2015Q3 Reports: Office Manager

Priscilla Rasmussen 20 July 2015

ACL Business Office Report

As usual, the Office is running smoothly.

In early August, we will look forward to another financial audit to be conducted by Nisivoccia, LLP, both in the office and through emails with Graeme and me for our 2014 tax forms to be completed and filed by the 15th August deadline We hope it will be as productive as it was last year.

Pat Kirby continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations (especially handling most of the memberships) as well as onsite at our conferences.

Please note, under Conferences, I would like to discuss possibly revamping the Student Lunch purpose and whether to continue offering this with the same or different format and function.

Publications, Journals and Royalties:

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates now handling print-on-demand of our publications, I received no requests for hardcopy publications in the office so far this year.

In Janurary 2015, Curran Associates sent $1,120.20 covering the 4th quarter royalties of 2014 and in April another $998.25 for the 1st quarter of 2015 came in. This agreement has turned out to be a good one for both them and the ACL. Copyright Clearance Center has not sent any earning to ACL for the CY 2014, nor has MIT Press Journals.

MIT Press Journals has sent us an invoice for their fiscal year, July 2013 - June 2014 in the amount of $44,079.10 for their services related to the Computational Linguistics Journal. So it seems we are finally on track with annual invoicing and are currently up-to-date with payments.

Membership:

Since 2006 we have consistently numbered over 2000 members but ended 2014 with 1,990 members. I believe the main reason for this is not having held a separate NAACL meeting in 2014. So far in 2015, we have almost 1,600 members and many more are expected through ACL 2015 late and onsite registrations plus all of EMNLP 2015 registrations. I expect we will be just over 2,000 members by the end of this year. The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be representing between 55 and 60 countries on a regular basis and, in 2014, exceeded this with a total of 64 countries being represented by our membership. For 2015, we are already at 57 countries and this will also increase after both ACL and EMNLP are completed.

We began 2015 with around 95 members who were in the middle of a multi-year membership and added 330 members directly through portal membership payments. The remainder of our current total of 1,588 resulted from conference registrations. This means that about 73% of the current 2015 memberships were generated by NAACL 2015 attendance (44%) and ACL 2015 attendance so far (29%) . Please see Membership spreadsheets for the final 2014 and mid-year 2015 details on countries represented and statistics.

Pat and I continue to do our best to keep the membership information updated and as correct as possible from information gathered on conference registration forms. The portal seems to be giving us less problems lately although I do still double-check the accuracy of the information. And, of course, Min and Pranav (our current webmaster) are extremely responsive to and helpful with any requests I have.

Memberships by Country - January 1 - July 15

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	TOTAL	REG	STUD		TOTAL	REG	STUD		TOTAL	REG	STUD
AUSTRALIA	20	12	8	INDIA	21	11	10	QATAR	12	11	1
AUSTRIA	2	1	1	INDONESIA	1	1		ROMANIA	1		1
BELGIUM	9	7	2	IRAN	1		1	RUSSIA	9	6	3
BRAZIL	5	3	2	IRELAND	15	9	6	SAUDI ARABIA	3	3
BULGARIA	1	1		ISRAEL	19	9	10	SINGAPORE	27	21	6
CANADA	49	27	22	ITALY	25	10	15	SLOVAKIA	1	1
CHINA	40	22	18	JAPAN	105	79	26	SLOVENIA		1	1
CROATIA	2	1	1	KOREA, REPUBLIC OF	49	30	19	SOUTH AFRICA		1	1
CZECH REPUBLIC	9	6	3	KUWAIT	1	1		SPAIN	32	21	11
DENMARK	9	8	1	LATVIA	4	2	2	SWEDEN	18	10	8
ESTONIA	1	1		LEBANON	2	1	1	SWITZERLAND	5	3	2
EGYPT	2	1	1	LITHUANIA	1	1	TAIWAN	21	13	8
FINLAND	4	2	2	LUXEMBOURG	1	1	THAILAND	1	1
FRANCE	40	26	14	MACAU	1	1	TURKEY	7	2	5
GERMANY	104	56	48	MALAYSIA	1	1	UKRAINE	1	1
GREECE	7	4	3	MEXICO	5	1	4	UNITED ARAB EMIRATES	1	1
HONG KONG	19	14	5	NETHERLANDS	29	19	10	UNITED KINGDOM	90	55	35
HUNGARY	1		1	NORWAY	1	1	UNITED STATES	742	498	244
				PAKISTAN	1	1		VIET NAM	2	1	1
				PORTUGAL	6	4	2
	57 COUNTRIES REPRESENTED				1,588	1,020	568

Fellows Program:

We will begin the nomination, recommendation and selection process again this fall to name the next group of fellows. A question was recently raised whether a Lifetime Achievement award winner could be nominated or are they automatically made fellows? I am not sure we have addressed this question.

Conferences:

NAACL 2015 was held in Denver, Colorado at the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel, May 31-June 6. This conference set an all-time record attendance for NAACLs with 950 registered attendees (about a 28% increase over 2013, the last independent conference) after taking out people who did not show up and others who cancelled. It seems our research endeavors may be hot topics now, attracting previously untapped companies. Having such a large number of attendees has caused some additional work in planning and communications (over 140 visa invitations issued, re-planning both catering and space configurations, hotel being sold out at our conference rates, etc.). Acting as Local Arrangements Chair means that both the organizational work and registrations were managed by the Office. And, a post-conference questionnaire was sent to the attendees immediately after the conference to gather valuable feedback on how to improve the attendees’ experience. While the financials are not completed for NAACL 2015, I have every expectation of reaping a nice surplus.

