Admin Wiki - User contributions [en]

2011Q3 Reports: NAACL

2011-06-21T06:23:46Z

RebeccaHwa: /* Report from NAACL, June 2011 */

=Report from NAACL, June 2011 =

Rebecca Hwa - Chapter board chair

Owen Rambow - Past chapter board chair

Christopher Manning - Treasurer

Anoop Sarkar - Secretary

==Executive Committee Meetings==

The Board will meet on June 20th, at the ACL HLT 2011 conference in Portland, Oregon. Additionally, the Board converses regularly by e-mail.

==Treasurer's Report==

Prepared by: Christopher Manning, NAACL Treasurer; June 19, 2011, Palo Alto, CA.

The Chapterʼs bank account held $116,072.66 at the end of May 2011. This is about $20,000 less than at the same time last year ($136,803.38). Income for the year was about $23.5K, primarily from booking surpluses from past NAACL conferences: $14K from NAACL HLT 2007 (in Rochester, which did produce a surplus, somewhat against the expectations of many!) and $9K from NAACL HLT 2009 (in Boulder). Expenses were considerably up from usual at $44K, though partly because of expenses that should have been booked to different years clumping: $17.5K for JHU summer workshop support (for extra students attending the first two weeks of lectures, including fees to JHU covering 2009 and 2010), $10K support to NACLO covering both NACLO 2010 and 2011, $10K support for the LSA Linguistic Institute 2011, $4K for NAACL 2010 student travel support, and $2.5K for regional workshops (in the NW USA and Argentina).

However, the big – and disastrous – financial news is in the pending category. The NAACL HLT 2010 conference in Los Angeles made a loss of at least $59K (this could actually still even grow a bit if some promised but as yet unpaid sponsorship fails to materialize). This is major bad news since it wipes out half of the surplus that NAACL has accumulated in its 10+ years of
existence, and which it uses to fund other activities such as those listed above. As the chart shows, this is the first NAACL conference to yield a deficit. But boy did it yield a deficit! What went wrong? It seems like it was a combination of things: (i) bad, unrealistically rosy budget projections of attendance and costs, (ii) unexpectedly high catering costs and extra charges
from the hotel, (iii) unexpectedly low attendance (which is kind of surprising, since the competing ACL event wasnʼt in a maximally easy to get to location), and (iv) poor tracking of data as it came in, which should have been able to alert us much earlier that things were not working out as expected. It shouldnʼt have taken till a year after the event. We need to fix at least (i) and (iv). (ii) and (iii) are harder to control, but also to be worked on. We either need cheaper venues or else NAACL conference fees just need to increase a bit.

While this bad news will probably make us more cautious in funding other activities, in the short term, there is no reason why we cannot still continue to fund the activities that we traditionally have, and so I imagine we should and will. But the action items are improved financial stewardship and revenue-generation thinking to guarantee future conference surpluses so that these activities can continue for the longer term future.

==North American conference in 2011==

This year's NAACL conference is to be held jointly with ACL in Portland, Oregon (ACL HLT 2011). Dekang Lin (Google) is the General Chair, and Brian Roark and Richard Sproat (both OGI) are leading the local arrangements efforts.

==North American conference in 2012==

NAACL-HLT 2012 will be held in Montreal, Canada. It is scheduled to take place June 3 -- June 8 2012, at the Montreal Sheraton. Sabine Bergler (Concordia University) and Guy Lapalme (University of Montreal) have agreed to serve on the local arrangements advisory committee. Jennifer Chu-Carroll (IBM) is the general chair.

==North American conference in 2013==

No bid for hosting NAACL HLT 2013 has been received as of this writing. The exec board will follow the procedure established for NAACL 2012 and select a suitable site. This is a major agenda item for the 2011 NAACL board meeting.

==Support for Summer Schools and Other Educational Outreach==

NAACL continues to support educational programs such as NACLO (the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad) and the Johns Hopkins summer school. This year, we have also provided financial sponsorship to the Linguistic Institute of the LSA in 2011, to be held in July at Boulder, Colorado.

==Support for Outreach to Emerging CL Communities==

In 2010, a small fund was established to support Latin American activities and a small fund to support regional student conferences. We formalized the reviewing process as follows: there would be two submission deadlines, one in September, and one in March; each proposal would be evaluated based on its potential impact to stimulate collaborations between researchers from emerging geographical regions. For the March 2011 deadline, we have received five proposals; out of which, three were chosen. They are: Symposium in Information and Human Language Technology (STIL 2011), Escuela de Linguistica Computacional (ELiC 2011), and NLP&Web-based Technologies Workshop 2011.

2011Q3 Reports: NAACL

2011-06-13T17:39:33Z

RebeccaHwa: /* Support for Outreach to Emerging CL Communities */

2011Q3 Reports: NAACL

2011-06-13T17:34:58Z

RebeccaHwa: /* Report from NAACL, June 2011 */

2011Q3 Reports: NAACL

2011-06-13T17:28:43Z

RebeccaHwa: /* Report from NAACL, June 2011 */

2011Q3 Reports: NAACL

2011-06-13T16:59:17Z

RebeccaHwa: /* Report from NAACL, June 2011 */

2011Q3 Reports: NAACL

2011-06-13T16:55:04Z

RebeccaHwa: /* Report from NAACL, June 2011 */

2011Q3 Reports: NAACL

2011-06-13T16:52:54Z

RebeccaHwa: /* Report from NAACL, June 2011 */

2011Q3 Reports: NAACL

2011-06-13T16:51:22Z

RebeccaHwa: New page: =Report from NAACL, June 2011 = Rebecca Hwa - Chapter board chair Owen Rambow - Past chapter board chair Christopher Manning - Treasurer Anoop Sarkar - Secretary

=Report from NAACL, June 2011 =

Rebecca Hwa - Chapter board chair

Owen Rambow - Past chapter board chair

Christopher Manning - Treasurer

Anoop Sarkar - Secretary

2011Q1 Reports: NAACL

2011-03-01T20:15:12Z

RebeccaHwa:

=Report from NAACL, February 2011 =

Rebecca Hwa - Chapter board chair

Owen Rambow - Past chapter board chair

Christopher Manning - Treasurer

Anoop Sarkar - Secretary

==Elections==

The NAACL election was held electronically in the Fall of 2010. David Chiang (USC-ISI) and Dan Gildea (University of Rochester) replaced Chris Brew (Ohio State University) and Ted Pedersen (University of Minnesota, Duluth) as board members.

==Executive Committee Meetings==

The Board converses regularly by e-mail. In addition, in 2011, the Board will meet in person at the ACL HLT 2011 conference in Portland.

==NAACL Treasurer's Report==

The NAACL bank account has been more active than usual for the period May 2010-Jan 2011, reflecting the new financial initiatives that NAACL has instituted in recent years. We booked surpluses from NAACL HLT 2007 ($14,000) and NAACL HLT 2009 ($9,000). This means both that NAACL has never had a financially unsuccessful conference and that we are less behind on post-conference accounting than ever before! (Thanks to Graeme and Chiaki for 2009, as well as to the NAACL treasurer for 2007.) We distributed about $23,000, including $10,000 to sponsor the LSA Linguistic Institute 2011 at Boulder, Colorado, $4,000 to support student travel to NAACL HLT 2010, $2,500 for workshop support under the local and Latin American funds (which we will be merging going forward), $5,000 in support of NACLO 2010, and $2,000 for JHU WS 2010 travel support. Pending expenses include supporting the JHU WS 2010 and NACLO 2011. For this period, income approximately equaled expenses, and the closing balance at the end of January was $136,590.97.

