2014Q1 Reports: ACL 2014

Report of Program Chairs (Kristina Toutanova and Hua Wu)

Paper assignment

The long papers have been assigned to reviewers. After withdrawals and rejection due to anonymity/formatting violations, there are 553 long paper submissions under review for ACL 2014.

Reviewer assignment

A tool developed by Mark Dredze was used to assign reviewers to different areas, enabling reviewer assignment according to the number of submissions in each area. The student volunteer Jiang Guo helped to run the tool and assign the reviewers.

Paper format and supplementary materials

We increased the page limit to 9 pages of content for submitted long papers and 5 pages of content for submitted short papers. We added the option to upload additional notes and examples, along with the paper, data, and software.

Review forms

We are using five different review forms for different submission types: applications/tools, empirical/data-driven, resources/evaluation, theoretical, and survey. The forms use ideas from prior ACL, EMNLP and NAACL conferences.

Multiple submissions

The authors were asked to report multiple submissions on a separate title page. The multiple submission policy was updated and is hosted at the ACL 2014 web site http://www.cs.jhu.edu/ACL2014/multiple_submission.htm

Anonymity/format checking

We developed a tool to automatically detect author information in file properties and in the main text of the submitted papers. Some technical problems with slow download interfered with our plans to notify authors of non-anonymized submissions before the deadline and give them a chance to anonymize their work. After the deadline, the area chairs helped to check formatting and anonymity problems, but it will be good to recruit a student volunteer to do this for all submissions in the future.

Invited speakers

We obtained a list of invited speakers with input from the area chairs and general chair and will send invitations after final decisions.

Poster sessions

We intend to have two evenings of poster sessions, to be confirmed with the local organizing committee.

Report of Workshop Chairs (Jill Burstein and Lluis Marquez)

In total, there were 42 workshop proposals submitted for consideration at EACL, ACL, and EMNLP. Together with the workshop chairs of those conferences we reviewed the proposals and decided on the final selection for each conference venue. At ACL, there will be 15 one-day, and 2 two-day workshops, the Student Research Workshop, and CoNNL. Dates for the one-day workshops have been circulated, 9 will take place on June 26th, and 8 on June 27th. Priscilla Rasmussen was consulted about the number of workshops to ensure that space was available, and she is aware of space needs. Start pages for all workshops have been created and the details sent to the workshop organizers. A list of workshop URLs has been linked to the main ACL webpage. Details are below.

June 26

9th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA) Chairs: Joel Tetreault, Jill Burstein and Claudia Leacock

Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT 2014) Chairs: Jan Alexandersson, Dimitra Anastasiou, Cui Jian, Ani Nenkova, Rupal Patel, Frank Rudzicz, Annalu Waller and Desislava Zhekova

Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL) Chairs: Vera Demberg and Tim O.Donnell

Argumentation Mining Chairs: Kevin Ashley, Nancy Green, Diane Litman, Chris Reed and Vern Walker

ComputEL: The use of computational methods in the study of endangered languages

Chairs: Jeff Good, Julia Hirschberg and Owen Rambow

The Second Workshop on Metaphor in NLP Chairs: Beata Beigman-Klebanov, Ekaterina Shutova and Patricia Lichtenstein

Workshop on Semantic Parsing (SP14) Chairs: Yoav Artzi, Tom Kwiatkowski and Jonathan Berant

Language Technologies and Computational Social Science Chairs: Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Jacob Eisenstein, Kathleen McKeown and Noah Smith