View source for 2015Q3 Reports: NAACL

= Report from NAACL, July 2015 =

Hal Daum&eacute; III - Chapter board chair

Joel Tetreault - Treasurer

== Executive Committee Meetings ==

The board had a meeting at NAACL on 31 May 2015. Additionally the Board converses regularly by email.

== Treasurer's Report ==

More details at: http://naacl.org/minutes/2015/NAACL_Treasurer_Report_2015.pdf

As of May 31, 2015, our budget balance was $59,889, the highest it's been since we took a hit from NAACL 2010 in LA. We had approximately $19,000 in outlays: $5000 to NACL, $3000 to the emerging regions fund, $6000 to the Jelinek summer workshop and $4800 to LSA. We had a very large amount of committed sponsorship in 2015 ($59k, more than double the $25k in 2013).

== North American conference in 2015 ==

NAACL was held in Denver CO, USA this year, from 31 May through 5 June. This was the largest NAACL ever by far (901 attendees as of the first day, versus a max of 650-700 in previous years). It featured two keynote addresses: Lillian Lee and Fei-fei Li, 6 tutorials, 13 one-day workshops, Semeval (2 day workshop) and was colocated with *SEM. Joyce Chai and Anoop Sarkar were program chairs; Rada Mihalcea was general chair.
ACL is in North America this year, so there is no separate NAACL.

== NAACL Officers as of 8 June 2014 ==

  Chair         Hal Daume III            University of Maryland
  Secretary     Michael White            Ohio State University
  Treasurer     Joel Tetreault           Yahoo! Research
  Past Chair    Chris Callison-Burch     University of Pennsylvania

  Board Members:
  Matt Post               Johns Hopkins University
  Fei Xia                 University of Washington
  Emily Bender            University of Washington
  Eduard Hovy             Carnegie Mellon University
  Graeme Hirst (ex-officio, ACL representative) University of Toronto

We have elections this year for four outgoing members: Hal (chair), Mike (secretary) and Emily and Ed (board members). The nominating committee is actively seeking candidates to replace these members; this will go to a vote that concludes on 15 Dec 2015.

== New Initiatives ==

The board is currently exploring three main initiatives:

* Backend in START (subcommittee chair: Matt Post).   Matt and CCB will be collecting suggestions (starting with their own long list) for ways of improving the process of working with START. NAACL will take the lead on working with softconf to implement these changes for NAACL 2016; after discussion, we hope that the ACL exec might be convinced to contribute funds towards tasks that will benefit the ACL as a whole.

* NAACL in South America (chair: Fei Xia). Fei and Joel noted that helping to host ACL/NAACL in Central or South America is likely to be the most important way in which NAACL can help progress CL there. Meanwhile the Emerging Regions Fund remains active and helpful. Fei clarified that according to the NAACL constitution, NAACL will serve members of the ACL in Central and South America until regional chapters are created for members there. As such, she noted that it does not make sense to consider changing the NAACL name until the question of regional chapters for Central and South America has been settled by ACL members there. Fei will work on updating the contacts list started by Ted Pedersen for ACL members in Central and South America who might be interested in hosting a future conference.

* Reviewing models (chair: Mike White). Largely driven by what we would like in reviewing, as well as by looking at what other conferences have been doing, we are putting together a list of "best practices." The main items discussed were reviewer feedback (eg a "star" system for good reviewers, maintained over time); publicly available reviews; resubmitted papers; author feedback; meta-reviews from area chairs.

NAACL is conducting a post-conference survey (see https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1tqhV5h-iiCruwWkoNtC4qO5h_gdzERyXaltZY0vvrR8/viewform); we will make the results available to ACL once they are in.

== North America Conference in 2016 ==

NAACL 2016 will take place at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina, 12-17 June 2016. General chair is Kevin Knight; program co-chairs are Ani Nenkova and Owen Rambow.

== Specific Items for ACL Exec ==

* We would still like ACL to revisit the decision that supplementary materials not be required to be anonymous. This is inconsistent with NAACL's policy.

* NAACL has decided to make it a policy that all reviewer scores (including overall recommendation) be made available to authors at response time---assuming there is an author response---and would like to encourage ACL to adopt a similar rule.