2019Q3 Minutes (public version)

ACL exec meeting

July 28, Florence, Italy

Participants

• ACL Exec:
  • Ming Zhou, President (Meeting Chair)
  • Marti Hearst, Past President
  • Hinrich Schuetze, Vice President
  • Rada Mihalcea, VP-elect
  • David Yarowsky, Treasurer
  • Shiqi Zhao, Secretary
  • Barbara Di Eugenio, Member at-large, Conference Officer
  • Nitin Madnani, Member at-large, Information Director
  • Jennifer Foster, Member at-large, SIG/BIG Chair
  • Hwee Tou Ng, CL Editor
  • Sharon Goldwater, EACL Chair
  • Julia Hockenmaier, NAACL Chair
  • Haifeng Wang, AACL Chair
• Office Manager:
  • Priscilla Rasmussen
• PCC Co-chair:
  • Emily Bender
• Anthology Director:
  • Matt Post
• TACL co-editors-in-chief:
  • Lillian Lee
  • Ani Nenkova
• ACL2019 conference chairs:
  • Lluis Marquez, General Chair
  • David Traum, PC Co-chair
  • Anna Korhonen, PC Co-chair
  • Alessandro Lenci: Local Chair
  • Bernardo Magnini: Local Chair
  • Simonetta Montemagni: Local Chair
• Other
  • Graham Neubig

IT and Anthology

• Nitin will draft an official conference website policy for feedback from ACL exec.
• Nitin needs the help of an ACL exec member familiar with the ACL fellows program (or perhaps someone from the previous ACL fellows nominating committee) to run an end-to-end test on the service that I am evaluating for this purpose. The new system for fellows nomination will be in place by the end of 2019.
• Matt suggests having a consistent naming convention for ACL conference proceedings. Matt will put together a proposal in a Google doc and ask for feedback from the exec.

Conference organization and paper reviewing

• Hinrich:
  • Constitute Committee on Reviewing, and hold first meeting of committee in Florence.
  • Identify COI task force head. Start working with COI task force head and with future conference chairs to improve COI handling (ideally for ACL 2020)
• Graham’s report: File:ACL Reviewing Survey Summary.pdf
  • Sharon: If we try out a very new system like OpenReview in a limited test case (e.g. workshops), that we take a survey before and after the process to see how experience with the process changed people's opinions.

PCC

• Extend the appointment of PCC co-chairs through 2022.
• Need a solution to store the PCC incident reports.
• Need a policy for how to respond to publicly aired accusations against members in ACL’s leadership, including the leadership of SIGs.
• Require legal advice on: (1) how the proposed non-expiring COI relates to the GDPR, and (2) whether to maintain the cases that the complainant wishes to take no further action.
• The PCC suggested that the ACL develop an academic misconduct policy, parallel to the anti-harassment policy.

Test-of-Time awards

• Two remaining questions that need to be further discussed (Barbara will follow up):
  • Who should serve on the ToT nominating committee and what should be the nomination procedure for papers?
  • How many papers should be awarded every year? Should journal and conference papers be awarded separate awards?

EACL chapter

• David will follow up the problem of ACL2016 surplus transfer.

Conferences

• Will cancel the recruitment lunch in the future conferences.
• Two motions on tutorial payment were voted on and passed:
  • Motion-1: Tutorial compensation for *ACL conferences henceforth will be up to three free conference registrations for those presenting the tutorials.
  • Motion-2: For EMNLP 2019, the maximum compensation for each tutorial is capped at $5000 US dollars. The formula for EMNLP 2019 tutorial payments otherwise remains unchanged, up to this per-tutorial maximum.
  • Barbara will revise the wiki page.

CL Journal

• CL has conducted an ACL membership survey
• Implementations following the survey:
  • Set up a pool of standing reviewers
  • Editorial board members become action editors and recommend acceptance of submissions (like area chairs in a conference)
• Motion: Submissions to CL will be divided to two categories: (1) Extended version of past conference paper(s): single-blind reviewing, no conference presentation; (2) New material not previously published: double-blind reviewing, given oral or poster presentation at *ACL/EMNLP conferences (the motion was passed)
• In order to implement two categories of submissions and add double-blind reviewing, CL journal will require professional help to modify its OJS paper submission system and paid support for ongoing maintenance and upgrade of OJS. The request from CL editor-in-chief for professional paid support to carry out these tasks is approved by the Exec.

TACL Journal

• The proposal from the TACL editors-in-chief for professional paid support of the submission system is approved by the Exec.
• Will work out plans for coordination between TACL and CL, once CL offers authors the option to present to conferences, to ensure a single, streamlined interaction with program chairs.

Notifying authors that sharing submissions between conferences and journals can happen in certain cases

• The Exec will discuss via email

Legal advice on GDPR

• Jennifer contacted a legal firm, which suggested a list of projects, as well as the quote for legal advice on the GDPR compliance.
• The exec agreed to go ahead with the projects suggested by the lawyer, and Jennifer will follow up.