2014Q3 Reports: Information Officer

[Link to 2014 Q1 Report] [Link to 2013 Q3 Report] [Link to 2013 Q1 Report]

The Information Officer (IO) portfolio includes integration of the different ACL-wide activities that are related to information dissemination; including the Anthology, website, wiki, portal and archive. Plans include provide integration of logins (through OpenID and OAuth; IN PROGRESS); update our information services to be updated and professionally-designed (PLANNED).

Long-term goals for the costs of the information services to be sponsored, movement of the aclweb.org infrastructure to a more modern webhost (IN PROGRESS), accessibility and long-term maintenance of the aclweb.org and other sites, and to be cost-neutral through sponsorship by corporate interests.

IO Overview

Budget. The IO has budget to oversee part-time manpower allocated to help improve our association's websites, which includes maintenance, upgrading, migrating and backup. So far, we have incurred costs of 2,270, but have an outstanding amount of over 400. This is well in line with our projections.

DOIs/CrossRef.

Collaboration with ELRA. We have also discussed joint work with ELRA's executive officers, Nicoletta Calzolari and Khalid Choukri, about information services. As a result, there was a meeting in Paris on 17 Nov 2013 that led to Gertjan (on ACL's behalf) to sign the NLP12 Paris Declaration. With respect to the IO portfolio, this explicitly endorses the common scheme for a International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN) to itemize and inventory language resources for searching and bibliometrics.

Other plans include:

• Investigating the citation indexing of our materials -- it appears that ACL materials are somewhat haphazardly indexed by Elsevier and SCI. We need to address this because many of our membership depend on the availability of indexing in determining whether to publish in our venues or not. The beta Anthology (see below) has proper metadata on each paper's individual pages (not present in the original Anthology), which will make it easier for clients (like Google Scholar) to index the metadata properly.

Anthology

The ACL Anthology is a digital archive of research papers in computational linguistics, sponsored by the CL community, and freely available to all. We employ a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial, Share-Alike license for materials published by ACL, although dual licensing for a fee is presumably possible (although not exercised currently).

The Anthology now contains over 31,500 papers (our method of inventory has somewhat changed from earlier reports to be more exact now. The new ACL Anthology is now active but not out of beta yet, so we are going to maintain both sites for the time being. The domain name aclanthology.info has been registered for 10 years to point towards the webhost (currently at NUS) that provides the Anthology.

Mailing List. The Anthology mailing list's (http://groups.google.com/group/acl-anthology) membership pool has grown, now consisting of 479 members (up from 426 from a year ago, and 469 from six months ago). This is an announcement-only list, where we notify members of newly listed released materials online.

Plans. A key thrust this year will be to start assigning DOIs, as part of the ACL's initiative to take DOIs under our control. We are working towards doing this, pending the Exec's approval.

A second thrust is to other forms of scientific knowledge that we are interested in archiving. These include software, datasets and videos. The procedures for integrating these with START and the submission process need to be worked out, and the space requirements for these services assessed. For the time being, we will concentrate on videos.

A third 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 have long term plans to work on these other following problems, which are less urgent:

• A previous discussion (with Ken Church) proposed that we create a single bibtex file for all Anthology materials. The beta Anthology can generate such information fairly easily with its database backing; we plan to have this file available soon (before the ACL 2014 conference).
• collaboration with START and aclpub (also may involve the Conference Officer's work)
• collaboration with ELRA with respect to use of the LRE Map and ISLRNs, and voluntarily helping them with scanning backlog archives into a digital form.

Website / Portal

Web Site

The ACL website was previously running legacy software (Mambo), and has been recently upgraded to Drupal 7 to keep with necessary software upgrades and to prevent security risks to the system.

The website was revamped from the earlier, non-responsive website in this half-year term. The resources listed on the website have largely been kept as-is in the port, pending integration with the Portal.

Portal

The Portal is the ACL Member Portal, which helps act as an member service database (which Priscilla uses for keeping tabs on our membership) as well as a system to help with announcements. It was originally envisioned as a system to demonstrate value add for our membership, as the print journal subscription was discontinued.

Problems with the Portal and Website

However, due to problems with the Portal software mailing (see below) and non-existent bounce processing, our internet service provider (1and1.com) has been regularly disrupting our own paid services, despite our efforts. You may have experienced temporary (1-2 day) outages of website, portal, Anthology and wikis, due to this problem. The problem that they have cited is that the portal has two PHP scripts that send out email (for announcement services) to our membership. However, our announcement service currently does not do bounce processing correctly, nor does our service provider give us proper notice of the bounce processing such that we can act on it. This makes correcting this problem a serious difficulty, as the portal software is also legacy code, in the sense that the original implementer (Ben Phelan) is no longer part of ACL's staff.

For these reasons, limitations of services (again, concerned with the mail service), we are in the process of moving from 1and1 and migrating to bluehost.com. We hope to complete the migration by the end of 2014, but perhaps substantially sooner (end of summer 2014).

The ACL website continues to serve as the primary online resource for the organization. It contains the main ACL site, an ACL Wiki which serves as a resource to the general computational linguistics community, an ACL Admin wiki used to store and maintain ACL specific resources such as reports, handbooks, and policies as well as an exec wiki reserved for the use of ACL execs. We also maintain mirrors of individual ACL conference websites, membership email lists for ACL announcements and a listing of resolutions of the ACL Exec Committee.

The ACL Portal was created to provide a web-based platform to house facilities for the benefit of members. The Portal currently serves little function other than maintaining a list of current members and a payment gateway for membership. We are currently working towards integrating the Portal into the website's functionality, now that both systems are run on a common platform (Drupal 7). Integration will involve upgrading existing custom modules developed by Ben Phelan (the previous developer) for the Portal to Drupal 7; this is ongoing work.

We are now working in parallel on consolidating the ACL Website and the ACL Portal, and on the establishment of a central login for ACL services (something akin to a "ACL Account" a la Google or Facebook). We are planning to use OpenID and OAuth, which would allow members to link their ACL account with other (i.e., Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Microsoft/Hotmail) services; such that one could use login credentials from those services for ACL use.

Update. From 2013 Q3 to now, we have reached several milestones:

• We completed updates to our software installations to fix security concerns and updated the website to be responsive (so that it functions somewhat better on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets). In particular, our MediaWiki installations were updated, and the main website was upgraded to a Drupal 7 installation that is responsive. This makes the website largely compatible with the code for the Portal.

• The previous webmaster, Joshua Herring, has voluntarily resigned as of March 2014. However, due to obligations to integrate the Portal and the website onto Drupal 7 that have not been entirely fulfilled, he has agreed to stay on for the time being until that piece has been sorted out. In the meantime, a new webmaster at NUS has been hired (as of end May) and will be assisting in maintaining the Drupal websites and assisting with the transition to the new webhost, bluehost.

We would like place on the record a note of thanks to Josh for his service. Josh's work has incurred a cost of about 2K USD for his time on the projects, that has been paid out of the 10K USD allocated budget for the IO portfolio.