==North American conference in 2010==

NAACL HLT 2010 took place in Los Angeles, California, in June 2010. Ron Kaplan was the conference chair; Geral Penn (Toronto), Mary Harper (CASL), and Jill Burstein (ETS) were the PC co-chairs; and David Chiang and Ed Hovy were the local organizers.A detailed conference report has been prepared by Ron.

==North American conference in 2011==

This will be held jointly with ACL in June.

==North American conference in 2012==

The Board has decided to hold NAACL-HLT 2012 in Montreal, Canada. It is scheduled to take place June 3 -- June 8 2012, at the Montreal Sheraton. Sabine Bergler and Guy Lapalme have agreed to serve on the local arrangements advisory committee. The general chair and the PC co-chairs will be named shortly.

==Shaping Future NAACL-HLT conferences==

The NAACL Board continues to explore ways to make our conference more lively and diverse. As NAACL-HLT conferences continue to grow, the increased size does add complexity for local arrangements. Although they do have the option to delegate to a professional conference organizer, many smaller institutions are hesitant about taking on the responsibility. No bid was received for hosting NAACL HLT 2012 despite active encouragements from the Board. Thus the Board has begun to experiment with alternative models of local arrangements to further reduce the burden on any particular institution. For 2012, the conference site was chosen by the Board based on the usual location selection criteria (e.g., geographical balance, active CL communities in the area). Then, researchers from the area are invited to serve on an advisory committee to offer suggestions about local arrangement matters. The tradition of calling for bids to host NAACL-HLT conferences will continue in the future, but our experiences in organizing NAACL-HLT 2012 may act as a guideline for those years when no institution comes forth.

==NAACL Representative to the ACL Sponsorship Committee for 2011-2013==

Srinivas Bangalore (AT&T) and Michael Gamon (MSR) are the current regional representatives (for the Americas) to the sponsorship committee. Michael will continue to serve in this committee next year. He will be joined by Patrick Pantel (MSR).

==Support for Summer Schools and Other Educational Outreach==

We are continuing our support for NACLO (the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad) and student participation at the summer school during the Johns Hopkins Natural Language Engineering Summer Workshop. We are also sponsoring the LSA Linguistic Institute 2011 at Boulder, Colorado.

==Support for Outreach to Emerging CL communities==

At our June 2010 meeting, the Board decided to merge two small funds programs created in 2009 (the Latin American Fund and the Regional Conferences Fund) to form the Emerging Regions Fund. Its purpose is to encourage more regional interactions among students and researchers anywhere in the Americas. A total of $5,000 has been set aside for this program, and two deadlines were planned: September 1, 2010, and March 1, 2011. In September, three proposals were received; one from Argentina (http://cs.famaf.unc.edu.ar/~laura/nlpw/index.html) was funded.

2011Q1 Reports: NAACL

2011-03-01T20:08:12Z

RebeccaHwa: 1

=Report from NAACL, February 2011 =

Rebecca Hwa - Chapter board chair

Owen Rambow - Past chapter board chair

Christopher Manning - Treasurer

Anoop Sarkar - Secretary

==Elections==

The NAACL election was held electronically in the Fall of 2010. David Chiang (USC-ISI) and Dan Gildea (University of Rochester) replaced Chris Brew (Ohio State University) and Ted Pedersen (University of Minnesota, Duluth) as board members.

==Executive Committee Meetings==

The Board converses regularly by e-mail. In addition, in 2011, the Board will meet in person at the ACL HLT 2011 conference in Portland.

==NAACL Treasurer's Report==

The NAACL bank account has been more active than usual for the period May 2010-Jan 2011, reflecting the new financial initiatives that NAACL has instituted in recent years. We booked surpluses from NAACL HLT 2007 ($14,000) and NAACL HLT 2009 ($9,000). This means both that NAACL has never had a financially unsuccessful conference and that we are less behind on post-conference accounting than ever before! (Thanks to Graeme and Chiaki for 2009, as well as to the NAACL treasurer for 2007.) We distributed about $23,000, including $10,000 to sponsor the LSA Linguistic Institute 2011 at Boulder, Colorado, $4,000 to support student travel to NAACL HLT 2010, $2,500 for workshop support under the local and Latin American funds (which we will be merging going forward), $5,000 in support of NACLO 2010, and $2,000 for JHU WS 2010 travel support. Pending expenses include supporting the JHU WS 2010 and NACLO 2011. For this period, income approximately equaled expenses, and the closing balance at the end of January was $136,590.97.

==North American conference in 2010==

NAACL HLT 2010 took place in Los Angeles, California, in June 2010. Ron Kaplan was the conference chair; Geral Penn (Toronto), Mary Harper (CASL), and Jill Burstein (ETS) were the PC co-chairs; and David Chiang and Ed Hovy were the local organizers.A detailed conference report has been prepared by Ron.

==North American conference in 2011==

This will be held jointly with ACL in June.

==North American conference in 2012==

The Board has decided to hold NAACL-HLT 2012 in Montreal, Canada. It is scheduled to take place June 3 -- June 8 2012, at the Montreal Sheraton. Sabine Bergler and Guy Lapalme have agreed to serve on the local arrangements advisory committee. The general chair and the PC co-chairs will be named shortly.

==Shaping Future NAACL-HLT conferences==

The NAACL Board continues to explore ways to make our conference more lively and diverse. As NAACL-HLT conferences continue to grow, the increased size does add complexity for local arrangements. Although they do have the option to delegate to a professional conference organizer, many smaller institutions are hesitant about taking on the responsibility. No bid was received for hosting NAACL HLT 2012 despite active encouragements from the Board. Thus the Board has begun to experiment with alternative models of local arrangements to further reduce the burden on any particular institution. For 2012, the conference site was chosen by the Board based on the usual location selection criteria (e.g., geographical balance, active CL communities in the area). Then, researchers from the area are invited to serve on an advisory committee to offer suggestions about local arrangement matters. The tradition of calling for bids to host NAACL-HLT conferences will continue in the future, but our experience for organizing NAACL-HLT 2012 may act as an initial guideline for those years when no institution comes forth.

==Support for Summer Schools and Other Educational Outreach==

We are continuing our support for NACLO (the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad) and student participation at the summer school during the Johns Hopkins Natural Language Engineering Summer Workshop. We are also sponsoring the LSA Linguistic Institute 2011 at Boulder, Colorado.

==Support for Outreach to Emerging CL communities==

At our June 2010 meeting, the Board decided to merge two small funds programs created in 2009 (the Latin American Fund and the Regional Conferences Fund) to form the Emerging Regions Fund. Its purpose is to encourage more regional interactions among students and researchers anywhere in the Americas. A total of $5,000 has been set aside for this program, and two deadlines were planned: September 1, 2010, and March 1, 2011. In September, three proposals were received; one from Argentina (http://cs.famaf.unc.edu.ar/~laura/nlpw/index.html) was funded.

2010Q3 Reports: NAACL

2010-06-21T14:09:44Z

RebeccaHwa: /* Nominations to ACL Sponsorship Committee for 2011 */

=Report from NAACL, June 2010 =

Rebecca Hwa - Chapter board chair

Owen Rambow - Past chapter board chair

Christopher Manning - Treasurer

Anoop Sarkar - Secretary

==Executive Committee Meetings==

The Board has met on June 1st, at the NAACL HLT 2010 conference in Los Angeles. Additionally, the Board converses regularly by e-mail.

==NAACL Treasurer's Report==

(prepared by: Christopher Manning, NAACL Treasurer; May 29, 2010, Palo Alto, CA.)

