2008Q1 Reports: Secretary

                         ACL Secretary report

                            Dragomir Radev
                           radev@umich.edu


- Elections were held in the Fall of 2007. 601 members voted (a 20%
  increase from last year). The winners are:

  Ido Dagan (Bar-Ilan University, Israel) - vice-president-elect
  Graeme Hirst (University of Toronto, Canada) - treasurer
  Hwee Tou Ng (National University of Singapore) - member

  On January 1, 2008, Ido, Graeme, and Hwee Tou replaced Keh-Yih Su
  and Jun'ichi Tsujii whose terms on the exec are expiring. In
  accordance with ACL's constitution, Kathy McCoy will remain on the
  exec for another year as past treasurer to ensure a proper
  transition of our books. Our current president, Mark Steedman, will
  stay on as past president for a year. Finally, the current
  vice-president, Bonnie Dorr, will become ACL president for 2008.

  In 2008 we will have elections to replace Claire Cardie and Mark
  Steedman whose terms ends in a year's time. The nominating committee
  (Martha Palmer (chair), Jun'ichi Tsujii, and Mark Steedman) are
  expected to suggest a slate of nominees by April 15 in order to give
  us time to collect candidate statements before the annual meeting in
  Columbus.

- In 2007, we had a call for ACL initiatives. Of these, one was
  started (the video anthology project) and another was too similar to
  the AAN initiative listed
  below. http://www.fask.uni-mainz.de/lk/videoarchive (Reinhard Rapp
  and Chris Biemann)

- LTA nominations were collected and a discussion is expected at the
  February 2 telecon.

- Eric Fosler-Lussier did an amazing job of updating the archives -
  please visit them here: http://www.aclweb.org/archive

- Ali Hakim has been very helpful with updates to the ACL site. 

- Ali and I put together the following page, based on Priscilla's
  spreadsheet:

  http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=Conference_Chairs

- The Singapore bid for ACL-IJCNLP 2009 was accepted.

- A pay raise was approved for Priscilla. Her pay went up from $51/hr
  to $53/hr effective January 1, 2008.

- A policy for ACL exec votes was approved: 
  "In order to clearly separate discussion from voting, the voting on
  ACL resolutions will be done via sending the vote via email to the
  ACL secretary. When the vote is over, the secretary will send a
  summary of the vote (including the names and votes) back to the
  executive committee and also record the status of the vote (minus
  the names) on the resolutions page.
  In special circumstances, the exec can decide *in advance of the
  vote* to change this procedure for valid reasons."

- SIGANN was approved. It deals with annotation. The officers of
  SIGANN are Nancy Ide and Adam Meyers.

- Mark Steedman suggested that in the future, we should make sure to
  read each other's reports in advance of the exec meetings. Doing so
  would avoid wasting precious time at the meetings (whether on the
  phone of face to face) and leave more time for productive
  discussions.

  Is this acceptable to everyone? Please let me know what you
  think. If the general feeling concurs with Mark's, I would like to
  establish a new procedure for the winter meeting that involves much
  less live reporting.

- My impression from talking to exec members and to other attendees at
  ACL this year is that the new format for the business meeting was
  much better than last year's. Everyone that I talked to (except for
  the author of one of the rejected proposals) was enthusiastic about
  the new format. Note too that in Sydney, there were fewer than 100
  people in the audience whereas in Prague, I counted 198 attendees. I
  would like to keep a similar format in the future: some brief time
  for reports and then more time for discussion. Of course, next year,
  we can propose some other formats and topics for discussion.

- I have collected and grouped all ACL07-related reports and documents
  here:

  http://tangra.si.umich.edu/~radev/aclsec/exec-meeting-summer-2007/

- One possible direction for our membership/reviewing/etc database

  http://dblife.cs.wisc.edu/

- I helped negotiate an agreement between SIGDAT and SIGNLL about
  taking turns at having first pick for a conference site. This
  agreement does not supersede any ACL policies and decisions about
  the actual locations.

- A web page was established where to store ACL resolutions:
  http://www.aclweb.org/policies/resolutions.html 

  The full list of recent resolutions is listed at the end of this
  document. 

I was personally involved in two additional activities of interest to
the exec. 

- The ACL Anthology Network
  (http://belobog.si.umich.edu/clair/anthology/). This is a manually
  curated citation and collaboration database. It includes degree,
  pagerank, h-index, collaboration centrality, and other bibliometric
  values (http://belobog.si.umich.edu/clair/anthology/rankings.html).