The planning for ACL/IJCNLP 2015, to be held in Beijing, July 26-31, is ongoing. The office is working closely with the local organizers in Beijing on all aspects of the organization as well as managing the non-Chinese registrations. Unfortunately, I have no information on the Chinese registrations to report but can say that the non-Chinese pre-conference registrations total 683. I would expect the combined total to end at about 1,000 attendees which is similar to previous final counts when ACLs are in Asia (Singapore, 2009, had 850 and Jeju, 2012, had 931).

EMNLP 2015, to be held in Lisbon, Portugal, September 17-22, is well underway and we hope to have registration open by the end of July. Most of the organizational details are finalized or nearly so. The Office is providing advice, general support, and will manage the registrations. Also, very soon, the exact location of EMNLP 2016, to be co-located with AMTA 2016 in Austin, Texas, will be decided.

It has been difficult to project attendance at ACL/IJCNLP, NAACL and EMNLP for 2015 since both EACL 2014 and ACL 2014 had their highest attendances on record. And, while EMNLP 2014 had a lower attendance, EMNLP 2013 was also their highest attended EMNLP conference. Planning for each conference based on previous years in general and being prepared for more than expected numbers is critical this year and going into the future.

As I continue as Local Arrangements Chair for NAACL 2016, contracts for the venue is already in place: NAACL 2016 will take place at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina, June 12 – 17, and after the 2015 conferences end, we will gear up with the intense planning for this conference.

ACL 2016 will be held in Berlin, August 7-11, at Humboldt University. Initial planning has begun and this promises to be an excellent venue and interesting city to explore. And, (NA)ACL 2017 should soon be decided. For ACL 2018, we already have one inquiry to possibly host our meeting in Asia/Pacific Rim.

As a side note, it is good to remember that poster sessions are always very difficult to set up in a way that pleases the majority of attendees. Each different layout causes some issue or another and we keep trying to improve although the overall space allotment at each venue poses its own constraints. And, workshops are becoming more and more mini-conferences complete with poster sessions. These are often more difficult to coordinate and organize, and for which finding adequate space is essential.

Issue for discussion: Student Lunches at conferences:

Do we need to change the Student Lunch? When we were a small conference (in the old days with Don Walker), the intention was to give the students a chance to mingle and get to know their future lifelong colleagues. Now that we're at 350-400+ students, it has turned into simply a "get your free lunch and get out of here" event. I feel the purpose has been lost and the expense and difficulty in finding suitable places is quite large. One idea we tried at ACL 2014 was to get Platinum or Gold sponsors to sponsor the lunch for an additional fee and allow them to do a presentation at the lunch as a Recruitment Lunch. We had 2 sponsors buy into this at ACL 2014 but had no takers for any of our 2015 meetings. So, I'd like to get the Exec's opinions/ideas on whether we should continue with the Student Lunch at all and, if so, should it be revamped in any way? One idea might be to clearly offer this in the Sponsor Booklet for *anyone* and for a lesser fee (currently, it is $6,000). It would be advertised as a Recruiter’s Luncheon, have each institution get 10 minutes promo time (with av) and offer a small room for interviewing that they could reserve during the conference. Or, not offer the small room but set up an area within the lunch space for them to make contacts. Or…Please come up with suggestions.

Conference Sponsorship:

NAACL 2015 had sponsorships totaling $58,971 plus $4,600 sponsoring various workshops and the SRW. In addition to our ever faithful sponsors (A9, Baobab, Bloomberg, Google, IBM Research, Microsoft, Nuance, SDL, University of Washington, USC/ISI, Yahoo!, etc.), we welcomed new and hopefully continuing sponsors (3M, Machine Zone, VoiceBox, Goldman Sachs and DigitalRoots).

For ACL 2015, the office received sponsorships totaling $56,830 and an additional $69,020 equivalent was donated directly to the local organizers. Once again, our usual sponsors (Amazon, Baidu, Baobab, Facebook, Google, IBM Research, Microsoft, Nuance, Yandex) plus VoiceBox made up our sponsor list combined with Tencent, CreditEase, Samsung, Alibaba, Sino Voice, and Sogou.com as local supporters. And, an additional $6,000 was received by the Office in support of a workshop and CoNLL.

$37,144 was collected by the Office plus about $1,200 directly to the local team so far as EMNLP 2015 sponsorships. Many are the result of 2-Pack or 3-Pack sponsorship agreements so the same companies as listed above (Amazon, Baidu, Bloomberg, Facebook, Google, ISI, Nuance, and VoiceBox) plus Recruit Technologies and Rakuten Inst of Technology generously donated.

I believe the new Sponsorship Booklet for 2015 that the International Sponsorship Committee and I pulled together made sponsoring easier, especially for our ongoing sponsors. Offering 2-Pack or 3-Pack options and including EMNLP allowed them to make one payment to support two or all three events rather than one at a time. One point to keep in mind is that, while it may seem that we should be able to draw more in sponsorship support, many companies are the same ones supporting all of our conferences and they may look at it as “support to ACL” regardless of which ACL event it is. So, it is important to see that our “ACL total support” is actually $227,765. This total is in keeping with the highest sponsorship totals I know of for other societies that hold only one conference a year. Of course, there are new industries apparently interested in our research areas that we do need to make efforts to tap into.

We need to add 1-2 sponsorship chairs for Europe, possibly one for North America, and one for Asia to the Sponsorship Committee. Please send recommendations to me.

The area Sponsorship Chairs and the Local Arrangement Sponsorship Chairs are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them. And, many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!