2011Q1 Reports: NAACL

Report from NAACL, February 2011

Rebecca Hwa - Chapter board chair

Owen Rambow - Past chapter board chair

Christopher Manning - Treasurer

Anoop Sarkar - Secretary

Elections

The NAACL election was held electronically in the Fall of 2010. David Chiang (USC-ISI) and Dan Gildea (University of Rochester) replaced Chris Brew (Ohio State University) and Ted Pedersen (University of Minnesota, Duluth) as board members.

Executive Committee Meetings

The Board converses regularly by e-mail. In addition, in 2011, the Board will meet in person at the ACL HLT 2011 conference in Portland.

NAACL Treasurer's Report

The NAACL bank account has been more active than usual for the period May 2010-Jan 2011, reflecting the new financial initiatives that NAACL has instituted in recent years. We booked surpluses from NAACL HLT 2007 ($14,000) and NAACL HLT 2009 ($9,000). This means both that NAACL has never had a financially unsuccessful conference and that we are less behind on post-conference accounting than ever before! (Thanks to Graeme and Chiaki for 2009, as well as to the NAACL treasurer for 2007.) We distributed about $23,000, including $10,000 to sponsor the LSA Linguistic Institute 2011 at Boulder, Colorado, $4,000 to support student travel to NAACL HLT 2010, $2,500 for workshop support under the local and Latin American funds (which we will be merging going forward), $5,000 in support of NACLO 2010, and $2,000 for JHU WS 2010 travel support. Pending expenses include supporting the JHU WS 2010 and NACLO 2011. For this period, income approximately equaled expenses, and the closing balance at the end of January was $136,590.97.

North American conference in 2010

NAACL HLT 2010 took place in Los Angeles, California, in June 2010. Ron Kaplan was the conference chair; Geral Penn (Toronto), Mary Harper (CASL), and Jill Burstein (ETS) were the PC co-chairs; and David Chiang and Ed Hovy were the local organizers.A detailed conference report has been prepared by Ron.

North American conference in 2011

This will be held jointly with ACL in June.

North American conference in 2012

The Board has decided to hold NAACL-HLT 2012 in Montreal, Canada. It is scheduled to take place June 3 -- June 8 2012, at the Montreal Sheraton. Sabine Bergler and Guy Lapalme have agreed to serve on the local arrangements advisory committee. The general chair and the PC co-chairs will be named shortly.

Shaping Future NAACL-HLT conferences

The NAACL Board continues to explore ways to make our conference more lively and diverse. As NAACL-HLT conferences continue to grow, the increased size does add complexity for local arrangements. Although they do have the option to delegate to a professional conference organizer, many smaller institutions are hesitant about taking on the responsibility. No bid was received for hosting NAACL HLT 2012 despite active encouragements from the Board. Thus the Board has begun to experiment with alternative models of local arrangements to further reduce the burden on any particular institution. For 2012, the conference site was chosen by the Board based on the usual location selection criteria (e.g., geographical balance, active CL communities in the area). Then, researchers from the area are invited to serve on an advisory committee to offer suggestions about local arrangement matters. The tradition of calling for bids to host NAACL-HLT conferences will continue in the future, but our experiences in organizing NAACL-HLT 2012 may act as a guideline for those years when no institution comes forth.

NAACL Representative to the ACL Sponsorship Committee for 2011-2013

Srinivas Bangalore (AT&T) and Michael Gamon (MSR) are the current regional representatives (for the Americas) to the sponsorship committee. Michael will continue to serve in this committee next year. He will be joined by Patrick Pantel (MSR).

Support for Summer Schools and Other Educational Outreach

We are continuing our support for NACLO (the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad) and student participation at the summer school during the Johns Hopkins Natural Language Engineering Summer Workshop. We are also sponsoring the LSA Linguistic Institute 2011 at Boulder, Colorado.

Support for Outreach to Emerging CL communities

At our June 2010 meeting, the Board decided to merge two small funds programs created in 2009 (the Latin American Fund and the Regional Conferences Fund) to form the Emerging Regions Fund. Its purpose is to encourage more regional interactions among students and researchers anywhere in the Americas. A total of $5,000 has been set aside for this program, and two deadlines were planned: September 1, 2010, and March 1, 2011. In September, three proposals were received; one from Argentina (http://cs.famaf.unc.edu.ar/~laura/nlpw/index.html) was funded.