2011Q3 Reports: ACL Anthology

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ACL ANTHOLOGY Report June 2011, Min-Yen Kan

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: In the past year, we have fixed most of the problems with the ACM's ingestion of our data and have published a prototype ACL Anthology site working with a canonicalized data model. Both actions will need to be approved by the ACL Exec before being finalized into production.

INTRO The ACL Anthology is a digital archive of research papers in computational linguistics, sponsored by the CL community, and freely available to all. Conference proceedings are published in the anthology around the same time as the conference (subject to general/program chairs' discretion). CL articles are published within a few days of publication on the MIT Press website, now that CL is open access.

The anthology now contains over 19,200 papers (up from 18,000 articles from twelve months ago). All papers prior to this conference that belong to the ACL (N.B., not sister organizations) are also indexed by the ACM Portal as per the ACL Anthology - ACM agreement. This agreement allows the ACM to assign DOIs for ACL materials, in exchange for being able to dictate where the DOI resolution goes to (currently, the ACM Portal)

CHANGES OVER LAST 12 MONTHS:

We have also also finished our work to ensure DBLP and ACM Portal accurately cover the Anthology materials; however, some of these changes may have not yet finalized by the opposing party at DBLP and ACM Portal. With the help of Praveen Bysani at NUS, ACM now has a complete list of proceedings from ACL and should finalize DOI assignments for legacy materials (particularly workshops) this year and provide this information back to the ACL Anthology for our records.

On a related note, we have also been working with the ACM to fix how our materials appear on the ACM website. Previously, the materials were freely accessible but only after registration of a free ACM account. Thanks to ACL members' feedback, we considered the registration to be an unacceptable barrier to access, and ACM has since changed their layout with respect to our materials to make it easier to 1) access the PDF of the paper 2) access the ACL Anthology's page for the paper.

Finally, we have finished our major push to incorporate our sister organizations' proceedings (ROCLING, PACLIC, ALTA, RANLP), although new forums may be undertaken in this coming year. In particular, we expect to get past proceedings from RANLP and from LREC, as and when these organizations can make their proceedings available to us.

HERE

e have also gotten approval to use 3600 USD of the ACL's budget to upgrade the Anthology. We are using these funds to requisition external consultant work to code a new version of the underlying ACL software, to upgrade the storage, curation of the metadata and a better faceted navigation user interface that will allow the filtering of publications by custom filters. Currently, the new Anthology model is built using Ruby on Rails and features OAI-PMH integration to allow third parties to ingest and list article metadata from the Anthology.

MAILING LIST: The Anthology mailing list's (http://groups.google.com/group/acl-anthology) membership pool has grown, now consisting of 259 members (up from 176 from last report). This is an announcement-only list, where we notify members of newly listed released materials online.

ONGOING WORK: While we incorporate more materials for CL, our next big project is ensuring that ACM lists our publications with appropriate rights and linkage to our Anthology copies. ACL members rightfully have complained that the ACM doesn't make it obvious that the publications are from ACL and that they can be obtained free without ACM registration.

Once completed, we will plan to work with START and aclpub (courtesy connections from Steven Bird) to directly support the ACL Anthology XML format to make future events using the aclpub package easier to incorporate directly into the Anthology, and to incorporate further categorization of submission by OLAC codes (language subject matter).

Other work left from last year is still queued. These are to provide a uniform level of service and metadata for past work. There are a number of issues that are being tackled:

• Correct XML representation of each article: names of authors (with diacritics for European names), first, "von" and last name portions
• BibTeX representations for all articles
• One PDF file per article. This is especially problematic for the J79 series, which largely represents one issue per PDF file.
• Text for all PDF files. Some articles (e.g., EACL 2003) only exist in image form in the Anthology, rendering indexing (and hence subsequent citation) of these articles problematic.
• PDF metadata fixing for all articles. Crucially, Google Scholar uses this information but it is not always correctly generated.
• Wikification of articles so that registered ACLs users will be able to edit their contributions to add errata and other metadata, multimedia.