2016Q3 Reports: Tutorial Chairs

Prepared July 8, 2016

Alexandra Birch (University of Edinburgh)

Willem Zuidema (University of Amsterdam)

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 15, 2016
Notification of acceptance: February 12, 2016
Tutorial descriptions due: March 11, 2016

ACL:

ACL Tutorial course material due: July 7, 2016
ACL Tutorial date: August 7, 2016

Call and selection procedure

The call for proposals (CFP) was posted the 10th of September, 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) (15)
quality of instructor (1=poor, 5=great) (15)
quality of proposal i.e. outline and whether depth/breadth is adequate (15)
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) (15)
1st preference for venue as indicated in proposal
comments

Each proposal was reviewed twice and given a total score. 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 made a tentative decision for the venue they're assigned to
we discussed the remaining/conflicting/redundant proposals, and tried to balance topics across venues

The 6 tutorial co-chairs reached consensus and agreed on selecting 8 half-day proposals for ACL. Acceptance letters were personalized by venue, then sent via softconf. We did not send feedback to proposers.

Selected tutorials

Tutorials were assigned by the tutorials chairs to morning or afternoon slots, in a way that tried to minimize overlap in potential audience between tutorials.

Morning Tutorials

Multimodal Learning and Reasoning

Desmond Elliott, Douwe Kiela and Angeliki Lazaridou

NLP Approaches to Computational Argumentation

Noam Slonim, Iryna Gurevych, Chris Reed and Benno Stein

Computer Aided Translation

Philipp Koehn

Semantic Representations of Word Senses and Concepts

José Camacho-Collados, Ignacio Iacobacci, Roberto Navigli and Mohammad Taher Pilehvar

Afternoon Tutorials

Neural Machine Translation

Thang Luong, Kyunghyun Cho and Christopher D. Manning

Game Theory and Natural Language: Origin, Evolution and Processing

Rocco Tripodi and Marcello Pelillo

Understanding Short Texts

Zhongyuan Wang and Haixun Wang

MetaNet: Repository, Identification System, and Applications

Miriam R L Petruck and Ellen K Dodge

Tutorial descriptions

The original tutorial proposals were submitted through the START system. Tutorial presenters submitted final versions of their tutorial descriptions by email to the tutorial chairs. These were converted by hand by the chairs and Kostadin Cholakov (local organizing committee) to a format appropriate for the ACL'16 website. We are currently in the process of collecting course materials from the presenters, but there is no plan to print them. We have collected abstracts of the tutorials for inclusion in the conference handbook.

There was some confusion among both co-chairs and presenters about the submission procedures for the final tutorial descriptions (for website and conference handbook), which led to presenters submitting by email in many different formats and extra (error prone) manual work in converting formats and correcting errors in the texts. The 'tutorial materials due' deadline, included in the acceptance email, seems obsolete in hindsight, as no materials at printed anymore.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Alexander Rush and Bishan Yang (NAACL tutorial chairs), Rebecca Hwa and Mohit Bansal (EMNLP tutorial chairs), Valia Kordoni and Kostadin Cholakov (local organizing committee), Florian Kunnerman and Yannick Versley (publication chair), and Priscilla Rasmussen (ACL), 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.