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

June 27

5th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis (WASSA 2014)
Chairs: Alexandra Balahur, Erik van der Goot, Ralf Steinberger and Andrés Montoyo

The 1st Workshop on NLP and Social Dynamics
Chairs: Alice Oh and Oren Tsur

Joint 1-day workshop between SIGMORPHON and SIGFSM
Chairs: Ozlem Cetinoglu, Jeffrey Heinz, Andreas Maletti and Jason Riggle

2nd Workshop on EVENTS: Definition, Detection, Coreference, and Representation
Chairs: Teruko Mitamura, Eduard Hovy and Martha Palmer

Workshop on Entity Attribute Prediction in Social Media
Chairs: Benjamin Van Durme, Svitlana Volkova and David Yarowsky

Workshop on Interactive Language Learning, Visualizations, and Interfaces
Chairs: Jason Chuang, Spence Green, Marti Hearst, Jeffrey Heer and Philipp Koehn

Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology . From Linguistic Signal to Clinical Reality
Chairs: Philip Resnik, Rebecca Resnik and Margaret Mitchell

Two-day Workshops (June 26 and 27)

Ninth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (WMT14)
Chairs: Philipp Koehn, Ondrej Bojar, Christian Buck, Christian Federmann, Barry Haddow, Christof Monz, Matt Post, Herve Saint-Amand, Radu Soricut and Lucia Specia

BioNLP 2014
Chairs: Kevin Cohen, Dina Demner-Fushman, Sophia Ananiadou, John Pestian, Jun-ichi Tsujii, Thamar Solorio and Yang Liu

Co-located Conference (June 26 and 27)

18th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2014[1])
Chairs: Roser Morante and Scott Wen-tau Yih

Report of Student Workshop Chairs (Ekaterina Kochmar, Annie Louis, and Svitlana Volkova) and Faculty Advisors (Jordan Boyd-Graber and Bill Byrne)

Student travel grants

US students, possibly also students from developing countries: Faculty advisor Jordan Boyd-Graber (jbg@umiacs.umd.edu) has submitted a proposal to NSF requesting $15K for student travel support. The proposal is pending now, we expect to get the award soon.

Other students: Faculty advisor Bill Byrne (bill.byrne@eng.cam.ac.uk) has requested funding from Baidu, Google (EMEA), and Microsoft.

The requests are pending now.

Program committee

We have recruited 51 reviewers for the program committee, of which 21 are students. Among all the reviewers, 29 are from North America, 18 from Europe and 4 from other places. They represent a wide range of research areas and cover all the research topics listed on the official conference website.

Mentorship Service Arrangement

Six students have requested pre- submission mentor services. We have recruited six mentors for these students and are currently running the mentorship service. Up to now, no action has been taken to recruit on-site conference mentors. This will be done later in the spring/summer when potential mentors know if they'll be attending the conference or not.

Publicity

We have set up an email alias acl-srw-2014@googlegroups.com to facilitate internal communications, and official website https://sites.google.com/site/aclsrw2014/ to serve as the information portal. All call for submissions are publicized at the official conference website, the SRW website, WikiCFP, and through various mailing lists and social media. No newsletter service is offered.