2016Q1 Reports: Conference Officer

Conference Management

There have been efforts to improve the overall conference management and integrate some of the new functionalities into the START system. Many thanks to the NAACL program chairs this year (Nenkova and Rambow) who have spearheaded the efforts by implementing several innovative methods. More specifically, (a) dynamic area definitions, (b) semi-automatic management of the reviewer pool, (c) automatic paper-to-area assignment, and (d) semi-automatic reviewer-to-area assignment. Thus far, the START support team has implemented (c), which is based on weighted key-word matching and it has been already used by NAACL 2016. The START support team is willing to implement (d), which we expect to be a relatively easy extension to the algorithm implemented for (c).

As these changes are somewhat exploratory, the ACL 2016 coordinating team will stay with the traditional method while focusing on other innovative pursuits (new outstanding paper awards targeting a larger pool of recipients, reversed ordering of long-short deadlines). Some of these changes will be picked up by the EMNLP 2016 coordinating committee. We look forward to seeing the feedback survey from the NAACL 2016 experience, which will guide the coordination of the 2017 conference management.

COIs of the Program Chairs

There have been discussions about the paper submission by students of the program chairs. The official policy discourages, but does not ban, the submissions by students of the program chairs. Some voiced strong concerns for the potential misuse of the power. Even without deliberate misuse, there have been concerns about subconscious biases --- not only between the program chairs, but also the dynamics between the area chairs and the program chairs. Now that we have TACL deadlines year around, which allows the authors of the accepted papers to attend the conference of their choosing, it seems relatively easy for the program chairs to find other publication outlets for their students. So, the consensus has been that it seems reasonable to continue discouraging the submissions from the program chairs for the conference they are in charge.

That said, some of the past and current program chairs proposed that the recruiting committee should inform future program chairs well in advance about this issue, preferably before they officially accept the offer to serve as the program chairs. While this knowledge would have not changed their decisions to accept the offers, it would have helped them better prepared for the upcoming conference deadlines, and also it's preferable not to find surprises later on.

Balanced Representation of Minority

There have been discussions about the balanced representation of minorities for broad ACL activities including the selection procedure of the ACL fellows. A new committee has been formed (Joakim, Min-yen, Marilyn, myself) and investigation is under way.

Timeline of Conference Deadlines

The timeline of deadlines has continued to be a tricky matter for those years when we have both NAACL and ACL. The NAACL coordinating committee last year had proposed the ACL to merge the long and short deadlines. However, initial investigation indicated that it may not be practical to merge deadlines given the recent substantial growth of the ACL submissions. Thus, as an alternative solution, the ACL 2016 program chairs have decided to try out the reverse ordering of deadlines, i.e., short first, long next. This will potentially ease out the tight scheduling between NAACL and ACL long-paper deadlines and lessen the reviewing overhead caused by the overflow of rejected long papers turning up as short paper submissions.