2023Q1 Minutes (public version)

• ACL Business, following up unresolved topics from our discussion in the last meeting
  • David will make three motions to the Exec on the following initiatives: (1) Establish an Investments Advisory Committee and Director of Investments to manage ACL's capital reserves. (2) Board resolution to transfer ACL officers on ACL's Malta investments to a new senior officer with the intention of closing these accounts. (3) Establish an Award Payment Committee to centralize the process of payments of various ACL awards.

• Update of the conference handbook
  • Yusuke has prepared a GitHub repository for maintaining the ACL conference handbook. It starts by copying the contents from the adminwiki and conference chairs are supposed to make updates to the handbook in a community-driven manner.

• Hybrid-conference-experience working group chair notes/summary/progress
  • A committee has been convened to improve the hybrid conference experience, which is chaired by Mohit. The committee held a meeting recently, mainly discussed about how to improve the experience of virtual poster sessions and came up with some concrete initial solutions. The committee will create a final document to share with the community for feedbacks.

• Brief discussion about cloud GPU underrepresented-community credits
  • Mohit has been in touch with two major companies with cloud compute programs and are discussing with them an award-based cloud GPU program for underserved communities. Mohit will talk with them for a second round.

• Report on EACL Board, EACL 2023 status, EACL 2024 status
  • Roberto reported the new Board members of EACL chapter, as well as the status of EACL2023 and 2024 conferences. EACL2023 will be held in Dubrovnik, 2-6, May. EACL2024's three bids are under evaluation. Site-visits are scheduled in March.

• Progress report from ARR
  • Mausam reported the progresses of ARR, especially the recent three two-monthly cycles. Some key points include: (1) October cycle: introduce tracks, (2) December cycle: introduce senior action editors and student constraint for paper review matching, (3) February Cycle: improve integration of SAE tasks in OpenReview, improve internal documentation of cycle process for EiCs.
  • The next steps of ARR are as follows: (1) build trust from the community, (2) mentor new reviewers, (3) reviewer tracking, (4) get more technical support from OpenReview, (5) do a survey around ACL2023, (6) coordinate with the NAACL2024 conference.
  • Since ARR has now moved to a two-month reviewing cycle, one concern raised was whether such a timeline would enable the rapid publication cycle (reviewing and acceptance) of conference papers that the CL community comes to expect, while achieving ARR’s goal of improving the conference paper reviewing process. This is because a complete paper reviewing cycle with one round of revision would need to take six months (from the date of first submission to the date when the revised submission receives its reviews and is ready for commitment to a conference) – two months for the first-round reviewing, two months for paper revision, and two months for the second-round reviewing of the revised submission.

• ACL policy on reviewing platforms of conferences
  • How much use of ARR is mandated, and how much use of START? Options that the ACL exec sees regarding reviewing process and platform (in random order): 1. Accept ARR papers committed through START and do proceeding generation on START (as done by the last few conferences) 2. Only use ARR, not allow direct submissions through START (as done for NAACL 2022) 3. Only use OpenReview without ARR (not recommended because the process needs to be built from scratch). 4. Only START (not recommended because authors already have papers on ARR) The decision among these 4 options is up to NAACL 2024 GC+PC with the advice of the Exec. ARR wants to offer support to implement option 2 above but see the next question.
  • How much of our [ACL] tooling, including moving stuff to the Anthology, is tied to START?

ARR does not currently have clear support for proceeding generation and Anthology interface. But ARR is offering to meet with the NAACL organizing team next week to discuss this. It is suggested to invite also one of the PC chairs of NAACL 2022 who only used ARR.