2013Q3 Reports: EMNLP-CONLL 2012

MNLP-CoNLL 2012 was organized jointly by SIGDAT and SIGNLL and was collocated with ACL's 50th anniversary conference at the Jeju Island, Korea. We received a good number of submissions (606), among which 36 submissions were withdrawn or rejected without review. From the remaining submissions, 99 were accepted for oral presentation and 40 for poster presentation, for a combined acceptance rate of 24.8%. As in recent editions of EMNLP, authors were given the opportunity to provide supplementary material in conjunction with their submissions, which the program committee could but was not required to take into account during reviewing. Also as in recent editions, authors of accepted papers were offered an additional page in the camera-ready version of their submissions, so that comments received from reviewers could be more easily addressed.

We had 22 area chairs, under which a team of 525 primary and 66 secondary reviewers performed rigorous reviews. We had two invited speakers, Eric Xing and Patrick Pantel, which enriched our program and attracted a large number of audiences. All the sessions were well attended, and the discussions were generally very alive. We had three sponsors (Baidu, Google, and Microsoft). Their sponsorships were used to partially support students' travel expenses, support the best paper award, and provide beverage/food for poster sessions.

While everything went smoothly with great help of the local organizers, my only concern is that combining the two large conferences (ACL and EMNLP-CoNLL) would have made the period of the conferences too long. A large number of participants could attend parts of the two conferences or had to choose one of the two conferences to attend.