2019Q3 Reports: Office Manager

Priscilla Rasmussen 24 July 2019

ACL Business Office Report

Even with the addition of an extra part-time staff person, the Office is becoming busier than in past years for each conference’s planning, organizing and onsite management.

Pat Kirby continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations (especially handling most of the membership entries into the portal), managing all conference registrations as well as managing the conference student housing and working with me in preparation for and onsite at our conferences. I have had her begin to do more of the expenditures and monthly bank statement oversight as well. I had not remembered how much time is taken in training new people and getting them up to speed. But now my new additional staff person, Cathy Magnusson, is settling into her main duties of communicating with the sponsors and exhibitors (who take a lot of our time and have lots of questions), manage the exhibits onsite and also assist with the main conference and workshop poster sessions. Cathy is following up on sponsorships payments and onsite registrations that are declined or invalid and is doing a great job in financial recovery. To a lesser extent now and with greater focus after our “conference season” ends, I am starting to see Cathy as an additional support to what Pat has been doing so Pat can be relieved of some of the more routine duties and I can work with Pat on more and better financial controls and oversight.

In addition to looking forward to working with Nitin Madnani on some of his plans to update the Member Portal and possibly streamline that part of the ACL website, I am now thinking there may be some potential coordination that we might look into to help with the online conference registration system. Possibly something similar to what Nitin had created as a program for people to apply for visa invitation letters which was a great time saver for the Office. Now, with the tremendous growth of our conferences, we have, especially for ACL 2019, been overrun with requests for invoices and more proper receipts. I am hoping Nitin may come up with an automated application process for these, too. I look forward to working with Nitin.

To help with the new ACL initiatives on anti-harassment and diversity & inclusion (D&I), we have: 1) put an anti-harassment checkbox directly on the NAACL, ACL and EMNLP2019 registration forms, just above the payment options, which prevents people from completing their registration until they check the box saying that they have read and agree to abide by our policy (and there is a link to the policy itself) and 2) For NAACL 2019, we incorporated almost all of the suggestions coming from the D&I committee such as changing the name fields, adding a nickname field, adding pronoun question, adding/adjusting gender questions, adding visa and childcare and travel assistance questions and links, adjusting the dietary restriction/preference question, adding mentoring options, and adding directly on the form (rather than just helping when requested) a question of whether a person needs assistance of any kind. The anti-harassment effort is working quite well. For the D&I initiative, we learned many lessons from our first attempt with NAACL 2019. Although most questions/fields had extensive explanations, a great many people put the wrong information in the name and affiliation fields so, for ACL and EMNLP, we are going back to the standard questions we had asked in all previous years. We also found that people made a joke of the pronoun question and only two people answered anything other than he/him or she/her so we did not include this for ACL or EMNLP. Similarly, there are other avenues for people to apply for visa invitation letters and travel awards so these are not included. But the highly successful mentoring and childcare options have been included for the upcoming conferences as well as the question about needing assistance. So, overall, some very good and well received initiatives resulted from the D&I effort and the dedication shown by the committee and its leaders was impressive.

This year, with NAACL, ACL and EMNLP following closely after each other, the overlap for planning, management and registrations, especially for NAACL and ACL, has proven to be much more intense than expected. This is, in part, due to the growth of each conference (25%+ growth in NAACL and almost double growth for ACL). My hope is that by making the above suggested staffing and other adjustments we will be better equipped to handle the ever-increasing numbers of conference attendees and there will be more time for me to offer the always-called-upon advice, attend and organize meetings, identify and pre-negotiate future conference venues, conduct site visits, pre-negotiate catering/av/social event and other contracts, develop working budgets, review bids, make initial approaches to potential sponsors, oversee Office operations, etc.

Publications, Journals and Royalties:

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates handling print-on-demand of our publications, I typically receive no requests for hardcopy publications in the office.

The Curran Associates agreement has turned out to be a good one for both them and the ACL. So far in 2019, we have received $1,017.13 covering the 4th quarter of 2018 and $759.70 for the 1st and 2nd quarters of 2019. Copyright Clearance Center has not sent any earnings to ACL for CY 2018 or a portion of 2019, nor has MIT Press Journals.

MIT Press Journals has not sent an invoice for their fiscal year, July 2018 - June 2019, for their services related to the Computational Linguistics Journal. This invoice is expected within the next month or so and should be for a total of just over $40,000 which is typical.

Our journals pay editorial assistants to help with the process. The CL Journal’s assistant was paid $1,841 for her services for the 3rd and 4th quarters of the 2018 calendar year and $1,177 in July for January-June, 2019. The TACL Journal’s assistant was paid $4,609 covering the 4th quarter of 2018 and 1st quarter of 2019.

Membership:

For the last report, I was pleased to say that we had 4,172 members at the end of the CY 2018 year but the even better news is that we have 3,704 members at just over the half-way mark in 2019. This is with only a portion of the ACL 2019 registration members included and none of the upcoming EMNLP-generated members. The end-of-year total is expected to be between 4,500 and 4.800 members. This indicates the continuing growth of our field and conferences. The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be representing close to 70 countries on a regular basis. Please refer to the Membership Report and Members By Country report for full details.

