2013Q3 Reports: Office Manager

Priscilla Rasmussen 18 July 2013

ACL Business Office Report

As you know, Graeme and I selected and interviewed a new accounting firm and, with your approval, have now engaged Mr. Tom Dartnell, of Nisivoccia, as our new accountant. I am in discussion with Mr. Dartnell now to make arrangements for an audit to be performed, probably in late August or so.

Otherwise, the office is chugging along nicely.

There is an issue I would ask the Board to discuss and provide input on for future conferences. I believe two concerns could be woven into one situation and a solution could be reached:

Concern #1: Banquets:

1. Getting more and more expensive and operating at a loss almost every year recently for both ACLs and NAACLs

2. It seems only about half the attendees are interested in attending banquets

3. Of those attending, many prefer museums or other interesting venues but when at that sort of place, some complain they could not interact with others because people were spread throughout the venue

4. Food is sometimes good but usually of the more standard, large gathering type and not the best variety

Concern #2: Poster Sessions

1. At ACL 2011, Portland, about 125 posters were accepted, the most ever accepted until ACL 2013 which has over 160 posters accepted

2. With ACL 2014 being hosted by NAACL and there not being a separate NAACL to diffuse the total posters over two conferences, the same numbers as this year might be accepted

3. With TACL papers being accepted for conference presentation, the numbers that may be turned into posters may grow from this year’s 4-6 to some much larger number, putting more pressure on the poster session planning

4. Fewer venues can offer adequate space for 1-2 sessions of posters with enough extra room to comfortably space the posters

Possible Solutions:

1. We could continue to hold the Poster/Dinner on Monday nights and the Banquet with Presidential Address on Tuesday nights

2. We could offer the poster sessions each lunchtime Monday-Wednesday but, to do this, we probably should offer box lunches (or similar) each day. Would the attendees pay or would we add the cost to the registration fees? This was done in Sweden, ACL 2010, but I heard quite a few complaints.

3. For ACL 2013, we are trying to hold Poster Sessions A and B on Monday to spread out the posters and give poster presenters a chance to see other posters. And, they will be left up all of Tuesday for browsing. This is not ideal but we were fortunate to have the space for all 160 posters and the program/banquet/other activities were already in place.

4. We could eliminate the Banquet and offer two nights of poster sessions on Monday and Tuesday nights. This way, 100-180 posters would be manageable, either with A/B sessions or just 3-4 hour single sessions as is done now. We could raise the registration fee by $50-75 and offer dinners both nights. Doing this would require the Presidents to give up their talks, though.

5. Another way of managing a large number of posters was done at ICML 2013. They end their sessions at 5:30-6:00 each of the three main days and hold their poster sessions 8:00-10:00pm, with one drink ticket each night and a cash bar. The idea is that people go out for dinner and come back to the poster sessions each night. Possibly some variation of this would work, maybe offering desserts and coffee and a cash bar. The one conflict would be Wednesday night’s Exec++ Dinner.

Discussion?

Publications, Journals and Royalties:

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates now handling print-on-demand of our publications, I receive very few requests for publications in the office. So far in 2013, I have filled only 2 orders.

We have finally received the past two years of invoices from MIT Press Journals for the CL Journal. The total of $85,417.29 was paid in July, covering the 2011 and 2012 years. We are now up-to-date with MIT Press Journals.

We have received royalties from Curran Associates for the last quarter of 2012 and the first quarter of 2013 in the amount of $1,578.02. Copyright Clearance Center also sent a check for $53.06 as the final check for the period ending December 31, 2012. MIT Press Journals’ royalty year ends March 31, 2013. Their annual statement has not yet been received but it is expected that, similar to last year, if we earn less than $50 in royalties, this small amount will be credited to our account for next year.

