Program Committee

Organising Committee

General Chair

Claire Cardie, Cornell University

Program Chairs

Iryna Gurevych, TU Darmstadt
Yusuke Miyao, National Institute of Informatics

Workshop Chairs

Brendan O’Connor, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Eva Maria Vecchi, University of Cambridge

Tutorial Chairs

Yoav Artzi, Cornell University
Jacob Eisenstein, Georgia Institute of Technology

Demo Chairs

Fei Liu, University of Central Florida
Thamar Solorio, University of Houston

Publications Chairs

Shay Cohen, University of Edinburgh
Kevin Gimpel, Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago
Wei Lu, Singapore University of Technology and Design (Advisory)

Exhibits Coordinator

Karin Verspoor, University of Melbourne

Conference Handbook Chairs

Jey Han Lau, IBM Research
Trevor Cohn, University of Melbourne

Publicity Chair

Sarvnaz Karimi, CSIRO

Local Sponsorship Chair

Cecile Paris, CSIRO

Local Chairs

Tim Baldwin, University of Melbourne
Karin Verspoor, University of Melbourne
Trevor Cohn, University of Melbourne

Student Research Workshop Organisers

Vered Shwartz, Bar-Ilan University
Jeniya Tabassum, Ohio State University
Rob Voigt, Stanford University

Faculty Advisors to the Student Research Workshop

Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ohio State
Wanxiang Che, Harbin Institute of Technology
Malvina Nissim, University of Groningen

Webmaster

Andrew MacKinlay(acl2018web@gmail.com), Culture Amp / University of Melbourne

Area chairs

Dialogue and Interactive Systems:
- Asli Celikyilmaz Senior Chair
- Verena Rieser
- Milica Gasic
- Jason Williams
Discourse and Pragmatics:
- Manfred Stede
- Ani Nenkova Senior Chair
Document Analysis:
- Hang Li Senior Chair
- Yiqun Liu
- Eugene Agichtein
Generation:
- Ioannis Konstas
- Claire Gardent Senior Chair
Information Extraction and Text Mining:
- Feiyu Xu
- Kevin Cohen
- Zhiyuan Liu
- Ralph Grishman Senior Chair
- Yi Yang
- Nazli Goharian
Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics:
- Shuly Wintner Senior Chair
- Tim O'Donnell Senior Chair
Machine Learning:
- Andre Martins
- Ariadna Quattoni
- Jun Suzuki Senior Chair
Machine Translation:
- Yang Liu
- Matt Post Senior Chair
- Lucia Specia
- Dekai Wu
Multidisciplinary (also for AC COI):
- Yoav Goldberg Senior Chair
- Anders S?gaard Senior Chair
- Mirella Lapata Senior Chair
Multilinguality:
- Bernardo Magnini Senior Chair
- Tristan Miller
Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation:
- Graham Neubig
- Hai Zhao Senior Chair
Question Answering:
- Lluís Màrquez Senior Chair
- Teruko Mitamura
- Zornitsa Kozareva
- Richard Socher
Resources and Evaluation:
- Gerard de Melo
- Sara Tonelli
- Karën Fort Senior Chair
Sentence-level Semantics:
- Luke Zettlemoyer Senior Chair
- Ellie Pavlick
- Jacob Uszkoreit
Sentiment Analysis and Argument Mining:
- Smaranda Muresan
- Benno Stein
- Yulan He Senior Chair
Social Media:
- David Jurgens
- Jing Jiang Senior Chair
Summarization:
- Kathleen McKeown Senior Chair
- Xiaodan Zhu
Tagging, Chunking, Syntax and Parsing:
- Liang Huang Senior Chair
- Weiwei Sun
- Željko Agić
- Yue Zhang
Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics:
- Michael Roth Senior Chair
- Fabio Massimo Zanzotto Senior Chair
Vision, Robotics, Multimodal, Grounding and Speech:
- Yoav Artzi Senior Chair
- Shinji Watanabe
- Timothy Hospedales
Word-level Semantics:
- Ekaterina Shutova
- Roberto Navigli Senior Chair

Main Innovations

PC co-chairs mainly focused on solving the problems of review quality and reviewer workload, because they are becoming a serious issue due to a rapidly increasing number of submissions while a limited number of experienced reviewers is available.

New structured review form (in cooperation with NAACL 2018) to address key contributions of the reviewed papers, strong arguments in favor or against, and other aspects (see also below under “Review Process”). Sample review form was made available to the community in advance: https://acl2018.org/2018/02/20/sample-review-form/
Overall rating scale changed from 1-5 to 1-6, where 6 stands for “award-level” paper (see details below under “Review Process”).
The role of PC chair assistants filled by several senior postdocs to manage the PC communication in a timely manner, draft documents and help the PC co-chairs during most intensive work phases.
Each area has a Senior Area Chair responsible for decision making in the area, including assigning papers to other Area Chairs, determining final recommendations, as well as writing meta-reviews, if necessary.
Each Area Chair is assigned around 30 papers as a meta-reviewer. They are responsible for their pool in various steps of reviewing, e.g. checking desk-reject cases, chasing late reviewers, improving review comments, leading discussions, etc. This made the responsibility of area chairs clear and the overall review process went smoothly.
The “Multidisciplinary” area from previous years was renamed to “Multidisciplinary / also for AC COI” to make sure Area Chairs’ papers will be reviewed in this area in order to prevent any conflict of interest
Weak PC COI (e.g., groups associated with the PC through graduate schools or project partners) were handled by the other PC. Program chairs’ research groups were not allowed to submit papers to ACL in order to prevent any COI.
A bottom-up community-based approach for soliciting area chairs, reviewers, and invited speakers (https://acl2018.org/2017/09/06/call-for-nominations/)
Toronto Paper Matching System (TPMS) has been used since ACL 2017, while this year we used TPMS also for assigning papers to area chairs (as a meta-reviewer) and have encouraged the community to create their TPMS profiles.
Automatic checking of the paper format has been implemented in START. Authors were notified when a potential format violation was found during the submission process. This significantly reduced the number of desk rejects due to incidental format violations.

Submissions

An overview of statistics

In total, 1621 submissions were received right after the submission deadline: 1045 long, 576 short papers.
13 erroneous submissions were deleted or withdrawn in the preliminary checks by PCs.
25 papers were rejected without review (16 long, 9 short); the reasons are the violation of the ACL 2018 style guideline and dual submissions.
32 papers were withdrawn before the review period starts; the main reason is that the papers have been accepted as the short papers at NAACL.
In total, 1551 papers went into the reviewing phase: 1021 long, 530 short papers.
3 long and 4 short papers were withdrawn during the reviewing period. 1018 long and 526 short papers were considered during the acceptance decision phase.
258 long and 126 short papers were notified about the acceptance. 2 long and 1 short papers were withdrawn after the notification. Finally, 256 long and 125 short papers appeared in the program. The overall acceptance rate is 24.7%.
1610 reviewers (1473 primary, 137 secondary reviewers) were involved in the reviewing process; each reviewer has reviewed about 3 papers on average.

2018Q3 Reports: Program Chairs

Contents