ACL-10 Workshop Instructions
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Dear X, First of all, congratulations again on submitting a successful workshop proposal to ACL 2010. Below we provide some more information about the conditions for organizing an ACL workshop. Please study this information carefully and let us know if anything is unclear. In order to have a smooth workshop session at ACL 2010, it is important that we all work together and try to solve any practical problems that may arise as early as possible. Many of your initial questions may be answered by referring to the ACL Workshop Policies at: http://www.aclweb.org/archive/policies/current/Workshops/Overview-workshop.html Best regards, Pushpak Bhattacharyya and David Weir Workshop Co-Chairs ACL 2010 Jan Hajic General Chair ACL 2010 -------------------- Financial conditions -------------------- Every workshop is entitled to a lecture room with standard equipment and to free refreshments for their participants during two coffee breaks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Every workshop is also entitled to one (1) free registration for an invited speaker. Please note that the registration is only for the workshop itself, not the main conference, and that you must inform Priscilla Rasmussen who should get the free registration. Any other expenses, such as additional free registrations, travel and accommodation for additional invited speakers, or catering for a lunch or reception, have to be covered by the workshop organizers themselves, either by securing sponsorship for the workshop or through the shadow account of an ACL SIG. In both cases, you must get approval from Priscilla Rasmussen before you can contact the local organizers regarding the practical arrangements. All questions regarding the financial conditions should be directed to Priscilla Rasmussen (email). ------------------ Local arrangements ------------------ Every workshop will be allocated a lecture room appropriate in size for the number of registered participants. All rooms will be equipped with laptop, screen and beamer. Larger rooms will also be equipped with microphones and speakers. If you need any other equipment, you must contact the local organizers to find out what the possibilities are and whether any additional costs are involved. Note that the standard arrangement does not provide space for a poster session. If you want to have a poster session as part of your workshop, you must therefore contact the local organizers and let them know how many posters you need and at what time. The conference venue has good space for poster sessions, so we should be able to accommodate all requests, provided that we get them at least two months before the conference. Some workshops may already have been instructed by the workshop chairs that they need to share a room with another workshop and must therefore have a poster session during one morning or afternoon. Even if this is the case, you need to inform the local organizers of the time of this session and of the number of posters needed. Break refreshments will be served during the morning and afternoon breaks. If you want additional catering for a lunch or a reception, you must first contact Priscilla Rasmussen about the finances (see above) and then contact the local organizers to have the catering arranged. Such requests must be made at least two months before the conference. The preliminary schedule for both workshop days (both Thursday, July 15 and Friday, July 16) is as follows: 09:00-10:30 Session 10:30-11:00 Morning break 11:00-12:30 Session 12:30-14:00 Lunch break 14:00-15:30 Session 15:30-16:00 Afternoon break 16:00-17:30 Session There is some flexibility in this schedule, especially concerning start and end times, but the morning and afternoon breaks must be 10:30-11:00 and 15:30-16:00 for logistic reasons. While each workshop has been allocated a maximum duration, we would only expect workshop organizers to make use the full duration if this is justified by the quality and number of submissions that are attracted. All questions regarding the local arrangements should be directed to X (email) and Y (email), who are the workshop liaisons in the local arrangements committee. ------- Website ------- Each workshop needs to set up its own website. As soon as you have done this, please send the URL to local@acl2010.org, so that a link can be put on the workshop page on the main conference website at http://acl2010.org. ----------- Submissions ----------- We have created a START V2 submission and review site for your workshop. You will be receiving an email about this very soon. Note also that ACL 2010 provides a mentoring service, which is open to authors not only for the main conference but also for workshops, so you may want to advertise this service in your call for papers. Questions about the mentoring service can be sent to mentoring@acl20XY.org. ----------- Proceedings ----------- Each workshop has to compile its own proceedings (including a subdirectory of the CD-ROM image containing individual pdf papers, their index files and bibdata), then send the compiled CD-ROM image (including the compiled full version of the proceedings) to the Publication Chairs to produce the CD-ROM proceedings. (There will be no printed hardcopy proceedings at ACL 2010.) If you have a separate publication chair or book chair who is responsible for compiling the proceedings, please forward this message to the person responsible, and inform the Publication Chairs of the right person to contact in the future. Compiling the proceedings simply means re-sorting the pdf files by your program schedule, adding page numbers, citation stamps, creating the TOC, and author index, and including your organizational information and prefaces from your chairs to the proceedings, ..., etc. For details on what should be compiled into the proceedings and some sample online proceedings (coling-acl06 & acl-08), please find the extended outline for the major working items of the publication committee, which is available online at: http://nlp.csie.ncnu.edu.tw/~shin/acl-ijcnlp2009/publication/howto/Working.Items.txt. This online document and its references were produced for the recent ACL-IJCNLP 2009 conference (Singapore). While some details may be changed for the ACL 2010 conference, it provides typical working items for proceedings publication. The Publication Chairs will post the most updated changes online, and will have a similar Working Items for ACL 2010 soon. Contact the Publication Chairs if you have any early questions. In particular, you should pay special attention to the sections related to "workshop" program committee/chairs and the "book chair". (A book chair is a person responsible for compiling the proceedings, if the workshop/program chairs do not take this responsibility.) Most of the publication work can be automated if you use the ACLPUB package, which is a set of Perl scripts and some LaTex templates, running under unix/linux. If you are not familiar with the package, you should try to run it on some test data from the START submission system as early as possible to avoid unexpected compilation problems earlier. ** ACL is working with the team who developed the START conference management system to integrate the ACLPUB publication tools into the START system. Therefore, ACL-2010 is likely to use the integrated system for producing the conference proceedings. However, since the integration may not be finished in time, it would be safer if you know how to use ACLPUB to produce the proceedings. You can do most of the compilation tasks using the ACLPUB package. But you also need to do some manual editing work on the provided templates to include the newest workshop specific information for your workshop. A few quick steps are available in the above URL as well. It also point you to a more complete document set of the ACLPUB, which is included in the ACLPUB package itself. Using other tools (such as Acrobat) to compile the proceedings is possible but not really recommended in terms of consistent style for all proceedings of the conference. According to our previous experience, this approach also needs more human effort. So it is not really recommended. The authors also need to sign the copyright transfer form in order for their work to be included to the proceedings. In ACL-IJCNLP-2009, the main conference adopted an e-signature practice, which is also used in some recent conferences. We may use the same practice for ACL-2010 to simplify the copyright transfer process. An e-copy of the copyright transfer form will be installed on the final submission page; the authors can transfer their copyright by typing their names in the signature field of the e-form. No hardcopy copyright transfer form will be collected under this practice. All questions regarding the workshop publications should be directed to the ACL 2010 Publications Chairs, X and Y (publications@acl20XY.org).