2017Q1 Reports: Office

Priscilla Rasmussen 12 February 2017

ACL Business Office Report

As usual, the Office is running smoothly.

In the fall, another financial audit was successfully conducted by Nisivoccia, LLP, both in the office and through emails with Graeme and me. Our tax forms were completed and filed in November.

In late December, our Directors/Officers insurance was renewed for the 2017 calendar year and our Office insurance was automatically renewed in January. As of April 1st, my office 3-year lease is due for renewal so in early February the lease was renewed for April 2017 through March 2020 at a 2% per year increase. For those of you who are new to the Board, this lease is under ARCS (my company) and ACL pays 70% of the rent, AMTA pays 10% and I pay the remainder so that both ACL and AMTA can use this office address as their place of business.

Pat Kirby continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations (especially handling most of the membership entries into the portal) as well as managing the student housing and working with me in preparation for and onsite at our conferences.

Publications, Journals and Royalties:

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates handling print-on-demand of our publications, I typically receive no requests for hardcopy publications in the office. However, one long-time member has asked to fill in gaps in his personal CL Journal library and will pay for the long list of journals, proceedings and shipping costs. This order is beginning to be filled.

The Curran Associates agreement has turned out to be a good one for both them and the ACL. In 2016, we have received a total of $2,731.40 in royalties from them, covering the 4th quarter of 2015 through the 3rd quarter of 2016 plus $1,371.16 paid to us this month covering the 4th quarter of 2016. Copyright Clearance Center has not sent any earnings to ACL for CY 2015, nor has MIT Press Journals.

MIT Press Journals has now sent us an invoice for their fiscal year, July 2015 - June 2016 for their services related to the Computational Linguistics Journal. The invoice, for $35,968.50 was paid this month.

Our journals pay editorial assistants to help with the process. The CL Journal’s assistant was paid $2,634 for November 2015 through February 2016 in 2016 and in January 2017 an additional $4,730 was paid for her services for the remainder of the 2016 calendar year. And just over $1,000 was spent to upgrade their online reviewing system. The TACL Journal’s assistant was paid $11,019.56 covering April through December 2016.

Membership:

Since 2007 we have consistently numbered slightly over or under 2000 members and exceeded any previous final year numbers by ending 2015 with 2,536 members. I am pleased to report we have 2,901 members which indicates the growth of our field and conferences. The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be representing between 55 and 60 countries on a regular basis and currently exceed this with a total of 62 countries being represented by our membership.

We began 2016 with 195 members who were in a multi-year membership and added 316 members directly through portal membership payments for a total of 511 members who renewed on their own. As is becoming more standard, most memberships come from conference registrations. At the end of 2016, about 82.4% of the 2016 memberships were generated by NAACL 2016 attendance (23.4%), ACL 2016 attendance (43.4%), and EMNLP 2016 (15.6%). Between the growth in overall memberships and the increased number resulting from conference registrations, a larger burden was on the office to input new and renewing members into the portal.

As always, Min, Jing-Shin and Pranav (our current webmaster) have been extremely responsive to and helpful with any requests I have. I am not sure anyone realized that all memberships resulting from conferences had to be manually input into the portal or how very long this manual process took. While we had discussed eventually figuring out how to make this process more automated, given that there is no way to tie the registration process to the membership portion of the portal, it became more urgent this winter to automate our input process since the office was falling behind in updating the increased number of renewing memberships and creating new membership records. Over December and January, Pranav and I worked on a new, more automated input system that captures all the information I need in each membership record and provides a report on the few that failed so we can manually check and update just those few records. This is now working wonderfully and is a huge improvement. This will also free Pat Kirby to do other, more useful projects for me.

Fellows Program:

A selection committee has been formed, headed by Joakim Nivre, which used the current selection process. Four new Fellows were chosen for 2016. Fellowship award certificates were made, sent to Pushpak Bhattacharrya for signature and then sent to each of the new fellows.

Conferences:

NAACL 2016 was held in San Diego, California, at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina, June 12-17. This conference set the second highest attendance for NAACLs with 877 final attendees (just under the 908 attendees achieved in 2015) after taking out people who did not show up and others who cancelled. Having such a large number of attendees has caused some additional work in planning and communications (over 125 visa invitations issued, re-planning both catering and space configurations, etc.). Acting as Local Arrangements Chair means that both the organizational work and registrations were managed by the Office. One thing that worked out well was that the hotel was willing to give a small number of rooms at a deeper discount to be used for students. After those rooms were filled, we were able to get a small number of rooms at the nearby Hilton to also serve as student housing. The Office managed a list of student reservations for each hotel plus facilitated student room sharing. I expect this conference to make a surplus but the exact amount will not be determined until the accountant finishes reviewing the records.