The Chapterʼs bank account held $136,771.90 at the end of Apr 2008, well more than at the same time last year ($71,530.32). Income for the year was about $88K, primarily from booking
the surpluses for past conferences following catch-up accounting: a huge $57K surplus from NAACL 2006 and $30K as our 50% share of the strong surplus from ACL 2008. Expenses are
also up (though less) at $23K, comprising $12K which JHU eventually billed for WS2007 and WS2008, $1.5K for JHU WS2009 travel fellowships, $5K in support of NACLO 2009, $2.5K for
two events under the Latin American fund (STIL and Propor), and $2K for NAACL 2009 student travel support. Other income and expenses are in process. Iʼm delighted to report a surplus of
$14K from NAACL HLT 2007. (Phew! Iʼm amazed.) Draft accounting for NAACL HLT 2009 (thanks Graeme and Chiaki!) suggests a surplus of about $12K (probably an upper bound). We
are also giving $1K for a Pacific Northwest NLP meeting, $5K for support of NACLO for 2010, and continuing to support the JHU summer workshop. We are giving further support from the
Latin American fund for people attending the Young Investigators workshop and the ELiC winter school, and giving support to student authors who need funds to attend NAACL.
One chart below shows the NAACL account balance from 2006 on. Itʼs a different story from the American federal account balance! The other shows our yearly income from conferences.
This has been a sea change year for the NAACL Treasury, with successful initiation of 3 new funds for using money to support our constituency: the NAACL HLT student travel support fund,
the Latin America fund, and the regional conferences fund, as well as continuing previous support for U.S. summer workshops and NACLO. We relearned the wisdom that itʼs a lot of
work dispensing money, and while I certainly think that we should continue initiatives like these, we also have to think a bit about how to make the work involved sustainable. For the moment,
all is fine with the NAACL Treasury. For the future, we should pay attention to generating the surpluses necessary to sustain such activities (neither NAACL 2007 nor 2009 yielded sizeable
surpluses) and continue to look at trends in corporate sponsorship and opportunities for links with the broader text mining/processing/search community (e.g., get feedback from the NAACL
2010 General Chair, Ron Kaplan, who recently spoke at the Text Analytics Summit 2010).

==North American conference in 2010==

NAACL HLT 2010 took place in Los Angeles, California, in June 2010. Ron Kaplan (MS) is the conference General Chair; Geral Penn (Toronto), Mary Harper (CASL), and Jill Burstein (ETS) are PC co-chairs; and David Chiang and Ed Hovy (ISI) are the local organizers. A detailed conference report is being prepared by Ron, and will be posted separately.

==North American conference in 2011==

Next year's NAACL conference will be held jointly with ACL in Portland, Oregon (ACL HLT 2011). Dekang Lin (Google) is the General Chair, and Brian Roark and Richard Sproat (both OGI) are leading the local arrangements efforts.

==North American conference in 2012==

The ICCL and NAACL have been exploring the possibility of holding a joint NAACL/COLING conference. Bids for hosting the event have been received. Plans for NAACL 2012 will be finalized later this summer.

==Shaping Future NAACL HLT conferences==

The NAACL Board continues to explore ways to make our conference more lively and diverse.
* We will continue to encourage research dialogs with the speech and IR communities by choosing area chairs who are active in both communities.
* We also aim to foster stronger relationships with industries. In recent conferences, we have held industry panel sessions. We are exploring additional activities that may be of interest to both academia and industry.
* The recent reorganization of the short paper track has become more stabilized. We will continue to solicit papers addressing a diverse set of categories. We will revise the reviewing instructions to refine the judging criteria for the short paper categories.
* Participation in the Student Research Workshop has seen a decrease. We have begun discussions on ways to re-energize the program.

==Nominations to ACL Sponsorship Committee for 2011==

Srinivas Bangalore (AT&T) and Christy Doran (MITRE) are the current regional representatives (for the Americas) to the sponsorship committee. One of the two will stay on and continue to serve in the committee next year. The Board is seeking a second representative to take over the responsibilities of the departing representative.

==Support for Summer Schools and Other Educational Outreach==
In the coming year, we will continue to support educational programs such as NACLO (the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad) and the Johns Hopkins summer school. Additionally, we will also provide financial sponsorship to the Linguistic Institute of the LSA in 2011, to be held in Boulder, Colorado.

==Support for Outreach to Emerging CL Communities==

We have established a small fund to support Latin American activities and a small fund to support regional student conferences. In 2010, we have sponsored the following programs:
* the 7th Brazilian Symposium in Information and Human Language Technology (STIL 2009)
* PROPOR 2010 - International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese Language (28 to 30 of April, Porto Alegre - RS, Brazil)
* Escuela de Linguistica Computacional (ELiC -- winter school in Argentina, Aug 2010)
* NAACL Workshop for Young Investigators in the Americas (June, 2010)
* Northwest Region NLP Workshop (April 2010)
We have formalized the reviewing process for 2011. We have planned for two submission deadlines: one in September, and one in March. We will evaluate each proposal based on its potential impact to stimulate collaborations between researchers from emerging geographical regions.

2010Q3 Reports: NAACL

2010-06-21T14:03:46Z

RebeccaHwa: /* Nominations to ACL Sponsorship Committee for 2011 */

=Report from NAACL, June 2010 =

Rebecca Hwa - Chapter board chair

Owen Rambow - Past chapter board chair

Christopher Manning - Treasurer

Anoop Sarkar - Secretary

==Executive Committee Meetings==

The Board has met on June 1st, at the NAACL HLT 2010 conference in Los Angeles. Additionally, the Board converses regularly by e-mail.

==NAACL Treasurer's Report==

(prepared by: Christopher Manning, NAACL Treasurer; May 29, 2010, Palo Alto, CA.)

The Chapterʼs bank account held $136,771.90 at the end of Apr 2008, well more than at the same time last year ($71,530.32). Income for the year was about $88K, primarily from booking
the surpluses for past conferences following catch-up accounting: a huge $57K surplus from NAACL 2006 and $30K as our 50% share of the strong surplus from ACL 2008. Expenses are
also up (though less) at $23K, comprising $12K which JHU eventually billed for WS2007 and WS2008, $1.5K for JHU WS2009 travel fellowships, $5K in support of NACLO 2009, $2.5K for
two events under the Latin American fund (STIL and Propor), and $2K for NAACL 2009 student travel support. Other income and expenses are in process. Iʼm delighted to report a surplus of
$14K from NAACL HLT 2007. (Phew! Iʼm amazed.) Draft accounting for NAACL HLT 2009 (thanks Graeme and Chiaki!) suggests a surplus of about $12K (probably an upper bound). We
are also giving $1K for a Pacific Northwest NLP meeting, $5K for support of NACLO for 2010, and continuing to support the JHU summer workshop. We are giving further support from the
Latin American fund for people attending the Young Investigators workshop and the ELiC winter school, and giving support to student authors who need funds to attend NAACL.
One chart below shows the NAACL account balance from 2006 on. Itʼs a different story from the American federal account balance! The other shows our yearly income from conferences.
This has been a sea change year for the NAACL Treasury, with successful initiation of 3 new funds for using money to support our constituency: the NAACL HLT student travel support fund,
the Latin America fund, and the regional conferences fund, as well as continuing previous support for U.S. summer workshops and NACLO. We relearned the wisdom that itʼs a lot of
work dispensing money, and while I certainly think that we should continue initiatives like these, we also have to think a bit about how to make the work involved sustainable. For the moment,
all is fine with the NAACL Treasury. For the future, we should pay attention to generating the surpluses necessary to sustain such activities (neither NAACL 2007 nor 2009 yielded sizeable
surpluses) and continue to look at trends in corporate sponsorship and opportunities for links with the broader text mining/processing/search community (e.g., get feedback from the NAACL
2010 General Chair, Ron Kaplan, who recently spoke at the Text Analytics Summit 2010).

