2013Q3 Reports: Conference Officer

With the two documents on Recommended Conference Scheduling Practice, as well as issues on ACL conference discussed in ACL exe in 2012 passed to ACL 2014 CCC, some issues have been revisited and provide more details to ACL 2014 and / or ACL 2013 organisers, including diverse paper types and corresponding review forms, author registration and attendance, mentoring service. They may be updated again with more discussions at ACL exe.

Some other issues are raised, being discussed in ACL exe this year, including quality of reviewing, anti-harassment policy, Identifiers for language resources, best paper special issue, mobile app for conference proceeding.

For the long-term continuity, Drago raised that a set of guidelines for a number of conference policies are needed, some of which have come up every year. I will give my inputs and discuss them at the coming ACL executive meeting at Sofia, later at ACL 2013, including 1) how many parallel sessions can be allowed; 2) can extra pages be allowed; 3) should the student research workshop be in parallel with regular paper sessions or lunch ; 5) should there be more than one poster session (so that people presenting posters have a chance to see other posters); 6) how many best paper awards should be awarded; 7) how to deal with authors who have time constraints or conflicts and want to present on a particular day; 8) when to schedule the best paper session, when to schedule the LTA session; They may be classified into different categories: 1) PC chairs decide alone, 2) PC chairs ask the exec/cc, 3) PC chairs cannot change.

All the discussions will be documented and the conclusive portions will be passed to the future conference organizers, which may be revisited with more details and adaptations to the new scenarios.

--Jian Su, ACL Conference Officer