2014Q3 Reports: NAACL
Report from NAACL, June 2014
Hal Daumé III - Chapter board chair
Joel Tetreault - Treasurer
Executive Committee Meetings
The board has a planned meeting on Wednesday 25 June 2014, during this year's ACL. Additionally the Board converses regularly by email.
Treasurer's Report
TODO
North American conference in 2014
ACL is in North America this year, so there is no separate NAACL.
NAACL Officers as of 8 June 2014
Chair Hal Daume III University of Maryland Secretary Michael White Ohio State University Treasurer Joel Tetreault Yahoo! Research Past Chair Chris Callison-Burch University of Pennsylvania
Board Members: Emily M. Bender University of Washington Katrin Erk University of Texas at Austin Julia Hirschberg Columbia University Eduard Hovy Carnegie Mellon University
New Initiatives
Anti-Harassment Policy
The most significant new initiative for NAACL is the creation of an Anti-Harassment Policy. Details are here:
http://naacl.org/policies/anti-harassment.html
This was the result of extensive discussion, particularly regarding implementation. It's approval was unanimous among the members of the board. We additionally encouraged (successfully) ACL 2014 to adopt this policy for this year's conference.
Repeated Use of Hotel Chains
As suggested by Priscilla, we can often get a better financial deal by going with the same physical hotel two years in a row. We can get a slightly less good financial deal by going with the same hotel *chain* two years in a row. We decided that to save $10,000 + extras it wasn't worth breaking with the model of a rotating location, but that it was worth $5,000 + extras to stay with the same chain.
Thus, when selecting sites for NAACL 2015 (we chose Denver; see below), we simultaneously selected a site for NAACL 2016 to ensure that we can negotiate with both hotels simultaneously. NAACL 2016 will be held in San Diego (see below).
Policy on Endorsement
NAACL has received many requests to "endorse" (and sometimes also to financially sponsor) related events. We decided to create an endorsement policy. The policy can be viewed here:
http://naacl.org/policies/sponsorship-requests.html
North America Conference in 2015
NAACL 2015 will be held in Denver, Colorado, USA, from May 31st - June 5th at:
Sheraton Denver Downtown 1550 Court Place Denver, CO http://www.starwoodhotels.com/sheraton/property/overview/index.html?propertyID=3205
This is steps from the 16th Street pedestrian mall. There is a promotional video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY435zgRxHo
Tentatively papers will be due Monday 8 December, 2014.
The general chair is Rada Mihalcea (Univ. Michigan). The program co-chairs are Joyce Chai (Michigan State) and Anoop Sarkar (Simon Fraser).
North America Conference in 2016
NAACl 2016 will take place at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina, 12 - 17 June 2016. The guest room rate is $189 for regulars and I got a small block of student rooms at the same hotel for $129 (this block may be increased from the current 50 rooms per night when we get closer to the time). They gave some really good concessions to save us money (especially 10% of **2014** menu prices and 20% off AV and internet although Priscialla may be able to get more of a discount).