2018Q3 Reports: Tutorial Chairs

Tutorial chairs

• Yoav Artzi, Cornell University
• Jacob Eisenstein, Georgia Institute of Technology

The tutorial call was coordinated between four conferences: ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, and COLING. In addition to distributing the open call, we actively recruited tutorial proposals that we thought were likely to be of interest. In total, the joint call received 49 proposals. Proposals were evaluated by the tutorial chairs from all four conferences, with cross-conference coordination by Mausam. Tutorials were then selected for each conference in a round-robin fashion, with an emphasis on quality, diversity, and likely audience interest. Eight tutorials were selected for ACL 2018:

• T1: 100 Things You Always Wanted to Know about Semantics & Pragmatics But Were Afraid to Ask, by Emily M. Bender
• T2: Neural Approaches to Conversational AI, by Jianfeng Gao, Michel Galley and Lihong Li
• T3: Variational Inference and Deep Generative Models, by Wilker Aziz and Philip Schulz
• T4: Connecting Language and Vision to Actions, by Peter Anderson, Abhishek Das and Qi Wu
• T5: Beyond Multiword Expressions: Processing Idioms and Metaphors, by Valia Kordoni
• T6: Neural Semantic Parsing, by Luke Zettlemoyer, Matt Gardner, Pradeep Dasigi, Srinivasan Iyer and Alane Suhr
• T7: Deep Reinforcement Learning for NLP, by William Yang Wang, Jiwei Li and Xiaodong He
• T8: Multi-lingual Entity Discovery and Linking, by Avirup Sil, Heng Ji, Dan Roth and Silviu-Petru Cucerzan

The joint call for tutorial proposals reduced the duplication of reviewing effort across conferences, and hopefully simplified things for the proposers. One friction point was in the creation of the handbooks and proceedings. Proposals were submitted a single shared softconf site for all four conferences, but generating ACL-specific proceedings from this site was technically difficult. We followed NAACL in creating a post hoc softconf site just for accepted ACL tutorials -- thanks to NAACL publications chair Stephanie Lukin for identifying this solution! However, this required non-trivial intervention from the Program Chairs, Publication Chairs, and from softconf personnel. We recommend investigating softconf's capabilities to create a more streamlined process for multi-conference submissions in the future.