2009Q3 Reports: Secretary

                        ACL Secretary report

                           Dragomir Radev
                          radev@umich.edu

• ELECTIONS AND NOMINATIONS

- The annual elections took place in the Fall of 2008. A total of 458 people voted (a 24% drop). Kevin Knight (ISI, USA) will be the new vice-president-elect Lori Levin (CMU, USA) will be the new member from the Americas region

- Giorgio Satta (Padua, Italy) is an ex-officio member of the exec by virtue of being elected as president of EACL.

- They replace Mark Steedman (current past president), Claire Cardie (North American member), and Alex Lascarides (chair of EACL, the European Chapter of ACL) whose terms ended. The exec wants to thank them for their leadership and for the hard work they devoted to ACL during their terms.

- Our 2008 president, Bonnie Dorr, will stay on the board as past president for a year. We welcome our current vice-president Steven Bird to the position of ACL president for 2009.

- Last year Kam-Fai Wong was elected AFNLP representative to the ACL executive board.

- The nominating cmte (Jun'ichi Tsujii, Mark Steedman, and Bonnie Dorr) nominated the following people for positions on the exec: Rajeev Sangal, Cecile Paris - for vp-elect, Paola Merlo, Alex Koller - for member. These names will be announced at the 2008 conference. The membership will then have one month to come up with other suggestions. The vote will take place in the Fall.

• OTHER BUSINESS

- From January 1st 2009, the Journal of Computational Linguistics has been open access and electronic only

- A new winner of the LTA award was selected using the new procedure. The winner will give a speech in Singapore.

- The site for ACL 2011 was selected (Ido Dagan was the chair of the site selection committee). The site will be announced in Singapore.

- Eric Fosler-Lussier did an amazing job of updating the archives - lease visit them here: http://www.aclweb.org/archive However, Eric suggested to move these documents to the Wiki and to do away with the position of archivist.

- Ali Hakim has been very helpful with updates to the ACL site.

- The ACL Wiki has grown a lot since it was inaugurated last year. It currently includes (http://www.aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=Main_Page) 1,302 pages and 267 articles.

• RESOLUTIONS

- http://www.aclweb.org/policies/resolutions.html

- July 7, 2009: (PASSED) The ACL exec approved the creation of the SIGFSM special interest group on finite-state methods (Ido Dagan).

- March 11, 2009: (PASSED) The ACL exec approved the creation of the SIGMT special interest group on machine translation (Ido Dagan).

- September 3, 2008: (PASSED) A Proposal for an ACL Member Portal (Robert Dale). This document proposes that we put in place an ACL Member Portal on the web by 1st January 2009.

- August 2008: (PASSED) The ACL exec approved the creation of the SIGBIOMED special interest group on biomedical NLP (Steven Bird).

- June 10, 2008: (PASSED) Shadow Account Practices, Eduard Hovy, Donia Scott, Kathy McCoy, Mike Rosner, Diane Litman

 (reconstructed by Kathy McCoy 2/3/04)

 Goal

 To set up limited financial independence for ACL's daughter
 organizations (ACL chapters and SIGs).

 1. Basic Structure: Shadow Accounts

 1.1 All funds brought in by any ACL activity (conference,
     chapter conference, workshop, SIG workshop, grant, donation,
     membership, journal fees, etc.) ultimately belong to the ACL,
     unless explicitly specified to the contrary.

 1.2 To give chapters and SIGs a certain amount of operational
     flexibility, and to facilitate affiliation of the ACL with
     other organizations, so-called Shadow Accounts will be set
     up. These accounts will record the amount of funds `belonging'
     to the daughter organizations.

 1.3 The funds in a shadow account might be held either in a bank
     account separate from the principal ACL account, or they might
     simply be an amount earmarked as `belonging' to the daughter
     organization, or a mixture of the two. That is, the shadow
     account is a (possibly) virtual sub-account of the accounts of
     the international ACL.

 1.4 A shadow account must be dissolved and its funds returned to
     the ACL either upon request of the ACL Executive, or when the
     daughter organization is dissolved.

 2. Signature Authority and Usage

 2.1 The shadow accounts will be managed by the ACL Treasurer,
     unless he or she allocates (partial or full) management to the
     daughter organization.

 2.2 If management of a shadow account is allocated to the
     daughter organization, both the ACL Treasurer and the
     Treasurer of the organization will have signature authority
     over the shadow account.

