2024Q3 Reports: General Chair

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ACL 2024 General Chair Report

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) took place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Tutorials took place on Sunday 11th, the main conference on 12-14th and the workshops on 15-16th. The Student Research Workshop was part of the main conference.

Program. We continue to see an increasing number of submissions. 940 regular papers and 975 Findings papers were selected and accepted from around 4,835 submissions. 2024 was the first year where all *CL conferences moved entirely to the ACL Rolling Review model. The special theme track was "Open science, open data, and open models for reproducible NLP research". We did not have an "Industry Track".

The program also includes 3 keynotes speakers, one pannel, 18 workshops, 6 tutorials, 38 demos and 60 SRW (Student Research Workshop) papers.

As was done in previous years, tutorial and workshop chairs from EACL 2024, NAACL-HLT 2024, ACL 2024, and EMNLP 2024 worked togethere to issue a joint CFP and select the proposals for each conference.

Participation. As of now (10 days before the conference), there are 3,644 registered participants (1,523 Regular, 2,121 Students).

Online Conference. Following NAACL experiment, and to encourage all attendees, both virtual and in-person, to join the virtual conference, the virtual poster session takes place a few days after the in-person conference ends (August, 22nd).

Presentation Mode. All in-person papers accepted to the main conference were given a poster slot. In addition, 102 papers were assigned oral presentations. These papers were selected by the program chairs and the decision was motivated by the goal of having a well-rounded program with a diverse set of topics. Additionally, all Findings papers were also assigned a poster presentation in separate.

Virtual Infrastructure. We continued to use Underline to support the hybrid conference. To enable chat interactions among participants, we dropped MiniConf and Rocketchat using Whova instead.

Money. Sponsorship was handled by the ACL sponsorship director Chris Callison-Burch, the conference Sponsorship Chairs, the Local chairs and Jennifer Rachford. The sponsors include 5 Diamond Sponsors (Apple, Google, LG AI Research, Meta, NewsBreak), 11 Platinum (Alibaba Cloud, Amazon, Baidu, ByteDance, IBM Research, Megagon, Meituan, Oracle, SCB 10X, Sony, Thailand Conference and Exhibition Bureau, TCEB), 6 Gold (Ahrefs, Chen Institute, Cohere, exa.ai, Kasikorn Business Technology Group (KBTG), Xiaomi Group), 2 Silver (Ant Group, Electronics Transaction Development Agency EDTA), 4 Bronze (Adobe, Babelscape, Data Ocean, Translated), 1 Diversity (Apple).

Communication. We asked Nitin Madmani (ACL Information Officer) to create an account for ACL 2024 on ACL Slack account and used this for communication between chairs. We used Freshdesk to handle and route the flow of incoming emails. We created two googlegroup adresses, editors@aclrollingreview.org for questions related to paper submission and acl2024-programchairs@googlegroups.com for all other questions.

Handbooks. Two versions were produced, a printed one which contains only partial information about the program as it is sent to the printer before all information is available and an online one which is updated up to the conference days.

Proceedings. The publications chairs coordinated the production of all proceedings (Main, Findings, Demos, SRW, Workshops, Tutorials).

SRW funding. 15K was allocaed by ACL. These were distributed to 18 students, with each receiving up to $700. In addition, a grant from Google was secured to cover their registration fees.

Diversity & Inclusion. The D&I subsidies ($14,250 in total) were allocated to 8 participants from a total of 162 applications, which is hoped to provide full support. At the time of writing, 7 accepted the awards. In addition, ACL provided registration waiver to 4 more participants. So 11 benefit from the D&I subsidies, 7 with full support and 4 with free registration.

Student Volunteers. At the time of writing (1 week before the conference), the Student Volunteer Chairs received 392 applications, recruted about 66 volunteers (56 in-person, 10 virtual) and allocated 66 grants.

Issues and future recommendations

Documentation. We would need a better way to document the conference organisation process. Much is still done by gleaning information from previous chairs. There are two online sets of guidelines (https://acl-org.github.io/conference-handbook/, https://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Conference_Handbook) which is a bit confusing, the first one is more recent but still incomplete. In particular, not all chairs are documented, the role and contributions of Jennifer Rachford are not elicited (and since she does a lot this is a non trivial gap) and there is a lack of example documents that could be adapted and reused saving much email writing time (e.g., CFP, emails, instructions for workshop/tutorial organisers etc.). The following actions might help improve this and make everyone's life easier:

  • Include a list of important contact persons (I listed some below)
  • Clarify Jennifer's input (venue visits, budget, fees and registration, program, conference logistics etc.)
  • Set up a process for updating the handbook.
  • Include a Secretary Chair whose role would be to get this information from the various chairs and update the handbook accordingly


