Publications at 10:38, 28 June 2010

2010-06-28T10:38:06Z

← Older revision		Revision as of 10:38, 28 June 2010
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	cross-workshop checking.		cross-workshop checking.

	Jing-Shin Chang, Publication Co-Chair, ACL-2010.		Jing-Shin Chang,
			Publication Co-Chair, ACL-2010.
	jshin@csie.ncnu.edu.tw		jshin@csie.ncnu.edu.tw
	National Chi Nan University, Taiwan~~, ROC~~.		National Chi Nan University, Taiwan.

Publications at 08:41, 28 June 2010

2010-06-28T08:41:56Z

← Older revision		Revision as of 08:41, 28 June 2010
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	be detected easily unless START implements some such		be detected easily unless START implements some such
	cross-workshop checking.		cross-workshop checking.

			Jing-Shin Chang, Publication Co-Chair, ACL-2010.
			jshin@csie.ncnu.edu.tw
			National Chi Nan University, Taiwan, ROC.

Publications: New page: This year, the paper proceedings are not printed due to a tight schedule of the conference. Instead, only the cdrom proceedings are produced. By "cdrom" we actually refer to a card-type US...

2010-06-28T08:38:59Z

New page: This year, the paper proceedings are not printed due to a tight schedule of the conference. Instead, only the cdrom proceedings are produced. By "cdrom" we actually refer to a card-type US...

New page

This year, the paper proceedings are not printed due to a tight
schedule of the conference. Instead, only the cdrom proceedings
are produced. By "cdrom" we actually refer to a card-type USB
memory stick. So this is also the first time the ACL conferences
use this new media for publishing the proceedings if I understand
it correctly. It is convenient for notebooks without a big cdrom
drive but with the tiny USB interface. It is also convenient
to put it into one's pocket since its size is small. The memory
card can also be re-used to hold one's notes taken during the
conference. We hope that people will like it.

The nice cover is the artwork of our excellent local committee.

This year, we have both the Linux version of the ACLPUB and a START
wrapper of the ACLPUB available. The START wrapper implements the
typical ACLPUB make options for producing a single-volume proceedings.
Therefore, it is convenient for generating a single-volume proceedings
if its input is well-formed, and if the proceedings are not going to be
divided into multiple volumes.

Many workshop chairs who are also compiling the proceedings
used the START wrapper directly, while some familiar with the
Linux version or those who need multiple-volume and cross-workshop
integration functions (such as the publication committee
and local committee) used the Linux version.
Therefore, we have to answer various questions from both sides.

The START administrators, especially Rich Gerber, had been very
helpful in answering questions regarding to the START wrapper.
They also resolved many problems that had not been considered
when the wrapper was initially implemented. We have also
established a publication home page to provide various publication
instructions, information and some FAQ's so the book chairs can
find publication information they may need.

To unify the publication style, we had customized the templates
for title page (titlepage.tex), copyright page (copyright.tex)
and citation-stamp (citation-stamp.tex) for each workshop,
and provided a workshop-specific cdrom meta file to each workshop.
Therefore, the book chairs do not need to edit such templates
manually and fill in workshop specific information such as the
proceedings formal book titles, ISBN's, publisher's information,
dates of their workshops, hosting university and city, and so on.

This helps avoid accidental typos and misuse of old templates.
It also helps to compile the proceedings quickly. The only
requirement is that the publication chairs have to prepare all
these templates in advance, and populate them to the
START's ACLPUB working environments for individual workshops,
or made the customized templates available on the publication
home page as early as possible.

Some book chairs are still unawared of such customized templates
though, and thus used templates from the ACLPUB ftp site with their
own revisions. Therefore, early announcement and contact to the
workshop chairs and book chairs are necessary to make it
more successful.

We have, however, reports from some book chairs that their templates
are not customized in spite of the population of the templates
by the START admins. We suspect that the customized templates
have earlier time stamps (because they are prepared early)
than the default templates, and therefore are replaced automatically
by the default templates when the proceedings are generated
by the underlying Makefile. This problem and solution will be
passed to the START admins so the time stamps of those customized
templates be renewed unconditionally before their first use
to generate the proceedings.

Another important problem with the START's wrapper was that its
Schedule Maker are not designed to directly export
the conventional forms of ACLPUB's "order" files, which
assign time slots to presented papers or special events.
The START wrapper had now provided a function to upload
conventional ACLPUB order file. Therefore, this problem is
consider resolved.

The START's wrapper does not have a concise
step-by-step instruction for producing a proceedings
as well.

The inherited limitations of ACLPUB still leave the
book chairs and publication chairs some problems to
resolve manually.

Some PDF files with compatibility level above 1.4
may not be processed correctly with current ACLPUB.
Some equtions in PDF files may become invisible
when the PDF files are combined into the proceedings
and when thr individual files are tagged with
metadata (such authors, paper titles, conference names.)
We normally asked the authors to re-compiled their
PDF files in a different machine. Most problems will
then disappear. Such problems seem to be related to
the fonts of the PDF files. May be such problems should
be re-examined by the ACLPUB authors.

In addition to the PDF files, the major problem is
the non-ASCII input in the title and author fields
of the metadata fields.

Some will cause ACLPUB to stop before they are
converted into LaTex special symbols in the metadata
file or be included to the internal conversion table
of some ACLPUB perl scripts. This is particularly
true for accents characters, since we have many
European authors this year whose names include
accents characters. Unfortunately, there are simply
too many such characters in know character sets.
Therefore, we can simply resolve it one-by-one
as new OOV characters (wrt the ACLPUB internal tables)
are encountered. An alternative is simply to
tell the authors not to use accent characters
in the final submission page.

On the request of the local committee, we also
wrote a simple script to normalize the capitalization
convention of the paper titles. We then asked
the book chairs of each workshop to revise some
paper titles in their metadata files the first time
their proceedings tarball is delivered to us.
The script is simple but seems to work fine. So we only
removed or manually revised a few titles based on those
produced by the normalization script. Maybe the
capitalization instructions should be included in the final
camera-ready instructions, and the suggestions from the
normalization script can be presented to the authors
when they submit their final paper.

Since author names are not spelled consistently, we also
spent some times to merge authors names in the unified
author index, and corrected their counterparts in individual
author indexes, paper indexes, program schedules, and
BibTex entries of individual workshops. If the ACLPUB
or START submission pages are also provided with
some simple utilities to detect inconsistent spellings
of author names, the generation of the unified author
index (as well as individual indexes) will be much more
easier. However, cross-workshop consistency cannot
be detected easily unless START implements some such
cross-workshop checking.

2010Q3 Reports: Publications Chairs - Revision history

Publications at 10:38, 28 June 2010

Publications at 08:41, 28 June 2010

Publications: New page: This year, the paper proceedings are not printed due to a tight schedule of the conference. Instead, only the cdrom proceedings are produced. By "cdrom" we actually refer to a card-type US...