2009Q1 Reports: ACL/IJCNLP-09

ACL/IJCNLP-09 Winter Report for AFNLP

Compiled by Keh-Yih Su at 2009/01/23

General Chair Report (Su, Keh-Yih)

Chairs for various positions have been approved and got acceptance by April 15, 2008: Webmaster (Dong, Minghui), Demo (Lee, Gary Geunbae and Schulte im Walde, Sabine), Exhibits (Baldwin, Timothy and Koehn, Philipp), Mentoring Service (Ng, Hwee Tou and Reeder, Florence), Publication (Barzilay, Regina and Chang, Jing-Shin), Publicity (Kan, Min-Yen and Way, Andy), Sponsorship (Isahara, Hitoshi and Lua, Kim-Teng), Student Research Workshop (Ngai, Grace and Roark, Brian), Tutorial (McCarthy, Diana and Zong, Chengqing), Workshop (Lin, Jimmy and Matsumoto, Yuji). All team members have cooperatively fulfilled their duties since then. I must thank all of them for their great work that has been accomplished so far.

To share and exchange information among team members, a bulletin board has been set up at http://www.bdc.com.tw/kysu/ACL_IJCNLP-09_Bulletin_Board/index.htm. We have also set up a check list to trace the progress of working items that each chair is expected to complete. The most updated list for the whole team could be found at http://www.bdc.com.tw/kysu/ACL_IJCNLP-09_Bulletin_Board/reports/Milestones_Spreadsheet/Speadsheet_PDF/Milestones%20Spreadsheet.pdf. Among total about 180 working items, 43 working items have been completed (about 140 items remained). So far, all working items, except that of Exhibits and Sponsorship (to be explained later), have progressed smoothly according to the schedule. Due to the hardship of current economic situation, Exhibits chairs and Sponsorship chairs have decided to work together, and they are expected to work out a plan soon (with the contact list). We are closely monitoring this situation, and hope we could get enough support through their effort. Further details could be found at the reports given by various chairs listed as follows.

Local Chair Report (Li, Haizhou)

1) The local organizing committee (LOC) has signed agreement with the Venue (Suntec Convention Centre) for rooms covering 4-6 Tutorials, 12 Workshops (confirmed), Main Conference (4 oral tracks) and EMNLP (3 oral tracks); 2) The LOC has made available special room rates for selected hotels http://www.acl-ijcnlp-2009.org/main/accommodation.html for early booking; 3) The LOC is talking to prospective event organizers on the arrangement of refreshment, reception, banquet, and student lunch etc. Details will be finalized in May 2009; 4) Conference website http://www.acl-ijcnlp-2009.org was setup in 2008 and has been regularly updated; 5) Priscilla Rasmussen, Keh-Yih Su, and Graeme Hirst visited the conference venue in 2008; 6) The LOC has appointed members for various local supports http://www.acl-ijcnlp-2009.org/main/localcommittee.html including on-site registration.

Program Chairs Report (Su, Jian and Wiebe, Jan)

1) After the Preliminary Call for Papers was announced on Sep 30, the Program Committee released 1st Call for Papers on Dec 4, 2008. The second Call for Papers will be released in the last week of January, 2009.

2) 20 area chairs has further invited 628 reviewers for the upcoming review process.

3) Both paper submission websites for main conference and mentoring services are ready. And Start Accounts for SRW and all the WSs have been created and passed to corresponding WS chairs.

Webmaster Report (Dong, Minghui)

In the past a few months, the following updates have been done for the acl-ijcnlp 2009 website.

Added and updated the page of call-for-papers for the main conference; Updated the pages of committees and information for authors; Added the page of call-for-tutorials; Added the page of call-for-papers for student research workshop; Added the page of call for software demos; Added the accommodation page; Added the links of all the workshops; Updated the page of conference venue; Improved the outlook of the website.

In the future, we will continue to attend requests and update the website timely. The major tasks will include the following:

March 10, 2009: Add tutorial information; May 3, 2009: Add invited talks; May 3, 2009: Add travel information; May 3, 2009: Online registration is ready; June 7, 2009: Add presentation instruction; July 3, 2009: Add conference program; July 10, 2009: Prepare and send report to the general chair.

Demo Chairs Report (Lee, Gary Geunbae and Schulte im Walde, Sabine)

The demo chairs finalized the 10 different demo committee members, geographically well balanced, and decided submission schedule, format, and topics, and all will be described in call for demo and demo website. The cfp and website will be finished as scheduled.

Exhibits Chairs Report (Baldwin, Timothy and Koehn, Philipp)

Progress on the exhibition front has been slow. We are waiting on a list of possible local exhibitors from Singapore, and also need details of the costing to potential exhibitors. There has been the suggestion that some Asian companies may be more open to exhibiting than sponsoring ACL 2009 (based on the experience of ACL 2003), so we are working closely with the sponsorship chairs (notably Hitoshi Isahara) to identify possible exhibitor candidates.

Mentoring Service Chairs Report (Ng, Hwee Tou and Reeder, Florence)

This year, we introduced for the first time the use of online submission via START for papers needing mentoring service. The submission website has been set up. 19 reviewers have been recruited. Each of them can review between 1 to 3 papers.

