2017Q3 Reports: Information Officer

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The Information Officer (IO) portfolio includes integration of information dissemination for various ACL-wide activities, through the

  • Anthology
  • Website
    • Wiki's
  • Portal
  • Archive.

Long-term goals for the IO include maintenance of the aclweb.org and mirroring of other conference sites, and to be cost-neutral through sponsorship by corporate interests or membership levies.

Plans include provide integration of logins (through OpenID and OAuth) and make our information services to be updated and professionally-designed with better UI for better UX.

New media, such as social media and Apps, might be future means for communications among members. The developing strategies of such new media are being investigated.

Organization

The Information Officer does not manage nor do the day-to-day operations for the Anthology, ACL Wiki or website, but has the purview to dictate policy for it.

The Anthology is managed separately by the Anthology Editor (Min-Yen Kan) and the primary ACL Wiki is managed by Peter Turney.

For other information services (other Wikis, the website and the portal), the current webmaster is in charge, but needs to have strong direction set by the Information Officer.

Jing-Shin Chang took the responsibility of the information officer since Jan 2016. The past CIO, Min-Yen, helps a lot in the transition of the duty.

Recent Events (2017/02~2017/07)

  • New Mailing Lists: Mailing lists for EACL Board (eacl-board@aclweb) and EACL Students Board (eacl-student-board@aclweb) were established.
  • ACL Forwarder: ACL-2017 mail forwarder for acl2017@aclweb.org, to nmadnani@ets.org, was established.
  • ACL Wiki Editor: The ACL Wiki Editor was taken over by Dr. Chunliang Lyu [Resume] from Peter Turney, who contributed the management of the ACL general Wiki for nearly 11 years. Great thanks are sent to him for his significant contribution.
  • Volunteers Selection: Policies on how to recruit volunteers for positions like ACL Wiki will be discussed in the ACL-2017 (Vancouver, Canada) executive committee meetings. There was no formal procedures and policies for rewarding such long-term volunteers, and thus requires discussion.
  • Nomination System: The Fellow Nomination and Recommendation System is revised from a two-page static forms into a version that allows repeated posting and revision by nominator and recommenders (until the deadline of nomination). Future revisions are expected after this first revision. About tens of off-the-shelf general application management systems was surveyed before the revision. They were found to cost a lot (charged yearly, more expensive than the current website hosting costs) and does not easily tailored to our needs.
    • Draft design of the revised version can be seen in the following files:
  • VPS Migration: VPS migration for porting the new anthology from independent domain to aclweb.org is under survey since the transition from shared host to VPS has some potential problems that may interfere current ACL web operations.

Recent Events (2016/08~2017/02)

  • The old ACL website is officially backup and closed. It was merged into the ACL portal. The old website can however be re-opened if some old broken links need be re-constructed.
  • Membership importing function of the member portal (from conference registration modules) is implemented. So member information of new members or renewed members who register near main ACL conference can be imported automatically with minimal manual entry. This is important since recent member registration or renewal was closely related to the main ACL conference, but the member portal and conference registration system are maintained independently for the past few years. Manual works were required to transfer the registration information to the member portal manually.
  • Elections were run for ACL-2017 new Exec board members & Amendment to the ACL Constitution (Article V, Item 5).
  • NAACL website was investigated to know whether its models can be adapted to ACL portal. Some difficulties were found: (1) It is based on github pages. So it is basically based on collaborator approach for maintaining their webpages and announcement. Posting announcement is just like submitting codes based on some templates. So maintainers need to be familiar with the development models of Github, and cannot use simple GUI like the ACL webmaster does based on the CMS for the portal. (2) It lakes functionalities that require database operations (like SQL for updating membership information.) So the NAACL models, so far, are only good for event announcement.
  • Social media accounts for Facebook and twitter are created. Automatic mutual posting from one media to another was tested. Management strategy is being developed so ACL-owned social media & conference-owned media accounts can be integrated and controlled in a better way.

Recent Events (2016/01~07)

ACL website is integrated with the ACL Portal to use the same CMS. They are under watching for further improvement.

The Anthology Steering Committee (ASC) held a teleconference on 7/14, discussing important to-do items of the Anthology, and their priorities. Current members of the ASC include Min-Yen Kan, Paola Merlo and Jing-Shin Chang.

Winter Q1 conference minutes (2016/02/27)

The website/wiki/portal are confusing and hard to use.

Further improvement of the website/wiki/portal is required.

The IO will collect opinions from our members for the most wanted functions of the information system.

(This report is under revision for 2016Q3. Some of the following data might be aged.)

