2021Q3 Reports: Office Manager
Priscilla Rasmussen 3rd Quarter 2021 Executive Board Meeting
ACL Business Office Report
19 July 2021
It seems surprising but, with three of the four 2021 conferences being virtual, there seems to be just as much demand on the Office staff as in past years, but in different ways. With an increase in attendance at each conference, the registrations, registrant questions and requests for invoices and more formal receipts has more than doubled. Similarly, more of the sponsors are supporting multiple conferences in greater numbers and, for each conference and each company, there are greatly increased numbers of questions and requests, especially given the virtual nature of their exhibiting. And, I am very much involved with the coordination between the virtual platform company and the individual conference organizing committees. All of this takes a substantial amount of Pat’s, Cathy’s and (especially) my time each day.
With the tremendous growth of our conferences and holding more conferences in one year than usual, we have been overrun with requests for invoices and more proper receipts. I am still hoping that when Nitin and Pranav are able, they might come up with an automated application process, similar to the visa letter requests, for paid-in-full invoices/receipts and certificates of attendance to reduce the hundreds of requests currently handled individually. Nitin and I have also been talking about bringing the registration form building inhouse where Pranav might build and maintain the registration form so we can have more immediate and reliable access to the registration process. It would be ideal if this could happen fore EMNLP 2021 or definitely for the 2022 conference year.
We decided to continue more formally with Young Associates as the accountant firm and will be renewing their contract for August 2021 to August 2022. Over this period, we will be looking to new and different ways of managing our bookkeeping efforts in coordination with them.
Pat Kirby continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations regarding membership entries, managing conference registrations as well as working with me in preparation for and during our conferences. Plus she continues to do more of the bank statement reconciliations and expenditure posting. Cathy Magnusson, my more part-time second assistant, continues communicating with the sponsors and exhibitors (who take a lot of our time and have lots of questions) and she seems to excel in following up on sponsorship delinquent payments and registrations that are declined or invalid, chasing registrants for their membership payments, etc. She is doing a great job in financial recovery.
For the ACL diversity & inclusion (D&I) initiative, we have continued to include most items requested to be included on the registration form, with refinements as we learned what works best. For D&I, the highly successful mentoring option has been included for the 2021 conferences as well as the questions about needing assistance, etc. Overall, some very good and well received initiatives resulted from the D&I efforts over the past two years and are continuing in 2021 and the dedication shown by the committees and leaders are impressive.
My hope is that 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 the multitude of zoom meetings, identify and pre-negotiate future conference venues, conduct site visits, pre-negotiate catering/av/social event and other contracts, develop and monitor working budgets, review bids, make initial approaches to potential sponsors, oversee Office operations, etc. The office has reopened completely as of late February.
I have not yet connected with anyone to formulate some ideas which may include engaging a Professional Conference Organizer (PCO) to work on all conferences in a coordinated way, as and when needed. After I am able to discuss this idea and expand it into something more concrete that I can propose, I will come back to this.
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 been good for both them and the ACL. We have received $1,365.70 covering the 4th Q of 2020 and 1st Q 2021.
MIT Press Journals has been paid for their invoice covering the 2019-2020 academic year for services supporting both the CL and TACL journals. These invoices totaled $82,379.07. As usual, we can expect the 2020-2021 invoice sometime this summer for a similar amount.
Our journals pay editorial assistants to help with the process. The CL Journal’s assistant has not submitted an invoice for work in 2020, nor so far in 2021. The TACL Journal’s assistant was paid $13,641.25 for January through June 2021.
Membership:
We ended 2020 with a total of 6,246 members which is an increase of 1,101 members over the close of 2019. So far in 2021, we have 3,699 through the end of June. As is becoming more standard, most memberships come from conference registrations. This includes the EACL and NAACL 2021 members who renewed or joined along with their conference registrations. A very small number of ACL 2021 registrations resulting in memberships are also included here but the bulk of ACL and all of EMNLP 2021 resulting memberships will be reported later this year. This indicates the continuing growth of our field and conferences...Only three years ago, membership was under 3,000. Additionally, it appears that holding virtual conferences allows more people, especially students, to be able to afford and attend conferences and pay memberships. Typically, regular vs student memberships had been 60/40% or even 65/35% but for 2020, the numbers are 49/51% regular vs student and this trend seems to be continuing in 2021, with 47/53% regular vs student. This may indicate that there will be a continuing need/desire for some portion of our future conferences to be virtual or hybrid to broaden the possibilities for people who may be under-funded or for other reasons cannot travel to in-person meetings to still be able to benefit from our conferences and membership.
