2010Q3 Reports: ACL Anthology

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ACL ANTHOLOGY Report June 2010, Min-Yen Kan

(please see the items for discussion at the end of the report)

The ACL Anthology is a digital archive of research papers in computational linguistics, sponsored by the CL community, and freely available to all. Conference proceedings are published in the anthology around the same time as the conference (subject to general/program chairs' discretion). CL articles are published within a few days of publication on the MIT Press website, now that CL is open access.

The anthology now contains over 18,000 papers (up from 15,900 articles from twelve months ago). All of the papers up to 2008 are also now indexed by the ACM Portal and should have Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) assigned to them per the ACL Anthology - ACM agreement.

CHANGES OVER LAST 12 MONTHS: As promised, we have been busy reaching out to sister CL/NLP related societies and have been also ingesting and hosting their materials. We have incorporated ROCLING, PACLIC and ALTA forums into the Anthology, now listed under Other Events. We are finalizing the incorporation of RANLP soon; although this may be delayed 1-2 months due to catastrophic disk failure of our preview and development copy of the Anthology at NUS.

We have also been busy ensuring the coverage of DBLP and ACM Portal cover the Anthology materials. We understand that the ACM Digital Library has finished ingestion and DOI assignation of over 100 venues (mostly workshops) that had been missing from their records. DBLP is known to digest information from the ACM Digital Library Portal, and has recently completed ingestion of most of the ACL materials at this point. Min is working with Drago's help to ensure that the information is up-to-date.

We have also gotten approval to use 3600 USD of the ACL's budget to upgrade the Anthology. We are using these funds to requisition external consultant work to code a new version of the underlying ACL software, to upgrade the storage, curation of the metadata and a better faceted navigation user interface that will allow the filtering of publications by custom filters. Currently, the new Anthology model is built using Ruby on Rails and features OAI-PMH integration to allow third parties to ingest and list article metadata from the Anthology.

MAILING LIST: The Anthology mailing list's (http://groups.google.com/group/acl-anthology) membership pool has grown, now consisting of XX members (up from 176 from last report). This is an announcement-only list, where we notify members of newly listed released materials online.

ONGOING WORK: While we incorporate more materials for CL, our next big project is ensuring that ACM lists our publications with appropriate rights and linkage to our Anthology copies. ACL members rightfully have complained that the ACM doesn't make it obvious that the publications are from ACL and that they can be obtained free without ACM registration.

Once completed, we will plan to work with START and aclpub (courtesy connections from Steven Bird) to directly support the ACL Anthology XML format to make future events using the aclpub package easier to incorporate directly into the Anthology, and to incorporate further categorization of submission by OLAC codes (language subject matter).

Other work left from last year is still queued. These are to provide a uniform level of service and metadata for past work. There are a number of issues that are being tackled:

• Correct XML representation of each article: names of authors (with diacritics for European names), first, "von" and last name portions
• BibTeX representations for all articles
• One PDF file per article. This is especially problematic for the J79 series, which largely represents one issue per PDF file.
• Text for all PDF files. Some articles (e.g., EACL 2003) only exist in image form in the Anthology, rendering indexing (and hence subsequent citation) of these articles problematic.
• PDF metadata fixing for all articles. Crucially, Google Scholar uses this information but it is not always correctly generated.
• Wikification of articles so that registered ACLs users will be able to edit their contributions to add errata and other metadata, multimedia.