We began 2019 with 94 members who were in a multi-year membership and about 152 members renewed on their own. As is becoming more standard, most memberships come from conference registrations. The NAACL 2019 attendees’ registrations included 1,267 new and renewing memberships and ACL 2019 resulted so far in 2,191 memberships. EMNLP 2019 will certainly generate more memberships, especially among the Asian communities. Between the growth in overall memberships and the increased number resulting from conference registrations, the portal’s automated input process seems to be working well and allows us to keep up with memberships very easily and quickly and have more time for other endeavors.

Occasionally inquiries come to the Office about what the benefits of ACL membership are and whether a particular country qualifies for the hard currency discount. It would be good to 1) update and more prominently post member benefits at the portal and 2) annually update the countries qualifying for hard currency discounts. I would also recommend making the location for posting job announcement more prominent at the portal. It currently resides within the wiki as “Employment opportunities, postdoctoral positions, summer jobs” which is harder for people to find and there is much confusion as people want and prefer to post their job announcements under conference events instead.

File:Membership-report-2010-2019-SUMMER-Statistics.xlsx

File:Memberships-2019-by-country-SUMMER.xlsx

Fellows Program:

The only involvement the Office now has in the Fellowship nomination and selection process is to verify nominated members’ eligibility according to our new policy for future years.

Conferences:

NAACL 2019 was held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Minneapolis, June 2-7. The final number of attendees was 1,635 after removing all cancellations and unpaid no-shows, which is a record of over 300 more attendees than the record set in 2018. This year we continued the successful innovations of adding both an Industrial (parallel) Track and holding the poster sessions in parallel with the other main conference sessions as well as lowering the food/beverage orders by 1/3 to keep costs down and avoid wasting leftover food. And, as discussed in the beginning of the Office Report, many innovations suggested by the D&I Committee were implemented. A few were not so successful and others were standout winners. For NAACLs (and possibly other conferences) in the future, it is advisable to continue with the lower food amounts, parallel Industry Track (NAACLs) and poster sessions and the more successful D&I initiatives (mentoring, nicknames, childcare, accessibility/assistance, better food labeling and attention to dietary needs, travel assistance when/if possible financially, new to ACL/I am Hiring/ I am looking for Employment/etc stickers for badges, quiet/prayer/mothers/childcare rooms, gender neutral bathroom, etc.). The hotel changed audio visual companies in January just before our meeting. This meant that PSAV (the company I used for many years with great success) was replaced by Encore, who seemed fine contractually honoring the previously entered into PSAV contract and in planning emails and phone calls. However, onsite, Encore was less than competent in many ways and it was difficult to keep after them to do what we needed or provide what we ordered as equipment. It is unclear whether our bad experience was due to their “growing pains” of just taking over this particular hotel or whether we must be very cautious about using Encore in the future. The Social Event at the Minneapolis Institute of Art was a great success, with the themed food stations offered to compliment the subject matter in the various galleries. The unfortunate thing was that there seemed to be little interest in the DJ and dancing so, possibly, when holding a Social Event where there is so much to do and see, there is no need to also provide music/dancing. The one true surprise and concern from NAACL 2019 was the failure of the Recruitment Lunch. Although over 500 people signed up on their registration forms to attend the lunch and we notified the non-students and late registrants that we were limited to 400 students and they could not attend, we did expect 400 students and up to 20 recruiters. About 14-16 recruiters showed up, representing 7 companies but only about 50 students showed up. The Recruitment Lunch was announced in various places but it seems not everywhere it should have been and there may have been some confusion since it is usually held the first conference day but was pushed to the second day. No one came to the registration desk asking about the Lunch and it seemed to be out of everyone’s mind and attendees did not seem to miss not attending this event. The lesson learned is to be very careful that this is well advertised if we are to continue offering these lunches and to evaluate whether it is useful to continue. The one fortunate thing is that this particular hotel is very green and community friendly/involved so all the food went to homeless shelters (if possible) and a local pig farm (food that spoiled and could not be served to the homeless).

Given the current concerns about possible travel restrictions going into the future, it may be interesting to note that NAACL 2019 had 13 cancellations specifically due to visas being denied compared to NAACL 2018 which had 8 cancellations. There were many more cancellations, due to illness and work obligations, but these numbers represent the ones that were identified as being specifically visa issues. There are no records kept or requested of authors who did not register and could not attend due to visa problems. Compare the NAACL experience to what we know so far about ACL 2019 in Italy, and with almost double the registrations, for ACL 2019 there have been 28 cancellations specifically due to visa denials and a few emails that people are still trying to get their interviews. It seems that the San Francisco Office was particularly backed up and offered appointments well after the beginning of the conference.

