2019Q1 Minutes (public version)

2019/03/15

Attendees

• ACL exec members
• Lluis Marquez (ACL2019 general chair), David Traum (ACL2019 PC chair), Bernardo Magnini (ACL2019 local chair)
• Matt Post (anthology director)

Conferences: ACL2019

• Can we shorten the presentations so as to accept more papers (Marti)?
• The poster experience -- the venue of the posters is 2-3 min distance from the plenaries (Bernardo).
• How to estimate the number of attendees? -- the number of submissions and the number of conference attendees are usually very close (Priscilla).
• Is it possible to shorten the lunch time to have more papers? -- It’s a big issue to supply lunch for 3000 attendees. Hard to estimate how many people need the lunch service.

Conferences: ACL2020

• Given the growth of the ACL conferences in recent years, consider adding a third PC chair.
  • More PC chairs may make it less efficient for communication or making decisions (David Traum)
  • Can instead hire assistants (students or postdocs) to do part of the work? (Barbara) -- We already have funds for this allocated and offer it every year. (Priscilla)
  • It is necessary to add one more PC chair, especially when one of the two PC chairs is unavailable due to some reason. But it is important that they are within the same time zones. (Julia)
  • PC chairs can work two years in a row, so that there is at least one experienced PC chair each year. (Julia, Rada)
  • Suggestion: pair up PC chairs in regions within conferences and the regions rotate across conferences, so that the communications between the PC chairs are more efficient (Marti)

Conferences: ACL2021

• There are three bids (anonymous) by the deadline. Still not sure the quality of the bids.

Conferences: AACL/IJCNLP 2020

• There is one bid submitted (anonymous)
• Issue-1: how to split the surplus among ACL, AACL, AFNLP and the local team?
• Issue-2: how to coordinate the date of the conference, given that EMNLP is also in the fall.
• David will coordinate the above two issues.
• Issue-2 is a problem not only for 2020 but for every year. EMNLP can consider to defer the conference to the end of the year (Nov. or Dec.), and if so, AACL/IJCNLP can be held in early Oct. (In the call for bids, AACL/IJCNLP is planned to be held in Nov. or Dec. of 2020). It is open for negotiation.

IT: information director

• Main points, which can be found in Nitin’s report:
  • Reliance on stable and well-built third party services with minor customizations.
  • Extremely comprehensive documentation.
  • A network of volunteers from the community with well-defined responsibilities.
  • A reasonable annual budget.
• Recommend the exec to use Slack -- Shiqi confirmed that Slack can be used in China.
• Membership fee payment problem -- Shiqi will check if he can pay the NAACL registration fee.
• GDPR issues -- Nitin keeps this problem in mind. Needs to be further discussed offline.
• IT problems of the fellows nomination system. Consider change the way that fellows nominations are submitted, to make it easier like we do for DSA (Marti).

IT: anthology director

• Have rebuilt the anthology site with static generation tools, which is much faster and can be correctly indexed and searched by Google and Google scholar.
• David Chiang and Dan Gildea put in many hours in improving data quality of the anthology.
• Main issue: many videos are missing.
  • What we have is a 1-time contract with Weyond to video the NAACL 2019 conference. And, this is a repeat of the same contract we had with Weyond the previous couple of years for NAACLs. ACL, Inc., do not have a contract with Weyond or anyone else. Since NAACL 2019 is in a contract with Weyond, should be able to push Rajnish (the owner and primary videographer) to get past videos to us. (Priscilla)
  • Matt can call for a volunteer or hire someone to do the video linking work. Under no circumstances should he do the nitty gritty details. (Marti)
• Consider other conference platforms, such as EasyChair and the microsoft conference management platform.

Test of time (TOT) paper award

• Barbara’s proposal:
  • Frequency: once/year. Covers all ACL +(*)ACL (no emnlp)
  • How many: 2 per year, one 10 years back, one 25 years back; one impact for research, one impact for industry
  • Who nominates: award committee (broad composition, TBD); this committee should decide criteria (can stay for two years)
  • Who judges: expert committee
• The main concern is if EMNLP and the journals should be included besides the (*)ACL conferences (Hwee Tou)
• Is it possible to form the committee and select the ToT award this year?
• Will be discussed on Slack.

Ad hoc leadership roles

• Pass the resolution that Graeme Hirst and Emily Bender are the co-chairs of the PCC for the remainder of the calendar year (2019).
• Received two nominations for publicity chair. Still need additional names. The committee will contact the other candidates and review the nominations.

ACL membership

• Ming’s proposal: do a survey on what services the ACL members expect or want.
• Further discussions ongoing via email and google docs.