2012Q1 Reports: ACL 2012

ACL 2012 Progress Report (16 Jan 2012)

General Chair (Haizhou Li)

ACL 2012 has appointed chairs of different programs, area chairs of technical program, and all subcommittees, set up conference website www.acl2012.org, called for submissions of technical papers, demos, workshops, and tutorials. ACL 2012 has reviewed and awarded 11 post-conference workshops.

1. Appointment of Organizers (Chairs)

September 2010:

ACL 2012 General Chair nominated the candidates of organizers and sought approval from conference coordination committee. The nominations reflected a geographical and gender balance.

October 2010:

1) General Chair invited the candidates; 2) ACL 2012 appointed 2 sponsorship chairs. The two chairs joined ACL sponsorship committee; 3) ACL 2012 appointed 2 workshop chairs. The two chairs joined ACL/NAACL/EACL workshop committee for the joint call review.

November 2010:

ACL 2012 announced the organizing committee on official website.

2. ACL 50th Anniversary

ACL 2012 will organize a number of events to commemorate the 50th anniversary of ACL, that include “Rediscovering 50 Years of Discoveries” workshop during ACL main conference and “50 Years of ACL” invited speeches.

3. Monthly Report and Newsletters

All organizers report monthly progress to General Chair, who summarizes into internal newsletters to facilitate communications. ACL 2012 also started a newsletter service since December 2011 for all ACL members.

4. Conference Program

8 July 2012: Tutorials 9-11 July 2012: Main Conference, Posters/Demos/Student Research Workshops, and ACL 50 Years Workshop 12-13 July 2012: ACL post-conference workshops 12-14 July 2012: EMNLP-CoNLL

5. Liaison with AFNLP

AFNLP will provide USD5000.0 as a grant to support student travellers of ACL 2012. The grant will be administered jointly by local organizer and student research workshop organizers.

Local Arrangements (Gary Lee, Jong Park)

Completed Tasks:

1. Set up initial web site: http://www.acl2012.org/ 2. Set up the official Twitter: http://twitter.com/ACL2012_Korea 3. Collect preliminary local info (travel info, visas, weather, etc.) 4. More fleshed out website, with most preliminary information: general conference announcement; preliminary local info; stubs for calls for papers, etc. 5. Site visit by Priscilla Rasmussen and Graeme Hirst, Li Haizhou

  - Conference venue, Banquet venue, Conference hotel and Student accommodation, Etc.

6. Decisions on venue/date - Conference venue: ICC Jeju - Conference hotel and Tutorial venue: The Shilla Jeju - Host dates: July 8 - July 14, 2012 7. Decisions on banquet site/date - Date: Tue, July 10, 2012 - Venue: Shangri La Buffet 8. Decisions on EXEC++ site/date

  - Date: Mon, July 9, 2012 (or Wed, July 11, 2012)
  - Venue: Korean House

9. Establish Local Arrangements Committee

  - Co-chairs: Gary Geunbae Lee, Jong C. Park

- Conference handbook: Jung-jae Kim - Government sponsorship: Harksoo Kim - Internet/WiFi/Equipments: Seong-Bae Park - Local exhibit: Byeongchang Kim - Local finance: Seungshik Kang - Local sponsorship: Hanmin Jung - Social activities: Jeong-Won Cha - Student volunteer management: Heuiseok Lim - Web site & flyer: Youngjoong Ko 10. Set up the email aliases - chairs_acl@nlp.postech.ac.kr (that includes all chairs)

  - srw_acl@nlp.postech.ac.kr (that includes both faculty advisors and student chairs)
 - sponsorship_acl@nlp.postech.ac.kr (that includes sponsorship chairs)

11. Set up the official email of ACL 2012: acl2012.conference@gmail.com

Remaining Tasks:

1. Arrange social programs for the conference: arrangement confirmation of banquet and other social events; such as banquet menu, confirm the proceeding plan, and establishing the tour plan - Target Completion Date: TBD (Before On-line Registration Open) 2. Finalize sign contracts for meetings and accommodations, and pay deposits Contracts between ICC Jeju and accommodations - Target Completion Date: 01/31/2012 3. Posting more concrete details of conference on the website: details of program, etc.

  - Target Completion Date: TBD 

4. Set up an website for accommodation booking and registration - Target Completion Date: TBD 5. Specific room allocation plan for main conference, tutorials, workshops and other meetings - Target Completion Date: TBD (after final program and registration status determined)

Initial plan (rough draft) for allocation has been made with Priscilla and Graeme

6. Make USB flash drives and Conference Handbook (making use of designs from ACLs and EMNLP). Send the ACL/EMNLP final proceeding file to Korea by 06/20/2012 (firm deadline), then finish making/shipping USB and conference handbook by 07/05/2012 - Target Completion Date: 07/05/2012 7. Plan on-site process, staff needs, etc. - Target Completion Date: 06/15/2012; Will work with Priscilla on this matter 8. Organize conference kits - Target Completion Date: 07/05/2012; Will work with Priscilla on this matter 9. Make a detailed budget for local costs - Target Completion Date: 06/15/2012; Will work with Priscilla and Graeme on this matter 10. Confirm menus for breakfasts and coffee breaks and order them. - Target Completion Date: 06/30/2012 11. Confirm menus for student lunch - Target Completion Date: 06/25/2012 12. Plan the time schedule of shuttle buses among ICC Jeju and Hotels - Target Completion Date: 06/25/2012; Post the schedules on the website 13. Set up all AVA & OA, and all materials at the venue with final check for enough capacity: Wi-Fi, email rooms, all demo & exhibition areas, etc - Target Completion Date: 06/07/2012 14. Final rehearsal for everything

  - Target Completion Date: 06/07/2012

• TBD is determined by on-line registration open/close and final program completion

Program Chairs (Chin-Yew Lin, Miles Osborne)

1. Appointments of Area Chairs

June 2011:

PC chairs nominated the candidates of area chairs and sought approval from conference coordination committee, chaired by Kevin Knight. The nominations reflected a geographical and gender balance.