- NACLO (http://www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu). I spent most of my time on this
  project. In 2007 we had 200 participants and 8 were selected for the
  ILO in Russia. I was the team coach and program chair while Lori
  Levin and Tom Payne were the two general co-chairs. One of the two
  US teams tied for first place in the team contest and one US student
  (Adam Hesterberg) finished first in the individual contest. See
  here: (http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=109891)
  
  This year, we expect more than 800 participants (see below) to take
  part in round one on Feburary 5. The top 100 contestants will
  advance to round two on March 11.

Site   # Students (Coordinator)
At their high schools   288 (Dragomir Radev)
Carnegie Mellon University 188 (Lori Levin)
University of Pennsylvania 68 (Mitch Marcus)
Brandeis University  58 (James Pustejovsky)
Columbia University  50 (Kathy McKeown)
University of Oregon  29 (Tom Payne)
University of Toronto  14 (Elaine Gold)
San Jose State University 12 (Roula Svorou)
University of Wisconsin 12 (Catherine Arnott-Smith)
Cornell University   11 (Lillian Lee and Claire Cardie)
University of Michigan 8 (Steve Abney and Sally Thomason)
University of Illinois 6 (Richard Sproat and Roxana Girju)
Middle Tennessee State University 2 (Aleka Blackwell *)
University of Ottawa   2 (Stan Szpakowicz and Diana Inkpen)
Total 748

About 5 of the students in the first category above are from Canada,
for a total of about 21 currently registered Canadians.

Aleka is hosting a local contest on February 2 and expects about 20
participants to then sign up for the NACLO. The registration for the
NACLO closes on Monday but we will be also accepting walk-ins at
existing sites.

Questions - organize similar contests elsewhere - I approahed UK and
Australia but found little interest.

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ACL Resolutions

This is a partial list of ACL resolutions. Older resolutions will be
added over time.
September 14, 2007

   1. (PASSED)The initial SIG organizer(s) may serve as the de facto
      officers for the first year, while a nomination/election process
      is being established; official elections must be held within the
      first year after approval of the SIG.

June 24, 2007

   1. (PASSED) The ACL exec approves the creation of a new SIG, SIGANN
      for Annotation. The officers of SIGANN are Nancy Ide and Adam
      Meyers.

June 18, 2007

   1.

      (PASSED) In order to clearly separate discussion from voting,
      the voting on ACL resolutions will be done via sending the vote
      via email to the ACL secretary. When the vote is over, the
      secretary will send a summary of the vote (including the names
      and votes) back to the executive committee and also record the
      status of the vote (minus the names) on the resolutions page.

      In special circumstances, the exec can decide *in advance of the
      vote* to change this procedure for valid reasons.

June 8, 2007

   1. (PASSED) To accept Singapore's bid for the 2009 ACL/IJCNLP
      conference.
   2. (PASSED) The supluses or deficits (as the case may be) will be
      shared 50-50 between ACL and AFNLP. AFNLP chooses to share its
      share 50-50 with the local organizers.

May 16, 2007

Three related proposals about ACL's 2008 conference:

   1. (PASSED) PROPOSAL 1 : long and short tracks. The 2008 conference
      maintains the NAACL HLT distinction between long and short
      papers, where short papers have a serious submission number, a
      serious reviewing, a Coling-level acceptance rate (about 40%),
      and a different profile (new ideas, smaller results, smaller
      experiments) with different submission and reviewing
      requirements (completed work not required) and a much later
      submission deadline.
   2. (PASSED) PROPOSAL 2 : the structure of the PC. There are 4 PC
      co-chairs: 1 NLP for long papers, 1 NLP for short papers, 1
      Speech (for both long and short), 1 IR (for both long and
      short). The senior PC will be different for long and short
      papers (though potentially with overlap). The short paper PC
      will also handle demos. The Speech and IR co-chairs should have
      at least some visibility in the general NLP field.
   3. (PASSED) PROPOSAL 3 : name. The conference has a name that (a)
      includes "HLT" in its short name and (b) "Human Language
      Technologies" in its long name. For specificity, this proposal
      is: "ACL-08:HLT" and "The 46th Annual meeting of the Association
      for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies".

May 2007

Free registration for some conference officials

   1. (PASSED) The General Chair, all PC co-chairs, and all local
      chairs (up to three) get free registration (not including the
      banquet) to ACL conferences. The free registration does not
      include ACL membership (it is assumed that people in these
      positions would already be ACL members).