2016Q1 Reports: Office
Priscilla Rasmussen 18 February 2016
ACL Business Office Report
As usual, the Office is running smoothly.
The Directors/Officers and Office insurances have been renewed for 2016 so we are all covered against unforeseen issues.
We will look forward to another financial audit to be conducted by Nisivoccia, LLP, both in the office and through emails with Graeme and me for our 2015 tax forms to be completed and filed. The exact date of the audit is not yet set but we hope it will be as productive as it was last year.
Pat Kirby continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations (especially handling most of the membership entries into the portal) as well as onsite at our conferences.
Publications, Journals and Royalties:
With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates now handling print-on-demand of our publications, I received no requests for hardcopy publications in the office this year.
The Curran Associates agreement has turned out to be a good one for both them and the ACL. We have received a total of $3,915.49 in royalties from them, covering the 4th quarter of 2014 through the 3rd quarter of 2015. Copyright Clearance Center has not sent any earnings to ACL for the CY 2015, nor has MIT Press Journals.
MIT Press Journals has sent us an invoice for their fiscal year, July 2014 - June 2015 in the amount of $36,371.05 for their services related to the Computational Linguistics Journal. We now seem to be on track with annual invoicing and are currently up-to-date with payments.
Our journals pay an editorial assistant to help with the process. In 2015, the CL Journal’s assistant was paid a total of $10,679 and the TACL Journal’s assistant was paid $2,592. The TACL assistant is a fairly new position, only filled for the later part of the year.
Membership:
Since 2006 we have consistently numbered over 2000 members and exceeded any previous final year numbers by ending 2015 with 2,536 members. The main reason for this is holding our ACL/IJCNLP 2015 meeting in Beijing. By deviating from our normal registration process to accommodate the Chinese attendees, I believe more locals were able to come and this is shown by a marked rise in Asian memberships, increasing by over 500 (mostly Chinese). I expect we will be over 2,000 members by the end of 2016 and hope we can maintain the newly found Asian population. The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be representing between 55 and 60 countries on a regular basis and, in 2015, exceeded this with a total of 65 countries being represented by our membership.
We began 2015 with around 150 members who were in the middle of a multi-year membership and added 203 members directly through portal membership payments for a total of 353 this year. As is becoming the more standard, most memberships come from conference registrations. At the end of 2015, about 78% of the 2015 memberships were generated by NAACL 2015 attendance (29%), ACL/IJCNLP 2015 attendance (30%), and EMNLP 2015 (19%). Please see Membership spreadsheets for the final 2015 details on countries represented and member statistics.
Pat and I continue to do our best to keep the membership information updated and as correct as possible from information gathered on conference registration forms, although I wish members would update their information on a regular basis themselves. The portal seems to be giving us less problems lately although I do still double-check the accuracy of the information and a few things are slightly different now that we have transitioned to having the main webpages integrated with the portal. And, of course, Min and Pranav (our current webmaster) have been extremely responsive to and helpful with any requests I have. I now look forward to working with Jing-Shin Chang, our new Information Officer.
Issue for discussion: Changing the Membership Year:
As shown above, about 78% of all memberships are paid along with conference registrations. This means that, while our actual membership year is January 1st through December 31st regardless of when one joins/renews, in people’s minds the year runs conference to conference. Those who pay directly for their memberships in the last quarter of the calendar year, especially those paying in December, are taken back when reminded in early January to pay to renew their memberships again.
One thought might be to change the membership year to June 1 through May 31...This would then coincide with most of our conferences and give (almost everyone) a full year membership. Since most people pay their membership as part of the conference registration, maybe aiming for some period that converges better with conferences could work? Of course, there could be problems as Graeme pointed out in an earlier email discussion:
“People would try to game or dispute the system, because the later they register for a conference and pay their membership, the more likely it is that the membership will also cover another conference. For example, if I become a member for the ACL 2016 conference in August 2016, am I covered for the ACL 2017 conference in July 2017? If I register late enough, then I can cover both conferences (and ACL will lose some income). If I register too early, then I will argue that my membership “really” begins on the date of the conference, regardless of the date I actually paid, and that I am therefore covered for next year’s conference as well.”
