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		<title>StevenBird: 2008 Summer Reports: ACL 2008 moved to 2008Q3 Reports: ACL 2008</title>
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		<updated>2008-11-25T22:50:30Z</updated>

		<summary type="html">&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/adminwiki/index.php?title=2008_Summer_Reports:_ACL_2008&quot; class=&quot;mw-redirect&quot; title=&quot;2008 Summer Reports: ACL 2008&quot;&gt;2008 Summer Reports: ACL 2008&lt;/a&gt; moved to &lt;a href=&quot;/adminwiki/index.php?title=2008Q3_Reports:_ACL_2008&quot; title=&quot;2008Q3 Reports: ACL 2008&quot;&gt;2008Q3 Reports: ACL 2008&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
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				&lt;td colspan=&quot;1&quot; style=&quot;background-color: #fff; color: #202122; text-align: center;&quot;&gt;← Older revision&lt;/td&gt;
				&lt;td colspan=&quot;1&quot; style=&quot;background-color: #fff; color: #202122; text-align: center;&quot;&gt;Revision as of 22:50, 25 November 2008&lt;/td&gt;
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&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;&lt;/table&gt;</summary>
		<author><name>StevenBird</name></author>
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		<title>StevenBird: New page: &lt;pre&gt; ACL08:HLT Conference Chair Report   Kathleen McKeown  Columbia University    This year&#039;s conference, ACL:HLT08, is jointly sponsored by the Association for Computational Linguistics ...</title>
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		<updated>2008-11-25T01:56:38Z</updated>

		<summary type="html">&lt;p&gt;New page: &amp;lt;pre&amp;gt; ACL08:HLT Conference Chair Report   Kathleen McKeown  Columbia University    This year&amp;#039;s conference, ACL:HLT08, is jointly sponsored by the Association for Computational Linguistics ...&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;New page&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div&gt;&amp;lt;pre&amp;gt;&lt;br /&gt;
ACL08:HLT Conference Chair Report &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
Kathleen McKeown &lt;br /&gt;
Columbia University &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
This year&amp;#039;s conference, ACL:HLT08, is jointly sponsored by the Association&lt;br /&gt;
for Computational Linguistics and the North American Chapter of the&lt;br /&gt;
Association for Computational Linguistics and it thus brings together the&lt;br /&gt;
traditions of both organizations. As is evident from the title, one of&lt;br /&gt;
those traditions is the focus on research from all areas of Human Language&lt;br /&gt;
Technology, including information retrieval, natural language processing&lt;br /&gt;
and speech. The conference features invited speakers in speech and&lt;br /&gt;
information retrieval and there are sessions devoted to all three of these&lt;br /&gt;
areas. &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
Since I was last involved in organizing the ACL Conferences back in the&lt;br /&gt;
90&amp;#039;s, the conferences have grown dramatically. This year there were eight&lt;br /&gt;
committees involved in the organization, most of which had two or more&lt;br /&gt;
chairs. This included the program committee, tutorial organizers, student&lt;br /&gt;
research workshop, demos organizers, publications, publicity and&lt;br /&gt;
sponsorship. For committees that were involved in putting together the&lt;br /&gt;
various aspects of the program, we had co-chairs drawn from the three main&lt;br /&gt;
areas of the conference. In order to facilitate organization, in most&lt;br /&gt;
cases, one chair was designated as the main coordinator and that person&lt;br /&gt;
drove the organization of their committee, was my main contact, and&lt;br /&gt;
communicated with the other co-chairs. This organization worked quite&lt;br /&gt;
well. I was quite impressed with the energy and commitment of the &lt;br /&gt;
different chairs. This made my job much easier. &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
One main issue that I think should be seriously considered for future&lt;br /&gt;
years of NAACL is the inclusion of speech and information retrieval. The&lt;br /&gt;
intention was to have a conference that is equally balanced between all&lt;br /&gt;
three areas. Submissions from the speech and IR area are low, however.&lt;br /&gt;
Thus, for the program committee, the workload is very unevenly balanced&lt;br /&gt;
between the co-program chairs. The vast majority of submissions came in NLP&lt;br /&gt;
and thus the NLP chairs were more heavily burdened, particularly in the&lt;br /&gt;
final week of decision making. Similarly, for tutorials and demos, while&lt;br /&gt;
there is the intent to equally balance the offerings between the different&lt;br /&gt;
areas, it is not clear whether either submissions or selection (of&lt;br /&gt;
tutorials) is equal in all areas. For future years, NAACL must either do&lt;br /&gt;
something different to raise participation from the other communities or&lt;br /&gt;
should change the structure of the committees to reflect what actually&lt;br /&gt;
happens. I don&amp;#039;t think publicity is enough. This year we had three&lt;br /&gt;
publicity chairs, one for each area. They did a great job in posting the&lt;br /&gt;
event, developing a flyer and bringing it to other conferences. It is&lt;br /&gt;
possible that that work could begin earlier, which would mean selecting&lt;br /&gt;
