2019Q1 Reports: Office

Priscilla Rasmussen 11 March 2019

ACL Business Office Report

As usual, the Office is beginning to become busier as planning for the conferences and opening registration for NAACL 2019 is now happening.

Pat Kirby continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations (especially handling most of the membership entries into the portal) as well as managing the conference student housing and working with me in preparation for and onsite at our conferences, mainly with registrations. I have had her begin to do more of the expenditures and monthly bank statement oversight. I have now added a second, more part-time person, Cathy Magnusson, to communicate with the sponsors and exhibitors who take a lot of our time and have a lot of questions, manage the exhibits onsite and possibly also manage the main conference and workshop poster sessions. I also plan for Cathy to do most of the expenditure postings and following up on sponsorships payments. We will see how Cathy fits in and what sort of things she can best help with to relieve some of my burden.

Nitin Madnani and I had a lengthy phone conversation about some of his plans to update the Member Portal and possibly do other things to streamline that part of the ACL website. I am excited to work with Nitin since some of what we discussed will have a positive impact on certain Office procedures as well as our members’ experiences.

And, we have put an anti-harassment checkbox directly on the NAACL 2019 registration form, just above the payment options, which prevents people from completing their registration until they check the box saying that they have read and agree to abide by our policy (and there is a link to the policy itself). This will also be included on the ACL and EMNLP 2019 registration forms to promote and educate our conference attendees on the existence of the PCC.

This year, with NAACL, ACL and EMNLP following closely on each other, the overlap for planning, management and registrations, especially for NAACL and ACL, will be challenging but has been handled successfully many times before. My hope is that by making the above suggested staffing adjustments we will be better equipped to handle the ever-increasing numbers of conference attendees and there will be more time for me to offer the always-called-upon advice, attend and organize meetings, identify and pre-negotiate future conference venues, conduct site visits, pre-negotiate catering/av/social event and other contracts, develop working budgets, review bids, make initial approaches to potential sponsors, oversee Office operations, etc.

Publications, Journals and Royalties:

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates handling print-on-demand of our publications, I typically receive no requests for hardcopy publications in the office.

The Curran Associates agreement has turned out to be a good one for both them and the ACL. In 2018, we have received a total of $3,230.24 in royalties from them, covering the 4th quarter of 2017 through the 3rd quarter of 2018. Copyright Clearance Center has not sent any earnings to ACL for CY 2017 or 2018, nor has MIT Press Journals.

MIT Press Journals sent an invoice for their fiscal year, July 2017 - June 2018, for their services related to the Computational Linguistics Journal. This invoice totaled $40,509.62.

Our journals pay editorial assistants to help with the process. The CL Journal’s assistant was paid $2,365 in January 2018 for her services for the fourth quarter of the 2017 calendar year and $3,311 in July for January-June, 2018. The TACL Journal’s assistant was paid $13,277.36 in April covering the 3rd and 4th quarters of 2017 and 1st quarter of 2018. She was also paid $7,339.75 for the 2nd quarter and $6,850.57 for the 3rd quarter of 2018.

Membership:

I am extremely pleased to report that we now have 4,172 members at the end of the year. This indicates the continuing growth of our field and conferences. 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 60 and 70 countries on a regular basis and ended this year with 70 countries being represented by our membership. Please refer to the Membership Report and Members By Country report for full details.

We began 2018 with 162 members who were in a multi-year membership and about 443 members renewed on their own. As is becoming more standard, most memberships come from conference registrations. The NAACL 2018 attendees’ registrations included 991 total memberships, ACL 2018 resulted in 886 memberships and EMNLP 2018 brought in 1,690 memberships. SIGdial 2018 instructed their attendees to pay memberships directly online at the portal so I do not have exact numbers for them. Between the growth in overall memberships and the increased number resulting from conference registrations, the portal automated input process seems to be working well and allows us to keep up with memberships very easily and quickly and have more time for other endeavors.

Occasionally inquiries come to the Office about what the benefits of ACL membership are and whether a particular country qualifies for the hard currency discount. It would be good to 1) update and more prominently post member benefits at the portal and 2) annually update the countries qualifying for hard currency discounts. I would also recommend making the location for posting job announcement more prominent at the portal. It currently resides within the wiki as “Employment opportunities, postdoctoral positions, summer jobs” which is harder for people to find and there is much confusion as people post their job announcements under conference events instead.

Fellows Program:

The only involvement the Office now has in the Fellowship nomination and selection process is to verify nominated members’ eligibility according to our new policy for future years.

