2014Q1 Reports: ACL 2014

Report of Program Chairs (Kristina Toutanova and Hua Wu)

Paper assignment

The long papers have been assigned to reviewers. After withdrawals and rejection due to anonymity/formatting violations, there are 553 long paper submissions under review for ACL 2014.

Reviewer assignment

A tool developed by Mark Dredze was used to assign reviewers to different areas, enabling reviewer assignment according to the number of submissions in each area. The student volunteer Jiang Guo helped to run the tool and assign the reviewers.

Paper format and supplementary materials

We increased the page limit to 9 pages of content for submitted long papers and 5 pages of content for submitted short papers. We added the option to upload additional notes and examples, along with the paper, data, and software.

Review forms

We are using five different review forms for different submission types: applications/tools, empirical/data-driven, resources/evaluation, theoretical, and survey. The forms use ideas from prior ACL, EMNLP and NAACL conferences.

Multiple submissions

The authors were asked to report multiple submissions on a separate title page. The multiple submission policy was updated and is hosted at the ACL 2014 web site http://www.cs.jhu.edu/ACL2014/multiple_submission.htm

Anonymity/format checking

We developed a tool to automatically detect author information in file properties and in the main text of the submitted papers. Some technical problems with slow download interfered with our plans to notify authors of non-anonymized submissions before the deadline and give them a chance to anonymize their work. After the deadline, the area chairs helped to check formatting and anonymity problems, but it will be good to recruit a student volunteer to do this for all submissions in the future.

Invited speakers

We obtained a list of invited speakers with input from the area chairs and general chair and will send invitations after final decisions.

Poster sessions

We intend to have two evenings of poster sessions, to be confirmed with the local organizing committee.

Report of Workshop Chairs (Jill Burstein and Lluis Marquez)

In total, there were 42 workshop proposals submitted for consideration at EACL, ACL, and EMNLP. Together with the workshop chairs of those conferences we reviewed the proposals and decided on the final selection for each conference venue. At ACL, there will be 15 one-day, and 2 two-day workshops, the Student Research Workshop, and CoNNL. Dates for the one-day workshops have been circulated, 9 will take place on June 26th, and 8 on June 27th. Priscilla Rasmussen was consulted about the number of workshops to ensure that space was available, and she is aware of space needs. Start pages for all workshops have been created and the details sent to the workshop organizers. A list of workshop URLs has been linked to the main ACL webpage. Details are below.

June 26

9th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA)
Chairs: Joel Tetreault, Jill Burstein and Claudia Leacock

Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT 2014)
Chairs: Jan Alexandersson, Dimitra Anastasiou, Cui Jian, Ani Nenkova, Rupal Patel, Frank Rudzicz, Annalu Waller and Desislava Zhekova

Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL)
Chairs: Vera Demberg and Tim O.Donnell

Argumentation Mining
Chairs: Kevin Ashley, Nancy Green, Diane Litman, Chris Reed and Vern Walker

ComputEL: The use of computational methods in the study of endangered languages
Chairs: Jeff Good, Julia Hirschberg and Owen Rambow

The Second Workshop on Metaphor in NLP
Chairs: Beata Beigman-Klebanov, Ekaterina Shutova and Patricia Lichtenstein

Workshop on Semantic Parsing (SP14)
Chairs: Yoav Artzi, Tom Kwiatkowski and Jonathan Berant

Language Technologies and Computational Social Science
Chairs: Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Jacob Eisenstein, Kathleen McKeown and Noah Smith

June 27

5th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis (WASSA 2014)
Chairs: Alexandra Balahur, Erik van der Goot, Ralf Steinberger and Andrés Montoyo

The 1st Workshop on NLP and Social Dynamics
Chairs: Alice Oh and Oren Tsur

Joint 1-day workshop between SIGMORPHON and SIGFSM
Chairs: Ozlem Cetinoglu, Jeffrey Heinz, Andreas Maletti and Jason Riggle

2nd Workshop on EVENTS: Definition, Detection, Coreference, and Representation
Chairs: Teruko Mitamura, Eduard Hovy and Martha Palmer

Workshop on Entity Attribute Prediction in Social Media
Chairs: Benjamin Van Durme, Svitlana Volkova and David Yarowsky

Workshop on Interactive Language Learning, Visualizations, and Interfaces
Chairs: Jason Chuang, Spence Green, Marti Hearst, Jeffrey Heer and Philipp Koehn

Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology . From Linguistic Signal to Clinical Reality
Chairs: Philip Resnik, Rebecca Resnik and Margaret Mitchell

Two-day Workshops (June 26 and 27)

Ninth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (WMT14)
Chairs: Philipp Koehn, Ondrej Bojar, Christian Buck, Christian Federmann, Barry Haddow, Christof Monz, Matt Post, Herve Saint-Amand, Radu Soricut and Lucia Specia

BioNLP 2014
Chairs: Kevin Cohen, Dina Demner-Fushman, Sophia Ananiadou, John Pestian, Jun-ichi Tsujii, Thamar Solorio and Yang Liu

Co-located Conference (June 26 and 27)

18th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2014)
Chairs: Roser Morante and Scott Wen-tau Yih

Report of Student Workshop Chairs (Ekaterina Kochmar, Annie Louis, and Svitlana Volkova) and Faculty Advisors (Jordan Boyd-Graber and Bill Byrne)

Student travel grants

US students, possibly also students from developing countries: Faculty advisor Jordan Boyd-Graber (jbg@umiacs.umd.edu) has submitted a proposal to NSF requesting $15K for student travel support. The proposal is pending now, we expect to get the award soon.

