2010Q1 Reports: Secretary

ACL Secretary Report

Winter 2010

• The annual elections brought Ken Church and Paola Merlo on board. They will be joined by Rebecca Hwa, the NAACL chair. Many thanks to our outgoing members Nicoletta Calzolari, Bonnie Dorr and Owen Rambow. The exec thanked the outgoing members for their amazing service to our organization.

• There were several problems with the voting - a lack of clear procedure to deal with cases in which no one gets a majority in the vote (the exec instituted a runoff), a miscommunication about the email address where nominations should be sent, and an unusually high number of bounced and spam-filtered messages related to the elections. A member of ACL also expressed concern about the privacy and security of online voting. These issues need to be discussed in 2010.

• On a related topic - there was a controversy as to the geographical composition of the nominations. Until now, the nominating committee had been trying to rotate some of the positions across the three main regions of ACL, whereas nominations from the floor could be made from any region. In the future, we need a clearer policy for geographical representation. We also need a clear definition of how many people need to nominate a new candidate and whether exec members should excuse themselves from nominating new candidates.

• Conference sudoku - it was resolved all the way to 2019 and possibly, on a longer term as well. The latest schedule is here: http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Conference_Schedule_for_2014-2019

• The fourth NACLO (North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad - http://www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu) was very successful with about 1125 participants in the US and Canada. Round 2 is on March 10, 2010. The newly formed ELCLO (English Language CLO) was expanded to Australia, the UK, and Ireland with several hundred participants each (UKLO > 600 students): http://www.ozclo.org.au http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/ec/CLIE/UKLO/uklo.htm http://www.cngl.ie/ailo.html

• A resolution was adopted to clarify the conditions under which ACL will endorse an external conference: http://aclweb.org/policies/resolutions.html

• Some resource pages were wikified for easier access and maintenance: http://www.aclweb.org/policies/

• A resolution about some changes in the responsibilities of the exec members was adopted. Under it, the most junior exec member will act as SIG convener.

• Funding for the ACL portal was approved: http://www.aclweb.org/portal - this is Robert Dale's initiative.

• Other resolutions are posted here: http://www.aclweb.org/policies/resolutions.html

• The wiki has grown: wiki http://www.aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=Main_Page from 1302/267 to 1332/290

• sponsorship - completely lost - need to be updated

• The ACL Anthology network was updated with all 2009 papers: aan - http://clair.si.umich.edu/clair/anthology/index.cgi

• A member proposed a Distinguished Service award - jochen.leidner@thomsonreuters.com - no action has been taken yet.

• sigmt and sigfsm were created

• External news: two newly elected ACM fellows are from the ACL community:

- Yorick Wilks, University of Sheffield; For research on meaning-based understanding of natural language by computers

- Terry Winograd, Stanford University; For contributions to AI, natural language processing, HCI, and human-centered design

- http://newswire.ascribe.org/cgi-bin/behold.pl?ascribeid=20091201.125636&time=14%2027%20PST&year=2009&public=0

• The LTA award winner for 2009 was picked: Fred Jelinek - http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Lifetime_Achievement_Award_Recipients

• The LTA award winner for 2010 was proposed by the LTA cmte.

• The ACL archive was transferred to the webmaster (Ali Hakim).