SRW

Timeline Organisation ACL-SRW 2007

Chris Biemann, Violeta Seretan, Ellen Riloff

Date	Event	Comment
October 27, 2006	2nd student co-chair acknowledged	Make sure that all co-chairs will be able to travel to the conference. ACL guidelines say that co-chairs must be self-financing.
October 31, 2006	ACL Guidelines available to student co-chairs	http://www.cis.udel.edu/~carberry/ACL/index-conf-handbook.html
November 3, 2006	Start working on the Call for Papers (CfP)	CfP must clearly state a number of things that are different from usual CfPs, regarding student specific issues. Also, try to avoid misunderstandings of previous years: double submission policy, previously published work, minimum/maximum page count, anonymous review. Fix dates for submission and acceptance. It is advisable to use the same dates as the main session. Camera-ready deadline should be at least one week earlier than the main conf camera ready deadline to account for inexperienced formatters. The CfP already contains most of the planning, so be very careful with it and discuss it thoroughly.
November 7, 2006	Ask webmasters to set up the webpage	Webpage should be up as soon as possible and updated as soon as changes occur - otherwise people ask about discrepancies, which causes extra work.
November 7, 2006	Ask ACL Secretary or local organizers to set up a common email address that is forwarded to all co-chairs	This ensures that everyone gets all mails; further, private email addresses are not published on the web which reduces spam (you’ll get a lot of it)
November 9, 2006	Set up a shared spreadsheet document at docs.google	Very useful for putting together lists and other information
November 9, 2006	Communicate CfP to general conference chair	Official calls should be double-checked by the main conf. organization
November 10, 2006	HTML version of CfP policy question: is handled by us	Webmasters ensure uniform layout with the rest of the page, however they might be too busy for that. Clarify!
November 10, 2006	Starting to work on the reviewer candidate list	Collect names together with current email addresses and mark people as senior or junior. Use SRW reviewers from previous years (if they have not already served twice) and ask people you know. We asked 94 people, 70 replied, 6 had non-valid email addresses, 53 accepted. Some people were asked later doe to shortage for some areas (keywords)
November 14, 2006	1st CfP ok-ed, HTML version ready
November 15, 2006	common email address up and working
November 16, 2006	Working on list of keywords	Keywords are good for assigning reviewers to papers and to find out whether all areas a covered. We used a blend of keywords from different ACL conferences as could be seen when submitting a paper via the START system. Our list is in Appendix A.
November 17, 2006	Distribution of 1st CfP	We used the following lists, maybe you find more? corpora@uib.no (membership necessary, or send directly to Knut Hofland) LINGUIST List (via web submission interface) elsnet-list@elsnet.org euralex@euralex.org cluk@dcs.shef.ac.uk LN@cines.fr ACL: Priscilla Rasmussen <rasmusse@ptd.net>
November 17, 2006	CfP on webpage
November 24, 2006	Reviewer invitation letter sent out to 1st round of reviewer candidates (84)	Letter: see Appendix B
November 30, 2006	Reviewer invitation letter sent out to 2nd round of reviewer candidates (10)	Second round reviewers were selected in anticipation to meet yet underrepresented keywords. Check http://www.elsnet.org/experts/
December 4, 2006	ACL newsletter nr.1 sent out including CfP
December 7, 2006	List of reviewers fixed
December 8, 2006	Thanks for being reviewer - letter sent out, with question about affiliation and spelling	Special characters are heaps of fun in international name lists; name spelling and affiliation should be checked before being published
December 12, 2006	first of a handful of mails that ask for invitation letters for long lists of "students"	It seems to be common to try to get invitation letters for visa via scientific conferences. Prepare a letter stating that once a paper was accepted, there will be an invitation letter, but not earlier.
December 12, 2006	START system submission page up and running	START system is very useful, try to check out the options
December 18, 2006	Preparation of funding proposal to NSF by faculty advisor	Get an idea about how to split the money between students and organization, estimate costs, decide on a best paper award
December 19, 2006	2nd CfP communicated to include it in ACL newsletter Nr. 2
December 19, 2006	2nd CfP distributed via same lists as 1st CfP
December 19, 2006	Program committee on webpage
January 3, 2007	ACL approaching deadlines reminder sent out by ACL
January 10, 2007	funding proposal communicated to NSF by faculty advisor
January 15, 2007	last CfP sent out on all lists
