2011Q3 Reports: NAACL

Report from NAACL, June 2011

Rebecca Hwa - Chapter board chair

Owen Rambow - Past chapter board chair

Christopher Manning - Treasurer

Anoop Sarkar - Secretary

Executive Committee Meetings

The Board will meet on June 20th, at the ACL HLT 2011 conference in Portland, Oregon. Additionally, the Board converses regularly by e-mail.

North American conference in 2011

This year's NAACL conference is to be held jointly with ACL in Portland, Oregon (ACL HLT 2011). Dekang Lin (Google) is the General Chair, and Brian Roark and Richard Sproat (both OGI) are leading the local arrangements efforts.

North American conference in 2012

NAACL-HLT 2012 will be held in Montreal, Canada. It is scheduled to take place June 3 -- June 8 2012, at the Montreal Sheraton. Sabine Bergler (Concordia University) and Guy Lapalme (University of Montreal) have agreed to serve on the local arrangements advisory committee. Jennifer Chu-Carroll (IBM) is the general chair.

North American conference in 2013

No bid for hosting NAACL HLT 2013 has been received as of this writing. The exec board will follow the procedure established for NAACL 2012 and select a suitable site. This is a major agenda item for the 2011 NAACL board meeting.

Support for Summer Schools and Other Educational Outreach

NAACL continues to support educational programs such as NACLO (the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad) and the Johns Hopkins summer school. This year, we have also provided financial sponsorship to the Linguistic Institute of the LSA in 2011, to be held in July at Boulder, Colorado.

Support for Outreach to Emerging CL Communities

In 2010, a small fund was established to support Latin American activities and a small fund to support regional student conferences. We formalized the reviewing process as follows: there would be two submission deadlines, one in September, and one in March; each proposal would be evaluated based on its potential impact to stimulate collaborations between researchers from emerging geographical regions. For the March 2011 deadline, we have received five proposals; out of which, three were chosen. They are: Symposium in Information and Human Language Technology (STIL 2011), Escuela de Linguistica Computacional (ELiC 2011), and NLP&Web-based Technologies Workshop 2011.