2015Q3 Reports: NAACL

Report from NAACL, July 2015

Hal Daumé III - Chapter board chair

Joel Tetreault - Treasurer

Executive Committee Meetings

The board had a meeting at NAACL on 31 May 2015. Additionally the Board converses regularly by email.

Treasurer's Report

More details at: http://naacl.org/minutes/2015/NAACL_Treasurer_Report_2015.pdf

As of May 31, 2015, our budget balance was $59,889, the highest it's been since we took a hit from NAACL 2010 in LA. We had approximately $19,000 in outlays: $5000 to NACL, $3000 to the emerging regions fund, $6000 to the Jelinek summer workshop and $4800 to LSA. We had a very large amount of committed sponsorship in 2015 ($59k, more than double the $25k in 2013).

North American conference in 2015

NAACL was held in Denver CO, USA this year, from 31 May through 5 June. This was the largest NAACL ever by far (901 attendees as of the first day, versus a max of 650-700 in previous years). It featured two keynote addresses: Lillian Lee and Fei-fei Li, 6 tutorials, 13 one-day workshops, Semeval (2 day workshop) and was colocated with *SEM. Joyce Chai and Anoop Sarkar were program chairs; Rada Mihalcea was general chair. ACL is in North America this year, so there is no separate NAACL.

NAACL Officers as of 8 June 2014

 Chair         Hal Daume III            University of Maryland
 Secretary     Michael White            Ohio State University
 Treasurer     Joel Tetreault           Yahoo! Research
 Past Chair    Chris Callison-Burch     University of Pennsylvania

 Board Members:
 Matt Post               Johns Hopkins University
 Fei Xia                 University of Washington
 Emily Bender            University of Washington
 Eduard Hovy             Carnegie Mellon University
 Graeme Hirst (ex-officio, ACL representative) University of Toronto

We have elections this year for four outgoing members: Hal (chair), Mike (secretary) and Emily and Ed (board members). The nominating committee is actively seeking candidates to replace these members; this will go to a vote that concludes on 15 Dec 2015.

New Initiatives

The board is currently exploring three main initiatives:

• Backend in START (subcommittee chair: Matt Post). Matt and CCB will be collecting suggestions (starting with their own long list) for ways of improving the process of working with START. NAACL will take the lead on working with softconf to implement these changes for NAACL 2016; after discussion, we hope that the ACL exec might be convinced to contribute funds towards tasks that will benefit the ACL as a whole.

• NAACL in South America (chair: Fei Xia). Fei and Joel noted that helping to host ACL/NAACL in Central or South America is likely to be the most important way in which NAACL can help progress CL there. Meanwhile the Emerging Regions Fund remains active and helpful. Fei clarified that according to the NAACL constitution, NAACL will serve members of the ACL in Central and South America until regional chapters are created for members there. As such, she noted that it does not make sense to consider changing the NAACL name until the question of regional chapters for Central and South America has been settled by ACL members there. Fei will work on updating the contacts list started by Ted Pedersen for ACL members in Central and South America who might be interested in hosting a future conference.

• Reviewing models (chair: Mike White). Largely driven by what we would like in reviewing, as well as by looking at what other conferences have been doing, we are putting together a list of "best practices." The main items discussed were reviewer feedback (eg a "star" system for good reviewers, maintained over time); publicly available reviews; resubmitted papers; author feedback; meta-reviews from area chairs.

NAACL is conducting a post-conference survey (see https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1tqhV5h-iiCruwWkoNtC4qO5h_gdzERyXaltZY0vvrR8/viewform); we will make the results available to ACL once they are in.

North America Conference in 2016

NAACL 2016 will take place at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina, 12-17 June 2016. General chair is Kevin Knight; program co-chairs are Ani Nenkova and Owen Rambow.

Specific Items for ACL Exec

• We would still like ACL to revisit the decision that supplementary materials not be required to be anonymous. This is inconsistent with NAACL's policy.

• NAACL has decided to make it a policy that all reviewer scores (including overall recommendation) be made available to authors at response time---assuming there is an author response---and would like to encourage ACL to adopt a similar rule.

UPDATE 20 OCT 2015, NAACL POST-CONFERENCE SURVEY

A summary of the survey results is in the following image:

All the questions are Likert-style, with dark red (left) meaning “strongly disagree” and dark blue (right) meaning “strongly agree.”

There are two exceptions to this rule:

• “Attended” for which the semantics are: light red=never attend, grey=usually attend *ACL, light blue=usually attend NAACL, dark blue=attended NAACL 2015
• “Talk length”: red=shorten to 12+3; grey=shorten to 16+4; blue=keep at 20+5

Brief summary in text:

• People are generally very happy with basic logistics (thanks Priscilla!!!).
• Many people are in favor of having meta-reviews.
• People are generally split on having author response, but the majority want to keep it. In addition, people ever more strongly want authors to be able to flag factual innacuracies in the reviews.
• People are about as split as they could possibly be on the question of making reviews public.
• There's support for having NAACL or ACL in Central or South America, but it's nowhere near strong support. Ditto for having NAACL in Winter or Spring.
• People are very split on the question of adding more awards beyond the current (new) NAACL model of four best papers and up to six honorable mentions.
• People generally like status quo for how the conference is run: the number of parallel sessions should neither grow nor shrink; talks should stay at 20+5.

Attendees also provided very useful long-form text on what they liked and what they thought could be improved.

The top of the "liked" is:

• The two invited talks (Fei-Fei Li and Lillian Lee) (*46)
• The content of the poster sessions (*23)
• The conference food (*13)

The top of the "could be improved" is:

• The crowding at the posters (*35)
• The food options for people with dietary restrictions, or general food complains (*9)
• The lack of daylight in the venue (*9)

Thanks to all for filling out the survey!