==North American conference in 2010==

NAACL HLT 2010 took place in Los Angeles, California, in June 2010. Ron Kaplan (MS) is the conference General Chair; Geral Penn (Toronto), Mary Harper (CASL), and Jill Burstein (ETS) are PC co-chairs; and David Chiang and Ed Hovy (ISI) are the local organizers. A detailed conference report is being prepared by Ron, and will be posted separately.

==North American conference in 2011==

Next year's NAACL conference will be held jointly with ACL in Portland, Oregon (ACL HLT 2011). Dekang Lin (Google) is the General Chair, and Brian Roark and Richard Sproat (both OGI) are leading the local arrangements efforts.

==North American conference in 2012==

The ICCL and NAACL have been exploring the possibility of holding a joint NAACL/COLING conference. Bids for hosting the event have been received. Plans for NAACL 2012 will be finalized later this summer.

==Shaping Future NAACL HLT conferences==

The NAACL Board continues to explore ways to make our conference more lively and diverse.
* We will continue to encourage research dialogs with the speech and IR communities by choosing area chairs who are active in both communities.
* We also aim to foster stronger relationships with industries. In recent conferences, we have held industry panel sessions. We are exploring additional activities that may be of interest to both academia and industry.
* The recent reorganization of the short paper track has become more stabilized. We will continue to solicit papers addressing a diverse set of categories. We will revise the reviewing instructions to refine the judging criteria for the short paper categories.
* Participation in the Student Research Workshop has seen a decrease. We have begun discussions on ways to re-energize the program.

==Nominations to ACL Sponsorship Committee for 2011==

Srinivas Bangalore (AT&T) and Christy Doran (MITRE) are the current regional representatives (for the Americas) to the sponsorship committee. One of the two will stay on and serve in the committee next year. The board is seeking a second representative for committee.

==Support for Summer Schools and Other Educational Outreach==
In the coming year, we will continue to support educational programs such as NACLO (the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad) and the Johns Hopkins summer school. Additionally, we will also provide financial sponsorship to the Linguistic Institute of the LSA in 2011, to be held in Boulder, Colorado.

==Support for Outreach to Emerging CL Communities==

We have established a small fund to support Latin American activities and a small fund to support regional student conferences. In 2010, we have sponsored the following programs:
* the 7th Brazilian Symposium in Information and Human Language Technology (STIL 2009)
* PROPOR 2010 - International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese Language (28 to 30 of April, Porto Alegre - RS, Brazil)
* Escuela de Linguistica Computacional (ELiC -- winter school in Argentina, Aug 2010)
* NAACL Workshop for Young Investigators in the Americas (June, 2010)
* Northwest Region NLP Workshop (April 2010)
We have formalized the reviewing process for 2011. We have planned for two submission deadlines: one in September, and one in March. We will evaluate each proposal based on its potential impact to stimulate collaborations between researchers from emerging geographical regions.

2010Q3 Reports: NAACL

2010-06-21T03:07:26Z

RebeccaHwa: /* Support for Outreach to Emerging CL Communities */

=Report from NAACL, June 2010 =

Rebecca Hwa - Chapter board chair

Owen Rambow - Past chapter board chair

Christopher Manning - Treasurer

Anoop Sarkar - Secretary

==Executive Committee Meetings==

The Board has met on June 1st, at the NAACL HLT 2010 conference in Los Angeles. Additionally, the Board converses regularly by e-mail.

==NAACL Treasurer's Report==

(prepared by: Christopher Manning, NAACL Treasurer; May 29, 2010, Palo Alto, CA.)

The Chapterʼs bank account held $136,771.90 at the end of Apr 2008, well more than at the same time last year ($71,530.32). Income for the year was about $88K, primarily from booking
the surpluses for past conferences following catch-up accounting: a huge $57K surplus from NAACL 2006 and $30K as our 50% share of the strong surplus from ACL 2008. Expenses are
also up (though less) at $23K, comprising $12K which JHU eventually billed for WS2007 and WS2008, $1.5K for JHU WS2009 travel fellowships, $5K in support of NACLO 2009, $2.5K for
two events under the Latin American fund (STIL and Propor), and $2K for NAACL 2009 student travel support. Other income and expenses are in process. Iʼm delighted to report a surplus of
$14K from NAACL HLT 2007. (Phew! Iʼm amazed.) Draft accounting for NAACL HLT 2009 (thanks Graeme and Chiaki!) suggests a surplus of about $12K (probably an upper bound). We
are also giving $1K for a Pacific Northwest NLP meeting, $5K for support of NACLO for 2010, and continuing to support the JHU summer workshop. We are giving further support from the
Latin American fund for people attending the Young Investigators workshop and the ELiC winter school, and giving support to student authors who need funds to attend NAACL.
One chart below shows the NAACL account balance from 2006 on. Itʼs a different story from the American federal account balance! The other shows our yearly income from conferences.
This has been a sea change year for the NAACL Treasury, with successful initiation of 3 new funds for using money to support our constituency: the NAACL HLT student travel support fund,
the Latin America fund, and the regional conferences fund, as well as continuing previous support for U.S. summer workshops and NACLO. We relearned the wisdom that itʼs a lot of
work dispensing money, and while I certainly think that we should continue initiatives like these, we also have to think a bit about how to make the work involved sustainable. For the moment,
all is fine with the NAACL Treasury. For the future, we should pay attention to generating the surpluses necessary to sustain such activities (neither NAACL 2007 nor 2009 yielded sizeable
surpluses) and continue to look at trends in corporate sponsorship and opportunities for links with the broader text mining/processing/search community (e.g., get feedback from the NAACL
2010 General Chair, Ron Kaplan, who recently spoke at the Text Analytics Summit 2010).

==North American conference in 2010==

NAACL HLT 2010 took place in Los Angeles, California, in June 2010. Ron Kaplan (MS) is the conference General Chair; Geral Penn (Toronto), Mary Harper (CASL), and Jill Burstein (ETS) are PC co-chairs; and David Chiang and Ed Hovy (ISI) are the local organizers. A detailed conference report is being prepared by Ron, and will be posted separately.

==North American conference in 2011==

Next year's NAACL conference will be held jointly with ACL in Portland, Oregon (ACL HLT 2011). Dekang Lin (Google) is the General Chair, and Brian Roark and Richard Sproat (both OGI) are leading the local arrangements efforts.

==North American conference in 2012==

The ICCL and NAACL have been exploring the possibility of holding a joint NAACL/COLING conference. Bids for hosting the event have been received. Plans for NAACL 2012 will be finalized later this summer.

==Shaping Future NAACL HLT conferences==

The NAACL Board continues to explore ways to make our conference more lively and diverse.
* We will continue to encourage research dialogs with the speech and IR communities by choosing area chairs who are active in both communities.
* We also aim to foster stronger relationships with industries. In recent conferences, we have held industry panel sessions. We are exploring additional activities that may be of interest to both academia and industry.
* The recent reorganization of the short paper track has become more stabilized. We will continue to solicit papers addressing a diverse set of categories. We will revise the reviewing instructions to refine the judging criteria for the short paper categories.
* Participation in the Student Research Workshop has seen a decrease. We have begun discussions on ways to re-energize the program.

==Nominations to ACL Sponsorship Committee for 2011==

Srinivas Bangalore (AT&T) and Christy Doran (MITRE) are the current regional representatives (for the Americas) to the sponsorship committee. Srinivas has agreed to continue to serve in this committee next year. The board is seeking a second representative for committee.

