2025Q3 Reports: Anthology Director

Overview

The Anthology staff comprises Matt Post (director since 2019), three current paid assistants who have been helping with day-to-day operations and improvements, and a number of volunteers. Over the past six months, active volunteers include Marcel Bollmann, Nathan Schneider, David Chiang, and Arne Koehn.

I have hired a new assistant, Ankur Kejriwal, to help handle issues, in responses to diminished activity from our main paid assistant.

Main items

Here are the main accomplishments and discussion points from January through June, 2025:

• For [2025Q1], we noted a plan to improve the representation of people in the Anthology. After a very long, helpful public discussion ([#623]), we have [a draft plan], which we hope to implement in the next quarter. We do hope that the ACL Exec will read it and comment. Key features:
  • We plan to rely heavily on ORCIDs to disambiguate papers, and to work with ARR to have everyone create and record these in their Open Review and Softconf profiles
  • We will maintain the Anthology's human-friendly names (no numbers), e.g., [yang-liu-umich]
• Since implementing our web interface for handling corrections, submissions have skyrocketed. We process these through a semi-automated process on a biweekly basis: typically, Nathan Schneider approves them, and then a bulk processing script automatically merges all approved corrections. We have processed 272 requests since February, and have 49 open ones. Often there is some complication that prevents quick dispatch.
• We also receive a large number of requests for author page merges and disambiguations, which we have no means of automating yet. Assistants still process these manually. The new author infrastructure should alleviate this. There are 400 (!) open requests.

Plans

We continue to hope to be able to expand our citation framework to include plenary videos. There is some progress here but no news since the last report (#3603, #4309).