Internal Communication. As the conference approaches, the flood of incoming emails is really a lot with peaks reaching sometime more than 100 emails a day. I would recommend using Freshdesk, having a good group of IC chairs and keeping them well informed of the decisions made about submissions, registration and presentations. The IC chairs should be kept in the loop as much as possible so they can answer questions directly (otherwise they will simply forward the email to whichever chair is relevant which again might result in these chair being flooded). All chairs should be aware of the IC chairs (else they often do not respond to their queries). Peaks can be expected at notification time (authors complaining about rejection), at camera ready time (people wanting to modify title, author list, being late), at registration time (which category to register under, errors in registration type) and generally the 4 weeks before the conference. To avoid flooding, be on time, have a FAQ on the website which the IC can refer to for simple questions and inform the IC chairs of where to find the information necessary to answer questions.

Virtual and OpenReview chairs. There is currrently no documentation of their duties in the ACL conference handbook and since the virtual infrastructure is mainly handled by Underline and Whova, and OpenReview by the ARR people, these two chairs are redundant.

Notes for future GCs

It is often difficult to know who to contact about a particular issue. I listed below some further information that may be useful to future conferences.

Useful links

  • ACL guidelines (Chair duties)
  • Proceedings
  • CL Github organization
    • to host any Github repositories relevant to any *ACL conference.
    • Contact the ACL Information Officer, Nitin Madnani (nmadnani@ets.org) to request access or to transfer existing repositories.
    • Used e.g., for conference website, creation of ACL anthology publications

Communication Tools

Slack

Using slack is a great way to keep track of each chair question/information/documents.

  • ACL has a paying account with Slack. Contact the ACL Information Officer, Nitin Madnani (nmadnani@ets.org) to create a slack channel for your conference
  • Ask Nitin to set up Slack with one channel per Chair + a general channel including everyone
  • Get all chairs to use Slack
  • The general channel will be useful when a given chair has a question whose answer is known by a different chair.

Contact emails

We used two contact emails (google group): one for PC related questions and one for all other questions.

Freshdesk

The conference attracts a lot of emails. Using Freshdesk and having Internal Communication chairs answering or routing incoming emails is a good idea! ACL has an account. Contact Jonathan Kummerfeld <j.k.kummerfeld@gmail.com> to set up Freshdesk for you.

Useful people

  • Nitin Madnani Chief Information Officer <nmadnani@ets.org>
    • to set up Slack
    • to get access to ACL git repo
  • Jennifer Rachford, ACL conference manager <Jennifer@ACLweb.org>
  • Chris Callison-Burch, ACL sponsorship chair <ccb@seas.upenn.edu>
  • Jonathan Kummerfeld, to set up Freshdesk (email handling) <j.k.kummerfeld@gmail.com>
  • ARR people, submission sites (OpenReview) and reviewing process. Thamar Solorio <thamar.solorio@gmail.com>, Mausam <mausam@cs.washington.edu>
  • Openreview Harold Rubio <harold@openreview.net> for issues regarding how to produce proceedings from OpenReview data.
  • Ingestion of Proceedings in ACL Anthology: Matt Post <post@cs.jhu.edu>;

Submission platform

  • Main conference uses ARR and OpenReview
  • Others (workshop, demos, SRW) can use other platforms such as START
  • The contact for setting up OpenReview is <tech@aclrollingreview.org> and more generally the ARR people
  • in 2024, ACL still had a contract with START. Contact: Rich Gerber <rrgerber@softconf.com>

Website

  • Ask Nitin to create repo in https://github.com/acl-org/
  • Send request to website chairs for update
  • You can also directly update the git repo and issue a pull request

Publications (Proceedings)

Handbook

  • for budget and printing please see with Jennifer Rachford ACL conference manager

Virtual Infrastructure

  • mainly handled by Underline and Whova
  • interactions start about 2 months before the conference (regular weekly meeting starting -2M)
  • Underline people: "Damira Mrsic" <damira@underline.io>; "Sol Rosenberg" <sol@underline.io>;

Sponsorships

  • mainly handled by Chris Callison-Burch, ACL Sponsorship officer
  • Connect Sponsorship chairs with him early
  • Sponsorship chair should also try to apply for funding from their own region
  • ACL has an Sponsorship Booklet

Fee waivers

Fee waivers are available for some e.g., each Tutorial will receive three (3) full conference registration. Contact Jennifer to know who can benefit from a fee waiver and how to proceed.

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