2020Q3 Reports: Faculty Advisors to the SRW

Most of the details about the SRW can be found in the student chair’s report [1]. The report below is meant to give an overview of the faculty advisors’ roles and responsibilities.

SRW faculty Advisors

Omri Abend (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Sujian Li (Peking University), Zhou Yu (University of California, Davis)

Appointing SRW Student Chairs

Rotem Dror (Israel Institute of Technology), Jiangming Liu (The University of Edinburgh), Shruti Rijhwani (Carnegie Mellon University), Yizhong Wang(University of Washington)

Four student co-chairs are selected with consideration of gender, ethnicity and geolocation. Student co-chairs should be appointed as soon as possible and they will take most of the responsibilities of the student workshop. For ACL SRW 2020, the student chairs were selected in May, 2019, except for Yizhong, who joined the team later on.

Funding

Funding was used to support the registration and membership fees for attendees of the SRW. In order to encourage students to volunteer to the student volunteer program, we covered the registration fee for all attendees, while volunteers were refunded their membership fee as well.

• Applying to the NSF fund: We planned the NSF proposal in November 2019. We received 15K USD from the program, which were partially used. The rest will be rolled over for next year.

• Search for other external funding possibilities: We attempted to form industry partnerships (by ourselves, and also by contacting the sponsorship chairs), but did not manage to recruit funding this way.

• Don and Betty Walker International Student Fund: Kindly supported the SRW as well.

Collaborating with Student Co-chairs

These are the main topics on which we advised and collaborated with the student co-chairs:

• Infrastructure: website, email and Twitter accounts.

• Deciding on the schedule.

• Selecting mentors and reviewers: mentors were recruited both for the pre-submission phase as well as for the post-submission phase (for helping with the presentations and with the camera-ready). The pre-mentoring phase further included supplying the participants with licenses for Grammarly (generously donated by Grammarly itself).

• Deciding on the review form, paper submission and paper reviewing process.

• Deciding on the SRW budget and student travel award support: we issued a joint call for student scholarships and for the student volunteer program. We also coordinated this effort with the D&I chairs.

• Feedback on the proceedings.

• About converting to an online format: notifying authors to select time zones and deciding the SRW sessions.

Some suggestions for future SRWs

• With different time zones, it is difficult to find an appropriate time for all the members to talk. We mainly use emails instead, and had online meetings of part of the team where it seemed more effective.
• About ethics: we recommend adding to the checks applied to the submissions before handing over the camera ready to the publication chairs a verification that improper content was removed from the submission (where applicable and indicated so by one of the reviewers or chairs).
• About online meeting: It is not easy to create a more familiar atmosphere in an online conference. We attempted to do so through a designated channel for the SRW, publishing the SRW specifically on Twitter (in addition to the publicity of the main conference), and attending some of the presentations ourselves. The SRW was held in parallel to the main conference, which worked well. If the SRW is to be held virtually next year as well, it would be good to think about creative ways to enhance the sense of familiarity in this challenging format.
• About funding: We have contacted some industry partners which have sponsored the main conference and failed to obtain the industry sponsorship. We think that the difference between SRW sponsorship and main conference sponsorship should be clarified. One way to do so would perhaps be to have a designated sponsorship option for the SRW.