2020Q1 Reports: EACL

Finances:

The funds in our shadow account have not changed since Q1 2019. As discussed at the last ACL Exec meeting, ACL would prefer for now to keep our share of the Berlin surplus in ACL accounts and cover our expenditures from there.

As usual we agreed to provide EUR 8,500 for ESSLII student sponsorships.

We are still awaiting transfer of signatories on the EACL account, which has not happened since the new treasurer took over in 2018. This transfer proves to be difficult due to the paperwork and multiple signatures required from people in various international locations. We hope that it will be possible to get the paperwork done in Seattle when all the required signators are in one place.

Website:

As part of preparations for EACL 2021, we are in the process of transferring the eacl.org domain to the control of the ACL Information Officer.

EACL 2021 Conference:

We have been proceeding with plans for EACL 2021, and have appointed Paola Merlo as General Chair and Reut Tsarfaty and Joerg Tiedemann as Program Chairs. Paola has begun appointing other chairs.

Unfortunately, we are dealing with complications surrounding the venue. The original choice of venue changed ownership during the contract negotiation and became unavailable. The local organizers hosted a site visit for Priscilla, Paola, and Claudia Borg (EACL Treasurer) in November to scope out alternative venues and we have identified a new venue. The local organizers and PCO have been preparing updated budgets and contracts, and our main concerns at this point are to keep the budget within reasonable limits (though it is significantly higher than the original venue) and to get the contracts signed. We plan to announce the location publicly once the contract has been signed.

Plans:

As noted in the last report, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find potential venues and hosts able and willing to provide the local conference organization; and problems such as those mentioned above are harder to deal with as size increases. It is still our plan to investigate alternatives to the traditional bidding and conference organization model, but unfortunately this project has taken a back seat to dealing with the more immediate concerns of sorting out the venue for 2021.

EACL Officers as of 1 Mar 2019:

Chair: Sharon Goldwater (University of Edinburgh, UK)

Chair-elect: Shuly Wintner (University of Haifa, Israel)

Secretary: Lucia Specia (Imperial College and University of Sheffield, UK)

Treasurer: Claudia Borg (University of Malta)

Past Treasurer: Mike Rosner (University of Malta)

Advisory Board:

• Angeliki Lazaridou (DeepMind, UK)
• Barbara Plank IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
• Preslav Nakov (QCRI, Qatar)
• Ivan Titov (University of Edinburgh, UK)

Nominating Committee:

• Walter Daelemans (University of Antwerp, Belgium)
• Iryna Gurevych (TU Darmstadt, Germany)
• Lluís Màrquez (Amazon)
• Caroline Sporleder (GCDH, Göttingen)

Student Board:

• Fernando Alva-Manchego (University of Sheffield, UK)
• Michael Schlichtkrull (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
• Madhumita Sushil (University of Antwerp, Belgium)