2025Q1 Minutes (public version)

ACL 2025 Organization

- ACL 2025 received 8,340 submissions, a 73% increase compared to the previous year and the ethics committee is in the process of recruiting reviewers.

- A new role, the Documentation Chair, has been introduced to improve the level of documentation throughout the conference process.

- Due to the large anticipated attendance, the social event venue is being reconsidered. Jennifer Rachford, ACL Business Manager， is working with the venue for options for the increase in presentations.

- The Technical Open Review Chairs role was discussed, with a focus on clarifying their responsibilities and improving communication with the ACL Rolling Review team.

Financial Planning

- The executive committee is monitoring U.S. travel budget trends and adjust conference planning accordingly.

- The executive committee will explore cost-saving measures for student participation, such as optional event pricing.

- The executive committee will review the financial allocation framework between ACL chapters, particularly regarding surplus distribution from joint conferences, and David Yarowsky, ACL Treasurer, will finalize clear guidelines for future joint conference financial allocations.

ACL Conference Awards Policy

- Based on the report and suggestions from the ACL2024 best paper award committee chairs, the executive committee discussed the procedures of best paper award selection. Concerns were raised about the operational challenges of identifying non-publicized papers and collecting anonymized versions of camera-ready papers for award selection. The committee agreed to revise the ACL wiki to clarify the policy and selection process, and clarify the link between the ARR submission questions and the non-publicized paper awards.

Virtual Conference Experience

- Jordan Lee Boyd-Graber, the member at-large of the ACL executive committee, will continue to explore ways to improve the virtual conference experience, including more interactive sessions, panel discussions, and pricing models that would approach marginal virtual participation cost. The goal is to make virtual attendance more engaging and accessible.

Reviewer Policies

- Concerns were raised about the review burden on interdisciplinary researchers, and some proposals were put forward, including: allow workshop papers to count towards reviewer qualifications, and consider a simpler system where senior authors are automatically conscripted to review a set number of papers. Roberto and Lu are responsible for reviewer qualification improvements.

- Wei Lu, CL Editor, proposed to develop a framework for sharing reviewer performance data across ACL venues and implement a "Best Reviewer Award" to incentivize high-quality reviews.

Future Conference Organization

- ACL 2026, ACL 2027 and ACL 2028 will be held in North America, Asia/Pacific and Europe, respectively. Discussions were ongoing regarding whether ACL 2027 will be a joint conference with another organization (e.g., IJCNLP).

- Consideration was being given to hosting EACL 2026 in North Africa (e.g., Morocco or Tunisia) to diversify locations and accommodate weather preferences.

- ACL members-at-large will discuss and propose a possible mechanism for each member to rotate and undertake a certain task, such as conference award, regional ACL organization, etc., instead of one member always doing one work.

- The executive committee will update the Conference Handbook to reflect recent changes in policies and procedures, ensuring that all conference organizers have access to clear and consistent guidelines.

Special Interest Groups (SIGs)

- SIGs are now required to include ethical considerations in their documentation. However, this policy is not yet systematically enforced.

- The committee proposed to update the SIG compliance document to include ethical considerations as a standard requirement.