2017Q1 Reports: ACL 2017

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General Chair

Chris Callison-Burch, University of Pennsylvania

The 55th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) will take place in Vancouver, Canada. ACL 2017 will be held at the Westin Bayshore Hotel in downtown Vancouver from July 30th through August 4th, 2017. I have organized an excellent team to put together the conference. I have structured this report around their activities. In addition to what is reported below, I am hoping to add some options to make our conference friendlier to participants bringing their children along. We are going to investigate childcare options and possibly allowing conference goers to purchase breakfasts and dinners for their family members.

A note on gender balance in the organizing committee: I attempted to recruit an even number of women and men to organize ACL 2017. There are 13 male organizers (including myself) and 11 female organizers.

Program Co-Chairs

Regina Barzilay, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Min-Yen Kan, National University of Singapore

The program co-chairs have been maintaining a blog about their process in part to increase transparency and in part to solicit feedback from the community on their new ideas. I encourage you to read it: https://chairs-blog.acl2017.org

The program co-chairs have recruited over 60 area chairs, in part through an open call inviting nominations and self-nominations (https://chairs-blog.acl2017.org/2016/10/24/help-us-recruit-the-best-area-chairs/).

Biomedical

Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics

Dialogue and Interactive Systems

Discourse and Pragmatics

Information Extraction and Retrieval, Question Answering, Text Mining, Document Analysis and NLP Applications

Machine Learning

Machine Translation

Multidisciplinary

Multilinguality

Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation

Resources and Evaluation

Semantics

Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining

Social Media

Speech

Summarization and Generation

Tagging, Chunking, Syntax and Parsing

Vision, Robotics and Grounding


The program co-chairs attempted to have a balanced set of area chairs in terms of gender, geography and seniority. Here’s a thoughtful analysis that they did of the makeup of their team: https://chairs-blog.acl2017.org/2017/01/14/on-the-process-of-area-chair-selection/

In addition to recruiting the 60 area chairs, the program co-chairs invited 1,532 reviewers, explaining their new procedure including a shortened reviewer time and the integration with the Toronto paper matching system (http://torontopapermatching.org/webapp/profileBrowser/about_us/). This blog post explains the changes to the reviewing process this year: https://chairs-blog.acl2017.org/2016/12/26/changes-to-the-reviewing-process/ 1,228 invitees accepted the invitation and 169 that had to decline. Of the 1,228 that accepted to be reviewers, 893 (72%) have finished the requested survey and we have their area preferences and keywords. Min and Regina and the area chairs manually assigned the reviewers to corresponding areas for the stragglers. The program co-chairs also invited PhD students who had previous publications in NLP venues to participate in the reviewing process.

The deadline for long and short paper submissions recently passed (it was Monday, Feb 6th). We received 829 long paper submissions, and 590 short paper submissions (1,359 total). After removing duplicates and erroneous submissions, 751 long papers and 567 short papers remained (1,318 total). Here are the historical submission rates: https://www.aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=Conference_acceptance_rates Last year there were 825 long paper submissions (a record) and 463 short paper submissions (1,288 total).

Here is the program co-chairs blog post about the paper submission process and assigning the papers to areas: https://chairs-blog.acl2017.org/2017/02/15/statistics-on-submissions-and-status-update/

Upcoming items on the reviewing are:

  • Feb 9-12 Paper bidding
  • Feb 13 ACs assign papers to reviewers
  • Feb 13-27 Paper reviewing
  • Feb 28 AC check that all reviews have been received
  • Mar 13-15 Author response period
  • Mar 16-20 Reviewers update reviews after reading author response
  • Mar 25 ACs send preliminary ranking to PCs
  • Mar 28 ACs produce Meta reviews for borderline papers; ACs produce Final rankings and Accept / Reject decisions
  • Mar 28 PCs create preliminary program
  • Mar 30 Notification of acceptance
  • April 22 Camera ready deadline
  • Apr 30 PCs finalize candidate pool for best papers

