2018Q3 Reports: General Chair
The 56th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) will take place next week in two weeks in Melbourne, Australia at the Melbourne Conference and Exhibition Centre. Tutorialswill be held on Sunday, July 15; the main conference on Monday, July 16 through Wednesday, July 18; and the workshops on Thursday/Friday, July 19-20.
The activities that I undertook as General Chair were:
(1) Selecting the organizing committee. Tim Baldwin, Trevor Cohn and Karin Vespoor were already on-board as the local arrangements chairs; the venue (and rooms/halls to be used) had been secured; and social event planned. In addition, the local arrangements chairs chose the local sponsorship chair (Cecile Paris), publicity chairs (Sarvnaz Karimi) and conference handbook chair (Jey Han Lau). The ACL 2018 coordinating committee and I selected the program co-chairs, Iryna Gurevych and Yusuke Miyao. I selected the remainder of the committee myself, taking care to have a good gender balance across the organizing team with 6 men and 6 women (including me). The faculty advisors to the student workshops selected the student workshop organizers. Geographic balance overall (including all organizing chairs) consisted of 8 from North America, 5 from Europe and 9 from Asia.
(2) I supported the program chairs in their decision to focus on review quality and reviewer workload. Please see their report for an analysis of this effort as well as recommendations going forward. From my perspective, it seems that the number of submissions to our conferences is making the program chair job unreasonably time-consuming. I hope that, as a community, we consider moving to a slightly different conference organization framework that distinguishes the management of workflow issues from the more substantive decision-making required in putting together a high quality conference program. ICML, for example, has two Workflow Chairs.
(3) As much as I wanted ACL to continue the new tradition of providing on-site options for childcare, I decided in conjunction with the ACL Treasurer and President and Local Arrangements Chairs, that it was not feasible for ACL 2018. Unlike the U.S., Australia does not have a professional childcare company like KiddieCorp and the other options identified proved to be too expensive given the very few anticipated attendees who would use the service. This is not meant to be interpreted as an indication that on-site childcare options are not a good idea, just that the far-from-most-everyone location of the ACL conference this year meant that few attendees are bringing their families along.
(4) Two new organizing positions were identified and filled. The first, a Remote Presentation Chair, had actually been identified by the ACL executive committee, but the conference organization web pages were not updated to reflect this decision. This position requires its chair to provide a means, and establish procedures, that allow authors who are unable to obtain the necessary visas to attend a conference to nevertheless present their papers remotely. Starting with a set of guidelines put together for WiNLP at NAACL 2018 by Meg Mitchell, we will update the conference organization web pages with information for subsequent Remote Presentation Chairs. In addition, in response to a recent discussion among the NAACL 2018 organizers, the ACL executive board and those in charge of the ACL Anthology, I am in the process of naming a Video Chair for ACL 2018 to handle all that is required to upload videos of all of the talks to the ACL anthology and work with the conference webmaster to upload them to the conference site.