Report from NAACL, February 2016

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

The NAACL Chapter's bank account held $90,017.12 as of December 31, 2015. This figure takes into account the surplus from ACL 2014, but does not yet reflect the impact of the NAACL 2015 conference. To give context for that balance, this is the highest level it has been since June 2012. The balance for 2014 was $34k and for 2013 it was $29k. In 2015, our expenditures were once again the sponsorship of external events: NACLO ($5k), two Emerging Regions Fund awards at $1.5k apiece ($3k) and the Summer Workshop ($6k) for a total of $14k. In short, 2016 begins on a very strong note for NAACL. That being said, we should continue to seek out new sources of sponsorship as many fields not previously connected with NLP, such as finance and gaming, were major sponsors for last year's NAACL.

NAACL Officers as of today

 Chair         Emily Bender             University of Washington
 Secretary     Colin Cherry             National Research Council Canada
 Treasurer     Joel Tetreault           Yahoo! Labs
 Past Chair    Hal Daume III            University of Maryland

 Board Members:
 Matt Post                              Johns Hopkins University
 Fei Xia                                University of Washington
 Marie-Catherine de Marneffe            The Ohio State University
 Julia Hockenmaier 	                 University of Illinois
 Graeme Hirst (ex-officio, ACL representative) University of Toronto

NAACL Issues Under Discussion

NAACL has initiated a new best paper policy, which will be posted soon. The goal is to make the selection process more uniform and to do a better job of promoting our members at their respective institutions.

NAACL recently held elections; the turnout was disappointingly low (232 votes out of 933 eligible). We don't know if ACL's is similar or what we can do to increase voter turnout.

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.

NAACL POST-CONFERENCE SURVEY RESULTS

This previously appeared in the last NAACL report, but appeared after the Exec meeting, so it is being duplicated here.

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 even 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)

2016Q1 Reports: NAACL

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