View source for 2011Q3 Reports: General Chair

'''ACL 2011 General Chair Report'''

by Dekang Lin

I am happy to report that all of the activities of the
organizing committee have wrapped up. The master copies of the
Proceedings and the Handbook were sent to the publisher/printer on
time. They are scheduled to arrive at the conference venue during the
week before the conference. The proceedings will go live on ACL
Anthology on June 13th. 

I am very grateful for the hard work by all the committee chairs. Most
of the details about conference organization efforts are found in
their reports. I will discuss several matters that I was involved in.

'''Publication/ACLPUB'''

The April-May period was a particularly busy time for PC, Publication
and Local chairs. There were many sequentially dependent deadlines in
a short period of time, including best paper selection, conference
schedule, compilation of the proceedings and the handbook. 

As in previous years, the proceedings were put together using ACLPUB
package. Some of the functionalities of ACLPUB were integrated into
START. The software seems to be sufficiently adequate for the job. The
main hurdle was the learning curve. The publication chair not only
needed to master the package, but also to give advise to the workshop
organizers. The effort spent on learning software package is largely not 
re-used. The hard-learned lessons are sometimes
re-learned in the following years. A better alternative may be to
shift some of the tasks of the publication chair to SoftConf.

'''Software/Dataset Attachments'''

One of the innovations by this year's PC co-chairs is to give the
authors an option to attach software or datasets to their papers in
the proceedings. This seems a wonderful idea and I hope that the
practice will be continued in future years. One mistake that we almost
made (but fortunately avoided) was to under-estimate the required
capacity of the USB drive. One attachment turned out to be bigger than
the total size of all the papers and the other attachments
combined. By relying bzip2 instead of zip or gzip for some of the
large attachments, we managed to fit everything on an 1GB USB drive,
with uncomfortably small space to spare. 

The ACLPUB package does not support these attachments and they were
incorporated into proceedings manually. The ACL Executives need to
think about mechanisms for updating the software/datasets on ACL
Anthology. 

'''Hardcopy Tutorial Notes'''

Since the tutorial notes are included in the USB drive, it could be
argued either way whether to print the hard copies. Eventually, we
decided to print the notes in case some tutorial registrants expect the hard
copies. Tutorial Chairs recommendation is to have opt-in option for
hardcopy notes on the registration form in future years.

'''Concurrent Meetings'''

One of the issues we encountered was that some groups requested
holding meetings/workshops during the conference in the same hotel. We
adopted the policy to accommodate smaller meetings (e.g., smaller than
a typical workshop) and recommended larger ones to be held on adjacent
dates to avoid conflict/competition with the conference.