2014Q3 Reports: Office Manager
Priscilla Rasmussen 14 June 2014
ACL Business Office Report
Graeme, his accounting assistant, and I have been working hard over the past couple of months to finalize our 2013 accounts in preparation of filing our 2013 taxes. We have gotten an automatic extension to August which allows us the needed time to complete our records and submit them to the accountants for final preparation and filing.
You will be pleased to know that the Directors/Officers and Office insurances are in place for the year so we are protected against unforeseen problems.
Pat Kirby continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations. And, while the portal has been inundated with spammers recently, causing some serious problems with the Member Portal, Min has worked hard in keeping the portal operational and has found some solutions to both keeping spammers at bay and also making our updating job easier. I am sure Min will have more to say about this in his report. Otherwise, the office is chugging along nicely.
There is an issue I would ask the Board to discuss and provide input on for the future related to our International Sponsorship program. Please see the Sponsorship section at the end of this document.
Publications, Journals and Royalties:
With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates now handling print-on-demand of our publications, I received no requests for publications in the office so far this year.
We have received royalties so far in 2014 from Curran Associates for the 4th quarter 2013 earnings of $1,067.47. Copyright Clearance Center will also be sending along some royalty income although none has been received so far.
MIT Press Journals has sent us an invoice for their fiscal year, July 2012-June 2013 in the amount of $38,728.28 for their services related to the Computational Linguistics Journal. It still remains a problem to receive timely invoicing unless we request it.
Membership:
Since 2009 we have consistently numbered over 2000 members and ended 2013 with 2093 members. The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be representing between 55 and 60 countries on a regular basis. So far this year, after adding in all memberships obtained through EACL 2014 and a good number of the ACL 2014 memberships paid, we stand at 1718 current members and have an additional 153 people who claimed to be members when registering for ACL 2014 but are not. These non-members will be chased for membership payments and there will be more from late and onsite registrations post-conference to add. I also expect additional memberships to come in from SIGdial, INLG, and EMNLP conferences so our total membership by the end of the year should be well over 2100 paid members. Please see Membership spreadsheets for the current 2014 details on countries represented and statistics.
Pat and I continue to do our best to keep the membership information updated and as correct as possible from information gathered on conference registration forms. The portal continues to give us problems as noted earlier and each problem is different from the last (plus smaller issues I will not go into here). This causes me to have doubts sometimes of the accuracy of the information and I do my best to double-check numbers through other means.
Fellows Program:
The Fellows for 2014 were selected after gathering nominations and recommendations through the fall 2013. Four Fellows were named: Ido Dagan, Dekang Lin, Candy Sidner, and David Yarowsky. We will begin the recommendation and selection process again this fall to name next year’s fellows.
Conferences:
NAACL HLT 2013, recently held in Atlanta, had a final count of attendees of 684 registrations, with 131 of these only attending co-located conference or workshops and the attempt at cross-pollination with ICML by holding the two conferences back-to-back was successful. ACL 2013, held in Sofia, Bulgaria, had a final total of 1016 registrations with 100 of these attending only workshops. It seems the trend continues that ACL-related conferences have about 20% of the total attendees not attending the main conference. And, EMNLP 2013, held in Seattle, Washington, ended with 518 registrations which is the largest number for an EMNLP to date. Only 5 registrants attended one of the 3 workshops and not the main conference.
Workshops are becoming more and more mini-conferences, complete with poster sessions which are often more difficult to coordinate, organize, and find adequate space.
EACL 2014, in Gothenberg, Sweden, went quite well from all reports I have heard. The final number of registrations was 467, which is one of the highest attended EACLs ever.
ACL 2014 will be held in Baltimore, Maryland at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront Hotel, June 22-27. I am extremely pleased to report that, as of this writing, there are 1302 pre-registered attendees and I expect more through onsite registrations, although post-conference, after taking out people who do not show up and others who cancel, the number will certainly change. This is a record-breaking number, exceeding previous years by almost 300 participants! I am not sure what is causing this huge increase in expected attendance but it may have something to do with proximity to the Washington DC area or our research endeavors being hot topics now. Having such a large number of attendees has caused some additional work in planning and communications (over 200 visa invitations issued, re-planning both catering and space configurations, hotel being sold out at our conference rates, etc.). With Option C of the Task List having been chosen, a major amount of the organizational work is being managed by the Office.
