2022Q1 Reports: EACL

EACL Officers as of February 2022

(No changes from last year)

Chair

• Shuly Wintner, University of Haifa, Israel

Secretary

• Georg Rehm, DFKI, Germany

Treasurer

• Claudia Borg, University of Malta, Malta

Chair-elect

• Roberto Basili, University of Roma, Tor Vergata, Italy

Advisory Board

• Angeliki Lazaridou, DeepMind, UK
• Barbara Plank, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
• Preslav Nakov, QCRI, Qatar
• François Yvon, Interdisciplinary Computer Science Laboratory (LISN), CNRS, France

Nominating Committee

• Walter Daelemans, University of Antwerp, Belgium
• Iryna Gurevych, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
• Sharon Goldwater, University of Edinburgh, UK
• Lucia Specia, Imperial College and University of Sheffield, UK

Student Board

• Alban Petit, Interdisciplinary Computer Science Laboratory (LISN), CNRS, France
• Ionut-Teodor Sorodoc, Pompeu Fabra University, Spain
• Ece Takmaz, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Conferences

EACL-2021, the 16th conference of the EACL, took place virtually on April 19-23, 2021. It was supposed to be held in Kyiv, Ukraine but moved online due to the pandemic. The local organization team was still Kyiv-based, with members from Grammarly and from the Ukrainian Catholic University. The general chair was Paola Merlo (University of Geneva) and the program chairs were Jörg Tiedemann (University of Helsinki) and Reut Tsarfaty (Bar Ilan University). The conference attracted an unprecedented number of 1400 submissions and 1331 participants, from 71 different countries. 326 excellent papers were presented, reflecting an acceptance rate of 24.7%. Free registrations were awarded to 128 student and non-student volunteers, and 143 participants received D&I awards.

In 2022, EACL will be part of ACL; in 2023, assuming that on-site conferences will be possible, we plan to hold the conference in Kyiv, Ukraine, with the original local organization team of 2021.

In future years, we would be happy to streamline the process of finding venues using a third-party PCO as an alternative to the traditional bidding and conference organization model, hopefully together with the other ACL chapters.

Website

We renewed our appearance in 2020 thanks to the help of our Student Board members. The new website is [1]. We strive to make the information on the website as updated as possible.

Finances

We are still awaiting transfer of signatories on the EACL account, which has not happened since the new treasurer took over in 2018. This transfer proves to be difficult due to the paperwork and multiple signatures required from people in various international locations.

We would also like to make our ACL shadow account our main account, as the need for a Europe-based bank account is diminishing.