2014Q3 Reports: ACL 2016
ACL 2016 - report by Christopher Manning
ACL 2016 is scheduled as a joint ACL and EACL conference in Europe/Middle East/Africa. The venue has now been selected.
Coordinating Committee
The initial conference coordinating committee was:
- Stephen Clark, EACL chair <sc609@cl.cam.ac.uk>
- Caroline Sporleder, EACL secretary <secretary@eacl.org>
- Mike Rosner, EACL treasurer <treasurer@eacl.org>
- Lluís Màrquez, EACL chair-elect <lluism@lsi.upc.edu>
- Christopher Manning, ACL past president in 2016 <manning@stanford.edu>
- Drago Radev, ACL secretary <radev@umich.edu>
- Graeme Hirst, ACL treasurer <gh@cs.toronto.edu>
- Jian Su, ACL information officer <sujian@i2r.a-star.edu.sg>
- Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL business manager <acl@aclweb.org>
The committee membership needs to be updated for the changes in Exec membership. We added as an observer this year, taking up a committee slot next year:
- Hermann Ney, ACL exec member <ney@informatik.rwth-aachen.de>
The committee email list address is: acl16cc@aclweb.org . The domain name http://acl2016.org/ has been reserved (but not yet populated).
Progress
Since the last report, both the deadline for initial and final bids has passed. For both, we received three full bids:
- Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany (Markus Egg and Valia Kordoni <evangelia.kordoni@anglistik.hu-berlin.de>)
- TU Darmstadt, Germany ("Prof. Dr. Iryna Gurevych" <gurevych@ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de> and Michael Matuschek <matuschek@ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de>)
- Yandex, initially for either Moscow or St. Petersburg, Russia, then proposing the latter (Alexey Baytin <baytin@yandex-team.ru>, Pavel Serdyukov <pavser@yandex-team.ru>, Irina Galinskaya <galinskaya@yandex-team.ru>)
The committee provided encouraging and useful feedback to all bidders on their initial bids, and then discussed and carefully evaluated the final bids. There were multiple good bids, but in the end the decision was made to accept the bid from Humboldt University for holding ACL 2016 in Berlin. This was based on the very satisfactory nature of the bid, the great response to all our questions and needs for information and clarification, and the fact that it was the most economical proposal presented (in terms of the cost to members for holding the conference there). We thank Humboldt University for their generous support of the bid. The proposed location is in the central campus buildings of Humboldt University, which are very well situated with respect to the Berlin city center. The proposed dates are: 7-12 August 2016.
The important steps in the schedule for the next 6 months are:
- June 2014 - Choose general chair for the conference. We have begun with generating potential candidates (ACL 16 coordinating committee)
- June 2014 - Start creation of work plan (local chair)
- June 2014 - Plan site visit (ACL office + local chair + coordinating committee)
- Dec 2014 - Select program chair(s) (coordinating committee)
- Dec 2014 - Select other chairs (general chair)