 2.3 Funds in shadow accounts can be spent by the daughter
     organizations without requiring formal approval from the
     central ACL Executive or its Treasurer, as long as this usage
     is consistent with the policies of the ACL. Usage of the funds
     in unusual ways requires approval from the ACL Executive.

 2.4 To ensure consistency with ACL policies, the ACL Secretary
     will maintain a list of approved purposes for which shadow
     account funds can be used.

 3. Satellite Shadow Accounts

 3.1 All funds brought into a shadow account under conditions
     that explicitly forbid the funds to belong to the
     International ACL as a whole (for example, grants made by
     national institutions for local usage), will reside in
     satellite shadow accounts.

 3.2 Such satellite shadow accounts will also include any monies
     brought in for activities that are independent of the
     International ACL (e.g., a grant to set up a website of
     training in CL within the chapter area) or monies tied to
     other specific projects (e.g., a grant specifically for
     students within the chapter area to attend ACL conferences).

 3.3 Satellite accounts will be managed by the Treasurer of the
     daughter organization.

 4. Reporting

 4.1 Every year at the annual business meeting of the ACL (and
     also at the ACL Executive meeting that precedes it during the
     ACL conference), the daughter organization must provide full
     accounting of its financial activities during the past year,
     including the activity of satellite shadow accounts.

 4.2 The daughter organization must provide full accounting of
     its financial activities to its own members at least once a
     year.

 5. Maintaining a Minimum

 5.1 At the beginning of every financial year, the ACL Treasurer
     will ensure that each shadow account contains a specified
     minimum, by transferring from the ACL central account the
     requisite amount. This minimum will not take into account the
     contents of satellite shadow accounts.

 5.2 At the time of writing, the minimum for chapters is US$5000
      and for SIGs is US$0.

 6. Income and Loss

 6.1 Unless explicitly designated otherwise by the giver, income
     derived from the activities of a daughter organization will be
     added to its shadow account. In the case of joint ACL-chapter
     conferences, the income will be split. A portion of the inco

MISCELLANEOUS

I was personally involved in two following activity of interest to ACL:

- The ACL Anthology Network

 (http://belobog.si.umich.edu/clair/anthology/). This is a manually
 curated citation and collaboration database. It includes degree,
 pagerank, h-index, collaboration centrality, and other bibliometric
 values (http://belobog.si.umich.edu/clair/anthology/rankings.html).

ITEMS FROM THE WINTER REPORT

- The exec approved a resolution to mark the 50th anniversary of

 ATALA with a special certificate of recognition. Eduard Hovy
 presented the certificate to ATALA.

- A new committee was formed that includes representatives of ACL,

 ELRA, ICCL, AFNLP, EACL, and NAACL. The goal of this committee is
 to find a solution of the "NLP conference sudoku" problem which
 causes the number of major NLP conferences to fluctuate from 2-3 to
 5-6 from year to year. It seems appropriate that NLP conferences
 should be spread around more evenly.

- A new contract was signed with Priscilla and ARCS to continue

 providing services to ACL.

- Min Yen Kan has asked for permission to delegate some

 Anthology-related, Web-intensive tasks to Ali. We need to discuss
 that issue.

- Future ACL conference budgets should have a $10k line item for

 student travel.

- A web site was created by Ali under Bonnie Dorr's instructions for

 publisher disounts for ACL members.

- CICLING asked for ACL endorsement and obtained it.

- A list of prior conference chairs has been compiled here:

 http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=Additional_conference_chairs

- New Admin wiki for reports, conference handbook, calendar, etc; any

 ACL officer is welcome to have write access.

- It was decided to drop joint memberships which allowed a family

 (according to some definition of this term) to get a discount on
 ACL membership. 

TODO ITEMS FROM PREVIOUS MEETINGS

Here is the list of todo items remaining from the last 3 exec meetings (in June, January, and March). I am going to code them below as follows:

X DONE/OBSOLETE ! URGENT

 PENDING

JUNE 2008

X 1. Don't put in your reports any sensitive info. Redact

  reports/minutes if necessary before posting. 

2. Change guidelines to say that the newest member will join the cc

  for the next conference (e.g., person after Hwee Tou, that is Lori
  Levin should be on 2011cc)  (DRAGO?)

