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-                ACL Program Chair Report
-            Sandra Carberry and Stephen Clark
-                    June 21, 2010
-   ACL 2010 received 987 submissions, a record number for the
-conference.  This was a surprise, since the submission deadline was
-identical for both long and short papers.  Thus we expected that the
-total number of submissions would be lower than for ACL 2009, where
-authors of rejected long papers had the opportunity to resubmit them
-as revised short papers.
-papers were submitted to ACL 2010 as long papers, and 332
-papers were submitted as short papers.  After filtering out those
-papers that did not satify the submission requirements, for example
-exceeded the length limitations or were not anonymous, 956 papers
-were distributed to the Area Chairs for reviewing, of which 646 were
-long submissions and 310 were short submissions. Due to the large
-number of submissions, a fifth parallel session was added to the
-program. We accepted 7 long papers as short papers, since these were
-considered worthy of acceptance, but not as long papers, and it was
-thought that the content could be presented as short papers. Counting
-these 7 submissions as short papers, the overall acceptance rate was
-% for long papers and 22% for short papers. The submissions roughly
-fell into the following categories, with an attempt made to prevent
-some categories, for example Machine Translation, from becoming too
-large (which would have placed an unreasonable burden on the MT Area
-Chairs):
-Long Paper Submissions:
-AREA                      SUBMITTED  ACCEPT-LONG  ACCEPT-SHORT  %-ACCEPTED
-----                      ---------  -----------  ------------  ----------
-Bioinformatics               10            1                      10.0%
-Discourse                    38           11                      28.9%
-Formal semantics             19            6                      31.6%
-Generation/summarization     39           10            1         28.2%
-Information extraction       44            8                      18.2%
-Information retrieval        24            6                      25.0%
-Lexical semantics            59           16                      27.1%
-Machine learning             57           13                      22.8%
-Machine translation          64           15                      23.4%
-Mathematical linguistics     23           10                      43.5%
-Multimodal                   13            4                      30.8%
-Parsing                      68           16            2         26.5%
-Psycholinguistics            14            5                      35.7%
-Question answering           22            5            2         31.8%
-Resources and evaluation     28            8                      28.6%
-Sentiment analysis           46            9            1         21.7%
-Speech                       18            4                      22.2%
-Tagging                      37           10                      27.0%
-Text mining                  23            7            1         34.8%
-Short Paper Submissions:
-AREA                      SUBMITTED     ACCEPTED     %-ACCEPTED
-----                      ---------     --------     ----------
-Bioinformatics                2            0            0.0%
-Discourse                    21            5           23.8%
-Formal semantics              4            1           25.0%
-Generation/summarization     17            2           11.8%
-Information extraction       11            3           27.3%
-Information retrieval        12            1            8.3%
-Lexical semantics            30            6           20.0%
-Machine learning             30            8           26.7%
-Machine translation          38           10           26.3%
-Mathematical linguistics      6            0            0.0%
-Multimodal                    5            1           20.0%
-Parsing                      24            5           20.8%
-Psycholinguistics             5            1           20.0%
-Question answering           18            2           11.1%
-Resources and evaluation     25            5           20.0%
-Sentiment analysis           26            6           23.1%
-Speech                       15            3           20.0%
-Tagging                      14            3           21.4%
-Text mining                   7            1           14.3%
-   The ACL 2010 program contains a wide variety of papers, ranging
-from theoretical papers to analysis papers to empirical papers. Of
-particular interest is the presence of 3 challenge papers and 3 survey
-papers on the ACL 2010 program; unfortunately, although we sought
-position papers, none of the submissions in this category were judged
-to warrant acceptance.
-   ACL 2010 will award 3 best paper prizes: best long paper, best long
-paper by a student author, and best short paper.  The selection of the
-prize recipients was made by a small panel consisting of selected area
-chairs and other senior members of the research community.  Although
-the selection of a single paper in each prize category was difficult,
-we chose to award only one prize in each category since we felt that
-it lends more prestige to the prize than if the prize were shared by
-several papers.
-   All submissions that were accepted as long papers were allocated 9
-pages of content in the proceedings, with the authors being granted an
-extra page for the final version compared to the 8 pages of content
-allowed at submission time.  All submissions that were accepted as
-short papers were allocated 5 pages of content in the proceedings,
-again with an extra page allowed for the final version compared to the
-pages at submission time.  In both cases, authors were allowed an
-unlimited number of extra pages for references.  The extra page of
-content in the final papers was an experiment this year, in order to
-allow authors to better improve their papers by addressing the
-comments and suggestions of the reviewers, without having to cut
-essential parts of their original submissions.  Long papers will be
-presented either as 25 minute oral talks or as 10 minute oral talks
-followed by a poster presentation.  Short papers will be presented
-either as 10 minute oral talks followed by a poster presentation or
-just as a poster presentation.  The decision about presentation mode
-was made by the program chairs based on the quality of the paper,
-input from the area chairs, and our own judgement about how the paper
-might best be presented.
