2021Q3 Reports: Website & Conference App Chairs

Chutima Beokhaimook and Wichamon Mankong

Preparation and call for paper phase

our team had been formed and coordinated with the chairs in according to update the ACL2021 website. The website started from updating chairs and their homepage links. Moreover, we updated the call for paper and necessary information to be appear on the website. We adjusted the menus and buttons as recommended by the data owner. The student research workshops were also added to the web.

Our task is a kind of daily correction as requested. Each chair requested or ask to update their content. Unfortunately, the original website we are working on now, was adopted from the previous version of ACL, modifying the web cannot be done dynamically. In case of the content owners would like to modify the web by themselves, they must log-in to GitHub system, then submitted code to the system and requested push and pull to see the updated results. The system for submit paper (called softconf) was beyond our duty.

Here are some tasks we had done in this phase

• Organizing the FAQ to be in the Blog.
• Adding Workshop information and keep updating it.
• Updating Ethic Advisory Committee (EAC), senior program committees, Sponsorships, templates and links, blog post and FAQ, call for paper, etc.

Paper submission phase

At this phase the quick responses were required because there were a lot of questions from the authors. What we have done was creating the news list at the front of ACL page as to notify or provide the urgent messages to authors. The PC chairs asked us to create the web as a channel for the social media team to urgently update and reply promptly. Since the original version of ACL2021 website did not have any features that allowed dynamic change the content on the web. Our suggestion to PC chair was to create the one web board for ACL announcement (which is outside ACL website) and we put the link on home page of ACL to that web board. With this way, the social team can access the web board, create, or edit the content as they wanted. We also provide the usernames and web board user manual in this case.

The URL of the web board was http://103.254.72.15/mybb/index.php

At this period, we still do daily correction as chairs requested as well as perform several tasks shown below

• Modifying chair’s names and their homepages
• Creating the link for ACL-IJCNLP2021 Demo CFP
• Updating reviewer mentoring program
• Updating news as requested
• Adjusting the links of various content as requested by the owner.
• Updating the workshop names and their links
• Restructuring the website (system demonstration and student research workshop)
• Adjusting the menu for more appropriate position and ease of use
• Creating page instruction for reviewer and notify in chair blog
• Restructuring D&I Co-chair
• Updating sponsorship brochure
• Updating conference schedule
• Updating schedule for Demo track

Paper Notification of Acceptance Phase

At this phase, we posted the reviewing advice and add it in Chairs Blog. We still updated workshop information such as workshop chair names, workshop names, etc. We also updated the sponsorship and the logos, FAQs and news. At this phase virtual infrastructure committees were added to the organization.

The necessary information such as camera-ready instructions, accept/ reject notification, registration, call for volunteers were added to the web. We got stuck on creating accepted page for the long and short papers for ACL-IJCNLP 2021 as well as the findings page, due to unsupported the Unicode characters found in many author’s names. We needed to check one by one paper and transformed the code to be supported by HTML format. It took a bit long time for this process.