Other students: Faculty advisor Bill Byrne (bill.byrne@eng.cam.ac.uk) has requested funding from Baidu, Google (EMEA), and Microsoft.

The requests are pending now.

Program committee

We have recruited 51 reviewers for the program committee, of which 21 are students. Among all the reviewers, 29 are from North America, 18 from Europe and 4 from other places. They represent a wide range of research areas and cover all the research topics listed on the official conference website.

Mentorship Service Arrangement

Six students have requested pre- submission mentor services. We have recruited six mentors for these students and are currently running the mentorship service. Up to now, no action has been taken to recruit on-site conference mentors. This will be done later in the spring/summer when potential mentors know if they'll be attending the conference or not.

Publicity

We have set up an email alias acl-srw-2014@googlegroups.com to facilitate internal communications, and official website https://sites.google.com/site/aclsrw2014/ to serve as the information portal. All call for submissions are publicized at the official conference website, the SRW website, WikiCFP, and through various mailing lists and social media. No newsletter service is offered.

Report of Publication Chairs (Alexander Koller and Yusuke Miyao)

We created LaTeX and Word style files based on the ACL 2013 ones, and made them available both on the main ACL page and on our own publication chair website. We further established contact with all other relevant chairs and all workshop chairs, and dry-ran the procedure for generating proceedings on a START test site.

One innovation in ACL 2014 is that we will provide the proceedings in a machine-readable XML format, in addition to the usual PDF. We got in touch with the developers of LateXML, the tool we will use for the conversion into XML, and made sure that the ACL style file is supported and a conversion testing website is available. We are currently fine-tuning the LateXML support to ensure it will be ready for the preparation of the camera-ready versions.

Report of Publicity Chair (Jason Riesa)

Contacted recent past chairs (Smaranda Muresan, NAACL 2012; Jung-Jae Kim, ACL 2012; Kristy Boyer, NAACL 2013, Anna Korhonen, ACL 2013) about their experience and solicited advice and suggestions for being a successful Publicity Chair. From their feedback, I am planning to:

Distribute an ACL Newsletter

- Before Friday 2/14: with Statistics about Submissions and # of Reviewers, etc.

- Before Friday 2/14: Resend CFP with info emphasis about Short Paper Submissions and SRW.

- Thursday, March 6, following Long-Paper Notifications.

- Thursday, March 6: Final Call for Short Papers.

- Friday, April 18: following Short-Paper Notifications.

- 1 month before: Monday, May 19; with complete information about planned social events, late-breaking announcements, etc.

- 1 week before: Monday, June 16

Send main conference Call for Papers and Call for Participation to appropriate mailing lists

- AAAI, ACM, AMTA, IEEE, SIGIR, SIGCHI, Various CS Departments for the SRW, specifically, Internally at Google

Contact Workshop Organizers about getting their CFPs and sending them out, as well, if not already available on their respective workshop websites

At the end of my tenure, update the Publicity Chair Duties page on aclweb.org (http://www.aclweb.org/archive/policies/current/publicity-chair.html) with:

- An updated set of points-of-contact and/or mailing list links to relevant venues where we are likely to find folks interested in ACL.

- Suggestions for content and dates to send out issues of the ACL Newsletter, which has very recently begun to be published several times a year preceding the start of each year’s conference.

Report of Tutorial Chairs (Alexander Fraser and Yang Liu)

The preparations for the ACL 2014 tutorials program are on schedule. We sent out two calls for tutorials to relevant high-volume mailing lists and to the ACL lists, the second call was sent to ML-News and UAI, which are two major mailing lists in machine learning and artificial intelligence, respectively (we did receive some applications from AI researchers). The announcement was also posted by David Yarowsky on the ACL 2014 website. The initial call was sent out in early October, and the second call was sent out from the end of December to the beginning of January. There are 19 applications, two applications were withdrawn because they were accepted by COLING.

Report of Demo Chairs (Kalina Bontcheva and Zhu Jingbo)

The program committee members for the demonstrations has now been finalized. The first call for submissions went out in November 2013. A second followed in January 2014. The START system has now been setup for the demonstrations and all reviewers have been invited on it. We are now expecting the submissions in February.