January 23, 2007	Submission deadline	We received 52 submissions, some not formatted right, some not anonymized, some not meeting the standards. We ignored formatting issues if they were not too far off, asked to re-submit anonymized versions (by email to us) and did not do anything about the standards. A min page count would have been nice.
January 23, 2007	First of several mails asking for deadline extension	To be answered negatively, see ACL policy
January 29, 2007	Finished assignments reviewers-papers	This took a while, be sure o be available in that time. Also, check for conflicts of interests (same affiliation)
January 30, 2007	Reviewing process started
January 31, 2007	Minor changes in reviewer assignment due to conflicts of interest (pointed out by reviewers)
March 1, 2007	Clarifying schedule, room, poster arrangements and student lunch	We had very good attendance and feedback with holding the SRW as a parallel session to main and putting the posters just along the main conference posters
March 8, 2007	Sent out reminder about review deadline
March 10, 2007	Review deadline
March 14, 2007	all reviews available
March 15, 2007	Starting to discuss about acceptance
March 20, 2007	clarify double submissions with those indicating it and with ACL paper chair	Do NOT allow a paper to be accepted in both main and SRW. Also, try to search for publications with similar title from the same author to find out about double publication. This is a bit tedious, but proved to be necessary.
March 23, 2007	Accepted papers decided for posters /oral presentation
March 23, 2007	Timing, rooms etc. fixed	Could have been earlier to take out the stress
March 23, 2007	Notification of acceptance/rejection sent out
March 29, 2007	List of accepted papers published on webpage
April 1, 2007	Sent out preliminary information about funding	This should be done early because of the Air America Act for NSF-funded events. Do not promise any amounts, rather indicate something like "approximately 75% of expenses".
April 13, 2007	ACL newsletter Nr. 3 sent out
April 15, 2007	Funding from NSF arrived
April 16, 2007	Sent out detailed information about NSF-compliant receipts to participants	We offered to have the flights checked by a U.S. travel agency to confirm that there are REALLY no U.S. carriers flying from Europe to Europe :) This should have been sorted out earlier, since some people already had booked their flights.
April 16, 2007	NSF logo on sponsor page
April 19, 2007	Clarifying poster sizes and orientation
April 20, 2007	Instructions from publication chair arrived	The proceedings preparation software needs some training - better do that before time gets tight
April 25, 2007	Camera ready deadline remainder with detailed formatting instructions ...	... which will not be followed in most cases, still. Mention the max page count explicitly again, since people will be confused about differing main and SRW paper length for oral and poster presentations May 2, 2007 first round of revisions for camera-ready papers Some people might need very detailed descriptions what they did wrong. Take care for paper size, this does not show well when only opening papers - print them all to see margin differences.
May 4, 2007	Deadline for 1st round of revisions. This was also ACL main camera-ready deadline
May 4, 2007	started discussing about how to get panelists for feedback	since panelists should be present at the conference, it makes sense to scan the list of accepted papers for well-known names. Also, the organizing committee might be a source. It did not prove useful in previous years to use conference-independent directories like ELSNET, since most people are not attending. Also check co-chairs and participants of satellite events!
May 5, 2007	ACL newsletter nr. 5 and hotel reservation opening	accommodation should be recommended to participants in order to plan the money and to avoid too high expectations or fluctuations. The stipend does not have to cover accommodation during all satellite events, but should cover the main conf.
May 7, 2007	Deadline for 2nd round of revisions	Our mails were full of the word URGENT. Still, 9 out of 16 had changes to do
May 8, 2007	Sent out poster size information to poster presenters	Check with poster chair, and ensure SRW posters keep hanging as long as other posters.
May 9, 2007	Starting to assemble the proceedings	allow for some hours of instruction reading before actually doing it. Ask about the cover page: is the SRW part of a companion volume or a separate book?
May 8, 2007	Sent out invitation letters to panelists candidates, see Appendix	We asked to reply with a list of papers they would comment on. See Appendix C for letter.
May 10, 2007	Deadline for 3rd round or revisions	Revisions were done on a point-to point basis. Be sure to check your email regularly in these days to avoid delays.
May 12, 2007	starting to write the preface for the proceedings volume	We decided to have also short summaries of papers. We could have done this earlier to avoid time problems with the proceedings
May 14, 2007	Official proceedings deadline