Membership:

We surpassed 2100 members in 2009 and 2010 and in 2011 reached over 2000 members. We ended 2012 with 2064 members and appear to be on track to end 2013 with about 2100 or more members, since we now have 1627 current members and still have more to come through ACL 2013 and all of EMNLP 2013. Please see Membership spreadsheets for the full 2012 calendar year details on countries represented and statistics, which have not changed since our Winter Teleconferences, and the update through July 18th of where we are so far in 2013.

Pat and I continue to do our best to keep the membership information updated and as correct as possible from information gathered on conference registration forms. It is unfortunate that membership records are not being properly updated by the members themselves as was originally envisioned, especially since I often cannot trust the mailing address at the portal and must go to people’s websites to find updated information.

Fellows Program:

The call for nominations of Fellows for the 2014 year should go out in early September. Nominations will be gathered for a couple of months and decisions made by December. I then send award certificates to each new inductee and have the results posted at our website.

Conferences:

NAACL HLT 2013, recently held in Atlanta, had a final count of attendees of 684 at part or all of the meeting. Of this total, there were 2 Visa Problem and 2 Medical cancellations which received full refunds. There was 1 cancellation without reason and 23 No-Shows who each get zero refund. There were 504 paying main conference attendees, another 49 were volunteers, SRW students, sponsors, exhibitors, and guests/organizers. There were also 131 people only attending tutorials, the *SEM co-located conference, or workshops. It seems the trend continues that ACL-related conferences have at least 20% of the total attendees not attending the main conference (NAACL 2012 was closer to 40%). Workshops are becoming more and more mini-conferences, complete with poster sessions which are often difficult to organize, especially the *SEM co-located conference and SemEval. The attempt at cross-pollination with ICML by holding the two conferences back-to-back was successful. NAACL held a Symposium on Saturday, between the two conferences and it attracted 80-100 people. ICML held two workshops the next day as part of their first day of events and some of the NAACL attendees attended those as well. As my second time as Local Arrangements Chair, I am still excited and find it even more satisfying and more challenging but, overall, very good to feel truly a part of the conference team.

ACL 2013, in Sofia, Bulgaria, has 900 total pre-conference registrations and late registration does not close for a few more days, so we seem to be on track for 975-1000 final attendees. The last stages of planning and setup are now happening and are being coordinated by Svetla Koeva and her local team. The Program Chairs overcame problems (see the beginning of this report regarding the poster session) and did a wonderful job, as did all the others on the organizing committee.

(NA)ACL HLT 2014 will be held in Baltimore, Maryland at the Marriott Hotel, June 22-27. Daniel Marcu (GC), David Yarowsky (LAC), Chris Callison-Burch and others of the organizing committee and I have been and will continue working closely on the various pieces of planning to pull together a great conference.

Planning for EACL 2014, in Gothenberg, Sweden, seem to be moving along nicely, with an excellent local team leading the way. The Office provided advice and support to the organizers.

Conference Sponsorship:

ACL 2013 had sponsorships totaling $62,052.75 to the Office plus a lot of in-kind sponsorship by the Bulgarian Academy of Science and the Bulgarian government; and, NAACL 2013 received sponsorships totaling $25,452.25. Baidu committed to being a Platinum Level sponsor, with certain concessions, for ACL 2013. Google was 2-Pack Gold Sponsor for ACL and NAACL this year. Qatar Computing Research Institute was a new sponsor, supporting ACL 2013 at the Silver level and expressed interest in becoming ongoing sponsor. Ontotext AD has also become a Gold sponsor this year. IBM made a generous contribution of $2,500 toward the NAACL Student Lunch in addition to their “standard” IBM Best Student Paper awards at both ACL and NAACL. And, Microsoft, Rakuten, SDL and others continue to be generous in supporting ACL and NAACL. I am also pleased to report that Yahoo has come back as a sponsor and we can add Facebook as a new sponsor who made a significant contribution this year. We are looking toward pursuing Amazon and others to add to our list of continuing sponsors.

