2016Q3 Reports: Faculty Advisors to the SRW

The faculty advisors to ACL 2016 Student Research Workshop (SRW) were Chris Biemann (Technische Universität Darmstadt), Gosse Bouma (University of Groningen), and Yang Liu (Tsinghua University).

Since late October 2015, the faculty advisors have been working with SRW chairs Will Roberts (Humboldt University of Berlin), Tao Lei (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and He He (University of Maryland) to organize the SRW. In particular, they offered advice on the following issues:

1. Discussion on tentative schedule. It is important to deal with potential deadline extensions. The SRW chairs need to negotiate with publication chairs on the camera-ready deadline to make sure the PDFs are available in time for the conference.

2. Recruiting reviewers. SRW chairs were advised to set a timeline for acquiring reviewers. The first step was to get the list of reviewers for ACL 2015 SRW.

3. Duty division between SRW chairs. It is necessary to divide the duties between three SRW chairs according to the timelines on the ACL Wiki. Student chairs were encouraged to take these timelines as a roadmap and develop them further.

4. Set-up of START system. SRW chairs were advised to contact the PC co-chairs to set up a conference manager page for SRW.

5. SRW website. Faculty advisors provided comments on how to improve the design of the website. The CFP should evolve and become more elaborate as SRW chairs start to add submission guidelines and paper length restrictions. It is important to put the URL on the main conference website as early as possible to let more people know SRW.

6. Sending out the CFP. Post the CFP to major NLP mailing lists such as LINGUIST List.

7. Decision making on acceptance of SRW papers. It is transparent to base decisions on overall recommendation scores. However, the downside is that it is prone to reviewer bias fluctuations. Therefore, SRW chairs need to discuss together to decide the acceptance of borderline submissions.

8. SRW program. SRW chairs were advised to check with the PC chairs for setting up oral/poster sessions and local arrangements chairs for meeting room reservation. Every participant should have a poster. But it is unnecessary to arrange an oral session for every participant. Oral sessions are usually not held in evening.

9. Funding. The faculty advisors have tried to search for funding for USA, European, and Asian students but failed to find any suitable programs (e.g., travel/support programs for student spending a short period of time at some university abroad). They contacted ACL Business Manager to inquire the possibility of registering SRW participants for free via student volunteer options or giving them precedence for applying for student volunteers.

10. Funding allocation. Receipts are needed for reimbursement. Participants who are far from Berlin and can only receive limited financial support from their institutions can be given precedence to get more allocation.

11. ACL Business Meeting. Advise SRW chairs how to report the progress at the meeting.

Recommendation for future SRWs: - clarify travel subsidies earlier to avoid delays and unclear situations for participants - clarify presentation format earlier with program chair and local chairs