Conferences:

NAACL 2018 was at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in New Orleans, June 1-6. The final number of attendees was 1,323 after removing all cancellations, which is a record high for NAACLs. This year a couple of innovations seem to have been successful. The organizers decided to add both an Industrial (parallel) Track and hold the poster sessions in parallel with the other main conference sessions. We also experimented with lowering the food/beverage orders by 1/3 to keep costs lower and avoid wasting leftover food. This seemed to work well and no complaints regarding a shortage of food were received, although a lack of water seemed to be a common complaint. For NAACLs (and possibly other conferences) in the future, trying to order food for breakfasts and breaks for about 50% of the expected attendance and requiring water be readily available may help the budget and be more pleasing to attendees. Internet seemed okay during the main conference and tutorials but, when we moved to the workshops area, the internet became more problematic. We need better assurances of adequate and reliable internet in the future. The Social Event seemed to be a success (although, again, a lack of water was an issue) and the dancing attendees seemed to enjoy the band.

Given the current concerns about possible travel restrictions going into the future, it may be interesting to note that NAACL 2018 had 8 cancellations specifically due to visas being denied compared to (NA)ACL 2017 which had 22 cancellations. There were many more cancellations, due to illness and work obligations, but these numbers represent the ones that were identified as being specifically visa issues. There are no records kept or requested of authors who did not register and could not attend due to visa problems.

ACL 2018 was also successful although much lower attended (1,322 registered) than usual. It was agreed to be more fiscally reasonable to have the local professional conference organizers (PCO) manage registrations to avoid complicated and costly taxation. Between the Local Arrangements Chairs, the PCO, the Local Sponsorship Chairs, and myself, we communicated on a regular basis, especially regarding sponsors and exhibitors as well as registration and other key policy questions. It seemed that the Local Arrangements team did more than their share of work to make the conference successful, taking over where the PCO left off. Tim, Karen, and Trevor deserve applause for this conference. And, we were given no statistics on reasons for cancellation so we are unaware of the possible number of people who could not attend due to visa issues.

EMNLP 2018 was a major surprise and a great success, with an increase of 35-40% in attendees above our highest prediction, with a final total of 2,458. Ellen Riloff (the General Chair), Sien Moens and the local team, and I were in frequent communication reallocating and adding space as it became apparent the conference was growing rapidly. We were fortunate to be able to manage this surge in participants by livestreaming sessions into other rooms both during the main conference and for the highly subscribed tutorials and workshops. Adding a second museum at the last minute saved the social event, as well. Ellen, Sien and the local team succeeded in a major way without having to impose registration cutoffs or otherwise limiting participation to any part of the conference. And, there were 13 cancellations/refunds specifically identified as being due to visas being declined.

While it is always difficult to project attendance at conferences, we now face the difficulty of having to negotiate and enter into venue contracts at least two years in advance but cannot predict whether our conferences will continue to grow substantially or if the numbers will level out. This has implications in how much space we contract and, if too much, be locked into space we may not need at a convention center with very high costs.

NAACL 2019 is well under way and registration has just opened. NAACL will again offer the usual three main conference session tracks plus an industry track. And, NAACL has accepted a somewhat higher number of workshops this year (20). The Social Event at the Minneapolis Institute of Art museum promises to be wonderful. A question came up in light of our recent growth, especially with EMNLP 2018’s experience, of whether registrations should be cut off at some number. We have decided against doing this unless the registrations soar out of control. This year, NAACL will be trying a couple of new initiatives. A Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) Committee has been formed to provide assistance to the visual, hearing and mobility impaired as well as providing travel and childcare assistance and gender neutral restrooms. You will notice questions on the registration form to help the D&I committee in making arrangements as needed. They have other ideas to possibly put in place onsite. Dovetailing with the D&I efforts, the General Chair and I are making much more concerted efforts to provided food/beverage options to suit the myriad of dietary restriction and preferences.

ACL 2019 preparations are well under way, with an expected attendance of 3,000. The Local Arrangements team have been revising plans for venue usage to accommodate these higher numbers. So far, they have what seems to be workable solutions and the conference should be excellent. I expect to have the working budget settled and be able to open registration around early May.

EMNLP 2019 venue at Asia World Expo has been contracted, the Organizing Committee members have been appointed and planning the details are now taking place.

Workshops continue to be more challenging in finding adequate space for the growing attendance at some workshops and the many poster sessions and numbers of posters within a workshop that they plan to present. Careful advance planning is essential for these events and may be something Cathy Magnusson can handle while attending the conferences to manage the exhibits.