-   In order to attract and appropriately review a wider variety of
-papers, we experimented this year with different review forms for
-the different categories of papers.  For example, the review criteria
-(and thus the questions on the review form) for theoretical papers were
-different from those for empirical papers.  There were 10 different
-review categories (analysis, challenge, empirical, negative result,
-paradigms, position, resources, survey, systems, and theoretical), which,
-combined with the long/short distinction resulted in 20 different review
-forms; the set of review forms can be found at:
-            http://acl2010.org/reviewforms.html
-In retrospect, we believe that the different review forms helped
-immensely in obtaining appropriate reviews for the different types
-of papers.
-   However, despite the submission page explicitly directing authors to
-examine the review forms posted on the ACL web site before selecting their
-review category, it is clear that authors did not do so.  Thus the program
-chairs and area chairs examined every paper and changed the review
-category for papers where an inappropriate category had been selected.
-(Note that the Call for Papers stated that the Program Chairs reserved
-the right to change the review category.)  This was an enormous amount
-of work.  If this experiment is continued next year, we recommend that
-the submission web page do one of the following:
-. contain a question associated with each category (such
-      as "Does this paper present a system that has been deployed
-      in an industrial or research setting and includes reports
-      of tests with actual users?" for a systems paper), where
-      the user must reply "Yes" in order to select that submission
-      category.
-. pop up the review form for the category that the author selects,
-      along with the statement "I have read this entire review form and
-      believe that it is appropriate for this submission".  The author
-      would need to respond "Yes" in order to finalize the category
-      selection.
-We would like to note that Rich Gerber was extremely helpful
-in modifying the START system to accommodate our needs.  For example,
-the START system has been modified so that when a reviewer clicks
-on the review form for a paper, he or she gets the appropriate
-review form for that category of paper.
-   Most of our Area Chairs and reviewers were outstanding.  However,
-a few reviewers did not provide the high-quality reviews that we
-expect for ACL submissions.  It appears that these individuals often
-review for ACL.  Although we do not have a solution, we do believe
-that some mechanism should be developed for keeping track of
-reviewers whose work is below norm so that future program chairs
-and area chairs avoid inviting them to be part of the program
-committee.
-   While we hope that at least one author of each accepted paper will
-attend the conference and present the paper, it appears that in a few
-cases, the authors may not be making a serious attempt to ensure that
-at least one author is present at the conference.  Some conferences
-require that at least one author register for the conference in order
-for a paper to appear in the proceedings; other conferences prohibit
-authors from submitting to the conference in the future if at least
-one author of an accepted paper does not attend the conference.  We
-recognize that these are either difficult to enforce or somewhat
-draconian measures, we do suggest that ACL adopt the policy that
-the submission page contain the following statement:
-   If this submission is accepted for the ACL conference, we
-   commit to at least one of the authors attending the conference
-   and presenting the paper during the main technical session
-   on <dates>.
-with the requirement that the authors click "YES" in order for
-the submission to be successful.
-   We also encountered problems with authors expecting that the
-submission deadline would not be enforced.  We had several authors
-(some who are senior researchers and active in ACL) who were very
-unhappy that the START system refused their papers after the
-submission deadline.  One spoke of a "traditional 1 hour or more grace
-period" for submissions.  After consultation with the ACL Exec, we did
-not accept these late submissions since we felt it was the only way to
-be fair to all authors.  (We did keep the START system open for 15
-minutes after the deadline in order to avoid cutting off authors who
-were in the process of submitting prior to the deadline.)  We most
-strongly recommend that ACL adopt the following (or something similar)
-as policy, that it be included in the Call for Papers in future years,
-and that it be added to the ACL conference handbook:
-   "The ACL submission deadline will be extended only in the event
-   that the START system crashes near the deadline.  The START system
-   will automatically shut down at the deadline, and it is ACL policy
-   that late submissions will not be allowed."
-Without such a policy, exceptions that are informally granted by
-Program Chairs are unfair to other authors (who are not aware of the
-possibility of an exception) and cause problems for subsequent Program
-Chairs.
-   ACL 2010 will have two outstanding invited talks:
-Andrei Broder: vice-president of Yahoo and both an ACM Fellow
-               and an IEEE Fellow.  He will present a talk on
-               the emerging field of computational advertising,
-               with an emphasis on issues relevant to computational
-               linguistics and natural language processing.
-Zenzi Griffin: professor of psychology at the University of Texas
-               at Austin.  She will present a talk on the
-               psycholinguistics of social interaction, with an
-               emphasis on issues in language processing.
-Our goal was to select invited speakers whose talks would be related
-to computational linguistics, but would broaden the perspective of
-the conference attendees.  In addition, we sought individuals who
-had a reputation for excellent presentational skills.  We believe
-that both of these individuals satisfy these criteria and will
-present excellent and exciting invited talks at ACL.

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