2018Q1 Reports: ACL 2018

General Chair

Claire Cardie, Cornell University

The 56th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2018) will take place in Melbourne, Australia at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre July 15th-20th, 2018. I believe that we have an excellent team for putting together the conference. For the organizing positions that I had primary control over (Workshops, Tutorials, Demos, Publications, Student Research Workshop), I attempted to recruit an even number of women and men. Among these, there are 7 female organizers (not including me) and 8 male organizers.

We have been using Slack for most intra-committee communication, and especially for requests to the Webmaster.

This report is structured around the activities associated with each Chair position, each with a separate section below.

Aravind Joshi tribute: In addition to what is reported below, I am hoping that we can incorporate some kind of tribute to Aravind Joshi and am working with the Local Arrangements and Program Chairs to determine what would be best. One option would involve making use of about 30 minutes of an interview that Joel Tetrault and Ellie Pavlick did with Aravind in 2016 (as part of a funny video they did to introduce the Poster Madness session of NAACL 2016 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQxQ25x24nw). According to Joel,

“...I have a lot of unused footage from that interview - maybe 30+ minutes. At a certain point I just started asking him random questions about what he likes, his past, etc. I'll have to make sure I still have it (switched computers) but pretty sure I do. If this seems like it could be nice/fun to include as a memoriam, just let me know and I can find it and clean it up.”

The idea would be to run this video --- either as part of a plenary session or continuously at a location where people could view it at their leisure. Getting feedback on this from the Executive Committee would be great!

Program Co-Chairs

Iryna Gurevych, TU Darmstadt
Yusuke Miyao, National Institute of Informatics

This year, the program co-chairs requested nominations from the community for area chairs, reviewers and invited speakers through an open call publicized in the Latest News section of the ACL 2018 website: http://acl2018.org/2017/09/06/call-for-nominations/.

They recruited 61 area chairs for 21 areas, including 1-2 senior chairs per area. The senior chairs are responsible for maintaining the overall process of reviewing in each area, while each area chair is assigned around 30 submissions and is responsible for managing reviews for the assigned submissions.

Dialogue and Interactive Systems:

• Asli Celikyilma (senior chair)
• Verena Rieser (senior chair)
• Milica Gasic
• Jason Williams

Discourse and Pragmatics:

• Manfred Stede
• Ani Nenkova (senior chair)

Document Analysis:

• Hang Li (senior chair)
• Yiqun Liu
• Eugene Agichtein

Generation:

• Ioannis Konstas
• Claire Gardent (senior chair)

Information Extraction and Text Mining:

• Feiyu Xu
• Kevin Cohen
• Zhiyuan Liu
• Ralph Grishman (senior chair)
• Yi Yang
• Nazli Goharian

Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics:

• Shuly Wintner (senior chair)
• Tim O'Donnell (senior chair)

Machine Learning:

• Andre Martins
• Ariadna Quattoni
• Jun Suzuki (senior chair)

Machine Translation:

• Yang Liu
• Matt Post (senior chair)
• Lucia Specia
• Dekai Wu

Multidisciplinary (also for AC COI):

• Yoav Goldberg
• Anders Søgaard
• Mirella Lapata

Multilinguality:

• Bernardo Magnini (senior chair)

Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation:

• Graham Neubig
• Hai Zhao (senior chair)
• Question Answering:
• Lluís Màrquez (senior chair)
• Teruko Mitamura
• Zornitsa Kozareva
• Richard Socher

Resources and Evaluation:

• Gerard de Melo
• Karën Fort (senior chair)
• Sara Tonelli

Sentence-level Semantics:

• Luke Zettlemoyer (senior chair)
• Ellie Pavlick
• Jacob Uszkoreit

Sentiment Analysis and Argument Mining:

• Smaranda Muresan
• Benno Stein
• Yulan He (senior chair)

Social Media:

• David Jurgens
• Jing Jiang (Senior Chair)

Summarization:

• Kathleen McKeown (senior chair)
• Xiaodan Zhu

Tagging, Chunking, Syntax and Parsing:

• Liang Huang (senior chair)
• Weiwei Sun
• Željko Agić
• Yue Zhang

Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics:

• Michael Roth (senior chair)
• Fabio Massimo Zanzotto (senior chair)

Vision, Robotics, Multimodal, Grounding and Speech:

• Yoav Artzi (senior chair)
• Shinji Watanabe
• Timothy Hospedales

Word-level Semantics:

• Ekaterina Shutova
• Roberto Navigli (senior chair)

The call for nominations posted in September 2017 resulted in 752 responses in total. Regarding the area chairs, out of 388 valid nominations, 299 unique persons were suggested; 110 persons were self-nominations. About 70% of the final area chairs were nominated by the community. We collected 936 valid nominations for reviewers. At the PhD level, 139 persons were self-nominations and 129 were nominated by others. At the PostDoc/Ass.Prof. level, 160 were self-nominated, 112 nominated by others. At the Prof. level, 221 persons were self-nominated, 175 nominated by others. We also received 138 unique nominations for invited speakers.

As in ACL 2017, we introduced a special area for handling COI of area chairs. The strategy is that if AC has a COI in their area, we try to find another area that still fits the paper well. If this is not the case, the paper is moved to the “Multidisciplinary / COI” area. This area is handled by experienced area chairs.

Right after the submission deadline, there are 1045 long and 576 short papers. Several submissions have already been identified as desk reject, but the program chairs and area chairs are still working on cleaning them up at the moment. Areas with more than a hundred submissions include: Information Extraction and Text Mining, Machine Learning, Machine Translation, Document Analysis, and Dialogue and Interactive Systems.

Summary of upcoming deadlines:

• March 26th–28th, 2018 Author Response Period
• April 20th, 2018 Notification of Acceptance
• May 11th, 2018 Camera-ready Due
• July 15th, 2018 Tutorials
• July 16th–18th, 2018 Main Conference
• July 19th–20th, 2018 Tutorials and Workshops

We have already announced two invited speakers:

• Carolyn Penstein Rose, Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, USA
• Anton van den Hengel, Australian Centre for Visual Technologies at University of Adelaide, Australia

In a cooperation with NAACL 2018 Program Chairs, we implemented a structured review form that should guide reviewers to better assess strengths and weaknesses of the submissions as well as to help the area chairs in their acceptance/rejection decisions. The form has been made publicly available (http://acl2018.org/2018/02/20/sample-review-form/).

Summary of upcoming tasks

• Finish area re-assignments and desk rejects
• Initiate the review process
• Publish statistics on submissions
• Initiate Author response period
• Collect decisions from ACs
• Elicit meta-reviews
• Decide border cases
• Publish notification of acceptance
• Update financial picture
• Integrate TACL papers
• Collect camera ready submissions
• Create the conference program
• Recruit session chairs
• Compile statistics for ACL wiki + business meeting
• Compile report
• Publish updates on the ACL web site