2015Q3 Reports: ACL 2016

ACL 2016 - report by Christopher Manning

In 2016 there will be a joint ACL and EACL conference in (central) Berlin, with hosting and local arrangements organization by Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. The dates are: 7-12 August 2016.

Coordinating Committee

The conference coordinating committee is:

• Lluís Màrquez, EACL chair <lluism@lsi.upc.edu>
• Caroline Sporleder, EACL secretary <secretary@eacl.org>
• Mike Rosner, EACL treasurer <treasurer@eacl.org>
• Walter Daelemans, EACL chair-elect <walter.daelemans@ua.ac.be>
• Christopher Manning, ACL past president in 2016, chair <manning@stanford.edu>
• Drago Radev, ACL secretary <radev@umich.edu>
• Graeme Hirst, ACL treasurer <gh@cs.toronto.edu>
• Yejin Choi, ACL conference officer <yejin@cs.washington.edu>

Additional non-voting members of the committee are:

Observers:

• Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL business manager <acl@aclweb.org>
• Stephen Clark, EACL past chair <sc609@cl.cam.ac.uk>
• Jian Su, past ACL information officer <sujian@i2r.a-star.edu.sg>
• Pushpak Bhattacharyya, ACL past president in 2017 <pushpakbh@gmail.com>
• Joakim Nivre, ACL past president in 2018 <joakim.nivre@lingfil.uu.se>

Key Organizers:

• Antal van den Bosch, general chair, <a.vandenbosch@let.ru.nl>
• Markus Egg, local co-chair <markus.egg@rz.hu-berlin.de>
• Valia Kordoni, local co-chair <evangelia.kordoni@anglistik.hu-berlin.de>
• Katrin Erk, program co-chair <katrin.erk@gmail.com>
• Noah Smith, program co-chair <nasmith@cs.washington.edu>
• Kostadin Cholakov, local website administrator <kostadin.cholakov@anglistik.hu-berlin.de>

The committee email list address is: acl16cc@aclweb.org .

Progress

Since the 2015Q1 report:

• We are very pleased to announce that Katrin Erk and Noah Smith accepted our entreaties to be program co-chairs for the conference.
• We have an involved Local Arrangements Committee of 3 people and a PCO, con gressa, where Ms. Delia Lemke is the main contact.
• Contracts have been signed with Humboldt University, con gressa, the Maritim Hotel (for the poster session), and for blocks of rooms at four nearby hotels.
• The local organizers, supported by the PCO and their web designer have created an attractive website for the conference. Kostadin Cholakov and Ms Lemke from the PCO are sharing the webmaster duties. The website is hosted on a Humboldt U. server. Initial content still needs to be added to the site before it is announced.
• Local organizer Valia Kordoni will be the local sponsorship chair. She has a good network of contacts in the German IT industry.

Upcoming tasks

We hope to finish these goals in the next couple of weeks to months:

• Presentation and video of ACL 2016 for presentation at ACL 2015. (Responsibility: Local Chairs.)
• Launching an initial conference website and pointing the reserved domain name http://acl2016.org/ at it. The site still needs content, including preliminary local information and preparing an initial conference announcement. (Responsibility: Local Chairs.)
• We need to select Student Workshop Chair(s) and Faculty Advisor, Publications Chair(s), Tutorial Chair(s), Workshop Chair(s), and Demo Chair(s), Exhibits Coordinator, and Publicity Chair(s) soon. (Responsibility: General Chair.)
• Set up an email address for conference chairs. (Responsibility: General Chair.)
• Publicize ACL 2016 including a Call for Participation. (Responsibility: General Chair & Local Chairs)
• Finalize Program chairs' timetable of calls, paper due dates etc. This is under construction and should be circulated soon. (Responsibility: Program Chairs.)

After that, key tasks are to:

• Develop conference budget. Estimate registration dates and costs. (Responsibility: General Chair, Local Chairs, and Priscilla)
• Create Call for Papers, work on finding Area Chairs and Invited Speakers. (Responsibility: Program Chairs.)