Other upcoming tasks:

  • Select invited speakers
  • Invite best paper panel; select best papers
  • Follow up with the TACL editors to see how many papers will be presented at ACL
  • Decide on which papers will be presented as talks and which as posters (including for TACL papers)
  • Set the program (include the SRW and Demo papers during the evening poster sessions)

Local Organizing Committee

Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL
Anoop Sarkar, Simon Fraser University
with help from Graeme Hirst

Priscilla Rasmussen and Graeme Hirst did a site visit in December, along with Anoop Sarkar, who has joined as the local Local Arrangements Chair. The goals of their site visit included figuring out how to fit a large conference and recruiting lunch into the hotel space, finding nearby cheaper hotels for students etc, and searching for venues for the social event and for the Recognition Dinner (formerly known as the Exec++ dinner). The Recognition dinner will be a cruise in the harbour during a fireworks show on Wednesday evening. The Social Event for all attendees will be at the Vancouver Aquarium.

They discovered that the week of our conference is an extremely busy week for tourism in Vancouver. It is it Gay Pride Week (the big parade will be the Sunday after our conference), and it is also the week of the annual major fireworks festival, Honda Celebration of Light http://hondacelebrationoflight.com/ which has three nights of firework displays that bring out hundreds of thousands of people. The fireworks will happen at 22:00 on the Saturday before our conference, the following Wednesday (the last day of the main conference), and the Saturday after, and prime viewing areas are within a 20-minute walk of the Westin Bayshore, our conference venue (and all around English Bay https://goo.gl/maps/ZyhNbst3h7u). We will encourage our conference guests to join the excitement.

But because of all this, cheap hotels will be expensive during the week of the conference. The Westin Bayshore was not able to increase our room block there (we already have about 85% of all their rooms) so we contracted with the Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre and the Marriott Vancouver Pinnacle Downtown for additional spillover blocks of rooms for non-students at slightly higher rates than the Westin. For students, we were able to get 10 rooms at a super discounted rate at the Westin Bayshore plus a small block of rooms at the YWCA (actually a hotel) and at the Georgian Court Hotel.

Additionally we have a spillover block of rooms at the Sheraton for regular conference goers at slightly higher than the Westin pricing.

Priscilla has been working with the Workshop Chairs and verified that we have ample space for all workshops and appropriately sized rooms at the Westin to accommodate higher attendance. The poster sessions will be tricky to get set up since we have to reuse some of the parallel session rooms rather than having a separate space (as in NAACL and ACL 2016) but it is more our burden than anything the attendees will see (hopefully!). We do have to get started in advertising the Recruitment Lunch and begin getting this plan in place soon.

Kostadin Cholakov, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, has agreed to be the student volunteer coordinator after being an excellent helper to Priscilla at ACL in Berlin.

Tutorial Chairs

Maja Popović, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Jordan Boyd-Graber, University of Colorado, Boulder

In total, we received 26 submissions for the joint ACL/EACL/EMNLP call, and we accepted 19 of them. Nine tutorials had ACL as the preferred conference: one was rejected, two were redirected to EMNLP, and the rest were accepted.

The following six tutorials were accepted for ACL 2017:

1) Multimodal Machine Learning - Louis-Philippe Morency and Tadas Baltrusaitis

Multimodal machine learning is a vibrant multi-disciplinary research field which addresses some of the original goals of artificial intelligence by integrating and modeling multiple communicative modalities, including linguistic, acoustic and visual messages. With the initial research on audio-visual speech recognition and more recently with image and video captioning projects, this research field brings some unique challenges for multimodal researchers given the heterogeneity of the data and the contingency often found between modalities. The present tutorial will review fundamental concepts of machine learning and deep neural networks before describing the five main challenges in multimodal machine learning.