==Support for Summer Schools and Other Educational Outreach==
In the coming year, we will continue to support educational programs such as NACLO (the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad) and the Johns Hopkins summer school. Additionally, we will also provide financial sponsorship to the Linguistic Institute of the LSA in 2011, to be held in Boulder, Colorado.

==Support for Outreach to Emerging CL Communities==

We have established a small fund to support Latin American activities and a small fund to support regional student conferences. In 2010, we have sponsored the following programs:
* the 7th Brazilian Symposium in Information and Human Language Technology (STIL 2009)
* PROPOR 2010 - International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese Language (28 to 30 of April, Porto Alegre - RS, Brazil)
* Escuela de Linguistica Computacional (ELiC -- winter school in Argentina, Aug 2010)
* NAACL Workshop for Young Investigators in the Americas (June, 2010)
* Northwest Region NLP Workshop (April 2010)
We have formalized the reviewing process for 2011. We have planned for two submission deadlines: one in September, and one in March. We will evaluate each proposal based on its potential impact to stimulate collaborations between researchers from emerging geographical regions.

2010Q3 Reports: NAACL

2010-06-21T03:04:39Z

RebeccaHwa: /* North American conference in 2010 */

=Report from NAACL, June 2010 =

Rebecca Hwa - Chapter board chair

Owen Rambow - Past chapter board chair

Christopher Manning - Treasurer

Anoop Sarkar - Secretary

==Executive Committee Meetings==

The Board has met on June 1st, at the NAACL HLT 2010 conference in Los Angeles. Additionally, the Board converses regularly by e-mail.

==NAACL Treasurer's Report==

(prepared by: Christopher Manning, NAACL Treasurer; May 29, 2010, Palo Alto, CA.)

The Chapterʼs bank account held $136,771.90 at the end of Apr 2008, well more than at the same time last year ($71,530.32). Income for the year was about $88K, primarily from booking
the surpluses for past conferences following catch-up accounting: a huge $57K surplus from NAACL 2006 and $30K as our 50% share of the strong surplus from ACL 2008. Expenses are
also up (though less) at $23K, comprising $12K which JHU eventually billed for WS2007 and WS2008, $1.5K for JHU WS2009 travel fellowships, $5K in support of NACLO 2009, $2.5K for
two events under the Latin American fund (STIL and Propor), and $2K for NAACL 2009 student travel support. Other income and expenses are in process. Iʼm delighted to report a surplus of
$14K from NAACL HLT 2007. (Phew! Iʼm amazed.) Draft accounting for NAACL HLT 2009 (thanks Graeme and Chiaki!) suggests a surplus of about $12K (probably an upper bound). We
are also giving $1K for a Pacific Northwest NLP meeting, $5K for support of NACLO for 2010, and continuing to support the JHU summer workshop. We are giving further support from the
Latin American fund for people attending the Young Investigators workshop and the ELiC winter school, and giving support to student authors who need funds to attend NAACL.
One chart below shows the NAACL account balance from 2006 on. Itʼs a different story from the American federal account balance! The other shows our yearly income from conferences.
This has been a sea change year for the NAACL Treasury, with successful initiation of 3 new funds for using money to support our constituency: the NAACL HLT student travel support fund,
the Latin America fund, and the regional conferences fund, as well as continuing previous support for U.S. summer workshops and NACLO. We relearned the wisdom that itʼs a lot of
work dispensing money, and while I certainly think that we should continue initiatives like these, we also have to think a bit about how to make the work involved sustainable. For the moment,
all is fine with the NAACL Treasury. For the future, we should pay attention to generating the surpluses necessary to sustain such activities (neither NAACL 2007 nor 2009 yielded sizeable
surpluses) and continue to look at trends in corporate sponsorship and opportunities for links with the broader text mining/processing/search community (e.g., get feedback from the NAACL
2010 General Chair, Ron Kaplan, who recently spoke at the Text Analytics Summit 2010).

==North American conference in 2010==

NAACL HLT 2010 took place in Los Angeles, California, in June 2010. Ron Kaplan (MS) is the conference General Chair; Geral Penn (Toronto), Mary Harper (CASL), and Jill Burstein (ETS) are PC co-chairs; and David Chiang and Ed Hovy (ISI) are the local organizers. A detailed conference report is being prepared by Ron, and will be posted separately.

==North American conference in 2011==

Next year's NAACL conference will be held jointly with ACL in Portland, Oregon (ACL HLT 2011). Dekang Lin (Google) is the General Chair, and Brian Roark and Richard Sproat (both OGI) are leading the local arrangements efforts.

==North American conference in 2012==

The ICCL and NAACL have been exploring the possibility of holding a joint NAACL/COLING conference. Bids for hosting the event have been received. Plans for NAACL 2012 will be finalized later this summer.

==Shaping Future NAACL HLT conferences==

The NAACL Board continues to explore ways to make our conference more lively and diverse.
* We will continue to encourage research dialogs with the speech and IR communities by choosing area chairs who are active in both communities.
* We also aim to foster stronger relationships with industries. In recent conferences, we have held industry panel sessions. We are exploring additional activities that may be of interest to both academia and industry.
* The recent reorganization of the short paper track has become more stabilized. We will continue to solicit papers addressing a diverse set of categories. We will revise the reviewing instructions to refine the judging criteria for the short paper categories.
* Participation in the Student Research Workshop has seen a decrease. We have begun discussions on ways to re-energize the program.

==Nominations to ACL Sponsorship Committee for 2011==

Srinivas Bangalore (AT&T) and Christy Doran (MITRE) are the current regional representatives (for the Americas) to the sponsorship committee. Srinivas has agreed to continue to serve in this committee next year. The board is seeking a second representative for committee.

==Support for Summer Schools and Other Educational Outreach==
In the coming year, we will continue to support educational programs such as NACLO (the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad) and the Johns Hopkins summer school. Additionally, we will also provide financial sponsorship to the Linguistic Institute of the LSA in 2011, to be held in Boulder, Colorado.

==Support for Outreach to Emerging CL Communities==

We have established a small fund to support Latin American activities and a small fund to support regional student conferences. In 2010, we have sponsored the following programs:
* the 7th Brazilian Symposium in Information and Human Language Technology (STIL 2009)
* PROPOR 2010 - International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese Language (28 to 30 of April, Porto Alegre - RS, Brazil)
* Escuela de Linguistica Computacional (ELiC -- winter school in Argentina, Aug 2010)
* NAACL Workshop for Young Investigators in the Americas
* Northwestern NLP Workshop
We have formalized the reviewing process for 2011. We have planned for two submission deadlines: one in September, and one in March. We will evaluate each proposal based on its potential impact to stimulate collaborations between researchers from emerging geographical regions.

2010Q3 Reports: NAACL

2010-06-21T03:03:29Z

RebeccaHwa: /* North American conference in 2011 */

=Report from NAACL, June 2010 =

Rebecca Hwa - Chapter board chair

Owen Rambow - Past chapter board chair

Christopher Manning - Treasurer

Anoop Sarkar - Secretary

==Executive Committee Meetings==

The Board has met on June 1st, at the NAACL HLT 2010 conference in Los Angeles. Additionally, the Board converses regularly by e-mail.

==NAACL Treasurer's Report==

(prepared by: Christopher Manning, NAACL Treasurer; May 29, 2010, Palo Alto, CA.)

