Suggestions

ACL should start giving more space (back?) to models that incorporate linguistic insights, and to work in areas such as discourse and dialogue, where the issue of evaluation can only rarely be answered by reporting results on available corpora. Linguistic insights are sometimes valuable even if they don't improve performance, in fact, sometimes precisely because they don't improve it. In discourse/ dialogue / NLG, meaningful available corpora are rare, even if one wanted to use them for evaluation. Evaluation of such work can be carried out from many different points of view, foremost among those, IMO, user evaluations. (Barbara Di Eugenio, May 19, 2008)

The ACL Anthology should be augmented to contain the complete back issues of "the Finite String" from Vol. 1, No. 1 (Jan., 1964). The issues contained in J79 (the microfiche issues, starting with Vol. 11) should be separately pointed to from a new "the Finite String" identification line. I've many of the paper copies and can scan them for ACL. (Robert A. Amsler, May 14, 2008)

In recognition of the amount of effort they have put in organizing their workshop, workshop chairs should not have to pay registration fees to attend their own workshop (Dragomir Radev, May 1, 2008)

Authors of papers should, wherever feasible, include in their papers a URL from which source code and/or data relevant to their papers can be downloaded (Dragomir Radev, May 1, 2008)

It would be nice if part of the waived "student volunteer" package at least included tutorials (which are of big interest to junior students), if not also workshops. (Hal Daume III, May 14, 2007)

Notes

Progress on the ideas proposed in 2007 (an open access journal, a video archive, and the extension of the ACL anthology) will be reported on at the 2008 ACL business meeting.

Suggestions entered before May 31, 2008, will be considered for discussion at the ACL business meeting at ACL 2008