2) Deep Learning for Dialogue Systems - Yun-Nung Chen, Asli Celikyilmaz, and Dilek Hakkani-Tur

The traditional conversational systems have rather complex and/or modular pipelines. The advance of deep learning technologies has recently risen the applications of neural models to dialogue modeling. Nevertheless, applying deep learning technologies for building robust and scalable dialogue systems is still a challenging task and an open research area as it requires deeper understanding of the classic pipelines as well as detailed knowledge on the benchmark of the models of the prior work and the recent state-of-the-art work. Thus, this tutorial is designed to focus on an overview of the dialogue system development while describing most recent research for building dialogue systems, and summarizing the challenges.


3) Deep Learning for Semantic Composition - Xiaodan Zhu and Edward Grefenstette

Learning representation to model the meaning of text has been a core problem in NLP. The last several years have seen extensive interests on distributional approaches, in which text spans of different granularities are encoded as vectors of numerical values. If properly learned, such representation has showed to achieve the state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of NLP problems. This tutorial will cover the fundamentals and the state-of-the-art research on neural network-based modeling for semantic composition, which aims to learn distributed representation for different granularities of text, e.g., phrases, sentences, or even documents, from their sub-component meaning representation, e.g., word embedding.


4) Beyond Words: Deep Learning for Multi-word Expressions and Collocations - Valia Kordoni

The aim of this tutorial is to go beyond the learning of word vectors and present methods for learning vector representations for Multiword Expressions and bilingual phrase pairs, all of which are useful for various NLP applications. This tutorial aims to provide attendees with a clear notion of the linguistic and distributional characteristics of Multiword Expressions (MWEs), their relevance for the intersection of deep learning and natural language processing, what methods and resources are available to support their use, and what more could be done in the future.


5) Natural Language Processing for Precision Medicine - Hoifung Poon, Chris Quirk, Kristina Toutanova, and Wen-tau Yih

The tutorial will introduce precision medicine and showcase the vast opportunities for NLP in this burgeoning field with great societal impact. Pressing NLP problems, state-of-the art methods, and important applications, as well as datasets, medical resources, and practical issues will be reviewed. The tutorial will provide an accessible overview of biomedicine, and does not presume knowledge in biology or healthcare. The ultimate goal is to reduce the entry barrier for NLP researchers to contribute to this exciting domain.

6) Making Better Use of the Crowd - Jennifer Wortman Vaughan

Over the last decade, crowdsourcing has been used to harness the power of human computation to solve tasks that are notoriously difficult to solve with computers alone, such as determining whether or not an image contains a tree, rating the relevance of a website, or verifying the phone number of a business. This tutorial will show innovative uses of crowdsourcing that go beyond data collection and annotation: applications to natural language processing and machine learning, hybrid intelligence or “human in the loop” AI systems that leverage the complementary strengths of humans and machines in order to achieve more than either could achieve alone, and large scale studies of human behavior online.


Workshop Chairs

Wei Xu, Ohio State University
Jonathan Berant, Tel Aviv University


The workshop chairs selected 14 workshops to be held immediately following the ACL 2017 conference. There will be two additional workshops - the Student Research Workshop (SRW) which will be held during one of the evening poster sessions during the main conference, and the Women in NLP workshop which will be held before the conference on the tutorial day.

The workshop chairs used a new procedure for selecting workshops:

  1. Each of the workshop proposals were reviewed by two workshop chairs in the SoftConf systems, with numerical scores and textual comments, similar to ACL paper reviews. The evaluation were primarily based on the proposals, and sometimes the web survey results are consulted (below).
  2. We also conducted a web-based survey to around 3000 past ACL conference/workshop registrants and received more than 700 responses and overwhelmingly positive feedbacks from survey participants. We used survey results to compare the popularity of workshops on similar topics and first-time workshops, as well as the past attendance numbers if available.

We successfully encouraged LaTech and CLfL for a merge and allocated both to ACL to help this subfield to gain more tractions. After much discussion, we also accepted the NMT workshop’s request to change their location from EACL to ACL. We did not receive any complaints from rejected workshop organizers this year.

