2016Q3 Reports: Conference Officer

Conference Timelines

ACL 2016 has adopted a new reversed ordering between the short and long deadlines. Overall, it worked out successfully. Based on this year’s experience, a reversed ordering is highly recommended for future conferences, especially in years when ACL is either in Asia or in Europe so that there will be a separate NAACL deadline beforehand. By pushing the long deadline until after the short deadline, it is possible to create a sufficient time gap between the NAACL deadline and the ACL long deadline --- as much as 2 month gap, which is substantially larger than what was previously possible.

ACL 2017 plans to adopt yet another new scheme — merging long and short deadlines. Since ACL 2017 will be held in Vancouver, ACL will not need to coordinate the deadlines with NAACL. Thus there are clearly less motivations for keeping separate and reversed deadlines. ACL traditionally maintained separate long and short deadlines and it will be for the first time for ACL 2017 to experiment with the merged deadlines. In fact, the idea of merging deadlines has been raised in the past, but we have been avoiding it due to the increased scale of ACL that became nearly twice of that of NAACL. However, this concern may have been too strong: EMNLP last year received a historically large volume of submissions, which now matches the current scale of ACL, and the merged deadlines of EMNLP seem to have worked out well after all. Thus, it seems reasonable to expect that ACL 2017 should be able to handle the similar workload incurred by the merged deadlines.

START support for Reviewer to Area Assignment

START support team has implemented a new feature to help with reviewer-to-area assignments, which has been used by NAACL 2016. This feature automatically allocates reviewers to areas based on keyword matching between reviewers and area chairs using a simple greedy algorithm. The current implementation supports weighted features, though NAACL 2016 operated with unweighted keyword matching. This feature was particularly helpful for NAACL 2016 as they were experimenting with a new definition of areas where areas are defined by the expertise of area chairs. This definition led to areas that can potentially be overlapping with other areas while also being diverse within each area, depending on the breadth of the research interests of the area chairs. NAACL 2016 reports that this experiment was a success.

EMNLP 2016 has decided to return to the more traditional method of assigning reviewers to area chairs based on the preferences specified by the reviewers and area chairs.

Publication Format

One question raised in the past ACL exec meeting was whether we should require additional file formats like XML or latex source files for camera-ready as they may be useful for scientific search engines, which can then help disseminating the scientific findings in our community. Based on inquiries made to some experts in scientific search and past publication chairs who have experimented with XML conversion, the verdict seems to be that latex sources are definitely useful, while the benefit of XML files is less clear.

Ad Hoc Committee for Diversity

An ad hoc committee has been formed to revise the current practices and polities for nominating and selecting various roles and awards in ACL, including ACL Fellows, life time achievements awards, ACL chairs and so forth. The committee has prepared a report, which will be discussed at ACL 2016.