2018Q3 Reports: ACL 2020

ACL2020 Report (Dated June. 28, 2018)

ACL 2020 will be held in America in collaboration with NAACL as usual. The mailing list acl20cc@aclweb.org has been set up joined with exec members from NAACL and ACL to form the ACL2020 Coordination Committee(ACL20CC).

Representatives from NAAC (4 people):

1. Luke Zettlemoyer, University of Washington (2018-2019)
2. Colin Cherry, National Research Council Canada, Secretary (2016-2017)
3. Joel Tetreault, Yahoo Labs, Treasurer (2017-2018)
4. Julia Hockenmaier, University of the Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, chair (2018-2019)

Representatives from ACL (6 people):

1. Ming Zhou, Microsoft Research Asia, China, Vice-President(2018)
2. Shiqi Zhao, Baidu, China, Secretary (2016-2020)
3. Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto, Canada, Treasurer (2013-2017)
4. David Yarowsky, , John Hopkins University, USA, new Treasurer (2018-2022)
5. Barbara Di Eugenio, University of Illinois, Chicago (2018-2020)
6. Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL business manager

Progress made until June. 28, 2018

We have announced the call for bidding of ACL 2020 at ACL portal: https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/call-bids-acl-2020. We also touched upon a few professors of some universities and companies to invite them to consider the bidding. Unfortunately, until the expiration n of this call for bidding, except a couple of PCO companies, there have not been any universities who contacted us for the bidding proposals.

Then ACL2020cc decided not to wait for the biddings but we select a city by ourselves that we think most appropriate. I suggest when we select the hosting city, we will especially consider the following factors, among many others, a) the impact and the size of the local NLP community; b) the accommodation ability of predicted 2000 participants; c) whether this city has ever hosted ACL, EMNLP, COLING, if yes, the time interval of last such conferences; d) We will also need to take into account whether there are other top AI conferences that have been hosted or to be hosted in that city by and in 2020. Last but not least, we should also consider whether we could well engage with industries, for instance, if local industries have strong investment in NLP, we can most likely to get sponsorship.

A Google Doc has been created to facilitate the discussion of the city selections: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Mgjpb-EQRgNpWRybWeQmoomHR0NvN_TK06NYchBAkxQ/edit#gid=0

There have been lot of meaningful discussions about nominations of host city. Many cities were nominated. In April 2018, three candidate host cities were decided via vote by the ACL2020 committee members which are: Seattle, Nashville, Salt Lake City. Then Priscilla collected information in June about the candidate hotels of each of these three cities. We estimated the number of participants of ACL2020 is around 2500 thus a large hotel able to accommodate such size is considered instead of convention center which is more expensive. In June, the committee made thorough discussion on the pros and cons of each of these cities in terms of location, price, accommodation capability, transportation, and finally Hyatt Seattle was chosen. There are two options of the date: July 6-11 or July 5-10, to be decided when talk to the hotel.

Actions:

1. Sign the agreement with Hyatt Seattle (ACL business manager, ACL treasurer)
2. Apoint local organization chair(s)
3. Set up ACL2020 conference website (local organization chair, in collaboration with ACL webmaster)
4. Appoint general chair(coordinating committee)
5. Appoint program chairs(coordinating committee, in collaboration with general chair)

Ming Zhou