2017Q3 Reports: General Chair

The 55th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) will take place in Vancouver, Canada. ACL 2017 will be held at the Westin Bayshore Hotel in downtown Vancouver from July 30th through August 4th, 2017. I have organized an excellent team to put together the conference. I have structured this report around their activities. In addition to what is reported below, I am hoping to add some options to make our conference friendlier to participants bringing their children along. We are going to investigate childcare options and possibly allowing conference goers to purchase breakfasts and dinners for their family members.

A note on gender balance in the organizing committee: I attempted to recruit an even number of women and men to organize ACL 2017. There are 12 male organizers (including myself) and 12 female organizers.

I have asked the organizers to update the Conference Organization Handbook on the ACL admin wiki. The following sections were updated (some of the sections hadn't been modified since 2008):

• Demo Chair Duties
• Tutorial Chair Duties
• Student Research Workshop pages
  • Student Chair Duties
  • Faculty Advisor Duties
  • Checklist for student chairs