ACL Poster-Demo Session

Philippe Blache

Report

The poster-demo session is now an entire part of the ACL. However, many
details were still unclear: recommendations and list of duties of the
poster-demo chairs was not very precise; not many information was
available from previous editions, etc. Fortunately, we have had a very
good interaction with the general chairs, making it possible to precise
many points and take decisions rapidly.

Our first task was then to precise the main goals of the session. It was
not clear in particular what the status for posters was. We had a
discussion with other chairs in order to clarify whether the papers
accepted in this section was only late-breaking papers or whether there
could be a possibility for good papers, but rejected from the main
conference for some reason (typically not enough evaluation due to too
recent results), to be presented in this session. Finally, the first
solution has been chosen. This solution was easiest to implement, even
though this point still has to be discussed.

The second question concerned the calendar and the selection process. We
have decided to set up a scientific committee, making it possible to
organize an actual reviewing process. The committee was formed by 23
experts, coming from different geographic and thematic areas. We have
then fixed the calendar, which was tight:

    Paper submission deadline:      May 1, 2003
    Notification of acceptance:     May 20, 2003
    Camera ready copy due:          June 1, 2003

As for the reviewing process itself, each article, (4-pages long,
anonymous) had to be reviewed by 2 reviewers. We have received 76
submissions; each reviewer has received 6 or 7 papers to review. This
was a problem because most of us were also involved in other reviewing
task, 7 papers is clearly too much. Some extra reviewers (in the end 2)
had to be found.

We had a problem during the reviewing process: no clear difference was
done between poster and demo submissions. Then no specific criteria have
been applied in the selection process. Finally, decided not to
distinguish them. We think that for further conferences authors should
be asked to identify their submissions as poster or demos and the
organization should propose an approximate balance between the two types
of submissions.

After the reviewing process, from the 76 submissions, 34 were accepted.
This ratio has also been under discussion. Some think that this section
could have a higher acceptance ratio. In the end, we have decided to
keep close to the ACL ratio, but again, this point still has to be
discussed.

Finally, having one of the chairs from the local side is clearly
indispensable, many decisions, including in the selection ratio, also
depends on practical constraints from local organization.


Scientific committee:
Philippe Blache, Universite de Provence, France
Rens Bod, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Christian Boitet, Universite Joseph Fourier, France
Antonio Branco, University of Lisbon, Portugal
Francisco Casacuberta, Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, Spain Ken
Church, ATT Labs, USA Tomaz Erjavec, Jozef Stefan Institute in
Ljubljana, Slovenia Roger Evans, University of Brighton, UK
Marcello Federico, IRST, Italy
Julio Gonzalo, UNED, Spain
Nancy Ide, Vassar College, USA
Ruslan Mitkov, Wolverhampton, UK
Diego Molla, Macquarie University, Australia
Stefan Muller, Universitaet Bremen, Germany
Kemal Oflazer, Sabanci University Istanbul, Turkey
Patrick Paroubek, LIMSI, France
German Rigau, EHU, Spain
Horacio Rodriguez, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain
Laurent Romary, INRIA, France
Graham Russell, RALI, Canada
Eric Wehrli, LATL, Switzerland
Shuly Wintner, University of Haifa, Israel
Pierre Zweigenbaum, DIAM, France