2016Q3 Reports: Tutorial Chairs

Prepared July 8, 2016

Alexandra Birch (University of Edinburgh)

Willem Zuidema (University of Amsterdam)

General Schedule

This year we had a joint call-for-tutorials, coordinated with the NAACL and EMNLP co-chairs (6 co-chairs in total).

In addition we coordinated the deadlines with Publication Chairs and Local Organizers.

Shared dates:

• Submission deadline for tutorial proposals: January 15, 2016
• Notification of acceptance: February 12, 2016
• Tutorial descriptions due: March 11, 2016

ACL:

• ACL Tutorial course material due: July 7, 2016
• ACL Tutorial date: August 7, 2016

Call and selection procedure

The call for proposals (CFP) was posted the 10th of September, both at the ACL website and sent to high-volume NLP/CL mailing lists. Tutorial co-chairs discussed interesting topics, and approached some experts to suggest they could submit proposals.

Softconf was used for proposal submission. We received 32 proposals which were reviewed by the 6 co-chairs according to the following criteria:

• relevance to ACL community (1=irrelevant, 5=great fit) (15)
• quality of instructor (1=poor, 5=great) (15)
• quality of proposal i.e. outline and whether depth/breadth is adequate (15)
• our estimate of potential attendance (not from proposal)
• newly emerging area not previously covered in an ACL related tutorial (yes or no)
• tutorials which provide introductions into related fields (yes or no)
• overall score (1=bad, 5=great) (15)
• 1st preference for venue as indicated in proposal
• comments

Each proposal was reviewed twice and given a total score. The procedure for selecting and assigning the tutorials to the three venues was the following:

• we ordered proposals by the venue preference expressed by proposers
• each subcommittee made a tentative decision for the venue they're assigned to
• we discussed the remaining/conflicting/redundant proposals, and tried to balance topics across venues

The 6 tutorial co-chairs reached consensus and agreed on selecting 8 half-day proposals for ACL. Acceptance letters were personalized by venue, then sent via softconf. We did not send feedback to proposers.

Selected tutorials

Tutorials were assigned by the tutorials chairs to morning or afternoon slots, in a way that tried to minimize overlap in potential audience between tutorials.

Morning Tutorials

Multimodal Learning and Reasoning

Desmond Elliott, Douwe Kiela and Angeliki Lazaridou

NLP Approaches to Computational Argumentation

Noam Slonim, Iryna Gurevych, Chris Reed and Benno Stein

Computer Aided Translation

Philipp Koehn

Semantic Representations of Word Senses and Concepts

José Camacho-Collados, Ignacio Iacobacci, Roberto Navigli and Mohammad Taher Pilehvar

Afternoon Tutorials

Neural Machine Translation

Thang Luong, Kyunghyun Cho and Christopher D. Manning

Game Theory and Natural Language: Origin, Evolution and Processing

Rocco Tripodi and Marcello Pelillo

Understanding Short Texts

Zhongyuan Wang and Haixun Wang

MetaNet: Repository, Identification System, and Applications

Miriam R L Petruck and Ellen K Dodge