We need to add two sponsorship chairs for Asia and one for North America to the Sponsorship Committee now since I am updating the Sponsorship Booklet for our 2014 campaign. Please send recommendations to me asap.

The area Sponsorship Chairs are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them. And, many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!

Membership Statistics report

July 18, 2013
(all full-year finals)	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013
TOTAL MEMBERSHIP	1641	1562	2123	2104	1602	2151	2136	2028	2064	1627
TOTAL REGULAR	1198	1114	1326	1365	1137	1402	1162	1111	1252	1043
TOTAL STUDENTS	443	448	521	729	463	749	974	917	812	584
TOTAL WITH NO TYPE			276	10	2	0	0	0	0	0
DISCOUNTS APPLIED TO ABOVE:
REDUCED RATES	9	15	8	12	8	4	282	276	81	84
AMTA DISCOUNTS	1	1	0	0	0	1	1	4	0	0
ISCA DISCOUNTS	0	4	1	3	3	3	3	14	4	1
HLT/NAACL FREE YEAR	590	0	540	324	0	535	548	0	0	0
COLING/ACL FREE HALF YEAR			301	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
COLING/ACL FREE FULL YEAR			188	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
TOTAL BY WORLD AREA:
TOTAL ASIA/PACIFIC RIM	209	203	419	314	214	384	569	552	539	275
TOTAL CANADA/MEXICO	68	74	93	83	59	54	60	51	82	43
TOTAL EUROPE	498	414	676	803	439	639	614	564	694	623
TOTAL SOUTH AMERICA	6	8	5	10	10	9	22	16	17	9
TOTAL USA	860	863	930	894	880	823	871	845	732	677
HOW MEMBERSHIPS CAME IN:
MEMBERSHIPS-ONLY	447	878	870	981	1602	2151	2136	2028	2064	1627
MEMBERSHIPS + ORDERS	205	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
ORDERS (FROM OUTSIDE ACL)	48	27	38	64	24	17	5	8	4	2
ORDERS (From ACL Membership)		0	0	223	7	5	0	2	4	0

THROUGH CONFERENCES:
HLT/NAACL-2004	590
ACL-2004	369
ACL-2005	487
HLT/EMNLP-2005	197
EACL 2006	224
HLT/NAACL 2006	540	('+ 126 extended through 2007)
COLING/ACL 2006	489
NAACL HLT 2007	324	('+ 145 extended through 2008)
ACL 2007	759	(790 '- 31 Fraudulent and No-Shows who did not pay)
ACL 2008 (incl. vol, spkrs, spons)	426
EMNLP 2008	110
EACL 2009	355
NAACL 2009	535	('+ 133 extended through 2010)
ACL/IJCNLP 2009	632
NAACL HLT 2010	548	('+ 78 extended through 2011)
ACL 2010	767	(new or renewed members captured of the 950 total attendees)
INLG 2010	26	(new or renewed members captured of the 49 total attendees)
EMNLP 2010	141	(new or renewed members captured of the 292 total attendees)
ACL 2011	866
EACL 2012	288
NAACL 2012	535
ACL 2012	697	(Includes EMNLP/CoNLL and SIGdial 2012)
Others such as INLG 2012	0	(any memberships from INLG went through normal online membership)
NAACL 2013	555	(Near final--Still chasing some outstanding memberships)
ACL 2013	569	(More expected by close of late plus all onsite registrations)
EMNLP 2013	0	(Registration is not yet open)

Members by country (update for 2013)

