2011Q3 Reports: Tutorial Chairs

ACL 2011 Tutorial Chairs Report

by Patrick Pantel and Andy Way

General Schedule

Submission deadline for tutorial proposals: December 17, 2010 Notification of acceptance: January 28, 2011 Tutorial descriptions due: March 11, 2011 Tutorial course material due: April 25, 2011 Tutorial date: June 19, 2011 We negotiated and agreed on all the deadlines with Publication Chairs and Local Organizers.

Call and selection procedure

The call for proposals (CFP) was posted at the ACL website by September 21, 2010 and broadcast twice: at the end of September and during December, 2010. Following a recommendation from the workshop chairs, we also posted the call for tutorial proposals on several mailing lists, including: Corpora www.hit.uib.no/corpora, ML-news groups.google.com/group/ML-news, COLT lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/colt, SIGIR www.sigir.org/sigirlist, IEEE Speech speechnewseds@listserv.ieee.org, Elsnet mailman.elsnet.org/mailman/listinfo/elsnet-list, MT-List http://www.mail-archive.com/mt-list%40eamt.org/. We received 18 proposals before the deadline of December 17, 2010. Email was used for handling submissions with email acknowledgement of receipt of proposals as stated in the CFP. Following advice from previous tutorial chairs, we solicited three proposals. We were very careful to encourage these proposals but at the same time warn that there was no guarantee of acceptance because all proposals would be subject to the same reviewing process. 1 out of the 3 solicited proposals were accepted. All 18 proposals were reviewed by both co-chairs and a few external reviewers were consulted. We selected six proposals based on the following criteria: novelty, scientific interest, presenter, proposal document and target audience.

Selected tutorials

Beyond Structured Prediction: Inverse Reinforcement Learning (Hal Daume III) Formal and Empirical Grammatical Inference (Jeffrey Heinz, Colin de la Higuera, and Menno van Zaanen) Summarizing Text and Speech: Algorithms, Approaches and Issues (Ani Nenkova, Sameer Maskey , and Yang Liu) Web Search Queries as a Corpus (Marius Pasca) Rich Prior Knowledge in Learning for Natural Language Processing (Gregory Druck, Kuzman Ganchev, and Joao Graca) Dual Decomposition for Natural Language Processing (Michael Collins and Alexander M Rush) We worked with publicity chairs and local organizers who advertised the tutorials with a short listing by email and full descriptions on the web page.

Proceedings

The last task consisted of preparing the "tutorials mini-proceedings" to be integrated in the general ACL 2011 proceedings. Following instructions from Publications Chairs and using the ACLPUB software, we prepared a PDF volume with tutorial abstracts, tutorial programme and authors list. The HTML versions of the mini-proceedings were generated as well. We discussed the possibility of not printing tutorial course notes this year. Ultimately, with advice from the general chair, we decided to print course notes. We recommend considering next year to include on the registration form an opt-in option for receiving tutorial notes. We believe that few attendees actually make good use of these notes.

Acknowledgements

We reused some of the materials (invitation letters, CFP draft, etc.) from last year tutorials. This was very useful and saved some time. Thanks to Lluís Màrquez and Haifeng Wang for providing these materials and for their valuable advice all throughout the process. We are also equally grateful to the ACL 2011 General Chair, and the Local/Publicity/Workshop/Publications Chairs for their help and advice in the organization of the Tutorials program.

June 9, 2011 Patrick Pantel (Microsoft Research, USA) Andy Way (Dublin City University, Ireland; Applied Language Solutions, UK)