July 2011:

PC chairs confirmed with the candidates;

2. Paper submission portal

We have made available all paper submission portals online since November 2011.

• Long papers: https://www.softconf.com/acl2012/papers/ • Short papers: https://www.softconf.com/acl2012/shortpapers/ • System Demos: https://www.softconf.com/acl2012/demos/ • Student Research Workshop papers: https://www.softconf.com/acl2012/srw/ • And submission portals of 11 post-conference workshops

3. Paper submission

ACL 2012 received 622 submissions (before validation) by 15 Jan 2012, the Long Paper due date. Short Paper submission is due on 18 March 2012.

Workshop Chairs (Massimo Poesio, Satoshi Sekine)

In 2012, proposals for workshops were jointly solicited for ACL, EACL, and NAACL/HLT. Review was conducted jointly by the workshop chairs of the respective conferences. In total, 44 proposals were received. 11 were selected for inclusion in the official ACL 2012 Workshop Program listed below. All workshops have put up their websites, committees and calls for papers and have their START accounts set up. The workshops have been fitted in the overall conference schedule (July 12 and 13th).

July 12&13: SP-Sem-MRL2012: Parsing and Semantic Processing of Morphologically Rich Languages 2012 July 12: SMIAE 2012: Speech and Multimodal Interaction in Assistive Environments July 12&13: The LAW VI: The 6th Linguistic Annotation Workshop July 12: WASSA2012: 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity and Sentiment Analysis July 13: ExProM: Extra-propositional aspects of meaning in computational linguistics July 13: MM: Multilingual Modeling July 13: The People's Web meets NLP: Collaboratively Constructed Semantic Resources and their Applications to NLP July 13: TextGraphs-7: Graph-based Methods for Natural Language Processing July 12: SSST-6: Sixth Workshop on Syntax, Semantics and Structure in Statistical Translation July 12: DSSD: Detecting Structure in Scholarly Discourse July 12: NEWS2012: 4th Named Entities Workshop

Tutorial Chair (Michael Strube)

The tutorial submission deadline is on January 22nd, 2012. Dates for notification, final tutorial descriptions, submitting course materials are set. Email will be used for submission and acknowledgement of receipt, notifications etc. Following advice from previous tutorial chairs I solicited three proposals without promising that these will get accepted. By 15 January 2012, I received two proposal submissions.

Mentorship Service (Joyce Chai)

The submission for mentorship requests of Long Paper has been closed. Mentoring Service will coordinate the mentoring service for Long and Short papers (deadline on 24 Jan 2012), while Demo Chair and SRW Faculty Advisors will coordinate for their respective programs. We have received 10 requests for mentoring service for long papers. Mentors worked very hard and all the comments were mailed to the authors on 21 December 2011.

Student Research Workshop (Kentaro Inui, Greg Kondrak, Yang Liu)

1. Student travel grants We have submitted a proposal to NSF requesting $19.5K for student travel support. The proposal is pending now, we expect to get the award soon. Note that this NSF grant will be mainly to support students from the US. It might be possible to support some students from developing countries. 2. Program committee We have appointed 4 student chairs, recruited 42 reviewers for the program committee, of which 11 are students. Among all the reviewers, 24 are from North America, 16 from Europe, and 2 from Asia. They represent a wide range of research areas. 3. Mentorship Service Arrangement Seven students have requested pre-submission mentor services. We are currently recruiting pre-submission and conference mentors, and three people have agreed to be pre-submission mentors so far. Most of the conference mentoring recruitment will be done later in the spring when potential mentors know if they'll be attending the conference or not. Publicity Chairs (Jung-jae Kim, Youngjoong Ko)

We have set up an email alias chairs@acl2012.org to facilitate internal communications, and official website www.acl2012.org to serve as the information portal. All call for submissions are publicized at official website and through various mailing lists. Newsletter service started in December 2011.

Sponsorship Chairs (Eiichiro Sumita, Wang Haifeng, Michael Gamon, Patrick Pantel, Massimiliano Ciaramita, Idan Szpektor, Priscilla Rasmussen)

ACL, NAACL, EACL formed a sponsorship committee with representatives from 3 different conferences. By 15 Jan 2012, the committee and Priscilla have secured over 23 thousand dollars of sponsorship from Google, Elsevier, Preferred Infrastructure, BaoBab, Butler Hill Group, Mixi, , Rakuten Institute of Technology, and ETS. They are working on several new leads that Priscilla will report separately. Others:

1. Demo Chair announced call for demos. Submission deadline is on March 12, 2012 2. Publication Chairs and Local Arrangement Chairs communicated with PC chairs and ACL regarding proceedings and conference handbooks.