May 15, 2007	Information about schedule coming in from general chair	since this is necessary for the proceedings, this was a bit late. Had to decide how to group papers rather quickly
May 15, 2007	Finalizing date and time for the poster session	Although posters hopefully keep hanging, there is need for an allotted time slot so panelists (and others) can find presenters. Should be parallel to one of the main poster sessions.
May 15, 2007	Call for panelist assignment	We had a great response for panelists and needed to assign a remaining 5 papers to those who had not expressed their preferences, so we asked the unassigned panelists.
May 16, 2007	First inquiries about travel grants are coming in	It would have been easier to send out information on grants as soon as possible and as detailed as possible. Estimate the cost per participant well beforehand (e.g. for different continents) and give the students rough figures as well as what they exactly will be able to reimburse. Answering inquires on a point-to-point basis eats up too much time
May 17, 2007	Finalizing Proceedings	Although late, we were doing well compared to other workshops :) Sorting out errors beforehand saves a lot of time later after delivering the thought-to-be-final version.
May 18, 2007	Proceedings approved by publication chair
May 18, 2007	Starting to work on ACL meeting report draft	Almost missed it! Luckily, versions of previous years help a lot.
May 22, 2007	ACL-related report deadline
May 22, 2007	Sending out paper assignments for reviewers	Check with main chairs for schedules of the panelist's talks. We unfortunately had to refuse 1 panelist since the only paper of interest to him ran in parallel to his presentation.
May 23, 2007	Sent out information about reimbursements and asked about estimates from students	Should explicitly mention various forms of travel (car, train, plane), should ask people to find a cheap hotel. Should clarify how registration is handled: in previous years SRW participants registered as student volunteers without having to work but without having to pay. The NSF grant was then used to pay registration fees to ACL directly. We let students register regularly and reimbursed later, but would not recommend this for the future: some missed the early registration deadline, and all had to pay the membership fee.
June 1, 2007	HTML version of program available, also abstracts of oral presentation and posters, including panelists	Actually, having the abstracts online took until June, 18, which was definitely too late.
June 1, 2007	Estimation of costs is done	We were lucky to have less long-distance participants than anticipated
June 5, 2007	Notifications about panelists to participants and about schedule
June 5, 2007	Choose your Menu for the Exec++ dinner
June 5, 2007	ACL newsletter Nr .5 (II)
June 12, 2007	Notes for the exec++ dinner come in	Prepare a very short presentation about the SRW. The shorter, the more happier the execs.
June 12, 2007	Invitation to post conference wrap up breakfast comes in
June 18, 2007	Worries about the student lunch	We were not sure whether we organize it or the local chairs take care of it. Further, we did not know who will pay for it. Further, it was forgotten to be announced in the program and had to be included in errata. Don't forget the student lunch! Clarify who's responsible well beforehand.
June 20, 2007	Slides for exec++ and business meeting prepared
June 23, 2007	Going to Prague!
June 25, 2007	Poster Session SRW	Great response! One panelist did not arrive, the panel was then hold on 27th.
June 25, 2007	Exec++ dinner	Yummy
June 26, 2007	Oral Session SRW	Even greater response. People had to leave the room because there were no places to stand (let alone to sit). Next time, ask for a bigger room (like all other rooms) and a microphone (like all other rooms). Be sure to keep the schedule for people that switch sessions
June 27, 2007	Business meeting
June 28, 2007	Wrap up breakfast	Be sure to mention behalves of students - you're their only representative there.
June 29, 2007	First of many "thank you" letters from participants	:) All that was for a purpose :)
June 29, 2007	First of numerous enquiries about the precise reimbursement procedure	Check with Priscilla on the conference how to proceed. Fix a strategy, even if everybody's busy. Reimbursement got quite delayed because everyone went on holiday and nobody knew where to send the stuff to.
July, 25 2007	ACL newsletter nr. 6
August 4, 2007	Sent detailed reimbursement information where to send what	Could have been one month earlier. Even better would be to hand out instructions (or even reimbursement forms) to the participants on-site.
August 24, 2007	Sorting out reimbursement and fixing upper limits	Some people simply send all receipts and wait how much they get (which is common in some countries), so better acknowledge before Priscilla sends out cheques
August 30, 2007	First cheques arriving
October 4, 2007	Reimbursement finished	To cash in ACL cheques is very expensive in some countries :(