those chairs in summer rather than fall, as I did. I believe, however,&lt;br /&gt;
that there needs to be some additional coordinated event that involves&lt;br /&gt;
invitations to members of the community in order to draw more&lt;br /&gt;
participation. &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
There were several other changes that we tried this year. A new plan for&lt;br /&gt;
sponsorship was developed that would enable coordination among different&lt;br /&gt;
ACL Conferences and across the years. This plan was finalized during the&lt;br /&gt;
summer and thus, relatively late in the process of selecting chairs. It&lt;br /&gt;
is an ambitious plan and we are fortunate to have one person who has&lt;br /&gt;
agreed to serve in a multi-year, multi-conference capacity. However,&lt;br /&gt;
finding people who are willing to serve in this larger capacity is&lt;br /&gt;
difficult. I think the next conference chair needs to start finding&lt;br /&gt;
people early for this task and the ACL should think about how to make the&lt;br /&gt;
task more rewarding. &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
We also instituted a change this year in the number of publication&lt;br /&gt;
chairs. In previous years, there was only one and this year, we expanded&lt;br /&gt;
that number to two. I think this change worked well. The task was divided&lt;br /&gt;
by proceedings with Joakim Nivre handling the main proceedings and Noah&lt;br /&gt;
Smith handling the workshop proceedings. Given the number of workshops, I&lt;br /&gt;
think an extra person was needed to handle this. We also made it possible&lt;br /&gt;
for them to find help within their local institutions, something that is&lt;br /&gt;
also needed for this particular job. There was a fair amount of&lt;br /&gt;
communication between the publication chairs to various other chairs and&lt;br /&gt;
the publishers. I found that it seamlessly switched between Joakim and&lt;br /&gt;
Noah and that when one was unavailable, the other would easily&lt;br /&gt;
substitute. So I would recommend again having two publications chairs in&lt;br /&gt;
future years. &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
This year the number of student paper submissions was lower than usual&lt;br /&gt;
and for future years, I would recommend asking the student research chairs&lt;br /&gt;
to think about how to publicize. This was unexpected this year so we did&lt;br /&gt;
not think of doing this ahead of time. Faculty at different universities&lt;br /&gt;
should keep in mind that with a lower number of submissions, there is a&lt;br /&gt;
better chance for the students to have papers accepted. The student papers&lt;br /&gt;
are presented in a parallel track as are all other papers and students&lt;br /&gt;
will have equal exposure. &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
In conclusion, I want to thank the many people involved. I thank the&lt;br /&gt;
committee chairs that I asked for agreeing to serve and for showing so&lt;br /&gt;
much responsibility. I also think local arrangements deserves a special&lt;br /&gt;
thanks for putting together such a nice event. &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
 &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
		ACL-08: HLT Program Chairs Report&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
The program for ACL-08: HLT features a wide variety of avenues for&lt;br /&gt;
authors to present their latest work in computational linguistics,&lt;br /&gt;
information retrieval, and speech technology.  The program includes:&lt;br /&gt;
full papers, short papers, posters, demonstrations, and a student&lt;br /&gt;
research workshop, as well as pre- and post-conference tutorials and&lt;br /&gt;
workshops.  In our program design, we attempted to combine the successful &lt;br /&gt;
approach of ACL07, which had four parallel oral sessions of &lt;br /&gt;
25-min full paper presentations, with the HLT model of presenting&lt;br /&gt;
late-breaking results in parallel sessions of 15-min short paper&lt;br /&gt;
presentations.  We also experimented with an idea adopted from&lt;br /&gt;
Interspeech, in which authors can choose their desired&lt;br /&gt;
mode of presentation, oral or poster, based on their assessment of&lt;br /&gt;
how best to present their work.   There is no distinction between&lt;br /&gt;
posters and oral presentations in terms of quality or in terms&lt;br /&gt;
of how they appear in the Proceedings.   Although it will take&lt;br /&gt;
more than one year to see this change fully taken up by the&lt;br /&gt;
membership, we were happy to see some authors choose the poster &lt;br /&gt;
option from the very outset.  Area chairs also used their&lt;br /&gt;
discretion in indicating which submissions would benefit from&lt;br /&gt;
which mode of presentation.   If the number of submissions continues&lt;br /&gt;
to grow as it has done in the past few years, poster sessions will&lt;br /&gt;
be one way to managing this growth without creating a large number&lt;br /&gt;
of parallel sessions.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
This year, the program committee received yet another record-breaking&lt;br /&gt;
number of submissions, with 470 full and 275 short paper submissions.&lt;br /&gt;
Full papers were due in mid-January, and the program committee &lt;br /&gt;
accepted 119 (25%) of these, 95 as oral presentations and 24 as posters.&lt;br /&gt;