The other possibility would be to have 3-5 annual membership periods each coinciding with the dates of conferences and announce to all members and conference attendees that the new annual memberships run conference to conference. The Office would only have to track up to 4 end dates to remind people to renew and this could avoid some of Graeme’s scenarios which would most certainly happen otherwise. The idea might be: Attend EMNLP 2016 and be good until EMNLP 2017 then expire; attend NAACL 2016 and be good to (NA)ACL 2017 then expire, etc. And, anyone not attending any conferences in a given year could renew their membership at the beginning of the calendar year. Or, running memberships to begin at the beginning of each quarter might work: EACL may be first quarter if held in March or second quarter along with NAACL (typically held in June), ACLs members would be third quarter and EMNLP would be either third or fourth quarter.
Fellows Program:
With the nomination, recommendation and selection process finalized in December, certificates were signed and mailed to each new Fellow. A committee has been formed to review and possibly adjust the selection process before this coming fall when the next group of fellows will be nominated.
Conferences:
NAACL 2015 was held in Denver, Colorado, at the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel, May 31-June 6. This conference set an all-time record attendance for NAACLs with 908 final paying attendees (about a 25% increase over 2013, the last independent conference) after taking out people who did not show up and others who cancelled. Having such a large number of attendees has caused some additional work in planning and communications (over 140 visa invitations issued, re-planning both catering and space configurations, hotel being sold out at our conference rates, etc.). Acting as Local Arrangements Chair means that both the organizational work and registrations were managed by the Office. And, a post-conference questionnaire was sent to the attendees immediately after the conference to gather valuable feedback on how to improve the attendees’ experience. While the financials are not completed for NAACL 2015, I have every expectation of reaping a nice surplus.
The ACL/IJCNLP 2015, held in Beijing, July 26-31, was somewhat unique for ACLs. Due to financial and other restrictions and complications, registration for the Chinese participants had to be completely managed locally within China. This means the Office handled the “international” audience and the Chinese financials and statistics had to be provided to Graeme and Priscilla to make a complete picture of the conference. The office had worked closely with the local organizers in Beijing on all aspects of the organization as well as managing the non-Chinese registrations. The combined total registration was 1,141, with the Chinese registrations totaled 396 and the non-Chinese registrations totaled 745. This is somewhat higher than previous final counts when ACLs are in Asia (Singapore, 2009, had 850 and Jeju, 2012, had 931). Final financial reporting is yet to come.
EMNLP 2015, held in Lisbon, Portugal, September 17-22, was a great success. Final registrations totaled 775 which is the highest ever for an EMNLP (2013 was 518, for example). The Office provided advice, general support, and managed the registrations. It is expected that a decent surplus should be made from this conference.
It has been difficult to project attendance at ACL/IJCNLP, NAACL and EMNLP for 2015 since both EACL 2014 and ACL 2014 had their highest attendances on record. And, while EMNLP 2014 had a lower attendance, EMNLP 2013 was also their highest attended EMNLP conference. Planning for each conference based on previous years in general and being prepared for more than expected numbers is critical again for 2016 until we see a couple of years numbers and can again trust our newly-adjusted predictions.
As I continue as Local Arrangements Chair for NAACL 2016, contracts for the venue are already signed to be at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina, June 12 – 17. Much of the planning is already in place and, after Priscilla’s site visit the first week of March, final details will be worked out. We hope registration can open before the end of March or by April 1st.
ACL 2016 will be held in Berlin, August 7-11, at Humboldt University. The planning is well underway, contracts are all in place, social event and other “side” events are almost finalized, and it seems a great many people are looking forward to coming to Berlin. This may be as large as ACL 2014 in Baltimore (our largest conference so far) or even higher. And, (NA)ACL 2017 will be held at the Westin Bayshore Hotel in Vancouver, Canada, July 30 – August 5, 2017. Graeme and Priscilla have already made the site visit and reported back to the Executive Board. Precise planning will begin in the fall of this year with Priscilla acting as Local Arrangements Chair.
EMNLP 2016, to be co-located with AMTA 2016 in Austin, Texas, has begun its planning, the Hilton hotel contract has been signed, and Priscilla (acting as Local Arrangements Chair) will be making a site visit the first week of March to both Austin and San Diego (for NAACL 2016). Due to ill health, Jan Wiebe was replaced by Jian Su as General Chair.