Appendix A

Keywords for categorizing papers and reviewer’s fields of expertise

Acoustic modeling . Audio and video retrieval . Cognitive modeling . Content-based/collaborative information filtering . Corpora and treebanks . Cross-language information retrieval . Dialogue . Discourse . Discriminative training . Distributed information retrieval . Evaluation metrics and methodologies . Grammar development and engineering . Grammar extraction and induction . Grammar formalisms . Human/machine dialogue systems . Human/human conversation and meeting processing . Inference and entailment . Information extraction . Information retrieval models . Interactive/Personalized information retrieval . Intranet/Enterprise Search . Knowledge acquisition . Language identification . Language modeling . Language resources . Name . Learning techniques for language processing . Lexical acquisition . Lexical/Pronunciation modeling . Lexical semantics . Machine translation . Mathematical models of language . Morphology . Multi-lingual generation . Multi-lingual resources . Multi-lingual speech recognition . Multi-word expressions/collocations . Multimodal representations and processing . Natural language interfaces . NLP applications . Ontology learning . Parsing . Paraphrase . Phonology . Pragmatics . Psycholinguistics . Question answering . Name . Rich transcription . Semantics . Semantic distance . Semantic role labeling . Sentiment analysis . Surface realization . Syntax . NLP/IR applications . Speech generation . Speech mining . Speech recognition . Speech summarization . Speech-based interfaces . Spoken language understanding . Text alignment . Text categorization and clustering . Text generation . Text/Web mining . Name . Text planning . Text representation . Text summarization . Topic detection and tracking . Unsupervised learning . Web information retrieval . Web technology . Word sense disambiguation

Appendix B: Invitation letter for reviewers

Subject: Inviting you to join the program committee for the ACL-07 Student Research Workshop.

Dear colleague,

We would like to invite you to serve on the Program Committee of the Student Research Workshop at ACL 2007. The event will be held alongside the main conference in Prague, Czech Republic, on June 25-27, 2007.

The committee will consist of a cross-section of students and experienced researchers, representing all interests within the ACL community. You will be asked to review papers from student researchers. This is an important responsibility as you will not only be able to provide students with an opportunity to showcase their work, but also offer all students who submit invaluable feedback on their work in progress. Initially, we anticipate you being assigned 3-4 papers to review.

If you accept this invitation (and we sincerely hope you do), we would be grateful if you could include your areas of interest in your reply, as chosen from the keywords below.

KEYWORDS ....

We would be grateful if you could let us know if you can serve, and under what areas you feel you can review, as soon as possible. We are looking forward to your participation and know that you can help make the Student Workshop at ACL 2007 a success.

Below we are including the call for papers. Please, contact us if you need any further information.

Sincerely,

Appendix C: Invitation to be a panelist

Subject: ACL-07 SRW panelist?

Dear Colleague,

We, the organisers of the Student Research Workshop, would like to invite you, as an accomplished researcher in the field of Computational Linguistics, to participate in the panel of the Student Research Workshop at ACL-07.

It is a tradition at the ACL Student Research Workshop that after their presentation, student authors receive feedback from a senior researcher panelists. A panelist has read the 6-page paper of a student, is familiar with both the related research and with advising students, attends the presentation of the student and gives about 5 minutes feedback directly after the presentation or in front of the student's poster. This feedback should enable the student to improve her/his work and should give valuable hints on how to continue with his/her research.

The ACL Student Research Workshop will take place on Tuesday, June 26th during the main ACL conference in Prague. If you will attend the conference and would probably be interested in serving as a panelist, please respond to this mail within one week. You can have a look at the student abstracts at http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dfpdxs6h_6df4f53. It would be nice if you could indicate 1-4 preferences, which we will try to follow when assigning panelists to students.

As a reward for serving as a panelist, your name will be mentioned on the ACL07-SRW page - this is unfortunately the only the honour we can offer you. But maybe you also find it interesting to get in contact with promising student researchers working in your area.

If you cannot attend ACL or you don't feel like being a panelist, please forward this mail to other senior researchers that might be willing to serve.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us.

Sincerely...