Short papers were due in mid-March, and the committee accepted 64 (23%)&lt;br /&gt;
of these, 32 for oral presentation and 32 for poster presentation.&lt;br /&gt;
(A breakdown by area is included at the end of this report.)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
We recruited 34 area chairs who recruited 720 reviewers, and who managed &lt;br /&gt;
the reviewing process of both full and short papers in their areas.  &lt;br /&gt;
Reviewers  wrote three reviews for each full paper submission, and two &lt;br /&gt;
reviews for each  short paper submission, for a staggering total of just &lt;br /&gt;
under 2000 reviews! Miraculously, there were only a handful of late reviews.  &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
As the number of submissions and, consequently the number of area&lt;br /&gt;
chairs, has risen over the last few years, the ACL program committee&lt;br /&gt;
has moved away from having a face-to-face meeting of all area chairs.&lt;br /&gt;
For ACL08: HLT, two of the program co-chairs met for two days at&lt;br /&gt;
Edinburgh University, using email and teleconferencing to get input&lt;br /&gt;
from the two program co-chairs not based in Europe, and all of the&lt;br /&gt;
area chairs.  For short paper decision making, three of the four&lt;br /&gt;
program co-chairs held a teleconference, with input from the fourth&lt;br /&gt;
co-chair by email as time zone differences permitted. &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
Another first this year was our decision to award several outstanding&lt;br /&gt;
paper prizes, rather than trying to identify a single best paper.  We&lt;br /&gt;
did this because we felt that it is typical for conferences as large&lt;br /&gt;
as this to have several particularly exciting, innovative, and&lt;br /&gt;
well-crafted papers, and it is extremely difficult to compare quality&lt;br /&gt;
across areas.  We asked area chairs to nominate papers for the various&lt;br /&gt;
awards and then formed an  Outstanding Paper Committee, who wish to &lt;br /&gt;
remain anonymous, and to whom we owe a great debt of gratitude for their &lt;br /&gt;
hard work at very short notice.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
There were three things that made our job possible.  First,&lt;br /&gt;
we were helped immensely by Jason Eisner, who has compiled an&lt;br /&gt;
excellent web site on &amp;quot;How to Serve as Program Chair of a Conference&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;
(http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~jason/advice/how-to-chair-a-conference.html).&lt;br /&gt;
This saved us more than once!  Second, we employed a recent PhD, James&lt;br /&gt;
Clarke, to help us get started with START, and to simply deal with the&lt;br /&gt;
large volume of work that must be processed within the first few days&lt;br /&gt;
after submissions are received. Third, there is the invaluable START &lt;br /&gt;
system for managing paper submission, reviewing, and decision making.  &lt;br /&gt;
Rich Gerber and the START team responded to questions/problems quickly, &lt;br /&gt;
even modifying START overnight to provide functionality we asked for.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
Submissions and acceptances by area:&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
LONG Papers    #subm   #accept	#oral	            &lt;br /&gt;
--------------------------------------------------------&lt;br /&gt;
Dialogue		16	4 (25%)	3 (19%)	&lt;br /&gt;
Discourse		12   	3 (25%)	3 (25%)	&lt;br /&gt;
Eval			13   	3 (23%)	3 (23%)	&lt;br /&gt;
IE			34   	8 (24%)	7 (21%)	&lt;br /&gt;
IR			28   	9 (32%)	8 (29%)	&lt;br /&gt;
LanguageGen		13   	3 (23%)	3 (23%)	&lt;br /&gt;
LanguageRes		12   	3 (25%)	2 (17%)	&lt;br /&gt;
MT			87    20 (23%)	15 (17%)	&lt;br /&gt;
Multimodal		 5    2 (40%)	2 (40%)	&lt;br /&gt;
Phon/Morph		32   	8 (25%)	7 (22%)	&lt;br /&gt;
QA			11    13 (27%)	2 (18%)	&lt;br /&gt;
Semantics		63    18 (29%)	13 (21%)	&lt;br /&gt;
Sentiment		20    3 (15%)	3 (15%)	&lt;br /&gt;
Speech		13   	4 (31%)	4 (31%)	&lt;br /&gt;
Stat ML		42   	9 (22%)	6 (14%)	&lt;br /&gt;
Summarisation	21   	5 (24%)	3 (14%)	&lt;br /&gt;
Syntax		54    14 (26%)	12 (22%)	&lt;br /&gt;
--------------------------------------------------------&lt;br /&gt;
total		     476    119 (25%)	96 (20%)	&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
SHORT Papers    #subm   #accept     #oral&lt;br /&gt;
------------------------------------------------------&lt;br /&gt;
 &lt;br /&gt;
Dialogue		12	4 (33%)	1 (8%)&lt;br /&gt;
Discourse  	 	 7	3 (43%)    	1 (14%)&lt;br /&gt;
Evaluation    	10	2 (20%)    	1 (10%)&lt;br /&gt;
IE			18	4 (22%)	1 ( 6%)&lt;br /&gt;
IR              	19	4 (21%)	3 (16%)&lt;br /&gt;
QA		 	 4	1 (25%)    	1 (25%)	&lt;br /&gt;
Sentiment  		18	4 (22%)	1 ( 6%)&lt;br /&gt;
Lang res 	 	 5	1 (20%)	1 (20%)&lt;br /&gt;
NLG		 	 5	2 (40%)	2 (40%)&lt;br /&gt;
MT	 		42	10 (24%)	4 (10%)&lt;br /&gt;
Multimodal  	 4	0 (0%)	0 (0%)&lt;br /&gt;
Phon/Morph		12	4 (33%)	1 ( 8%)&lt;br /&gt;
Semantics		30	6 (20%)	5 (17%)&lt;br /&gt;
Speech 		15	4 (26%)	3 (20%)&lt;br /&gt;
Stat ML		33	7 (21%)	1 ( 3%)&lt;br /&gt;
Summ			20	5 (25%)	1 ( 5%)&lt;br /&gt;
Syntax 		21	7 (33%)	5 (24%)&lt;br /&gt;
-----------------------------------------------------&lt;br /&gt;
		     275	68 (25%)	32 (12%)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
Johanna Moore, Simone Teufel, James Allan, Sadaoki Furui&lt;br /&gt;
ACL-08:HLT Program Committee Chairs&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
