2013Q1 Reports: NAACL

Report from NAACL, February 2013

Chris Callison-Burch - Chapter board chair

Elections

The results of the most recent NAACL election were released in December 2012. Julia Hirschberg (Columbia University) and Katrin Erk (UT Austin) are the new board members, replacing outgoing board members David Chiang and Dan Gildea. Joel Tetreault (Nuance) is the new Treasurer, replacing Chris Manning who left his NAACL post to become ACL VP Elect.

Here is a list of all current members of the NAACL board: http://www.naacl.org/officers

Executive Committee Meetings

The board communicates regularly via email. The board met in person at NAACL 2012 in Montreal and will meet in NAACL 2013 in Atlanta.

NAACL Treasurer's Report

This report is will be filled in on Wednesday.

North American conference in 2013

NAACL HLT 2013 will be held in Atlanta, GA from June 9 -- June 14 2013. The general chair is Lucy Vanderwende (Microsoft Research) and the PC co-chairs are Katrin Kirchhoff (University of Washington, Seattle), and Hal Daume (University of Maryland, College Park). Priscilla Rasmussen who has taken over the responsibilities of local arrangements chair.

The number of submissions to NAACL 2013 was much improved over last year. In 2013 we received 460 long+short paper submissions, versus 301 in 2012. We attribute the improvement to better coordination with ACL on submission deadlines. Last year we had the following problems:

• ACL and NAACL disallowed dual submission, and ACL's deadline was scheduled to be 10 days later than NAACL's,
• when faced with a choice between two similar deadlines (no dual submission allowed), people will tend to pick the later one,
• NAACL's earlier deadline was too close to Christmas and New Year's.

Having a robust number of submissions makes it easier for the PC Chairs to assemble a strong program.

This year we are introducing two new initiatives for the conference. (1) We have hired a professional videographer to record all of the main conference talks and the tutorial. The cost is $12,000. This increased cost is offset in the NAACL budget because JHU is not hosting the CLSP summer workshop this year, so we do not have our normal $10,000 expense to support the associated summer school. (2) We are discontinuing the distribution of conference proceedings on thumb drives (a savings of approximately $8000), and will make the proceedings available for download several days before the conference. We will communicate this fact to all registered attendees and ask them to download the proceedings in advance to reduce the bandwidth at the hotel. Hal Daume successfully made the transition away from USB drives for ICML, and will be leading this effort.

Matt Post, this year's publications chair, proposed putting the $8000 savings towards developing new mechanisms for distributing the proceedings. He has produced a spec for a mobile app, and has two quotes from Duet Health ($21,200) and 10clouds ($14,000). Would ACL like to contribute $10,000 towards the development of this tool?

Here is Matt's mockups and his spec:

• JQuery Mobile web prototype: desktop preview | mobile
• Technical specification

North American conference in 2014

ACL 2014 will be held in North America, in Baltimore MD.