IO Overview

With the beginning of 2016, Jing-Shin Chang has taken over the IO as part of his at-large duties, with outgoing IO Min-Yen Kan, overseeing and retaining execution rights where needed. Min-Yen will revoke his rights no later than 2016 Q2 or as when Jing-Shin sees fit to remove access control.

Budget. The IO has a budget to oversee part-time manpower allocated to help improve our association's websites, which includes maintenance, upgrading, migrating and backup. So far, we have incurred costs of 2,940, with less than 1000 additional in committed manpower for outstanding payments to our new webmaster and for our new web host. This is well in line with our projections.

DOIs/CrossRef. We have assiged Document Object Identifiers (DOIs) on a trial basis for conference proceedings for 2014 and plan to continue up to 2015, before assigning backlogged materials back to 2012. We hope to assign live DOIs to ACL 2015 and satellite materials. We hope to have a standard operating procedure in place for DOI assignation for our conference proceedings by the end of the year. We are still investigating DOIs for TACL, as DOIs for TACL would also be assigned directly by ACL (in contrast to Computational Linguistics, which is assigned by MIT Press).

Thompson Reuters Web of Knowledge / Elsevier Scopus Indexing: We know a good portion of our membership relies on impact assessment for promotion, ranking and tenure. We are trying to tackle this problem by investigating whether our materials can be indexed by major citation indices, namely Thompson Reuter's Web of Knowledge (Wok) and Elsevier's Scopus. We have initiated discussions and provided materials since Oct 2014 to WoK, but they have not been forthcoming with any status or updates with respect to our queries. We continue to attempt to remind them on a monthly basis, but unfortunately, we have not be able to get any response.

Elsevier requires that journals have an ISSN (largely reserved for serials / journals), an issue we are currently investigating.

Note that the onus of journal indexing (both CL and TACL) is the responsibility of the respective journals. Currently, CL is indexed by Elsevier, but TACL is not indexed by either service.

We would appreciate help from our membership who have been successful at approaching either indexing service in helping to get the agencies to index our conference proceedings.

Anthology

Since the Anthology Editor is not necessarily the same as the Information Officer since 2016, the major updates on the Anthology management will be referred to the Anthology Editor's recent report at: [2016 Q3 Reports ACL Anthology]

The following past materials about the Anthology will therefore be removed from this report soon:

The ACL Anthology is a digital archive of research papers in computational linguistics, sponsored by the CL community, and freely available to all. We employ a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial, Share-Alike license for materials published by ACL. This makes our content usable by the general public with attribution to the ACL (although it is not mandatory for any user to inform us of their use of our materials). Dual licensing for a fee is presumably possible (although not exercised currently).

The Anthology now contains over 36,500 (up from 34,800 papers in the last report in '15 Q3) The new ACL Anthology is now active and will be switched to the primary Anthology site around ACL this year, as we have had some time to sort out problems with the site. However, we know a portion of our membership will want to still use the older version, so we are going to maintain both sites at least until the end of 2016.

We assign DOIs to our own materials since 2014. This year, we will be working towards ingesting other earlier materials before the migration from the courtesy DOI assignation from ACM (for pre-2012 materials). For reference, the ACL decided to create our own DOIs such that we could control where the DOIs resolved to, as earlier, ACM "owned" the DOI redirect, taking traffic from ACL to route to their ACM Portal digital library, in exchange for the cost of DOI assignation (US$1 per paper). With our current practice of assigning DOIs to all materials, our costs are likely to escalate to at least US$ 2K as we digitally publish at least this amount of scholarly articles. For 2014/2015 we had to incur about ~1.5K for both years combined.

We now have semi-updated statistics on the most accessed papers and authors from the Anthology. We have begun to automate this information and propagate this information into the pages for the papers and authors so to provide additional data for authors to argue for their impact. We have preserved the web log data for the new Anthology so as to be able to run other analytics when interests from members of our community can utilize the logs to create better services for ourselves.

While the new Anthology is live, it lives on a university virtual machine in Singapore, and will not likely scale to provide adequate bandwidth when faced with the full access from the ACL membership and general public. We are investigating which service to take our work towards as it likely requires a VPS account as we need to install certain software and libraries that usually requires root privileges. We hope to work this migration soon.

Finally, we recognise that the ACL Anthology has become a significant asset for the ACL, manifesting its central role in the NLP/CL research communities. The Exec accepted Min's resolution to have a steering committee deal with the oversight of the Anthology. Currently, the IO (Jing-Shin), the editor (Min) and the CL journal editor (Paola) serve on this committee. The committee has not started meeting yet, but we envision it will meet soon after the winter teleconference, and be held twice yearly.