 &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
Report from ACL-HLT 2008 Workshop chair:&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
 &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
The committee consisted of myself, Helen Meng, Chengxiang Zhai. We received&lt;br /&gt;
14 applications for workshops. The committee chose 11 Workshops including 2&lt;br /&gt;
two-day workshops and 9 one-day workshops. From the ratio of acceptance, the&lt;br /&gt;
selection process is not very competitive. The review process was very simple:&lt;br /&gt;
First the reviews were made by the committee members independently and then&lt;br /&gt;
group discussion was made for the unsure cases. The dropped 3 applications were&lt;br /&gt;
primarily due to the mismatch of the topics. For instance, some applications&lt;br /&gt;
were not core-CL related. After the paper submission, we decide to cancel&lt;br /&gt;
ACL08-Semantic-Evaluation based on the email by the organizer Eneko Agirre who&lt;br /&gt;
reported just one submission was received.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
 &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
The final list of workshops are:&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
Two days:&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
1.     SIGDIAL, ACL08-SIGDIAL (two days)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
2.     The Third Workshop on Issues in Teaching Computational Linguistics,&lt;br /&gt;
ACL08-Teaching-CL, (two days)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
 &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
One-day:&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
1.     Third Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation, ACL08-SMT&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
2.     SSST-2: Second Workshop on Syntax and Structure in Statistical&lt;br /&gt;
Translation, ACL08-SSST&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
3.     Software engineering, testing, and quality assurance for natural&lt;br /&gt;
language processing, ACL08-NLP-Software&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
4.     BioNLP 2008, ACL08-BioNLP&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
5.     Computational Morphology and Phonology(SIGMORPHON), ACL08-SIGMORPHON,&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
6.     Natural language processing and mobile devices, ACL08-Mobile-NLP&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
7.     The 4th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational&lt;br /&gt;
Applications,  ACL08-NLP-Education&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
8.     Workshop on German Parsing, ACL08-German-Parsing&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
 &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
I want to give special thanks to Chris Brew, Priscilla Rasmussen, Kathy&lt;br /&gt;
Mckeown, Simone Teufel who provided fast and professional support for the WS&lt;br /&gt;
organization.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
  &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
Ming Zhou,&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
June 1st, 2008&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
 &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
This year we received 13 submissions for tutorial proposals. Of these,&lt;br /&gt;
3 covered topics on machine learning with applications to natural&lt;br /&gt;
language processing, 5 dealt with information retrieval/information&lt;br /&gt;
extraction/data mining, 3 were related to speech processing or&lt;br /&gt;
dialogue systems.&lt;br /&gt;
 &lt;br /&gt;
Some of the submissions were very similar to other tutorials given in&lt;br /&gt;
past ACL and NAACL conferences. While we tried to avoid repetition of&lt;br /&gt;
topics, the question came up of whether it is a good idea to accept&lt;br /&gt;
&amp;quot;repeats&amp;quot; in cases where there was a big audience at the previous&lt;br /&gt;
offering. Having an explicit agreement about this can facilitate the&lt;br /&gt;
decision process for future tutorial chairs.&lt;br /&gt;
 &lt;br /&gt;
After considering the various constraints: clarity of the proposal,&lt;br /&gt;
covering of NLP, IR and speech, offerings in previous years, 6&lt;br /&gt;
tutorials were selected for presentation.&lt;br /&gt;
 &lt;br /&gt;
T1: Introduction to Computational Advertising&lt;br /&gt;
T2: Building Practical Spoken Dialog Systems&lt;br /&gt;
T3: Semi-supervised Learning for Natural Language Processing&lt;br /&gt;
T4: Advanced Online Learning for Natural Language Processing&lt;br /&gt;
T5: Speech technology from research to industry&lt;br /&gt;
T6: Interactive Visualization for Computational Linguistics&lt;br /&gt;
 &lt;br /&gt;
Covering the speech area tutorials was most problematic as there were&lt;br /&gt;
fewer submissions. We intentionally chose two---one for the morning&lt;br /&gt;
(T2 on dialogue)&lt;br /&gt;
and one for the afternoon session (T5 focusing more on underlying technologies&lt;br /&gt;
for spoken language-based applications). In previous years the speech&lt;br /&gt;
tutorials were often not very popular, sometimes because of coinciding&lt;br /&gt;
with other highly popular tutorials. The offerings of two very&lt;br /&gt;
interesting presentation this year would make possible to assess if&lt;br /&gt;