As my second time as Local Arrangements Chair for NAACL 2013 and being much more involved in the ACL 2014 organization, I am excited and find it even more satisfying and more challenging to feel truly a part of the conference teams.
Conference Sponsorship:
ACL 2013 had sponsorships totaling $62,052.75 to the Office plus a lot of in-kind sponsorship by the Bulgarian Academy of Science and the Bulgarian government; and, NAACL 2013 received sponsorships totaling $25,452.25.
For 2014, the International Sponsorship Committee and I pulled together the Sponsorship Booklet with a couple of new options included. Since we have never been successful in getting Welcome Reception or Conference Dinner or Entertainment sponsors, we added Student Lunch Sponsorship where only Platinum or Gold level sponsors could add $6,000 to their sponsorship and be able to present themselves at the Student Lunch. This resulted in $12,000 additional sponsorship income from Bloomberg and Nuance. I have also worked more closely with some of the sponsors, especially new ones, to gain their ongoing support and trust. I am thrilled to report that we have the highest ever recorded current main conference sponsorship total of $110,554.13 plus an additional total of $10,050 earmarked to specific workshops. This does not include the generous in-kind support provided by Johns Hopkins University, who provided staff and faculty time and other support. In addition to our ever faithful sponsors (Baidu, Google, IBM Research, Microsoft, Nuance, University of Washington, USC/ISI, Xerox Research Centre Europe, Yahoo!, Yandex, etc.), we can welcome new and hopefully future sponsors (A9.com, Amazon.com, Bloomberg, Brandeis University, Facebook and IBM Watson). Most of these sponsors either responded to my reminder to once again support our meeting or, in the case of the new ones, I was directly approached to work out the details for them to give us money. Once again, I am not sure why all were so keen to support this year’s conference but hope to entice their continued support.
We need to add one sponsorship chair for Asia and two for North America to the Sponsorship Committee now in preparation for updating the Sponsorship Booklet for our 2015 campaign. Please send recommendations to me.
The area Sponsorship Chairs (especially the two European Chairs) are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them. And, many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!
Point for discussion:
As you know, I work closely in coordinating our International Sponsorship Committee. Some of the members and I were getting inquiries about also supporting EMNLP when we spoke to them about sponsoring ACL and/or EACL 2014, and possibly doing a 3-pack sponsorship (we only offered a 2-pack sponsorship of ACL and EACL this year). It is becoming awkward to not list them as well as ACL, EACL, NAACL (as appropriate for the year) in our sponsorship booklet.
Many of our same sponsors also want and do support EMNLP. As Local Arrangements Chair of the last EMNLP in Seattle, it seemed to me sponsors were being asked for and gave varying amounts not consistent with what we request of these same sponsors for ACLs, EACLs, and NAACLs. EMNLP is not far off in size to EACLs and NAACLs and recently has been larger than many EACLs (EACL 2014 was 467, NAACL 2013 was 684 and EMNLP 2013 was 518 in Seattle). While I realize EMNLP is not a chapter, its popularity and ability to attract sponsors could be a justification to include them in a coordinated way so as to not devalue ACL or the chapters. I believe that we should present a coordinated image to potential sponsors whereby ACL has the highest value, followed by the chapters and EMNLP. I have been led to believe EMNLP would be keen to be included in our sponsorship booklet.
Some members of the Sponsorship Committee had asked me to update the booklet to include EMNLP but I think this may be an Executive Board decision. The only possible problem I envision is if other SIGs would then also ask to be included in our booklet (which could make it too cumbersome and complicated). This could be answered based on meeting attendance and SIG membership representation. The largest other SIGs, based on meeting attendance, would be Machine Translation, SIGNLL and *SEM (about 100-125 attendees each), INLG and SIGdial (about 75-100 each).
