciting commitments are from eleven companies who each paid $500 for the experimental Recruitment Lunch, for a total of $5,500. Two of these companies also decided to be a Silver and a Bronze sponsor of the main conference.

$74,739 in EMNLP 2016 sponsorships were committed. Many were the result of 2-Pack or 3-Pack sponsorship agreements so the same companies as listed above (Amazon, Baidu, Bloomberg, Brandeis University, ebay, Facebook, Google, Grammarly, IBM, Maluuba, Microsoft, Nuance, Voicebox, Yandex) plus 3M, Citadel, ISI and Oracle Labs generously donated.

For 2017, I am pleased to report that sponsorships are steadily coming in. So far, ACL 2017 has a total commitment of $92,331 for the main conference plus $2,500 for the Abusive Language and $2,000 for the RepL4NLP workshops. It is exciting to have captured Apple as a new sponsor/exhibitor. Other commitments are currently being decided both for the main conference and for the Women in NLP workshop. EACL 2017 has $6,688 in sponsorships directed through ACL’s bank account either because the sponsorship was part of a multi-pack or the sponsor was more comfortable working with the Office. Many other sponsorships are being sent to the EACL 2017 PCO for direct management within Europe. EMNLP 2017 has received $34,046 in commitments to date with more expected.

The idea of offering 2-Pack or 3-Pack options and including EMNLP allowed sponsors to make one payment to support two or all three events rather than one at a time. This made sponsoring easier, especially for our ongoing sponsors. For the 2016 Sponsorship Booklet that the International Sponsorship Committee and I pulled together, we continue to offer these multi-pack options, resulting in some of the first commitments and at higher levels (Amazon and Baidu at Platinum, for example) to come in.

The area Sponsorship Chairs and the Local Arrangement Sponsorship Chairs are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them. And, many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!

File:Membership-report-2007-2016-Full-Year-statistics.xlsx

2017-02-13T23:52:22Z

PriscillaRasmussen:

2017Q1 Reports: Office

2017-02-13T23:48:47Z

PriscillaRasmussen:

Priscilla Rasmussen
12 February 2017

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

As usual, the Office is running smoothly.

In the fall, another financial audit was successfully conducted by Nisivoccia, LLP, both in the office and through emails with Graeme and me. Our tax forms were completed and filed in November.

In late December, our Directors/Officers insurance was renewed for the 2017 calendar year and our Office insurance was automatically renewed in January. As of April 1st, my office 3-year lease is due for renewal so in early February the lease was renewed for April 2017 through March 2020 at a 2% per year increase. For those of you who are new to the Board, this lease is under ARCS (my company) and ACL pays 70% of the rent, AMTA pays 10% and I pay the remainder so that both ACL and AMTA can use this office address as their place of business.

Pat Kirby continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations (especially handling most of the membership entries into the portal) as well as managing the student housing and working with me in preparation for and onsite at our conferences.

'''Publications, Journals and Royalties''':

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates handling print-on-demand of our publications, I typically receive no requests for hardcopy publications in the office. However, one long-time member has asked to fill in gaps in his personal CL Journal library and will pay for the long list of journals, proceedings and shipping costs. This order is beginning to be filled.

The Curran Associates agreement has turned out to be a good one for both them and the ACL.
In 2016, we have received a total of $2,731.40 in royalties from them, covering the 4th quarter of 2015 through the 3rd quarter of 2016 plus $1,371.16 paid to us this month covering the 4th quarter of 2016. Copyright Clearance Center has not sent any earnings to ACL for CY 2015, nor has MIT Press Journals.

MIT Press Journals has now sent us an invoice for their fiscal year, July 2015 - June 2016 for their services related to the Computational Linguistics Journal. The invoice, for $35,968.50 was paid this month.

Our journals pay editorial assistants to help with the process. The CL Journal’s assistant was paid $2,634 for November 2015 through February 2016 in 2016 and in January 2017 an additional $4,730 was paid for her services for the remainder of the 2016 calendar year. And just over $1,000 was spent to upgrade their online reviewing system. The TACL Journal’s assistant was paid $11,019.56 covering April through December 2016.

'''Membership:'''

Since 2007 we have consistently numbered slightly over or under 2000 members and exceeded any previous final year numbers by ending 2015 with 2,536 members. I am pleased to report we have 2,901 members which indicates the growth of our field and conferences. The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be representing between 55 and 60 countries on a regular basis and currently exceed this with a total of 62 countries being represented by our membership.

We began 2016 with 195 members who were in a multi-year membership and added 316 members directly through portal membership payments for a total of 511 members who renewed on their own. As is becoming more standard, most memberships come from conference registrations. At the end of 2016, about 82.4% of the 2016 memberships were generated by NAACL 2016 attendance (23.4%), ACL 2016 attendance (43.4%), and EMNLP 2016 (15.6%). Between the growth in overall memberships and the increased number resulting from conference registrations, a larger burden was on the office to input new and renewing members into the portal.

As always, Min, Jing-Shin and Pranav (our current webmaster) have been extremely responsive to and helpful with any requests I have. I am not sure anyone realized that all memberships resulting from conferences had to be manually input into the portal or how very long this manual process took. While we had discussed eventually figuring out how to make this process more automated, given that there is no way to tie the registration process to the membership portion of the portal, it became more urgent this winter to automate our input process since the office was falling behind in updating the increased number of renewing memberships and creating new membership records. Over December and January, Pranav and I worked on a new, more automated input system that captures all the information I need in each membership record and provides a report on the few that failed so we can manually check and update just those few records. This is now working wonderfully and is a huge improvement. This will also free Pat Kirby to do other, more useful projects for me.

'''Fellows Program:'''

A selection committee has been formed, headed by Joakim Nivre, which used the current selection process. Four new Fellows were chosen for 2016. Fellowship award certificates were made, sent to Pushpak Bhattacharrya for signature and then sent to each of the new fellows.

'''Conferences:'''

NAACL 2016 was held in San Diego, California, at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina, June 12-17. This conference set the second highest attendance for NAACLs with 877 final attendees (just under the 908 attendees achieved in 2015) after taking out people who did not show up and others who cancelled. Having such a large number of attendees has caused some additional work in planning and communications (over 125 visa invitations issued, re-planning both catering and space configurations, etc.). Acting as Local Arrangements Chair means that both the organizational work and registrations were managed by the Office. One thing that worked out well was that the hotel was willing to give a small number of rooms at a deeper discount to be used for students. After those rooms were filled, we were able to get a small number of rooms at the nearby Hilton to also serve as student housing. The Office managed a list of student reservations for each hotel plus facilitated student room sharing. I expect this conference to make a surplus but the exact amount will not be determined until the accountant finishes reviewing the records.

The ACL 2016, was held in Berlin, August 7-12 and has been managed quite well by Valia Kordoni and her local team plus an excellent PCO (professional conference organizer company), along with Antal van den Bosch as General Chair stepping in when needed. The office had worked closely with the local organizers in Berlin on all aspects of the organization. The final registration count is 1650, setting a new all-time high (2014, in Baltimore, being the previous high at 1439 registered). Last year it was decided to eliminate the Student Lunch. We decided, instead, to hold a Recruitment Lunch, charging a $500 fee for each recruiting company to help defray some part of the lunch costs. There were 12 companies at the lunch, making this first-time experiment a success that we recommend being tried again. One problem that arose was that no one seemed to know their job included the production of the Conference Handbook, creating a last minute scramble to find someone willing to manage this project. This has led to the creation going forward of a Conference Handbook Chair to avoid confusion.

EMNLP 2016, held in Austin, Texas, November 1-5 was co-located with AMTA 2016 which immediately preceded EMNLP. Due to difficulties with the hotel, both AMTA and EMNLP were forced to shift their conferences one day earlier than previously advertised which, along with a great many failures and issues with the hotel during the conference itself, lead to organizational difficulties I hope were not too noticeable to the attendees. For example, the last day of AMTA and first day of EMNLP were supposed to purposely overlap with workshops, one of which (SSST) was to be co-located with AMTA to foster cross-over attendance but this did not happen in the end and SSST was rescheduled to the last day of EMNLP instead. These difficulties, though, allowed me to negotiate further discounts in our final billing. EMNLP 2016 ended with 804 total registrants, making it slightly larger than the previous record of 775 in Lisbon in 2015. The Office acted as Local Arrangements Chair as well as providing advice, general support, and registration management.

Given the current concerns about possible travel restrictions going into the future, it may be interesting to note that NAACL 2016 had a total of 18 No Shows (people who had registered but did not attend the conference) and 3 cancellations due to visas not being issued. ACL 2016 had 32 No Shows (10 of which registered but did not pay) and 10 cancellations due to visa problems. EMNLP 2016 had 19 No Shows with only 1 reported cancellation due to a visa application being declined. The No Shows did not explain why they did not attend.

Planning for (NA)ACL 2017 has begun and Graeme, Anoop and I conducted a second site visit in December to be sure the Westin Bayshore Hotel (the conference venue) would be able to handle the potentially higher number of attendees. Of concern was that some of the parallel session rooms will have to be turned over quickly for the two evening poster/dinner sessions but we have been assured the hotel will make it work. The venue contract has been signed and initial plans are in place. Anoop Sarkar has agreed to be co-Local Arrangements Chair to help with the more local aspects of our planning, including helping to find local sponsors and possibly some sort of childcare. One great concern is having found out during the second site visit that Vancouver will be overrun with tourists and locals coming out for the Gay Pride Week beginning the weekend following our conference and a fireworks competition beginning the weekend before our conference and running through the week. This means hotels are charging much higher rates and finding relatively inexpensive accommodations may be more difficult. To help with this potential problem, we looked at other hotels and have now signed non-penalty contracts with both the Sheraton Wall Centre and the Marriott for a limited number of guest rooms at similar price points to the Westin for our regular attendees. We also contracted small blocks of rooms at the YWCA and Georgian Court hotels which, in addition to 10 super-discounted rooms at the Westin, will provided some much less expensive rooms for some of our students. We also visited a few options for both the Social Event (for all attendees) and the Recognition Dinner (for the LTA awardee and ACL key volunteers). Contracts are now in place for the Social Event to be at the Vancouver Aquarium (at our expected high numbers of attendees, there are few places which are large enough and interesting for holding such an event) and a Harbour Cruise is contracted for the Recognition Dinner Wednesday evening (which happens to coincide with one of the evening fireworks competitions). We will begin now to advertise our Recruitment Lunch to our sponsors and others who might be interested. I expect to spend much of March collecting quotes for all aspects of the conference and setting up the working budget which we will then use to set registration fees. My hope is to open registration in early April.

SIGDAT 2017 will be held in Copenhagen, Denmark, September 7-11, 2017. On my way home from ACL 2016 in Berlin, I met Dirk Hovy and Anders Søgaard (the Local Arrangements Chairs) to conduct a site visit of the proposed conference venues, hotels and social event locations. Contracts have been signed with DGI-byen for both the conference venues and the nearby hotel. The venue will be in the old meat packing district which has been turned into shops, restaurants, bars and a meeting space (Øksnehallen). It is a lively area with many other restaurants and hotels in the vicinity. No-penalty contracts are being negotiated with a couple of other hotels and Dirk and Anders will be working on setting up an exciting Social Event in the courtyard adjacent to the Øksnehallen. The office will continue to provide advice and will manage registrations.

EACL 2017 will be held in Valencia, Spain, April 3-7, 2017 and, although the Office is not typically involved in this conference’s planning, the organizers and General Chair have been requesting much more guidance than in years past.

NAACL has requested that I begin searching for two years (2018 and 2019) potential venues and SIGDAT has asked that I also search for a 2018 venue for EMNLP. This search has just begun and I am hoping the three-conference leverage can work to our advantage. Sometimes, negotiating a two or three year contract with the same hotel chain can result in better pricing so this will be my goal.

While it is always difficult to project attendance at conferences, we seem to be settling into a new higher level of attendance, after a growth spurt the last couple of years. Being prepared for more than expected numbers is extremely important for the next couple of years until we can again trust our newly-adjusted predictions.

Using Michael Strube’s schema to optimally lay out the posters, demos and food/beverages for the poster/dinner sessions worked very well for all three conferences in 2016, allowing ample walk space and overall comfort. And, workshops continue to be more challenging in finding adequate space for the growing attendance at some workshops and the many poster sessions they plan to present. Careful advance planning is essential for these events.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

NAACL 2016 had sponsorships totaling $70,012 plus $6,700 sponsoring the BEA and CLPsych workshops. Once again, our usual sponsors (Amazon, Baidu, Baobab, Bloomberg, ebay, Facebook, Google, IBM Research, Microsoft, Nuance, Yahoo and the University of Washington) plus newer sponsors (Adobe, Brandeis University, Civis Analytics, Grammarly, Huawei Technologies, Maluuba, Open Table, United Health Group, VoiceBox, @newsela) lent their support. Quite a few sponsors also opted to be exhibitors in addition to KITT.AI and Quora who exhibited but were not sponsors.

ACL 2016 has proven to be quite popular, not only in numbers of registrations but also in having $100,786 in conference sponsorship commitments. Our faithful sponsors (Amazon, Baidu, ebay, Facebook, Google, IBM Research, Microsoft, Nuance, Yandex) plus sponsors we have not seen before or are returning (Elsevier, Grammarly, Maluuba, Textkernel, VoiceBox, Zalando) continue to help us thrive. We also have $9,120 in sponsorships supporting workshops and $1,000 specifically committed to the SRW. The most exciting commitments are from eleven companies who each paid $500 for the experimental Recruitment Lunch, for a total of $5,500. Two of these companies also decided to be a Silver and a Bronze sponsor of the main conference.

$74,739 in EMNLP 2016 sponsorships were committed. Many were the result of 2-Pack or 3-Pack sponsorship agreements so the same companies as listed above (Amazon, Baidu, Bloomberg, Brandeis University, ebay, Facebook, Google, Grammarly, IBM, Maluuba, Microsoft, Nuance, Voicebox, Yandex) plus 3M, Citadel, ISI and Oracle Labs generously donated.

For 2017, I am pleased to report that sponsorships are steadily coming in. So far, ACL 2017 has a total commitment of $92,331 for the main conference plus $2,500 for the Abusive Language and $2,000 for the RepL4NLP workshops. It is exciting to have captured Apple as a new sponsor/exhibitor. Other commitments are currently being decided both for the main conference and for the Women in NLP workshop. EACL 2017 has $6,688 in sponsorships directed through ACL’s bank account either because the sponsorship was part of a multi-pack or the sponsor was more comfortable working with the Office. Many other sponsorships are being sent to the EACL 2017 PCO for direct management within Europe. EMNLP 2017 has received $34,046 in commitments to date with more expected.

The idea of offering 2-Pack or 3-Pack options and including EMNLP allowed sponsors to make one payment to support two or all three events rather than one at a time. This made sponsoring easier, especially for our ongoing sponsors. For the 2016 Sponsorship Booklet that the International Sponsorship Committee and I pulled together, we continue to offer these multi-pack options, resulting in some of the first commitments and at higher levels (Amazon and Baidu at Platinum, for example) to come in.

The area Sponsorship Chairs and the Local Arrangement Sponsorship Chairs are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them. And, many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!

2017Q1 Reports: Office

2017-02-13T23:47:06Z

PriscillaRasmussen: Created page with "Priscilla Rasmussen 12 February 2017 '''ACL Business Office Report''''''Bold text''' As usual, the Office is running smoothly. In the fall, another financial audit was..."

Priscilla Rasmussen
12 February 2017

'''ACL Business Office Report''''''Bold text'''

As usual, the Office is running smoothly.

In the fall, another financial audit was successfully conducted by Nisivoccia, LLP, both in the office and through emails with Graeme and me. Our tax forms were completed and filed in November.

In late December, our Directors/Officers insurance was renewed for the 2017 calendar year and our Office insurance was automatically renewed in January. As of April 1st, my office 3-year lease is due for renewal so in early February the lease was renewed for April 2017 through March 2020 at a 2% per year increase. For those of you who are new to the Board, this lease is under ARCS (my company) and ACL pays 70% of the rent, AMTA pays 10% and I pay the remainder so that both ACL and AMTA can use this office address as their place of business.

Pat Kirby continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations (especially handling most of the membership entries into the portal) as well as managing the student housing and working with me in preparation for and onsite at our conferences.

'''Publications, Journals and Royalties''':

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates handling print-on-demand of our publications, I typically receive no requests for hardcopy publications in the office. However, one long-time member has asked to fill in gaps in his personal CL Journal library and will pay for the long list of journals, proceedings and shipping costs. This order is beginning to be filled.

The Curran Associates agreement has turned out to be a good one for both them and the ACL.
In 2016, we have received a total of $2,731.40 in royalties from them, covering the 4th quarter of 2015 through the 3rd quarter of 2016 plus $1,371.16 paid to us this month covering the 4th quarter of 2016. Copyright Clearance Center has not sent any earnings to ACL for CY 2015, nor has MIT Press Journals.

MIT Press Journals has now sent us an invoice for their fiscal year, July 2015 - June 2016 for their services related to the Computational Linguistics Journal. The invoice, for $35,968.50 was paid this month.

Our journals pay editorial assistants to help with the process. The CL Journal’s assistant was paid $2,634 for November 2015 through February 2016 in 2016 and in January 2017 an additional $4,730 was paid for her services for the remainder of the 2016 calendar year. And just over $1,000 was spent to upgrade their online reviewing system. The TACL Journal’s assistant was paid $11,019.56 covering April through December 2016.

'''Membership:'''

Since 2007 we have consistently numbered slightly over or under 2000 members and exceeded any previous final year numbers by ending 2015 with 2,536 members. I am pleased to report we have 2,901 members which indicates the growth of our field and conferences. The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be representing between 55 and 60 countries on a regular basis and currently exceed this with a total of 62 countries being represented by our membership.

We began 2016 with 195 members who were in a multi-year membership and added 316 members directly through portal membership payments for a total of 511 members who renewed on their own. As is becoming more standard, most memberships come from conference registrations. At the end of 2016, about 82.4% of the 2016 memberships were generated by NAACL 2016 attendance (23.4%), ACL 2016 attendance (43.4%), and EMNLP 2016 (15.6%). Between the growth in overall memberships and the increased number resulting from conference registrations, a larger burden was on the office to input new and renewing members into the portal.

As always, Min, Jing-Shin and Pranav (our current webmaster) have been extremely responsive to and helpful with any requests I have. I am not sure anyone realized that all memberships resulting from conferences had to be manually input into the portal or how very long this manual process took. While we had discussed eventually figuring out how to make this process more automated, given that there is no way to tie the registration process to the membership portion of the portal, it became more urgent this winter to automate our input process since the office was falling behind in updating the increased number of renewing memberships and creating new membership records. Over December and January, Pranav and I worked on a new, more automated input system that captures all the information I need in each membership record and provides a report on the few that failed so we can manually check and update just those few records. This is now working wonderfully and is a huge improvement. This will also free Pat Kirby to do other, more useful projects for me.

'''Fellows Program:'''

A selection committee has been formed, headed by Joakim Nivre, which used the current selection process. Four new Fellows were chosen for 2016. Fellowship award certificates were made, sent to Pushpak Bhattacharrya for signature and then sent to each of the new fellows.

'''Conferences:'''

NAACL 2016 was held in San Diego, California, at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina, June 12-17. This conference set the second highest attendance for NAACLs with 877 final attendees (just under the 908 attendees achieved in 2015) after taking out people who did not show up and others who cancelled. Having such a large number of attendees has caused some additional work in planning and communications (over 125 visa invitations issued, re-planning both catering and space configurations, etc.). Acting as Local Arrangements Chair means that both the organizational work and registrations were managed by the Office. One thing that worked out well was that the hotel was willing to give a small number of rooms at a deeper discount to be used for students. After those rooms were filled, we were able to get a small number of rooms at the nearby Hilton to also serve as student housing. The Office managed a list of student reservations for each hotel plus facilitated student room sharing. I expect this conference to make a surplus but the exact amount will not be determined until the accountant finishes reviewing the records.

The ACL 2016, was held in Berlin, August 7-12 and has been managed quite well by Valia Kordoni and her local team plus an excellent PCO (professional conference organizer company), along with Antal van den Bosch as General Chair stepping in when needed. The office had worked closely with the local organizers in Berlin on all aspects of the organization. The final registration count is 1650, setting a new all-time high (2014, in Baltimore, being the previous high at 1439 registered). Last year it was decided to eliminate the Student Lunch. We decided, instead, to hold a Recruitment Lunch, charging a $500 fee for each recruiting company to help defray some part of the lunch costs. There were 12 companies at the lunch, making this first-time experiment a success that we recommend being tried again. One problem that arose was that no one seemed to know their job included the production of the Conference Handbook, creating a last minute scramble to find someone willing to manage this project. This has led to the creation going forward of a Conference Handbook Chair to avoid confusion.

EMNLP 2016, held in Austin, Texas, November 1-5 was co-located with AMTA 2016 which immediately preceded EMNLP. Due to difficulties with the hotel, both AMTA and EMNLP were forced to shift their conferences one day earlier than previously advertised which, along with a great many failures and issues with the hotel during the conference itself, lead to organizational difficulties I hope were not too noticeable to the attendees. For example, the last day of AMTA and first day of EMNLP were supposed to purposely overlap with workshops, one of which (SSST) was to be co-located with AMTA to foster cross-over attendance but this did not happen in the end and SSST was rescheduled to the last day of EMNLP instead. These difficulties, though, allowed me to negotiate further discounts in our final billing. EMNLP 2016 ended with 804 total registrants, making it slightly larger than the previous record of 775 in Lisbon in 2015. The Office acted as Local Arrangements Chair as well as providing advice, general support, and registration management.

Given the current concerns about possible travel restrictions going into the future, it may be interesting to note that NAACL 2016 had a total of 18 No Shows (people who had registered but did not attend the conference) and 3 cancellations due to visas not being issued. ACL 2016 had 32 No Shows (10 of which registered but did not pay) and 10 cancellations due to visa problems. EMNLP 2016 had 19 No Shows with only 1 reported cancellation due to a visa application being declined. The No Shows did not explain why they did not attend.

Planning for (NA)ACL 2017 has begun and Graeme, Anoop and I conducted a second site visit in December to be sure the Westin Bayshore Hotel (the conference venue) would be able to handle the potentially higher number of attendees. Of concern was that some of the parallel session rooms will have to be turned over quickly for the two evening poster/dinner sessions but we have been assured the hotel will make it work. The venue contract has been signed and initial plans are in place. Anoop Sarkar has agreed to be co-Local Arrangements Chair to help with the more local aspects of our planning, including helping to find local sponsors and possibly some sort of childcare. One great concern is having found out during the second site visit that Vancouver will be overrun with tourists and locals coming out for the Gay Pride Week beginning the weekend following our conference and a fireworks competition beginning the weekend before our conference and running through the week. This means hotels are charging much higher rates and finding relatively inexpensive accommodations may be more difficult. To help with this potential problem, we looked at other hotels and have now signed non-penalty contracts with both the Sheraton Wall Centre and the Marriott for a limited number of guest rooms at similar price points to the Westin for our regular attendees. We also contracted small blocks of rooms at the YWCA and Georgian Court hotels which, in addition to 10 super-discounted rooms at the Westin, will provided some much less expensive rooms for some of our students. We also visited a few options for both the Social Event (for all attendees) and the Recognition Dinner (for the LTA awardee and ACL key volunteers). Contracts are now in place for the Social Event to be at the Vancouver Aquarium (at our expected high numbers of attendees, there are few places which are large enough and interesting for holding such an event) and a Harbour Cruise is contracted for the Recognition Dinner Wednesday evening (which happens to coincide with one of the evening fireworks competitions). We will begin now to advertise our Recruitment Lunch to our sponsors and others who might be interested. I expect to spend much of March collecting quotes for all aspects of the conference and setting up the working budget which we will then use to set registration fees. My hope is to open registration in early April.

SIGDAT 2017 will be held in Copenhagen, Denmark, September 7-11, 2017. On my way home from ACL 2016 in Berlin, I met Dirk Hovy and Anders Søgaard (the Local Arrangements Chairs) to conduct a site visit of the proposed conference venues, hotels and social event locations. Contracts have been signed with DGI-byen for both the conference venues and the nearby hotel. The venue will be in the old meat packing district which has been turned into shops, restaurants, bars and a meeting space (Øksnehallen). It is a lively area with many other restaurants and hotels in the vicinity. No-penalty contracts are being negotiated with a couple of other hotels and Dirk and Anders will be working on setting up an exciting Social Event in the courtyard adjacent to the Øksnehallen. The office will continue to provide advice and will manage registrations.

EACL 2017 will be held in Valencia, Spain, April 3-7, 2017 and, although the Office is not typically involved in this conference’s planning, the organizers and General Chair have been requesting much more guidance than in years past.

NAACL has requested that I begin searching for two years (2018 and 2019) potential venues and SIGDAT has asked that I also search for a 2018 venue for EMNLP. This search has just begun and I am hoping the three-conference leverage can work to our advantage. Sometimes, negotiating a two or three year contract with the same hotel chain can result in better pricing so this will be my goal.

While it is always difficult to project attendance at conferences, we seem to be settling into a new higher level of attendance, after a growth spurt the last couple of years. Being prepared for more than expected numbers is extremely important for the next couple of years until we can again trust our newly-adjusted predictions.

Using Michael Strube’s schema to optimally lay out the posters, demos and food/beverages for the poster/dinner sessions worked very well for all three conferences in 2016, allowing ample walk space and overall comfort. And, workshops continue to be more challenging in finding adequate space for the growing attendance at some workshops and the many poster sessions they plan to present. Careful advance planning is essential for these events.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

NAACL 2016 had sponsorships totaling $70,012 plus $6,700 sponsoring the BEA and CLPsych workshops. Once again, our usual sponsors (Amazon, Baidu, Baobab, Bloomberg, ebay, Facebook, Google, IBM Research, Microsoft, Nuance, Yahoo and the University of Washington) plus newer sponsors (Adobe, Brandeis University, Civis Analytics, Grammarly, Huawei Technologies, Maluuba, Open Table, United Health Group, VoiceBox, @newsela) lent their support. Quite a few sponsors also opted to be exhibitors in addition to KITT.AI and Quora who exhibited but were not sponsors.

ACL 2016 has proven to be quite popular, not only in numbers of registrations but also in having $100,786 in conference sponsorship commitments. Our faithful sponsors (Amazon, Baidu, ebay, Facebook, Google, IBM Research, Microsoft, Nuance, Yandex) plus sponsors we have not seen before or are returning (Elsevier, Grammarly, Maluuba, Textkernel, VoiceBox, Zalando) continue to help us thrive. We also have $9,120 in sponsorships supporting workshops and $1,000 specifically committed to the SRW. The most exciting commitments are from eleven companies who each paid $500 for the experimental Recruitment Lunch, for a total of $5,500. Two of these companies also decided to be a Silver and a Bronze sponsor of the main conference.

$74,739 in EMNLP 2016 sponsorships were committed. Many were the result of 2-Pack or 3-Pack sponsorship agreements so the same companies as listed above (Amazon, Baidu, Bloomberg, Brandeis University, ebay, Facebook, Google, Grammarly, IBM, Maluuba, Microsoft, Nuance, Voicebox, Yandex) plus 3M, Citadel, ISI and Oracle Labs generously donated.

For 2017, I am pleased to report that sponsorships are steadily coming in. So far, ACL 2017 has a total commitment of $92,331 for the main conference plus $2,500 for the Abusive Language and $2,000 for the RepL4NLP workshops. It is exciting to have captured Apple as a new sponsor/exhibitor. Other commitments are currently being decided both for the main conference and for the Women in NLP workshop. EACL 2017 has $6,688 in sponsorships directed through ACL’s bank account either because the sponsorship was part of a multi-pack or the sponsor was more comfortable working with the Office. Many other sponsorships are being sent to the EACL 2017 PCO for direct management within Europe. EMNLP 2017 has received $34,046 in commitments to date with more expected.

The idea of offering 2-Pack or 3-Pack options and including EMNLP allowed sponsors to make one payment to support two or all three events rather than one at a time. This made sponsoring easier, especially for our ongoing sponsors. For the 2016 Sponsorship Booklet that the International Sponsorship Committee and I pulled together, we continue to offer these multi-pack options, resulting in some of the first commitments and at higher levels (Amazon and Baidu at Platinum, for example) to come in.

