2016Q3 Reports: NAACL 2016

Report by Emily M. Bender, Chair of the NAACL Executive Board

NAACL 2016 took place on June 12th - June 17th, 2015 in San Diego, CA. Stats and highlights of the conference:

• The program co-chairs, Ani Nenkova and Owen Rambow pioneered a new system for recruiting reviewers and matching reviewers (and papers) to areas. The PC, with 685 reviewers, was the largest ever for a NAACL.
• The main program received 698 submissions (396 long, 284 short). The resulting program had 181 papers and posters. One short paper and three long papers were recognized as best papers and presented in the closing plenary session of the conference. This year, we experimented with shorter presentations (20 minutes for long, 10 minutes for short; including questions).
• The conference featured two inspiring invited keynotes by Regina Barzilay (on how NLP can support cancer research) and Ehud Reiter (on evaluation, with a case study of evaluation of NLG) and a panel discussion on deep learning and computational linguistics.
• The posters were introduced in two one-minute madness sessions.
• Six tutorials were held on June 12th.
• The conference also featured a student research workshop and demos.
• The main conference was followed by two days of workshops, including SemEval (held over two days) and 14 one-day workshops. The workshops covered a wide variety of topics, including computational linguistics for literature, semantics-based SMT, automated knowledge-based construction, and multilingual and cross-lingual methods in NLP.

The main conference papers, keynotes, panel discussion and one-minute-madness session were recorded by Weyond.com and the videos will be available soon via TechTalks.tv.

NAACL 2016 was made possible by the hard work of many dedicated people: Kevin Knight (General Chair), Ani Nenkova and Owen Rambow (program chairs); Priscilla Rasmussen (local arrangements chair), Radu Soricut and Adrià de Gispert (workshop co-chairs); Mohit Bansal and Alexander M. Rush (tutorial co-chairs); Jacob Andreas, Eunsol Choi, and Angeliki Lazaridou (student research workshop co-chairs); Jacob Eisenstein and Nianwen Xue (SRW faculty advisors); Mark Finlayson, Sravana Reddy and John DeNero (demo co-chairs), Aliya Deri (student volunteer coordinator), Julie Medero (local sponsorship chair), Wei Xu (publicity chair), Adam Lopez and Margaret Mitchell (publication co-chairs), Jason Riesa (website chair), and Jonathan May (social media chair).

The event was sponsored by several generous contributors: @newsela, Adobe, Amazon, Baidu, Bloomberg, Brandeis University, Cambridge University Press, Civis Analytics, ebay, Facebook, Google, Grammarly, Huawei Technologies, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, KITT.AI, Maluuba, Microsoft Research, Morgan Claypool Publishers, Nuance, Open Table, Quora, U of Washington, UNITEDHEALTH GROUP, University of Colorado at Boulder, Voicebox, and Yahoo; plus for the BEA workshop: American Institutes for Research (AIR), Cambridge Assessment, Cognii, ETS, Grammarly, iLexIR, Pacific Metrics, and Turnitin; and for CLPysch'16: Microsoft