2017Q3 Reports: Publications Chairs

Publication Chairs

Wei Lu, Singapore University of Technology and Design
Sameer Singh, University of California, Irvine
Margaret Mitchell, Google (Advisory)

Summary

The publication chairs produced the proceedings of the main conference (two volumes, for long and short papers) and coordinated the work of all book chairs for the individual workshops.

This process went reasonably smoothly. The publication chairs benefited from reading the instructions shared by their mentor Meg Mitchell: https://github.com/acl-org/acl-pub.

Changes from previous years

This year, we provided a Latex template as well as a MS-Word template to all authors. Several changes to the style files were made. The templates were adapted from earlier versions used in NAACL-2016.

The new BibTex file was used for including for each reference its URL to the DOI (or ACL Anthology identifier), thanks to the contributions from Min-Yen Kan and Dan Gildea.

The DOI string was attached to each paper appearing in the main proceedings as part of the front footer.

Problems

It is noted that there seems to be some subtle differences between the style files used in several recent ACL-affiliated conferences such as NAACL, EMNLP, and EACL. For example, the style files of NAACL-2016 and EMNLP-2016 used font size 10pt for the abstract. However, font size 11pt was used for ACL-2016. It might be a good idea to use the same font size across these different conferences.

While most of the work can be done through the online START system, things such as inclusion of sponsorship logos and DOI strings in the front footer still need to be done locally. It would be good to have such features fully supported in the START system in the future.

Two authors contacted the publication chairs or PC chairs after papers had been published online with the same issue – the title they typed in the START system does not match the actual title used in their final version of their paper. We can think about how to help the authors eliminate such errors in the future.