2018Q1 Reports: ACL 2020
ACL2020 Report (Dated Feb. 28, 2018)
ACL 2020 will be held in America in collaboration with NAACL as usual. The mailing list acl20cc@aclweb.org has been set up joined with exec members from NAACL and ACL to form the ACL2020 Coordination Committee(ACL20CC).
Representatives from NAAC (4 people):
- Luke Zettlemoyer, University of Washington (2018-2019)
- Colin Cherry, National Research Council Canada, Secretary (2016-2017)
- Joel Tetreault, Yahoo Labs, Treasurer (2017-2018)
- Julia Hockenmaier, University of the Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, chair (2018-2019)
Representatives from ACL (6 people):
- Ming Zhou, Microsoft Research Asia, China, Vice-President(2018)
- Shiqi Zhao, Baidu, China, Secretary (2016-2020)
- Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto, Canada, Treasurer (2013-2017)
- David Yarowsky, , John Hopkins University, USA, new Treasurer (2018-2022)
- Barbara Di Eugenio, University of Illinois, Chicago (2018-2020)
- Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL business manager
Progress made until Feb. 28, 2018
We have announced the call for bidding of ACL 2020 at ACL portal: https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/call-bids-acl-2020. We also touched upon a few professors of some universities and companies to invite them to consider the bidding. Unfortunately, until the expiration n of this call for bidding, except a couple of PCO companies, there have not been any universities who contacted us for the bidding proposals.
Then ACL2020cc decided not to wait for the biddings but we select a city by ourselves that we think most appropriate. I suggest when we select the hosting city, we will especially consider the following factors, among many others, a) the impact and the size of the local NLP community; b) the accommodation ability of predicted 2000 participants; c) whether this city has ever hosted ACL, EMNLP, COLING, if yes, the time interval of last such conferences; d) We will also need to take into account whether there are other top AI conferences that have been hosted or to be hosted in that city by and in 2020. Last but not least, we should also consider whether we could well engage with industries, for instance, if local industries have strong investment in NLP, we can most likely to get sponsorship.
A Google Doc has been created to facilitate the discussion of the city selections: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Mgjpb-EQRgNpWRybWeQmoomHR0NvN_TK06NYchBAkxQ/edit#gid=0
There have been lot of meaningful discussions about nominations of host city. I am soliciting ideas from all exec members on the selection of city. We will decide a city based on the discussion and via vote. After the city is decided, we will invite some of the key leaders from the host city to join the local organization committee of ACL2020, and furthermore, we will also invite a local PCO to help with local organization committee, like we did for ACL 2017 in Vancouver.
Actions:
- Invite more nominations and make thorough discussions on pros and cons of each nominated city;
- Invite all ACL2020 coordination members to vote;
- Select the top-3 ranked cities and then select the one with most supports after discussions;
- Get the approval of ACL exec;
Since we will need to announce the host city at ACL2018 in July 16-18, we will need to make the decision as quickly as we can.
Ming Zhou