Here are the 14 selected workshops / colocated conferences:

2 Day Workshops (Aug 3-4)
Abbreviation Title Organizers Website
*Sem The Sixth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics Aurelie Herbel and Lluis Marquez https://sites.google.com/site/starsem2017/
CoNLL The SIGNLL Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Lucia Specia and Roger Levy http://www.conll.org/
SemEval 11th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluations Steven Bethard, Marine Carpuat, Marianna Apidianaki and Saif Mohammad http://alt.qcri.org/semeval2017/


1 day workshops on August 3:
Abbreviation Workshop title Workshop organizers Website
TextGraphs-11 TextGraphs-11: Graph-based Methods for Natural Language Processing Martin Riedl, Swapna Somasundaran, Goran Glavaš and Eduard Hovy http://textgraphs.org/ws17
BUCC 10th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora Serge Sharoff, Pierre Zweigenbaum and Reinhard Rapp https://comparable.limsi.fr/
RepL4NLP 2nd Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP Phil Blunsom, Antoine Bordes, Shay B. Cohen, Kyunghyun Cho, Chris Dyer, Edward Grefenstette, Karl Moritz Hermann, Laura Rimell, Jason Weston and Wen-tau Yih https://sites.google.com/site/repl4nlp2017
RoboNLP 1st Workshop on Language Grounding for Robotics Mohit Bansal, Cynthia Matuszek, Jacob Andreas, Yoav Artzi and Yonatan Bisk https://robonlp2017.github.io/
NLP+CSS 2nd workshop on NLP and Computational Social Science Dirk Hovy, A. Seza Doğruöz, Oren Tsur, David Bamman, David Jurgens and Brendan O'Connor https://sites.google.com/site/nlpandcss/nlp-css-at-acl-2017
CLPsych 4th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology - From Linguistic Signal to Clinical Reality Kristy Hollingshead, Molly Ireland and Kate Loveys http://clpsych.org/
1 day workshops on August 4
Abbreviation Workshop title Workshop organizers Website
LaTeCH-CLfL Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature Beatrice Alex, Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Anna Feldman, Anna Kazantseva, Nils Reiter and Stan Szpakowicz https://sighum.wordpress.com/events/latech-clfl-2017/
BioNLP17 BioNLP 2017 Dina Demner-Fushman, Kevin Cohen, Sophia Ananiadou and Jun'ichi Tsujii https://www.aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=BioNLP_Workshop
EventStory Events and Stories in the News Tommaso Caselli, Ben Miller, Marieke van Erp, Piek Vossen, Martha Palmer, Eduard Hovy, Teruko Mitamura and David Caswell https://sites.google.com/site/eventsandstoriesinthenews/
Abusive 1st Workshop on Abusive Language Online Zeerak Waseem, Dirk Hovy, Joel Tetreault and Wendy Chun https://sites.google.com/site/abusivelanguageworkshop2017/
NMT 1st Workshop on Neural Machine Translation Minh-Thang Luong, Graham Neubig, Alexandra Birch and Andrew Finch https://sites.google.com/site/acl17nmt

Student Research Workshop, ACL 2017

Allyson Ettinger on behalf of the SRW organizers :
Spandana Gella, University of Edinburgh
Allyson Ettinger, University of Maryland, College Park
Matthieu Labeau, Laboratoire d’Informatique pour la Mécanique et les Sciences de l’Ingénieur (LIMSI)
and faculty advisors:
Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Rochester Institute of Technology
Mark Dredze, Johns Hopkins University
Marine Carpuat, University of Maryland, College Park

Information about the Student Research Workshop (SRW) for ACL 2017 has been posted at the following URL: https://sites.google.com/site/aclsrw2017 . The SRW has been awarded a grant of $15,000 by the National Science Foundation (NSF Award Number 1714855: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1714855&HistoricalAwards=false ). The SRW will be integrated into the main ACL conference during an evening poster session. Submission deadlines for the SRW are as follows:

Pre-submission mentoring deadline: February 15, 2017 Paper submission deadline: April 21, 2017 Camera-ready submission deadline: May 24, 2017 Travel grant application deadline: June 20, 2017** We will adjust this date based on registration deadlines

Program committee recruitment is complete, with 66 confirmed PC members. Pre-submission and post-acceptance mentors will be recruited from among the PC members -- an initial survey to establish interest in mentorship responsibilities has been distributed to PC members, and it indicates that interest in pre-submission mentorship is already at a satisfactory level for the upcoming pre-submission mentoring deadline. Final post-acceptance mentor recruitment will be completed after ACL acceptances have been determined. The SRW START site has been set up. The SRW CfP has been distributed to the following lists: ACL member portal, LINGUIST List, MT-list, Ln, comp.ai.nat-lang, Corpora, SigIR, FIRE-List.


Women in NLP workshop

Libby Barak on behalf of the WiNLP organizers: Libby Barak

Isabelle Augenstein

Chloé Braud

He He
Margaret Mitchell

The workshop for Women and underrepresented minorities in NLP is scheduled to co-locate with ACL 17 on July 30, 2017. The workshop is organized by Libby Barak, Isabelle Augenstein, Chloé Braud, He He, and Margaret Mitchell. Currently, CRW agreed to fund the workshop at a level of $20,000. Several companies, including Google, Microsoft, and IBM, have agreed to fund the workshop at various levels.

The agenda of the workshop will include invited talks by 3 distinguished members of the ACL community, contributed talks by students, and mentorship session. We plan to open the workshop for submissions of abstracts to be presented mostly as posters by April 21. Notification of acceptance will be sent by May 26. More information will be available shortly on the workshop's website: http://www.winlp.org/winlp-workshop/

On the day of the workshop, we will require a room for the talks/poster session and space designated for lunch and mentoring session. We aim for the poster session to be held in parallel to the tutorial break to allow for all participants to visit the posters.

Please refer any additional questions to the organizing chairs email: winlp-chairs@googlegroups.com


Demonstration Chairs

Heng Ji, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Mohit Bansal, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

The submission deadline for demonstration papers at ACL 2017 is March 1, 2017. We plan to evaluate these based on reviews from at least two program committee members per submission. Submissions may range from early research prototypes to mature production-ready systems, including technologically innovative industrial systems. Of particular interest are publicly available open-source or open-access systems. The two demo co-chairs will then go through all the reviewer recommendations to make the final acceptance decisions. Accepted submissions will be published in a companion volume of the ACL 2017 conference proceedings, and will be presented during one of evening poster sessions. This year's ACL will also feature a Best Demo Award, with the motivation to encourage researchers to make their code publicly available and in the form of an end-to-end runnable system.


Conference Handbook Chair

Christian Federmann, Microsoft

On the advise of the ACL 2016 organizers, we create a new chair position this year to be in charge of assembling the printed conference handbook. Christian Federmann has agreed to take on those responsibilities. Here is his report:

I have read through Matt Post's "handbook chair duties" notes which are available from the ACL Wiki and checked the source code and scripts for previous ACL handbooks available on Github. Based on an email discussion with Priscilla, Matt, Drago and others, I have drafted a timeline for handbook creation (see below). For handbook production, I have blocked off time from June 4--10 to ensure that the main conference materials' integration process goes smoothly. I have identified the list of external inputs for the handbook and set deadlines for myself to collect materials and approach respective contacts. My plan is to complete a handbook draft, including cover, local guide, invited speakers' information and other "structural" information but lacking the actual conference and workshop data, by April 28. As my next step, I will contact various organizers with follow-up questions regarding some of the materials that will be required for the handbook, and adapt the timeline as necessary.

Timeline (based on discussions with Priscilla, Matt, others) - 4/28: Handbook draft, excluding conference and workshop data - 5/26: Draft workshop schedules and programs due - 6/02: Final main conference program (including poster sessions and TACL content) due - 6/12: Final workshop schedules and programs due - 7/03: Final handbook to OmniPress for printing - 7/25: Printed handbook arrives in Vancouver

I will find a place to keep a spreadsheet tracking the various dates (on Google Docs) and share this with organizers.