The ACL 2016, was held in Berlin, August 7-12 and has been managed quite well by Valia Kordoni and her local team plus an excellent PCO (professional conference organizer company), along with Antal van den Bosch as General Chair stepping in when needed. The office had worked closely with the local organizers in Berlin on all aspects of the organization. The final registration count is 1650, setting a new all-time high (2014, in Baltimore, being the previous high at 1439 registered). Last year it was decided to eliminate the Student Lunch. We decided, instead, to hold a Recruitment Lunch, charging a $500 fee for each recruiting company to help defray some part of the lunch costs. There were 12 companies at the lunch, making this first-time experiment a success that we recommend being tried again. One problem that arose was that no one seemed to know their job included the production of the Conference Handbook, creating a last minute scramble to find someone willing to manage this project. This has led to the creation going forward of a Conference Handbook Chair to avoid confusion.

EMNLP 2016, held in Austin, Texas, November 1-5 was co-located with AMTA 2016 which immediately preceded EMNLP. Due to difficulties with the hotel, both AMTA and EMNLP were forced to shift their conferences one day earlier than previously advertised which, along with a great many failures and issues with the hotel during the conference itself, lead to organizational difficulties I hope were not too noticeable to the attendees. For example, the last day of AMTA and first day of EMNLP were supposed to purposely overlap with workshops, one of which (SSST) was to be co-located with AMTA to foster cross-over attendance but this did not happen in the end and SSST was rescheduled to the last day of EMNLP instead. These difficulties, though, allowed me to negotiate further discounts in our final billing. EMNLP 2016 ended with 804 total registrants, making it slightly larger than the previous record of 775 in Lisbon in 2015. The Office acted as Local Arrangements Chair as well as providing advice, general support, and registration management.

Given the current concerns about possible travel restrictions going into the future, it may be interesting to note that NAACL 2016 had a total of 18 No Shows (people who had registered but did not attend the conference) and 3 cancellations due to visas not being issued. ACL 2016 had 32 No Shows (10 of which registered but did not pay) and 10 cancellations due to visa problems. EMNLP 2016 had 19 No Shows with only 1 reported cancellation due to a visa application being declined. The No Shows did not explain why they did not attend.

Planning for (NA)ACL 2017 has begun and Graeme, Anoop and I conducted a second site visit in December to be sure the Westin Bayshore Hotel (the conference venue) would be able to handle the potentially higher number of attendees. Of concern was that some of the parallel session rooms will have to be turned over quickly for the two evening poster/dinner sessions but we have been assured the hotel will make it work. The venue contract has been signed and initial plans are in place. Anoop Sarkar has agreed to be co-Local Arrangements Chair to help with the more local aspects of our planning, including helping to find local sponsors and possibly some sort of childcare. One great concern is having found out during the second site visit that Vancouver will be overrun with tourists and locals coming out for the Gay Pride Week beginning the weekend following our conference and a fireworks competition beginning the weekend before our conference and running through the week. This means hotels are charging much higher rates and finding relatively inexpensive accommodations may be more difficult. To help with this potential problem, we looked at other hotels and have now signed non-penalty contracts with both the Sheraton Wall Centre and the Marriott for a limited number of guest rooms at similar price points to the Westin for our regular attendees. We also contracted small blocks of rooms at the YWCA and Georgian Court hotels which, in addition to 10 super-discounted rooms at the Westin, will provided some much less expensive rooms for some of our students. We also visited a few options for both the Social Event (for all attendees) and the Recognition Dinner (for the LTA awardee and ACL key volunteers). Contracts are now in place for the Social Event to be at the Vancouver Aquarium (at our expected high numbers of attendees, there are few places which are large enough and interesting for holding such an event) and a Harbour Cruise is contracted for the Recognition Dinner Wednesday evening (which happens to coincide with one of the evening fireworks competitions). We will begin now to advertise our Recruitment Lunch to our sponsors and others who might be interested. I expect to spend much of March collecting quotes for all aspects of the conference and setting up the working budget which we will then use to set registration fees. My hope is to open registration in early April.

SIGDAT 2017 will be held in Copenhagen, Denmark, September 7-11, 2017. On my way home from ACL 2016 in Berlin, I met Dirk Hovy and Anders Søgaard (the Local Arrangements Chairs) to conduct a site visit of the proposed conference venues, hotels and social event locations. Contracts have been signed with DGI-byen for both the conference venues and the nearby hotel. The venue will be in the old meat packing district which has been turned into shops, restaurants, bars and a meeting space (Øksnehallen). It is a lively area with many other restaurants and hotels in the vicinity. No-penalty contracts are being negotiated with a couple of other hotels and Dirk and Anders will be working on setting up an exciting Social Event in the courtyard adjacent to the Øksnehallen. The office will continue to provide advice and will manage registrations.

