2014Q3 Reports: Program Chairs

2014Q3 Reports: Program Chairs

Program Chairs (Kristina Toutanova and Hua Wu)

Innovations

As compared to ACL conferences in prior years, the main innovations this year were: • We allocatedreviewers to areas based on the reviewers’ preferences over areas, the preferences of area chairs over reviewers, and the number of submissions in each area (using a tool developed by Mark Dredze and applied to ACL with the help of Jiang Guo; this tool had been applied to NAACL and EMNLP in the past but was applied at ACL for the first time this year). • We optimized the conference schedule based on feedback from attendees on the talks they would like to see. • All talks will be recorded at ACL 2014, as in NAACL 2013. • We scheduled two large poster sessions on two evenings of the conference, to accommodate the large number of poster presentations. Instead of a banquet, we will have is a no-feelight social event, and the president’s talk will be given on the first morning of the conference. • We grouped oral TACL papers in thematic sessions together with ACL paper presentations, instead of in separate TACL-only sessions. • We solicited nominations for outstanding reviewers and acknowledged them in the proceedings (around 14% of reviewers were acknowledged).

Submissions and Presentations

ACL 2014 received a total of 1123 submissions, of which 572 were long papers and 551 were short papers. 15 long papers and 19 short papers were rejected without review due to non-anonymity or formatting issues.The remaining submissions were assigned to one of 20 areas, and managed by a program committee of 33 area chairs and 779 reviewers. 146 (26.2%) of the 557 qualifying long papers and 139 (26.1%) of the 532 qualifying short papers were selected for presentation at the conference. Of the accepted long papers, 95 were selected for oral presentation, and 51 for poster presentation. Of the accepted short papers, 51 have oral and 88 have poster presentation slots. The oral versus poster decision was made based not on the quality of the work, but the estimated appeal to a wide audience. In addition, 19 TACL papers will be presented at ACL – 13 as talks and 6 as posters. Including TACL papers, there will be 159 oral and 145 poster presentations at the main ACL conference. The table below shows the number of reviewed submissions in each area for long and short papers, as well as the number of papers accepted in each area. The table also shows the number of qualifying long and short papers that were withdrawn prior to the completion of the review process (11 long and 34 short papers were withdrawn).

Areas Long received Long accepted Short received Short accepted Total submissions Percent of Total Total Accepts Percent of Total Area Acceptance Rate Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics 9 3 14 4 23 2.11% 7 2.46% 30.43% Dialogue and Interactive Systems 10 2 8 2 18 1.65% 4 1.40% 22.22% Discourse, Coreference, and Pragmatics 22 5 20 5 42 3.86% 10 3.51% 23.81% Document Categorization, Sentiment Analysis, and Topic Models 53 14 48 13 101 9.27% 27 9.47% 26.73% Generation 13 6 7 4 20 1.84% 10 3.51% 50.00% Information Extraction and Text Mining 54 13 49 14 103 9.46% 27 9.47% 26.21% Information Retrieval 8 2 9 2 17 1.56% 4 1.40% 23.53% Language Resources and Evaluation 31 8 28 10 59 5.42% 18 6.32% 30.51% Lexical Semantics and Ontology 26 7 23 6 49 4.50% 13 4.56% 26.53% Machine Learning for Language Processing 39 13 15 5 54 4.96% 18 6.32% 33.33% Machine Translation 76 18 72 19 148 13.59% 37 12.98% 25.00% Multilinguality and Multimodal NLP 12 3 14 3 26 2.39% 6 2.11% 23.08% NLP Applications and NLP-enabled Technology 32 6 34 9 66 6.06% 15 5.26% 22.73% NLP for the Web and Social Media 29 5 29 7 58 5.33% 12 4.21% 20.69% Question Answering 6 2 4 0 10 0.92% 2 0.70% 20.00% Semantics 53 16 37 11 90 8.26% 27 9.47% 30.00% Summarization 19 6 11 4 30 2.75% 10 3.51% 33.33% Spoken Language Processing 9 2 10 3 19 1.74% 5 1.75% 26.32% Tagging, Chunking, Syntax and Parsing 35 12 48 14 83 7.62% 26 9.12% 31.33% Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation 10 4 18 4 28 2.57% 8 2.81% 28.57% Withdrawn 11 34 45 4.13% 0 0.00% 0.00% Total 557 146 532 139 1089 100.00% 285 100.00% 26.17%