2013Q3 Reports: Program Chairs

Program Chairs (Pascale Fung and Massimo Poesio)

This year's ACL introduces a number of innovations, main among which are that this will be the first year in which TACL papers are going to be presented; that mentoring was trialled again; and that a stricter policy regarding registrations was introduced. Handling such innovations as well as the greatly increased number of submissions proved challenging, but in the end not really problematic.

ACL 2013 received a total of 1286 submissions, of which 662 long papers and 624 short papers. (This number of long paper submissions is in line with previous years and in fact slightly lower than in 2011, but the number of short paper submissions is the highest ever - almost twice the 369 of last year, and 20% higher than in 2011.) These submissions were managed by a program committee of 45 area chairs, much larger than in the past (cfr. the 30 area chairs of 2012 and the 27 of 2011), assisted by XXX reviewers. 174 (26%) long papers and 154 (24%) short papers were selected for presentation in the conference. Among the accepted papers, 111 of the long papers will have an oral presentation (in 37 sessions of 3 papers each) as well as 56 of the short papers (in 14 sessions of 4 papers each). In addition, the authors of 16 TACL papers chose presentation at ACL; 9 of these were given an oral presentation and 7 a poster presentation. In total, then, 344 papers will be presented at ACL 2013: 176 orally and 168 as posters. The number of poster presentations is much higher than the 75 of the 2012 edition and the 128 of 2011. We believe the increase in the number of posters is a positive development that may eventually lead to ACL playing a greater community building role; but it will have to be managed in a number of ways, e.g., by ensuring that suitable space is allocated to the posters. (How to handle the number of posters, much exceeding expectations, was one of the main issues we had to face as program chairs. More in general, we recommend keeping program chairs more in the loop regarding venue characteristics - we only learned about the specifics of this year's venue after coming up with a first version of the program, which then had to be substantially revised.)

The submission process in general worked reasonably well, except for the delay caused by Softconf moving to a new platform in October 2012. The new platform aims at reducing the number of distinct Softconf accounts each of us has to keep track of, which is a very good idea, but the fact it only came live in October meant that both us and the area chairs had to invite people twice, first via email and then through Softconf, which was quite painful. (But apart from this difficulty we wish to stress that we were very impressed with the level and speed of support provided by Softconf, which went way beyond the terms of the contract.) The timetable for submissions, developed in close collaboration with both the chairs of NAACL and with ACL exec, worked quite well and we recommend future chairs to follow it quite closely as it will not be easy to find a different solution satisfying all the constraints.

The list of areas was substantially revised with respect to previous years. The traditional area 'Dialogue and Discourse' was split in separate areas for Dialogue and Discourse as there is very little interaction between these communities nowadays. Information Retrieval and Information Extraction, unified in a single area in 2012, were separated again, as in 2011. Phonology/Morphology, Tagging/Chunking, and Word Segmentation was split in separate areas. Conversely, the areas 'Lexical Semantics' and 'Lexicon and Ontologies' introduced in 2012 were merged into a single area 'Lexical Semantics and Ontology'. New areas for 'Evaluation Methods', 'Low Resource Language Processing' and 'NLP for the Languages of Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans' were introduced. The result was a fairly large number of areas, 26. The following table shows the number of submissions in each area for long and short papers, as well as the number of papers accepted in each area.

Areas	Long Received	Long Accepted	Short Received	Short accepted
Cognitive Modelling and Psycholinguistics	13	3	12	5
Dialogue and Interactive Systems	15	4	10	1
Discourse, Coreference, and Pragmatics	28	9	19	4
Evaluation Methods	11	3	15	4
Information Retrieval
Language Resources	24	9	27	5
Lexical Semantics and Ontologies	25	3	25	6
Low Resource Language Processing
Machine Translation: Methods, Applications and Evaluations
Machine Translation: Statistical Models
Multilinguality
NLP Applications	46	10	42	15
NLP and Creativity	3	2	4	2
NLP for the Languages of Central and Eastern Europe and The Balkans	2	1	8	3
NLP for the Web and Social Media	32	8	26	2
Phonology and Morphology	11	2	10	0
Question Answering	14	4	12	3
Semantics	50	17	32	10
Sentiment Analysis, Opinion Mining and Text Classification	46	12	60	15
Spoken Language Processing	9	2	12	2
Statistical and Machine Learning Methods in NLP	35	11	32	5
Summarization and Generation	31	11	23	6
Syntax and Parsing
Tagging and Chunking
Text Mining and Information Extraction	68	7	53	9
Word Segmentation
TOTAL	662	174	624	154

As it's clear from the table some of the new areas were successful, others less so. The new area 'Evaluation Methods', with 25 submissions, proved reasonably popular. E.g., having separate areas for 'Low Resource Language Processing' and 'NLP for the Languages of Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans' , done to incentivise submissions among NLP researchers in those areas, wasn't successful. It's clear that maintaining some areas is becoming an issue, even for traditional ones such as Information Retrieval or Phonology / Morphology.