2013Q3 Reports: Workshop Chairs
ACL 2013 Report: The Workshops
Aoife Cahill & Qun Liu
The ACL Workshop Chairs (Aoife Cahill and Qun Liu) worked together with the NAACL and EMNLP workshop chairs to jointly select workshops for ACL, NAACL and EMNLP. The first joint call went out on the 5th of October. The deadline was November 30th. These dates were slightly later than originally planned as we coordinated with EMNLP who joined in the call at the last minute. Proponents were asked to indicate their preferences regarding the venue (e.g., ACL, NAACL, EMNLP) and the duration of the workshop.
We received 38 proposals in total. Of these, one expressed no preference for a particular venue, 14 exclusively wanted ACL, 4 exclusively wanted NAACL, and 3 exclusively wanted EMNLP. Of those that expressed a ranked preference list 10 proponents had ACL as their first choice, and 2 had ACL as the second. Each workshop received a score from all the workshop chairs of the venues that had been indicated by that proposal. The selection process went very smoothly, resulting in 15 workshops being accepted for ACL (1 being the merging of two proposed workshops), 11 for NAACL (one of which again the merging of two proposed workshops, and one subsequently canceled), 4 for EMNLP (one subsequently canceled), and 6 proposals being rejected. The following workshops were accepted for ACL: BioNLP, ENLG, WMT, Law7-ID, BSNLP, BUCC, CMC, LaTeCH, PITR, HyTra, TNLP, MoL, MultiLing, CVSC and DiscoMT. Of these, 9 are long-standing series, and the other workshops all focus on topics of great interest.
Deciding the dates for the ACL workshops was straightforward. We set up a Google group and invited all workshop organizers listed in the proposals to join. We used this group as the primary way of communicating with all organizers. We also included the publication chairs in this group so that they could easily send publication-related information to organizers. There was one glitch setting up the Softconf account for the CoNLL shared task. This account was set up later than all the other accounts, and for some reason it did not contain the final copyright notice. The Softconf support were able to fix this quickly. There were no other issues setting up the Softconf accounts.
The Balto-Slavic NLP workshop asked on May 14 to extend the length of their workshop from one day to one and a half days. After some back and forth, we told them on May 17 that this would be possible. Unfortunately, there was some miscommunication and the main ACL webpage and registration pages were not updated to reflect this. This caused confusion, since the workshop was still listed as a one-day workshop. We were not able to correct for this on time, and participants for this workshop only paid registration for a one day workshop. ACL will absorb the additional costs for the extra half day.