The area Sponsorship Chairs and the Local Arrangement Sponsorship Chairs are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them. And, many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!

2016Q3 Reports: Office Manager

2016-08-02T20:15:41Z

PriscillaRasmussen: Created page with " Priscilla Rasmussen 28 July 2016 '''ACL Business Office Report''' As usual, the Office is running smoothly. We will look forward to another financial audit to be condu..."

Priscilla Rasmussen
28 July 2016

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

As usual, the Office is running smoothly.

We will look forward to another financial audit to be conducted by Nisivoccia, LLP, both in the office and through emails with Graeme and me for our 2015 tax forms to be completed and filed. The exact date of the audit is not yet set but we hope it will be as productive as it was last year. This may not happen until September so we may have to request a second no-cost extension.

Pat Kirby continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations (especially handling most of the membership entries into the portal) as well as onsite at our conferences.

'''Publications, Journals and Royalties:'''

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates now handling print-on-demand of our publications, I typically receive no requests for hardcopy publications in the office. However, one long-time member has asked to fill in gaps in his personal CL Journal library and will pay for the long list of journals and shipping costs.

The Curran Associates agreement has turned out to be a good one for both them and the ACL.
We have received a total of $2,397.84 in royalties from them, covering the 4th quarter of 2015 through the 2nd quarter of 2016. Copyright Clearance Center has not sent any earnings to ACL for CY 2015, nor has MIT Press Journals.

MIT Press Journals has not yet sent us an invoice for their fiscal year, July 2015 - June 2016 for their services related to the Computational Linguistics Journal. I expect the invoice to come soon.

Our journals pay an editorial assistant to help with the process. The CL Journal’s assistant was paid $2,634 for November 2015 through February 2016 services so far this year. And just over $1,000 was spent to upgrade their online reviewing system. The TACL Journal’s assistant was paid $7,345 covering August 2015 through March 2016.

'''Membership:'''

Since 2006 we have consistently numbered over 2000 members and exceeded any previous final year numbers by ending 2015 with 2,536 members. I am pleased to report we already have 2,161 members which exceeds membership numbers at this point in prior years. The membership should grow even more when ACL 2016 onsite registrations and EMNLP 2016 memberships are added. The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be representing between 55 and 60 countries on a regular basis and currently exceed this with a total of 61 countries being represented by our membership.

We began 2016 with 271 members who were in a multi-year membership and added 316 members directly through portal membership payments for a total of 587 so far this year. As is becoming the more standard, most memberships come from conference registrations. At the end of 2015, about 78% of the 2015 memberships were generated by NAACL 2015 attendance (29%), ACL/IJCNLP 2015 attendance (30%), and EMNLP 2015 (19%). So far in 2016, 31% of memberships were generated by NAACL 2016 and 56% by ACL 2016. Of course these percentages will change considerably by the end of the year when all three conferences are completed.

As always, Min and Pranav (our current webmaster) have been extremely responsive to and helpful with any requests I have. I now look forward to working with Jing-Shin Chang, our new Information Officer.

'''Fellows Program:'''

A committee has been formed, headed by Joakim Nivre, to review and possibly adjust the selection process before this coming fall when the next group of fellows will be nominated.

'''Conferences:'''

NAACL 2016 was held in San Diego, California, at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina, June 12-17. This conference set the second highest attendance for NAACLs with 877 final attendees (just under the 908 attendees achieved in 2015) after taking out people who did not show up and others who cancelled. Having such a large number of attendees has caused some additional work in planning and communications (over 125 visa invitations issued, re-planning both catering and space configurations, etc.). Acting as Local Arrangements Chair means that both the organizational work and registrations were managed by the Office. One thing that worked out well was that the hotel was willing to give a small number of rooms at a deeper discount to be used for students. After those rooms were filled, we were able to get a small number of rooms at the nearby Hilton to also serve as student housing. The Office managed a list of student reservations for each hotel plus facilitated student room sharing.

The ACL 2016, to be held in Berlin, August 7-12, has been managed quite well by Valia Kordoni and her local team, along with Antal van den Bosch as General Chair stepping in when needed. The office had worked closely with the local organizers in Berlin on all aspects of the organization. The combined total pre-registration is 1590, with 178 attending only tutorials or workshops, setting a new all-time high. Last year it was decided to eliminate the Student Lunch. We decided to hold a Recruitment Lunch, charging a $500 fee for each recruiting company to help defray some part of the lunch costs. There are 11 companies at the lunch, making this first-time experiment a success that we recommend being tried again.

EMNLP 2016, to be held in Austin, Texas, November 1-5 will be co-located with AMTA 2016 which immediately precedes EMNLP. Due to difficulties with the hotel, both AMTA and EMNLP were forced to shift their conferences one day earlier than previously advertised. Please tell all you know of these new dates. The last day of AMTA and first day of EMNLP purposely overlap with workshops, one of which (SSST) is being co-located with AMTA to foster cross-over attendance. The Office acts as Local Arrangements Chair as well as providing advice, general support, and registration management.

Planning for (NA)ACL 2017 will begin in earnest after ACL 2016 concludes. The venue contract has been signed and initial plans are in place. Anoop Sarkar has agreed to be co-Local Arrangements Chair to help with the more local aspects of our planning. SIGDAT is considering venues for 2017 but the exact location is still undecided. EACL 2017 will be held in Valencia next April but the Office is not involved in this conference’s planning. NAACL has requested that I begin searching for one or two years (2018 and 2019) potential venues and this search will begin in the Fall/Winter. Sometimes, negotiating a two-year contract with the same hotel chain can result in better pricing so it is worth exploring.

While it is always difficult to project attendance at conferences, we seem to be settling into a new higher level of attendance, after a growth spurt the last couple of years. Being prepared for more than expected numbers is extremely important for the next couple of years until we can again trust our newly-adjusted predictions.

As a side note, it is good to remember that poster sessions are always very difficult to set up in a way that pleases the majority of attendees. Michael Strube, the ACL/IJCNLP 2015 co-Program Chair, developed a schema to optimally lay out the posters, demos and food/beverages, allowing ample walk space, and this is now the guide to be used for all future conferences. It is included at the ACL wiki in the Conference Handbook. Additionally, workshops are becoming more and more mini-conferences complete with poster sessions. These are often more difficult to coordinate and organize, and for which finding adequate space is essential.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

NAACL 2016 had sponsorships totaling $70,020 plus $5,700 sponsoring various workshops. Once again, our usual sponsors (Amazon, Baidu, Baobab, ebay, Facebook, Google, IBM Research, Microsoft, Nuance, Yahoo and the University of Washington) plus newer sponsors (Adobe, Brandeis University, Civis Analytics, Grammarly, Huawei Technologies, Maluuba, Open Table, United Health Group, VoiceBox, @newlea) lent their support. Quite a few sponsors also opted to be exhibitors in addition to KITT.AI and Quora who exhibited but were not sponsors.

ACL 2016 has proven to be quite popular, not only in numbers of registrations but also in having $100,806 in conference sponsorship commitments. Our faithful sponsors (Amazon, Baidu, ebay, Facebook, Google, IBM Research, Microsoft, Nuance, Yandex) plus sponsors we have not seen before or are returning (Elsevier, Grammarly, Maluuba, Textkernel, VoiceBox) continue to help us thrive. We also have $10,120 in sponsorships supporting workshops. The most exciting commitments are from eleven companies who each paid $500 for the experimental Recruitment Lunch, for a total of $5,500. Two of these companies also decided to be a Silver and a Bronze sponsor of the main conference.

$53,389 has been committed so far in EMNLP 2016 sponsorships. Many are the result of 2-Pack or 3-Pack sponsorship agreements so the same companies as listed above (Amazon, Baidu, Bloomberg, Brandeis University, ebay, Facebook, Google, IBM, Maluuba, Microsoft, Nuance, Yandex) plus Oracle Labs generously donated.

The idea of offering 2-Pack or 3-Pack options and including EMNLP allowed sponsors to make one payment to support two or all three events rather than one at a time. This made sponsoring easier, especially for our ongoing sponsors. For the 2016 Sponsorship Booklet that the International Sponsorship Committee and I pulled together, we continue to offer these multi-pack options, resulting in some of the first commitments and at higher levels (Amazon and Baidu at Platinum, for example) to come in.

The area Sponsorship Chairs and the Local Arrangement Sponsorship Chairs are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them. And, many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!

2016Q1 Reports: Office

2016-02-19T21:43:31Z

PriscillaRasmussen: Created page with "Priscilla Rasmussen 18 February 2016 '''ACL Business Office Report''' As usual, the Office is running smoothly. The Directors/Officers and Office insurances have been r..."

Priscilla Rasmussen
18 February 2016

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

As usual, the Office is running smoothly.

The Directors/Officers and Office insurances have been renewed for 2016 so we are all covered against unforeseen issues.

We will look forward to another financial audit to be conducted by Nisivoccia, LLP, both in the office and through emails with Graeme and me for our 2015 tax forms to be completed and filed. The exact date of the audit is not yet set but we hope it will be as productive as it was last year.

Pat Kirby continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations (especially handling most of the membership entries into the portal) as well as onsite at our conferences.

'''Publications, Journals and Royalties:'''

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates now handling print-on-demand of our publications, I received no requests for hardcopy publications in the office this year.

The Curran Associates agreement has turned out to be a good one for both them and the ACL.
We have received a total of $3,915.49 in royalties from them, covering the 4th quarter of 2014 through the 3rd quarter of 2015. Copyright Clearance Center has not sent any earnings to ACL for the CY 2015, nor has MIT Press Journals.

MIT Press Journals has sent us an invoice for their fiscal year, July 2014 - June 2015 in the amount of $36,371.05 for their services related to the Computational Linguistics Journal. We now seem to be on track with annual invoicing and are currently up-to-date with payments.

Our journals pay an editorial assistant to help with the process. In 2015, the CL Journal’s assistant was paid a total of $10,679 and the TACL Journal’s assistant was paid $2,592. The TACL assistant is a fairly new position, only filled for the later part of the year.

'''Membership:'''

Since 2006 we have consistently numbered over 2000 members and exceeded any previous final year numbers by ending 2015 with 2,536 members. The main reason for this is holding our ACL/IJCNLP 2015 meeting in Beijing. By deviating from our normal registration process to accommodate the Chinese attendees, I believe more locals were able to come and this is shown by a marked rise in Asian memberships, increasing by over 500 (mostly Chinese). I expect we will be over 2,000 members by the end of 2016 and hope we can maintain the newly found Asian population. The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be representing between 55 and 60 countries on a regular basis and, in 2015, exceeded this with a total of 65 countries being represented by our membership.

We began 2015 with around 150 members who were in the middle of a multi-year membership and added 203 members directly through portal membership payments for a total of 353 this year. As is becoming the more standard, most memberships come from conference registrations. At the end of 2015, about 78% of the 2015 memberships were generated by NAACL 2015 attendance (29%), ACL/IJCNLP 2015 attendance (30%), and EMNLP 2015 (19%). Please see Membership spreadsheets for the final 2015 details on countries represented and member statistics.

Pat and I continue to do our best to keep the membership information updated and as correct as possible from information gathered on conference registration forms, although I wish members would update their information on a regular basis themselves. The portal seems to be giving us less problems lately although I do still double-check the accuracy of the information and a few things are slightly different now that we have transitioned to having the main webpages integrated with the portal. And, of course, Min and Pranav (our current webmaster) have been extremely responsive to and helpful with any requests I have. I now look forward to working with Jing-Shin Chang, our new Information Officer.

'''Issue for discussion: Changing the Membership Year:'''

As shown above, about 78% of all memberships are paid along with conference registrations. This means that, while our actual membership year is January 1st through December 31st regardless of when one joins/renews, in people’s minds the year runs conference to conference. Those who pay directly for their memberships in the last quarter of the calendar year, especially those paying in December, are taken back when reminded in early January to pay to renew their memberships again.

One thought might be to change the membership year to June 1 through May 31...This would then coincide with most of our conferences and give (almost everyone) a full year membership. Since most people pay their membership as part of the conference registration, maybe aiming for some period that converges better with conferences could work? Of course, there could be problems as Graeme pointed out in an earlier email discussion:

“People would try to game or dispute the system, because the later they register for a conference and pay their membership, the more likely it is that the membership will also cover another conference. For example, if I become a member for the ACL 2016 conference in August 2016, am I covered for the ACL 2017 conference in July 2017? If I register late enough, then I can cover both conferences (and ACL will lose some income). If I register too early, then I will argue that my membership “really” begins on the date of the conference, regardless of the date I actually paid, and that I am therefore covered for next year’s conference as well.”

The other possibility would be to have 3-5 annual membership periods each coinciding with the dates of conferences and announce to all members and conference attendees that the new annual memberships run conference to conference. The Office would only have to track up to 4 end dates to remind people to renew and this could avoid some of Graeme’s scenarios which would most certainly happen otherwise. The idea might be: Attend EMNLP 2016 and be good until EMNLP 2017 then expire; attend NAACL 2016 and be good to (NA)ACL 2017 then expire, etc. And, anyone not attending any conferences in a given year could renew their membership at the beginning of the calendar year. Or, running memberships to begin at the beginning of each quarter might work:
EACL may be first quarter if held in March or second quarter along with NAACL (typically held in June), ACLs members would be third quarter and EMNLP would be either third or fourth quarter.

'''Fellows Program:'''

With the nomination, recommendation and selection process finalized in December, certificates were signed and mailed to each new Fellow. A committee has been formed to review and possibly adjust the selection process before this coming fall when the next group of fellows will be nominated.

'''Conferences:'''

NAACL 2015 was held in Denver, Colorado, at the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel, May 31-June 6. This conference set an all-time record attendance for NAACLs with 908 final paying attendees (about a 25% increase over 2013, the last independent conference) after taking out people who did not show up and others who cancelled. Having such a large number of attendees has caused some additional work in planning and communications (over 140 visa invitations issued, re-planning both catering and space configurations, hotel being sold out at our conference rates, etc.). Acting as Local Arrangements Chair means that both the organizational work and registrations were managed by the Office. And, a post-conference questionnaire was sent to the attendees immediately after the conference to gather valuable feedback on how to improve the attendees’ experience. While the financials are not completed for NAACL 2015, I have every expectation of reaping a nice surplus.

The ACL/IJCNLP 2015, held in Beijing, July 26-31, was somewhat unique for ACLs. Due to financial and other restrictions and complications, registration for the Chinese participants had to be completely managed locally within China. This means the Office handled the “international” audience and the Chinese financials and statistics had to be provided to Graeme and Priscilla to make a complete picture of the conference. The office had worked closely with the local organizers in Beijing on all aspects of the organization as well as managing the non-Chinese registrations. The combined total registration was 1,141, with the Chinese registrations totaled 396 and the non-Chinese registrations totaled 745. This is somewhat higher than previous final counts when ACLs are in Asia (Singapore, 2009, had 850 and Jeju, 2012, had 931). Final financial reporting is yet to come.

EMNLP 2015, held in Lisbon, Portugal, September 17-22, was a great success. Final registrations totaled 775 which is the highest ever for an EMNLP (2013 was 518, for example). The Office provided advice, general support, and managed the registrations. It is expected that a decent surplus should be made from this conference.

It has been difficult to project attendance at ACL/IJCNLP, NAACL and EMNLP for 2015 since both EACL 2014 and ACL 2014 had their highest attendances on record. And, while EMNLP 2014 had a lower attendance, EMNLP 2013 was also their highest attended EMNLP conference. Planning for each conference based on previous years in general and being prepared for more than expected numbers is critical again for 2016 until we see a couple of years numbers and can again trust our newly-adjusted predictions.

As I continue as Local Arrangements Chair for NAACL 2016, contracts for the venue are already signed to be at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina, June 12 – 17. Much of the planning is already in place and, after Priscilla’s site visit the first week of March, final details will be worked out. We hope registration can open before the end of March or by April 1st.

ACL 2016 will be held in Berlin, August 7-11, at Humboldt University. The planning is well underway, contracts are all in place, social event and other “side” events are almost finalized, and it seems a great many people are looking forward to coming to Berlin. This may be as large as ACL 2014 in Baltimore (our largest conference so far) or even higher. And, (NA)ACL 2017 will be held at the Westin Bayshore Hotel in Vancouver, Canada, July 30 – August 5, 2017. Graeme and Priscilla have already made the site visit and reported back to the Executive Board. Precise planning will begin in the fall of this year with Priscilla acting as Local Arrangements Chair.

EMNLP 2016, to be co-located with AMTA 2016 in Austin, Texas, has begun its planning, the Hilton hotel contract has been signed, and Priscilla (acting as Local Arrangements Chair) will be making a site visit the first week of March to both Austin and San Diego (for NAACL 2016). Due to ill health, Jan Wiebe was replaced by Jian Su as General Chair.

As a side note, it is good to remember that poster sessions are always very difficult to set up in a way that pleases the majority of attendees. Michael Strube, the ACL/IJCNLP 2015 co-Program Chair, developed a schema to optimally lay out the posters, demos and food/beverages, allowing ample walk space, and this is now the guide to be used for all future conferences. It is included at the ACL wiki in the Conference Handbook. Additionally, workshops are becoming more and more mini-conferences complete with poster sessions. These are often more difficult to coordinate and organize, and for which finding adequate space is essential.

'''Issue for discussion: Student Lunches at conferences:'''

'''Current Question:''' After lengthy discussions among the International Sponsorship Committee, there seemed to be a fairly even split among those who liked moving forward with a Recruitment Lunch and those who seemed rather strongly opposed. Those opposing it felt that the big companies already do side receptions that satisfy their recruiting needs and smaller companies/universities would not be so interested or afford reasonable charges we might set. So, this was not included in our 2016 Sponsorship Booklet as an option. There still may be enough interest among the ACL 2016 organizers to try this idea as a test, though.

My question now is whether to keep the “old” Student Lunch (especially for NAACL 2016 and, possibly, for ACL 2016 if they do not move forward with a Recruiterment Lunch) or shall we eliminate the Student Lunch entirely?

'''Previous Question and Background:''' Do we need to change the Student Lunch? When we were a small conference (in the old days with Don Walker), the intention was to give the students a chance to mingle and get to know their future lifelong colleagues. Now that we're at 350-400+ students, it has turned into simply a "get your free lunch and get out of here" event. I feel the purpose has been lost and the expense and difficulty in finding suitable places is quite large. One idea we tried at ACL 2014 was to get Platinum or Gold sponsors to sponsor the lunch for an additional fee and allow them to do a presentation at the lunch. We had 2 sponsors buy into this at ACL 2014 but had no takers for any of our 2015 meetings. So, should we continue with the Student Lunch at all and, if so, should it be revamped in any way? One idea might be to clearly offer this in the Sponsor Booklet for *anyone* and for a lesser fee (currently, it is $6,000). It would be advertised as a Recruiter’s Luncheon, have each institution get 10 minutes promo time (with av) and offer a small room for interviewing that they could reserve during the conference. Or, not offer the small room but set up an area within the lunch space for them to make contacts. Or…Please come up with suggestions.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

NAACL 2015 had sponsorships totaling $58,971 plus $4,600 sponsoring various workshops and the SRW. In addition to our ever faithful sponsors (A9, Baobab, Bloomberg, Google, IBM Research, Microsoft, Nuance, SDL, University of Washington, USC/ISI, Yahoo!, etc.), we welcomed new and hopefully continuing sponsors (3M, Machine Zone, VoiceBox, Goldman Sachs and DigitalRoots).

For ACL/IJCNLP 2015, the office received sponsorships totaling $56,830 and an additional $69,020 equivalent was donated directly to the local organizers. Once again, our usual sponsors (Amazon, Baidu, Baobab, Facebook, Google, IBM Research, Microsoft, Nuance, Yandex) plus VoiceBox made up our sponsor list combined with Tencent, CreditEase, Samsung, Alibaba, Sino Voice, and Sogou.com as local supporters. And, an additional $6,000 was received by the Office in support of a workshop and CoNLL.

$47,229 was collected by the Office plus about $1,200 directly to the local team as EMNLP 2015 sponsorships. Many are the result of 2-Pack or 3-Pack sponsorship agreements so the same companies as listed above (Amazon, Baidu, Bloomberg, Facebook, Google, ISI, Nuance, and VoiceBox) plus Recruit Technologies and Rakuten Inst of Technology generously donated.

The new idea of offering 2-Pack or 3-Pack options and including EMNLP allowed sponsors to make one payment to support two or all three events rather than one at a time. This made sponsoring easier, especially for our ongoing sponsors. For the 2016 Sponsorship Booklet that the International Sponsorship Committee and I pulled together, we continue to offer these multi-pack options. So far this year, we have four 3-Pack Platinum or Gold sponsors (Bloomberg, ebay, Facebook, and Google) and one 2-Pack sponsor (Yandex) for a main conference grand total of $63,928 ($26,274 ACL; $18,281 NAACL and $19,373 EMNLP) plus various workshops’ sponsorships totaling $3,200. Many other companies have indicated they are deciding what they will be able to do this year.

One point to keep in mind is that, while it may seem that we should be able to draw more in sponsorship support, many companies are the same ones supporting all of our conferences and they may look at it as “support to ACL” regardless of which ACL event it is. So, it is important to see that our “ACL total support” is actually $237,850 for last year. This total is in keeping with the highest sponsorship totals I know of for other societies that hold only one conference a year. Of course, there are new industries apparently interested in our research areas that we do need to make efforts to tap into.

The 2 sponsorship chairs positions for Europe have been filled as well as both Asian positions. We also have an EMNLP sponsorship chair and Local Sponsorship Chairs for both Europe and North America. This makes the Sponsorship Committee complete.

The area Sponsorship Chairs and the Local Arrangement Sponsorship Chairs are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them. And, many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!

2015Q3 Reports: Office Manager

2015-07-20T23:51:00Z

PriscillaRasmussen: Created page with "Priscilla Rasmussen 20 July 2015 '''ACL Business Office Report''' As usual, the Office is running smoothly. In early August, we will look forward to another financial a..."

Priscilla Rasmussen
20 July 2015

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

As usual, the Office is running smoothly.

In early August, we will look forward to another financial audit to be conducted by Nisivoccia, LLP, both in the office and through emails with Graeme and me for our 2014 tax forms to be completed and filed by the 15th August deadline We hope it will be as productive as it was last year.

Pat Kirby continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations (especially handling most of the memberships) as well as onsite at our conferences.

Please note, under Conferences, I would like to discuss possibly revamping the Student Lunch purpose and whether to continue offering this with the same or different format and function.

'''Publications, Journals and Royalties:'''

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates now handling print-on-demand of our publications, I received no requests for hardcopy publications in the office so far this year.

In Janurary 2015, Curran Associates sent $1,120.20 covering the 4th quarter royalties of 2014 and in April another $998.25 for the 1st quarter of 2015 came in. This agreement has turned out to be a good one for both them and the ACL. Copyright Clearance Center has not sent any earning to ACL for the CY 2014, nor has MIT Press Journals.

MIT Press Journals has sent us an invoice for their fiscal year, July 2013 - June 2014 in the amount of $44,079.10 for their services related to the Computational Linguistics Journal. So it seems we are finally on track with annual invoicing and are currently up-to-date with payments.

'''Membership:'''

Since 2006 we have consistently numbered over 2000 members but ended 2014 with 1,990 members. I believe the main reason for this is not having held a separate NAACL meeting in 2014. So far in 2015, we have almost 1,600 members and many more are expected through ACL 2015 late and onsite registrations plus all of EMNLP 2015 registrations. I expect we will be just over 2,000 members by the end of this year. The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be representing between 55 and 60 countries on a regular basis and, in 2014, exceeded this with a total of 64 countries being represented by our membership. For 2015, we are already at 57 countries and this will also increase after both ACL and EMNLP are completed.

We began 2015 with around 95 members who were in the middle of a multi-year membership and added 330 members directly through portal membership payments. The remainder of our current total of 1,588 resulted from conference registrations. This means that about 73% of the current 2015 memberships were generated by NAACL 2015 attendance (44%) and ACL 2015 attendance so far (29%) . Please see Membership spreadsheets for the final 2014 and mid-year 2015 details on countries represented and statistics.

Pat and I continue to do our best to keep the membership information updated and as correct as possible from information gathered on conference registration forms. The portal seems to be giving us less problems lately although I do still double-check the accuracy of the information. And, of course, Min and Pranav (our current webmaster) are extremely responsive to and helpful with any requests I have.

'''Fellows Program:'''

We will begin the nomination, recommendation and selection process again this fall to name the next group of fellows. A question was recently raised whether a Lifetime Achievement award winner could be nominated or are they automatically made fellows? I am not sure we have addressed this question.

'''Conferences:'''

NAACL 2015 was held in Denver, Colorado at the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel, May 31-June 6. This conference set an all-time record attendance for NAACLs with 950 registered attendees (about a 28% increase over 2013, the last independent conference) after taking out people who did not show up and others who cancelled. It seems our research endeavors may be hot topics now, attracting previously untapped companies. Having such a large number of attendees has caused some additional work in planning and communications (over 140 visa invitations issued, re-planning both catering and space configurations, hotel being sold out at our conference rates, etc.). Acting as Local Arrangements Chair means that both the organizational work and registrations were managed by the Office. And, a post-conference questionnaire was sent to the attendees immediately after the conference to gather valuable feedback on how to improve the attendees’ experience. While the financials are not completed for NAACL 2015, I have every expectation of reaping a nice surplus.

The planning for ACL/IJCNLP 2015, to be held in Beijing, July 26-31, is ongoing. The office is working closely with the local organizers in Beijing on all aspects of the organization as well as managing the non-Chinese registrations. Unfortunately, I have no information on the Chinese registrations to report but can say that the non-Chinese pre-conference registrations total 683. I would expect the combined total to end at about 1,000 attendees which is similar to previous final counts when ACLs are in Asia (Singapore, 2009, had 850 and Jeju, 2012, had 931).

EMNLP 2015, to be held in Lisbon, Portugal, September 17-22, is well underway and we hope to have registration open by the end of July. Most of the organizational details are finalized or nearly so. The Office is providing advice, general support, and will manage the registrations. Also, very soon, the exact location of EMNLP 2016, to be co-located with AMTA 2016 in Austin, Texas, will be decided.

It has been difficult to project attendance at ACL/IJCNLP, NAACL and EMNLP for 2015 since both EACL 2014 and ACL 2014 had their highest attendances on record. And, while EMNLP 2014 had a lower attendance, EMNLP 2013 was also their highest attended EMNLP conference. Planning for each conference based on previous years in general and being prepared for more than expected numbers is critical this year and going into the future.

As I continue as Local Arrangements Chair for NAACL 2016, contracts for the venue is already in place: NAACL 2016 will take place at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina, June 12 – 17, and after the 2015 conferences end, we will gear up with the intense planning for this conference.

ACL 2016 will be held in Berlin, August 7-11, at Humboldt University. Initial planning has begun and this promises to be an excellent venue and interesting city to explore. And, (NA)ACL 2017 should soon be decided. For ACL 2018, we already have one inquiry to possibly host our meeting in Asia/Pacific Rim.

As a side note, it is good to remember that poster sessions are always very difficult to set up in a way that pleases the majority of attendees. Each different layout causes some issue or another and we keep trying to improve although the overall space allotment at each venue poses its own constraints. And, workshops are becoming more and more mini-conferences complete with poster sessions. These are often more difficult to coordinate and organize, and for which finding adequate space is essential.

'''Issue for discussion: Student Lunches at conferences:'''

Do we need to change the Student Lunch? When we were a small conference (in the old days with Don Walker), the intention was to give the students a chance to mingle and get to know their future lifelong colleagues. Now that we're at 350-400+ students, it has turned into simply a "get your free lunch and get out of here" event. I feel the purpose has been lost and the expense and difficulty in finding suitable places is quite large. One idea we tried at ACL 2014 was to get Platinum or Gold sponsors to sponsor the lunch for an additional fee and allow them to do a presentation at the lunch as a Recruitment Lunch. We had 2 sponsors buy into this at ACL 2014 but had no takers for any of our 2015 meetings. So, I'd like to get the Exec's opinions/ideas on whether we should continue with the Student Lunch at all and, if so, should it be revamped in any way? One idea might be to clearly offer this in the Sponsor Booklet for *anyone* and for a lesser fee (currently, it is $6,000). It would be advertised as a Recruiter’s Luncheon, have each institution get 10 minutes promo time (with av) and offer a small room for interviewing that they could reserve during the conference. Or, not offer the small room but set up an area within the lunch space for them to make contacts. Or…Please come up with suggestions.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

NAACL 2015 had sponsorships totaling $58,971 plus $4,600 sponsoring various workshops and the SRW. In addition to our ever faithful sponsors (A9, Baobab, Bloomberg, Google, IBM Research, Microsoft, Nuance, SDL, University of Washington, USC/ISI, Yahoo!, etc.), we welcomed new and hopefully continuing sponsors (3M, Machine Zone, VoiceBox, Goldman Sachs and DigitalRoots).

