2022Q1 Reports: Office

Priscilla Rasmussen 1st Quarter 2022 Executive Board Meeting

5 March 2022

ACL Business Office Report

With March 31st (the mark of a full year since I advised the Board of my intent to retire) fast approaching, my plans are to use April as the winding down period. I have told the landlord of the office closing at the end of April so plans for mail and phone forwarding, sale or other disposal of office furniture and the office contents, etc. must be put in place by April 1st. I am using March as the month to try to put as many plans in place as possible for both ACL and NAACL 2022. For ACL 2022, there is a very competent PCO to manage most plans and I will remain available to advise and will be onsite in Dublin. It is NAACL 2022 that is of major concern since I will not be acting as the PCO as I used to do. It is therefore imperative that a Conference Manager be found and hired well before this July meeting. To this end, an [Office-working-group] for Priscilla's retirement and replacement plan has been formed and will hopefully very quickly develop workable plans. Again, I will be available for advising but the bulk of the work will need to be covered by someone yet to be hired.

With an increase in attendance at each conference, the registrations, registrant questions and being overrun with requests for invoices and more proper receipts takes a substantial amount of time each day. I believe the need is immediate for Nitin and Pranav to come up with an automated application process, similar to the visa letter requests, for paid-in-full invoices/receipts and certificates of attendance unable to be handled individually, as was done in the past. This is most important for the upcoming ACL 2022 conference registration now being built.

And, Pat Kirby, my always indispensable right arm, will be leaving us at the end of April, after helping me with the close of the office. We should wish her well as she looks to warmer climates to build her own retirement future.

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 $2,464.86 covering the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Q 2021.

MIT Press Journals has been paid for their invoice covering the 2020-2021 academic year for services supporting both the CL and TACL journals. These invoices totaled $89,483.23. As usual, we can expect the 2021-2022 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 2021, nor so far in 2022. The TACL Journal’s assistant was paid $18,436.25 for July-December 2021 and January 2022.

Membership:

We ended 2021 with a total of 7,173 members which is an increase of 927 members over the close of 2020. So far in 2022, we have 654 through the end of February, made up mostly of members in the midst of their multi-year memberships. As is becoming more standard, most memberships come from conference registrations. This includes the EACL, NAACL, ACL, and EMNLP 2021 members who renewed or joined along with their conference registrations. This indicates the continuing growth of our field and conferences...At the close of 2017, only four 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 2021, the numbers are 47/53% regular vs student and this trend seems to be continuing, possibly because the student virtual fees for all 2021 conferences were so very affordable and this also allowed the D&I conference funding to stretch further to cover more people. 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. However, since people are forced to join as part of their registrations, when a lot of CFP announcements are sent out, a much larger than usual number of new members asked to be removed, thus making the high membership number actually a bit less.

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 70-80 or more countries on a regular basis. Countries represented so far in 2021 totaled 96, 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.

File:Membership-report-2012-2021-Statistics.xlsx

File:Memberships-2021-by-Country.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:

As was reported last summer, for the 2021 conferences (ACL, EMNLP, and NAACL), the Office focus was 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. However, EMNLP 2021 presented an entirely new set of challenges being the first hybrid meeting ACL has had. This was more like holding two separate but coordinated meetings, one virtual and one in-person.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021, intended to be in Bangkok, was 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 worked 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 this and the other conferences this year. ACL-IJCNLP 2021 ended with 3,531 total virtual attendees.

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.

NAACL 2021, led by Kristina Toutanova, was contracted to be held in-person in Mexico City but, again due to COVID-19 instability, we were fortunate to be able to renegotiate the contracts to now be NAACL 2024 in Mexico City in June with no penalties for these changes. It was a pleasure to work with Kristina and her able team of Organizing Committee members on this 100% virtual conference. This was the first conference to use Underline as the platform for the virtual meeting, all presentation recordings, all sponsors’ exhibiting, all D&I special arrangements and requirements, etc. So this was a learning process for all involved as the Underline team got to know ACL and its practices and processes and visa versa. Weekly virtual meetings were held to keep the planning moving forward without slippage and focusing on different aspects or issues each week. This was a very good exercise and has continued for the later conferences. NAACL 2021 ended with a total of 2,682 virtual attendees.

EMNLP 2021, being our first hybrid, held in November in the Dominican Republic, was actually a success with in-person attendees expressing their happiness in being somewhat back to normal and being able to see each other. Extra precautions were taken to help assure attendees of the safety of the venue and that COVID-19 vaccination proof was required from all attendees. And, with little reason to leave the resort, people mostly stayed in the resort and were safely catered to without going outside “the bubble”. The largest issue was with the local AV crew who did not have up-to-date equipment, most did not know how to run the equipment, and some slept in the back of the rooms, etc. So, having a 4 person team from Underline onsite (meant to be there for coordination purposes only) who worked 20 hour days, taking over much that should have been handled by the local AV team, was what saved the AV portion of the in-person conference. Other than the AV issues, the in-person conference went pretty well, with only minor adjustments needed from day to day. And, as with both NAACL and ACL 2021 conferences, the weekly virtual planning meetings were invaluable as both Underline and ACL/EMNLP learned what is involved in making hybrid meetings work. EMNLP 2021 ended with a combined total of 3,760 attendees, 485 onsite and 3,275 virtual.

I expect future hybrid meetings to have larger in-person components as people become more comfortable travelling and hopefully COVID and all its variants are better controlled. 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 meeting, it is more difficult to predict future needs. This is compounded with the unpredictability of the number of attendees at each conference as overall attendance numbers are increasing and what portions will be in-person vs virtual.

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 overall program. With a future of hybrid conferences, we could run the danger of defaulting on contractual commitments we have made or may negotiate and then find our predictions to be off. 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. Or, optimistically, we may find there are more registrations than anticipated and have to scurry to find adequate space, possibly at higher cost.

Conference Sponsorship:

Thanks to Chris Callison-Burch, our (global) Sponsorship Director, who has taken over much of the sponsoring and exhibiting communications and management, this area of tasks will be well managed after my retirement and I continue to work with and advise Chris as requested. As of March 4, 2022 we have secured the following confirmed sponsors:

ACL: Amazon (Diamond), Apple (Diamond), LivePerson (Diamond), Meta (Diamond), Grammarly (Platinum), IBM (Platinum), Megagon (Platinum), Bosch (Gold), ServiceNow (Gold), Relativity (Gold), Adobe (Bronze), Babelscape (Bronze)

NAACL: Amazon (Diamond), LivePerson (Diamond), Meta (Diamond), Apple (Platinum), Grammarly (Platinum), Megagon (Platinum), Nuveen (Gold), ServiceNow (Gold), Relativity (Gold), Adobe (Bronze), Babelscape (Bronze)

EMNLP: Amazon (Diamond), Apple (Diamond), LivePerson (Diamond), Meta (Diamond), Megagon (Platinum), Adobe (Bronze), Babelscape (Bronze)

AACL: Adobe (Bronze)

D&I Sponsorship: Microsoft (D&I Champion) for all 4 conferences.

The total sponsorship commitments for the main conferences as of March 4, 2022 amount of $440,610. Additionally, we have $48,575 for workshop sponsorships and colocated conferences ($20k for IWSLT, plus $30k for miscellaneous other workshops).

It is wonderful to see the return of so many faithful sponsors. 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 continuing sponsors.