EACL 2017 will be held in Valencia, Spain, April 3-7, 2017 and, although the Office is not typically involved in this conference’s planning, the organizers and General Chair have been requesting much more guidance than in years past.

ACL 2018 planning is under way. Venue and Social Event (Aquarium) contracts have been signed, with special care given to assuring the proper space for all possible conference events. I will continue to offer advice as needed but it was agreed to be more fiscally reasonable to have the local professional conference organizers manage registrations to avoid complicated and costly taxation.

NAACL has requested that I begin searching for two years (2018 and 2019) potential venues and SIGDAT has asked that I also search for a 2018 venue for EMNLP. This search has just begun and I am hoping the three-conference leverage can work to our advantage. Sometimes, negotiating a two or three year contract with the same hotel chain can result in better pricing so this will be my goal.

While it is always difficult to project attendance at conferences, we seem to be settling into a new higher level of attendance, after a growth spurt the last couple of years. Being prepared for more than expected numbers is extremely important for the next couple of years until we can again trust our newly-adjusted predictions.

Using Michael Strube’s schema to optimally lay out the posters, demos and food/beverages for the poster/dinner sessions worked very well for all three conferences in 2016, allowing ample walk space and overall comfort. And, workshops continue to be more challenging in finding adequate space for the growing attendance at some workshops and the many poster sessions they plan to present. Careful advance planning is essential for these events.

Conference Sponsorship:

NAACL 2016 had sponsorships totaling $70,012 plus $6,700 sponsoring the BEA and CLPsych workshops. Once again, our usual sponsors (Amazon, Baidu, Baobab, Bloomberg, ebay, Facebook, Google, IBM Research, Microsoft, Nuance, Yahoo and the University of Washington) plus newer sponsors (Adobe, Brandeis University, Civis Analytics, Grammarly, Huawei Technologies, Maluuba, Open Table, United Health Group, VoiceBox, @newsela) lent their support. Quite a few sponsors also opted to be exhibitors in addition to KITT.AI and Quora who exhibited but were not sponsors.

ACL 2016 has proven to be quite popular, not only in numbers of registrations but also in having $100,786 in conference sponsorship commitments. Our faithful sponsors (Amazon, Baidu, ebay, Facebook, Google, IBM Research, Microsoft, Nuance, Yandex) plus sponsors we have not seen before or are returning (Elsevier, Grammarly, Maluuba, Textkernel, VoiceBox, Zalando) continue to help us thrive. We also have $9,120 in sponsorships supporting workshops and $1,000 specifically committed to the SRW. The most exciting commitments are from eleven companies who each paid $500 for the experimental Recruitment Lunch, for a total of $5,500. Two of these companies also decided to be a Silver and a Bronze sponsor of the main conference.

$74,739 in EMNLP 2016 sponsorships were committed. Many were the result of 2-Pack or 3-Pack sponsorship agreements so the same companies as listed above (Amazon, Baidu, Bloomberg, Brandeis University, ebay, Facebook, Google, Grammarly, IBM, Maluuba, Microsoft, Nuance, Voicebox, Yandex) plus 3M, Citadel, ISI and Oracle Labs generously donated.

For 2017, I am pleased to report that sponsorships are steadily coming in. So far, ACL 2017 has a total commitment of $92,331 for the main conference plus $2,500 for the Abusive Language and $2,000 for the RepL4NLP workshops. It is exciting to have captured Apple as a new sponsor/exhibitor. Other commitments are currently being decided both for the main conference and for the Women in NLP workshop. EACL 2017 has $6,688 in sponsorships directed through ACL’s bank account either because the sponsorship was part of a multi-pack or the sponsor was more comfortable working with the Office. Many other sponsorships are being sent to the EACL 2017 PCO for direct management within Europe. EMNLP 2017 has received $34,046 in commitments to date with more expected.

The idea of offering 2-Pack or 3-Pack options and including EMNLP allowed sponsors to make one payment to support two or all three events rather than one at a time. This made sponsoring easier, especially for our ongoing sponsors. For the 2016 Sponsorship Booklet that the International Sponsorship Committee and I pulled together, we continue to offer these multi-pack options, resulting in some of the first commitments and at higher levels (Amazon and Baidu at Platinum, for example) to come in.

The area Sponsorship Chairs and the Local Arrangement Sponsorship Chairs are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them. And, many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!