For ACL 2015, the office received sponsorships totaling $56,830 and an additional $69,020 equivalent was donated directly to the local organizers. Once again, our usual sponsors (Amazon, Baidu, Baobab, Facebook, Google, IBM Research, Microsoft, Nuance, Yandex) plus VoiceBox made up our sponsor list combined with Tencent, CreditEase, Samsung, Alibaba, Sino Voice, and Sogou.com as local supporters. And, an additional $6,000 was received by the Office in support of a workshop and CoNLL.

$37,144 was collected by the Office plus about $1,200 directly to the local team so far as EMNLP 2015 sponsorships. Many are the result of 2-Pack or 3-Pack sponsorship agreements so the same companies as listed above (Amazon, Baidu, Bloomberg, Facebook, Google, ISI, Nuance, and VoiceBox) plus Recruit Technologies and Rakuten Inst of Technology generously donated.

I believe the new Sponsorship Booklet for 2015 that the International Sponsorship Committee and I pulled together made sponsoring easier, especially for our ongoing sponsors. Offering 2-Pack or 3-Pack options and including EMNLP allowed them to make one payment to support two or all three events rather than one at a time. One point to keep in mind is that, while it may seem that we should be able to draw more in sponsorship support, many companies are the same ones supporting all of our conferences and they may look at it as “support to ACL” regardless of which ACL event it is. So, it is important to see that our “ACL total support” is actually $227,765. This total is in keeping with the highest sponsorship totals I know of for other societies that hold only one conference a year. Of course, there are new industries apparently interested in our research areas that we do need to make efforts to tap into.

We need to add 1-2 sponsorship chairs for Europe, possibly one for North America, and one for Asia to the Sponsorship Committee. Please send recommendations to me.

The area Sponsorship Chairs and the Local Arrangement Sponsorship Chairs are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them. And, many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!

2015Q1 Reports: Office

2015-02-19T00:04:45Z

PriscillaRasmussen: Created page with "Priscilla Rasmussen 18 February 2015 '''ACL Business Office Report''' As usual, the Directors/Officers and Office insurances are in place for CY2015 so we are protected ag..."

Priscilla Rasmussen
18 February 2015

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

As usual, the Directors/Officers and Office insurances are in place for CY2015 so we are protected against unforeseen problems.

In mid-October, another audit was conducted by Nisivoccia, LLP, both in the office and through emails with Graeme and me for our 2013 tax forms to be completed and filed. It was a successful audit that did not turn up anything out of line in our practices. Graeme can comment further on the audit.

Pat Kirby continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations as well as onsite at our conferences.

Otherwise, the Office is running smoothly.

Please note, under Sponsorship Committee, my request that we need to add one sponsorship chair for Europe and one for Asia to the International Sponsorship Committee. Please send recommendations to me.

'''Publications, Journals and Royalties:'''

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates now handling print-on-demand of our publications, I received no requests for hardcopy publications in the office this year.

We have received royalties in 2014 from Curran Associates, through the 3rd quarter 2014, of $3,150.88. In Janurary 2015, Curran Associates sent another $1,120.20 covering the 4th quarter of 2014. This agreement has turned out to be a good one for both them and the ACL. Copyright Clearance Center has not sent any earning to ACL for the CY 2014.

MIT Press Journals has sent us an invoice for their fiscal year, July 2012-June 2013 in the amount of $38,728.28 for their services related to the Computational Linguistics Journal. It still remains a problem to receive timely invoicing unless we make the request but, for now, we are up-to-date with payments.

'''Membership:'''

Since 2009 we have consistently numbered over 2000 members. We ended 2014 with 1,990 members. I believe the main reason for this is not having held a separate NAACL meeting in 2014. Generally, with separate ACL, NAACL, EMNLP and possibly EACL meetings, more attendees become members so, this slight drop is not alarming. The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be representing between 55 and 60 countries on a regular basis and, in 2014, exceeded this with a total of 64 countries being represented by our membership. It is interesting to note that we began 2014 with around 150 members who were in the middle of a multi-year membership and added 456 members from SIGdial/INLG, EMNLP, or direct membership payments. This means that almost 57% of all 2014 memberships were generated by ACL 2014 attendance and over 18% was generated by EACL 2014 attendance. Please see Membership spreadsheets for the final 2014 details on countries represented and statistics.

We may have lost a few potential members this year from the Joint SIGdial/INLG and EMNLP conferences since both sent any non-current-members to the portal to make their memberships up-to-date rather than collecting the memberships as part of the registration fees. This practice may not be a good idea to continue.

Pat and I continue to do our best to keep the membership information updated and as correct as possible from information gathered on conference registration forms. The portal continues to give us problems that vary from time to time. This causes me to have doubts sometimes of the accuracy of the information and I do my best to double-check numbers through other means. And, of course, Min and Pranav (our current webmaster) are extremely responsive to and helpful with all of my requests.

'''Fellows Program:'''

The Fellows for 2014 were selected after gathering nominations and recommendations through the fall 2014. Six Fellows were named: Walter Daelemans, Kevin Knight, Daniel Marcu, Ray Mooney, Martha Palmer, and Junichi Tsujii. We will begin the nomination, recommendation and selection process again this fall to name next year’s fellows.

'''Conferences:'''

EACL 2014, in Gothenberg, Sweden, went quite well. The final number of registrations was 518, making this EACL the highest attended ever. EACL 2014 generated a surplus of $25,134.78, after returning to ACL $30,758.19 in collected membership fees.

ACL 2014 was held in Baltimore, Maryland at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront Hotel, June 22-27. This conference set an all-time record attendance for ACLs with 1,439 registered attendees (about a 30% increase) after taking out people who did not show up and others who cancelled. I am not sure what caused this huge increase in attendance but it may have something to do with proximity to the Washington DC area or our research endeavors being hot topics now. Having such a large number of attendees had caused some additional work in planning and communications (over 200 visa invitations issued, re-planning both catering and space configurations, hotel being sold out at our conference rates, etc.). With Option C of the Task List having been chosen, a major amount of the organizational work was managed by the Office. While the financials are not completed for ACL 2014, I have every expectation of reaping a surplus.

ACL 2014 made a few experimental changes to ACL’s normal way of holding a conference. The most successful change was to hold two evenings of poster sessions/dinners (main conference days 1 and 2), eliminate the traditional banquet on the second main conference day, and hold a “social event” on the second poster session evening (at the Baltimore National Aquarium) which was open to all attendees at no additional cost. Another innovation was to send out a post-conference questionnaire immediately after the conference to gather valuable feedback on how to improve the attendees’ experience. Overall, both of these changes were successful and could be used as models for future events.

EMNLP 2014, held in Doha, Qatar, October 25-29, went well. We are awaiting their final conference report and financials to be submitted.

The planning for ACL/IJCNLP 2015, to be held in Beijing, July 26-31, is in full swing. After the difficulties of competing events at the convention center that forced a change of conference dates, we were fortunate to find alternate acceptable dates rather than having to find a different venue. The office is working closely with the local organizers in Beijing.

As I continue as Local Arrangements Chair for NAACL 2015 and 2016, contracts for the venues are already in place: NAACL 2015 will be at the Sheraton Denver Downtown, May 31 – June 5, and NAACL 2016 will take place at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina, June 12 – 17. Planning for NAACL 2015 is well under way and we plan to follow the ACL 2014 poster session and social event scheme.

EMNLP 2015 will be in Lisbon, September 17 – 22. The venue contract has been negotiated and signed and the Office is providing advice, general support, and will manage the registrations.

It is difficult to project attendance at ACL/IJCNLP, NAACL and EMNLP for 2015 since both EACL 2014 and ACL 2014 each had their highest attendance on record. And, while EMNLP 2014 had a lower attendance, EMNLP 2013 was also their highest attended conference. Planning for each conference based on previous years in general and being prepared for more than expected numbers is critical this year.

ACL 2016 will be held in Berlin, August 7-11, at Humboldt University. The General Chair is Antal Van Den Bosch and local arrangements will be led by Valia Kordoni and Markus Egg along with an already selected PCO. After Graeme and I conducted a site visit to Berlin in July, contracts were negotiated and signed with the University, PCO, and a few hotels. Initial planning has begun and this promises to be an excellent venue and interesting city to explore.

As a side note, it is good to remember that workshops are becoming more and more mini-conferences complete with poster sessions. These are often more difficult to coordinate and organize, and for which finding adequate space is essential.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

ACL 2014 had sponsorships totaling $110,554 plus $11,050 sponsoring various workshops and the SRW. This, again, was record for ACL sponsorship income for one conference and does not include the generous in-kind support provided by Johns Hopkins University, who provided staff and faculty time and other support. Since we have never been successful in getting Welcome Reception or Conference Dinner or Entertainment sponsors, we added Student Lunch Sponsorship to our Sponsorship Booklet where only Platinum or Gold level sponsors could add $6,000 to their sponsorship and be able to present themselves at the Student Lunch. This resulted in $12,000 additional sponsorship income from Bloomberg and Nuance. In addition to our ever faithful sponsors (Baidu, Google, IBM Research, Microsoft, Nuance, University of Washington, USC/ISI, Xerox Research Centre Europe, Yahoo!, Yandex, etc.), we welcomed new and hopefully continuing sponsors (A9.com, Amazon.com, Bloomberg, Brandeis University, Facebook and IBM Watson).

For EACL 2014, the office received sponsorships totaling 4,246.90 euros and an additional 3,300 euros were sent directly to the local organizers. And, $10,250 was collected as EMNLP 2014 sponsorships. Other funds may have also been collected locally for both EACL and EMNLP.

In December, the International Sponsorship Committee and I pulled together the Sponsorship Booklet for 2015 with a couple of new options included. First, as agreed in the last Executive meeting, EMNLP was added to the list of ACL, EACL, and NAACL as potential conferences to be sponsored. This led to offering 2-Pack and 3-Pack options to the potential sponsors where they can opt to support a single conference or a 2-Pack (ACL/NAACL or ACL/EMNLP or NAACL/EMNLP) or a 3-Pack supporting all three 2015 conferences. The 2-Pack and 3-Pack options are discounted by 20% and are hoped to make it easier for companies to make one commitment in their budget year and cover more of our conferences.

''We need to add one sponsorship chair for Europe and one for Asia to the Sponsorship Committee. Please send recommendations to me.''

The area Sponsorship Chairs and the Local Arrangement Sponsorship Chairs are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them. And, many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!

2014Q3 Reports: Office Manager

2014-06-14T19:51:03Z

PriscillaRasmussen: /* Membership Report */

Priscilla Rasmussen
14 June 2014

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

Graeme, his accounting assistant, and I have been working hard over the past couple of months to finalize our 2013 accounts in preparation of filing our 2013 taxes. We have gotten an automatic extension to August which allows us the needed time to complete our records and submit them to the accountants for final preparation and filing.

You will be pleased to know that the Directors/Officers and Office insurances are in place for the year so we are protected against unforeseen problems.

Pat Kirby continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations. And, while the portal has been inundated with spammers recently, causing some serious problems with the Member Portal, Min has worked hard in keeping the portal operational and has found some solutions to both keeping spammers at bay and also making our updating job easier. I am sure Min will have more to say about this in his report. Otherwise, the office is chugging along nicely.

There is an issue I would ask the Board to discuss and provide input on for the future related to our International Sponsorship program. Please see the Sponsorship section at the end of this document.

'''Publications, Journals and Royalties:'''

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates now handling print-on-demand of our publications, I received no requests for publications in the office so far this year.

We have received royalties so far in 2014 from Curran Associates for the 4th quarter 2013 earnings of $1,067.47. Copyright Clearance Center will also be sending along some royalty income although none has been received so far.

MIT Press Journals has sent us an invoice for their fiscal year, July 2012-June 2013 in the amount of $38,728.28 for their services related to the Computational Linguistics Journal. It still remains a problem to receive timely invoicing unless we request it.

'''Membership:'''

Since 2009 we have consistently numbered over 2000 members and ended 2013 with 2093 members. The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be representing between 55 and 60 countries on a regular basis. So far this year, after adding in all memberships obtained through EACL 2014 and a good number of the ACL 2014 memberships paid, we stand at 1718 current members and have an additional 153 people who claimed to be members when registering for ACL 2014 but are not. These non-members will be chased for membership payments and there will be more from late and onsite registrations post-conference to add. I also expect additional memberships to come in from SIGdial, INLG, and EMNLP conferences so our total membership by the end of the year should be well over 2100 paid members. Please see Membership spreadsheets for the current 2014 details on countries represented and statistics.

Pat and I continue to do our best to keep the membership information updated and as correct as possible from information gathered on conference registration forms. The portal continues to give us problems as noted earlier and each problem is different from the last (plus smaller issues I will not go into here). This causes me to have doubts sometimes of the accuracy of the information and I do my best to double-check numbers through other means.

'''Fellows Program:'''

The Fellows for 2014 were selected after gathering nominations and recommendations through the fall 2013. Four Fellows were named: Ido Dagan, Dekang Lin, Candy Sidner, and David Yarowsky. We will begin the recommendation and selection process again this fall to name next year’s fellows.

'''Conferences:'''

NAACL HLT 2013, recently held in Atlanta, had a final count of attendees of 684 registrations, with 131 of these only attending co-located conference or workshops and the attempt at cross-pollination with ICML by holding the two conferences back-to-back was successful. ACL 2013, held in Sofia, Bulgaria, had a final total of 1016 registrations with 100 of these attending only workshops. It seems the trend continues that ACL-related conferences have about 20% of the total attendees not attending the main conference. And, EMNLP 2013, held in Seattle, Washington, ended with 518 registrations which is the largest number for an EMNLP to date. Only 5 registrants attended one of the 3 workshops and not the main conference.

Workshops are becoming more and more mini-conferences, complete with poster sessions which are often more difficult to coordinate, organize, and find adequate space.

EACL 2014, in Gothenberg, Sweden, went quite well from all reports I have heard. The final number of registrations was 467, which is one of the highest attended EACLs ever.

ACL 2014 will be held in Baltimore, Maryland at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront Hotel, June 22-27. I am extremely pleased to report that, as of this writing, there are 1302 pre-registered attendees and I expect more through onsite registrations, although post-conference, after taking out people who do not show up and others who cancel, the number will certainly change. This is a record-breaking number, exceeding previous years by almost 300 participants! I am not sure what is causing this huge increase in expected attendance but it may have something to do with proximity to the Washington DC area or our research endeavors being hot topics now. Having such a large number of attendees has caused some additional work in planning and communications (over 200 visa invitations issued, re-planning both catering and space configurations, hotel being sold out at our conference rates, etc.). With Option C of the Task List having been chosen, a major amount of the organizational work is being managed by the Office.

As my second time as Local Arrangements Chair for NAACL 2013 and being much more involved in the ACL 2014 organization, I am excited and find it even more satisfying and more challenging to feel truly a part of the conference teams.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

ACL 2013 had sponsorships totaling $62,052.75 to the Office plus a lot of in-kind sponsorship by the Bulgarian Academy of Science and the Bulgarian government; and, NAACL 2013 received sponsorships totaling $25,452.25.

For 2014, the International Sponsorship Committee and I pulled together the Sponsorship Booklet with a couple of new options included. Since we have never been successful in getting Welcome Reception or Conference Dinner or Entertainment sponsors, we added Student Lunch Sponsorship where only Platinum or Gold level sponsors could add $6,000 to their sponsorship and be able to present themselves at the Student Lunch. This resulted in $12,000 additional sponsorship income from Bloomberg and Nuance. I have also worked more closely with some of the sponsors, especially new ones, to gain their ongoing support and trust. I am thrilled to report that we have the highest ever recorded current main conference sponsorship total of $110,554.13 plus an additional total of $10,050 earmarked to specific workshops. This does not include the generous in-kind support provided by Johns Hopkins University, who provided staff and faculty time and other support. In addition to our ever faithful sponsors (Baidu, Google, IBM Research, Microsoft, Nuance, University of Washington, USC/ISI, Xerox Research Centre Europe, Yahoo!, Yandex, etc.), we can welcome new and hopefully future sponsors (A9.com, Amazon.com, Bloomberg, Brandeis University, Facebook and IBM Watson). Most of these sponsors either responded to my reminder to once again support our meeting or, in the case of the new ones, I was directly approached to work out the details for them to give us money. Once again, I am not sure why all were so keen to support this year’s conference but hope to entice their continued support.

We need to add one sponsorship chair for Asia and two for North America to the Sponsorship Committee now in preparation for updating the Sponsorship Booklet for our 2015 campaign. Please send recommendations to me.

The area Sponsorship Chairs (especially the two European Chairs) are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them. And, many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!

'''Point for discussion:'''

As you know, I work closely in coordinating our International Sponsorship Committee. Some of the members and I were getting inquiries about also supporting EMNLP when we spoke to them about sponsoring ACL and/or EACL 2014, and possibly doing a 3-pack sponsorship (we only offered a 2-pack sponsorship of ACL and EACL this year). It is becoming awkward to not list them as well as ACL, EACL, NAACL (as appropriate for the year) in our sponsorship booklet.

Many of our same sponsors also want and do support EMNLP. As Local Arrangements Chair of the last EMNLP in Seattle, it seemed to me sponsors were being asked for and gave varying amounts not consistent with what we request of these same sponsors for ACLs, EACLs, and NAACLs. EMNLP is not far off in size to EACLs and NAACLs and recently has been larger than many EACLs (EACL 2014 was 467, NAACL 2013 was 684 and EMNLP 2013 was 518 in Seattle).
While I realize EMNLP is not a chapter, its popularity and ability to attract sponsors could be a justification to include them in a coordinated way so as to not devalue ACL or the chapters. I believe that we should present a coordinated image to potential sponsors whereby ACL has the highest value, followed by the chapters and EMNLP. I have been led to believe EMNLP would be keen to be included in our sponsorship booklet.

Some members of the Sponsorship Committee had asked me to update the booklet to include EMNLP but I think this may be an Executive Board decision. The only possible problem I envision is if other SIGs would then also ask to be included in our booklet (which could make it too cumbersome and complicated). This could be answered based on meeting attendance and SIG membership representation. The largest other SIGs, based on meeting attendance, would be Machine Translation, SIGNLL and *SEM (about 100-125 attendees each), INLG and SIGdial (about 75-100 each).

Discussion?

== Membership Report ==

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<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>(all full-year finals)</td>
<td>2005</td>
<td>2006</td>
<td>2007</td>
<td>2008</td>
<td>2009</td>
<td>2010</td>
<td>2011</td>
<td>2012</td>
<td>2013</td>
<td>2014</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td>Jan-June</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>TOTAL MEMBERSHIP</td>
<td>1562</td>
<td>2123</td>
<td>2104</td>
<td>1602</td>
<td>2151</td>
<td>2136</td>
<td>2028</td>
<td>2064</td>
<td>2093</td>
<td>1718</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>TOTAL REGULAR</td>
<td>1114</td>
<td>1326</td>
<td>1365</td>
<td>1137</td>
<td>1402</td>
<td>1162</td>
<td>1111</td>
<td>1252</td>
<td>1232</td>
<td>1133</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>TOTAL STUDENTS</td>
<td>448</td>
<td>521</td>
<td>729</td>
<td>463</td>
<td>749</td>
<td>974</td>
<td>917</td>
<td>812</td>
<td>861</td>
<td>585</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>DISCOUNTS APPLIED TO ABOVE:</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>REDUCED RATES</td>
<td>15</td>
<td>8</td>
<td>12</td>
<td>8</td>
<td>4</td>
<td>282</td>
<td>276</td>
<td>81</td>
<td>84</td>
<td>40</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>AMTA DISCOUNTS</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>4</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>ISCA DISCOUNTS</td>
<td>4</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>3</td>
<td>3</td>
<td>3</td>
<td>3</td>
<td>14</td>
<td>4</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>5</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>HLT/NAACL FREE YEAR</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>540</td>
<td>324</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>535</td>
<td>548</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>COLING/ACL FREE HALF YEAR</td>
<td> </td>
<td>301</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>COLING/ACL FREE FULL YEAR</td>
<td> </td>
<td>188</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>TOTAL BY WORLD AREA:</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>TOTAL ASIA/PACIFIC RIM</td>
<td>203</td>
<td>419</td>
<td>314</td>
<td>214</td>
<td>384</td>
<td>569</td>
<td>552</td>
<td>539</td>
<td>355</td>
<td>230</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>TOTAL CANADA/MEXICO</td>
<td>74</td>
<td>93</td>
<td>83</td>
<td>59</td>
<td>54</td>
<td>60</td>
<td>51</td>
<td>82</td>
<td>56</td>
<td>57</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>TOTAL EUROPE</td>
<td>414</td>
<td>676</td>
<td>803</td>
<td>439</td>
<td>639</td>
<td>614</td>
<td>564</td>
<td>694</td>
<td>786</td>
<td>639</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>TOTAL SOUTH AMERICA</td>
<td>8</td>
<td>5</td>
<td>10</td>
<td>10</td>
<td>9</td>
<td>22</td>
<td>16</td>
<td>17</td>
<td>9</td>
<td>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>TOTAL USA</td>
<td>863</td>
<td>930</td>
<td>894</td>
<td>880</td>
<td>823</td>
<td>871</td>
<td>845</td>
<td>732</td>
<td>887</td>
<td>786</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>HOW MEMBERSHIPS CAME IN:</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>MEMBERSHIPS-ONLY</td>
<td>878</td>
<td>870</td>
<td>981</td>
<td>1602</td>
<td>2151</td>
<td>2136</td>
<td>2028</td>
<td>2064</td>
<td>2093</td>
<td>1718</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>MEMBERSHIPS + ORDERS</td>
<td>N/A</td>
<td>N/A</td>
<td>N/A</td>
<td>N/A</td>
<td>N/A</td>
<td>N/A</td>
<td>N/A</td>
<td>N/A</td>
<td>N/A</td>
<td>N/A</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>ORDERS (FROM OUTSIDE ACL)</td>
<td>27</td>
<td>38</td>
<td>64</td>
<td>24</td>
<td>17</td>
<td>5</td>
<td>8</td>
<td>4</td>
<td>2</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>ORDERS (From ACL Membership)</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>223</td>
<td>7</td>
<td>5</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>2</td>
<td>4</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>THROUGH CONFERENCES:</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>ACL-2005</td>
<td>487</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>HLT/EMNLP-2005</td>
<td>197</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>EACL 2006</td>
<td>224</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>HLT/NAACL 2006</td>
<td>540</td>
<td>('+ 126 extended through 2007)</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>COLING/ACL 2006</td>
<td>489</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>NAACL HLT 2007</td>
<td>324</td>
<td>('+ 145 extended through 2008)</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>ACL 2007</td>
<td>759</td>
<td>(790 '- 31 Fraudulent and No-Shows who did not pay)</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>ACL 2008 (incl. vol, spkrs, spons)</td>
<td>426</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>EMNLP 2008</td>
<td>110</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>EACL 2009</td>
<td>355</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>NAACL 2009</td>
<td>535</td>
<td>('+ 133 extended through 2010)</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>ACL/IJCNLP 2009</td>
<td>632</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>NAACL HLT 2010</td>
<td>548</td>
<td>('+ 78 extended through 2011)</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>ACL 2010</td>
<td>767</td>
<td>(new or renewed members captured of the 950 total attendees)</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>INLG 2010</td>
<td>26</td>
<td>(new or renewed members captured of the 49 total attendees)</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>EMNLP 2010</td>
<td>141</td>
<td>(new or renewed members captured of the 292 total attendees)</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>ACL 2011</td>
<td>866</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>EACL 2012</td>
<td>288</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>NAACL 2012</td>
<td>535</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>ACL 2012</td>
<td>697</td>
<td>(Includes EMNLP/CoNLL and SIGdial 2012)</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Others such as INLG 2012</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>(any memberships from INLG went through normal online membership)</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>NAACL 2013</td>
<td>552</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>ACL 2013</td>
<td>696</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>EMNLP 2013</td>
<td>301</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>EACL 2014</td>
<td>56</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>ACL 2014</td>
<td>440</td>
<td>Will go up post-conference with onsite registrations and 153 currently unpaid</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Joint INLG and SIGdial 2014</td>
<td>N/A</td>
<td>Memberships will be known post-conference</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>EMNLP 2014</td>
<td>N/A</td>
<td>Memberships will be known post-conference</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
</table>

== Memberships by Country ==

<p> </p>
<table border="1" width="779">
<tr>
<td width="117">June 10, 2014</td>
<td colspan="11" width="662">   MEMBERSHIPS BY   COUNTRY JANUARY-JUNE 2014</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td>TOTAL</td>
<td>REG</td>
<td>STUD</td>
<td> </td>
<td>TOTAL</td>
<td>REG</td>
<td>STUD</td>
<td>TOTAL</td>
<td>REG</td>
<td>STUD</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>ARGENTINA</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>0</td>
<td width="142">INDIA   </td>
<td>9</td>
<td>4</td>
<td>5</td>
<td>QTAR</td>
<td>4</td>
<td>4</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>ARMENIA</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>INDONESIA</td>
<td>2</td>
<td>2</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>ROMANIA</td>
<td>2</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="117">AUSTRALIA </td>
<td>20</td>
<td>13</td>
<td>7</td>
<td>IRAN</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td width="132">RUSSIA             </td>
<td>12</td>
<td>9</td>
<td>3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>AUSTRIA</td>
<td>4</td>
<td>2</td>
<td>2</td>
<td width="142">IRELAND </td>
<td>17</td>
<td>12</td>
<td>5</td>
<td>SAUDI ARABIA</td>
<td>2</td>
<td>2</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="117">BELGIUM   </td>
<td>10</td>
<td>7</td>
<td>3</td>
<td width="142">ISRAEL               </td>
<td>17</td>
<td>8</td>
<td>9</td>
<td>SERBIA</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="117">BRAZIL             </td>
<td>4</td>
<td>3</td>
<td>1</td>
<td width="142">ITALY </td>
<td>39</td>
<td>21</td>
<td>18</td>
<td width="132">SINGAPORE   </td>
<td>13</td>
<td>11</td>
<td>2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>BULGARIA</td>
<td>7</td>
<td>7</td>
<td>0</td>
<td width="142">JAPAN</td>
<td>81</td>
<td>66</td>
<td>15</td>
<td>SLOVENIA</td>
<td>2</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="117">CANADA </td>
<td>53</td>
<td>37</td>
<td>16</td>
<td>KAZAKHSTAN</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td width="132">SOUTH AFRICA             </td>
<td>1</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="117">CHINA   </td>
<td>67</td>
<td>43</td>
<td>24</td>
<td>KOREA, REPUBLIC OF</td>
<td>24</td>
<td>18</td>
<td>6</td>
<td width="132">SPAIN               </td>
<td>26</td>
<td>21</td>
<td>5</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>COLUMBIA</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>LITHUANIA</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>SRI LANKA</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>CROATIA</td>
<td>2</td>
<td>2</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>LUXENBOURG</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td width="132">SWEDEN </td>
<td>57</td>
<td>37</td>
<td>20</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="117">CZECH REPUBLIC </td>
<td>16</td>
<td>6</td>
<td>10</td>
<td>MACAU</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td width="132">SWITZERLAND </td>
<td>19</td>
<td>13</td>
<td>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="117">DENMARK   </td>
<td>6</td>
<td>5</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>MALAYSIA</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>0</td>
<td width="132">TAIWAN</td>
<td>13</td>
<td>6</td>
<td>7</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>ECUADOR</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>MALTA</td>
<td>2</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>THAILAND</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>EGYPT</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>0</td>
<td width="142">MEXICO               </td>
<td>4</td>
<td>3</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>TUNISIA</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="117">ESTONIA   </td>
<td>2</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>1</td>
<td width="142">NETHERLANDS </td>
<td>29</td>
<td>21</td>
<td>8</td>
<td width="132">TURKEY               </td>
<td>13</td>
<td>6</td>
<td>7</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="117">FINLAND </td>
<td>9</td>
<td>4</td>
<td>5</td>
<td>NEW ZEALAND</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>UKRAINE</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="117">FRANCE             </td>
<td>45</td>
<td>30</td>
<td>15</td>
<td width="142">NORWAY   </td>
<td>13</td>
<td>5</td>
<td>8</td>
<td width="132">UNITED EMERATES</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="117">GERMANY </td>
<td>125</td>
<td>62</td>
<td>63</td>
<td>PAKISTAN</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>UNITED KINGDOM</td>
<td>122</td>
<td>72</td>
<td>50</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="117">GREECE               </td>
<td>8</td>
<td>6</td>
<td>2</td>
<td>PHILIPPINES</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>0</td>
<td>UNITED STATES</td>
<td>786</td>
<td>534</td>
<td>252</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="117">HONG KONG </td>
<td>6</td>
<td>5</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>POLAND</td>
<td>5</td>
<td>4</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>VIET NAM</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="117">HUNGARY   </td>
<td>3</td>
<td>2</td>
<td>1</td>
<td width="142">PORTUGAL   </td>
<td>4</td>
<td>3</td>
<td>1</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="6">COUNTRIES REPRESENTED</td>
<td> </td>
<td>57</td>
<td width="132">TOTAL             </td>
<td>1,718</td>
<td>1,133</td>
<td>585</td>
</tr>
</table>

2014Q1 Reports: Office

2014-02-26T18:58:56Z

PriscillaRasmussen: Created page with "Priscilla Rasmussen 24 February 2014 '''ACL Business Office Report''' As you know, we have engaged Mr. Tom Dartnell, of Nisivoccia, as our new accountant. Tom and an assoc..."