Conference Sponsorship:

ACL 2018, although having low registration numbers, maintained a high level of sponsorship commitments of $264,660 through the International Sponsorship Committee (ISC) plus local sponsorships gathered within Australia of $11,3655. Our faithful sponsors (Amazon, Apple, Baidu, ByteDance, Facebook, Google, Huawei Technologies, IBM Research, Microsoft, NAVER, Nuance, Recruit Technologies, Tencent, Yandex) plus sponsors we have not seen before or are returning (CVTE, Duolingo, Elsevier, ISI, Jingdong, Roam Analytics, SAP, Samsung Electronics, Uber) continue to help us thrive. The local team pursued companies to participate in the Recruitment Lunch and the Office received one $500 payment. There were also companies supporting individual workshops: Representation Workshop for $12,500, Neural MT and Generation Workshop for $1,000, CALCS Workshop for $4,000, the NLP-OSS Workshop for $11,000 and the MQRA Workshop for $6,000 in total contributions.

EMNLP 2018 had $236,953 in sponsorship. Many were the result of 2-Pack or 3-Pack sponsorship agreements so many of the same companies as listed above for ACL (Amazon, Baidu, Facebook, Google, Huawei Technologies, Microsoft, NAVER, Nuance, Tencent, Yandex) plus Bloomberg, CVTE, Duolingo, ebay, Figure 8, Grammarly, Jingdong, Megagon, NEXT Canada, Oracle, PolyAI, Salesforce, Sogou, YITU Technologies, and others generously donated. Additionally, the Abusive Language Workshop had received $11,000, the Argument Mining Workshop received $3,000, the Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks Workshop had $4,422 and CoNLL had $1,175 in sponsor commitments.

NAACL 2018 received a total of $131,319 in main conference commitments. As with ACL and EMNLP 2018, many were the result of 2-Pack or 3-Pack sponsorship agreements so many of the same companies as listed above (Amazon, Bloomberg, ByteDance, ebay, Facebook, Google, Grammarly, IBM, ISI, Nuance, Oracle, PolyAI) plus Capital One, Duolingo, Figure 8, iMerit, KPMG, Tulane University, and Two Sigma generously donated. A childcare donation was made by Airbnb. Additional workshop-specific donations were made to WiNLP for $49,421, BEA for $2,700, Ethics for $12,500, CLPsych for $3,000, TextGraphs for $600 and *SEM for $1,000.

For 2019, sponsorships are coming in almost daily for single conferences or workshops and many 2-Packs and 3-Packs. ACL 2019 has $182,056 in main conference sponsorships from Apple, Babblescape, Baidu, BBN (Raytheon) Technologies, Bloomberg, BMW, Bosch Center for AI, DIDI Research, Duolingo, Facebook, Google, Jingdong, Megagon Labs, PolyAI, and SAP. Plus some workshops have received their own funding commitments: WiNLP with $15,000, SemEval with $3,000, BEA with $1,350, BlackBox with $4,000 and ArgMining with $500. NAACL 2019 currently has main conference commitments totaling $76,995 (with Amazon and Two Sigma being strictly NAACL sponsors) plus workshop commitments of $2,000 for the NLP+CSS Workshop and $4,000 for the Neural Language Generation Workshop. EMNLP 2019 has $80,463 in main conference sponsorships and the W-NUT Workshop has $500. Clearly, not only are more attendees keen on coming to ACL 2019 but so are the sponsors and exhibitors!

The idea of offering 2-Pack or 3-Pack options and including EMNLP allowed sponsors to make one payment to support two or all three events rather than one at a time. This made sponsoring easier, especially for our ongoing sponsors. For the 2019 Sponsorship Booklet that the International Sponsorship Committee and the Office pulled together, we continue to offer these multi-pack options, resulting in some first-time as well as repeating commitments and sometimes at higher levels. We made a few changes to the Sponsorship booklet for 2019. With the new Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) initiative being tried for the first time for NAACL 2019, we added a section to sponsor this. The D&I includes Accessibility (for mobility, hearing and visually impaired), Childcare, Travel Assistance, etc. While we have accommodated an individual who requested accessibility assistance in the past, it may be a positive step to more clearly and openly offer such assistance. My one ongoing concern is that it seems some companies are opting for a 2-Pack for ACL and EMNLP and fewer seem to be opting to support NAACL 2019.

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!