2023Q3 Reports: General Chair

Update

Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format. While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference.

Despite the relatively late start in preparing for ACL (with general chairs and program chairs appointed less than a year ago), we successfully formed the organizing committee within a short period of time. With the conference just about two weeks away, we are pleased that the preparation has encountered minimal issues thus far, thanks to the dedication and hard work of the organizing committee.

In the following we summarize a few key things about the organizational work. Details about each organizing committee can be found in their reports.

• The organizing committees are mostly similar to previous years. Note we don’t have a local organizing chair, instead Jennifer Rachfold from ACL performed this role. We added a visa assistance team to provide invitation letters to participants who need to apply for visas to attend the conference.

• We continue to see an increasing number of submissions. For the main conference regular papers, both direct submissions (via Softconf) and ARR submissions were considered. Program chairs introduced a few novel processes, for example, the new review criteria, paper matching methods. They also added a new presentation format for Findings papers (spotlight sessions).

• An addition to this year’s ACL is the introduction of a separate industry track. This is motivated by two factors. First, ACL is held in North America this year (and thus no NAACL), and NAACL has an established tradition of hosting an industry track. Second there was an increasing number of industry track submissions at EMNLP last year from previous years. We hope that a separate industry track can foster the dissemination of research on real-world applications in industry settings.

• About the program: there are two keynote talks, one panel on LLM, one discussion on ARR, one on Ethics, and ACL business meeting and Award session. Program chairs worked hard to design the program with the constraint of time and physical spaces.

• Tutorials and workshops follow the previous years of a joint call for proposals for multiple conferences (EACL/ACL/EMNLP). Tutorial and workshop chairs worked with EACL chairs to select the proposals (EMNLP chairs were not appointed yet at that time).

• Though the economy was not great this year, we managed to have a very reasonable number of sponsors. Sponsorship is managed by ACL sponsorship director Chris Callison-Burch, and our conference sponsorship chairs.

• Virtual infrastructure. We are continuing to use Underline to support the hybrid conference. The virtual infra chairs also developed other mechanisms to improve the conference experience, especially for virtual participations. MiniConf and Rocketchat will be used to make the program easily accessible and enable more interactions among participants.

• Ethics chairs handled a number of papers to ensure our papers are up to the standards of ethics, for main conference regular papers as well as industry and demo papers.

• Publication chairs put tremendous efforts to produce the handbook and proceedings on time, under very tight schedule.

• D&I chairs organized various activities to help participants develop career and socialize, and provide supports to attendee with financial needs. Thanks to the support by D&I sponsorship and ACL funds.

• Conference information update is well supported by the website chairs, and publicity and social media chairs. Authors and participants are informed on a timely basis.

Issues and future recommendations

There are a few issues and observations that may be relevant to future conferences:

• Conference location. First, obtaining Canadian visas is a time-consuming process. Even though we started the visa assistance process early to support participant, many individuals couldn’t obtain their visas on time for the conference. Regrettably, there was little we could do to expedite the process. Second, hotels tend to be expensive during the summer season. The blocked hotel rooms were sold out quickly, and it is not easy to find affordable accommodations close to the conference venue.

• Conference venue. With the increasing number of submissions and accepted papers, accommodating all the papers is becoming more challenging.

• Because of the proximity of ACL and EACL, some preparation for ACL started after EACL was over. This was also due to the fact that Jennifer Rachfold is responsible for managing all the conferences. As a result, there is some delay in certain tasks such as opening registrations.

• Joint workshops/tutorials. This has been a practice for a while. However, given the long time gap between conferences, e.g., EACL and EMNLP, coupled with the rapidly evolving nature of our field, it may not be optimal to determine tutorials nearly a year in advance (take EMNLP 2023 as an example, tutorials proposals were due Dec 1st, a year before the conference).

• Ethics committee/chairs. They were initially formed to check ethics issues for the regular papers. However, there was a need for this aspect for the industry track and demo papers. Since these were separate submission sites from the regular papers (Softconf setting), it wasn’t straightforward for the Ethics committee to access the papers.

• Student research workshop papers are integrated with regular papers in the conference program. This raised concerns regarding whether the oral session for the SRW will receive sufficient attention. The student research workshop organizers had introduced some new ideas to address this, we are waiting to see the impact (will update this part after the conference).

• The implementation of the hybrid conference mode is crucial for this conference, partly due to the visa issues. But broadly speaking, hybrid conferences enable people who can’t travel to conference to participate virtually. However, we also acknowledge that the hybrid conferences come with their expenses. Continued efforts to enhance virtual participant experience and minimizing the cost will benefit the entire community.

• Collecting information from workshop organizers (20+ workshops) at various stages (coordinating paper submission, to producing handbook/proceedings) remains challenging.

• About the organizing committee: Each committee’s responsibility can be made more clear from the outset. Proper knowledge transfer from previous conferences is incredibly valuable. One approach to facilitate this is to have overlapping committee members. For publication, virtual infrastructure, and D&I, we implemented this, and it turned to be beneficial for these committees. Of course for certain roles, such as program chairs, this is not feasible, and some committee duties are also clear and may not have this need.