Priscilla Rasmussen
24 February 2014

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

As you know, we have engaged Mr. Tom Dartnell, of Nisivoccia, as our new accountant. Tom and an associate conducted an audit over the early fall, including visiting the office for a full day. I believe we passed their fiduciary tests but, Graeme will speak more on that.

The ACL elections ran smoothly this fall except for one problem with the Member Portal where a number of paid members’ records were not updated automatically by the portal as being current and, until people questioned not receiving their PINs, we were unaware of this issue. It was fixed by our webmaster, PINs were issued, and these people’s votes were cast.

Otherwise, the office is chugging along nicely.

There is an issue I would ask the Board to discuss and provide input on for now and the future.
We have had the International Sponsorship Committee set up for a few years now, with two representatives for Europe, two for Asia/Pacific, and two for North/South America. We put together an updated Sponsorship Booklet each year which describes the various levels of contributions and benefits to be had at each level. Each year, we offer a 2-Pack or 3-Pack to support all conferences in that particular year (ACL, EACL and/or NAACL) as well as the possibility to support just an individual conference.

Last year and currently, there has become a question of what to do with EMNLP. It seems quite a few of the same continuing sponsors such as Google, Microsoft, Nuance, etc. also want to support EMNLP and would like to do a multi-Pack sponsorship which includes EMNLP. Currently, it is awkward to say that we do not have EMNLP support levels decided yet and will get back to them.

''Pros to including EMNLP in our sponsorship booklet:''

1. This would allow the Sponsorship Committee to address all of a potential sponsor’s wishes at once

2. It would keep the amounts of sponsorships and levels consistent (EMNLP 2013 might have gotten more from Google on their own, calling it the same level, until Google questioned the disparity)

3. EMNLP 2013 reached out to and received support from some companies we had not tapped into (Amazon and Facebook) and, taking advantage of that connection, it appears ACL 2014 may get Amazon support…a good new upper level connection. The total sponsorship for EMNLP 2013 was $32,145.

4. EMNLP 2013 numbered over 500 attendees, making it almost as large as NAACL and larger than EACL so it becomes harder to justify to sponsors that it is not treated the same

''Cons to including EMNLP in our sponsorship booklet:''

1. Fairness to other SIGs who are told to find their own support? Possibly the shear number of attendees and sponsors’ interest puts EMNLP in a separate class? (CoNLL and MT SIGs’ meetings can number 100-150 at most, SIGdial reaches about 85-100 and all the rest are less)

2. Most other workshops and SIGs get much smaller sponsorships than the typical amounts generated by our Sponsorship Committee/Booklet…unsure if there would be enough interest to support other SIGs at the booklet’s higher levels.

3. It would be awkward, in the sponsorship booklet, to name all the possible workshops/SIGs and a whole range of lower level options of support.

Can the Sponsorship Committee include EMNLP in the Sponsorship Booklet for 2014 and the future? Discussion?

'''Publications, Journals and Royalties:'''

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates now handling print-on-demand of our publications, I receive very few requests for publications in the office. Through all of 2013, I have filled only 2 orders.

We have received royalties from Curran Associates in 2013 for the last quarter of 2012 and the first three quarters of 2013 in the amount of $2,993.87 and, in January 2014, we received the 4th quarter 2013 earnings of $1,067.47. Copyright Clearance Center also sent checks totaling $667.53 covering the period ending December 31, 2012. MIT Press Journals’ royalty year ends March 31, 2014. Their annual statement has not yet been received but it is expected that, similar to last year, if we earn less than $50 in royalties, any small amount will be credited to our account for next year.

'''Membership:'''

We surpassed 2100 members in 2009 and 2010; in 2011 and 2012 we reached over 2000 members. We ended 2013 with 2093 members. The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate yearly depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held. Please see Membership spreadsheets for the full 2013 calendar year details on countries represented and statistics.

Pat and I continue to do our best to keep the membership information updated and as correct as possible from information gathered on conference registration forms. This year, however, the portal gave us some unexpected problems. Besides the election problem explained earlier, this report was delayed because another problem cropped up where the download of 2013 memberships was considerably less than it should have been so, once again, the webmaster had to research the problem and recently gave me a download that seems more correct to me. These problems, each different from the last (and smaller issues I will not go into here), cause me to have doubts sometimes of the accuracy of the information and I do my best to double-check numbers through other means.

'''Fellows Program:'''

The Fellows for 2014 were selected after gathering nominations and recommendations through the fall 2013. Four Fellows were named: Ido Dagan, Dekang Lin, Candy Sidner, and David Yarowsky.

'''Conferences:'''

NAACL HLT 2013, recently held in Atlanta, had a final count of attendees of 684 at part or all of the meeting. Of this total, there were 2 Visa Problem and 2 Medical cancellations which received full refunds. There was 1 cancellation without reason and 23 No-Shows who each get zero refund. There were 504 paying main conference attendees, another 49 were volunteers, SRW students, sponsors, exhibitors, and guests/organizers. There were also 131 people only attending tutorials, the *SEM co-located conference, or workshops. It seems the trend continues that ACL-related conferences have at least 20% of the total attendees not attending the main conference (NAACL 2012 was closer to 40%). Workshops are becoming more and more mini-conferences, complete with poster sessions which are often difficult to organize, especially the *SEM co-located conference and SemEval. The attempt at cross-pollination with ICML by holding the two conferences back-to-back was successful. NAACL held a Symposium on Saturday, between the two conferences and it attracted 80-100 people. ICML held two workshops the next day as part of their first day of events and some of the NAACL attendees attended those as well.

ACL 2013, in Sofia, Bulgaria, had 1016 total registrations, with 2 medical cancellations, 2 visa problems and 2 no-shows who arranged for friends to collect materials and paid, 26 no-shows (without explanation, all but 4 paid). This made the final actual attendance 984 overall, with 100 attending only the tutorials and/or workshops. While some may have questioned Bulgaria as a conference site, many people spoke of being pleasantly surprised and pleased with their experience.

(NA)ACL HLT 2014 will be held in Baltimore, Maryland at the Marriott Hotel, June 22-27. Daniel Marcu (GC), David Yarowsky (LAC), Chris Callison-Burch and others of the organizing committee and I have been and will continue working closely on the various pieces of planning to pull together a great conference. The first week of March, I will meet David and others in Baltimore to make more finalized plans to use the venue space, now that the workshops and program are more solidly in place. This, then, allows for tentative room assignments, av and catering to be decided and a budget worked up to set registration fees. The plan is to open registration around the beginning of April.

EACL 2014, in Gothenberg, Sweden, is moving along nicely, with an excellent local team leading the way. The Office has been providing ongoing advice and support to the organizers.

As NAACL Local Arrangements Chair, I have been searching for venues for both 2015 and 2016 and now have a long list of options to present to the NAACL Board next week. And, with ICML rotating back to North America in 2016, they are interested in entertaining the possibility of co-location once again.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

ACL 2013 had sponsorships totaling $62,052.75 to the Office plus a lot of in-kind sponsorship by the Bulgarian Academy of Science and the Bulgarian government; and, NAACL 2013 received sponsorships totaling $25,452.25. Baidu committed to being a Platinum Level sponsor, with certain concessions, for ACL 2013. Google was 2-Pack Gold Sponsor for ACL and NAACL this year. Qatar Computing Research Institute was a new sponsor, supporting ACL 2013 at the Silver level and expressed interest in becoming ongoing sponsor. Ontotext AD has also become a Gold sponsor this year. IBM made a generous contribution of $2,500 toward the NAACL Student Lunch in addition to their “standard” IBM Best Student Paper awards at both ACL and NAACL. And, Microsoft, Rakuten, SDL and others continue to be generous in supporting ACL and NAACL. I am also pleased to report that Yahoo has come back as a sponsor and we can add Facebook as a new sponsor who made a significant contribution this year. We are looking toward pursuing Amazon and others to add to our list of continuing sponsors.

The area Sponsorship Chairs are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them. And, many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!

2013Q3 Reports: Office Manager

2013-07-19T22:44:39Z

PriscillaRasmussen: /* Membership Statistics report */

Priscilla Rasmussen
18 July 2013

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

As you know, Graeme and I selected and interviewed a new accounting firm and, with your approval, have now engaged Mr. Tom Dartnell, of Nisivoccia, as our new accountant. I am in discussion with Mr. Dartnell now to make arrangements for an audit to be performed, probably in late August or so.

Otherwise, the office is chugging along nicely.

There is an issue I would ask the Board to discuss and provide input on for future conferences.
I believe two concerns could be woven into one situation and a solution could be reached:

'''Concern #1: Banquets:'''

1. Getting more and more expensive and operating at a loss almost every year recently for both ACLs and NAACLs

2. It seems only about half the attendees are interested in attending banquets

3. Of those attending, many prefer museums or other interesting venues but when at that sort of place, some complain they could not interact with others because people were spread throughout the venue

4. Food is sometimes good but usually of the more standard, large gathering type and not the best variety

'''Concern #2: Poster Sessions'''

1. At ACL 2011, Portland, about 125 posters were accepted, the most ever accepted until ACL 2013 which has over 160 posters accepted

2. With ACL 2014 being hosted by NAACL and there not being a separate NAACL to diffuse the total posters over two conferences, the same numbers as this year might be accepted

3. With TACL papers being accepted for conference presentation, the numbers that may be turned into posters may grow from this year’s 4-6 to some much larger number, putting more pressure on the poster session planning

4. Fewer venues can offer adequate space for 1-2 sessions of posters with enough extra room to comfortably space the posters

'''Possible Solutions:'''

1. We could continue to hold the Poster/Dinner on Monday nights and the Banquet with Presidential Address on Tuesday nights

2. We could offer the poster sessions each lunchtime Monday-Wednesday but, to do this, we probably should offer box lunches (or similar) each day. Would the attendees pay or would we add the cost to the registration fees? This was done in Sweden, ACL 2010, but I heard quite a few complaints.

3. For ACL 2013, we are trying to hold Poster Sessions A and B on Monday to spread out the posters and give poster presenters a chance to see other posters. And, they will be left up all of Tuesday for browsing. This is not ideal but we were fortunate to have the space for all 160 posters and the program/banquet/other activities were already in place.

4. We could eliminate the Banquet and offer two nights of poster sessions on Monday and Tuesday nights. This way, 100-180 posters would be manageable, either with A/B sessions or just 3-4 hour single sessions as is done now. We could raise the registration fee by $50-75 and offer dinners both nights. Doing this would require the Presidents to give up their talks, though.

5. Another way of managing a large number of posters was done at ICML 2013. They end their sessions at 5:30-6:00 each of the three main days and hold their poster sessions 8:00-10:00pm, with one drink ticket each night and a cash bar. The idea is that people go out for dinner and come back to the poster sessions each night. Possibly some variation of this would work, maybe offering desserts and coffee and a cash bar. The one conflict would be Wednesday night’s Exec++ Dinner.

Discussion?

'''Publications, Journals and Royalties:'''

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates now handling print-on-demand of our publications, I receive very few requests for publications in the office. So far in 2013, I have filled only 2 orders.

We have finally received the past two years of invoices from MIT Press Journals for the CL Journal. The total of $85,417.29 was paid in July, covering the 2011 and 2012 years. We are now up-to-date with MIT Press Journals.

We have received royalties from Curran Associates for the last quarter of 2012 and the first quarter of 2013 in the amount of $1,578.02. Copyright Clearance Center also sent a check for $53.06 as the final check for the period ending December 31, 2012. MIT Press Journals’ royalty year ends March 31, 2013. Their annual statement has not yet been received but it is expected that, similar to last year, if we earn less than $50 in royalties, this small amount will be credited to our account for next year.

'''Membership:'''

We surpassed 2100 members in 2009 and 2010 and in 2011 reached over 2000 members. We ended 2012 with 2064 members and appear to be on track to end 2013 with about 2100 or more members, since we now have 1627 current members and still have more to come through ACL 2013 and all of EMNLP 2013. Please see Membership spreadsheets for the full 2012 calendar year details on countries represented and statistics, which have not changed since our Winter Teleconferences, and the update through July 18th of where we are so far in 2013.

Pat and I continue to do our best to keep the membership information updated and as correct as possible from information gathered on conference registration forms. It is unfortunate that membership records are not being properly updated by the members themselves as was originally envisioned, especially since I often cannot trust the mailing address at the portal and must go to people’s websites to find updated information.

'''Fellows Program:'''

The call for nominations of Fellows for the 2014 year should go out in early September. Nominations will be gathered for a couple of months and decisions made by December. I then send award certificates to each new inductee and have the results posted at our website.

'''Conferences:'''

NAACL HLT 2013, recently held in Atlanta, had a final count of attendees of 684 at part or all of the meeting. Of this total, there were 2 Visa Problem and 2 Medical cancellations which received full refunds. There was 1 cancellation without reason and 23 No-Shows who each get zero refund. There were 504 paying main conference attendees, another 49 were volunteers, SRW students, sponsors, exhibitors, and guests/organizers. There were also 131 people only attending tutorials, the *SEM co-located conference, or workshops. It seems the trend continues that ACL-related conferences have at least 20% of the total attendees not attending the main conference (NAACL 2012 was closer to 40%). Workshops are becoming more and more mini-conferences, complete with poster sessions which are often difficult to organize, especially the *SEM co-located conference and SemEval. The attempt at cross-pollination with ICML by holding the two conferences back-to-back was successful. NAACL held a Symposium on Saturday, between the two conferences and it attracted 80-100 people. ICML held two workshops the next day as part of their first day of events and some of the NAACL attendees attended those as well. As my second time as Local Arrangements Chair, I am still excited and find it even more satisfying and more challenging but, overall, very good to feel truly a part of the conference team.

ACL 2013, in Sofia, Bulgaria, has 900 total pre-conference registrations and late registration does not close for a few more days, so we seem to be on track for 975-1000 final attendees. The last stages of planning and setup are now happening and are being coordinated by Svetla Koeva and her local team. The Program Chairs overcame problems (see the beginning of this report regarding the poster session) and did a wonderful job, as did all the others on the organizing committee.

(NA)ACL HLT 2014 will be held in Baltimore, Maryland at the Marriott Hotel, June 22-27. Daniel Marcu (GC), David Yarowsky (LAC), Chris Callison-Burch and others of the organizing committee and I have been and will continue working closely on the various pieces of planning to pull together a great conference.

Planning for EACL 2014, in Gothenberg, Sweden, seem to be moving along nicely, with an excellent local team leading the way. The Office provided advice and support to the organizers.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

ACL 2013 had sponsorships totaling $62,052.75 to the Office plus a lot of in-kind sponsorship by the Bulgarian Academy of Science and the Bulgarian government; and, NAACL 2013 received sponsorships totaling $25,452.25. Baidu committed to being a Platinum Level sponsor, with certain concessions, for ACL 2013. Google was 2-Pack Gold Sponsor for ACL and NAACL this year. Qatar Computing Research Institute was a new sponsor, supporting ACL 2013 at the Silver level and expressed interest in becoming ongoing sponsor. Ontotext AD has also become a Gold sponsor this year. IBM made a generous contribution of $2,500 toward the NAACL Student Lunch in addition to their “standard” IBM Best Student Paper awards at both ACL and NAACL. And, Microsoft, Rakuten, SDL and others continue to be generous in supporting ACL and NAACL. I am also pleased to report that Yahoo has come back as a sponsor and we can add Facebook as a new sponsor who made a significant contribution this year. We are looking toward pursuing Amazon and others to add to our list of continuing sponsors.

We need to add two sponsorship chairs for Asia and one for North America to the Sponsorship Committee now since I am updating the Sponsorship Booklet for our 2014 campaign. Please send recommendations to me asap.

The area Sponsorship Chairs are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them. And, many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!

== Membership Statistics report ==

<TABLE>
<TR><TD>July 18, 2013</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD> </TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>(all full-year finals)</TD><TD>2004</TD><TD>2005</TD><TD>2006</TD><TD>2007</TD><TD>2008</TD><TD>2009</TD><TD>2010</TD><TD>2011</TD><TD>2012</TD><TD>2013</TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>TOTAL MEMBERSHIP </TD><TD>1641</TD><TD>1562</TD><TD>2123</TD><TD>2104</TD><TD>1602</TD><TD>2151</TD><TD>2136</TD><TD>2028</TD><TD>2064</TD><TD>1627</TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>TOTAL REGULAR</TD><TD>1198</TD><TD>1114</TD><TD>1326</TD><TD>1365</TD><TD>1137</TD><TD>1402</TD><TD>1162</TD><TD>1111</TD><TD>1252</TD><TD>1043</TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>TOTAL STUDENTS</TD><TD>443</TD><TD>448</TD><TD>521</TD><TD>729</TD><TD>463</TD><TD>749</TD><TD>974</TD><TD>917</TD><TD>812</TD><TD>584</TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>TOTAL WITH NO TYPE</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD>276</TD><TD>10</TD><TD>2</TD><TD>0</TD><TD>0</TD><TD>0</TD><TD>0</TD><TD>0</TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>DISCOUNTS APPLIED TO ABOVE:</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>REDUCED RATES</TD><TD>9</TD><TD>15</TD><TD>8</TD><TD>12</TD><TD>8</TD><TD>4</TD><TD>282</TD><TD>276</TD><TD>81</TD><TD>84</TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>AMTA DISCOUNTS</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>0</TD><TD>0</TD><TD>0</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>4</TD><TD>0</TD><TD>0</TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>ISCA DISCOUNTS</TD><TD>0</TD><TD>4</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>3</TD><TD>3</TD><TD>3</TD><TD>3</TD><TD>14</TD><TD>4</TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>HLT/NAACL FREE YEAR</TD><TD>590</TD><TD>0</TD><TD>540</TD><TD>324</TD><TD>0</TD><TD>535</TD><TD>548</TD><TD>0</TD><TD>0</TD><TD>0</TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>COLING/ACL FREE HALF YEAR</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD>301</TD><TD>0</TD><TD>0</TD><TD>0</TD><TD>0</TD><TD>0</TD><TD>0</TD><TD>0</TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>COLING/ACL FREE FULL YEAR</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD>188</TD><TD>0</TD><TD>0</TD><TD>0</TD><TD>0</TD><TD>0</TD><TD>0</TD><TD>0</TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>TOTAL BY WORLD AREA:</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>TOTAL ASIA/PACIFIC RIM</TD><TD>209</TD><TD>203</TD><TD>419</TD><TD>314</TD><TD>214</TD><TD>384</TD><TD>569</TD><TD>552</TD><TD>539</TD><TD>275</TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>TOTAL CANADA/MEXICO</TD><TD>68</TD><TD>74</TD><TD>93</TD><TD>83</TD><TD>59</TD><TD>54</TD><TD>60</TD><TD>51</TD><TD>82</TD><TD>43</TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>TOTAL EUROPE</TD><TD>498</TD><TD>414</TD><TD>676</TD><TD>803</TD><TD>439</TD><TD>639</TD><TD>614</TD><TD>564</TD><TD>694</TD><TD>623</TD><TD> </TD></TR>
<TR><TD>TOTAL SOUTH AMERICA</TD><TD>6</TD><TD>8</TD><TD>5</TD><TD>10</TD><TD>10</TD><TD>9</TD><TD>22</TD><TD>16</TD><TD>17</TD><TD>9</TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>TOTAL USA</TD><TD>860</TD><TD>863</TD><TD>930</TD><TD>894</TD><TD>880</TD><TD>823</TD><TD>871</TD><TD>845</TD><TD>732</TD><TD>677</TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD> </TD><TD></TD><TD> </TD><TD> </TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>HOW MEMBERSHIPS CAME IN:</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>MEMBERSHIPS-ONLY</TD><TD>447</TD><TD>878</TD><TD>870</TD><TD>981</TD><TD>1602</TD><TD>2151</TD><TD>2136</TD><TD>2028</TD><TD>2064</TD><TD>1627</TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>MEMBERSHIPS + ORDERS</TD><TD>205</TD><TD>N/A</TD><TD>N/A</TD><TD>N/A</TD><TD>N/A</TD><TD>N/A</TD><TD>N/A</TD><TD>N/A</TD><TD>N/A</TD><TD>N/A</TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>ORDERS (FROM OUTSIDE ACL)</TD><TD>48</TD><TD>27</TD><TD>38</TD><TD>64</TD><TD>24</TD><TD>17</TD><TD>5</TD><TD>8</TD><TD>4</TD><TD>2</TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>ORDERS (From ACL Membership)</TD><TD></TD><TD>0</TD><TD>0</TD><TD>223</TD><TD>7</TD><TD>5</TD><TD>0</TD><TD>2</TD><TD>4</TD><TD>0</TD><TD></TD></TR>
</TABLE>
<TABLE>
<TR><TD>THROUGH CONFERENCES:</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>HLT/NAACL-2004</TD><TD>590</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD> </TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>ACL-2004</TD><TD>369</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>ACL-2005</TD><TD>487</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD> </TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>HLT/EMNLP-2005</TD><TD>197</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>EACL 2006</TD><TD>224</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>HLT/NAACL 2006</TD><TD>540</TD><TD>('+ 126 extended through 2007)</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>COLING/ACL 2006 </TD><TD>489</TD><TD> </TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>NAACL HLT 2007</TD><TD>324</TD><TD>('+ 145 extended through 2008)</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>ACL 2007</TD><TD>759</TD><TD>(790 '- 31 Fraudulent and No-Shows who did not pay)</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>"ACL 2008 (incl. vol</TD><TD> spkrs</TD><TD> spons)"</TD><TD>426</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>EMNLP 2008</TD><TD>110</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>EACL 2009</TD><TD>355</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>NAACL 2009</TD><TD>535</TD><TD>('+ 133 extended through 2010)</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>ACL/IJCNLP 2009</TD><TD>632</TD><TD> </TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>NAACL HLT 2010</TD><TD>548</TD><TD>('+ 78 extended through 2011)</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>ACL 2010</TD><TD>767</TD><TD>(new or renewed members captured of the 950 total attendees)</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>INLG 2010</TD><TD>26</TD><TD>(new or renewed members captured of the 49 total attendees)</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>EMNLP 2010</TD><TD>141</TD><TD>(new or renewed members captured of the 292 total attendees)</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>ACL 2011</TD><TD>866</TD><TD> </TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD> </TD><TD> </TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>EACL 2012</TD><TD>288</TD><TD> </TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>NAACL 2012</TD><TD>535</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>ACL 2012</TD><TD>697</TD><TD>(Includes EMNLP/CoNLL and SIGdial 2012)</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>Others such as INLG 2012</TD><TD>0</TD><TD>(any memberships from INLG went through normal online membership)</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>NAACL 2013</TD><TD>555</TD><TD>(Near final--Still chasing some outstanding memberships)</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>ACL 2013</TD><TD>569</TD><TD>(More expected by close of late plus all onsite registrations)</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>EMNLP 2013</TD><TD>0</TD><TD>(Registration is not yet open)</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TR>
</TABLE>

== Members by country (update for 2013) ==

<TABLE>
<TR><TD>July 18, 2013</TD><TD COLSPAN=7> MEMBERSHIPS BY COUNTRY FOR SUMMER 2013 (THROUGH REPORT DATE)<TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TR>
<TR><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TR>
<TR><TD></TD><TD>TOTAL</TD><TD>REG</TD><TD>STUD</TD><TD></TD><TD>TOTAL</TD><TD>REG</TD><TD>STUD</TD><TD> </TD><TD>TOTAL</TD><TD>REG</TD><TD>STUD</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TR>
<TR><TD> </TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD> </TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD> </TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TR>
<TR><TD>ARGENTINA</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>1</TD><TD> </TD><TD>HONG KONG </TD><TD>11</TD><TD>10</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>POLAND</TD><TD>4</TD><TD>2</TD><TD>2</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TR>
<TR><TD>AUSTRIA</TD><TD>2</TD><TD>2</TD><TD></TD><TD>HUNGARY </TD><TD>8</TD><TD>3</TD><TD>5</TD><TD>ROMANIA</TD><TD>7</TD><TD>2</TD><TD>5</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TR>
<TR><TD>AUSTRALIA </TD><TD>24</TD><TD>19</TD><TD>5</TD><TD>INDIA </TD><TD>26</TD><TD>11</TD><TD>15</TD><TD>RUSSIA </TD><TD>15</TD><TD>10</TD><TD>5</TD><TD> </TD><TD></TD><TD></TR>
<TR><TD>BELGIUM </TD><TD>9</TD><TD>7</TD><TD>2</TD><TD>IRAN</TD><TD>1</TD><TD> </TD><TD>1</TD><TD>SAUDI ARABIA</TD><TD>3</TD><TD>3</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD> </TD><TD></TR>
<TR><TD>BRAZIL </TD><TD>7</TD><TD>2</TD><TD>5</TD><TD>IRELAND </TD><TD>9</TD><TD>7</TD><TD>2</TD><TD>SCOTLAND </TD><TD>31</TD><TD>21</TD><TD>10</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TR>
<TR><TD>BULGARIA</TD><TD>5</TD><TD>3</TD><TD>2</TD><TD>ISRAEL </TD><TD>15</TD><TD>7</TD><TD>8</TD><TD>SINGAPORE </TD><TD>20</TD><TD>15</TD><TD>5</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TR>
<TR><TD>CANADA </TD><TD>39</TD><TD>29</TD><TD>10</TD><TD>ITALY </TD><TD>50</TD><TD>32</TD><TD>18</TD><TD>SLOVENIA</TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TR>
<TR><TD>CHINA </TD><TD>55</TD><TD>30</TD><TD>25</TD><TD>JAPAN </TD><TD>98</TD><TD>72</TD><TD>26</TD><TD>SOUTH AFRICA </TD><TD>5</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>4</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TR>
<TR><TD>COLUMBIA</TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD><TD>1</TD><TD>LITHUANIA</TD><TD>3</TD><TD>2</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>SOUTH KOREA</TD><TD>22</TD><TD>17</TD><TD>5</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TR>
<TR><TD>CROATIA</TD><TD>4</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>3</TD><TD>LUXENBOURG</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>1</TD><TD> </TD><TD>SPAIN </TD><TD>32</TD><TD>21</TD><TD>11</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TR>
<TR><TD>CZECH REPUBLIC </TD><TD>27</TD><TD>12</TD><TD>15</TD><TD>MACAU</TD><TD>3</TD><TD> </TD><TD>3</TD><TD>SRI LANKA</TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TR>
<TR><TD>DENMARK </TD><TD>8</TD><TD>6</TD><TD>2</TD><TD>MALAYSIA</TD><TD>3</TD><TD>2</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>SWEDEN </TD><TD>15</TD><TD>10</TD><TD>5</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TR>
<TR><TD>ENGLAND </TD><TD>72</TD><TD>51</TD><TD>21</TD><TD>MALTA</TD><TD>2</TD><TD> </TD><TD>2</TD><TD>SWITZERLAND </TD><TD>19</TD><TD>11</TD><TD>8</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TR>
<TR><TD>ESTONIA </TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD><TD>1</TD><TD>MEXICO </TD><TD>4</TD><TD>3</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>TAIWAN </TD><TD>9</TD><TD>6</TD><TD>3</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TR>
<TR><TD>FINLAND </TD><TD>8</TD><TD>4</TD><TD>4</TD><TD>NETHERLANDS </TD><TD>35</TD><TD>23</TD><TD>12</TD><TD>THAILAND</TD><TD>1</TD><TD> </TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TR>
<TR><TD>FRANCE </TD><TD>61</TD><TD>40</TD><TD>21</TD><TD>NEW ZEALAND</TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD><TD>1</TD><TD>TUNISIA</TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TR>
<TR><TD>GEORGIA</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>1</TD><TD> </TD><TD>NORWAY </TD><TD>8</TD><TD>5</TD><TD>3</TD><TD>TURKEY </TD><TD>18</TD><TD>9</TD><TD>9</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TR>
<TR><TD>GERMANY </TD><TD>118</TD><TD>71</TD><TD>47</TD><TD>PORTUGAL </TD><TD>4</TD><TD>4</TD><TD> </TD><TD>UKRAINE</TD><TD>3</TD><TD>3</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TR>
<TR><TD>GREECE </TD><TD>10</TD><TD>7</TD><TD>3</TD><TD>QTAR</TD><TD>7</TD><TD>6</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>UNITED EMERATES</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>1</TD><TD> </TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD> </TR>
<TR><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD> </TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD>UNITED STATES</TD><TD>677</TD><TD>437</TD><TD>240</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TR>
<TR><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TR>
<TR><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD> </TD><TD> </TD><TD></TD><TD> </TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TR>
<TR><TH>COUNTRIES REPRESENTED</TH><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TH>TOTAL </TH><TH>1,627</TH><TH>1,043</TH><TH>584</TH></TR>
</TABLE>