As a side note, it is good to remember that poster sessions are always very difficult to set up in a way that pleases the majority of attendees. Michael Strube, the ACL/IJCNLP 2015 co-Program Chair, developed a schema to optimally lay out the posters, demos and food/beverages, allowing ample walk space, and this is now the guide to be used for all future conferences. It is included at the ACL wiki in the Conference Handbook. Additionally, workshops are becoming more and more mini-conferences complete with poster sessions. These are often more difficult to coordinate and organize, and for which finding adequate space is essential.
Issue for discussion: Student Lunches at conferences:
Current Question: After lengthy discussions among the International Sponsorship Committee, there seemed to be a fairly even split among those who liked moving forward with a Recruitment Lunch and those who seemed rather strongly opposed. Those opposing it felt that the big companies already do side receptions that satisfy their recruiting needs and smaller companies/universities would not be so interested or afford reasonable charges we might set. So, this was not included in our 2016 Sponsorship Booklet as an option. There still may be enough interest among the ACL 2016 organizers to try this idea as a test, though.
My question now is whether to keep the “old” Student Lunch (especially for NAACL 2016 and, possibly, for ACL 2016 if they do not move forward with a Recruiterment Lunch) or shall we eliminate the Student Lunch entirely?
Previous Question and Background: Do we need to change the Student Lunch? When we were a small conference (in the old days with Don Walker), the intention was to give the students a chance to mingle and get to know their future lifelong colleagues. Now that we're at 350-400+ students, it has turned into simply a "get your free lunch and get out of here" event. I feel the purpose has been lost and the expense and difficulty in finding suitable places is quite large. One idea we tried at ACL 2014 was to get Platinum or Gold sponsors to sponsor the lunch for an additional fee and allow them to do a presentation at the lunch. We had 2 sponsors buy into this at ACL 2014 but had no takers for any of our 2015 meetings. So, should we continue with the Student Lunch at all and, if so, should it be revamped in any way? One idea might be to clearly offer this in the Sponsor Booklet for *anyone* and for a lesser fee (currently, it is $6,000). It would be advertised as a Recruiter’s Luncheon, have each institution get 10 minutes promo time (with av) and offer a small room for interviewing that they could reserve during the conference. Or, not offer the small room but set up an area within the lunch space for them to make contacts. Or…Please come up with suggestions.
Conference Sponsorship:
NAACL 2015 had sponsorships totaling $58,971 plus $4,600 sponsoring various workshops and the SRW. In addition to our ever faithful sponsors (A9, Baobab, Bloomberg, Google, IBM Research, Microsoft, Nuance, SDL, University of Washington, USC/ISI, Yahoo!, etc.), we welcomed new and hopefully continuing sponsors (3M, Machine Zone, VoiceBox, Goldman Sachs and DigitalRoots).
For ACL/IJCNLP 2015, the office received sponsorships totaling $56,830 and an additional $69,020 equivalent was donated directly to the local organizers. Once again, our usual sponsors (Amazon, Baidu, Baobab, Facebook, Google, IBM Research, Microsoft, Nuance, Yandex) plus VoiceBox made up our sponsor list combined with Tencent, CreditEase, Samsung, Alibaba, Sino Voice, and Sogou.com as local supporters. And, an additional $6,000 was received by the Office in support of a workshop and CoNLL.
$47,229 was collected by the Office plus about $1,200 directly to the local team as EMNLP 2015 sponsorships. Many are the result of 2-Pack or 3-Pack sponsorship agreements so the same companies as listed above (Amazon, Baidu, Bloomberg, Facebook, Google, ISI, Nuance, and VoiceBox) plus Recruit Technologies and Rakuten Inst of Technology generously donated.
The new idea of offering 2-Pack or 3-Pack options and including EMNLP allowed sponsors to make one payment to support two or all three events rather than one at a time. This made sponsoring easier, especially for our ongoing sponsors. For the 2016 Sponsorship Booklet that the International Sponsorship Committee and I pulled together, we continue to offer these multi-pack options. So far this year, we have four 3-Pack Platinum or Gold sponsors (Bloomberg, ebay, Facebook, and Google) and one 2-Pack sponsor (Yandex) for a main conference grand total of $63,928 ($26,274 ACL; $18,281 NAACL and $19,373 EMNLP) plus various workshops’ sponsorships totaling $3,200. Many other companies have indicated they are deciding what they will be able to do this year.