the problem is general lack of interest. If this is the case, it will&lt;br /&gt;
be good to discuss what can be done differently in future years.&lt;br /&gt;
 &lt;br /&gt;
Core information retrieval proposal (as opposed to information&lt;br /&gt;
extraction) were also not many. For both Speech and IR tutorials the&lt;br /&gt;
chairs solicited proposals personally, beyond the general advertising&lt;br /&gt;
of the conference. Some of these were rejected eventually, but the&lt;br /&gt;
above is worth mentioning so that the number of submissions does not&lt;br /&gt;
seem misleading.&lt;br /&gt;
 &lt;br /&gt;
In printing the one page abstracts for the proceedings, it will be&lt;br /&gt;
useful for future chairs to provide a sample style file with the&lt;br /&gt;
necessary section titles and formatting in order to achieve&lt;br /&gt;
consistencies. When given instructions, regardless of how clear they&lt;br /&gt;
might, different people come up with different interpretations.&lt;br /&gt;
 &lt;br /&gt;
ACL:HLT 2008 Tutorial Chairs&lt;br /&gt;
Ani Nenkova&lt;br /&gt;
Marilyn Walker&lt;br /&gt;
Eugene Agichtein&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
 &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
ACL-08: HLT --- Demo Chair Report&lt;br /&gt;
(Jimmy Lin, University of Maryland)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
As the demo chair for the conference, I was responsible for arranging&lt;br /&gt;
the demo program.  This year, 21 submissions were received, 9 of which&lt;br /&gt;
were selected for inclusion in the program after review by at least&lt;br /&gt;
two members of the program committee.  Care was taken to ensure a&lt;br /&gt;
balanced demo program encompassing as many areas of HLT as possible.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
ACL-08: HLT Publications Co-Chairs Report&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
As publications co-chairs for ACL-08: HLT, we have been responsible&lt;br /&gt;
for producing the conference proceedings (in hardcopy, on DVD, and&lt;br /&gt;
for the ACL Anthology) and for processing copyright transfer agreements.&lt;br /&gt;
Below we report on the work done and suggest improvements for the future.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
1. Preparatory work&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
In order to facilitate the work on the proceedings, both for ourselves and&lt;br /&gt;
for authors, we made several revisions to the style files and formatting&lt;br /&gt;
guidelines in order to (a) make some of the more common space-saving&lt;br /&gt;
devices part of the official guidelines, and (b) make the style files consistent&lt;br /&gt;
with the guidelines. In addition, we promoted the idea, pioneered by Jason&lt;br /&gt;
Eisner at last year&amp;#039;s EMNLP-CoNLL, of allowing 8 pages of content + an&lt;br /&gt;
unlimited number of pages for references, in order to encourage thorough&lt;br /&gt;
citation. In the end, the limit for long papers (and for many of the workshops)&lt;br /&gt;
was set at 8 pages of content + 1 page of references. We think this was a&lt;br /&gt;
perfectly reasonable compromise for ACL-08: HLT, but we see no reason to&lt;br /&gt;
restrict the length of the bibliography for future conferences, given that&lt;br /&gt;
the demand for printed proceedings seems to be declining steadily. The&lt;br /&gt;
revised style files and guidelines will be included in the ACLPUB repository&lt;br /&gt;
for the benefit of future publications chairs.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
We also tried to make sure that important revisions to the ACLPUB software,&lt;br /&gt;
made by the chairs of previous years, were actually committed into the&lt;br /&gt;
repository. We are especially grateful to Eric Ringger and Jason Eisner for&lt;br /&gt;
contributing several important improvements during this conference cycle&lt;br /&gt;
that they had made previously. During the whole process we have fixed a&lt;br /&gt;
number of bugs ourselves, and improved the functionality for converting&lt;br /&gt;
LaTeX to HTML for the DVD. All these changes have been committed to the&lt;br /&gt;
ACLPUB repository.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
2. Main conference publications&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
The main conference proceedings are divided into five logical books:&lt;br /&gt;
main proceedings (containing all long papers), short papers, SRW, demos,&lt;br /&gt;
and tutorial abstracts. When printed, the last four of these are bound&lt;br /&gt;
together in a single companion volume.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
The main proceedings and short papers were handled by the publications&lt;br /&gt;
co-chairs themselves. This work involved the usual fixing of papers that&lt;br /&gt;
were not correctly formatted or did not have all fonts embedded. We decided&lt;br /&gt;
not to be overly strict in the application of formatting guidelines, which&lt;br /&gt;
resulted in 25 out of 119 long papers and 9 out of 68 short papers having&lt;br /&gt;
to be sent back to the authors for correction. (Applying the guidelines&lt;br /&gt;
strictly would have meant sending back more than two thirds of the papers.)&lt;br /&gt;
Given that more than 90% of the problematic papers were produced using&lt;br /&gt;
Word, rather than LaTeX, it is worth discussing whether we should provide&lt;br /&gt;
Word document templates in addition to LaTeX style files in the future.&lt;br /&gt;