Discussion?
Membership Report
| June 10, 2014 | MEMBERSHIP REPORT 2005-2014 STATISTICS | |||||||||
| (all full-year finals) | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 |
| Jan-June | ||||||||||
| TOTAL MEMBERSHIP | 1562 | 2123 | 2104 | 1602 | 2151 | 2136 | 2028 | 2064 | 2093 | 1718 |
| TOTAL REGULAR | 1114 | 1326 | 1365 | 1137 | 1402 | 1162 | 1111 | 1252 | 1232 | 1133 |
| TOTAL STUDENTS | 448 | 521 | 729 | 463 | 749 | 974 | 917 | 812 | 861 | 585 |
| DISCOUNTS APPLIED TO ABOVE: | ||||||||||
| REDUCED RATES | 15 | 8 | 12 | 8 | 4 | 282 | 276 | 81 | 84 | 40 |
| AMTA DISCOUNTS | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| ISCA DISCOUNTS | 4 | 1 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 14 | 4 | 1 | 5 |
| HLT/NAACL FREE YEAR | 0 | 540 | 324 | 0 | 535 | 548 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| COLING/ACL FREE HALF YEAR | 301 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | |
| COLING/ACL FREE FULL YEAR | 188 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | |
| TOTAL BY WORLD AREA: | ||||||||||
| TOTAL ASIA/PACIFIC RIM | 203 | 419 | 314 | 214 | 384 | 569 | 552 | 539 | 355 | 230 |
| TOTAL CANADA/MEXICO | 74 | 93 | 83 | 59 | 54 | 60 | 51 | 82 | 56 | 57 |
| TOTAL EUROPE | 414 | 676 | 803 | 439 | 639 | 614 | 564 | 694 | 786 | 639 |
| TOTAL SOUTH AMERICA | 8 | 5 | 10 | 10 | 9 | 22 | 16 | 17 | 9 | 6 |
| TOTAL USA | 863 | 930 | 894 | 880 | 823 | 871 | 845 | 732 | 887 | 786 |
| HOW MEMBERSHIPS CAME IN: | ||||||||||
| MEMBERSHIPS-ONLY | 878 | 870 | 981 | 1602 | 2151 | 2136 | 2028 | 2064 | 2093 | 1718 |
| MEMBERSHIPS + ORDERS | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| ORDERS (FROM OUTSIDE ACL) | 27 | 38 | 64 | 24 | 17 | 5 | 8 | 4 | 2 | 0 |
| ORDERS (From ACL Membership) | 0 | 0 | 223 | 7 | 5 | 0 | 2 | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| THROUGH CONFERENCES: | ||||||||||
| ACL-2005 | 487 | |||||||||
| HLT/EMNLP-2005 | 197 | |||||||||
| EACL 2006 | 224 | |||||||||
| HLT/NAACL 2006 | 540 | ('+ 126 extended through 2007) | ||||||||
| COLING/ACL 2006 | 489 | |||||||||
| NAACL HLT 2007 | 324 | ('+ 145 extended through 2008) | ||||||||
| ACL 2007 | 759 | (790 '- 31 Fraudulent and No-Shows who did not pay) | ||||||||
| ACL 2008 (incl. vol, spkrs, spons) | 426 | |||||||||
| EMNLP 2008 | 110 | |||||||||
| EACL 2009 | 355 | |||||||||
| NAACL 2009 | 535 | ('+ 133 extended through 2010) | ||||||||
| ACL/IJCNLP 2009 | 632 | |||||||||
| NAACL HLT 2010 | 548 | ('+ 78 extended through 2011) | ||||||||
| ACL 2010 | 767 | (new or renewed members captured of the 950 total attendees) | ||||||||
| INLG 2010 | 26 | (new or renewed members captured of the 49 total attendees) | ||||||||
| EMNLP 2010 | 141 | (new or renewed members captured of the 292 total attendees) | ||||||||
| ACL 2011 | 866 | |||||||||
| EACL 2012 | 288 | |||||||||