One point to keep in mind is that, while it may seem that we should be able to draw more in sponsorship support, many companies are the same ones supporting all of our conferences and they may look at it as “support to ACL” regardless of which ACL event it is. So, it is important to see that our “ACL total support” is actually $237,850 for last year. This total is in keeping with the highest sponsorship totals I know of for other societies that hold only one conference a year. Of course, there are new industries apparently interested in our research areas that we do need to make efforts to tap into.
The 2 sponsorship chairs positions for Europe have been filled as well as both Asian positions. We also have an EMNLP sponsorship chair and Local Sponsorship Chairs for both Europe and North America. This makes the Sponsorship Committee complete.
The area Sponsorship Chairs and the Local Arrangement Sponsorship Chairs are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them. And, many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!
MEMBERSHIP REPORT 2006-2015 STATISTICS
February 18, 2016
| (all full-year finals) | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 |
| TOTAL MEMBERSHIP | 2123 | 2104 | 1602 | 2151 | 2136 | 2028 | 2064 | 2093 | 1990 | 2536 |
| TOTAL REGULAR | 1326 | 1365 | 1137 | 1402 | 1162 | 1111 | 1252 | 1232 | 1345 | 1488 |
| TOTAL STUDENTS | 521 | 729 | 463 | 749 | 974 | 917 | 812 | 861 | 645 | 1048 |
| DISCOUNTS APPLIED TO ABOVE: | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| REDUCED RATES | 8 | 12 | 8 | 4 | 282 | 276 | 81 | 84 | 41 | 188 |
| AMTA DISCOUNTS | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 2 |
| ISCA DISCOUNTS | 1 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 14 | 4 | 1 | 5 | 2 |
| HLT/NAACL FREE YEAR | 540 | 324 | 0 | 535 | 548 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| COLING/ACL FREE HALF YEAR | 301 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| COLING/ACL FREE FULL YEAR | 188 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| TOTAL BY WORLD AREA: | ||||||||||
| TOTAL ASIA/PACIFIC RIM | 419 | 314 | 214 | 384 | 569 | 552 | 539 | 355 | 277 | 793 |
| TOTAL CANADA/MEXICO | 93 | 83 | 59 | 54 | 60 | 51 | 82 | 56 | 65 | 68 |
| TOTAL EUROPE | 676 | 803 | 439 | 639 | 614 | 564 | 694 | 786 | 709 | 776 |
| TOTAL SOUTH AMERICA | 5 | 10 | 10 | 9 | 22 | 16 | 17 | 9 | 8 | 12 |
| TOTAL USA | 930 | 894 | 880 | 823 | 871 | 845 | 732 | 887 | 931 | 887 |
HOW MEMBERSHIPS CAME IN:
| MEMBERSHIPS-ONLY | 870 | 981 | 1602 | 2151 | 2136 | 2028 | 2064 | 2093 | 1990 | 2536 |
| MEMBERSHIPS + ORDERS | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| ORDERS (FROM OUTSIDE ACL) | 38 | 64 | 24 | 17 | 5 | 8 | 4 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| ORDERS (From ACL Membership) | 0 | 223 | 7 | 5 | 0 | 2 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
THROUGH CONFERENCES:
| EACL 2006 | 224 | |
| HLT/NAACL 2006 | 540 | ('+ 126 extended through 2007) |
| COLING/ACL 2006 | 489 | |
| NAACL HLT 2007 | 324 | ('+ 145 extended through 2008) |
| ACL 2007 | 759 | (790 '- 31 Fraudulent and No-Shows who did not pay) |
