2012Q3 Reports: Tutorial Chairs
ACL 2012 Tutorial Chair Report
by Michael Strube
General Schedule
Submission deadline for tutorial proposals: January 22, 2012 (avoiding a possible conflict with the paper submission deadline); Notification of acceptance: March 18, 2012 Tutorial descriptions due: April 30, 2012 Tutorial course material due: June 17, 2012 Tutorial date: July 8, 2012. I 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 in October 2011. I received 17 proposals. Email was used for handling submissions with email acknowledgement of receipt of proposals as stated in the CFP (I would recommend that future tutorial chairs use START right away also for handling submissions; once it is set up correctly, it would be easier to handle final submissions, create the proceedings etc.). Following advice from previous tutorial chairs, I solicited three proposals. 2 out of the 3 solicited proposals were accepted. External reviewers were consulted whenever necessary. Eventually, I selected six proposals based on the following criteria: quality, diversity, novelty, target audience.
Selected tutorials
Qualitative Modeling of Spatial Prepositions and Motion Expressions(Inderjeet Mani, James Pustejovsky); State-of-the-Art Kernels for Natural Language Processing (Alessandro Moschitti); Topic Models, Latent Space Models, Sparse Coding, and All That: A Systematic Understanding of Probabilistic Semantic Extraction in Large Corpora (Eric Xing); Multilingual Subjectivity and Sentiment Analysis (Rada Mihalcea, Carmen Banea, Janyce Wiebe); Deep Learning for NLP (without Magic) (Richard Socher, Yoshua Bengio, Christopher D. Manning); Graph-based Semi-Supervised Learning Algorithms for NLP (Amarnag Subramanya, Partha Pratim Talukdar)
Proceedings
Following instructions from the Publications Chairs and using the START/ACLPUB software, I prepared a PDF volume with tutorial abstracts, tutorial programme and authors list. The HTML versions of the proceedings were generated as well. I found it rather difficult to set the START/ACLPUB software up after the final submission deadline and would recommend that future tutorial chairs already handle submissions through START. Tutorial course notes will be printed locally. I consider these notes important, in particular for non-native speakers of English and recommend printing these in the future as well. Also, following last year's tutorial chairs I decided (in accordance with the general chair) that the course notes will be put in the ACL anthology. START should be slightly modified to make this easier in the future.
The tutorials will be videotaped (I asked the presenters whether they are ok with that). The recordings will be put in the ACL video archive and hopefully also on videolectures.net
Final Note
The amount of work for organizing the tutorials is not too much for one chair. But I felt slightly awkward to basically decide about acceptance on my own and hence would recommend that two tutorial chairs should be appointed.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the ACL 2012 General Chair, the Local/Publications Chairs, and Priscilla Rasmussen for their help and advice in the organization of the Tutorials program.
Michael Strube (HITS gGmbH)
June 21, 2012