2015Q3 Reports: Conference Officer

Long and Short Deadlines

There's been discussion about whether to merge or not the long and short deadlines for ACL, and if not merging, how to align them in accordance with other conference timelines. Long story short, there's been strong advice against rushed implementation of merged deadlines without properly scaling up the operational structure. For one, ACL is twice larger than NAACL or EMNLP. Plus there's been a substantial increase (27%) in this year's ACL. In the meanwhile, it looks like EMNLP 2016 will adopt the idea of having separate deadlines in reverse order, i.e., short comes first and long next.

In sum, while we have not found one perfect answer to address all potential issues with deadline coordination, new ideas have emerged and will be implemented in the near future. While we are attaining new experiences with deadline scheduling, we will also work on scaling up the operational structure in parallel.

Reviewer to Area Assignment

It looks like the START support team is willing to integrate Mark Dredze's tool for reviewer-to-area assignment.