== Members by country (Final for 2012) ==

Also presented at our Winter teleconference

<TABLE>
<TR><TD>February 4, 2013</TD><TD> MEMBERSHIPS BY COUNTRY FOR 2012 CALENDAR YEAR</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD></TD><TD>TOTAL</TD><TD>REG</TD><TD>STUD</TD><TD></TD><TD>TOTAL</TD><TD>REG</TD><TD>STUD</TD><TD></TD><TD>TOTAL</TD><TD>REG</TD><TD>STUD</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD> </TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD> </TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD> </TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>ARGENTINA</TD><TD>3</TD><TD>2</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>HONG KONG </TD><TD>16</TD><TD>9</TD><TD>7</TD><TD>QTAR</TD><TD>6</TD><TD>5</TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>AUSTRALIA </TD><TD>37</TD><TD>24</TD><TD>13</TD><TD>HUNGARY </TD><TD>7</TD><TD>5</TD><TD>2</TD><TD>ROMANIA</TD><TD>2</TD><TD></TD><TD>2</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>AUSTRIA</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD><TD>INDIA </TD><TD>25</TD><TD>10</TD><TD>15</TD><TD>RUSSIA </TD><TD>8</TD><TD>7</TD><TD>1</TD><TD> </TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>BAHRAIN</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD><TD>INDONESIA</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD><TD>SAUDI ARABIA</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD> </TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>BELGIUM </TD><TD>14</TD><TD>8</TD><TD>6</TD><TD>IRAN</TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD><TD>1</TD><TD>SCOTLAND </TD><TD>31</TD><TD>19</TD><TD>12</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>BRAZIL </TD><TD>12</TD><TD>9</TD><TD>3</TD><TD>IRELAND </TD><TD>15</TD><TD>6</TD><TD>9</TD><TD>SINGAPORE </TD><TD>29</TD><TD>17</TD><TD>12</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>BULGARIA</TD><TD>7</TD><TD>5</TD><TD>2</TD><TD>ISRAEL </TD><TD>21</TD><TD>11</TD><TD>10</TD><TD>SLOVENIA</TD><TD>3</TD><TD>2</TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>CANADA </TD><TD>78</TD><TD>43</TD><TD>35</TD><TD>ITALY </TD><TD>40</TD><TD>28</TD><TD>12</TD><TD>SOUTH AFRICA </TD><TD>4</TD><TD>3</TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>CHILE</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD><TD>JAPAN </TD><TD>113</TD><TD>98</TD><TD>15</TD><TD>SPAIN </TD><TD>46</TD><TD>35</TD><TD>11</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>CHINA </TD><TD>94</TD><TD>43</TD><TD>51</TD><TD>KOREA</TD><TD>184</TD><TD>90</TD><TD>94</TD><TD>SWEDEN </TD><TD>26</TD><TD>16</TD><TD>10</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>CROATIA</TD><TD>2</TD><TD></TD><TD>2</TD><TD>LATVIA</TD><TD>2</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>SWITZERLAND </TD><TD>26</TD><TD>13</TD><TD>13</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>CZECH REPUBLIC </TD><TD>15</TD><TD>8</TD><TD>7</TD><TD>LITHUANIA</TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD><TD>1</TD><TD>TAIWAN </TD><TD>32</TD><TD>10</TD><TD>22</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>DENMARK </TD><TD>8</TD><TD>5</TD><TD>3</TD><TD>MACAU</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD><TD>THAILAND</TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>EGYPT</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD><TD>MALTA</TD><TD>2</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>TURKEY </TD><TD>8</TD><TD>4</TD><TD>4</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>ENGLAND </TD><TD>66</TD><TD>39</TD><TD>27</TD><TD>MEXICO </TD><TD>4</TD><TD>3</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>UNITED ARAB EMER</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>ESTONIA </TD><TD>3</TD><TD></TD><TD>3</TD><TD>NETHERLANDS </TD><TD>31</TD><TD>22</TD><TD>9</TD><TD>UNITED STATES</TD><TD>732</TD><TD>471</TD><TD>261</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>ETHIOPIA</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD><TD>NIGERIA</TD><TD>1</TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD><TD>URUGUAY</TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>FINLAND </TD><TD>12</TD><TD>7</TD><TD>5</TD><TD>NORWAY </TD><TD>10</TD><TD>5</TD><TD>5</TD><TD>VIET NAM</TD><TD>3</TD><TD>2</TD><TD>1</TD><TD></TD><TD> </TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>FRANCE </TD><TD>89</TD><TD>54</TD><TD>35</TD><TD>PHILIPPINES</TD><TD>2</TD><TD>2</TD><TD></TD><TD> </TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD> </TD></TR>
<TR><TD>GERMANY </TD><TD>160</TD><TD>87</TD><TD>73</TD><TD>POLAND</TD><TD>7</TD><TD>3</TD><TD>4</TD><TD> </TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>GREECE </TD><TD>9</TD><TD>6</TD><TD>3</TD><TD>PORTUGAL </TD><TD>6</TD><TD>4</TD><TD>2</TD><TD> </TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TR><TH>COUNTRIES REPRESENTED</TH><TH></TH><TH></TH><TH></TH><TH></TH><TH></TH><TH></TH><TH> </TH><TH>TOTAL </TH><TH>2,064</TH><TH>1,252</TH><TH>812</TH><TH></TH><TH></TH><TH></TH></TR>
</TABLE>

2013Q1 Reports: Office

2013-02-15T20:27:16Z

PriscillaRasmussen:

Priscilla Rasmussen
7 February 2013

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

Pat Kirby continues to work for us on an as-needed basis throughout the year. It seems to be working well with her working primarily at conference times (almost full-time when she would be needed most) and at other high-volume times. When (or if) our current arrangement is no longer working, I will search for a more permanent arrangement with someone else but, with the ebb and flow of office work requiring more than one person, finding someone who is flexible is difficult.

I have issued the 1099s and am working with Graeme and the accountant to finalize our 2013 IRS tax filing requirements. And, Kevin Knight and I collected, reviewed and made awards to five new ACL Fellows this year.

Otherwise, the office is chugging along nicely.

'''Publications and Royalties:'''

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates now handling print-on-demand of our publications, I receive few requests for publications in the office. In all of 2012, I filled only 4 orders.

We have received royalties from Curran Associates for the last quarter of 2011 and four quarters of 2012 in the amount of $1,985.33. Copyright Clearance Center also sent a check for $1,266.81 for the period ending December 31, 2012. MIT Press Journals’ royalty year ends March 31, 2013. Their annual statement has not yet been received but it is expected that, similar to last year, if we earn less than $50 in royalties, this small amount will be credited to our account for next year.

'''Membership:'''

We surpassed 2100 members in 2009 and 2010 and in 2011 and 2012 have reached over 2000 members. I was surprised to see the China membership fall off to 94 in 2012, after having been at a high of 348 at the end of 2010 and 311 at the end of 2011. It seems the extra efforts put forth to focus on bringing China’s membership up from the 65 represented in 2009 worked but a sustained effort of some sort needs to continue if we are to keep them as active members. Please see Membership spreadsheets for the full 2012 calendar year details on countries represented and statistics.

The new Membership Portal is cooperating with my needs. The problem continues, though, that a lot of members are not updating and correcting their information in the Portal and many seem to have never visited their record at all. Pat and I are doing our best to keep the membership information updated and as correct as we can. It is unfortunate that membership records are not being properly updated by the members themselves as was originally envisioned, especially since I often cannot trust the mailing address and must go to people’s websites to find updated information.

'''Elections:'''

We abandoned the experiment of sending out postcards this year and the elections seemed to go very smoothly. The Office had very, very few bounced emails and no complaints of not being allowed to vote due to lapsed membership status. I think setting a membership cut-off date for those who would be eligible to vote worked well.

'''Conferences:'''

EACL 2012, in Avignon, was a success with registrations totaling 362.

The office also provided advice and support to Barbara Di Eugenio who organized the INLG 2012 in Utica which had 41 registrants.

While paper submissions were down for NAACL HLT 2012 in Montreal, our final body count of attendees was 705 at part or all of the meeting. Of these, 468 were paying main conference attendees. Another 52 were volunteers, SRW students, sponsors, exhibitors, and guests/organizers. There were also 181 people only attending tutorials, the *SEM co-located conference, or workshops. This was the first ACL-related conference that had close to 40% of the total attendees *not* attending the main conference. If it becomes a trend of some conferences becoming dominated by workshops and co-located conferences, the increased registration fees we currently charge for workshops without main conference are more than justified. Workshops are becoming more and more mini-conferences, complete with poster sessions (13 workshop and *SEM poster sessions took place during the two workshop days in Montreal). It seems everyone enjoyed the conference quite a lot. And, given it was my first time as Local Arrangements Chair, I found it more satisfying and more challenging but, overall, very good to feel truly a part of the conference team.

ACL 2012, held in Jeju, South Korea, had 931 total attendees. Of these, 173 attended only workshops or SIGdial or EMNLP/CoNLL and 13 are complimentary or sponsors. Another 33 are volunteers or SRW student attendees and 14 are staff (mostly Korean local organizers). Overall, the conference went very smoothly, in good part due to the extraordinary efforts of Gary Guenbae Lee and the PCO he selected.

The Office provided advice, online registration system and support to the SIGdial 2012 organizers in Seoul and to the co-located EMNLP/CoNLL 2012 conference in Jeju as well as an advance to SIGdial. SIGdial numbered 79 registrants and EMNLP/CoNLL had 335 registrants plus one invited speaker. Both were quite successful.

ACL 2013 will be in Sofia, Bulgaria. Graeme has signed the venue contract with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS), where Svetla Koeva will be our Local Arrangements Chair, and also signed the contract with the AIM Group who will serve as the local PCO. Graeme and I made a second site visit in January where we met with the AIM Group, revisited the conference venue and other places and were happy to see that our suggestions and plans are being followed up. It is possible that Hinrich Schuetze and I may make a visit in April so he can be assured of what is envisioned to make this an interesting and exciting conference.

NAACL HLT 2013 will be held in Atlanta, GA, at the Westin Peachtree, June 9-14. Lucy Vanderwende and others of the organizing committee and I have been working closely on the various planning stages for both NAACL HLT and *SEM which will co-locate in Atlanta. And, the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) has been definitely decided to be in Atlanta the week immediately following NAACL (June 15-21). I hope that there can be some cross-event planning to take advantage of this positive co-location.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

ACL 2012 had sponsorships totaling $38,646.76 to the Office plus approximately $65,890 USD equivalent in sponsorships directly to/in Korea; EACL 2012 received sponsorships totaling € 5,372.88 through the Office; and, NAACL 2012 received sponsorships totaling $30,304.84 plus $1,800 as a portion of the NSF SRW grant. Baidu committed to being a Platinum Level sponsor, with certain concessions, for ACL 2012. Nuance was a Platinum Sponsor for NAACL 2012, and Google was 3-Pack Gold Sponsor for ACL, EACL and NAACL this year. Elsevier was a new sponsor, supporting ACL 2012 at the Gold level. IBM made a generous contribution of $2,500 toward the NAACL Student Lunch in addition to their “standard” IBM Best Student Paper awards at both ACL and NAACL. And, Microsoft continues to be generous in supporting ACL and NAACL. I am also pleased to report that this year, we had more 3-pack sponsorships (for a somewhat reduced rate, they support all three events) than ever before with 5 companies opting for 3-packs and two other companies supported two of the three conferences. Baidu, Google, Microsoft, IBM and AT&T, among others, also provided support to SIGdial (well over $7,000) and EMNLP/CoNLL ($11,750).

So far we have commitments to ACL 2013 in the amount of $22,254, primarily from Baidu at the Platinum Level and Google as a 2-Pack Gold sponsor plus additional support dedicated to student travel from disadvantaged countries. NAACL 2013 has sponsorship commitments of $8,586 to date as well as $500 in support of the BEA Workshop. IBM continues to support the IBM Best Student Paper awards at both ACL and NAACL and, in addition, will provide $2,500 toward defraying the costs of the Student Lunch at NAACL as they did last year. I am in discussions with Microsoft, Nuance and the Qatar Computing Research Institute as well as others for larger donations to either or both conferences.

The new plan of appointing a Sponsorship Committee with two representatives from each regional world area (Asia, North/South America and Europe/Africa) and having an overall Chair is working very well. It is usually quite difficult to get sponsorships from world areas not hosting a conference, so expectations of support from Asia for 2013 are not high.

The area Sponsorship Chairs are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them. And, many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!

2013Q1 Reports: Office

2013-02-15T20:26:13Z

PriscillaRasmussen:

Priscilla Rasmussen
7 February 2013

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

Pat Kirby continues to work for us on an as-needed basis throughout the year. It seems to be working well with her working primarily at conference times (almost full-time when she would be needed most) and at other high-volume times. When (or if) our current arrangement is no longer working, I will search for a more permanent arrangement with someone else but, with the ebb and flow of office work requiring more than one person, finding someone who is flexible is difficult.

I have issued the 1099s and am working with Graeme and the accountant to finalize our 2013 IRS tax filing requirements. And, Kevin Knight and I collected, reviewed and made awards to five new ACL Fellows this year.

Otherwise, the office is chugging along nicely.

'''Publications and Royalties:'''

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates now handling print-on-demand of our publications, I receive few requests for publications in the office. In all of 2012, I filled only 4 orders.

We have received royalties from Curran Associates for the last quarter of 2011 and four quarters of 2012 in the amount of $1,985.33. Copyright Clearance Center also sent a check for $1,266.81 for the period ending December 31, 2012. MIT Press Journals’ royalty year ends March 31, 2013. Their annual statement has not yet been received but it is expected that, similar to last year, if we earn less than $50 in royalties, this small amount will be credited to our account for next year.

'''Membership:'''

We surpassed 2100 members in 2009 and 2010 and in 2011 and 2012 have reached over 2000 members. I was surprised to see the China membership fall off to 94 in 2012, after having been at a high of 348 at the end of 2010 and 311 at the end of 2011. It seems the extra efforts put forth to focus on bringing China’s membership up from the 65 represented in 2009 worked but a sustained effort of some sort needs to continue if we are to keep them as active members. Please see Membership spreadsheets for the full 2012 calendar year details on countries represented and statistics.

The new Membership Portal is cooperating with my needs. The problem continues, though, that a lot of members are not updating and correcting their information in the Portal and many seem to have never visited their record at all. Pat and I are doing our best to keep the membership information updated and as correct as we can. It is unfortunate that membership records are not being properly updated by the members themselves as was originally envisioned, especially since I often cannot trust the mailing address and must go to people’s websites to find updated information.

'''Elections:'''

We abandoned the experiment of sending out postcards this year and the elections seemed to go very smoothly. The Office had very, very few bounced emails and no complaints of not being allowed to vote due to lapsed membership status. I think setting a membership cut-off date for those who would be eligible to vote worked well.

'''Conferences:'''

EACL 2012, in Avignon, was a success with registrations totaling 362.

The office also provided advice and support to Barbara Di Eugenio who organized the INLG 2012 in Utica which had 41 registrants.

While paper submissions were down for NAACL HLT 2012 in Montreal, our final body count of attendees was 705 at part or all of the meeting. Of these, 468 were paying main conference attendees. Another 52 were volunteers, SRW students, sponsors, exhibitors, and guests/organizers. There were also 181 people only attending tutorials, the *SEM co-located conference, or workshops. This was the first ACL-related conference that had close to 40% of the total attendees *not* attending the main conference. If it becomes a trend of some conferences becoming dominated by workshops and co-located conferences, the increased registration fees we currently charge for workshops without main conference are more than justified. Workshops are becoming more and more mini-conferences, complete with poster sessions (13 workshop and *SEM poster sessions took place during the two workshop days in Montreal). It seems everyone enjoyed the conference quite a lot. And, given it was my first time as Local Arrangements Chair, I found it more satisfying and more challenging but, overall, very good to feel truly a part of the conference team.

ACL 2012, held in Jeju, South Korea, had 931 total attendees. Of these, 173 attended only workshops or SIGdial or EMNLP/CoNLL and 13 are complimentary or sponsors. Another 33 are volunteers or SRW student attendees and 14 are staff (mostly Korean local organizers). Overall, the conference went very smoothly, in good part due to the extraordinary efforts of Gary Guenbae Lee and the PCO he selected.

The Office provided advice, online registration system and support to the SIGdial 2012 organizers in Seoul and to the co-located EMNLP/CoNLL 2012 conference in Jeju as well as an advance to SIGdial. SIGdial numbered 79 registrants and EMNLP/CoNLL had 335 registrants plus one invited speaker. Both were quite successful.

ACL 2013 will be in Sofia, Bulgaria. Graeme has signed the venue contract with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS), where Svetla Koeva will be our Local Arrangements Chair, and also signed the contract with the AIM Group who will serve as the local PCO. Graeme and I made a second site visit in January where we met with the AIM Group, revisited the conference venue and other places and were happy to see that our suggestions and plans are being followed up. It is possible that Hinrich Schuetze and I may make a visit in April so he can be assured of what is envisioned to make this an interesting and exciting conference.

NAACL HLT 2013 will be held in Atlanta, GA, at the Westin Peachtree, June 9-14. Lucy Vanderwende and others of the organizing committee and I have been working closely on the various planning stages for both NAACL HLT and *SEM which will co-locate in Atlanta. And, the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) has been definitely decided to be in Atlanta the week immediately following NAACL (June 15-21). I hope that there can be some cross-event planning to take advantage of this positive co-location.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

ACL 2012 had sponsorships totaling $38,646.76 to the Office plus approximately $65,890 USD equivalent in sponsorships directly to/in Korea; EACL 2012 received sponsorships totaling € 5,372.88 through the Office; and, NAACL 2012 received sponsorships totaling $30,304.84 plus $1,800 as a portion of the NSF SRW grant. Baidu committed to being a Platinum Level sponsor, with certain concessions, for ACL 2012. Nuance was a Platinum Sponsor for NAACL 2012, and Google was 3-Pack Gold Sponsor for ACL, EACL and NAACL this year. Elsevier was a new sponsor, supporting ACL 2012 at the Gold level. IBM made a generous contribution of $2,500 toward the NAACL Student Lunch in addition to their “standard” IBM Best Student Paper awards at both ACL and NAACL. And, Microsoft continues to be generous in supporting ACL and NAACL. I am also pleased to report that this year, we had more 3-pack sponsorships (for a somewhat reduced rate, they support all three events) than ever before with 5 companies opting for 3-packs and two other companies supported two of the three conferences. Baidu, Google, Microsoft, IBM and AT&T, among others, also provided support to SIGdial (well over $7,000) and EMNLP/CoNLL ($11,750).

So far we have commitments to ACL 2013 in the amount of $22,254, primarily from Baidu at the Platinum Level and Google as a 2-Pack sponsor plus additional support dedicated to student travel from disadvantaged countries. NAACL 2013 has sponsorship commitments of $8,586 to date as well as $500 in support of the BEA Workshop. IBM continues to support the IBM Best Student Paper awards at both ACL and NAACL and, in addition, will provide $2,500 toward defraying the costs of the Student Lunch at NAACL as they did last year. I am in discussions with Microsoft, Nuance and the Qatar Computing Research Institute as well as others for larger donations to either or both conferences.

The new plan of appointing a Sponsorship Committee with two representatives from each regional world area (Asia, North/South America and Europe/Africa) and having an overall Chair is working very well. It is usually quite difficult to get sponsorships from world areas not hosting a conference, so expectations of support from Asia for 2013 are not high.

The area Sponsorship Chairs are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them. And, many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!

2013Q1 Reports: Office

2013-02-15T20:15:13Z

PriscillaRasmussen:

Priscilla Rasmussen
7 February 2013

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

Pat Kirby continues to work for us on an as-needed basis throughout the year. It seems to be working well with her working primarily at conference times (almost full-time when she would be needed most) and at other high-volume times. When (or if) our current arrangement is no longer working, I will search for a more permanent arrangement with someone else but, with the ebb and flow of office work requiring more than one person, finding someone who is flexible is difficult.

I have issued the 1099s and am working with Graeme and the accountant to finalize our 2013 IRS tax filing requirements. And, Kevin Knight and I collected, reviewed and made awards to five new ACL Fellows this year.

Otherwise, the office is chugging along nicely.

'''Publications and Royalties:'''

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates now handling print-on-demand of our publications, I receive few requests for publications in the office. In all of 2012, I filled only 4 orders.

We have received royalties from Curran Associates for the last quarter of 2011 and four quarters of 2012 in the amount of $1,985.33. Copyright Clearance Center also sent a check for $1,266.81 for the period ending December 31, 2012. MIT Press Journals’ royalty year ends March 31, 2013. Their annual statement has not yet been received but it is expected that, similar to last year, if we earn less than $50 in royalties, this small amount will be credited to our account for next year.

'''Membership:'''

We surpassed 2100 members in 2009 and 2010 and in 2011 and 2012 have reached over 2000 members. I was surprised to see the China membership fall off to 94 in 2012, after having been at a high of 348 at the end of 2010 and 311 at the end of 2011. It seems the extra efforts put forth to focus on bringing China’s membership up from the 65 represented in 2009 worked but a sustained effort of some sort needs to continue if we are to keep them as active members. Please see Membership spreadsheets for the full 2012 calendar year details on countries represented and statistics.

The new Membership Portal is cooperating with my needs. The problem continues, though, that a lot of members are not updating and correcting their information in the Portal and many seem to have never visited their record at all. Pat and I are doing our best to keep the membership information updated and as correct as we can. It is unfortunate that membership records are not being properly updated by the members themselves as was originally envisioned, especially since I often cannot trust the mailing address and must go to people’s websites to find updated information.

'''Elections:'''

We abandoned the experiment of sending out postcards this year and the elections seemed to go very smoothly. The Office had very, very few bounced emails and no complaints of not being allowed to vote due to lapsed membership status. I think setting a membership cut-off date for those who would be eligible to vote worked well.

'''Conferences:'''

EACL 2012, in Avignon, was a success with registrations totaling 362.

The office also provided advice and support to Barbara Di Eugenio who organized the INLG 2012 in Utica which had 41 registrants.

While paper submissions were down for NAACL HLT 2012 in Montreal, our final body count of attendees was 705 at part or all of the meeting. Of these, 468 were paying main conference attendees. Another 52 were volunteers, SRW students, sponsors, exhibitors, and guests/organizers. There were also 181 people only attending tutorials, the *SEM co-located conference, or workshops. This was the first ACL-related conference that had close to 40% of the total attendees *not* attending the main conference. If it becomes a trend of some conferences becoming dominated by workshops and co-located conferences, the increased registration fees we currently charge for workshops without main conference are more than justified. Workshops are becoming more and more mini-conferences, complete with poster sessions (13 workshop and *SEM poster sessions took place during the two workshop days in Montreal). It seems everyone enjoyed the conference quite a lot. And, given it was my first time as Local Arrangements Chair, I found it more satisfying and more challenging but, overall, very good to feel truly a part of the conference team.

ACL 2012, held in Jeju, South Korea, had 931 total attendees. Of these, 173 attended only workshops or SIGdial or EMNLP/CoNLL and 13 are complimentary or sponsors. Another 33 are volunteers or SRW student attendees and 14 are staff (mostly Korean local organizers). Overall, the conference went very smoothly, in good part due to the extraordinary efforts of Gary Guenbae Lee and the PCO he selected.

The Office provided advice, online registration system and support to the SIGdial 2012 organizers in Seoul and to the co-located EMNLP/CoNLL 2012 conference in Jeju as well as an advance to SIGdial. SIGdial numbered 79 registrants and EMNLP/CoNLL had 335 registrants plus one invited speaker. Both were quite successful.

ACL 2013 will be in Sofia, Bulgaria. Graeme has signed the venue contract with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS), where Svetla Koeva will be our Local Arrangements Chair, and also signed the contract with the AIM Group who will serve as the local PCO. Graeme and I made a second site visit in January where we met with the AIM Group, revisited the conference venue and other places and were happy to see that our suggestions and plans are being followed up. It is possible that Hinrich Schuetze and I may make a visit in April so he can be assured of what is envisioned to make this an interesting and exciting conference.

NAACL HLT 2013 will be held in Atlanta, GA, at the Westin Peachtree, June 9-14. Lucy Vanderwende and others of the organizing committee and I have been working closely on the various planning stages for both NAACL HLT and *SEM which will co-locate in Atlanta. And, the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) has been definitely decided to be in Atlanta the week immediately following NAACL (June 15-21). I hope that there can be some cross-event planning to take advantage of this positive co-location.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

ACL 2012 had sponsorships totaling $38,646.76 to the Office plus approximately $65,890 USD equivalent in sponsorships directly to/in Korea; EACL 2012 received sponsorships totaling € 5,372.88 through the Office; and, NAACL 2012 received sponsorships totaling $30,304.84 plus $1,800 as a portion of the NSF SRW grant. Baidu committed to being a Platinum Level sponsor, with certain concessions, for ACL 2012. Nuance was a Platinum Sponsor for NAACL 2012, and Google was 3-Pack Gold Sponsor for ACL, EACL and NAACL this year. Elsevier was a new sponsor, supporting ACL 2012 at the Gold level. IBM made a generous contribution of $2,500 toward the NAACL Student Lunch in addition to their “standard” IBM Best Student Paper awards at both ACL and NAACL. And, Microsoft continues to be generous in supporting ACL and NAACL. I am also pleased to report that this year, we had more 3-pack sponsorships (for a somewhat reduced rate, they support all three events) than ever before with 5 companies opting for 3-packs and two other companies supported two of the three conferences. Baidu, Google, Microsoft, IBM and AT&T, among others, also provided support to SIGdial (well over $7,000) and EMNLP/CoNLL ($11,750).

So far we have commitments to ACL 2013 in the amount of $22,254, primarily from Baidu at the Platinum Level and Google as a 2-Pack sponsor plus additional support dedicated to student travel from disadvantaged countries. NAACL 2013 has sponsorship commitments of $6,086 to date as well as $500 in support of the BEA Workshop. I am in discussions with Microsoft, Nuance and the Qatar Computing Research Institute as well as others for larger donations to either or both conferences.

The new plan of appointing a Sponsorship Committee with two representatives from each regional world area (Asia, North/South America and Europe/Africa) and having an overall Chair
is working very well. It is usually quite difficult to get sponsorships from world areas not hosting a conference, so expectations of support from Asia for 2013 are not high.

The area Sponsorship Chairs are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them. And, many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!