3. Decide whether to encourage bids from organizations not affiliated

  with universities (cf Puerto Rico's recent bid, EMNLP in Hawaii) 

4. For local bids - check if VAT has to be paid, don't confuse ACL

  office staff with local staff, don't hire a huge local staff,
  justify any rebudgetings, go to the treasurer if going over budget) 

X5. Bonnie: add to conference handbook - before an area chair changes a

  reviewer - they should ask first.

6. Keep w/s attendance figures on wiki

(IN PROGRESS) 7. start publications cmtes - short journal papers, more diverse paper

  types, consider changing the proportion of posters, short paper
  track, etc. Consider the model used by Bioinformatics/IMDB. 

8. line up all conference chairs by end of previous summer

9. authorize the sponsorship cmte to design a procedure to hire

  sponsorship chairs who would get commissions 

10. follow up on last two years' membership proposals - possible get

   more proposals 

11. request less detail of preliminary site bids

12. Kam Fai: discuss conference liability

13. Graeme: auditing ACL

13. Ido: involve dancing

14. Ask authors to update their reference lists at the time of publication.

15. Opinion: global sponsorship is a bad idea

16. very few submissions in IR/speech

X17. avoid conflict of poster session and exec++ dinner (Drago)

18. determine cost for "facebook" application (Robert)

19. Drago: consider its relationship with AAN:

   http://belobog.si.umich.edu/clair/anthology/index.cgi

20. post papers online as soon as they are ready (and not on the first

   day of the conference) (CONF CHAIR)

JANUARY 2009

21. offer fire-sale of proceedings older than 3 years during 2009

   (for $5 + S&H)   (Priscilla)

22. consider other possible office locations (Priscilla)

23. the need to sell off steel shelving (Priscilla)

24. chase up Microsoft and Yahoo; liaise with sponsorship committee

   (Priscilla)

25. make sure conference coordination committee ("sudoku") is

   functioning; report at next teleconference (Drago) 

26. AFNLP representative in this committee (Kam-Fai)

X27. Post common fares from major cities to Singapore, to give people

   an idea of what costs are like (hopefully lower than they might
   assume) (Hwee Tou or Kam-Fai to put this idea to ACL09
   coordination committee)

28. Check whether our Wachovia CDs are insured... (Graeme, Priscilla)

29. Check insurance of European accounts (Graeme, with Mike Rosner)

30. explore idea of streaming video of conference talks integrated

   with Portal (Robert, Steven) 

31. ask AAAI about their plans for dealing with the recession (Priscilla)

32. summarize discussion of proposed SIGDAT advisory board back to

   the exec-2009 mailing list (Owen)

33. request new budget for 2009 conference (Bonnie)

X34. communicate name of our proposed ACL rep to AFNLP (Hwee Tou) to

   the AFNLP (Kam-Fai) 

35. admin committee to have call with ACL/IJCNLP committee (Bonnie)

X36. plan for a quarterly conference call and the possibility of

   reducing the July/August exec meeting to half a day (Steven)

MARCH 2009

X37. collate outstanding action items and circulate [Drago]

38. Revive discussion on Sudoku list [Owen]

39. Respond to discussion on Sudoku list [Nicoletta wearng ELRA hat,

   Giorgio, Drago] 

40. Drago send update on results of last round of ACL member

   initiatives so we can decide whether to do it again at ACL-2009
   [Drago]

41. authentication issue re publisher discount page to resolve

   [Drago, Bonnie, Priscilla, ...]

42. revised budget for ACL-2009 to go to Graeme and Kam-Fai

   [Priscilla]

43. revise the estimated ratio between full and discounted tickets for

   the banquet based on data from recent conferences [Priscilla] 

44. send info about ACL bid process to EACL and NAACL in case

   they want to revise their processes [Ido] 

45. write up concerns about divergence between ACL and NAACL

   approach to posters [Drago] 

46. delay decision for a few days; members to raise further issues on

   the email thread [All]

47. issue of replacement of elected officers who step down to be

   resolved offline [Ido]

48. Action: issue of declaring single nominee elected; procedures

   could go into SIG constitution template -- resolve offline [Ido]

X49. forward conference discussion materials to Owen, Giorgio,

   Nicoletta, Steven [Ido]

X50. Ido and Steven to discuss priorities in bringing these issues back

   to the board during the proposed May call [Ido, Steven]

X51. Publications committee (Robert, Drago, Ido, Hwee-Tou?) -- set up

   [Ido]

52. Finalize the discussion about the algorithm for the 3-pack

   sponsorship

53. identify coordinators for proposed workshops in the 2010

   conferences, incl large workshops [Steven]