Mailing List. The Anthology mailing list's (http://groups.google.com/group/acl-anthology) membership pool has grown, now consisting of 555 members (up from 479 from a year ago, and 533 from the last report 6 months ago). This is an announcement-only list, where we notify members of newly listed released materials online.

Plans. With the work item of DOI assignation largely complete, a second thrust is to other forms of scientific knowledge that we are interested in archiving. These include software, datasets and videos. The procedures for integrating these with START and the submission process need to be worked out, and the space requirements for these services assessed. Videos have been handled for ACL 2015, and integration of those from NAACL 2015 are underway by the NAACL organization. The compilation of the video to talk metadata mapping needs to be provided by the service that provides the video recording.

A third thrust will be to incorporate the results of the R50 workshop into the Anthology, and allow third-party applications to automatically annotate articles with new metadata and papers in the Anthology, as they come available. Such an API will raise the visibility of the Anthology as a object of study, complementing our earlier work to make the Anthology's text a corpus.

We have long term plans to work on these other following issues which are smaller in scope than the above major thrusts:

  • A previous discussion (with Ken Church) proposed that we create a single bibtex file for all Anthology materials. The beta Anthology can generate such information fairly easily with its database backing; we plan to have this file available during the ACL 2015 conference.
  • To create a XML representation of all of the metadata that is used to create the Anthology site.
  • [low priority] collaboration with START and aclpub (also may involve the Conference Officer's work) to integrate users of their system and to obtain LaTeX and abstracts for indexing and preservation.
  • [low priority] collaboration with ELRA with respect to use of the LRE Map and ISLRNs, and voluntarily helping them with scanning backlog archives into a digital form.

Hosting Provider

Our current hosting provider is Bluehost, on their shared Pro hosting (about $20 per month), which has seen fairly good response times. Due to the nature of shared hosting, the custom installation of the ACL Anthology cannot share this host, and one of the plans this year is to move the ACL Anthology to a VPS provider that can accommodate the service for a reasonable price. Static information from the Anthology will still likely be put on Bluehost, since the hosting can hold unlimited files.

Website and Portal

The ACL website continues to serve as the primary online resource for the organization, and is a Drupal 7 installation. It contains the main ACL site, an ACL Wiki which serves as a resource to the general computational linguistics community, an ACL Admin wiki used to store and maintain ACL specific resources such as reports, handbooks, and policies as well as an Exec wiki reserved for the use of ACL Exec officers. We also maintain mirrors of individual ACL conference websites, membership email lists for ACL announcements (via the webhosts' installation of Mailman) and a listing of resolutions of the ACL Exec Committee (within the ACL Wiki).

The ACL Portal was created to provide a web-based platform to house facilities for the benefit of members. The Portal currently serves little function other than maintaining a list of current members and a payment gateway for membership. We are currently working towards integrating the Portal into the website's functionality, now that both systems are run on a common platform (Drupal 7). Integration will involve upgrading existing custom modules developed by Ben Phelan (the previous developer) for the Portal to Drupal 7; this is still ongoing work. Pranav, our current webmaster, is working towards these goals since last report; we are still waiting on him to finish the integration (stalled).

We still need to manage spam registrations on a weekly basis as the Portal allows anyone to register an account (and get a webpage listing their profile, a target for spammers to get an "endorsed" hyperlink from the Portal). An open issue will be to lock down new registrations to the Portal in effort to combat spam.

Agenda

We are now working in parallel on consolidating the ACL Website and the ACL Portal, which is our primary goal for our current webmaster. We also hope to resume our work on the establishment of a central login for ACL services (something akin to a "ACL Account" a la Google or Facebook). We are planning to use OpenID and OAuth, which would allow members to link their ACL account with other (i.e., Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Microsoft/Hotmail) services; such that one could use login credentials from those services for ACL use.

Election and Volunteers Recruitment

The Information Officer is a position linked with one of the At-Large positions on the ACL Executive board. It is up for the 2015 election for the standard At-Large executive officer term (3 years). The new information officer, Jing-Shin Chang, took this position since January 2016. And the initial Information Officer, Min-Yen Kan, continue to provide useful information to make the information services better.

We also have our senior ACL Wiki master, Peter Turney, running for 10 years in his position. Since the contents of the information service are changing over time, and the work load of our webmaster and wiki master will become heavier, the current information officer is considering to recruit more volunteers to help maintain the whole ACL information service system. The recruitment procedure and criteria will be discussed later with the executive committee members.

See Also

[2016 Q3 Report for ACL Anthology] [2016 Q3 Report for ACL Wiki]

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