The Chapterʼs bank account held $136,771.90 at the end of Apr 2008, well more than at the same time last year ($71,530.32). Income for the year was about $88K, primarily from booking
the surpluses for past conferences following catch-up accounting: a huge $57K surplus from NAACL 2006 and $30K as our 50% share of the strong surplus from ACL 2008. Expenses are
also up (though less) at $23K, comprising $12K which JHU eventually billed for WS2007 and WS2008, $1.5K for JHU WS2009 travel fellowships, $5K in support of NACLO 2009, $2.5K for
two events under the Latin American fund (STIL and Propor), and $2K for NAACL 2009 student travel support. Other income and expenses are in process. Iʼm delighted to report a surplus of
$14K from NAACL HLT 2007. (Phew! Iʼm amazed.) Draft accounting for NAACL HLT 2009 (thanks Graeme and Chiaki!) suggests a surplus of about $12K (probably an upper bound). We
are also giving $1K for a Pacific Northwest NLP meeting, $5K for support of NACLO for 2010, and continuing to support the JHU summer workshop. We are giving further support from the
Latin American fund for people attending the Young Investigators workshop and the ELiC winter school, and giving support to student authors who need funds to attend NAACL.
One chart below shows the NAACL account balance from 2006 on. Itʼs a different story from the American federal account balance! The other shows our yearly income from conferences.
This has been a sea change year for the NAACL Treasury, with successful initiation of 3 new funds for using money to support our constituency: the NAACL HLT student travel support fund,
the Latin America fund, and the regional conferences fund, as well as continuing previous support for U.S. summer workshops and NACLO. We relearned the wisdom that itʼs a lot of
work dispensing money, and while I certainly think that we should continue initiatives like these, we also have to think a bit about how to make the work involved sustainable. For the moment,
all is fine with the NAACL Treasury. For the future, we should pay attention to generating the surpluses necessary to sustain such activities (neither NAACL 2007 nor 2009 yielded sizeable
surpluses) and continue to look at trends in corporate sponsorship and opportunities for links with the broader text mining/processing/search community (e.g., get feedback from the NAACL
2010 General Chair, Ron Kaplan, who recently spoke at the Text Analytics Summit 2010).

==North American conference in 2010==

NAACL HLT 2010 took place in Los Angeles, California, in June 2010. Ron Kaplan is conference chair; Geral Penn (Toronto), Mary Harper (CASL), and Jill Burstein (ETS) are PC co-chairs; and David Chiang and Ed Hovy are the local organizers.A detailed conference report is being prepared by Ron Kaplan, and will be posted separately.

==North American conference in 2011==

Next year's NAACL conference will be held jointly with ACL in Portland, Oregon (ACL HLT 2011). Dekang Lin (Google) is the General Chair, and Brian Roark and Richard Sproat (both OGI) are leading the local arrangements efforts.

==North American conference in 2012==

The ICCL and NAACL have been exploring the possibility of holding a joint NAACL/COLING conference. Bids for hosting the event have been received. Plans for NAACL 2012 will be finalized later this summer.

==Shaping Future NAACL HLT conferences==

The NAACL Board continues to explore ways to make our conference more lively and diverse.
* We will continue to encourage research dialogs with the speech and IR communities by choosing area chairs who are active in both communities.
* We also aim to foster stronger relationships with industries. In recent conferences, we have held industry panel sessions. We are exploring additional activities that may be of interest to both academia and industry.
* The recent reorganization of the short paper track has become more stabilized. We will continue to solicit papers addressing a diverse set of categories. We will revise the reviewing instructions to refine the judging criteria for the short paper categories.
* Participation in the Student Research Workshop has seen a decrease. We have begun discussions on ways to re-energize the program.

==Nominations to ACL Sponsorship Committee for 2011==

Srinivas Bangalore (AT&T) and Christy Doran (MITRE) are the current regional representatives (for the Americas) to the sponsorship committee. Srinivas has agreed to continue to serve in this committee next year. The board is seeking a second representative for committee.

==Support for Summer Schools and Other Educational Outreach==
In the coming year, we will continue to support educational programs such as NACLO (the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad) and the Johns Hopkins summer school. Additionally, we will also provide financial sponsorship to the Linguistic Institute of the LSA in 2011, to be held in Boulder, Colorado.

==Support for Outreach to Emerging CL Communities==

We have established a small fund to support Latin American activities and a small fund to support regional student conferences. In 2010, we have sponsored the following programs:
* the 7th Brazilian Symposium in Information and Human Language Technology (STIL 2009)
* PROPOR 2010 - International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese Language (28 to 30 of April, Porto Alegre - RS, Brazil)
* Escuela de Linguistica Computacional (ELiC -- winter school in Argentina, Aug 2010)
* NAACL Workshop for Young Investigators in the Americas
* Northwestern NLP Workshop
We have formalized the reviewing process for 2011. We have planned for two submission deadlines: one in September, and one in March. We will evaluate each proposal based on its potential impact to stimulate collaborations between researchers from emerging geographical regions.

2010Q3 Reports: NAACL

2010-06-21T02:59:40Z

RebeccaHwa: New page: =Report from NAACL, June 2010 = Rebecca Hwa - Chapter board chair Owen Rambow - Past chapter board chair Christopher Manning - Treasurer Anoop Sarkar - Secretary ==Executive Committ...

=Report from NAACL, June 2010 =

Rebecca Hwa - Chapter board chair

Owen Rambow - Past chapter board chair

Christopher Manning - Treasurer

Anoop Sarkar - Secretary

==Executive Committee Meetings==

The Board has met on June 1st, at the NAACL HLT 2010 conference in Los Angeles. Additionally, the Board converses regularly by e-mail.

==NAACL Treasurer's Report==

(prepared by: Christopher Manning, NAACL Treasurer; May 29, 2010, Palo Alto, CA.)

The Chapterʼs bank account held $136,771.90 at the end of Apr 2008, well more than at the same time last year ($71,530.32). Income for the year was about $88K, primarily from booking
the surpluses for past conferences following catch-up accounting: a huge $57K surplus from NAACL 2006 and $30K as our 50% share of the strong surplus from ACL 2008. Expenses are
also up (though less) at $23K, comprising $12K which JHU eventually billed for WS2007 and WS2008, $1.5K for JHU WS2009 travel fellowships, $5K in support of NACLO 2009, $2.5K for
two events under the Latin American fund (STIL and Propor), and $2K for NAACL 2009 student travel support. Other income and expenses are in process. Iʼm delighted to report a surplus of
$14K from NAACL HLT 2007. (Phew! Iʼm amazed.) Draft accounting for NAACL HLT 2009 (thanks Graeme and Chiaki!) suggests a surplus of about $12K (probably an upper bound). We
are also giving $1K for a Pacific Northwest NLP meeting, $5K for support of NACLO for 2010, and continuing to support the JHU summer workshop. We are giving further support from the
Latin American fund for people attending the Young Investigators workshop and the ELiC winter school, and giving support to student authors who need funds to attend NAACL.
One chart below shows the NAACL account balance from 2006 on. Itʼs a different story from the American federal account balance! The other shows our yearly income from conferences.
This has been a sea change year for the NAACL Treasury, with successful initiation of 3 new funds for using money to support our constituency: the NAACL HLT student travel support fund,
the Latin America fund, and the regional conferences fund, as well as continuing previous support for U.S. summer workshops and NACLO. We relearned the wisdom that itʼs a lot of
work dispensing money, and while I certainly think that we should continue initiatives like these, we also have to think a bit about how to make the work involved sustainable. For the moment,
all is fine with the NAACL Treasury. For the future, we should pay attention to generating the surpluses necessary to sustain such activities (neither NAACL 2007 nor 2009 yielded sizeable
surpluses) and continue to look at trends in corporate sponsorship and opportunities for links with the broader text mining/processing/search community (e.g., get feedback from the NAACL
2010 General Chair, Ron Kaplan, who recently spoke at the Text Analytics Summit 2010).

