2024Q3 Reports: Anthology Director
Overview
The Anthology staff comprises Matt Post (director since 2019) and four paid assistants who have been helping with day-to-day operations and improvements. We also continue to benefit from our volunteers, especially longtime contributor Marcel Bollmann of Linköping University, Sweden.
Accomplishments
In addition to normal operations, we have completed the following over the past quarter:
- Moved all Vimeo videos to local hosting, and also cleared out an old Dropbox folder with miscellaneous videos #3125
- Improved the corrections submission process with an updated set of templates
- Ingested an old volume from the Second workshop on Very Large Corpora contributed by Ken Church
Issues
We discovered this year that the signed copyright transfer forms are not being consistently collected. This was a solved problem in the Softconf days but this detail got lost in the transfer to OpenReview. Thanks to Steven Bethard it was done correctly at NAACL this year, and we are working to ensure it will be used consistently in future conferences. However, it requires some manual setup, so this has been additional work.
We continue to have difficulties with ingesting proceedings of major conferences. As I write, ACL's proceedings are not yet available. Many issues have been introduced with the transition away from Softconf to OpenReview, and despite good documentation, there are difficulties with knowledge transfer and management of the many moving pieces.
The selection / appointment of a conference's publication chair plays a big role. It is extremely important that each conference have a publication chair with technical expertise, an eye for detail, management skills, and ideally some experience in the job.
Plans
We have the following projects in mind in the coming quarters:
- Decide on and implement a format for canonical author names discussion. This will likely be based on ORCID, and look like the following: https://aclanthology.org/people/matt-post/ORC-ID
- Address the copyright issue, and potentially move to paper-level labeling of copyright
- Update documentation and aclpub2-based processes to smooth out ingestion
- Implement ability to host plenary videos, along with BibTeX citations