July 18, 2013	MEMBERSHIPS BY COUNTRY FOR SUMMER 2013 (THROUGH REPORT DATE)
	TOTAL	REG	STUD		TOTAL	REG	STUD		TOTAL	REG	STUD
ARGENTINA	1	1		HONG KONG	11	10	1	POLAND	4	2	2
AUSTRIA	2	2		HUNGARY	8	3	5	ROMANIA	7	2	5
AUSTRALIA	24	19	5	INDIA	26	11	15	RUSSIA	15	10	5
BELGIUM	9	7	2	IRAN	1		1	SAUDI ARABIA	3	3
BRAZIL	7	2	5	IRELAND	9	7	2	SCOTLAND	31	21	10
BULGARIA	5	3	2	ISRAEL	15	7	8	SINGAPORE	20	15	5
CANADA	39	29	10	ITALY	50	32	18	SLOVENIA	1		1
CHINA	55	30	25	JAPAN	98	72	26	SOUTH AFRICA	5	1	4
COLUMBIA	1		1	LITHUANIA	3	2	1	SOUTH KOREA	22	17	5
CROATIA	4	1	3	LUXENBOURG	1	1		SPAIN	32	21	11
CZECH REPUBLIC	27	12	15	MACAU	3		3	SRI LANKA	1		1
DENMARK	8	6	2	MALAYSIA	3	2	1	SWEDEN	15	10	5
ENGLAND	72	51	21	MALTA	2		2	SWITZERLAND	19	11	8
ESTONIA	1		1	MEXICO	4	3	1	TAIWAN	9	6	3
FINLAND	8	4	4	NETHERLANDS	35	23	12	THAILAND	1		1
FRANCE	61	40	21	NEW ZEALAND	1		1	TUNISIA	1		1
GEORGIA	1	1		NORWAY	8	5	3	TURKEY	18	9	9
GERMANY	118	71	47	PORTUGAL	4	4		UKRAINE	3	3
GREECE	10	7	3	QTAR	7	6	1	UNITED EMERATES	1	1
								UNITED STATES	677	437	240
COUNTRIES REPRESENTED								TOTAL	1,627	1,043	584

Members by country (Final for 2012)

Also presented at our Winter teleconference

February 4, 2013	MEMBERSHIPS BY COUNTRY FOR 2012 CALENDAR YEAR
	TOTAL	REG	STUD		TOTAL	REG	STUD		TOTAL	REG	STUD
ARGENTINA	3	2	1	HONG KONG	16	9	7	QTAR	6	5	1
AUSTRALIA	37	24	13	HUNGARY	7	5	2	ROMANIA	2		2
AUSTRIA	1	1		INDIA	25	10	15	RUSSIA	8	7	1
BAHRAIN	1	1		INDONESIA	1	1		SAUDI ARABIA	1	1
BELGIUM	14	8	6	IRAN	1		1	SCOTLAND	31	19	12
BRAZIL	12	9	3	IRELAND	15	6	9	SINGAPORE	29	17	12
BULGARIA	7	5	2	ISRAEL	21	11	10	SLOVENIA	3	2	1
CANADA	78	43	35	ITALY	40	28	12	SOUTH AFRICA	4	3	1
CHILE	1	1		JAPAN	113	98	15	SPAIN	46	35	11
CHINA	94	43	51	KOREA	184	90	94	SWEDEN	26	16	10
CROATIA	2		2	LATVIA	2	1	1	SWITZERLAND	26	13	13
CZECH REPUBLIC	15	8	7	LITHUANIA	1		1	TAIWAN	32	10	22
DENMARK	8	5	3	MACAU	1	1		THAILAND	1		1
EGYPT	1	1		MALTA	2	1	1	TURKEY	8	4	4
ENGLAND	66	39	27	MEXICO	4	3	1	UNITED ARAB EMER	1	1
ESTONIA	3		3	NETHERLANDS	31	22	9	UNITED STATES	732	471	261
ETHIOPIA	1	1		NIGERIA	1	1		URUGUAY	1		1
FINLAND	12	7	5	NORWAY	10	5	5	VIET NAM	3	2	1
FRANCE	89	54	35	PHILIPPINES	2	2
GERMANY	160	87	73	POLAND	7	3	4
GREECE	9	6	3	PORTUGAL	6	4	2
COUNTRIES REPRESENTED								TOTAL	2,064	1,252	812