2020Q3 Reports: General Chair

The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place online from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.

Some initial notes, to be modified as I see everyone's reports

Switching to Virtual: Advice on Personnel and Chairs

• Have virtual infrastructure chairs than we did. We had essentially 9 (6 virtual infrastructure chairs led by Hao Fang and Sudha Rao, plus 2 captioning chairs, plus 1 volunteer chair). Probably we need twice that, with specific chairs for live Video (Zoom or whatever), the virtual website, talk recordings, the non-virtual website, chat,
• Assign separate infrastructure chairs for the workshops, who is closely in contact with the workshop chairs at all times. The workshops need strict deadlines for finalizing schedules and materials, much earlier stricter than with a physical conference.
• We need a social chair to find ways to encourage folks to chat more.
• Volunteer coordinator should be more tightly integrated from the beginning with the infrastructure chairs, since the volunteers are mainly helping with infrasturcture
• Possibly have an ethics chair (see below)

Switching to Virtual: Advice on Infrastructure

• QA sessions could be improved by incorporate more poster-like elements (like having speakers do 5-minute spiels every 30 minutes or etc)
• Speakers should upload their slides as well as the talks
• How to do virtual live sessions: work out methods for taking questions, probably involving 2 moderators who screen and present questions (and so as to avoid the "more of a comment than a question" people)
• if you use slideslive or any such operator that uses a delay for transcription, need more training of each speaker about how to deal with delay.
• minor: if you use miniconf, fix so that the whole website can shift timezone.
• Nitin's suggestion: "use one of the many bot frameworks (Rasa, BotKit, Botpress, Hubot) to make a simple FAQ bot that can answer repeated questions"

Permissions:

• Decide whether to ask/require people for permission to record their chat conversations
• Explicitly require people to give permission to store the captions of their videos
• Somehow encourage people to correct the captions of their videos.

Global Inclusion:

• For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc., or else require VPNs.
• Iran is a particularly difficult case.
• Perhaps we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government, so we'll need to set up mirrors.

Ethics:

• Require an ethics statement of all papers, add ethics to reviewing form, add ethics, and also diversity & inclusion to all paper award decision criteria.
• Possibly have an ethics chair For videos (and docs and chats), decide whether to solve problem of viewability in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc., or else require VPNs.
• Iran is a particularly difficult case.
• Perhaps we should assume that any single technology could be banned at any time by some government, so we'll need to set up mirrors.

Switching to Virtual: Timeline of Decision to go online:

• Feb 5: Concern about coronavirus expressed by Seattle Convention and Tourist board.
• Mar 2: Companies begin to restrict travel, Stanford switches to virtual classes
• Mar 4: ACL Exec meeting, I ask Exec for their advice, advice disagreed
• Mar 6: We changed Mar 11 site visit to be a virtual meeting with hotel
• Mar 11: At meeting, Hyatt refuses to discuss refunds or cancellations until mid-April
• Mar 17: Things have worsened, I ask ACL Exec advice, they mostly advise going virtual
• April 2: We decide to go virtual and announce on homepage.

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