2023Q3 Reports: NAACL

Report from NAACL, July 2023

Contributions to this report (in alphabetic order of surname) by:

• Luciana Benotti
• Jonathan May
• Thamar Solorio
• Wei Xu

Executive Committee Meetings

The board had a meeting on July 27 2022. The next meeting will be scheduled after ACL 2023. Additionally, the board converses by email.

Regional Americas Fund

Committee members Jonathan May, Eduardo Blanco, and Ammittai Axelrod issued a call for submissions in March 2023. The call was issued in English, Portuguese and Spanish. We received 15 submissions and met to discuss the merits of each. We attempted to create a pool of recipients whose applications were clear about what they wanted to do and how the funding they were requesting would help them fulfill that goal, whose outcome had some chance of succeeding in the mission of expanding NLP access in the Americas (though we encouraged and funded ambitious proposals), and who, in aggregate, met our goals of geographical and institutional diversity. We decided to fund eight proposals, totaling $13,700: $1500 to Mauricio Mazuecos of Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (UNC), Argentina, to support the second annual Argentinian NLP Symposium $1500 to Christopher Clarke and Jason Mars of University of Michigan / University of Guyana, to support corpus creation of Carribean creole language data sets $2000 to Raimundo Moura of Federal University of Piauí (Brazil), to support student travel to the TiLIC workshop $1500 to Pastor Lopez of Mathematics Research Center (CIMAT) Mexico, to support student travel and attendance at a workshop on data processing held in Guanajuato $1500 to Juan Antonio Lossio-Ventura of Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education, Mexico City, MX, for travel for students to the SIMBig conference $1000 to Jorge Andres Alvarado Valencia of Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Colombia, to support student attendance at an NLP summer school in Bogota $2200 to Leidiana Freitas of Brasileiras em PLN (BPLN), to support female student travel to STIL $3000 to Claudio Gutierrez and Antonios Anastasopoulos of Universidad de Chile and GMU, to support travel and attendance of students at Chilean indigenous language hackathon We contacted the applicants. We requested payment receipt information from those we elected to fund and provided feedback to those we were unable to fund. Jon is distributing funds over time as we receive funding contact information.

Ammittai has decided to leave the RAF committee and Thamar Solorio has volunteered to join. Eduardo would like to continue serving on the committee, despite no longer being on the NAACL board; we may put this to a vote. We have received reports from 2022 funding recipients, confirming their good use of our support funds.

NAACL Conference in 2024

NAACL 2024 will be in Mexico City. This is the first time that a NAACL conference will happen in Latin America. The board selected Katrin Erk as GC. The PCs that were selected are Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, and Steven John Bethard.

The board had discussions on the criteria used for selection of Program Chairs over the emails, including the consideration of the geolocation, demographic group, and publication record.

The webpage for the conference is https://2024.naacl.org/.

NAACL Conference in 2025

The board is deciding the location.

Treasurer's Report

The NAACL bank account budget currently stands at $99,902.60, which includes outlays of $13,500 for Khipu and RAF support, fees associated with the distribution of that support, taxes withheld, and monthly interest income. It does not account for expected outlays of $5000 for NACLO support nor an additional $10,200 obligated to RAF recipients. It also does not account for an unknown amount of money to be credited or debited based on surplus or loss from NAACL 2022 in Seattle.

NAACL Officers and goals per member

• Chair: Luciana Benotti - Luciana is advising the organization of NAACL 2024 and interacting with the ACL exec as an interface with DEI organizations such as EquiCL, WiNLP, Khipu, LatinX and others.
• Secretary: Heng Ji
• Treasurer: Jonathan May - Ensure financial stability and deliver on NAACL’s mission to expand access to and interest in NLP research in the Americas.
• Past Chair: Colin Cherry
• Executive Board Members:
  • Wei Xu - Serving on the coordinating committee of ACL 2026. Goals for 2023 is to push for improving the transparency of NAACL board, including (1) public recordings of board voting results and Board meeting/discussion; (2) clear and public rules on the selection criteria of Program Chairs and Senior Area Chairs for future NAACL conferences; (3) improve NAACL board member and officer nomination process.
  • Yunyao Li - Yunyao’s goals for 2023 are to (1) bridge academic and industry research, (2) promote interdisciplinary work, and (3) support the growth of our community.
  • Anna Rumshisky
  • Thamar Solorio - Thamar is working with Diyi and other external members of the community on a survey about the current state of NLP and perceived barriers by young researchers and/or researchers in different research environments. We have collected responses from ~90 participants and are now reviewing responses to create a white paper discussing our findings.
  • Diyi Yang - Diyi is working with Thamar and other external members to work on a survey about the current state of NLP community. In addition to this, I’d be interested in helping WiNLP and other DEI related activities.