Publication Chairs Report (Barzilay, Regina and Chang, Jing-Shin)

The publication committee had submitted formatting instructions, author instructions and style files to the program committee and web master near the end of the last November before the first official Call for paper.

Our busiest hours will start after the camera ready date on mid-May. We will begin the compilation of the main proceedings after the camera-ready copies are received.

I will start to contact the local committee for potential local publishers in the near future. Before the camera ready due, we will continuously watch and coordinate the publication needs of the various co-events, including workshops, tutorials, demos, exhibitions, student research workshops and local information. We will also hack some of the ACL tools and see how they could help us in compiling the proceedings.

Publicity Chairs Report (Kan, Min-Yen and Way, Andy)

We have circulated the CFP for the ACL-IJCNLP main conference twice to major mailing lists including corpora, irlist, to the ACL membership via Priscilla, bionlp and mtlist. We have also helped to circulate the ACL CFP for tutorials, software demonstrations and the student research workshop.

At the last LREC, COLING and EMNLP, we have circulated fliers and posters about the conference.

Finally, with the ACL-IJCNLP webmaster's help we have set up the mechanism for an ACL-IJCNLP 09 blog, which is scheduled to become active around March.

Sponsorship Chairs Report (Isahara, Hitoshi and Lua, Kim-Teng)

Sponsorship chairs discuss issues with Exhibit Chair (Tim Boldwin) and agreed to jointly work to gather budget for ACL/IJCNLP-09. We checked what ACL2003 chair did for exhibit/sponsorship. We will make calls for exhibit/sponsorship soon and distribute them to appropriate organizations.

Student Research Workshop Faculty Advisors Report (Ngai, Grace and Roark, Brian)

Nomination and Selection of student co-chairs: The potential list of student co-chairs was presented to the ACL board in May 2008. We nominated two candidates for each geographical area: the US, Europe and Asia. Our list was approved by the ACL board, and we finalized the student co-chairs in June 2008. They are: Blaise Thomson (Europe), Jenny Rose Finkel (US) and Davis Dimalen (Asia).

Program Committee Formation: The proposed program committee list was presented to the ACL board in September 2008. The list was approved by the ACL board, and after contacting the candidates on the list, we finalized the program committee with 44 members, of which 15 are from North America, 14 are from Europe, and 15 are from Asia. They represent 7 broad areas of NLP and computational linguistics research.

Conference Setup and Procedures: The first call for papers was issued in November 2008. Another call for papers will be issued before the end of January. The START account has also been readied for the submission process.

Funding for Participants: We have been awarded travel funding for participants from NSF, COLIPS and AFNLP/Nagao Fund. As these funds are designated for US and Asian participants, we are currently looking for other sources of funding for European and Central/South American participants.

Tutorial Chairs Report (McCarthy, Diana and Zong, Chengqing)

We drafted a call for proposals and broadcast this early Oct 08. We will send a second and final call out 19th January. We know of 2 proposals which are being drafted, 1 which we solicited and 1 where the proposer contacted us. We are now in the process of soliciting a few other proposals. We are a little guarded on this because of the ACL 08/07 Tutorial chairs comments where solicited proposals are not always the best ones and therefore have to be rejected, which is awkward. We are liaising with EACL and NAACL chairs about the proposals that they received. We would not want to duplicate tutorial topics within the 2009 conferences.

Having spoken to previous and present tutorial and publication chairs we wish to smooth over the process of tutorial material production. Regarding the tutorial descriptions for inclusion in the proceedings: we will base the format on the main conference style files and produce guidelines so that the organizers all follow the same format for the 1 page description. We will pass the source files to the publication chairs with plenty of time so these can be processed with the rest of the proceedings to produce the tutorials booklet. We will also give clear instructions for the web (ascii) descriptions and course materials and will forward these to the publicity chairs and local organizers respectively.

Workshop Chairs Report (Lin, Jimmy and Matsumoto, Yuji)

This year, proposals for workshops were jointly solicited for EACL, ACL/IJCNLP, and NAACL/HLT. Review was conducted jointly by the workshop chairs of the respective conferences. In total, 41 proposals were received. Twelve were selected for inclusion in the official ACL/IJCNLP 2009 Workshop Program, listed below. As of the date of this report, preparations for the workshops are on track.

• Applied Textual Inference (TextInfer)
• Grammar Engineering across Frameworks
• KRAQ'09: Knowledge and Reasoning for Answering Questions
• Language Generation and Summarisation
• Multiword Expressions: Identification, Interpretation, Disambiguation and Applications
• TextGraphs-4: Graph-based Methods for Natural Language Processing
• The Third Linguistic Annotation Workshop (The LAW III)
• 2nd Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora: from parallel to non-parallel corpora
• The People's Web meets NLP: Collaboratively Constructed Semantic Resources
• The 7th Workshop on Asian Language Resources
• Named Entities Workshop - Shared Task on Transliteration (NEWS on Transliteration)
• Workshop on text and citation analysis for scholarly digital libraries (NLPIR4DL)