2015Q3 Reports: EMNLP 2014
The EMNLP conference series is annually organized by SIGDAT, the Association for Computational Linguistics special interest group on linguistic data and corpus-based approaches to NLP.
This edition of the conference was held from October 25, 2014 (Sat.) to October 29, 2014 (Wed.) in Doha, Qatar.
In the past five years, the EMNLP conference attendance has been continuously growing, reaching just over 500 paying attendees in 2013, and it is nowadays considered as one of the leading conferences in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing.
Given the growing trend, we believe it was the right time to led EMNLP 2014 into an organization structure typical of large and important conferences. Therefore, we proposed several novelties:
first of all, a large organization committee consisting of twenty (plus twenty-six area chairs) well-known members of the ACL community, who carried out several tasks required by the new achieved scale.
Secondly, as this is the first conference edition spanning five days, in addition to six workshops, we also selected and included for the first time an excellent selection of eight tutorials. We defined a registration policy that allows the participants to attend any of the tutorials and workshops (held on October 25th and 29th) by just paying a low flat rate on top of the registration fee for the main conference. This greatly increased the participation in tutorials and workshops.
Thirdly, as a standalone conference, EMNLP required the definition of new administrative procedures and policies, regarding sponsorship booklets, double submission, scholarship assignment, and the joint EACL-ACL-EMNLP call for workshop proposals.
Fourthly, we experimented with a new approach to overcome the increasing number of papers to be presented at the conference. Our new approach consisted in presenting posters in nine sessions each proposing a small numbers of papers: this way poster presentations received more space and consideration. Most people liked this new initiative. However there were a couple of presenters of the last session of the last day, who felt penalized by the lack of audience. Suggesting that such typically difficult slots may not be the best fit for our new presentation format.
Next, we recorded tutorials, invited speakers and all the oral presentations of the technical papers. These videos are available at the official website of the conference http://emnlp2014.org/program.html
Finally, this was the first time that an ACL conference was largely supported by a government research foundation. The Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF) included EMNLP 2014 as one of its local funding events. This enabled EMNLP and SIGDAT to perform unprecedented student scholarship support: more than 33 students were sponsored (partially or entirely) for participating to the conference. The obtained funds also allowed for offering a social dinner free of charge to all the attendees and closing the conference budget in active, i.e., $46,100. This has provided SIGDAT with important additional resources for sponsoring students for the next editions of EMNLP.