2012Q3 Reports: ACL Anthology
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ACL ANTHOLOGY Report June 2012, Min-Yen Kan
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: We now have two versions of the ACL Anthology site working in parallel (the new beta and our original static HTML version). We have started ingesting attachments to papers (dataset, software, slides) and allowing user errata and revisions to be submitted. Within the next year, we plan to convert fully to the new ACL Anthology (downing the original static version), to ingest the upcoming debut of the TCL journal into the archives, and work with STARTV2 to have further integration with the publication roles to smooth proceedings chairs' work.
INTRO The ACL Anthology is a digital archive of research papers in computational linguistics, sponsored by the CL community, and freely available to all. Conference proceedings are published in the anthology around the same time as the conference (subject to general/program chairs' discretion). CL articles are published within a few days of publication on the MIT Press website, now that CL is open access. With TCL going into circulation soon, this venue will also need to be incorporated into the Anthology this coming year.
The anthology now contains over 20,200 papers (up from 18,000 articles from twelve months ago).
CHANGES OVER LAST 12 MONTHS:
The new ACL Anthology has gone live in Feb 2012. In this new version, we have finished our past milestones of:
- XML import and export of single, multiple papers and volumes
- BibTeX and other bibliographic formats import and export of single, multiple papers and volumes
- Addition of custom fields (e.g., SIG info, attachment-types)
- Suggestion of corrections to metadata or added fields by public (to be moderated by the Anthology editor)
- Incorporation of SensEval 1998, 2001, and OCR of EACL 2003 to provide the text (previously the PDFs only contained images of the text, but not the underlying text layer).
We will seek the ACL Exec's approval to launch the prototype as our production Anthology, which will need to be hosted by a (commercial) third party.
With respect to materials, we continue to integrate other CL related venues into the Anthology to increase the prestige of ACL as well as to make the Anthology even more useful. We are incorporating TALN and have completed the incorporation of LREC and PACLIC into the Anthology. We expect to incorporate RANLP when they can make their proceedings available to us in the ACL Anthology ingestion format.
MAILING LIST: The Anthology mailing list's (http://groups.google.com/group/acl-anthology) membership pool has grown, now consisting of 363 members (up from 312 from last report). This is an announcement-only list, where we notify members of newly listed released materials online.
ONGOING WORK: A key thrust for this year will be to incorporate the results of the R50 workshop into the Anthology, and allow third-party applications to automatically annotate articles with new metadata and papers in the Anthology, as they come available. Such an API will raise the visibility of the Anthology as a object of study, complementing our earlier work to make the Anthology's text a corpus.
We plan to work on these other following problems, but which are less urgent:
- collaboration with START and aclpub
- PDF metadata fixing for all articles. Crucially, Google Scholar uses this information but it is not always correctly generated.
- One PDF file per article. This is especially problematic for the J79 series, which largely represents one issue per PDF file.