| NAACL 2012 | 535 | |||||||||
| ACL 2012 | 697 | (Includes EMNLP/CoNLL and SIGdial 2012) | ||||||||
| Others such as INLG 2012 | 0 | (any memberships from INLG went through normal online membership) | ||||||||
| NAACL 2013 | 552 | |||||||||
| ACL 2013 | 696 | |||||||||
| EMNLP 2013 | 301 | |||||||||
| EACL 2014 | 56 | |||||||||
| ACL 2014 | 440 | Will go up post-conference with onsite registrations and 153 currently unpaid | ||||||||
| Joint INLG and SIGdial 2014 | N/A | Memberships will be known post-conference | ||||||||
| EMNLP 2014 | N/A | Memberships will be known post-conference | ||||||||
Memberships by Country
| June 10, 2014 | MEMBERSHIPS BY COUNTRY JANUARY-JUNE 2014 | ||||||||||
| TOTAL | REG | STUD | TOTAL | REG | STUD | TOTAL | REG | STUD | |||
| ARGENTINA | 1 | 1 | 0 | INDIA | 9 | 4 | 5 | QTAR | 4 | 4 | 0 |
| ARMENIA | 1 | 1 | 0 | INDONESIA | 2 | 2 | 0 | ROMANIA | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| AUSTRALIA | 20 | 13 | 7 | IRAN | 0 | 0 | 0 | RUSSIA | 12 | 9 | 3 |
| AUSTRIA | 4 | 2 | 2 | IRELAND | 17 | 12 | 5 | SAUDI ARABIA | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| BELGIUM | 10 | 7 | 3 | ISRAEL | 17 | 8 | 9 | SERBIA | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| BRAZIL | 4 | 3 | 1 | ITALY | 39 | 21 | 18 | SINGAPORE | 13 | 11 | 2 |
| BULGARIA | 7 | 7 | 0 | JAPAN | 81 | 66 | 15 | SLOVENIA | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| CANADA | 53 | 37 | 16 | KAZAKHSTAN | 0 | 0 | 0 | SOUTH AFRICA | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| CHINA | 67 | 43 | 24 | KOREA, REPUBLIC OF | 24 | 18 | 6 | SPAIN | 26 | 21 | 5 |
| COLUMBIA | 0 | 0 | 0 | LITHUANIA | 1 | 1 | 0 | SRI LANKA | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| CROATIA | 2 | 2 | 0 | LUXENBOURG | 0 | 0 | 0 | SWEDEN | 57 | 37 | 20 |
| CZECH REPUBLIC | 16 | 6 | 10 | MACAU | 0 | 0 | 0 | SWITZERLAND | 19 | 13 | 6 |
| DENMARK | 6 | 5 | 1 | MALAYSIA | 1 | 1 | 0 | TAIWAN | 13 | 6 | 7 |
| ECUADOR | 1 | 1 | 0 | MALTA | 2 | 1 | 1 | THAILAND | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| EGYPT | 1 | 1 | 0 | MEXICO | 4 | 3 | 1 | TUNISIA | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| ESTONIA | 2 | 1 | 1 | NETHERLANDS | 29 | 21 | 8 | TURKEY | 13 | 6 | 7 |
| FINLAND | 9 | 4 | 5 | NEW ZEALAND | 1 | 1 | 0 | UKRAINE | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| FRANCE | 45 | 30 | 15 | NORWAY | 13 | 5 | 8 | UNITED EMERATES | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| GERMANY | 125 | 62 | 63 | PAKISTAN | 1 | 1 | 0 | UNITED KINGDOM | 122 | 72 | 50 |
| GREECE | 8 | 6 | 2 | PHILIPPINES | 1 | 1 | 0 | UNITED STATES | 786 | 534 | 252 |
| HONG KONG | 6 | 5 | 1 | POLAND | 5 | 4 | 1 | VIET NAM | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| HUNGARY | 3 | 2 | 1 | PORTUGAL | 4 | 3 | 1 | ||||
| COUNTRIES REPRESENTED | 57 | TOTAL | 1,718 | 1,133 | 585 | ||||||