2021Q3 Reports: General Chair

2021Q3 Reports: General Chair

The Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2021) took place online from August 1st through 6th, 2021.

I really thought we’d be holding the conference in Bangkok. However, as they say, man proposes, God disposes. Organizing a fully virtual conference became our only choice, given the serious COVID-19 pandemic situation. And now we know that this was a wise decision. The decision news was announced on May 17, 2021.

Compared with organizing an on-site conference, there are many differences to organize an online conference. What happened and what we have done are briefly summarized as follows:

• We constructed a great organization team, 68 co-chairs distributed in 19 sub-committees.
• 710 regular papers and 493 Findings papers were selected and accepted from 3350 submissions. And this year, for the first time, ACL has accepted Findings papers as well.
• Tutorial chairs and workshop chairs selected the proposals by coordinating with the corresponding chairs of NAACL’2021, EMNLP’2021 and EACL’2021. This is beneficial to the all conferences. Finally, 6 tutorials and 23 workshops have been selected. The workshop organizers and tutorial presenters were given full freedom for considering different time zone. They can decide by themselves whether their workshops/ tutorials go live or pre-recorded.
• Demo chairs received 133 paper submissions, among which 131 papers are valid with full paper submissions. Finally, they accepted 43 papers, and rejected 88 papers, the acceptance rate is 32%.
• Forty-five papers were selected and accepted from 104 valid submissions to student research workshop.
• To top off all of that, three excellent keynote speeches were given.
• We chose Underline.io platform, which was also employed by COLING’2020 and NAACL’2021. Many functions, including pre-recording, playing and storing videos, discussion/chat etc. are all integrated in the platform. Underline.io helped us to do many things, including contacting and coordinating with committee chairs, such as workshop chairs, tutorials chairs, and demo chairs, and collecting videos and so on.
• We constructed a great virtual infrastructure committee (VIC), one advisor and 6 chairs, who coordinated with other teams, e.g., social media team, student volunteer chair, PCs, Underline.io, social media committee, remote presentation committee etc. to ensure that the virtual conference will be successful. Also, they will pay close attention to the status of Underline.io platform during the conference to deal with any potential harassment issues. Dr. Hao Fang led the committee as advisor. He served ACL’2020 as VIC chair. With his experience and good responsibility, VIC played good role.
• As I mentioned above, this year,for the first time, ACL has accepted Findings papers. After discussing with Hinrich, Rada and some conference organizers, PC Chairs conducted a survey to investigate whether authors agree that their papers will be published as Findings papers and sent the survey announcement to the ACL mailing and all ACL 2021 authors/ reviewers/ ACs/ SACs. Based on the survey results and discussed again with some conference organizers, PC chairs made the final decision that if authors want to present in an ACL workshop we will allow that, but the authors need to arrange that with individual workshops directly. The authors of Findings papers to register as authors of normal accepted papers will do. All accepted Findings papers are collected in the proceedings named as “Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2021”. I think this is a successful attempt.
• Ethic Advisory Committee (EAC) seems indispensable for organizing a successful and fair academic conference.
• With the great help of Chris Callison-Burch and Priscilla Rasmussen, the new version of Sponsorship booklet has been well prepared and announced in the conference homepage. Twenty-five sponsors, including 5 Diamond sponsors, 8 Platinum sponsors, 2 Gold sponsor, 3 Silver sponsor and 7 Bronze sponsors and three supporters as well gave the conference strong support.

Some suggestions for future conference organization:

• It will be better to decide the conference format (online/ on-site) and virtual infrastructure as earlier as possible. This is directly related to whether some committees, such as sustainability committee and handbook committee, need to be established or how many chairs are necessary.
• If there are more chairs in a committee, such as three or more, it would be better to appoint a leader.
• It will be better to make clear difference between the tasks of different committees, such as the tasks of publicity chair and social media committee chairs, VIC chairs and remote presentation committee chairs. This is also related to how many chairs are necessary for these committees.
• At least one of the website co-chairs should be from PC chairs’ affiliations or is keeping close in touch with PC chairs so that the important news from PC Chairs can be very quickly announced or updated. PC Chairs always play the most important role and guide the organization and management of the main conference, and they need to frequently announce or update data on the conference webpage. If the Website Chairs can’t quickly react and well cooperate with PC chairs, it will be very frustrating.
• To select the tutorial and workshop proposals in coordination with other ACL conferences, such as NAACL, EACL, EMNLP and even COLING if possible. It would be beneficial to each other.
• The additional alternative chairpersons for some committees are always needed, because there will always be some chairs who have accepted the invitation but cannot perform their duties due to various reasons, and a supplementary chairperson is necessitated. This case will not be many, but once it occurs, it is normal. So it is necessary to have this kind of psychological preparation.