==North American conference in 2010==

NAACL HLT 2010 took place in Los Angeles, California, in June 2010. Ron Kaplan is conference chair; Geral Penn (Toronto), Mary Harper (CASL), and Jill Burstein (ETS) are PC co-chairs; and David Chiang and Ed Hovy are the local organizers.A detailed conference report is being prepared by Ron Kaplan, and will be posted separately.

==North American conference in 2011==

Next year's NAACL conference will be held jointly with ACL in Portland, Oregon (ACL HLT 2011). The general chair is Dekang Lin (Google).

==North American conference in 2012==

The ICCL and NAACL have been exploring the possibility of holding a joint NAACL/COLING conference. Bids for hosting the event have been received. Plans for NAACL 2012 will be finalized later this summer.

==Shaping Future NAACL HLT conferences==

The NAACL Board continues to explore ways to make our conference more lively and diverse.
* We will continue to encourage research dialogs with the speech and IR communities by choosing area chairs who are active in both communities.
* We also aim to foster stronger relationships with industries. In recent conferences, we have held industry panel sessions. We are exploring additional activities that may be of interest to both academia and industry.
* The recent reorganization of the short paper track has become more stabilized. We will continue to solicit papers addressing a diverse set of categories. We will revise the reviewing instructions to refine the judging criteria for the short paper categories.
* Participation in the Student Research Workshop has seen a decrease. We have begun discussions on ways to re-energize the program.

==Nominations to ACL Sponsorship Committee for 2011==

Srinivas Bangalore (AT&T) and Christy Doran (MITRE) are the current regional representatives (for the Americas) to the sponsorship committee. Srinivas has agreed to continue to serve in this committee next year. The board is seeking a second representative for committee.

==Support for Summer Schools and Other Educational Outreach==
In the coming year, we will continue to support educational programs such as NACLO (the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad) and the Johns Hopkins summer school. Additionally, we will also provide financial sponsorship to the Linguistic Institute of the LSA in 2011, to be held in Boulder, Colorado.

==Support for Outreach to Emerging CL Communities==

We have established a small fund to support Latin American activities and a small fund to support regional student conferences. In 2010, we have sponsored the following programs:
* the 7th Brazilian Symposium in Information and Human Language Technology (STIL 2009)
* PROPOR 2010 - International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese Language (28 to 30 of April, Porto Alegre - RS, Brazil)
* Escuela de Linguistica Computacional (ELiC -- winter school in Argentina, Aug 2010)
* NAACL Workshop for Young Investigators in the Americas
* Northwestern NLP Workshop
We have formalized the reviewing process for 2011. We have planned for two submission deadlines: one in September, and one in March. We will evaluate each proposal based on its potential impact to stimulate collaborations between researchers from emerging geographical regions.

2010Q1 Reports: NAACL

2010-02-04T22:36:15Z

RebeccaHwa: /* North American conference in 2009 */

=Report from NAACL, February 2010 =

Rebecca Hwa - Chapter board chair

Owen Rambow - Past chapter board chair

Christopher Manning - Treasurer

Anoop Sarkar - Secretary

==Elections==

The NAACL election was held electronically in the Fall of 2009. Chris Callison-Burch (JHU) and Kristina Toutanova (MSR) replace Hal Daume III (Utah) and Rebecca Hwa (Pittburgh) as board members. Anoop Sarkar (Simon Fraiser) replaces Suzanne Stevenson (Toronto) as secretary. Rebecca Hwa replaces Owen Rambow (Columbia) as chair. Chris Manning (treasurer) ran unopposed for re-election. Owen Rambow and Grame Hirst remain on board ex officio as past NAACL Chair and ACL treasurer, respectively. The board now has nine members again.

==Executive Committee Meetings==

The Board converses regularly by e-mail. In addition, in 2010, the Board will meet in person at the NAACL HLT 2010 conference in Los Angeles. This needs to be scheduled ASAP.

==NAACL Treasurer's Report==

The Chapter's bank account held $108,294.60 at the end of November 2009. As foreshadowed, this is a large increase reflecting the healthy surplus from NAACL 2006 in Brooklyn ($57,000) offset only somewhat by expenditures. The expenditures were $12,000 catching up on payments for past JHU WS summer schools to JHU (for 2007 and 2008), $5,000 in support of NACLO 2009, a bit less than $2000 in support of students attending the JHU WS 2009 summer school, and the first expenditures on one of our new initiatives, almost $2000 in support of students attending NAACL 2009. 2010 should see other expenditures hit, including support under our new Latin American fund, and working out the financial outcome of NAACL 2007 (presumed to have made a loss).

==North American conference in 2009==

NAACL HLT 2009 took place in Boulder, Colorado, in June 2009. Mari Ostendorf was the conference chair; the PC co-chairs were: Michael Collins, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (NLP) Lucy Vanderwende, Microsoft (NLP) Doug Oard, University of Maryland (IR) Shri Narayanan, University of Southern California (Speech); and Martha Palmer and James Martin were local organizers. The conference was the best attended NAACL/HLT conference ever. The main discussion points during the board meeting are highlighted below (full minutes is at: http://www.naacl.org/archives/index.html).

* '''Sponsorship''': Sponsors are encouraged to participate in “3-packs” of conferences. Some potential sponsors of student travel awards want to put certain conditions on sponsorship money, e.g., as travel for certain types of students or given as award presented at conference. Suggestions: We need to turn the issue over to the sponsorship committee, to determine policy to guide these decisions. Set up conference calls among local sponsorship people and sponsorship committee. Send sponsorship guidelines to everyone involved in conferences. Might make more sense to have two people doing local sponsorship.
* '''Industry''': There was some feedback from industry people that tutorials were more appealing this year – more applied/relevant topics. The Industry panel was also well attended and successful.
* '''Demos''': There were not as many demos this year (only 5), almost not worth the trouble. Will return consider revised demo policy for 2010.
* '''Representation of IR''': including IR, QA and TC, about the size of a medium sized area in the conference. (In rest of conference, smallest workshop is one related to IR, but well-attended tutorial on the topic.) Conclusion: There is an insufficient number of submissions to warrant a PC Co-Chair, but the topic does warrant an Area Chair. (Alternative view: Having a PC Co-Chair sends message that should encourage more submissions in this area; however, it doesn’t seem to be working.).
* '''Scheduling''': There were challenges in setting all the dates (submission, notification, etc., of all paper types), especially under time pressures. One lesson from this year – don’t try to coordinate with SIGIR. Suggestion: ACL and NAACL boards should coordinate some on dates and then turn over some suggestions to the PC chairs. Workshops schedule is done independently of local organizers. (Issues with setting up of posters.) Suggestion: Workshops Chair(s) should play stronger role in coordination and organization. Should refer this to ACL executive – broader issue of what the role of Workshops Chairs should be.
* '''Short papers''': implemented suggestion of having different categories of papers – negative result (1), interesting application note (10), small focused contribution (119), opinion piece (2), work in process (38). (Numbers indicate majority agreement on category for paper; 170 of 180 papers had such agreement.) Suggestion: Authors should specify category, not reviewers. Suggestion: Need to discuss the issue of short papers, and different categories, among wider membership, perhaps at Business Meeting. Suggestion: It might help to not call all of these “short papers”, because people are predisposed to think of short papers in a certain way (just as short versions of regular conference papers).