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 70 or more countries on a regular basis. Countries represented so far in 2021 totaled 89, reflecting the increasingly successful WiNLP and Diversity & Inclusion outreach efforts. Please refer to the Membership Report and Members By Country report for full details.
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.
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:
For the 2021 conferences (ACL, EMNLP, and NAACL) as well as the upcoming 2022 conferences, the Office focus is on advising, helping select virtual platforms for the conference, creating and monitoring the working budget, creating and managing registrations as usual, working with sponsors and exhibitors to ensure they receive the promised promotion and recognition of their support, working with the Organizing Committee members (especially the general, program, tutorial, workshop chairs and D&I chairs). In addition, for EACL, close coordination with the PCO and General Chair were particularly important. Moving to 100% virtual meetings for EACL, NAACL and ACL dramatically changed my role, in particular in that I did not have to be concerned with the physical conference setup, space requirements, av and catering contracts and arrangements, exhibits’ physical setups, etc.
ACL-IJCNLP 2021, intended to be in Bangkok, will be held 100% virtually due to the COVD-19 pandemic. We were successful in avoiding very large penalties for cancelling the in-person meeting and hope to be able to reschedule in Bangkok sometime soon. I am currently working very closely with Chengqing Zong as General Chair and the marvelous program chairs, infrastructure team and other organizers. With this team, one of my ongoing interactions is coordinating various aspects of the conference with Underline, especially working with the PCs and sponsors. The Office is always available to offer advice and registration lists and statistics, track and approve the budget expenditures, monitor registrations and work with the tutorial and workshop chairs and organizers. The more successful D&I initiatives (mentoring, preferred names, accessibility/assistance, registration payment assistance, helping to purchase greater bandwidth for some attendees, coordination for time zones and scheduling, etc.) were incorporated into the conferences this year.
ACL 2019 in Italy ended with 3,283 registrations; Virtual ACL 2020 ended with a total of 4,973 registrations; so far, ACL-IJCNLP 2021 has 2,511 registrations and seems on track for a final total of around 3,000-3,100 attendees. I believe a part of the 2020 large increase was due to our need for 250-300 volunteers rather than the normal 75-100. This increase in volunteer awards and the much lower cost of registration allowed for many more students and younger researchers to attend. But, the ACL-IJCNLP 2021 conference is competing with three other ACL conferences this year (EACL and NAACL before ACL 2021 and EMNLP afterward) for a portion of the same overall NLP pool of researchers and students. This is having an effect on each conference’s final attendance numbers.
NAACL 2019 in Minneapolis ended with 1,635 registrations and Virtual NAACL 2021 that just ended in June, had a total of 2,682 registrations, making an increase of over 1,000 additional attendees. The much lower cost of registration allowing many more students and younger researchers as well as those from disadvantaged countries made this conference more accessible. Kristina Toutanova was impressive as General Chair, with hands-on coordination of every part of the conference. Being our first experience with using Underline as the main conference platform, she made sure to know how everything works and what pitfalls could be avoided. To this end, I worked closely with the GC, PCs and the rest of the organizing committee members as well as managing registrations and coordination of sponsorships. The one challenge was that AgoraNet, who has built our registration forms for many years now, will no longer be supporting us or building our registration forms. After being persuaded to build the NAACL 2021 form, it was agreed this would be the last conference we would work on together. So, for ACL-IJCNLP 2021, a different company was engaged and, depending on how this agreement works out, we may or may not continue with them.
EMNLP 2019 numbered 1,939 final registrations and for Virtual EMNLP 2020, the conference ended with 4,069 attendees. With EMNLP 2021 being planned as our first attempt at a hybrid meeting, it is difficult to project attendance numbers although we are prepared for about 2,000 or more in-person attendees plus possibly another 1500 or more virtual attendees. Having been fortunate enough to be able to negotiate moving the in-person meeting to 2021 at the same all-inclusive resort, the Barcelo Bavaro Resort in Punta Cana, without large penalties, we expect the safe, self-contained nature of an all-inclusive resort to actually be desirable, given the ongoing threat of COVID-19. But, it is hoped that COVID-19 might be less threatening and people will mostly be vaccinated so it will be safe enough by November to travel. The other reason to be somewhat optimistic is that, once there, there is little reason to leave the resort. With many restaurants, beaches, nightclub, bowling alley, theaters, etc. there are ample things to keep people occupied and safely catered to without going outside “the bubble”. I am working closely with Sien Moens and Underline as well as her organizing committee in making all the plans for this hybrid meeting. As Local Arrangements Chair I will be doing the same sort of things as for EMNLP 2019 (in-person) and EMNLP 2020 (virtual), working with the sponsors and exhibitors, managing registrations, maintaining the working budget, managing onsite space, av, and catering, etc. and coordinating the virtual aspects as well.
