2019Q1 Reports: ACL 2020

ACL2020 report by Ming Zhou(ACL2020 coordination chair)

ACL2020, to be held in Seattle (July 6-11, 2020), has decided its GC, PC and LC thanks to the great efforts of ACL2020 coordination committee which consists of execs from NAACL and ACL. The following is the team with good diversity:

•GC: Dan Jurafsky(Stanford)

•PC: Joyce Chai (MSU) and Natalie Schluter(IT University of Copenhagen)

•LC: Priscilla (ACL), Luke Zettlemoyer(UW/Facebook), Jianfeng Gao(Microsoft)

Dan has started to lead this team to prepare ACL2020, including website construction, set up of various of sub-committees. They will follow the ACL conference book at http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Conference_Handbook (needs to update though), and learn from organizers of previous ACLs to define work items, time schedule and checkpoints. We will continue to support this team from all aspects.

However, there is one new issue: ACL 2019 had a record-breaking number of submissions — a 75% increase over last year. We had 2820 submissions, a few more withdrawn later. We predict ACL2020 will continue to grow but unsure how much. Conservatively estimating, if ACL2020 maintains the similar submission number of ACL2019, it will need huge review efforts. Therefore, we are suggesting to add one additional PC for ACL 2020, thus three PCs work together to handle the management of paper reviews.