A key issue here is whether adequate support for all character sets exists&lt;br /&gt;
for LaTeX.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
The SRW and demos were handled by the respective chairs, while the tutorial&lt;br /&gt;
abstracts were handled jointly by the publications co-chairs and the tutorials&lt;br /&gt;
chairs. Overall, these volumes caused relatively few problems, but we question&lt;br /&gt;
whether it is worth the effort to produce a 15 page volume containing the&lt;br /&gt;
one-page tutorial abstracts. If this practice is continued in the future,&lt;br /&gt;
this should be the responsibility of the tutorials chairs.  Providing templates&lt;br /&gt;
to the tutorial presenters will also make this a simpler job.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
3. Workshop publications&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
All ten workshops have printed proceedings. One workshop decided to take&lt;br /&gt;
care of their own printing to allow for a later submission deadline for&lt;br /&gt;
camera-ready papers. Unfortunately, this also meant that the proceedings&lt;br /&gt;
of that workshop is not available on the DVD (although it will of course&lt;br /&gt;
be available in the ACL Anthology). In the end, the difference between the&lt;br /&gt;
two deadlines turned out to be less than two weeks, and we believe that&lt;br /&gt;
it should be possible in the future to get all workshop proceedings printed&lt;br /&gt;
in the same process and included on the DVD provided that deadlines are&lt;br /&gt;
fixed earlier.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
The remaining nine workshop proceedings were produced by the respective&lt;br /&gt;
chairs and delivered to the publications co-chairs. Despite some minor&lt;br /&gt;
technical problems with the installation of the ACLPUB software on&lt;br /&gt;
different sites, the production of each individual book went rather&lt;br /&gt;
smoothly. However, a substantial amount of work had to be done afterwards&lt;br /&gt;
to achieve consistency with respect to title pages, spine texts, citation&lt;br /&gt;
stamps and pdf meta-data. We believe that some of this work can be avoided&lt;br /&gt;
in the future with a slightly different work flow, where the publications chair&lt;br /&gt;
provide all book chairs with customized templates.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
4. DVD&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
Generating the content for the DVD from the (files for the) printed version&lt;br /&gt;
of the proceedings is largely automated by the ACLPUB software. However, it&lt;br /&gt;
is our impression that this part of the ACLPUB package is less mature than&lt;br /&gt;
the tools for producing the proceedings, and we had to make several&lt;br /&gt;
improvements especially for the generation of the program and table of&lt;br /&gt;
contents for the DVD.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
5. Future work&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
We believe that some of the problems we encountered along the way could&lt;br /&gt;
have been avoided if the instructions for publications chairs in the conference&lt;br /&gt;
handbook had been more complete and up to date. This should not be seen as&lt;br /&gt;
criticism of our predecessors, only as recognition of the fact that the whole&lt;br /&gt;
publication process has changed with the advent of the ACLPUB package,&lt;br /&gt;
and that it has not been possible to update the documentation at the same pace.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
We therefore intend to create a &amp;quot;publications chair instructions&amp;quot; document,&lt;br /&gt;
which will basically recapitulate what we did and what advice we have about&lt;br /&gt;
each step. This will be included in the ACLPUB repository but can also be&lt;br /&gt;
integrated into the conference handbook, perhaps in condensed form. The&lt;br /&gt;
most important thing we want to leave behind is a timeline that eliminates&lt;br /&gt;
all of the surprises and helps the next publications chair to know what he/she&lt;br /&gt;
is in for. &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
Joakim Nivre and Noah A. Smith&lt;br /&gt;
Uppsala and Pittsburgh, May 2008&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
 &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
Report for ACL 2008 Student Research Workshop Â &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
Student co-chairs:&lt;br /&gt;
Ebru Arisoy &amp;lt;arisoyeb@boun.edu.tr&amp;gt;, Bogazici University, Bebek, Istanbul, Turkey&lt;br /&gt;
Wolfgang Maier &amp;lt;wo.maier@uni-tuebingen.de&amp;gt;, University of Tuebingen, Tuebingen, Germany&lt;br /&gt;
Keisuke Inoue &amp;lt;kinoue@syr.edu&amp;gt;, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, USA &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
Faculty Advisor:&lt;br /&gt;
Jan Wiebe &amp;lt;wiebe@cs.pitt.edu&amp;gt;, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
1. Program Committee&lt;br /&gt;
The co-chairs of the ACL 2008 Student Research Workshop are Ebru Arisoy&lt;br /&gt;
(Bogazici University, Turkey), Wolfgang Maier (University of Tuebingen,&lt;br /&gt;
Germany) and Keisuke Inoue (Syracuse University, USA). Jan Wiebe&lt;br /&gt;
(University of Pittsburgh, USA) is the faculty advisor. The program committee&lt;br /&gt;
is formed by the co-chairs by asking previous SRW reviewers, previous SRW&lt;br /&gt;
