2017Q1 Reports: EACL

EACL 2017Q1 Report, February 2017

Walter Daelemans, Chair

Sharon Goldwater, Chair-Elect

Lucia Specia, Secretary

Mike Rosner, Treasurer

EACL-2017

The organization of EACL-2017 is now at full speed. Everything is going smoothly and according to plan. Some highlights are the following:

From the general chair, Mirella Lapata:

• Acceptance: 119 (of 488 submitted) long papers and 120 (of 555 submitted) short papers were accepted.
• Invited speakers: David Blei, Hinrich Schuetze, Devi Parikh.
• Programme will be online by end of February.
• Workshops have been decided and are listed on the conference website. One workshop (EASL: The 1st International Workshop on ``Deep NLP Meets Computational Linguistics for Evaluative, Affective, Subjective Language Analysis) did not receive enough submissions, and withdrew.

From the SRW board (EACL student board and faculty advisor Barbara Plank):

• 35 submissions (25 research papers and 10 thesis proposals)
• accepted 12 papers (10 papers, 2 proposals)
• organizational innovation: assign roles to SRW board members early in the process (publication chair, email chair, media (website+social media) chair); otherwise standard (review process, afterwards assign mentoring, finally EACL studentship grants)

From the organization chair, Paolo Rosso: Local organization, in cooperation with Pacifico Meetings is going as planned.

For updates and extended information on the conference see the EACL-2017 website

Financial Report

2016 Chapter Finances (shadow accounting)

Date	Category	Amount (in euro)
31-Dec-2015		23,559
INCOME		0
EXPENSE		-2,861
	*SEM Workshop Sponsorship (ws fee)	-97
	EACL Sponsorship ESSLLI	-2,750
	Bank charges	-14
21-Jul-2016		20,698
30-Sep-2016		20,044
	*SEM Workshop (remaining expenses)	-654
31-Dec-2016		20,044
Projected Expenses	Sponsorships EACL Valencia	-7150
12-feb-2017	Projected current balance	12,894

Mike Rosner 21.02.2017

EACL Sponsorship

In 2017, EACL sponsorship has already been assigned to the EACL-2017 conference. In 2016, expenses were kept modest in order to save for the sponsorship of the EACL-2017 conference and its associated Student Research Workshop (SRW). The call was open to all students presenting at EACL, and not limited to SRW presenters. It was possible to finance 13 grants (from 27 applications). Barbara Plank (as faculty advisor), and the SRW committee (consisting of the EACL student board) carefully ranked and commented on the applications and proposed funding the first 13. The EACL board checked the proposal and accepted it.

EACL short

• EACL has elected a new student board member, Uxoa Inurrieta, to replace Mariona Coll Ardanuy and a new advisory board member, Ivan Titov, to replace Frank Keller.

• Caroline Sporleder and Lluís Màrquez arrived to the end of their term as Chair and Secretary by Dec. 31, 2016. The Nominating Committee proposed Sharon Goldwater and Lucia Specia by the end of September as new candidates for Chair-elect and Secretary positions, respectively. They became duly elected after the established period passed without any other candidate being proposed by the membership. They started in office on Jan 1, 2017. Walter Daelemans has become the new EACL Chair for the period 2017-2019.

We thank Mariona, Frank, Caroline, and Lluís for the excellent work they did for EACL, and Uxoa, Ivan, Sharon, and Lucia for their willingness to serve.

EACL conference cycle

Background: With Lluís Màrquez as chair and initiator, the EACL Board started analyzing the status of the EACL community and discussing measures to better promote and to increase its visibility. The current 3-year cycle of the conference was perceived as a problem in this direction. We want to increase visibility, impact (and prestige) of EACL, increase opportunities for publishing, increase the income for EACL (assuming the conference has a sustained surplus), and thus the opportunities to organize more activities and sponsorship. A number of options were discussed (1. two year cycle, 2. yearly except when ACL is in Europe, and 3. make the ACL in Europe a joint EACL/ACL conference). At least in the board there was a preference for the second option (the NAACL model), the most important drawback being that a lot more organizational work is required. Possible solutions would be to have professional local organizers, involving regional NLP organizations in the organization, co-locating with regional conferences, LREC or COLING, etc.

Board resolution: There is an agreement that it is the right time to increase the frequency of EACL but the question is how to do this organizationally. The question is also when to start on new cycle, the earliest possibility would be 2020, as there is no time to organize anything before 2020 as per the Conference Book requirements. We also decided to poll the (European) ACL members about their opinion on this with a simple survey.

EACL Officers per February 10, 2017

The current officers are the following:

Chair:

• Walter Daelemans (University of Antwerp, Belgium)

Chair-Elect:

• Sharon Goldwater (University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK)

Secretary:

• Lucia Specia (University of Sheffield, UK)

Treasurer:

• Mike Rosner (University of Malta, Malta)

Advisory Board:

• Iryna Gurevych (Technical University Darmstadt, Germany)
• Roberto Navigli (University of Rome, Italy)
• Stephan Oepen (University of Oslo, Norway)
• Ivan Titov (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

Student Board:

• Florian Kunneman (Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands)
• John Camilleri (Chalmers University of Technology and University of Gothenburg)
• Uxoa Inurrieta (University of the Basque Country, Spain)

Nominating Committee:

• Stephen Clark (University of Cambridge, UK)
• Vivi Nastase (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy)
• Lluís Màrquez (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar)
• Caroline Sporleder (Goettingen University, Germany)