2022Q1 Reports: NAACL

Report from NAACL, February 2022

Contributions to this report by:

• Luciana Benotti (NAACL chair)
• Heng Ji (NAACL secretary)
• Jonathan May (NAACL treasurer)
• Eduardo Blanco (NAACL board member)

Executive Committee Meetings

The board had a meeting on June 25, 2021. The next meeting will be on March 28, 2022. Additionally, the board converses regularly by email.

Treasurer's Report

We last reported finances at the 6/2021 NAACL board meeting. At that time we reported final numbers for NAACL/ACL events that had previously been estimated. The actual balance as of June 2021 was $16,764.79 but with adjustments per the table below the effective balance should be $139,723.79. However, the required transfers to make that account accurate were not made. Since then we have outlaid $4000 for RAF and have received modest interest payments, so the actual balance as of 2/28/22 stands at $12,765.53. Before adjustments for ACL 2020 and any surplus or loss for NAACL 2021 our effective balance should be 135,724.53.

Conference	Income	Expense	Surplus / (Loss)	NAACL share	NAACL chapter exp	Effect on NAACL account
ACL 2017 (Vancouver)	1,386,92	1,106,678	280,204	119,352	(7,176)	112,176
NAACL 2018 (New Orleans)	885,562	954,092	(68,530)	(62,894)	(14,569)	(77,463)
NAACL 2019 (Minneapolis)	882,826	942,660	(59,834)	(55,828)	(7,500)	(63,328)
ACL 2020 (Virtual)	690,747	350,789	339,958	152,499	(295)	151,574

NAACL Election

NAACL recently held elections. We composed a nomination committee led by Ellen Riloff, and set up the voting platform for the NAACL membership to vote on the nominated candidates. The voter turnout was 15%. Four board members were elected instead of the usual three, in order to fill the position vacated by the new chair. The board member filling the position will serve for one year instead of two.

Regional Americas Fund

The Regional Americas Fund issued awards to three projects for 2021-2022:

• Helena de Medeiros Caseli, Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil
• Francis Tyers, Indiana University, USA
• Evandro L. T. P. Cunha, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil

The RAF committee bids a fond farewell to Aline Villavicencio, and welcomes Eduardo Blanco. Eduardo Blanco, Jonathan May and Amittai Axelrod met in February 2022 to refine the call and commence advertising. Grants of up to 1500 dollars are available for NLP/CompLing initiatives across the Americas. The call was issued in English, Portuguese and Spanish. Once the call closes on April 30 we will choose our top candidates and allot awards as appropriate; the exact number of awards and total we will support will depend on refinements to the current NAACL budget.

NAACL 2021 post-conference survey

NAACL 2021 was held online on June 6 to 11, 2021. The board organized a post-conference survey. The total number of respondents was 127. We summarize the main findings below.

• Aspects that were ranked as “Needs improvement”:
  • Web interface
  • Program schedule navigation
  • Exploring papers
  • Text-based chats for videos and posters
  • Underline platform experience
• Aspects that were ranked as “Excellent”
  • Sponsor activities
  • Industry track panels
  • Ability to get help
  • Business meeting
  • Best paper awards
  • Workshop keynotes

Additional comments on technical aspects: many complaints about underline (xploring, liking papers was hard, too slow), timing complaints (for some the time zone of the conference was very inconvenient), too many platforms to juggle. They greatly preferred Miniconf and Rochetchat which were used for ACL 2020 and EMNLP 2020. In spite of the technical problems 85% of the respondents answered yes to the question "Irrespective of COVID, should we keep a virtual component or even fully virtual events in our future conferences?”

NAACL conference in 2022

The board appointed Program Chairs for NAACL 2022, to be hosted in Seattle, July 10 - 15, 2022.

• General Chair: Dan Roth (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
• Program Chairs:
  • Marine Carpuat (University of Maryland, USA)
  • Marie-Catherine de Marneffe (The Ohio State University, USA)
  • Ivan Vladimir Meza-Ruiz (National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico)

As a new procedure for NAACL 2022, the NAACL board and the NAACL 2022 organizing committee issued an open call for D&I Committee members. The resulting D&I committee and its initiatives are described here: https://2022.naacl.org/blog/diversity-intro/

The NAACL 2022 PC has incorporated a checklist into the submission process, designed to encourage best research practices in our field, from an ethics and reproducibility perspective. For details see https://2022.naacl.org/blog/responsible-nlp-research-checklist/. Also, a reproducibility track has been created, see https://2022.naacl.org/blog/reproducibility-track/

NAACL conference in 2024

NAACL 2021 was originally intended for Mexico City but happened online. The venue will be used for NAACL 2024. The board will select a GC during 2022.

NAACL officers as of March 1, 2022

• Chair: Luciana Benotti
• Secretary: Heng Ji
• Treasurer: Jonathan May
• Past Chair: Colin Cherry
• Executive Board Members:
  • Eduardo Blanco
  • Graham Neubig
  • Anna Rumshisky
  • Thamar Solorio
  • Diyi Yang