participants and other researchers from the community.Â  The final program&lt;br /&gt;
committee consists of 61 reviewers, of which 27 are students or young&lt;br /&gt;
researchers and 34 are senior researchers. &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
2. Paper Submission and Acceptance Â &lt;br /&gt;
We received 27 submissions from 10 countries (see Table 1). All papers were&lt;br /&gt;
assigned 5 reviewers (at least 1 senior and 1 student reviewer). We accepted&lt;br /&gt;
12 papers, of which 5 are regular (oral) presentations and 7 are posters.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
Country	     Submission       Accepted&lt;br /&gt;
------------+------------+---------&lt;br /&gt;
Australia	1			1&lt;br /&gt;
China		1			1&lt;br /&gt;
France		3			1&lt;br /&gt;
Germany		1			0&lt;br /&gt;
India		2			0&lt;br /&gt;
Japan		2			1&lt;br /&gt;
Korea		1			0&lt;br /&gt;
Spain		1			0&lt;br /&gt;
Switzerland	1			0&lt;br /&gt;
UK		2			1&lt;br /&gt;
US		12			7&lt;br /&gt;
-----------------------------------&lt;br /&gt;
Total:		27			12&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
Table 1: Submission and acceptance by countries&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
3. Presentation Format&lt;br /&gt;
The Student Research Workshop poster session is colocated with the main&lt;br /&gt;
conference poster session on Day 1 of ACL (June 16, 2008).Â The five oral&lt;br /&gt;
presentations are held in a single session parallel to the last main&lt;br /&gt;
conference sessions on the same day. Each oral presentation consists of&lt;br /&gt;
15 minutes of talk, and 5 minutes each for panelist feedback and for&lt;br /&gt;
general audience questions.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
4. Panelists&lt;br /&gt;
The co-chairs asked senior conference attendees to be on the panel to&lt;br /&gt;
provide feedback to student authors. The panelists were selected for&lt;br /&gt;
their knowledge in the area and availability during the workshop. At the&lt;br /&gt;
time of this report, most papers have been assigned at least one panelist.&lt;br /&gt;
Further positive responses are still expected.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
5. Funding&lt;br /&gt;
We submitted our request to the National Science Foundation in January&lt;br /&gt;
2008 and received the award in April 2008. The grant totaled $18,180,&lt;br /&gt;
of which $15,950 was budgeted for student travel, registration,&lt;br /&gt;
accommodation and meals. The remaining $2,230 will be used to cover the&lt;br /&gt;
student co-chairs registration and to partially defray costs associated&lt;br /&gt;
with the student research workshop such as refreshments during the breaks. &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
We will be able to provide funds to every SRW participant. Because the&lt;br /&gt;
cost of traveling to Columbus varies depending on the student&amp;#039;s location,&lt;br /&gt;
the level of funding is determined based on the cost of travel. We will&lt;br /&gt;
award a guaranteed $305 in funds to students from Columbus, $1,505-$1,705&lt;br /&gt;
to students from Europe and $3,105 to students from Australia. In the&lt;br /&gt;
distribution of the grant, we aim to cover student&amp;#039;s expenses for airfare,&lt;br /&gt;
ACL registration, and membership fee. We also aim to contribute toward 4&lt;br /&gt;
nights stay in a shared room in one of the conference hotels and meals&lt;br /&gt;
during the conference. &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
6. Organization and Planning&lt;br /&gt;
The Workshop was publicized by sending CFPs to mailing lists of&lt;br /&gt;
computational linguistics and related fields. The Workshop webpage was&lt;br /&gt;
placed prominently on the main conference website. We are grateful to&lt;br /&gt;
the webmaster for swift updating on request. In addition, the ACL&lt;br /&gt;
Newsletters helped to disseminate information on the Student Research&lt;br /&gt;
Workshop.Â  We are grateful to the main conference organizers for the&lt;br /&gt;
support. We used the START system and Google Docs to manage the&lt;br /&gt;
submission and review process. Both proved immensely helpful for&lt;br /&gt;
managing the coordination among 27 submissions and 61 reviewers.&lt;br /&gt;
None of the submissions showed formal problems, i.e., there were no&lt;br /&gt;
double submissions without indication, all copyright forms were&lt;br /&gt;
correctly signed, etc.Â  &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
7. Suggestions and Considerations&lt;br /&gt;
a) We believe that the success of the Student Research Workshop&lt;br /&gt;
depends on the quality of the reviewer and panelist feedback to&lt;br /&gt;
students. We were happy to find 61 reviewers and 12 panelists who&lt;br /&gt;
are supportive of this educational goal. The community was very&lt;br /&gt;
responsive, which shows that the Student Research Workshop is&lt;br /&gt;
widely accepted and recognized. Also for students whose work could&lt;br /&gt;
not be accepted, the elaborate reviews will be of great help. We&lt;br /&gt;
recommend that future Workshop organizers continue the tradition of&lt;br /&gt;
concentrating their efforts on assembling good reviewers and panelists.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
b) For many Workshop presenters, this is their first major conference&lt;br /&gt;
attendance. Therefore, we thought it would be beneficial for students&lt;br /&gt;
