Report from NAACL, January 2008 Owen Rambow, Chapter Board Chair
http://www.naacl.org
1. Elections
The NAACL election was held electronically in the Fall of 2007.
Rebecca Hwa (Pitt) and Hal Daume (Utah) replace Regina Barzilay and
Mary Harper on the Board. Suzanne Stevenson (Toronto) replaces
Lillian Lee as secretary, and Chris Manning (treasurer) and Owen
Rambow (chair) ran unopposed for re-election. Kathy McCoy as ex-
officio member is replaced by Grame Hirst, who now is board member
for two reasons (past NAACL chair and ACL treasurer), but with only
one vote. The board thus now has only eight members.
2. Executive Committee Meetings
The Board converses regularly by e-mail. In addition, in 2008, the
Board will meet in person at the ACL2008:HLT conference in Columbus.
This needs to be scheduled asap (competition with ACL Board for time).
3. Shadow Account Status
The NAACL bank balance stood at $66,868 at the end of 2007. The
increase reflected accounting for HLT-NAACL 2004 (large surplus). A
more modest surplus from ACL 2005 will be finalized and added soon.
We aim to account for NAACL 2006 finances before ACL 2008, and
another surplus is expected. We assume NAACL 2007 made a loss. The
other major expenses for the past year were supporting the Johns
Hopkins summer school, the Stanford LSA Linguistic Institute, and the
computational linguistics olympiad (NACLO).
4. North American conference in 2007
A detailed report on the NAACL HLT 2007 conference is on the
NAACL website:
http://www.naacl.org/archives/2007/conf-chairs-and-subchairs-report.html
The conference drew a disappointingly small number of attendants,
which we attribute to the early paper submission deadlines, the early
conference data (April), the small number of workshops (5), and
perhaps the location. We have concluded that the NAACL conference
should never be that early again.
5. North American conference in 2008
The 2008 conference is being organized jointly with ACL and a summary
of progress can be found here: http://tangra.si.umich.edu/~radev/
aclsec/reports-winter08/ACL2008-report.doc .
6. North American conference in 2009
NAACL HLT 2009 will take place in Boulder, Colorado, in June 2009.
Mari Ostendorf is conference chair, Martha Palmer and James Martin
are local organizers. Jennifer Chu-Carroll is the NAACL Board member
in charge of coordination.
7. North American conference in 2010
A call for proposals will go out shortly.
8. Support for Summer Schools and Other Educational Outreach
There was enormous interest in our scholarships at the LSA Summer
Institute; we will probably change the procedure if we do it again,
there seemed an inordinate amount of administrative overhead. NACLO
(the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad) was
apparently a great success, and we intend to be involved again,
perhaps increasing our participation. As usual, we will also be
sponsoring students to attend the summer
courses in computational linguistics that is held in conjunction with
the summer
CLSP workshops at the Johns Hopkins University .