StevenBird: 2008 Summer Reports: ACL 2010 moved to 2008Q3 Reports: ACL 2010

2008-11-25T22:50:58Z

2008 Summer Reports: ACL 2010 moved to 2008Q3 Reports: ACL 2010

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StevenBird: New page: ACL 2010 Report The 48th Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, will take place in Europe in 2010, and will be organized jointly with EACL. MEMBERSHIP The ACL 2010 C...

2008-11-25T02:06:35Z

New page: ACL 2010 Report The 48th Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, will take place in Europe in 2010, and will be organized jointly with EACL. MEMBERSHIP The ACL 2010 C...

New page

ACL 2010 Report

The 48th Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics,
will take place in Europe in 2010, and will be organized jointly
with EACL.

MEMBERSHIP

The ACL 2010 Coordinating Committee currently has the following
membership, in accordance with the guidelines:

ACL Executive:
Steven Bird (as past-president in 2010)
Drago Radev (secretary)
Graeme Hirst (treasurer)
Hwee Tou Ng (as newest member of ACL exec)
EACL Executive:
Giorgio Satta (vice president, in place of Alex Lascarides)
Anette Frank (secretary)
Mike Rosner (treasurer)
Eric Gaussier (additional member from EACL)
ACL Business Officer:
Priscilla Rasmussen

BIDS

The committee considered three strong bids in February, and has now
reached a consensus for a recommendation to the two Executive Boards
(ACL and EACL) and we will announce the site of ACL 2010 at this
year's conference.

REVIEW PROCESS

The committee recieved four preliminary bids in February, and provided
detailed feedback to three of them and rejected the fourth. Some
common issues across all preliminary bids were: the need to document
the past experience of the proposers with organizing large events; the
need for the venue to host four parallel sessions and a plenary
session, all with sufficient capacity; the need to adhere to the
budget template and provide estimates in both local currency and US
dollars. These and many other issues are being documented in new
detailed instructions to bidders, currently in preparation.

Three revised bids were received in early May, from Bulgaria, France,
and Sweden. All three were impressive in presentation, painstaking
attention to detail, and in the careful thought in coming up with
venues, hotels and entertainment. Its a pity that ACL can't go to all
three! In discussing the revised bids, the committee agreed on some
points about ACL conferences that could be considered by future
bidders: the value of lecture theatre seating with sloped floor and
fixed or fold-away tables; the value of the conference and its
satellite events being held in the one location; the expense of going
for a fancy convention centre and lavish banquet; the need to help the
committee picture the configuration of the venue and ease of movement
between hotels, conference, transportation, and airports.

Reflecting on the overall bidding process, I believe it needs to be
further streamlined. At present the expectations on bidders are not
detailed enough, leading to differences of organization and level of
detail that confound the reviewing process. Committee members need to
have several hours to review the bids (for both rounds) and then
participate in complex discussions over the following weeks. For
detailed comparison of bids it was helpful to have a single
spreadsheet containing budgets for all bids. The target dates for the
conference need to be mapped out in light of the other ACL conferences
to happen in the same year.

RECOMMENDATIONS

(1) Potential bidders should be asked to signal their intention to bid
~3 months ahead of the deadline, so that (i) they can be given
additional materials and guidance; (ii) answers to questions posed by
any bidder can be circulated to all bidders; (iii) there is time to
promote the call for bids more intensively (e.g. by personal contact)
in case it looks like there will be an insufficient number of bids.

(2) The president elect should be added to the coordinating committee
in a non-voting role, in order to learn the process which s/he will
need to operate the following year, and perhaps to be better connected
to the organizers of the conference where s/he will deliver an
address.

(3) The budget spreadsheet should use two currencies, local and USD,
with an explicit conversion rate, so that major fluctuations in
exchange rates can be taken into consideration.

(4) In addition to the budget template, there should be a proposal template,
specifying the structure and content of bids in detail. The preliminary
bid could omit certain sections (such as tourist information, letters of
support).

(5) The call for bids should specify a range of dates that takes other
CL conferences into account, in order to get maximal separation of
conferences and avoid overlapping reviewing periods.

Steven Bird, Chair, ACL 2010 Coordinating Committee

2008Q3 Reports: ACL 2010 - Revision history

StevenBird: 2008 Summer Reports: ACL 2010 moved to 2008Q3 Reports: ACL 2010

StevenBird: New page: ACL 2010 Report The 48th Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, will take place in Europe in 2010, and will be organized jointly with EACL. MEMBERSHIP The ACL 2010 C...