2015Q3 Reports: Tutorial Chairs

ACL 2014 Tutorial Chairs Report

Prepared June 30, 2015
Eneko Agirre (University of the Basque Country)
Kevin Duh (Nara Institute of Science and Technology)

General Schedule

This year we had a joint call-for-tutorials, coordinated with the NAACL and EMNLP co-chairs (6 co-chairs in total).
In addition we coordinated the deadlines with Publication Chairs and Local Organizers.

Shared dates:

Submission deadline for tutorial proposals: January 9, 2015
Notification of acceptance: February 6, 2015
Tutorial descriptions due: March 6, 2015

NAACL:

NAACL Tutorial course material due: April 10, 2015
NAACL Tutorial date: May 31, 2015

ACL:

ACL Tutorial course material due: June 26, 2015
ACL Tutorial date: July 26, 2015

EMNLP:

EMNLP Tutorial course material due: August 14, 2015
EMNLP Tutorial dates: September 17, 2015

Call and selection procedure

The call for proposals (CFP) was posted the 31st of August, both at the ACL website and sent to high-volume NLP/CL mailing lists.

Tutorial co-chairs discussed interesting topics, and approached some experts to suggest they could submit proposals.

Softconf was used for proposal submission. We received 32 proposals which were reviewed by the 6 co-chairs according to the following criteria:

relevance to ACL community (1=irrelevant, 5=great fit) (1-5)
quality of instructor (1=poor, 5=great) (1-5)
quality of proposal i.e. outline and whether depth/breadth is adequate (1-5)
our estimate of potential attendance (not from proposal)
newly emerging area not previously covered in an ACL related tutorial (yes or no)
tutorials which provide introductions into related fields (yes or no)
overall score (1=bad, 5=great) (1-5)
1st preference for venue as indicated in proposal
comments

The procedure for selecting and assigning the tutorials to the three venues was the following:

we ordered proposals by the venue preference expressed by proposers
each subcommittee makes a tentative decision for the venue they're assigned to
we discuss the remaining/conflicting/redundant proposals
at the same time we try to balance topics across venues

ACL selected 8 half-day proposals, NAACL 6 and EMNLP 8. The decision process was uncontroversial.

Acceptance letters were personalised by venue, then sent via softconf. We did not send feedback to proposers.

Selected tutorials

Morning:
Successful Data Mining Methods for NLP
Jiawei Han, Heng Ji and Yizhou Sun

Structured Belief Propagation for NLP
Matthew R. Gormley and Jason Eisner

Sentiment and Belief: How to Think about, Represent, and Annotate Private States
Owen Rambow and Janyce Wiebe

Corpus Patterns for Semantic Processing
Octavian Popescu, Patrick Hanks, Elisabetta Jezek and Daisuke Kawahara

Afternoon:
Matrix and Tensor Factorization Methods for Natural Language Processing
Guillaume Bouchard, Jason Naradowsky, Sebastian Riedel, Tim Rocktaschel and Andreas Vlachos

Scalable Large-Margin Structured Learning: Theory and Algorithms
Liang Huang and James Cross

Detecting Deceptive Opinion Spam using Linguistics, Behavioral and Statistical Modeling
Arjun Mukherjee

What You Need to Know about Chinese for Chinese Language Processing
Chu-Ren Huang

Proceedings

We have received the final abstracts for the tutorials (which include a description as well as an outline). These were submitted through the START system and have been passed along to the publications chair. We are currently in the process of collecting all of the course materials from each of the presenters. If tutorial presenters cannot match the deadline, they have to print out the handouts themselves and bring them to the conference before the registration starts.

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to Yang Liu and Thamar Solorio (NAACL tutorial chairs), Maggie Li and Khalil Sima'an (EMNLP tutorial chairs), Le Sun and Yang Liu (local chairs), Wanxiang Che and Guodong Zhou (publication chairs), Yuji Matsumoto (general chair), and of course Priscilla Rasmussen, for various kinds of help, advice and assistance offered during the process of putting the tutorial programme and materials together. Most importantly, we would like to thank the tutorial presenters for the time and effort in preparing and presenting the tutorials.