2018Q3 Reports: EMNLP 2017

EMNLP 2017 Report – Martha Palmer, General Chair

EMNLP 2017 was held in Copenhagen, Denmark, September 7-11, 2017. It included three invited talks, fifteen workshops, seven tutorials, nine TACL presentations, 323 reviewed papers presented as both oral talks and posters with 4 Best Paper awards, and twenty-one demos. The Program Chairs, Rebecca Hwa and Sebastian Riedel, did a fantastic job managing a backbreaking 1,500 paper submissions (1466 reviewed papers). This involved 51 Area chairs and 980 reviewers. A few new things were tried, including a more careful handling of the COIs that result from Area Chair submissions, and the addition of a meta-review step to encourage more thoughtful reviewing. Despite the additional time involvement, many of the Area Chairs embraced this new approach. However, there are clearly a few dissenters, since Rebecca and Sebastian ended up writing around 200 meta-reviews themselves at the last minute. We also tried to raise the visibility and status of the poster sessions by integrating them as 3 parallel sessions alongside 3 oral talk sessions, with poster session chairs. This was in response to the survey results from EMNLP 2015 that indicated a decided preference for smaller, more frequent poster sessions during the day rather than evening mega-sessions. This poster session format was very popular. The outstanding invited speakers were Dan Jurafsky, Sharon Goldwater, and Nando de Freitas. Including exhibitors, there were over 1100 attendees. The video archive of everything but the tutorials, is here: https://vimeo.com/channels/emnlp2017

There were problems with the local organization. We only realized a few weeks before the conference that we would have 150% of the predicted attendees, so needed more rooms and larger rooms. Negotiating with the conference site for more space required a native speaker of Danish, and Anders Søgaard was on vacation. We continued to have communication issues and lack of local support for minor items, like poster fasteners, throughout the conference.

There is also a logistical problem in that the conference handbook, the proceedings, the web site program and the conference app are all theoretically generated from softconf. However, in practice, they each have different constraints on exactly what settings are needed and on exactly what needs to be filled out in what way, and they get generated at different times. This results in a lot of last minute changes and updates for example, for the conference app, which can have unintended consequences for the website program and/or the proceedings. This delayed our public posting of the proceedings until the second day of the meeting (the second workshop day). It is also in general more complicated to hold the workshops prior to the main conference.

Our platinum sponsors were Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Bloomberg, Facebook, Google, and Siteimprove. Gold sponsors included Deloitte, ebay, IBM Research, Maluuba, Microsoft, SAP, Recruit Institute of Technology, textkernel, and Zalando. Silver sponsors were CVTE, Duolingo, Huawei, Nuance, Oracle, Snapchat, Sogou, Unsilo and Wizkids. Grammarly, NextAI and Yandex were our Bronze sponsors. http://emnlp2017.net/index.html

EMNLP 2017 Organizers

• Program Co-Chairs
  • Rebecca Hwa, University of Pittsburgh,
  • Sebastian Riedel, University College London

• Local Arrangements Co-Chairs
  • Dirk Hovy, University of Copenhagen
  • Anders Søgaard, University of Copenhagen

• Local Sponsorship Chair
  • Daniel Hardt, Copenhagen Business School

• Workshop Co-Chair
  • Victoria Fossum, Google
  • Karl Moritz Hermann, DeepMind

• Tutorial Co-Chairs
  • Alexandra Birch, Edinburgh University
  • Nathan Schneider, Georgetown University

• Demos Co-Chairs
  • Michael Paul, University of Colorado
  • Lucia Specia, Sheffield University
  • Matt Post, Johns Hopkins University

• Publications Sr Chair
  • Siddharth Patwardhan, Apple
• Publications Jr Chair
  • Preethi Raghavan, TJ Watson Lab, IBM

• Publicity Chair
  • Isabelle Augenstein, University of Copenhagen

• Web Chair
  • Anders Johannsen, Apple

• Conference Handbook Chair
  • Joachim Bingel , University of Copenhagen

• Conference Handbook Advisor
  • Matt Post, Johns Hopkins University

• Handbook Proofreader
  • Pontus Stenetorp, University College London

• Student Scholarship Co-Chair and Student Volunteer Coordinator
  • Zeljko Agic , IT University of Copenhagen
  • Yonatan Bisk , University of Southern California, ISI

• SIGDAT Liason
  • Chris Callison-Birch, University of Pennsylvania

• Conference App Chair
  • Chloe Braud, University of Copenhagen