ACL 2019 will be incredibly successful, with 3,160 people already pre-registered at the close of late registration. This is more than double ACL 2018 and 44% more than ACL 2017 final numbers. Between the Local Arrangements Chairs, the PCO, the Local Sponsorship Chairs, and myself, we communicated on a regular basis, especially regarding sponsors and exhibitors as well as registration, venue setup and other key policy questions and this has been extraordinarily important with the increased conference size. We are fortunate to have an excellent PCO guiding the physical setup, catering and av of the venue as well as assisting with the other logistics. Having 32 or more exhibitors adds an entire extra level of work for the PCO but I might recommend not making full exhibit booth builds in the future. They are costly and more demanding to satisfy each exhibitor when exhibitors can easily rent their own exhibit furniture and setup as is done at NAACLs. Many thanks must be given to the Local Arrangements team who scrambled more than once to revise the venue space and usage to accommodate the ever increasing registration predictions. In the end, we should have about 3,300 attendees and an excellent event.

EMNLP 2019 venue at Asia World Expo has been contracted and the Social Event will most likely be held at Tomorrowland in Disney World. Kentaro and the entire organizing team are working hard right now on finalizing contracts and venue plans/options to be able to begin making a working budget. Between the Local team and the Office, we hope to have a complete working budget agreed upon by the end of August and be able to open registration in early September.

While it is always difficult to project attendance at conferences, we now face the difficulty of having to negotiate and enter into venue contracts at least two years in advance but cannot predict whether our conferences will continue to grow substantially or if the numbers will level out. This has implications in how much space we contract and, if too much, be locked into space we may not need at a convention center with very high costs.

Workshops continue to be more challenging in finding adequate space for the growing attendance at some workshops plus the many poster sessions they plan to present. Careful advance planning is essential for these events.

Conference Sponsorship:

ACL 2019 has a high level of sponsorship commitments of $410,256 from 41 sponsors through the International Sponsorship Committee (ISC). Our faithful sponsors (Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Bloomberg, ByteDance, ebay, Facebook, Deep Mind/Google, Google, Grammarly, Huawei/Noah's Ark Lab, IBM Research, Megagon Labs, Microsoft, NAVER Labs, Tencent, Yandex) plus sponsors we have not seen before or are returning (Almaware, ASAPP, Babelscape, BBN, BMW, Bosch, Cisco, DiDi Research, Duolingo, Expert System Iberia, G-Research, ISI, Jingdong, PolyAI, SAP, Salesforce, Shannon AI, Verisk) continue to help us thrive. There were also companies supporting individual workshops: WiNLP with 12 sponsors for $66,426, BEA Workshop for $2,350, Blackbox Workshop for $5,000, the ArgMining Workshop for $500, the Workshop on Detecting Abusive Language for $4,750, the Rep4NLP Workshop for $5,262, TYP-NLP Workshop for $500 and SIGMORPHON for $1,000 in total contributions.

EMNLP 2019 so far has $211,135 in sponsorship. Many were the result of 2-Pack or 3-Pack sponsorship agreements so many of the same companies as listed above for ACL (Apple, Amazon, ASAPP, Babelscape, Baidu, BBN, ByteDance, Cisco, DeepMind/Google, Duolingo, ebay, Facebook, Google, Huawei/Noah's Ark Labs, Megagon, Naver Labs, Poly AI, Salesforce, SAP, Shannon AI, Verisk, Yandex) plus GT COM, Xiaomi, Zhuiyi Company and others generously donated. Additionally, the MRQA Workshop received $3,000, the W-NUT received $500, and CoNLL has $3,000 in sponsor commitments.

NAACL 2019 received a total of $162,218 in main conference commitments. As with ACL and EMNLP 2019, many were the result of 2-Pack or 3-Pack sponsorship agreements so many of the same companies as listed above (ASAPP, BBN, Bloomberg, Cisco, DeepMind/Google, Duolingo, ebay, Facebook, Google, Grammarly, IBM, ISI, Megagon, PolyAI, SAP) plus Amazon, Capital One, Capital Group, Clinc, ETS, Grammarly, Interactions, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, Two Sigma and Vanguard generously donated. Additional workshop-specific donations were made to SemEval for $3,000, to NLP+CSS workshop for $4,000, to Neural Language Generation workshop for $4,000, to CLPsych for $8,000, to ESSP for $1,784, to WNU for $500, to Narrative Understanding Workshop for $3,500 and to SpLU-RoboNLP for $1,500.

The idea of offering 2-Pack or 3-Pack options and including EMNLP allowed sponsors to make one payment to support two or all three events rather than one at a time. This has made sponsoring easier, especially for our ongoing sponsors. For the 2019 Sponsorship Booklet that the International Sponsorship Committee and the Office pulled together, we continue to offer these multi-pack options, resulting in some first-time as well as repeating commitments and sometimes at higher levels. We made a few changes to the Sponsorship booklet for 2019. With the new Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) initiative being tried for the first time at NAACL 2019, we added a section to sponsor this. The D&I includes Accessibility (for mobility, hearing and visually impaired), Childcare, Travel Assistance, Mentoring, etc. While we have accommodated an individual who requested accessibility assistance in the past, it is a positive step to more clearly and openly offer such assistance.

The area Sponsorship Chairs and the Local Arrangement Sponsorship Chairs are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them. And, many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!