Call for Bids: 15th Meeting of the European Chapter of the ACL

The European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) invites proposals to host the 2017 EACL conference, to be held in Europe, the Middle East or Africa (EMEA) in Spring (preferably April) 2017. From 2014 EACL takes place every 3 years. The 2017 conference will be the 15th meeting of the EACL.

We seek draft proposals from prospective bidders. Based on an evaluation of the draft proposals received, promising bidders will be asked to provide additional information for the final selection.

The EACL Board will appoint the general chair for the conference, the programme committee co-chairs, and all other chairs (tutorial co-chairs, workshop co-chairs, etc., in conjunction with the general chair), except for the local arrangements chair.

Draft proposals should identify a local arrangements chair, who will be responsible for activities such as arranging meeting rooms, equipment, refreshments, accommodation, on-site registration, participant internet access, the reception, the conference dinner, and working with the other chairs and the EACL Board to develop the budget and registration materials. Achieving budget estimates will, in particular, involve liaising with the sponsorship committee.

The conference should take place during Spring 2017 (preferably April), avoiding national holidays of the EACL countries such as Western and Orthodox Easter and Jewish passover.

Draft proposals should include information on the following (each item to be explicitly addressed):

  1. Location: accessibility; conference venue, e.g., hotel or
    university; accommodations, e.g., hotels, motels, student dorms;
    dining options
  2. Proposed dates
  3. Local Arrangements team: chair/co-chair, committee, volunteer labour,
    registration handling
  4. Local Computational Linguistics community
  5. Meeting venues: space for plenary sessions including 4
    conference rooms hosting respectively 600, 250, 200 and 125
    persons; a large poster or exhibit room; 11 rooms on the
    workshops/tutorials days among which at least two host 150
    persons and the others 60 persons; and rooms for demos,
    small meetings and registration. Workshops may request for
    demo/poster sessions, so it would be good to have some
    adjoint rooms available or open areas with poster boards
  6. High-speed desktop and wireless Internet access
  7. Audiovisual equipment
  8. Printing of conference booklet and tutorial notes
  9. Food and catering including breaks, receptions and conference dinner
  10. Social events including infrastructure for banquets and receptions
  11. Sponsorships
  12. Local expenses spreadsheet (template provided)
  13. Registration and payment procedure
  14. Opportunities for co-location with other meetings

Proposals will be evaluated in relation to a number of site selection
criteria (unordered):

  • Adequacy of conference and exhibit facilities for the anticipated
    number of registrants
  • Adequacy of residence accommodations and food services (in a range of
    price categories) and proximity to the conference facilities
  • Adequacy of expenses projections and expected surplus
  • Appropriateness of proposed dates
  • Geographical and national balance with regard to previous EACL and ACL
    conferences, and other major Natural Language Processing conferences,
    held in EMEA
  • Experience of local arrangements team
  • Local CL community support
  • Local government and industry support
  • Appropriateness of expected registration fees
  • Accessibility of proposed site

A conference bid template for EACL 2017 and successful bids for the four previous EACL conferences are available at: http://eacl.coli.uni-saarland.de/contents/cfb17.html

The ACL conference handbook (including ACL Bid guidelines) and more about ACL policies can be found at:

http://www.aclweb.org/website/policies
http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Conference_Handbook
http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Bid_Guidelines

Successful bids for previous ACL conferences can be found at:
http://www.aclweb.org/archive/bids.html

Please send your draft proposal (including template form with
estimated expenses) electronically to the EACL Chair-elect:

Lluis Marquez
Arabic Language Technologies
Qatar Computing Research Institute
qcri.org.qa/our-people/lluismarquez
lmarquez [at] qf.org.qa

The EACL board encourages groups who intend to submit a proposal to ask
questions about how to prepare the proposal.

Important Dates:

  • December 20, 2014: Deadline for draft bids
  • January 31, 2015: Feedback to bidders and announcement of shortlist
    of bidders
  • March 15, 2015: Deadline for final bids
  • April 30, 2015: Final bid chosen
  • April, 2017: EACL Conference