2019Q3 Reports: Tutorial Chairs

Tutorial chairs

• Preslav Nakov, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU
• Alexis Palmer, University of North Texas

The tutorial call was coordinated between three conferences: ACL, EMNLP, and NAACL. 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 46 proposals. Proposals were evaluated by the tutorial chairs from all three conferences.

Each conference selected its top 8 tutorial proposals, with an emphasis on quality, diversity, and likely audience interest. Some overlaps in preferences led to a negotiation process in order to ensure that each conference would have a selection of tutorials with a good balance of introductory and cutting-edge tutorials, as well as balance between theoretical vs. applied tutorials (while keeping presenter location preferences in mind). We also had to account for the fact that some authors were affiliated with more than one successful tutorial proposal. To achieve this balance, we ended up accepting nine tutorials for ACL, instead of our original goal of eight tutorials. Many thanks to the local organizers (Alessandro Lenci, Bernardo Magnini, and Simonetta Montemagni) for making that possible.

In the end, nine tutorials were selected for ACL 2019:

• T1: Latent Structure Models for Natural Language Processing, by Andre F. T. Martins, Tsvetomile Mihaylova, Nikita Nangia, and Vlad Niculae
• T2: Graph-Based Meaning Representations: Design and Processing, by Alexander Koller, Stephan Oepen, and Weiwei Sun
• T3: Discourse Analysis and Its Applications, by Shafiq Joty, Giuseppe Carenini, Raymond Ng, and Gabriel Murray
• T4: Computational Analysis of Political Texts: Bridging Research Efforts Across Communities, by Goran Glavas, Federico Nanni, and Simone Paolo Ponzetto
• T5: Wikipedia as a Resource for Text Analysis and Retrieval, by Marius Pasca
• T6: Deep Bayesian Natural Language Processing, by Jen-Tzung Chien
• T7: Unsupervised Cross-Lingual Representation Learning, by Sebastian Ruder, Anders Sogaard, and Ivan Vulic
• T8: Advances in Argument Mining, by Katarzyna Budzynska and Chris Reed
• T9: Storytelling from Structured Data and Knowledge Graphs: An NLG Perspective, by Abhijit Mishra, Anirban Laha, Karthik Sankaranarayanan, Parag Jain, and Saravanan Krishnan

There were two difficulties with the process. First, the process of balancing tutorials across conferences was quite complex and may have been easier if we had taken a more systematic approach. Second, for those of us new to the tutorial process, there was quite a bit of uncertainty about which steps need to be taken, and when. Fortunately the group of six tutorial co-chairs included several who have done this many times before and were able to illuminate the process, but this strikes me (Alexis) as over-reliance on unwritten institutional memory. We suggest preparing a written guide for future tutorial co-chairs. This could live in the ACL wiki and be updated over time as appropriate.