2020Q3 Reports: General Chair

The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.

Some initial notes, to be modified as I see everyone's reports

Summary of what happened

• We managed to run a virtual conference! And it wasn't a disaster!
• Largest ever in # of papers (as usual) and also in attendance!
• Also most diverse ACL ever!
• People had lots of great discussion on chat; ACL conferences should ramp up use of chat media.
• Biggest problem: The infrastructure team had to work way too hard, especially the last two weeks + the conference, it was a completely unreasonable load on them.

Our advice for future conferences

Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs

• Have more virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably we need twice that, with specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the non-virtual website, chat, and more.
• Assign separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who can be closely in contact with the workshop chairs at all times. (And the workshops will need stricter deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier stricter than with a physical conference.)
• We need a social chair to find ways to encourage folks to chat more.
• Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs, since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrastructure
• Possibly have an ethics chair (see below)

Switching to Virtual: Advice on Software Partners

• We think the ACL should probably not use SlidesLive going forward. They caused a number of problems:
  • They initially gave us the impression they would handle creating all the zoom rooms for the conference, then changed their mind
  • Then they gave us the impression they would at least handle creating all the zoom rooms for the workshops, then changed their mind at the last minute, too late to create all the zoom rooms for the workshops.
  • Our contact, Alex Chandler, didn't seem to listen to our needs.
  • On one day, they repeatedly ignored requests for live session ids for the workshops, forcing the Infra Chairs to stay up until the wee hours desparately trying to get them on the phone or email.
  • They did not do well at helping speakers navigate the 40-second delay between the live zoom rooms, and the livescreen window (failing, for example, to explain to speaker that they had to turn off the audio on the livescreen when they were entering the zoom room, which caused the 40-second delayed echo in the LTA and in many other speakers, especially in the workshops).
• However, we don't know if there are storng alternatives. SlidesLive seemed better for our needs than the alternative we considered (we chose Slideslive over Underline and Freeman when it was still a physical conference, and then they were the conference for ICLR and the ICLR chairs seemed happy with them; we didn't find a lot of alternative options at that point).
• We assume by now there are probably other options, but inclusion is extremely important to keep in mind (making it possible to record for folks in countries without ability to buy video recording software).

Switching to Virtual: Advice on Infrastructure

• QA sessions could be improved by incorporate more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)
• Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks
• How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions (and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)
• if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker about how to deal with delay.
• minor: if you use miniconf, fix so that the whole website can shift timezone.
• Nitin's suggestion: "use one of the many bot frameworks (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot) to make a simple FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions"

Permissions:

• Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations
• Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos
• Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.

Global Inclusion:

• For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc., or else require VPNs.
  • Vimeo (used by ACL Anthology and also SlidesLive pre-recorded talks) not visible in China, Indonesia, Vietnam
  • SlidesLive live (but not pre-recorded, which uses Vimeo) is is visible in China
• Iran is a particularly difficult case, can't use Google or Microsoft either
• Proposal: we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government, so we should set up mirrors.

Ethics:

• Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form, add ethics, and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.
• Possibly have an ethics chair For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc., or else require VPNs.
• Iran is a particularly difficult case.
• Perhaps we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government, so we'll need to set up mirrors.

Switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:

• Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.
• Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes
• Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I briefly fill Exec in that virtual is an option, but still low-probability
• Mar 6: Things worsen. We change Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel
• Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April
• Mar 17: Things worsened more, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual, we wait to hear about hotel $$$
• Mar 25: Priscilla gets word that we can probably delay our Hyatt contract til NAACL 2021, removing the final obstacle to ogoing virtual
• April 2: We announce the decision to go virtual.

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