EACL 2021 was also successful as a 100% virtual meeting rather than being in-person in Kiev and ended with 1,328 attendees, an increase of over 400 attendees from the last EACL held. Paola Merlo, as General Chair, plus her committee and the selected PCO have been an excellent team. The Office acted as advisor when questions of practice, policies, and procedures came up. The hope, I think, is to possibly hold an in-person meeting in Kiev in the future.
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 for in-person meetings but cannot predict whether our conferences will continue to grow substantially or if the numbers will level out. And having held five virtual conferences plus our first hybrid this fall, it is more difficult to predict future needs. This is compounded with the unpredictability of numbers attending each conference, especially as in 2021, where the numbers at EACL and NAACL were considerably higher than in the past and, so far, ACL 2021 looks like it will be up to a quarter smaller than expected. It seems that the more conferences there are in a given year, the more our attendance is spread out over all conferences in potentially unpredictable ways.
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. Also, whatever space is contracted for a particular conference tends to lock the Program Chairs into presenting the posters in a certain way and removes their flexibility in planning the program. And, if hybrid conferences are desired, we could run the danger of defaulting on contract commitments we have made or may negotiate before this decision is reached. The space/catering/av may not be required at the amounts contracted, placing us in a position of not meeting contracted amounts. Or, conversely, we may need to pay space rental if our catering and guest rooms are not at a high enough level to gain complimentary space as we do now.
Conference Sponsorship:
ACL-IJCNLP 2021 has commitments of $289,744 in main conference sponsorships, with $38,400 of this being dedicated to Diversity & Inclusion efforts. Also committed to particular ACL workshops is $14,698. EACL 2021 ended their conference with $27,366 in main conference sponsorships paid through the ACL Office, with $3,200 earmarked for D&I efforts. Other sponsorships may have been awarded directly through the PCO to the EACL Treasurer. NAACL 2021 ended their meeting with a main conference total commitment of $107,025 with $13,200 of this dedicated to the D&I effort; plus $12,600 in support of some of the NAACL workshops. And so far, EMNLP 2021 enjoys a total main conference commitment of $183,581, with $35,520 to be dedicated to the D&I efforts and $35,000 in various workshop sponsorships (mostly $30,000 supporting WiNLP).
These donations were from many of our faithful continuing sponsors such as Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Bablelcape, Baidu, Bloomberg, Bytedance, Deep Mind, Facebook, G-Research, Google, Grammarly, HLTCOE, IBM, Megagon, Microsoft, Naver Labs Corporation, Naver Labs Europe, Tencent, Two Sigma, and Vanguard plus newly returning sponsors including Alibaba, Bosch, Duolingo and ETS. A new addition to our sponsor family is Legal Force. It is possible a few more sponsors will make commitments, especially for EMNLP 2021. It is encouraging to note that many of the returning sponsors remarked positively on their 2020 sponsor/exhibit virtual experiences.
The idea of offering 2-Pack or 3-Pack options and including EMNLP allows sponsors to make one payment to support multiple events in a given year rather than one at a time. This has made sponsoring easier, especially for our ongoing sponsors. For the 2021 Sponsorship Booklet we continued to offer these multi-pack options including ACL-IJCNLP 2021, EACL 2021, NAACL 2021 and EMNLP 2021, which has resulted in some first-time as well as repeating commitments and sometimes at higher levels. With the new Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) initiative continuing since NAACL 2019, we kept and updated the section giving options to sponsor this effort. Due to COVD-19 and our conferences being virtual, about half of the benefits assured to sponsors could no longer be promised since they were in-person benefits (exhibit space, inserts into conference bags, logos emblazoned on conference bags, ads in conference handbooks, etc.). To encourage sponsors to continue their support, the benefits were adjusted to include what could be offered from the in-person Sponsorship Booklet and add the additional benefits of free virtual exhibit space to all but Bronze, Supporter and Publisher levels, ability to receive a list of registrants who indicated they were looking for employment and wanted their information shared, full Participant List (with those who expressed not wanting to share contact information culled from the list), and exhibiting allowed for the full 6 days rather than just the main conference 3 days.
Chris Callison-Burch, our new Sponsorship Director, has already had an impact on our sponsorship efforts. We now have a sleek new and updated 2021 Sponsorship Booklet which looks more professional and appealing. Most all of the levels and benefit remain the same except, even for virtual meetings, only Diamond and Platinum levels receive complimentary exhibiting and all others must pay for this option. And, he has taken a good part of the growing demands of working with the individual sponsors off of the Office’s list of duties. We have been working closely and very successfully to gather sponsors for all ACL conferences in 2021.