| ACL 2008 (incl. vol, spkrs, spons) | 426 | |
| EMNLP 2008 | 110 | |
| EACL 2009 | 355 | |
| NAACL 2009 | 535 | ('+ 133 extended through 2010) |
| ACL/IJCNLP 2009 | 632 | |
| NAACL HLT 2010 | 548 | ('+ 78 extended through 2011) |
| ACL 2010 | 767 | (new or renewed members captured of the 950 total attendees) |
| INLG 2010 | 26 | (new or renewed members captured of the 49 total attendees) |
| EMNLP 2010 | 141 | (new or renewed members captured of the 292 total attendees) |
| ACL 2011 | 866 | |
| EACL 2012 | 288 | |
| NAACL 2012 | 535 | |
| ACL 2012 | 697 | (Includes EMNLP/CoNLL and SIGdial 2012) |
| Others such as INLG 2012 | 0 | (any memberships from INLG went through normal online membership) |
| NAACL 2013 | 552 | |
| ACL 2013 | 696 | |
| EMNLP 2013 | 301 | |
| EACL 2014 | 336 | |
| ACL 2014 | 1048 | |
| Joint INLG and SIGdial 2014 | N/A | If membership was owed, they were told to update through the portal |
| EMNLP 2014 | N/A | If membership was owed, they were told to update through the portal |
| NAACL 2015 | 726 | More to come--If membership is owed, they were told to pay through the portal |
| ACL 2015 | 769 | Includes 243 through Chinese-run registrations |
| EMNLP 2015 | 473 |
MEMBERSHIPS BY COUNTRY -- January 1 - December 31, 2015 February 17, 2016
| TOTAL | REG | STUD | TOTAL | REG | STUD | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AUSTRALIA | 24 | 12 | 12 | MACAU | 2 | 2 | ||
| AUSTRIA | 3 | 2 | 1 | MALAYSIA | 1 | 1 | ||
| BELGIUM | 18 | 10 | 8 | MALTA | 1 | 1 | ||
| BRAZIL | 10 | 6 | 4 | MEXICO | 4 | 1 | 3 | |
| BULGARIA | 1 | 1 | NETHERLANDS | 47 | 27 | 20 | ||
| CANADA | 64 | 34 | 30 | NORWAY | 9 | 7 | 2 | |
| CHILE | 1 | 1 | PAKISTAN | 3 | 3 | |||
| CHINA | 438 | 180 | 258 | PORTUGAL | 11 | 6 | 5 | |
| CROATIA | 2 | 1 | 1 | PHILLIPINES | 1 | 1 | ||
| CZECH REPUBLIC | 12 | 7 | 5 | POLAND | 3 | 3 | ||
| DENMARK | 11 | 8 | 3 | QATAR | 14 | 13 | 1 | |
| ESTONIA | 3 | 2 | 1 | ROMANIA | 1 | 1 | ||
| EGYPT | 3 | 1 | 2 | RUSSIA | 12 | 9 | 3 | |
| FINLAND | 7 | 4 | 3 | SAUDI ARABIA | 3 | 3 | ||
| FRANCE | 65 | 47 | 18 | SINGAPORE | 33 | 20 | 13 | |
| GERMANY | 176 | 89 | 87 | SLOVAKIA | 1 | 1 | ||
| GREECE | 11 | 7 | 4 | SLOVENIA | 2 | 2 | ||
| HONG KONG | 20 | 13 | 7 | SOUTH AFRICA | 1 | 1 | ||
| HUNGARY | 8 | 3 | 5 | SPAIN | 46 | 28 | 18 | |
| INDIA | 32 | 16 | 16 | SWEDEN | 28 | 14 | 14 | |
| INDONESIA | 1 | 1 | SWITZERLAND | 17 | 9 | 8 | ||
| IRAN | 1 | 1 | TAIWAN | 24 | 14 | 10 | ||
| IRELAND | 22 | 14 | 8 | THAILAND | 1 | 1 | ||
| ISRAEL | 26 | 14 | 12 | TURKEY | 7 | 2 | 5 | |
| ITALY | 41 | 20 | 21 | UKRAINE | 1 | 1 | ||
| JAPAN | 150 | 107 | 43 | UNITED ARAB EMIRATES | 4 | 4 | ||
| JORDAN | 1 | 1 | UNITED KINGDOM | 142 | 83 | 59 | ||
| KAZAKHSTAN | 1 | 1 | UNITED STATES | 887 | 586 | 301 | ||
| KOREA, REPUBLIC OF | 63 | 41 | 22 | URUGUAY | 1 | 1 | ||
| KUWAIT | 1 | 1 | VIET NAM | 3 | 1 | 2 | ||
| LATVIA | 5 | 3 | 2 | YUGOSLAVIA | 1 | 1 | ||
| LEBANON | 1 | 1 | TOTALS | 2,536 | 1,488 | 1,048 | ||
| LITHUANIA | 1 | 1 | ||||||
| LUXEMBOURG | 2 | 2 | ||||||
| 65 COUNTRIES/REGIONS REPRESENTED | ||||||||