2013Q1 Reports: Office

2013-02-07T22:55:23Z

PriscillaRasmussen: New page: Priscilla Rasmussen 7 February 2013 '''ACL Business Office Report''' Pat Kirby continues to work for us on an as-needed basis throughout the year. It seems to be working well with her...

Priscilla Rasmussen
7 February 2013

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

Pat Kirby continues to work for us on an as-needed basis throughout the year. It seems to be working well with her working primarily at conference times (almost full-time when she would be needed most) and at other high-volume times. When (or if) our current arrangement is no longer working, I will search for a more permanent arrangement with someone else but, with the ebb and flow of office work requiring more than one person, finding someone who is flexible is difficult.

I have issued the 1099s and am working with Graeme and the accountant to finalize our 2013 IRS tax filing requirements. And, Kevin Knight and I collected, reviewed and made awards to five new ACL Fellows this year.

Otherwise, the office is chugging along nicely.

'''Publications and Royalties:'''

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates now handling print-on-demand of our publications, I receive few requests for publications in the office. In all of 2012, I filled only 4 orders.

We have received royalties from Curran Associates for the last quarter of 2011 and four quarters of 2012 in the amount of $1,985.33. Copyright Clearance Center also sent a check for $1,266.81 for the period ending December 31, 2012. MIT Press Journals’ royalty year ends March 31, 2013. Their annual statement has not yet been received but it is expected that, similar to last year, if we earn less than $50 in royalties, this small amount will be credited to our account for next year.

'''Membership:'''

We surpassed 2100 members in 2009 and 2010 and in 2011 and 2012 have reached over 2000 members. I was surprised to see the China membership fall off to 94 in 2012, after having been at a high of 348 at the end of 2010 and 311 at the end of 2011. It seems the extra efforts put forth to focus on bringing China’s membership up from the 65 represented in 2009 worked but a sustained effort of some sort needs to continue if we are to keep them as active members. Please see Membership spreadsheets for the full 2012 calendar year details on countries represented and statistics.

The new Membership Portal is cooperating with my needs. The problem continues, though, that a lot of members are not updating and correcting their information in the Portal and many seem to have never visited their record at all. Pat and I are doing our best to keep the membership information updated and as correct as we can. It is unfortunate that membership records are not being properly updated by the members themselves as was originally envisioned, especially since I often cannot trust the mailing address and must go to people’s websites to find updated information.

'''Elections:'''

We abandoned the experiment of sending out postcards this year and the elections seemed to go very smoothly. The Office had very, very few bounced emails and no complaints of not being allowed to vote due to lapsed membership status. I think setting a membership cut-off date for those who would be eligible to vote worked well.

'''Conferences:'''

EACL 2012, in Avignon, was a success with registrations totaling 362.

The office also provided advice and support to Barbara Di Eugenio who organized the INLG 2012 in Utica which had 41 registrants.

While paper submissions were down for NAACL HLT 2012 in Montreal, our final body count of attendees was 705 at part or all of the meeting. Of these, 468 were paying main conference attendees. Another 52 were volunteers, SRW students, sponsors, exhibitors, and guests/organizers. There were also 181 people only attending tutorials, the *SEM co-located conference, or workshops. This was the first ACL-related conference that had close to 40% of the total attendees *not* attending the main conference. If it becomes a trend of some conferences becoming dominated by workshops and co-located conferences, the increased registration fees we currently charge for workshops without main conference are more than justified. Workshops are becoming more and more mini-conferences, complete with poster sessions (13 workshop and *SEM poster sessions took place during the two workshop days in Montreal). It seems everyone enjoyed the conference quite a lot. And, given it was my first time as Local Arrangements Chair, I found it more satisfying and more challenging but, overall, very good to feel truly a part of the conference team.

ACL 2012, held in Jeju, South Korea, had 931 total attendees. Of these, 173 attended only workshops or SIGdial or EMNLP/CoNLL and 13 are complimentary or sponsors. Another 33 are volunteers or SRW student attendees and 14 are staff (mostly Korean local organizers). Overall, the conference went very smoothly, in good part due to the extraordinary efforts of Gary Guenbae Lee and the PCO he selected.

The Office provided advice, online registration system and support to the SIGdial 2012 organizers in Seoul and to the co-located EMNLP/CoNLL 2012 conference in Jeju as well as an advance to SIGdial. SIGdial numbered 79 registrants and EMNLP/CoNLL had 335 registrants plus one invited speaker. Both were quite successful.

ACL 2013 will be in Sofia, Bulgaria. Graeme has signed the venue contract with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS), where Svetla Koeva will be our Local Arrangements Chair, and also signed the contract with the AIM Group who will serve as the local PCO. Graeme and I made a second site visit in January where we met with the AIM Group, revisited the conference venue and other places and were happy to see that our suggestions and plans are being followed up. It is possible that Hinrich Schuetze and I may make a visit in April so he can be assured of what is envisioned to make this an interesting and exciting conference.

NAACL HLT 2013 will be held in Atlanta, GA, at the Westin Peachtree, June 9-14. Lucy Vanderwende and others of the organizing committee and I have been working closely on the various planning stages for both NAACL HLT and *SEM which will co-locate in Atlanta. And, the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) has been definitely decided to be in Atlanta the week immediately following NAACL (June 15-21). I hope that there can be some cross-event planning to take advantage of this positive co-location.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

ACL 2012 had sponsorships totaling $38,646.76 to the Office plus approximately $65,890 USD equivalent in sponsorships directly to/in Korea; EACL 2012 received sponsorships totaling € 5,372.88 through the Office; and, NAACL 2012 received sponsorships totaling $30,304.84 plus $1,800 as a portion of the NSF SRW grant. Baidu committed to being a Platinum Level sponsor, with certain concessions, for ACL 2012. Nuance was a Platinum Sponsor for NAACL 2012, and Google was 3-Pack Gold Sponsor for ACL, EACL and NAACL this year. Elsevier was a new sponsor, supporting ACL 2012 at the Gold level. IBM made a generous contribution of $2,500 toward the NAACL Student Lunch in addition to their “standard” IBM Best Student Paper awards at both ACL and NAACL. And, Microsoft continues to be generous in supporting ACL and NAACL. I am also pleased to report that this year, we had more 3-pack sponsorships (for a somewhat reduced rate, they support all three events) than ever before with 5 companies opting for 3-packs and two other companies supported two of the three conferences. Baidu, Google, Microsoft, IBM and AT&T, among others, also provided support to SIGdial (well over $7,000) and EMNLP/CoNLL ($11,750).

So far we have commitments to ACL 2013 in the amount of $11,954, primarily from Google as a 2-Pack sponsor plus additional support dedicated to student travel from disadvantaged countries. NAACL 2013 has sponsorship commitments of $6,086 to date as well as $500 in support of the BEA Workshop. I am in discussions with Baidu, Microsoft, Nuance and the Qatar Computing Research Institute as well as others for larger donations to either or both conferences.

The new plan of appointing a Sponsorship Committee with two representatives from each regional world area (Asia, North/South America and Europe/Africa) and having an overall Chair
is working very well. It is usually quite difficult to get sponsorships from world areas not hosting a conference, so expectations of support from Asia for 2013 are not high.

The area Sponsorship Chairs are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them. And, many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!

2012Q3 Reports: Office Manager

2012-06-25T20:55:10Z

PriscillaRasmussen: New page: Priscilla Rasmussen 25 June 2012 '''ACL Business Office Report''' My plan of hiring Pat Kirby on an as-needed basis throughout the year seems to be working well., She works primarily a...

Priscilla Rasmussen
25 June 2012

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

My plan of hiring Pat Kirby on an as-needed basis throughout the year seems to be working well., She works primarily at conference times (almost full-time when she would be needed most) and at other high-volume times. When (or if) our current arrangement is no longer working, I will search for a more permanent arrangement with someone else but, with the ebb and flow of office work requiring more than one person, finding someone who is flexible is difficult.

Otherwise, the office is chugging along nicely.

'''Publications and Royalties:'''

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates now handling print-on-demand of our publications, I receive few requests for publications in the office. In all of 2011, there were only 10 orders that I filled and 8 orders so far in 2012.

We have received royalties from Curran Associates for the last quarter of 2011 and first quarter of 2012 in the amount of $1,045.05. Copyright Clearance Center also sent a check for $1,266.81 for the period ending December 31, 2011. MIT Press Journals’ royalty year ends March 31, 2012 and their statement claims we earned less than $50 so this smaller amount will be credited to our account for next year.

'''Membership:'''

Having surpassed 2100 members each of the past few years and with 2012 having conferences in all three of our world regions, I would have expected our membership to be 200-400 higher than the 1608 current members. Of course, there will be more resulting from ACL 2012 and some will continue to dribble in throughout the rest of the year. I also have to get the EACL 2012 members-from-registrations list, the (much smaller) INLG 2012 membership from that recently held conference and add in any SIGdial 2012 memberships. But, I still am a bit concerned that we may not quite make the 2000 mark this year and am surprised by this. Please see Membership spreadsheets for January-to-June 2012 details on countries represented and statistics.

The new Membership Portal is now working better, with Josh having added additional scripts which allow me to search and download information needed for reports. The searching mechanism is not ideal for my purposes but I understand my needs are only a fraction of all users’ search requirements so we deal with this inconvenience. The problem continues, though, that a lot of members are not updating and correcting their information in the Portal and many seem to have never visited their record at all. Pat and I are doing our best to keep the membership information updated and as correct as we can. It is unfortunate that membership records are not being properly updated by the members themselves as was originally envisioned.

'''Elections:'''

I am not so sure the postcard mailing (in addition to emails to the membership) had the desired effect. Possibly a handful of members were notified by the postcards rather than through emails because of bad email addresses. But, the 120+ postcards that were returned as undeliverable cost us almost $75 in postage and were coming back to us, one by one, up until about two months ago.

My one recommendation is that we really do need to set a membership cut-off date for those who will be eligible to vote. Possibly, we ought to send emails to recently lapsed members telling them they have until September 1st to renew their membership if they want to participate in the ACL elections. This notice should also be sent out to the current members to be sure there are no complaints that someone did not know of the deadline. This deadline would make the voting process more uniform for all and relieve both Drago and me of adding late renewals and coordinating to be sure we captured everyone.

'''Conferences:'''

EACL 2012, in Avignon, was a success but I do not have specific numbers to report to you at this time.

The office also provided advice and support to Barbara Di Eugenio who organized the INLG 2012 in Utica.

While paper submissions were down for NAACL HLT 2012 in Montreal, our final body count of attendees was 706 at part or all of the meeting. Of these, 472 were paying main conference attendees. Another 52 were volunteers, SRW students, sponsors, exhibitors, and guests/organizers. There were also 181 people only attending tutorials, the *SEM co-located conference, or workshops. This was the first ACL-related conference that had close to 40% of the total attendees *not* attending the main conference. If this becomes a trend of some conferences becoming dominated by workshops and co-located conferences, the increased registration fees we currently charge for workshops without main conference are more than justified. Workshops are becoming more and more mini-conferences, complete with poster sessions (13 workshop and *SEM poster sessions took place during the two workshop days in Montreal). It seems everyone enjoyed the conference quite a lot. And, given it was my first time as Local Arrangements Chair, I found it more satisfying and more challenging but, overall, very good to feel truly a part of the conference team.

The planning for ACL 2012, to be held at Jeju, South Korea, July 8-13, 2012 is moving along well.
It looks like we will have between 900 and 1000 total attendees…Late registration has just closed, giving the current total of 822 participants. Of these, 137 are attending only workshops or SIGdial or EMNLP/CoNLL and six are complimentary or sponsors. Another 35-45 are volunteers or SRW student attendees who have not registered yet and are not included in my totals.

The Office is providing advice and an advance to the SIGdial 2012 organizers in Seoul and to the co-located EMNLP/CoNLL 2012 conference in Jeju. SIGdial numbers roughly 65-70 registrants and EMNLP/CoNLL is about 300 registrants.

ACL 2013 will be in Sofia, Bulgaria. Graeme has signed the venue contract with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS), where Svetla Koeva will be our Local Arrangements Chair. She will be in Jeju if anyone wants to meet her. BAS has already signed the contract with the National Palace of Congress (NPC, the conference venue) after Graeme and I made adjustments and approved of it. I plan to work very closely with Svetla and am sure this will be an interesting and exciting conference.

NAACL HLT 2013 was decided to be held in Atlanta, GA, at the Westin Peachtree, June 9-14. Having completed the site visit, I can say that, while the Westin is in the downtown commercial area, there are wonderful restaurants and clubs within a few blocks walk and the MARTA line is less than half a block away. And, the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) has been definitely decided to be in Atlanta the week immediately following NAACL (June 15-21). I hope that there can be some cross-event planning to take advantage of this positive co-location. I am pleased to say I will again serve as Local Arrangements Chair for NAACL as well a providing a bridge to ICML as its Treasurer.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

ACL 2012 currently has sponsorships totaling $38,646.76; EACL 2012 received sponsorships totaling € 5,372.88 through the Office; and, NAACL 2012 received sponsorships totaling $30,304.84. To date, Baidu has committed to being a Platinum Level sponsor, with certain concessions, for ACL 2012. Nuance was a Platinum Sponsor for NAACL 2012, and Google was Gold Sponsor for both ACL and NAACL this year. IBM made a generous contribution toward the NAACL Student Lunch in addition to their “standard” IBM Best Student Paper awards at both ACL and NAACL. And, Microsoft continues to be generous in supporting ACL and NAACL. I am also pleased to report that this year, we had more 3-pack sponsorships (for a somewhat reduced rate, they support all three events) than ever before with 5 companies opting for 3-packs and two other companies supported two of the three conferences. Baidu, Google, Microsoft, IBM and AT&T, among others, also provided support to SIGdial (well over $6000) and EMNLP/CoNLL ($11,750).

The new plan of appointing a Sponsorship Committee with two representatives from each regional world area (Asia, North/South America and Europe/Africa) and having an overall Chair (currently Haifeng Wang) is working very well. While it is usually quite difficult to get sponsorships from world areas not hosting the conference, this year, we seem to be more successful.

The area Sponsorship Chairs are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them. And, many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!

2012Q1 Reports: Office - Priscilla Rasmussen

2012-01-16T22:19:18Z

PriscillaRasmussen: New page: Priscilla Rasmussen, 16 January 2012 '''ACL Business Office Report''' First, many thanks to all of you for my 3-year contract renewal and raise! It is such a pleasure to work with peo...

Priscilla Rasmussen,
16 January 2012

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

First, many thanks to all of you for my 3-year contract renewal and raise! It is such a pleasure to work with people who are so dedicated to the health and well-being of ACL. I learn and grow by working with each of you.

I have hired Pat Kirby, on a project-by-project basis, for now. She has been helping me on election issues related to membership status and updating records, cleaning up and updating membership records as the election postcards were returned as undeliverable, readying the office for the new year, and so on. My plan, unless/until she might find more permanent work, is to call her in on an as-needed basis throughout the year and to have her work primarily at conference times almost full-time when she would be needed most. When (or if) our current arrangement is no longer working, I will search for a more permanent arrangement with someone else but, with the ebb and flow of office work requiring more than one person, finding someone who is flexible is difficult.

'''Publications and Royalties:''' With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates now handling print-on-demand of our publications, I receive few requests for publications in the office. In all of 2011, there were only 10 orders that I filled (two from our membership and eight from outside vendors).

We have received royalties from Curran Associates this year in the amount of $1,311.00. Copyright Clearance Center also sent a check for $1,122.24 for the period ending December 31, 2011. And, MIT Press Journals’ royalty year ends March 31, 2012 so we have not received a statement from them. However, if we earn less than $50, this smaller amount will be credited to our account for next year.

'''Membership: ''' Having surpassed 2100 members each of the past few years and ending 2011 with 2028 total members, we seem to be staying on course with something over 2000 members each year. Of course, with 2012 having conferences in all three of our world regions, I expect our membership may well surpass the 2200 mark. And, the Chinese students seem to be renewing in small spurts of individual renewals but, again, certain professors or researchers are contacting me with “bulk membership renewals” of their students and these renewals, in particular, come very late in the calendar year. Please see Membership spreadsheets for final 2011 details on countries represented and statistics.

As of today, the total membership for 2012 from online Portal renewals and multi-year members is 432. I expect most 2012 memberships will come with conference registrations.

The new Membership Portal is now working well. In gathering statistics for this report and other reports requested by various Boards’ members, I have found some difficulties in pulling out necessary information without having to go through my own multi-step piecing together of bits of information from differing locations. Also, the searching mechanism is less than ideal. However, Joshua Herring, our new portal webmaster, is doing wonderful things to help fix those issues of concern to me. He is highly responsive and, for just recently stepping into his role, I believe he is quite effective. I need to continue to say that there are quite a lot of conscientious long-term members (and others, I would guess) who are not updating and correcting their information in the Portal. When pulling out statistics for this report, a good number of people seem not to have changed the default of “undergraduate student” to what their actual position is, do not update their physical mailing address (over 200 election postcards were returned, most as undeliverable), and many seem to have never visited their record at all. This leaves me to do my best to determine student versus non-student for reporting, update addresses as best I can (at least the country which is needed for my report), etc.. Each is a small issue but, taken together, leads me to continue to worry that some membership records are not being properly updated by the members as was originally envisioned.

'''Elections: ''' The elections ran fairly smoothly, I think. When Drago was ready to assign PIN numbers, I was able to download and send to him the up-to-date list of members. He later returned the file with the PINs assigned and I mailed out the postcards to everyone. Simultaneously, he emailed to everyone the same information as on the postcards. We were delayed a little bit so we could include the SIGDAT elections along with the ACL elections but I think it was well worth the extra days waited so we could make the SIGDAT transition as painless as possible for them.

My one recommendation is that we really do need to set a membership cut-off date for those who will be eligible to vote. When we know approximately when the elections will begin (say October 1st), we ought to send emails to recently lapsed members telling them they have until September 30th to renew their membership if they want to participate in the ACL elections. I recommend this because there were well over 100+ membership renewals that arrived after voting had begun and a good many of these were the “bulk membership renewals” of Chinese students.

'''Conferences:''' ACL-HLT 2011, in Portland, Oregon was be our largest meeting ever held, with a total of 1101 attendees at part or all of the meeting. Of these, a record-breaking 898 were paying main conference attendees. Another 72 were volunteers, SRW students, sponsors, exhibitors, and guests/organizers. There were also 118 people only attending tutorials or workshops. This does not include the 77 people registered separately for SIGdial. And, with poster session having over 120 posters (including the SRW posters), it was especially challenging to accommodate all session events but it seems everyone enjoyed the conference quite a lot.

The Office provided advice and an advance to the EMNLP 2011 organizers in Edinburgh but otherwise, EMNLP was managed solely within Scotland. From what I understand, EMNLP 2011 was a great success, ending with a surplus of a little more than $14,000.

While EACL 2012 is being managed by those in Europe (as is always the case), I have been working with Walter Daelemans and others, mostly in an advisory capacity. It seems they have things well under control and Avignon should be a wonderful conference.

NAACL HLT 2012 will be held in Montreal, June 3-8, 2012 at the Le Centre Sheraton. Our planning is moving forward nicely and, so far, I see no problems at all. I expect to make a second site visit to Montreal around the end of February to pin down the exact rooms we will need and release the others being held as well as meet with the staff and go over the entire physical layout and other planning. This should be a great conference in a great city!

The planning for ACL 2012, to be held at Jeju, South Korea, July 8-13, 2012 is moving along well and much of our energies are now being devoted to the planning and fine-tuning of our 50th anniversary event. Having made the site visit to Jeju, I can promise a great experience to all attendees.

ACL 2013 will be in Sofia, Bulgaria. The venue is quite large and will comfortably hold all our events. Graeme has signed the contract with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS), where our Local Arrangements Chair, Svetla Koeva, was just elected to a 4-year term as Director. BAS will receive advances from ACL and act as our “agent” in Bulgaria to enter into contracts on our behalf (with our prior approval) and make intermediate payments as required. BAS has already signed the contract with the National Palace of Congress (NPC, the conference venue) after Graeme and I made adjustments and approved of it. I plan to work very closely with Svetla and am sure this will be an interesting and exciting conference.

NAACL HLT 2013 was recently decided to be held in Atlanta, GA, at the Westin Peachtree, June 9-14. Having completed the site visit, I can say that, while the Westin is in the downtown commercial area, there are wonderful restaurants and clubs within a few blocks walk and the MARTA line is less than half a block away. Within 2-4 stops on the MARTA, the super upscale restaurants and nightlife of Buckhead is easily reached. Atlanta should be a lovely venue for our meeting. And, the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) is definitely going to be in Atlanta in 2013. Their typical conference time is the end of June or early July but I have been talking to them and we agree there could be significant overlap of participants interested in attending both NAACL and ICML. The President of ICML has recommended to their 2013 organizers that they look strongly at the week immediately following NAACL to hold their meeting and I am working with them on making that happen.

'''Conference Sponsorship:''' ACL 2012 currently has sponsorships totaling $15,177.41; EACL 2012 currently has sponsorships totaling €2,663.20; and, NAACL 2012 currently has sponsorships totaling $14,733.87. To date, Google has committed to being a Platinum Level sponsor if certain concessions can be worked out; Baidu, IBM and Microsoft are deciding what levels/types of sponsorships they wish to make.
These are not included in the totals since details are not finalized yet. The area Sponsorship Chairs are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them.

The new plan of appointing a Sponsorship Committee with two representatives from each regional world area (Asia, North/South America and Europe/Africa) and having an overall Chair (currently Haifeng Wang) is working very well. While it is usually quite difficult to get sponsorships from world areas not hosting the conference, this year, we seem to be more successful in getting offers of 3-pack sponsorships whereby a company sponsors all three conferences at a somewhat reduced rate than supporting each conference individually.

Many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!

2011Q3 Reports: Office Manager

2011-06-15T18:46:14Z

PriscillaRasmussen: New page: Priscilla Rasmussen 15 June 2011 '''ACL Business Office Report''' My plan to not hire a replacement for a while seems to be working alright although, with this conference numbering man...

Priscilla Rasmussen
15 June 2011

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

My plan to not hire a replacement for a while seems to be working alright although, with this conference numbering many more than expected, it has been a bit overwhelming. In late-summer to early-fall, I hope to hire someone to work primarily at conference times and more minimally throughout the year.

'''Publications and Royalties'''

Curran Associates is now offering print-on-demand of our publications as we have moved to USB flash drives and online access so I receive few requests for publications. In all of 2010, there were five orders that I filled and so far this year there have been six orders (two from our membership and four from outside vendors).

We have received royalties from Curran Associates so far this year in the amount of $706.80. Copyright Clearance Center also sent a check for $1,122.24 for the period ending December 31, 2010. And, MIT Press Journals sent a statement that, during our royalty year ending March 31, 2011, we earned less that $50 and any smaller amount will be credited to our account for next year.

'''Membership'''

Having surpassed 2100 members each of the past few years and ending 2010 with 2136 total members, it is unfortunate that we have only 1563 members to date this year. Of course, we will continue to grow a bit throughout the remainder of 2011, especially with EMNLP happening later this summer. And, the Chinese students seem to be renewing in small spurts of individual renewals (after completing my statistics report yesterday, I received eight Chinese student renewals today). This may or may not confirm the concern that more people become members only when attending conferences.

As of yesterday, the total membership for 2011 from online Portal renewals and new members is 740 and ACL 2011 has added an additional 823 members through required membership to attend the conference. This 823 includes SIGdial 2011 attendees since the Office is handling their registrations even though the conference is being held separately. EMNLP 2011 (managed in Edinburgh, including registration) is sure to generate more members which will be sent to me after their event ends so I can add these members to the Portal. Please see Membership spreadsheets for details on countries represented and statistics.

The new Membership Portal is now working quite well. In gathering statistics for this report, I have found some tweaks I would like to be made in how I can retrieve information but, these are minor and more for my benefit. I will discuss these with Robert Dale after this conference ends. However, I do want to say that there are quite a lot of conscientious long-term members (and others, I would guess) who are not updating and correcting their information in the Portal. When pulling out statistics for the report, a good number of people either did not change the default of “undergraduate student” to what their actual position is or made it blank. This leaves me to do my best to determine student versus non-student for reporting, based on amount paid or simply knowing the people. Also, I am positive we have no one from Afganistan but a few people have not updated the country from the default. Each is a small issue but, taken together, leads me to worry a bit that some membership records are not being properly updated so I plan to spend time this year double-checking all current members.

'''Conferences'''

ACL-HLT 2011, in Portland, Oregon will be our largest meeting ever held. At the close of late registration (after taking out cancellations, frauds and such) we total 1068 pre-registered people. Of these, a record-breaking 890 are paying main conference attendees. Another 72 are volunteers, SRW students, sponsors, exhibitors, and guests/organizers. There are also 115 people only attending tutorials or workshops. This does not include the 77 people pre-registered separately for SIGdial. I would expect our final count to be well over 1100 people. The poster session now numbers over 120 posters (including the SRW posters). All of these numbers have made it especially challenging to accommodate all sessions (four parallel are at the Marriott and one will be in the hotel directly across the street), the poster session/dinner (held at the World Trade Center about three blocks away), and demos (held in two parts on Tuesday). After I made a second site visit in early April, we believe we have gotten past all obstacles this high attendance causes and hope everyone will enjoy the conference. But, this may signal a trend toward ACLs being larger and even more complex to organize. In this particular year, a convention center would have much more easily accommodated the larger numbers of people. And, while convention centers are not ideal (impersonal and expensive), we pay a cost both in attendee and organizers’ convenience and in real dollars as each place charges rental fees or demands minimum guarantees.

The Office is providing advice to the EMNLP 2011 organizers in Edinburgh but otherwise, EMNLP is being managed solely within Scotland. I would expect this conference to also be a banner year in numbers of attendees.

NAACL HLT 2012 will be held in Montreal, June 3-8, 2012 at the Le Centre Sheraton (the contract is signed). Graeme and I made a site visit to Montreal in early May and have now signed the contract for Le Windsor as the banquet site and have two possibilities for the student accommodations which will be firmed up later this summer. This should be a great conference in a great city!

The planning for ACL 2012, to be held at Jeju, South Korea, July 8-13, 2012 is moving along in bits and pieces as is typical this far out from the conference dates. I expect, after ACL 2011 is completed, much of our energies will be devoted to the planning and fine-tuning of our 50th anniversary event. Having made the site visit to Jeju, I can promise a great experience to all attendees…Jeju is known, from what I am told, as the Hawaii of Asia.

ACL 2013 sites are now being decided. A decision should be announced soon.

As an aside, related to ACL 2011 and possibly future conferences, it seems to me that many more people have required visas than ever before (over 140 requests for letters of invitation to help in the visa application process; about 75% with papers accepted for presentation)). I am not sure whether this is due to some tighter restrictions imposed by the USA government or not. But, with so many people requiring visas and the danger of not being approved, there is more risk of those presenting papers to not be able to attend the conference.

'''Conference Sponsorship'''

ACL HLT 2011 currently has sponsorships totaling $69,700, of which $7,250 is SIGdial 2011 sponsorship and $1,000 is for the CoNLL 2011 Best Student Paper award. Additional funding comes as $4,500 from three Exhibitors and one $300 for an ad. To date, Google and Baidu are Platinum Level sponsors. This conference will be the first time we are trying something a bit different. Since Portland is known for its beer production, Richard Sproat (Local Sponsorship Chair) was successful in recruiting Widmer brewery for a donation of beverages for our banquet, thereby helping to reduce the cost to us of the complimentary drink tickets.

The new plan of appointing a Sponsorship Committee with two representatives from each regional world area (Asia, North/South America and Europe/Africa) and having an overall Chair (currently Srinivas Bangalore) is working very well. While it is usually quite difficult to get sponsorships from world areas not hosting the conference, this year, Kevin Duh (Asia Co-Chair) has been successful in obtaining two (smaller) Supporter Level sponsorships from Japanese companies and Haifeng Wang has obtained Platinum level sponsorship from Baidu in China. And, we have been a bit creative in ways of enticing larger sponsorships from the old standby companies (Google, for example, has increased from their previous Silver Level).

Many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!

2011Q1 Reports: Office

2011-03-01T22:55:48Z

PriscillaRasmussen: New page: 1 March 2011 -- Priscilla Rasmussen '''ACL Business Office Report''' Our accounting is now streamlined and works well except we still need to find a better system of coordination betw...

