2009Q3 Reports: EACL

EACL Report, July 2009

Giorgio Satta, Chair
Sien Moens, Chair-Elect
Joakim Nivre, Secretary
Mike Rosner, Treasurer

EACL 2009

The EACL 2009 conference was held on 30 March - 3 April 2009 in Athens, Greece. The event has been extremely successful, with 515 registrations (including participants to 10 workshops and 4 tutorials). This is a record for EACL conferences. The EACL board whishes to express its gratitude to all the people who have been working for this event, and especially to the general conference chair Alex Lascarides, the program committee co-chairs Claire Gardent and Joakim Nivre and the local organizing committee chair Vangelis Karkaletsis.

The meeting was extremely well organized, thanks in particular to the efforts of the local organizers, who also managed to get very generous financial support from local institutions and companies. The final figures in the conference budget are still pending, but it appears that the conference will make a surplus of around 3000 Euros.

The conference had the largest number of submissions ever, and the largest main programme. A special thank you goes to the PC chairs, who were very receptive to the EACL board's concerns about diversifying the kinds of papers that get submitted and accepted.

This time the conference adopted a new model for paper presentation, which was very well received by the attendees. In this model, there was a single type of publication, called paper (8+1 pages in the proceedings). At the conference, there were two modes of presentation, one called talk and the other called poster. Talks consisted of 20 minutes of oral presentation followed by 5 minutes of discussion, and posters had 10-minute presentation with no questions, followed by a 60-minute poster session. At the business meeting on the last day, participants suggested that we should retain this format in the future.

More information about the event can be found in the EACL 2009 report by Alex Lascarides, submitted as a 2009Q3 ACL report.

Financial report

CHAPTER FINANCES 2008-09 Intermediate Report, June 2009
	balance
31/12/2008	12,642
EXPENSES
eacl.org.mt domain	-23.29
Sponsorships
EACL 2009 student grants	-3,000.00
ESSLLI 2009 student grants	-2,000.00
total expenses	-5,023.29
01/07/2009	07,618.71

[Mike Rosner June 2009]

EACL Student Board Elections

Elections for the EACL Student Board have been run in May 2009, since Vera Demberg and Yanjun Ma have their terms expiring on June 30. The EACL has elected two new members:

Marta Recasens, Linguistic Department, University of Barcelona, Spain; and
Mattias Nilsson, Department of Linguistics and Philology, University of Uppsala, Sweden

We would like to thank Vera and Yanjun for their stirling work over the last two years.

ACL 2010

Three members of the EACL Executive Board have joined the coordinating committee for ACL 2010 held in Uppsala, Sweden (jointly with the EACL chapter): Giorgio Satta, Marie Francine Moens, and Eric Gaussier. (Joakim Nivre, EACL secretary, is also on this committee, but wearing the hat of the local chair.)

Nils Reiter from EACL Student Board has also joined the committee organizing the Student Research Workshop at ACL 2010.

Call for Bids for EACL 2012

The Call for Bids was sent out in March 2009 by Sien Moens. Deadline for draft bids is September 11, 2009. Feedback on draft bids is due November 12, 2009, the deadline for final bids is January 12, 2010, and the deadline for notification to bidders is March 26, 2010.

Change in policy for general conference chair at EACL conferences

In the EACL Board meeting of April 2009 a change in policy was approved by the EACL Board, regarding the appointment of the general conference chair at EACL conferences. According to the old policy, the resigning EACL chair becomes general chair for the upcoming EACL conference, but this policy (which has only been applied once) violates the ACL policy that major conference chairs should not recently have served as ACL officers. The new policy states that the general chair of the EACL conference should be selected from outside the board, as soon as possible after the site of the conference has been determined.

EACL Sponsorships

EACL has provided support for ESSLLI 2009 in Bordeaux, France, in the form of student grants, with an amount of 2000 Euros.

EACL has also awarded 6 sponsorships for student participants to the EACL 2009 conference and the student research workshop, for the total amount of 3000 Euros.

EACL Officers per July, 1st, 2009

The actual EACL Board composition is as follows:

Chair:	Giorgio Satta (University of Padua, Italy)
Chair-elect:	Sien Moens (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium)
Secretary:	Joakim Nivre (Uppsala University, Sweden)
Treasurer:	Mike Rosner (University of Malta)

Advisory Board members:

Eric Gaussier (Joseph Fourier University, Grenoble, France)
Josef van Genabith (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Toni Martí (University of Barcelona, Spain)
Kiril Simov (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria)

Nominating Committee:

Anette Frank (University of Heidelberg, Germany)
Alex Lascarides (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Gertjan van Noord (University of Groningen, Netherlands)
Felisa Verdejo (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Spain)

Student Board Members:

Mattias Nilsson (University of Uppsala, Sweden)
Marta Recasens (University of Barcelona, Spain)
Nils Reiter (University of Heidelberg, Germany)