if we could arrange their poster/regular sessions early during the&lt;br /&gt;
conference, such that they can begin networking and get the most out&lt;br /&gt;
of the duration of the conference. We suggest that future Workshop&lt;br /&gt;
planners communicate with the main conference organizers in the early&lt;br /&gt;
stages of planning to ensure that the logistics for this situation&lt;br /&gt;
work out. Both oral and poster presentations were scheduled and&lt;br /&gt;
located to make the SRW look like a part of the main conference rather&lt;br /&gt;
than a separate event. We believe this is beneficial for the students,&lt;br /&gt;
as they get more attention from the general audience. &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
c) This year, the submission deadline as well as the notification of&lt;br /&gt;
acceptance for the SRW was set to be at the same time as that of the&lt;br /&gt;
main conference. In the call for papers we clearly state that the&lt;br /&gt;
students should indicate if a paper has been submitted to another&lt;br /&gt;
conference or workshop. We did not receive papers that indicated&lt;br /&gt;
double submissions. We also manually searched the authors of the&lt;br /&gt;
accepted papers and their previous publications on the web to make&lt;br /&gt;
sure that their papers are unpublished and original works.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
d) Since our funding came from the National Science Foundation, in&lt;br /&gt;
order for students to be reimbursed for their airfare their flights&lt;br /&gt;
have to comply with the Fly America Act. This essentially means that&lt;br /&gt;
the flights have to be on a U.S. carrier or code-shared by a U.S.&lt;br /&gt;
carrier, unless no such options are available (there are a few&lt;br /&gt;
exceptions, primarily when the travel time would be dramatically&lt;br /&gt;
increased). We announced this fact to the students in a few weeks&lt;br /&gt;
after the notification of acceptance. Since the workshop will be held&lt;br /&gt;
in the USA, students won&amp;#039;t have any problems to find flights from U.S.&lt;br /&gt;
carriers.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
 &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
ACL 2008 Sponsorship Report&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
Based on email discussions with officers of the ACL, NAACL, and EACL, the&lt;br /&gt;
Sponsorship Chairs developed a sponsorshop prospecturs, located at:&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/acl08/files/ACLSponsorshipProspectus2008-2009.pdf.  &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
The total amount of sponsorship received was $33,500.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
The sponsorship details are as folows:&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
Gold Level: Ohio State University.&lt;br /&gt;
Silver Level: BBN Technologies, Google, Microsoft Research, PowerSet.&lt;br /&gt;
Bronze Level: Center for Next Generation Localisation.&lt;br /&gt;
Supporter: Thomson Reuters.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
In addition, IBM Yorktown Heights supported the Best Student Paper to the&lt;br /&gt;
tune of $1000.Cincinatti Children&amp;#039;s Hospital supported $700 for the&lt;br /&gt;
reception and $500 for the keynote speaker.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
Google and PowerSet also sponsored booths. LanguageWeaver sponsored a&lt;br /&gt;
conference bag. The University of Michigan School of Information Sciences&lt;br /&gt;
sponsored an ad in the brochure along with a conference bag insert.&lt;br /&gt;
Thomson Reuters also sponsored a conference bag insert.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
For a complete list of sponsors, please visit this webpage  &lt;br /&gt;
http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/acl08/sponsors.html&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
The Sponsorship Chairs:&lt;br /&gt;
Inderjeet Mani imani@mitre.org&lt;br /&gt;
Michael White  mwhite@ling.osu.edu&lt;br /&gt;
Josef van Genabith  josef@computing.dcu.ie&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
 &lt;br /&gt;
Publicity for ACL 2008 (Diane Kelly, Hal Daume III, Eric Fosler-Lussier)&lt;br /&gt;
 &lt;br /&gt;
This year, we tried to extend the reach of ACL by not only  &lt;br /&gt;
advertising to the NLP community, but also the IR, ML, and Speech  &lt;br /&gt;
communities as well.   We made an 8.5 x 11 printable flyer, which was  &lt;br /&gt;
put up at NIPS, IEEE ASRU,  Digital Libraries, several research labs,  &lt;br /&gt;
and the SIGIR PC meeting.  The flyer and CFP were also distributed on  &lt;br /&gt;
several mailing lists (ACL, IR, Digital Libraries, Info Science,  &lt;br /&gt;
several machine learning/statistics lists), as well as mailings to  &lt;br /&gt;
many of the major labs.&lt;br /&gt;
 &lt;br /&gt;
One issue that came up is that it would be good to coordinate with  &lt;br /&gt;
the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee on cross-advertising  &lt;br /&gt;
of events.  It might be a positive development if some deal could be  &lt;br /&gt;
worked out where events that might interest the other community are  &lt;br /&gt;
advertised via the other group&amp;#039;s mailing list(s) as related events.&lt;br /&gt;
&amp;lt;/pre&amp;gt;&lt;/div&gt;</summary>
		<author><name>StevenBird</name></author>
	</entry>
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