2009Q1 Reports: Secretary

Notes

                        ACL Secretary report
                           Dragomir Radev
                          radev@umich.edu

1. The ACL elections were held in the Fall of 2008. I am happy to announce that three new ACL members will join the exec as of January 1, 2009:

- Kevin Knight (ISI) - vice-president-elect - Lori Levin (CMU) - North American member - Giorgio Satta (U. Padua) - ex officio as chair of EACL

They replace Mark Steedman (current past president), Claire Cardie (North American member), and Alex Lascarides (chair of EACL, the European Chapter of ACL) whose terms ended. The exec wants to thank them for their leadership and for the hard work they devoted to ACL during their terms.

Our 2008 president, Bonnie Dorr, will stay on the board as past president for a year. We welcome our current vice-president Steven Bird to the position of ACL president for 2009.

Earlier in the year, Kam-Fai Wong was elected AFNLP representative to the ACL executive board. Mark Steedman's reciprocal term as ACL representative to AFNLP ended and a procedure for naming a replacement is under way now.

2. The exec approved a resolution to mark the 50th anniversary of ATALA with a special certificate of recognition.

3. The winter teleconferences switched to a new format, proposed by Steven Bird. There are now two 90-minute telecons, each of which is scheduled in a way that two continents have it during the regular day.

4. The ACL exec discussed the creation of two new SIGs: SIGMT and SIGFSM as well as the proposed constitution of SIGDAT.

5. A new committee was formed that includes representatives of ACL, ELRA, ICCL, AFNLP, EACL, and NAACL. The goal of this committee is to find a solution of the "NLP conference sudoku" problem which causes the number of major NLP conferences to fluctuate from 2-3 to 5-6 from year to year. It seems appropriate that NLP conferences should be spread around more evenly.

6. A new contract was signed with Priscilla and ARCS to continue providing services to ACL.

7. Min Yen Kan has asked for permission to delegate some Anthology-related, Web-intensive tasks to Ali. We need to discuss that issue.

8. Future ACL conference budgets should have a $10k line item for student travel.

9. Bonnie Dorr has agreed to continue discussions with AAAI about possible interactions between ACL and AAAI.

10. A web site was created by Ali under Bonnie Dorr's instructions for publisher disounts for ACL members.

11. One todo item from last year - we should get the draft schedule for ACL 2009 early and check for any time conflicts, esp. with the exec++ dinner, the student poster session (if any), any other poster sessions, and receptions.

12. Drago's private initiative to build a manually linked version of the ACL Anthology has been successful. The 2008 release is available here: http://belobog.si.umich.edu/clair/anthology/release/ http://belobog.si.umich.edu/clair/anthology/

13. A proposal was approved to put in place an ACL Member Portal on the web by 1st January 2009. Robert Dale is in charge.

14. CICLING asked for ACL endorsement and obtained it.

15. A list of prior conference chairs has been compiled here: http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=Additional_conference_chairs

16. The next ACL newsletter will be mailed out soon and it will be partially based on this document.

17. We need to decide how to run the exec++ dinner meeting and the business meeting at the conference in Singapore. I liked the 2008 model. Let's keep it.

18. The US team tied for first place at the International Linguistics Olympiad in Bulgaria.

19. Are we going to be soliciting more ideas and initiatives from the membership like we did in 2007 and 2008?

20. Tsujii is now chair of the nominating committee, with Mark Steedman and Bonnie Dorr as members -- confirm they are on track?

21. New Admin wiki for reports, conference handbook, calendar, etc; ny ACL officer is welcome to have write access.

22. It was decided to drop joint memberships which allowed a family (according to some definition of this term) to get a discount on ACL membership.