Webmaster and Appmaster

Nitin Madnani, Educational Testing Service

Nitin Madnani has been ably managing the conference web site (http://acl2017.org), which is set up through GitHub. In addition to his webmaster duties, he will be putting together a conference handbook app as an experiment to see if it is preferable to the printed handbook for some/many of our participants. Here is his update on his activities regarding the app:

We will use the GuideBook platform (https://guidebook.com) to build an ACL 2017 conference app that will provide attendees with all the information they'd need to get the most out of the conference. The following functionality is planned:

- Always up-to-date conference schedule with the ability to create personalized schedules for use within the app. - Search the program by keyword/author and also have a keyword/author index - Send real-time push notifications to all or a subset of attendees for room changes, cancellations of talks, reminders of venues etc. - Conduct live polls, perhaps useful for the business meeting? - Integrated twitter feed - Create exportable notes for papers and sessions - Offline version of the venue map - Make real-time changes to schedules and other app content - Provide feedback on the app _within_ the app itself.

Nitin has also designed a feature for the ACL 2017 website that will support customized schedule generation for people who prefer paper and/or don’t/can't use the app.


Publicity Chair

Charley Chan, Bloomberg

The publicity effort, which so far mainly involves disseminating information on multiple mailing lists and making announcements on social media, has been going smoothly. In addition to the ongoing effort of establishing communication with the press office at SFU and other publicity duties, going forward we will consider highlighting some of the more impactful accepted papers on social media.


Business Office

Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL

In March, I would plan to work on the working budget to set registration fees so that whole process could be done and simultaneously the registration form could be built. If we can open registration on or around April 1st, that would be sooner than we usually do and would be my target. (It takes quite a lot of back and forth and time to get all of this in place) I would suggest that, even now, we could populate the registration page with what the fees were last year and VERY CLEARLY state that we expect the fees to be similar but possibly a bit higher and last year's fees are only for attendee approximate budgeting purposes.

I think we could start any time now to set up our accommodations page and list the few hotels we recommend (just got the last of the contracts in place a week or two ago). And, both at the front page and top of the accommodations page we really need a strong notice encouraging early booking to avoid crazy high prices and nearby hotels.

Usually, I just write my letters of invitation and this has always worked well. Of course, in these days of turmoil, who knows? But, I would suggest that, for now, we could proceed as usual, with me writing the invitation letters. I think we should wait a couple of weeks to see how this immigration/travel situation settles down legally before we change to any other procedure. I don't think it'd be good to add to the confusion.

And, I'll be writing more about the conference planning and sponsorships and such in my Office Report but you may want to see where we stand right now with sponsorships so that spreadsheet is attached here.

Amount Level Sponsor
$14,644 Platinum level 2-Pack (ACL+EMNLP) $21,535 total Amazon
$18,400 Platinum Level Tencent Technology
$2,176 Bronze 2-Pack ACL + EMNLP Yandex
$8,851 Gold 3-Pack $15,900 total ebay
$1,400 Supporter Level University of Washington
$14,644 Platinum 2-pack (with EMNLP) total of $21,535 Apple
$14,644 Platinum Level 2-Pack with EMNLP total $21,535 Google
$8,786 Gold 2-pack (with EMNLP) total of $12,920 Microsoft
$8,786 Gold 2-pack (with EMNLP) total of $12,920 IBM
$92,331 Total Commitments

Apple is joining us as a sponsor for the first time this year. We expect to go well over $100K in total main conference sponsorships.

In addition to the main conference sponsorships, some of the workshop have sponsors as well:

Amount Workshop Sponsor
$500 Abusive Language Workshop New York Times
$1,000 Abusive Language Workshop Google
$1,000 Abusive Language Workshop Amazon
Direct travel support Abusive Language Workshop Bloomberg
$2,000 Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP) Microsoft
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