==North American conference in 2010==

NAACL HLT 2010 will take place in Los Angeles, California, in June 2010. Ron Kaplan is conference chair; Geral Penn (Toronto), Mary Harper (CASL), and Jill Burstein (ETS) are PC co-chairs; and David Chiang and Ed Hovy are the local organizers. Based on the 2009 debrief (see above), we agreed to drop the IR Co-Chair, and maintain the Speech Co-Chair. Another change that we agreed to try was to set the same deadline for both the long and short papers. When we meet during the summer, we will review how these changes affected the conference. We will also discuss whether accepted papers should be allowed an additional page to address reviewer comments.

==North American conference in 2011==

This is joint with ACL. The coordinating committee was formed early and work has started smoothly under Ido Dagan's leadership.

==North American conference in 2012==

A call for proposals has been issued.

==Support for Summer Schools and Other Educational Outreach==

We have increased our support for NACLO (the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad) and again supported student participation at the Johns Hopkins summer school.

==Support for Outreach to the Latin American CL communities==

We have established a small fund to support Latin American activities and a small fund to support regional student conferences. We have not yet received any request for the regional student conferences, but there have been a few Latin American requests. For 2009 and 2010, we have committed support to three events thus far:

* the 7th Brazilian Symposium in Information and Human Language Technology (STIL 2009)
* PROPOR 2010 - International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese Language (28 to 30 of April, Porto Alegre - RS, Brazil)
* Escuela de Linguistica Computacional (ELiC -- winter school in Argentina, Aug 2010)

2010Q1 Reports: NAACL

2010-02-04T22:35:44Z

RebeccaHwa: New page: =Report from NAACL, February 2010 = Rebecca Hwa - Chapter board chair Owen Rambow - Past chapter board chair Christopher Manning - Treasurer Anoop Sarkar - Secretary ==Elections== ...

=Report from NAACL, February 2010 =

Rebecca Hwa - Chapter board chair

Owen Rambow - Past chapter board chair

Christopher Manning - Treasurer

Anoop Sarkar - Secretary

==Elections==

The NAACL election was held electronically in the Fall of 2009. Chris Callison-Burch (JHU) and Kristina Toutanova (MSR) replace Hal Daume III (Utah) and Rebecca Hwa (Pittburgh) as board members. Anoop Sarkar (Simon Fraiser) replaces Suzanne Stevenson (Toronto) as secretary. Rebecca Hwa replaces Owen Rambow (Columbia) as chair. Chris Manning (treasurer) ran unopposed for re-election. Owen Rambow and Grame Hirst remain on board ex officio as past NAACL Chair and ACL treasurer, respectively. The board now has nine members again.

==Executive Committee Meetings==

The Board converses regularly by e-mail. In addition, in 2010, the Board will meet in person at the NAACL HLT 2010 conference in Los Angeles. This needs to be scheduled ASAP.

==NAACL Treasurer's Report==

The Chapter's bank account held $108,294.60 at the end of November 2009. As foreshadowed, this is a large increase reflecting the healthy surplus from NAACL 2006 in Brooklyn ($57,000) offset only somewhat by expenditures. The expenditures were $12,000 catching up on payments for past JHU WS summer schools to JHU (for 2007 and 2008), $5,000 in support of NACLO 2009, a bit less than $2000 in support of students attending the JHU WS 2009 summer school, and the first expenditures on one of our new initiatives, almost $2000 in support of students attending NAACL 2009. 2010 should see other expenditures hit, including support under our new Latin American fund, and working out the financial outcome of NAACL 2007 (presumed to have made a loss).

==North American conference in 2009==

NAACL HLT 2009 took place in Boulder, Colorado, in June 2009. Mari Ostendorf was the conference chair; the PC co-chairs were: Michael Collins, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (NLP) Lucy Vanderwende, Microsoft (NLP) Doug Oard, University of Maryland (IR) Shri Narayanan, University of Southern California (Speech); and Martha Palmer and James Martin were local organizers. The conference was the best attended NAACL/HLT conference ever. The main discussion points during the board meeting are highlighted below (full minutes is at: http://www.naacl.org/archives/index.html).

* '''Sponsorship''': Sponsors are encouraged to participate in “3-packs” of conferences. Some potential sponsors of student travel awards want to put certain conditions on sponsorship money, e.g., as travel for certain types of students or given as award presented at conference. Suggestions: We need to turn the issue over to the sponsorship committee, to determine policy to guide these decisions. Set up conference calls among local sponsorship people and sponsorship committee. Send sponsorship guidelines to everyone involved in conferences. Might make more sense to have two people doing local sponsorship.
* '''Industry''': There was some feedback from industry people that tutorials were more appealing this year – more applied/relevant topics. The Industry panel was also well attended and successful.
* Demos: There were not as many demos this year (only 5), almost not worth the trouble. Will return consider revised demo policy for 2010.
* '''Representation of IR''': including IR, QA and TC, about the size of a medium sized area in the conference. (In rest of conference, smallest workshop is one related to IR, but well-attended tutorial on the topic.) Conclusion: There is an insufficient number of submissions to warrant a PC Co-Chair, but the topic does warrant an Area Chair. (Alternative view: Having a PC Co-Chair sends message that should encourage more submissions in this area; however, it doesn’t seem to be working.).
* '''Scheduling''': There were challenges in setting all the dates (submission, notification, etc., of all paper types), especially under time pressures. One lesson from this year – don’t try to coordinate with SIGIR. Suggestion: ACL and NAACL boards should coordinate some on dates and then turn over some suggestions to the PC chairs. Workshops schedule is done independently of local organizers. (Issues with setting up of posters.) Suggestion: Workshops Chair(s) should play stronger role in coordination and organization. Should refer this to ACL executive – broader issue of what the role of Workshops Chairs should be.
* '''Short papers''': implemented suggestion of having different categories of papers – negative result (1), interesting application note (10), small focused contribution (119), opinion piece (2), work in process (38). (Numbers indicate majority agreement on category for paper; 170 of 180 papers had such agreement.) Suggestion: Authors should specify category, not reviewers. Suggestion: Need to discuss the issue of short papers, and different categories, among wider membership, perhaps at Business Meeting. Suggestion: It might help to not call all of these “short papers”, because people are predisposed to think of short papers in a certain way (just as short versions of regular conference papers).

==North American conference in 2010==

NAACL HLT 2010 will take place in Los Angeles, California, in June 2010. Ron Kaplan is conference chair; Geral Penn (Toronto), Mary Harper (CASL), and Jill Burstein (ETS) are PC co-chairs; and David Chiang and Ed Hovy are the local organizers. Based on the 2009 debrief (see above), we agreed to drop the IR Co-Chair, and maintain the Speech Co-Chair. Another change that we agreed to try was to set the same deadline for both the long and short papers. When we meet during the summer, we will review how these changes affected the conference. We will also discuss whether accepted papers should be allowed an additional page to address reviewer comments.

==North American conference in 2011==

This is joint with ACL. The coordinating committee was formed early and work has started smoothly under Ido Dagan's leadership.

==North American conference in 2012==

A call for proposals has been issued.

==Support for Summer Schools and Other Educational Outreach==

We have increased our support for NACLO (the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad) and again supported student participation at the Johns Hopkins summer school.

==Support for Outreach to the Latin American CL communities==

We have established a small fund to support Latin American activities and a small fund to support regional student conferences. We have not yet received any request for the regional student conferences, but there have been a few Latin American requests. For 2009 and 2010, we have committed support to three events thus far:

* the 7th Brazilian Symposium in Information and Human Language Technology (STIL 2009)
* PROPOR 2010 - International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese Language (28 to 30 of April, Porto Alegre - RS, Brazil)
* Escuela de Linguistica Computacional (ELiC -- winter school in Argentina, Aug 2010)