1 March 2011 -- Priscilla Rasmussen

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

Our accounting is now streamlined and works well except we still need to find a better system of coordination between Graeme and Chiaki (the accountant) and myself. Regarding our tax filings, we are now caught up through 2009 and are on track to file our 2010 taxes by the May 15th deadline. Mr. Pope, our accountant, has also been successful in getting ACL reinstated as a non-profit 501 (c) 3 with the State of New Jersey, where we are incorporated. So, we are now on a timely tax filing schedule, both with the IRS and New Jersey.

In January, the Directors and Officers insurance was paid for CY2011.

Last week, John Kirby, my assistant, gave his notice that he cannot work anymore. He has set the end of May as his final and full retirement due to health problems. He has been very dedicated to ACL’s activities and will be missed. But, with the Member Portal now operating well, there is less work to demand his attention other than at conference times. So, I plan to not hire a replacement for a while and see how it goes. I would hope to then hire someone either just to help me at conference times or minimally throughout the year and more so as conferences approach.

As you may already know, the previous landlord offered a reduction in the office rent to entice us to stay in the same space for 14 months (to June 1, 2011) and I accepted the offer. Now that June is approaching again and the office has been sold to a very nice gentleman a few months ago, I have called him to find out what his ideas are regarding the space and lease renewal. Once we meet, I will be able to report whether the rent will increase from the current $715/month to possibly as high as it had been ($850/month) or even higher. This will help us to decide whether the office should move to a smaller space or not. In preparation of possible bad news from the new landlord, I have begun searching for less expensive space that is smaller. So far, I have found one very good space for $600/month which is as large as the current space but located right next to a post office in a small office park. If the office moves, the space required would be about 2/3 of what we currently have (450 sq. ft. may be ideal rather than 750 sq. ft.) but, in the area, office space seems to either be larger or smaller than needed. I will keep looking for smaller space while waiting to see what the current landlord says about the lease renewal. Of course, it may be better to stay here if the rent is right, at least in part, to avoid the difficulties of address changing worldwide, keeping a more stable main office address for ACL and AMTA and avoiding the cost/trouble of the move itself. I welcome any opinions on whether to pursue moving and downsizing.

'''Publications and Royalties: '''

Now that we have an agreement with Curran Associates for print-on-demand of our publications as we have moved to USB flash drives and online access, I send to Curran Associates each USB stick as soon as the conference ends for their use in hardcopy production. This seems to be working well and, to date, we have received royalties from Curran Associates totaling $2,081.40. Other royalties we have received are from our long-term agreement with Copyright Clearance Center, totaling $764.67 for CY2010.

I continue to receive a minimal number of orders and, if I do have flash drives or CD-ROMs, I do fill the orders from the office. These orders numbered only 5 in CY2010.

In December, we finally received an invoice from MIT Press Journals for the FY2010 (ending June 2010) production of Computational Linguistics. With this $51,230 being paid, we are now current in our financial obligation to MIT Press Journals since they bill annually.

'''Membership:'''

In 2006, 2007 and 2009, and 2010, we surpassed 2100 members by the end of each year…our highest numbers in the past 15 years. When there are three conferences, one in each geographic area of the world we represent, we tend to increase memberships quite a bit. We ended 2010 with 2136 members; 1162 regular and 974 students.

We began 2011 with 257 multi-year members who carried over into 2011 plus a couple of anxious renewals that had come in at the very beginning of the year. Adding to this the 78 NAACL 2010 conference registrants who got a complimentary year of membership but had already paid for 2010 so had the extra year carried over to 2011, the total membership for 2011 now stands at 509. This is not so unusually low of a number given how early in the year it is. Please see Membership spreadsheets for details on countries represented and statistics.

''Question:'' Do we want to continue the tradition of offering one complimentary year of membership to all NAACL attendees rather than having them pay when registering for the conference as ACLs are done?

The new Membership Portal is now working quite well. I am encouraging members to go to the portal to answer their own questions and to update their user profiles. It seems one must be a current member to post announcements/events so I have encouraged people to renew their memberships in order to post events. I think it will still take time for the members to get used to using the portal. Meanwhile, I am becoming more comfortable with navigating the portal to update people’s records, make corrections, glean information and statistics and otherwise work with it.

'''Conferences:'''

NAACL 2010 in Los Angeles was quite a success with a final registration count of 662. Many people commented on the beauty and interesting features of the hotel and were quite impressed at the relatively modest guest room costs ($139) given the quality of the hotel and its staff. We were able to cut costs quite a bit and obtain a good amount of sponsorship and I believe we should make a nice surplus (hopefully, in the $40-50,000 range).

ACL 2010 in Uppsala was a wonderful success, with a total registration count of 950 after refunds, cancellations and no-shows were removed from the registration database. The huge efforts of Joakim Nivre, Ulla Conti and the entire conference organizing team can be a good model for future organizers, especially when working with a divided venue that is sure to cause additional problems and requires extra planning for all to go smoothly.

The Office also provided support to INLG 2010, which had 49 attendees in Ireland and generated 26 new or renewing members. Sponsored by SIGGEN, the recently completed final accounting should give an additional $10,558 to the SIGGEN coffers.

And the Office provided management of the registration to EMNLP 2010 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. EMNLP 2010 was a great success, with 292 final registrants and generating 141 new or renewing ACL memberships. I believe a healthy surplus will be achieved for SIGDAT but am unsure of the full and final budget details.

ACL-HLT 2011, in Portland, Oregon will be a great meeting, across the street from the banks of the Columbia River and near an interesting and lively downtown area. The planning and budgeting is now in place and all contracts are signed. In the next couple of weeks, Brian and I will begin to pull together the final budget estimates to set registration fees so we can hopefully have registration open toward the end of this month. I am expecting we might reach 1000+ attendees, given the lack of many competing conferences this year and Rada’s comment that she and Yuji are receiving an unexpectedly high number of short papers. It is now looking like our poster session will be very large, possibly numbering close to 100 posters (including the SRW posters). Both Brian and I are seeing more indications that this will be a very large and possibly more complex meeting given we will use the ballroom in the hotel across the street for one parallel session and have high attendance. In early April, I will be going out to Portland for a couple of days to walk through all the space and finalize our space planning, go over budget and other details, make sure the poster/dinner space is adequate now that we have extended our reserved space, etc.

The NAACL Board asked that I locate a venue for NAACL HLT 2012 and, after quite a search, we have agreed to hold the conference in Montreal, June 3-8, 2012 at the Le Centre Sheraton. The contract has been signed and planning should begin shortly after ACL HLT 2011 is wrapped up.

The planning for ACL 2012, to be held at Jeju, South Korea, July 8-13, 2012 is moving along nicely. Gary Geumbae Lee (Local Chair) and Haizhou Li (General Chair) and Graeme have been working on the budget, pulling it into shape and Gary and the local team are finalizing space and banquet plans. Having made the site visit to Jeju, I can promise a great experience to all attendees…Jeju is known, from what I am told, as the Hawaii of Asia.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

NAACL-HLT 2010 was also very successful in garnering sponsorships and received just over $38,119 in total sponsorship. Srinivas Bangalore, Ed Hovy and I were the most active in acquiring these funds.

For ACL 2010, we received donations totaling $46,244 plus Platinum Level Sponsorships of 240,000 SEK (around $30,000) from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation) and Swedish Research Council (VR). Quite a few different people played roles in acquiring this excellent level of sponsorship.

And, with ACL HLT 2011 coming soon, we currently have sponsorships totaling $50,550, of which $7,250 is SIGdial 2011 sponsorship and $1,000 is for the CoNLL 2011 Best Student Paper award. To date, Google is our only Platinum Level sponsor but I just received word that Baidu may also come in as a Platinum Level sponsor, adding another $12,000 to our total. This conference will be the first time we are trying something a bit different. Since Portland is known for its beer and is reputed to be up-and-coming in its wine production, Richard Sproat (Local Sponsorship Chair) was successful in recruiting Widmer brewery and Barefoot Winery for donations of beverages for our banquet, thereby helping to reduce the cost to us of the complimentary drink tickets. They may consider also making donations to our Welcome Reception but this is not definite yet.

The new plan of appointing a Sponsorship Committee with two representatives from each regional world area (Asia, North/South America and Europe/Africa) and having an overall Chair (currently Srinivas Bangalore) is working very well. While it is usually quite difficult to get sponsorships from world areas not hosting the conference, this year, Kevin Duh (Asia Co-Chair) has been successful in obtaining two (smaller) Supporter Level sponsorships from Japanese companies. And, we have been a bit creative in ways of enticing larger sponsorships from the old standby companies (Google, for example, has increased from their previous Silver Level).

Many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!

2010Q3 Reports: Office

2010-06-24T23:17:19Z

PriscillaRasmussen: New page: Priscilla Rasmussen 24 June 2010 '''ACL Business Office Report''' Our accounting continues to improve in being streamlined and there is better coordination between Graeme and Chiaki (t...

Priscilla Rasmussen
24 June 2010

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

Our accounting continues to improve in being streamlined and there is better coordination between Graeme and Chiaki (the accountant) and myself. Regarding our tax filings, we are now caught up through 2008 and have file for an extension to file 2009 taxes by August 15th. Graeme has already sent the 2009 accounting to me and I have an appointment with Mr. Pope (our USA accountant) to hand over the files to be done while we are all in Sweden at ACL 2010. So, we are now on a good, timely tax filing schedule.

John Kirby, my assistant, continues to be invaluable to me as I bring him along, when possible, to conferences and allows me greater freedom to attend meetings, put out logistical fires, and do all those things beyond registration that I need to do. He continues to feel ACL is a part of him, much as I do.

As you probably already know, the current landlord has offered a reduction in the current rent to entice us to stay in the same space for the next 14 months (to April 1, 2011). I have accepted his offer, at least in part, to avoid the difficulties of address changing worldwide, keeping a more stable main office address for ACL and AMTA and waiting to see if he might extend the lowered rate beyond next April. Currently, we are saving about $130/month from what the rent would have been.

'''Publications:''' While we had agreed it was a good idea to hold a “fire sale” of a lot of the proceedings stock held in the office, the fire sale has not taken place yet. But, I do think holding a fire sale at summer’s end (after the conferences have ended) is still a good idea to do. We will continue to down-size our stock and begin to prepare for a sale in the fall unless anyone has better ideas on how to rid ourselves of much of this overwhelming number of hardcopy publications.

There are some book vendors who take orders from libraries and such that want only hardcopies. It seems that we now have an agreement with Curran Associates (who have been one of our largest yearly purchasers) to take an online, USB stick or CD-ROM copy and produce hardcopies for sale to satisfy this group of customers. The ACL would receive royalties for books sold. I believe Drago would have more information on the agreement end of this arrangement. Meanwhile, I have just sent the NAACL 2010 USB stick to Curran Associates for production.

'''Membership:''' In 2006, 2007 and 2009, we surpassed 2100 members by the end of each year..our highest numbers in the past 15 years. When there are three conferences, one in each geographic area of the world we represent, we tend to increase memberships quite a bit. And, when in Europe (Prague, 2007), it seems our conference registrations are increasing dramatically which results in higher end-of-year membership totals. This seems to be happening again for 2010 with a very high number of registrations for our Uppsala meeting (more conference details below).

We begin 2010 with 366 multi-year members who carried over into 2010 plus some anxious renewals that have come in even before our online membership form has been updated. Adding to this the NAACL 2010 conference registrants who all get a complimentary year of membership and the ACL 2010 registrants paying their memberships, the total membership for 2010 now stands at 1648. I am currently “chasing” 62 ACL 2010 registrants (52 regular and 10 students) who claimed to be members but are not. Capturing these 62 plus the rest of late and onsite registrants, all INLG 2010 and EMNLP 2010 registrants becoming members, should result in over 2000 members for the year. Please see the two Membership spreadsheets for details of countries represented and statistics.

It will be interesting (and exciting) to see the response from members to our new Portal! I believe we are “on track” to go live with this just prior to our Uppsala conference.

'''Conferences:'''

NAACL 2010 in Los Angeles was quite a success with a final registration count of 662. The venue, Millennium Biltmore, was a landmark hotel from the 1920s and many people commented on the beauty and interesting features of the hotel and were quite impressed at the relatively modest guest room costs ($139) given the quality of the hotel and its staff. We were able to cut costs quite a bit and obtain a good amount of sponsorship and I believe we should make a nice surplus (hopefully, in the $40-50,000 range). I had expected to reach a full 700 or slightly more but, again it seems more people are interested in going to our European event.

ACL 2010 in Uppsala will be wonderfully successful. We currently have a total registration count of 891 and more continue to dribble in until the close of late registration on July 2nd. I expect final pre-registrations to be about 950 and onsite registrations to add another 50 or more, bringing us to a final registration count of over 1000. The awkwardness of this success has meant Joakim Nivre, Ulla Conti and I have been scrambling to accommodate these higher-than-expected numbers, having to order additional proceedings and conference bags, rearranging some of the meeting space (especially for a couple of workshops), increasing food orders, etc. All of our planning is well under control. Sponsorships have been generous, too, bringing me to believe there should be a very healthy surplus.

And, ACL-HLT 2011, in Portland, Oregon will be a great meeting, across the street from the banks of the Columbia River and near an interesting and lively downtown area. The planning and budgeting is now in place and all contracts are signed. After the 2010 conferences end, Brian, Richard and I will begin to maintain and update the budget so we will be in good shape when it is time to set registration fees late-winter to early-spring.

Beyond our large regular meetings, the Office has provided support to INLG 2010 (unexpectedly) and has been asked to manage the registration of EMNLP 2010 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Additionally, NAACL has been approached to jointly hold their 2012 conference with Coling. The location being considered is Baltimore, Maryland, with Johns Hopkins University playing a role in the event and its planning. I will be contacting the two likely venues and most likely conducting a site visit to Baltimore upon my return from Sweden. More on this as the feasibility becomes more clear.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

I am very pleased to report that, for ACL 2010, we received commitments totaling just over $45,000 plus Platinum Sponsorships of 240,000 SEK (around $30,000) from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation) and Swedish Research Council (VR).
Quite a few different people played roles in acquiring this wonderful level of sponsorship.

NAACL-HLT 2010 was also very successful in garnering sponsorships and received just over $37,500 in total sponsorship. Srinivas Bangalore, Ed Hovy and myself were the most active in acquiring these funds.

Many thanks to all sponsors who helped to make our conferences and workshops successful!

'''ACL’s 50th Anniversary:'''

I wonder what sort of new initiatives or special functions we should begin to plan for our upcoming 50th anniversary in 2012 in Asia? Anything of impressive size will most likely require a targeted sponsorship drive. Discussion?

2010Q1 Reports: Office

2010-02-18T04:47:31Z

PriscillaRasmussen: New page: Priscilla Rasmussen 17 February 2010 '''ACL Business Office Report''' First of all, my sincere thanks for the raise…much appreciated! Graeme Hirst and I, following his interactions ...

Priscilla Rasmussen
17 February 2010

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

First of all, my sincere thanks for the raise…much appreciated!

Graeme Hirst and I, following his interactions with the new accountant, Chiaki, have been coding our income and expenses and revamping our system. She is wonderful and I follow her logic in her coding. More importantly, our ACL accountant in Stroudsburg has said the new system makes sense and helps to make our tax filings easier and quicker to do.

Speaking of tax filings, we are now completely up-to-date with our federal filings. Phil Pope (The Pope!), the Stroudsburg accountant actually pulling together our filing forms, says we should have no problem being timely from now on. We switched from a cost-basis accounting to an accrual-based system which makes more sense as we cross years with conference advances, repayments of NSF-SRW award outlays by ACL, and so on.

John Kirby, my assistant, continues to be invaluable to me in many aspects of keeping the office, memberships and publications in order. Mainly, though, as many of you have seen when he accompanies me to our conferences, I am finding bringing him along when possible allows me greater freedom to attend meetings, put out logistical fires, and do all those things I need to do but am torn in half when trying to also manage the registration desk full time. He continues to feel ACL is a part of him, too.

As you know, our Office three-year lease came to an end as of April 1, 2009 and the first of our two possible 1-year extensions ends this April 1st. The discussion in our conference calls the winter of last year led me to believe I was to find new and smaller office space now that we will no longer produce and sell post-conference proceedings. I have shopped around the local area and found a space (you have seen Graeme’s message regarding this already) which would be less expensive and smaller yet comfortable. Of course, I would prefer to stay where we currently are located to avoid the difficulties of address changing worldwide and the physical move itself, as well as keeping a more stable main office address for ACL and AMTA. With the current landlord offering a reduction in the current rent to entice us to stay, it is an appealing idea but, his offer is only for the next 14 months to April 1, 2011. At that time, I would expect some sort of rate adjustment and having to enter into a new lease or face moving about a year from now. Graeme has further details on the cost differences. So, I ask for some direction on this…both the current and future landlords are expecting a decision from me when I return from vacation.

'''Publications:''' While we had agreed it was a good idea to hold a “fire sale” of a lot of the proceedings stock held in the office, the fire sale has not taken place yet. In preparation for the possible office move, John and I have begun packing the two copies of each and every publication I want to keep so I can still maintain as much of a full reference set as possible. Where we are simply holding way too many copies, we have begun paring down the stock a bit. But, holding a fire sale either before moving (if the office remains in place for the next 14 months) or at summer’s end (after the conferences have ended) is still a good idea to do.

There seem to be some book vendors who take orders from libraries and such that want only hardcopies. One in particular, Curran Associates (who have been one of our largest yearly purchasers), has offered to take an online or CD-ROM copy and produce hardcopies, with our approval, for sale to satisfy this group of customers. The ACL would receive royalties for books sold. I believe someone from the ACL would have to negotiate the royalties agreement for this to happen (as, long ago, an agreement was signed for royalties from MIT Press and CUP).

'''Membership:''' We had a record-breaking total of 2,123 members in 2006. Happily, we have surpassed this record, ending 2009 with 2,151 members! The three conferences, one in each geographic area of the world we represent, really helped to boost our membership but I believe we had more first-time, non-conference memberships than usual this year as well.

We begin 2010 with the multi-year members who carried over into 2010 plus some anxious renewals that have come in even before our online membership form has been updated. The total membership for 2010 now stands at 366.

I am a bit concerned that we have not yet sent out the reminder that it is time to renew memberships for 2010. My understanding is that the Portal will be the vehicle for 2010 memberships but I am unsure whether it is ready to be announced so we can begin the 2010 membership drive.

'''Conferences:'''

ACL 2009 in Singapore was wonderfully successful, ending with a final count of 802 total registrants. The invoices have been received from the local team and I have sent copies to Graeme so we can begin to finalize the bookkeeping. I believe there should be a reasonably healthy surplus.

NAACL 2009 in Boulder was also a success with a final registration count of 668. I should be able to begin finalizing this meeting’s accounting with Chris soon and expect a nice surplus even though we reduced registration fees a bit.

EACL 2009, held in Athens, Greece, was a successful meeting, I am told. The Office provided much advice and support when requested.

The planning for ACL 2010 in Sweden is moving along nicely. I expect my involvement to intensify in the coming months as the budget estimates are completed and registration fees are fixed.

And, NAACL-HLT 2010, in Los Angeles, California, will be an exciting meeting, with a “grand dame” hotel as our venue. The planning and budgeting is shaping up quite nicely and most everything is now in place.

The Office has also been heavily involved in negotiating the final ACL 2011 contracts for Portland. The hotel, spill-over hotel, banquet and poster session/dinner contracts are now in place or just needing final tweaking before signing. The university dorms are also almost finalized.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

I am very pleased to report that, for ACL 2009, we received commitments totaling about $26.5K pre-conference plus a lot of local and COLIPS support. NAACL-HLT 2009 received about $30,925 in total sponsorship. Many thanks to all sponsors who helped to make our conferences and workshops successful!

So far, I am aware of ACL 2010 commitments of about $19,700. I am in touch with both Google and Yahoo! who promise something but have not yet committed to definite amounts. For NAACL-HLT 2010, we have commitments totaling about $28,312, with more to come!

I would like to recommend we pursue Ed Hovy as our paid or otherwise long-term-engaged overall Sponsorship guru. He has brought in more “big-ticket” sponsorships for NAACL in LA than I’ve usually seen by one person.

2009Q3 Reports: Office

2009-07-13T16:17:03Z

PriscillaRasmussen:

The membership report for 2009 is at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~lsl/acl/Memberships-2009-by-country-Summer.xls

The membership report showing statistics from 2000 to 2009 is at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~lsl/acl/membership-report-2000-2009-Summer-statistics.xls

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

Priscilla Rasmussen
12 July 2009

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

Our Office three-year lease comes to an end as of April 1st, with two one-year renewal options. The 2009/2010 year has been locked in at the same rental fee as has been paid over the past three years. Now that we are expecting 2010 and the future to require less space to house fewer (or no) hardcopies of both the journals and conference publications, I have been speaking to our realtor about possibilities of finding about half the current amount of space and there is a good possibility we can find space within the realtor’s own building. Otherwise, I will begin an earnest search for new space in late fall 2009.

Regarding the possible office move, first, the background: ACL has always paid 75% of the office rental; AMTA pays 10%; ARCS (my company) pays 15%. These percentages were derived based upon the amount of time I spend on ACL and AMTA activities and the remainder covers whatever other events I might pick up through ARCS (Digital Government Society, WISE, ISI, etc). So, currently:

$850 Rent = $630 ACL/$85 AMTA/$135 ARCS (expected increase April 1st to $900 = $675 ACL/$90 AMTA/$135 ARCS)

Plus security system (around $400/year) and electric utilities (around $1,000/year)

Yearly ACL office rental cost = $630 X 12 = $7,560 + $400 + $1,000 = $8,960

Separate phone/fax/internet are paid by ACL regardless of where office is located

New space, at about 450 square feet, will cost around $12-14 per square foot unless the realtor and I can strike a better deal. This means rental of the new space will cost around $500 per month, or about $5,500 per year. I would expect savings on electric, security, postal meter rental, etc. to also reduce the ACL cost burden. The potential new costs would be:

$500 Rent = $375 ACL/$50 AMTA/$75 ARCS

Yearly ACL office rental cost = $375 X 12 = $4,500

Separate phone/fax/internet are paid by ACL regardless of where office is located

So, ACL would stand to save about $349/month = $4,188/year or around $12,564 over the next three years.

'''Wachovia and safeguarding our funds''': Wachovia Bank now has appointed a Small Business Representative with whom I have been working to optimize and, at the same time, safeguard our various accounts’ holdings. To this end, one account was cancelled and another, safer and with better interest rates, was established as our main “Operating Account”. I also verified that all of our accounts, except the Operating Account, are jointly FDIC (federally) insured up to $250,000 under new federal guidelines that came into effect last October. These new guidelines and the increased maximum insurable will be in effect through 2013. The Operating account is the most variable in amounts held each month and, when large sums come in, such as from conferences, I can move lump sums to one of our Money Market accounts which fall under the FDIC protection until the funds are needed.

'''Publications:''' With the low publications ordering in the last couple of years (only a handful of book resellers and very few member orders), we had made the decision in our last (Winter Executive) meeting to end the hardcopy publication sales before the impending office move next spring. To make this happen, I will offer a “fire sale” of all hardcopy publications in my office over the 3-month period of October-December 2009, at a flat $5 per copy plus shipping. This will include all years of the journal sets, ACL/EACL/NAACL/COLING main conference proceedings, and all workshops. We will then try to find libraries, especially in disadvantaged countries, who might like to stock “series” of some of our publications at no cost other than shipping. The goal will be to eliminate as much as possible before March 31, 2010.

If anyone knows of libraries who might be interested in some of our older publications, please let me know which ones and a contact person.

'''Membership:''' We had a record-breaking total of 2,123 members in 2006 and 2007 ended with 2,104 total members. In 2008, we took a large dip in final members, down to 1602, which I believe is greatly due to holding only one conference that year (membership is required for conference attendance). I am pleased to report that 2009 currently has 1909 members and more will come from the ACL-IJCNLP 2009 conference attendance plus some more individuals joining. So, it appears we are back on track and should expect over 2000 members by the end of the year. The changes to our membership types (elimination of Joint membership option) and benefits (going to electronic-only version of the Journal, offering select publishers’ discounts, etc.) have not seemed to discourage members from joining the ACL.

'''Walker Fund:''' Thanks to the Executive for their approval of increasing Student Travel Awards funding beyond the previously typical 1-3 Walker Fund awards (basically never exceeding 10% of the roughly $30,000 in the Walker Fund account). This year, for ACL-IJCNLP 2009, $10,000 was allocated to be distributed along with the SRW and AFNLP/COLIPS funding and the Student Volunteer Program to support as many students as possible.

'''Conferences: '''

While we know from media reports that there is an economic downturn worldwide which has effected many conferences with lowered attendance, this is not the case at all for our three ACL events in 2009. A concern we always have, when all three ACLs happen in one year is that there is a drop in anticipated attendance at each individual conference but, possibly this year, the economy has enticed people to stay in their own region but to come out in record numbers.

EACL 2009, held in Athens, Greece, enjoyed a record attendance of 515 people. Much of this success is due to the excellent stewardship of Alex Lascarides and Vangelis Karkaletsis and his tremendous local team.

NAACL 2009, in Boulder, Colorado, was also quite a success, in no small part due to Martha Palmer, Jim Martin and Christina Paterno of the University’s Conference Services Office. Their dedication and attention to detail (and the beautiful setting!) made for a successful meeting, with 682 attendees.

ACL-IJCNLP 2009 is almost upon us and is already exceeding our attendance expectations, with 751 pre-registered as of the end of last week. The coordination efforts of the entire planning committee and exuberant local organizing, headed by Haizhou Li, will ensure a superb experience for all who go to Singapore.

In April, Jan Hajic and I met with Joakim Nivre and others to conduct the ACL 2010 site visit in Uppsala, Sweden. The logistics were reviewed, sites seen and selected for the conference and banquet venues, and organizing matters discussed. We are excited to be going to Uppsala! And, Ido Dagan and I will be conducting the site visit in September for ACL 2011.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

I am very pleased to report that EACL 2009 reaped about 45,000 euros in conference support and NAACL 2009 received commitments totaling $30,750. And, ACL-IJCNLP 2009 has commitments of well over $30,000. This is a very healthy amount of support, indeed! Many thanks to all sponsors who continue to believe in the importance of our meetings and help to make our conferences successful!

The ACL Office will act as record-keeper of our sponsor contacts and assist any interested company representatives in making new, additional, or repetitive donations, clarify sponsorship benefits, and put potential sponsors in touch with the proper Sponsorship Chair(s).

2009Q1 Reports: Office

2009-03-10T22:28:14Z

PriscillaRasmussen:

Priscilla Rasmussen

10 March 2009

'''ACL Business Office Report – '''
'''Follow-up on “to do” items from the January Conference Call'''

1. '''“Fire Sale” of Proceedings''': It was agreed we would offer all proceedings (ACL, EACL, NAACL, Coling main conferences, and workshops) 3 years or older for sale at $5.00 each to try to clear out some of our older stock before the end of March 2010 when our lease runs out on the current location. I have thought about how to do this and think that first I will ask Chris Pennington to update the current Publications Order form to be sure all proceedings are included and reduce the costs directly on the order form to $5.00 for most of the proceedings. Then, I can send an announcement of the “fire sale” to our membership and to the few book resellers and Ebsco who order directly from us. I can also send the announcement to Linguist, Corpora and any other lists people might suggest to me. Beyond these ideas, I am unsure how to tap into a resource of libraries and/or other institutions who might be interested (and able to pay for the shipping).

2. '''Selling the steel shelving''': I believe I will be able to do this fairly easily but, of course, this cannot happen until close to March 2010 when we will move.

3. '''New Office locations for 2010''': Since I had to call our current landlord (a real estate office, privately owned) to make the agreement that our lease would be extended for one more year, through March 31, 2010, I spoke with one of the owners about other rental possibilities and pricing. She said that the “going rate” for rentals is $12-$14 per square foot. It turns out we got a good deal when signing the lease for $850 for somewhere between 750-775 sq. ft. of current space. I measured what I think we would need as new office space and think about 400 sq. ft. would be good. She has been happy with our tenancy so offered possible smaller space within her 2-story real estate office building (still in the same town, Stroudsburg) or in her small 1-story satellite office the next town over (which is closer to my home). Of course, this far out, she could not make a commitment of space in either building. I plan to have a meeting with her in the next couple of months to further discuss our options through her agency and, if this does not work out, I will have a lot of time to “shop around”, although small spaces such as what we need seem harder to find.

4. '''Sponsorship''': I have spoken to Bill Dolan (Microsoft) who will try to figure out what he can afford to give this year. He said he is feeling the pinch of the times and would not be in a position to give as much as in the past. I have not gotten the final word from him yet. I also spoke to Patrick Pantel (Yahoo!) who has gone back to his funding people and will let me know what he can do for us. I left multiple messages with Fernando Pereira (Google) both in email and by phone but have failed so far to make a connection…Still trying. I was a bit more successful with IBM, getting their usual $1,000 commitment for IBM Best Student Paper awards at both NAACL and ACL/IJCNLP. I also sent email inquiries to Mike Morgan (Morgan Claypool Publishers) and Olga Chiarcos (Springer). Mike has agreed to be at NAACL as a “manned” exhibit table and is considering Singapore. I have not heard back from Olga yet but will ping her again. And, lastly, I got the contacts from Bonnie of all the Publishers who are offering discounts to our members. My thinking is that they are showing interest in the ACL by offering discounts so they may well be interested in some sort of book exhibits, too. In all cases, as an ACL “Inc.” representative, I am pushing the 3-pack idea as much as I can but, of course, accepting whatever they are comfortable in giving.

5. '''Wachovia and safeguarding our funds''': Wachovia Bank now has appointed a Small Business Representative with whom I have scheduled two meetings so far and both meetings have been cancelled. I hope to reschedule but it will not be in time for the conference call on March 12th. I will report to Graeme and the exec. Once I have met with her.

----

Priscilla Rasmussen
12 January 2009

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

First, all the best to everyone throughout 2009 and, my sincere thanks for my contract renewal and raise…much appreciated!

Graeme Hirst and I continue working on setting up a good system for transferring financial information back and forth and getting our accounting scheme in place.

John Kirby, my assistant, continues to be invaluable to me in many aspects of keeping the office, memberships and publications in order. Mainly, though, as many of you have seen when he accompanies me to our conferences, I am finding bringing him along when possible allows me greater freedom to attend meetings, put out logistical fires, and do all those things I need to do but am torn in half when trying to also manage the registration desk full time. So far, I have only brought John to meetings I was able to drive to and had negotiated his stay as part of the hotel contract (or got agreement to use some of our earned credit nights) so his involvement would
not cost anything to ACL other than his working hours. Of course, I'd really benefit from having him come to both Boulder and Singapore but hadn't wanted to introduce more costs to the conferences. If possible, though, bringing John along (if he can come) would be excellent!

Our Office three-year lease comes to an end as of April 1st. Within the lease is an option of two one-year extensions “at no more than 5% increase per year”. I intend to work with the realtor to lock in the first year (2009/10) option at the best (lowest) possible rate. It occurs to me that, beginning April 1, 2010, I might make three rooms in my home available as the office (Graeme and Kathy McCoy have both seen my space at home). This would reduce the ACL Office rent as well as making it more convenient for me. I mention this just as a possible option for the future for you to mull over since my expectation is that less space will be required to house fewer hardcopies of both the journals and conference publications.

Regarding moving the office to my home, first some background: ACL has always paid 75% of the office rental; AMTA pays 10%; ARCS (my company) pays 15%. These percentages were derived based upon the amount of time I spend on ACL and AMTA activities and the remainder covers whatever other events I might pick up through ARCS (Digital Government Society, WISE, ISI, etc). So, currently:

$850 Rent = $630 ACL/$85 AMTA/$135 ARCS (expected increase April 1st to $900 = $675 ACL/
$90 AMTA/$135 ARCS)
Plus security system (around $400/year) and electric utilities (around $1,000/year)
Yearly ACL office rental cost = $630 X 12 = $7,560 + $400 + $1,000 = $8,960
ACL currently pays separate phone/fax/internet regardless of where the office is located

If we were to use my loft and its closets as the "main office", one bedroom as storage/mailing/etc. that must always be accessible, and half my barn for historical and publication storage, this equals about 600 sq ft of my 2000 sq ft. So, with the same
75% ACL, 10% AMTA, and 15% ARCS of the 30% of total sq. ft. space:

30% of $1,763/month I pay for my house = $528.90/month
75% ACL = $396.67
Plus 25% of electric monthly average of $185 = $52 X 75% = $39
So, ACL's monthly portion would be $396.67 + $39 = $435.67 = $435.00
Presumes house security and water are part of my household expenses and not chargable;
ACL continues to pay phone/fax/internet

So, ACL would stand to save about $311.66/month = $3,739.92/year or $11,000+ over the next 3 years.

'''Publications''': Publications orders seem to have leveled off to only a small amount per year now. We have a few “standard” book resalers who faithfully order small quantities of the newest publications but have very few orders from the membership these days. And, we have almost no requests for workshops or older copies of main conference proceedings (I think there were only 1-2 older main proceedings ordered in all of 2008). So, I believe we need to further reduce our hardcopy ordering for future conferences. And, by the end of the month, the online Publications Order Form will be updated to reflect our newest publications, including Coling 2008.

'''Membership:''' I will summarize here the important points of the two spreadsheets I have sent to this group as excel files: Total membership at the end of 2008 was 1602, comprised of 1137 Regular, 463 Student, and 2 Unknown type members. Three took advantage of the ISCA discount to first-time members and eight were from hard-currency problem countries. The worldwide composition is 214 Asia/Pacific Rim, 59 Canada/Mexico, 439 Europe, 10 South America and 880 USA. Conferences generated memberships as well as through direct membership applications: 426 through ACL 2008 and 110 through EMNLP 2008.

We had a record-breaking total of 2,123 members in 2006. For 2007, after taking out fraudulent and conference no-shows who did not pay at all, we ended the year with 2,104 total members. Sadly, my optimism of coming close to the 2,000 mark did not materialize by the end of 2008. Our final membership count is 1,602. My best guesses of why we see this slippage in members are that NAACL hosted ACL this year and did not hold its own event and EACL did not hold a European conference in 2008 either. Conferences seem to generate quite a lot of one-time members who must become members to attend our meetings. For example, ACL 2007 in Prague totaled 1082 registrants, of which 533 were one-timers who did not renew for 2008. Another approximately 250 registrants from 2006 Coling/ACL renewed only for 2007 but not again for 2008. It seems many of these were Europeans who do go to Colings and EACLs moreso that to US-held meetings. We had 425 brand new memberships in 2008, most of whom attended either ACL 2008 or EMNLP 2008 and will hopefully renew for 2009. I would expect in 2009, with three conferences, one in each geographic area of the world we represent, our membership should increase over the 2008 numbers.

We begin 2009 with the multi-year members who carry over into 2009 plus some anxious renewals that have come in even before our online membership form has been updated. The total membership for 2009 now stands at 254. The membership form should be updated online within the next week or so. And, lastly, with our changes to memberships and benefits and the decision to eliminate the Joint membership option, I want to let you know there were only 22 such memberships to be effected.

'''Walker Fund:''' Thanks to the Executive for their approval of increasing Student Travel Awards funding beyond the previously typical 1-3 Walker Fund awards (basically never exceeding 10% of the roughly $30,000 in the Walker Fund account). I received a total of 34 applications for Student Travel Awards and was able to extend the $10,000 to make meaningful awards to 14 students. Unfortunately, two students were from China and, in the end, could not get visas to attend the conference.

'''Conferences: '''

ACL 2008 in Columbus ended with a final count of 804 total registrants. The last of the invoices was recently paid so we can begin to finalize the bookkeeping. I believe there should be a reasonably healthy surplus.

EMNLP 2008 in Hawaii was also a success with a final registration count of 227. Holding EMNLP immediately following AMTA 2008, in the same hotel, resulted in a good amount of “cross-pollination” which helped the attendance at both meetings.

The planning for ACL/IJCNLP 2009 in Singapore continues; I expect my involvement to intensify in the coming months.

EACL 2009, to be held in Athens, Greece, promises to also be a wonderful meeting. The Office continues to provide advice and support as requested. Registration opened mid-December.

And, NAACL 2009, in Boulder, Colorado, will be an exciting meeting, with the beautiful mountains surrounding our venue. The planning and budgeting is shaping up quite nicely and most everything is now in place.

The Office has also been heavily involved in negotiating the final NAACL 2010 contract for Los Angeles and this contract is now in place. My next steps are to finalize the Banquet contract with the Library which is nearby the hotel. Also, in April 2009, Jan Hajic and I will conduct the ACL 2010 site visit to Uppsala, Sweden. Joakim Nivre is pulling together a site visit agenda for us now. And, Ido Dagan has just issued the ACL 2011 Call for Bids so, hopefully soon, we will have those proposed bids for review.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

I am very pleased to report that, for ACL 2008, we received commitments totaling $33,000 which is a very healthy amount of support, indeed! Additionally, two workshops (BioNLP and SIGdial) found their own support of their 2008 workshops, totaling $5,250. EMNLP 2008 received support from Google in the amount of $4,000 and $500 from Microsoft. Many thanks to all sponsors who helped to make our conferences and workshops successful!

Unfortunately, so far for the three 2009 conferences, non-local support has been very slow to materialize, although I have just received a Gold Level ($5,500) sponsorship check from the Rosetta Stone for NAACL 2009 (through Martha Palmer and the local team) and have invoiced CNGL for a 3-pack sponsorship.

2009Q1 Reports: Office

2009-01-26T22:36:53Z

PriscillaRasmussen:

Priscilla Rasmussen
12 January 2009

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

First, all the best to everyone throughout 2009 and, my sincere thanks for my contract renewal and raise…much appreciated!

Graeme Hirst and I continue working on setting up a good system for transferring financial information back and forth and getting our accounting scheme in place.

John Kirby, my assistant, continues to be invaluable to me in many aspects of keeping the office, memberships and publications in order. Mainly, though, as many of you have seen when he accompanies me to our conferences, I am finding bringing him along when possible allows me greater freedom to attend meetings, put out logistical fires, and do all those things I need to do but am torn in half when trying to also manage the registration desk full time. So far, I have only brought John to meetings I was able to drive to and had negotiated his stay as part of the hotel contract (or got agreement to use some of our earned credit nights) so his involvement would
not cost anything to ACL other than his working hours. Of course, I'd really benefit from having him come to both Boulder and Singapore but hadn't wanted to introduce more costs to the conferences. If possible, though, bringing John along (if he can come) would be excellent!

Our Office three-year lease comes to an end as of April 1st. Within the lease is an option of two one-year extensions “at no more than 5% increase per year”. I intend to work with the realtor to lock in the first year (2009/10) option at the best (lowest) possible rate. It occurs to me that, beginning April 1, 2010, I might make three rooms in my home available as the office (Graeme and Kathy McCoy have both seen my space at home). This would reduce the ACL Office rent as well as making it more convenient for me. I mention this just as a possible option for the future for you to mull over since my expectation is that less space will be required to house fewer hardcopies of both the journals and conference publications.

Regarding moving the office to my home, first some background: ACL has always paid 75% of the office rental; AMTA pays 10%; ARCS (my company) pays 15%. These percentages were derived based upon the amount of time I spend on ACL and AMTA activities and the remainder covers whatever other events I might pick up through ARCS (Digital Government Society, WISE, ISI, etc). So, currently:

$850 Rent = $630 ACL/$85 AMTA/$135 ARCS (expected increase April 1st to $900 = $675 ACL/
$90 AMTA/$135 ARCS)
Plus security system (around $400/year) and electric utilities (around $1,000/year)
Yearly ACL office rental cost = $630 X 12 = $7,560 + $400 + $1,000 = $8,960
ACL currently pays separate phone/fax/internet regardless of where the office is located

If we were to use my loft and its closets as the "main office", one bedroom as storage/mailing/etc. that must always be accessible, and half my barn for historical and publication storage, this equals about 600 sq ft of my 2000 sq ft. So, with the same
75% ACL, 10% AMTA, and 15% ARCS of the 30% of total sq. ft. space:

30% of $1,763/month I pay for my house = $528.90/month
75% ACL = $396.67
Plus 25% of electric monthly average of $185 = $52 X 75% = $39
So, ACL's monthly portion would be $396.67 + $39 = $435.67 = $435.00
Presumes house security and water are part of my household expenses and not chargable;
ACL continues to pay phone/fax/internet

So, ACL would stand to save about $311.66/month = $3,739.92/year or $11,000+ over the next 3 years.

'''Publications''': Publications orders seem to have leveled off to only a small amount per year now. We have a few “standard” book resalers who faithfully order small quantities of the newest publications but have very few orders from the membership these days. And, we have almost no requests for workshops or older copies of main conference proceedings (I think there were only 1-2 older main proceedings ordered in all of 2008). So, I believe we need to further reduce our hardcopy ordering for future conferences. And, by the end of the month, the online Publications Order Form will be updated to reflect our newest publications, including Coling 2008.

'''Membership:''' I will summarize here the important points of the two spreadsheets I have sent to this group as excel files: Total membership at the end of 2008 was 1602, comprised of 1137 Regular, 463 Student, and 2 Unknown type members. Three took advantage of the ISCA discount to first-time members and eight were from hard-currency problem countries. The worldwide composition is 214 Asia/Pacific Rim, 59 Canada/Mexico, 439 Europe, 10 South America and 880 USA. Conferences generated memberships as well as through direct membership applications: 426 through ACL 2008 and 110 through EMNLP 2008.

We had a record-breaking total of 2,123 members in 2006. For 2007, after taking out fraudulent and conference no-shows who did not pay at all, we ended the year with 2,104 total members. Sadly, my optimism of coming close to the 2,000 mark did not materialize by the end of 2008. Our final membership count is 1,602. My best guesses of why we see this slippage in members are that NAACL hosted ACL this year and did not hold its own event and EACL did not hold a European conference in 2008 either. Conferences seem to generate quite a lot of one-time members who must become members to attend our meetings. For example, ACL 2007 in Prague totaled 1082 registrants, of which 533 were one-timers who did not renew for 2008. Another approximately 250 registrants from 2006 Coling/ACL renewed only for 2007 but not again for 2008. It seems many of these were Europeans who do go to Colings and EACLs moreso that to US-held meetings. We had 425 brand new memberships in 2008, most of whom attended either ACL 2008 or EMNLP 2008 and will hopefully renew for 2009. I would expect in 2009, with three conferences, one in each geographic area of the world we represent, our membership should increase over the 2008 numbers.

We begin 2009 with the multi-year members who carry over into 2009 plus some anxious renewals that have come in even before our online membership form has been updated. The total membership for 2009 now stands at 254. The membership form should be updated online within the next week or so. And, lastly, with our changes to memberships and benefits and the decision to eliminate the Joint membership option, I want to let you know there were only 22 such memberships to be effected.

'''Walker Fund:''' Thanks to the Executive for their approval of increasing Student Travel Awards funding beyond the previously typical 1-3 Walker Fund awards (basically never exceeding 10% of the roughly $30,000 in the Walker Fund account). I received a total of 34 applications for Student Travel Awards and was able to extend the $10,000 to make meaningful awards to 14 students. Unfortunately, two students were from China and, in the end, could not get visas to attend the conference.

'''Conferences: '''

ACL 2008 in Columbus ended with a final count of 804 total registrants. The last of the invoices was recently paid so we can begin to finalize the bookkeeping. I believe there should be a reasonably healthy surplus.

EMNLP 2008 in Hawaii was also a success with a final registration count of 227. Holding EMNLP immediately following AMTA 2008, in the same hotel, resulted in a good amount of “cross-pollination” which helped the attendance at both meetings.

The planning for ACL/IJCNLP 2009 in Singapore continues; I expect my involvement to intensify in the coming months.

EACL 2009, to be held in Athens, Greece, promises to also be a wonderful meeting. The Office continues to provide advice and support as requested. Registration opened mid-December.

And, NAACL 2009, in Boulder, Colorado, will be an exciting meeting, with the beautiful mountains surrounding our venue. The planning and budgeting is shaping up quite nicely and most everything is now in place.

The Office has also been heavily involved in negotiating the final NAACL 2010 contract for Los Angeles and this contract is now in place. My next steps are to finalize the Banquet contract with the Library which is nearby the hotel. Also, in April 2009, Jan Hajic and I will conduct the ACL 2010 site visit to Uppsala, Sweden. Joakim Nivre is pulling together a site visit agenda for us now. And, Ido Dagan has just issued the ACL 2011 Call for Bids so, hopefully soon, we will have those proposed bids for review.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

I am very pleased to report that, for ACL 2008, we received commitments totaling $33,000 which is a very healthy amount of support, indeed! Additionally, two workshops (BioNLP and SIGdial) found their own support of their 2008 workshops, totaling $5,250. EMNLP 2008 received support from Google in the amount of $4,000 and $500 from Microsoft. Many thanks to all sponsors who helped to make our conferences and workshops successful!

Unfortunately, so far for the three 2009 conferences, non-local support has been very slow to materialize, although I have just received a Gold Level ($5,500) sponsorship check from the Rosetta Stone for NAACL 2009 (through Martha Palmer and the local team) and have invoiced CNGL for a 3-pack sponsorship.

2009Q1 Reports: Office

2009-01-16T18:51:20Z

PriscillaRasmussen:

Priscilla Rasmussen
12 January 2009

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

First, all the best to everyone throughout 2009 and, my sincere thanks for my contract renewal and raise…much appreciated!

Graeme Hirst and I continue working on setting up a good system for transferring financial information back and forth and getting our accounting scheme in place.

John Kirby, my assistant, continues to be invaluable to me in many aspects of keeping the office, memberships and publications in order. Mainly, though, as many of you have seen when he accompanies me to our conferences, I am finding bringing him along when possible allows me greater freedom to attend meetings, put out logistical fires, and do all those things I need to do but am torn in half when trying to also manage the registration desk full time.

Our Office three-year lease comes to an end as of April 1st. Within the lease is an option of two one-year extensions “at no more than 5% increase per year”. I intend to work with the realtor to lock in the first year (2009/10) option at the best (lowest) possible rate. It occurs to me that, beginning April 1, 2010, I might make three rooms in my home available as the office (Graeme and Kathy McCoy have both seen my space at home). This would reduce the ACL Office rent as well as making it more convenient for me. I mention this just as a possible option for the future for you to mull over since my expectation is that less space will be required to house fewer hardcopies of both the journals and conference publications.

'''Publications''': Publications orders seem to have leveled off to only a small amount per year now. We have a few “standard” book resalers who faithfully order small quantities of the newest publications but have very few orders from the membership these days. And, we have almost no requests for workshops or older copies of main conference proceedings (I think there were only 1-2 older main proceedings ordered in all of 2008). So, I believe we need to further reduce our hardcopy ordering for future conferences. And, by the end of the month, the online Publications Order Form will be updated to reflect our newest publications, including Coling 2008.

'''Membership:''' I will summarize here the important points of the two spreadsheets I have sent to this group as excel files: Total membership at the end of 2008 was 1602, comprised of 1137 Regular, 463 Student, and 2 Unknown type members. Three took advantage of the ISCA discount to first-time members and eight were from hard-currency problem countries. The worldwide composition is 214 Asia/Pacific Rim, 59 Canada/Mexico, 439 Europe, 10 South America and 880 USA. Conferences generated memberships as well as through direct membership applications: 426 through ACL 2008 and 110 through EMNLP 2008.

We had a record-breaking total of 2,123 members in 2006. For 2007, after taking out fraudulent and conference no-shows who did not pay at all, we ended the year with 2,104 total members. Sadly, my optimism of coming close to the 2,000 mark did not materialize by the end of 2008. Our final membership count is 1,602. My best guesses of why we see this slippage in members are that NAACL hosted ACL this year and did not hold its own event and EACL did not hold a European conference in 2008 either. Conferences seem to generate quite a lot of one-time members who must become members to attend our meetings. For example, ACL 2007 in Prague totaled 1082 registrants, of which 533 were one-timers who did not renew for 2008. Another approximately 250 registrants from 2006 Coling/ACL renewed only for 2007 but not again for 2008. It seems many of these were Europeans who do go to Colings and EACLs moreso that to US-held meetings. We had 425 brand new memberships in 2008, most of whom attended either ACL 2008 or EMNLP 2008 and will hopefully renew for 2009. I would expect in 2009, with three conferences, one in each geographic area of the world we represent, our membership should increase over the 2008 numbers.

We begin 2009 with the multi-year members who carry over into 2009 plus some anxious renewals that have come in even before our online membership form has been updated. The total membership for 2009 now stands at 254. The membership form should be updated online within the next week or so. And, lastly, with our changes to memberships and benefits and the decision to eliminate the Joint membership option, I want to let you know there were only 22 such memberships to be effected.

'''Walker Fund:''' Thanks to the Executive for their approval of increasing Student Travel Awards funding beyond the previously typical 1-3 Walker Fund awards (basically never exceeding 10% of the roughly $30,000 in the Walker Fund account). I received a total of 34 applications for Student Travel Awards and was able to extend the $10,000 to make meaningful awards to 14 students. Unfortunately, two students were from China and, in the end, could not get visas to attend the conference.

'''Conferences: '''

ACL 2008 in Columbus ended with a final count of 804 total registrants. The last of the invoices was recently paid so we can begin to finalize the bookkeeping. I believe there should be a reasonably healthy surplus.

EMNLP 2008 in Hawaii was also a success with a final registration count of 227. Holding EMNLP immediately following AMTA 2008, in the same hotel, resulted in a good amount of “cross-pollination” which helped the attendance at both meetings.

The planning for ACL/IJCNLP 2009 in Singapore continues; I expect my involvement to intensify in the coming months.

EACL 2009, to be held in Athens, Greece, promises to also be a wonderful meeting. The Office continues to provide advice and support as requested. Registration opened mid-December.

And, NAACL 2009, in Boulder, Colorado, will be an exciting meeting, with the beautiful mountains surrounding our venue. The planning and budgeting is shaping up quite nicely and most everything is now in place.

The Office has also been heavily involved in negotiating the final NAACL 2010 contract for Los Angeles and this contract is now in place. My next steps are to finalize the Banquet contract with the Library which is nearby the hotel. Also, in April 2009, Jan Hajic and I will conduct the ACL 2010 site visit to Uppsala, Sweden. Joakim Nivre is pulling together a site visit agenda for us now. And, Ido Dagan has just issued the ACL 2011 Call for Bids so, hopefully soon, we will have those proposed bids for review.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

I am very pleased to report that, for ACL 2008, we received commitments totaling $33,000 which is a very healthy amount of support, indeed! Additionally, two workshops (BioNLP and SIGdial) found their own support of their 2008 workshops, totaling $5,250. EMNLP 2008 received support from Google in the amount of $4,000 and $500 from Microsoft. Many thanks to all sponsors who helped to make our conferences and workshops successful!

Unfortunately, so far for the three 2009 conferences, non-local support has been very slow to materialize, although I have just received a Gold Level ($5,500) sponsorship check from the Rosetta Stone for NAACL 2009 (through Martha Palmer and the local team) and have invoiced CNGL for a 3-pack sponsorship.

2009Q1 Reports: Office

2009-01-14T20:47:37Z

PriscillaRasmussen: New page: Priscilla Rasmussen 12 January 2009 '''ACL Business Office Report''' First, all the best to everyone throughout 2009 and, my sincere thanks for my contract renewal and raise…much app...

Priscilla Rasmussen
12 January 2009

'''ACL Business Office Report'''

First, all the best to everyone throughout 2009 and, my sincere thanks for my contract renewal and raise…much appreciated!

Graeme Hirst and I continue working on setting up a good system for transferring financial information back and forth and getting our accounting scheme in place.

John Kirby, my assistant, continues to be invaluable to me in many aspects of keeping the office, memberships and publications in order. Mainly, though, as many of you have seen when he accompanies me to our conferences, I am finding bringing him along when possible allows me greater freedom to attend meetings, put out logistical fires, and do all those things I need to do but am torn in half when trying to also manage the registration desk full time.

Our Office three-year lease comes to an end as of April 1st. Within the lease is an option of two one-year extensions “at no more than 5% increase per year”. I intend to work with the realtor to lock in the first year (2009/10) option at the best (lowest) possible rate. It occurs to me that, beginning April 1, 2010, I might make three rooms in my home available as the office (Graeme and Kathy McCoy have both seen my space at home). This would reduce the ACL Office rent as well as making it more convenient for me. I mention this just as a possible option for the future for you to mull over since my expectation is that less space will be required to house fewer hardcopies of both the journals and conference publications.

'''Publications''': Publications orders seem to have leveled off to only a small amount per year now. We have a few “standard” book resalers who faithfully order small quantities of the newest publications but have very few orders from the membership these days. And, we have almost no requests for workshops or older copies of main conference proceedings (I think there were only 1-2 older main proceedings ordered in all of 2008). So, I believe we need to further reduce our hardcopy ordering for future conferences. And, by the end of the month, the online Publications Order Form will be updated to reflect our newest publications, including Coling 2008.

'''Membership:''' We had a record-breaking total of 2,123 members in 2006. For 2007, after taking out fraudulent and conference no-shows who did not pay at all, we ended the year with 2,104 total members. Sadly, my optimism of coming close to the 2,000 mark did not materialize by the end of 2008. Our final membership count is 1,602. My best guesses of why we see this slippage in members are that NAACL hosted ACL this year and did not hold its own event and EACL did not hold a European conference in 2008 either. Conferences seem to generate quite a lot of one-time members who must become members to attend our meetings. For example, ACL 2007 in Prague totaled 1082 registrants, of which 533 were one-timers who did not renew for 2008. Another approximately 250 registrants from 2006 Coling/ACL renewed only for 2007 but not again for 2008. It seems many of these were Europeans who do go to Colings and EACLs moreso that to US-held meetings. We had 425 brand new memberships in 2008, most of whom attended either ACL 2008 or EMNLP 2008 and will hopefully renew for 2009. I would expect in 2009, with three conferences, one in each geographic area of the world we represent, our membership should increase over the 2008 numbers.

We begin 2009 with the multi-year members who carry over into 2009 plus some anxious renewals that have come in even before our online membership form has been updated. The total membership for 2009 now stands at 254. The membership form should be updated online within the next week or so. And, lastly, with our changes to memberships and benefits and the decision to eliminate the Joint membership option, I want to let you know there were only 22 such memberships to be effected.

'''Walker Fund:''' Thanks to the Executive for their approval of increasing Student Travel Awards funding beyond the previously typical 1-3 Walker Fund awards (basically never exceeding 10% of the roughly $30,000 in the Walker Fund account). I received a total of 34 applications for Student Travel Awards and was able to extend the $10,000 to make meaningful awards to 14 students. Unfortunately, two students were from China and, in the end, could not get visas to attend the conference.

'''Conferences: '''

ACL 2008 in Columbus ended with a final count of 804 total registrants. The last of the invoices was recently paid so we can begin to finalize the bookkeeping. I believe there should be a reasonably healthy surplus.

EMNLP 2008 in Hawaii was also a success with a final registration count of 227. Holding EMNLP immediately following AMTA 2008, in the same hotel, resulted in a good amount of “cross-pollination” which helped the attendance at both meetings.

The planning for ACL/IJCNLP 2009 in Singapore continues; I expect my involvement to intensify in the coming months.

EACL 2009, to be held in Athens, Greece, promises to also be a wonderful meeting. The Office continues to provide advice and support as requested. Registration opened mid-December.

And, NAACL 2009, in Boulder, Colorado, will be an exciting meeting, with the beautiful mountains surrounding our venue. The planning and budgeting is shaping up quite nicely and most everything is now in place.

The Office has also been heavily involved in negotiating the final NAACL 2010 contract for Los Angeles and this contract is now in place. My next steps are to finalize the Banquet contract with the Library which is nearby the hotel. Also, in April 2009, Jan Hajic and I will conduct the ACL 2010 site visit to Uppsala, Sweden. Joakim Nivre is pulling together a site visit agenda for us now. And, Ido Dagan has just issued the ACL 2011 Call for Bids so, hopefully soon, we will have those proposed bids for review.

'''Conference Sponsorship:'''

I am very pleased to report that, for ACL 2008, we received commitments totaling $33,000 which is a very healthy amount of support, indeed! Additionally, two workshops (BioNLP and SIGdial) found their own support of their 2008 workshops, totaling $5,250. EMNLP 2008 received support from Google in the amount of $4,000 and $500 from Microsoft. Many thanks to all sponsors who helped to make our conferences and workshops successful!

Unfortunately, so far for the three 2009 conferences, non-local support has been very slow to materialize, although I have just received a Gold Level ($5,500) sponsorship check from the Rosetta Stone for NAACL 2009 (through Martha Palmer and the local team).