2008Q1 Reports: Secretary
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ACL Secretary report Dragomir Radev radev@umich.edu - Elections were held in the Fall of 2007. 601 members voted (a 20% increase from last year). The winners are: Ido Dagan (Bar-Ilan University, Israel) - vice-president-elect Graeme Hirst (University of Toronto, Canada) - treasurer Hwee Tou Ng (National University of Singapore) - member On January 1, 2008, Ido, Graeme, and Hwee Tou replaced Keh-Yih Su and Jun'ichi Tsujii whose terms on the exec are expiring. In accordance with ACL's constitution, Kathy McCoy will remain on the exec for another year as past treasurer to ensure a proper transition of our books. Our current president, Mark Steedman, will stay on as past president for a year. Finally, the current vice-president, Bonnie Dorr, will become ACL president for 2008. In 2008 we will have elections to replace Claire Cardie and Mark Steedman whose terms ends in a year's time. The nominating committee (Martha Palmer (chair), Jun'ichi Tsujii, and Mark Steedman) are expected to suggest a slate of nominees by April 15 in order to give us time to collect candidate statements before the annual meeting in Columbus. - In 2007, we had a call for ACL initiatives. Of these, one was started (the video anthology project) and another was too similar to the AAN initiative listed below. http://www.fask.uni-mainz.de/lk/videoarchive (Reinhard Rapp and Chris Biemann) - LTA nominations were collected and a discussion is expected at the February 2 telecon. - Eric Fosler-Lussier did an amazing job of updating the archives - please visit them here: http://www.aclweb.org/archive - Ali Hakim has been very helpful with updates to the ACL site. - Ali and I put together the following page, based on Priscilla's spreadsheet: http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=Conference_Chairs - The Singapore bid for ACL-IJCNLP 2009 was accepted. - A pay raise was approved for Priscilla. Her pay went up from $51/hr to $53/hr effective January 1, 2008. - A policy for ACL exec votes was approved: "In order to clearly separate discussion from voting, the voting on ACL resolutions will be done via sending the vote via email to the ACL secretary. When the vote is over, the secretary will send a summary of the vote (including the names and votes) back to the executive committee and also record the status of the vote (minus the names) on the resolutions page. In special circumstances, the exec can decide *in advance of the vote* to change this procedure for valid reasons." - SIGANN was approved. It deals with annotation. The officers of SIGANN are Nancy Ide and Adam Meyers. - Mark Steedman suggested that in the future, we should make sure to read each other's reports in advance of the exec meetings. Doing so would avoid wasting precious time at the meetings (whether on the phone of face to face) and leave more time for productive discussions. Is this acceptable to everyone? Please let me know what you think. If the general feeling concurs with Mark's, I would like to establish a new procedure for the winter meeting that involves much less live reporting. - My impression from talking to exec members and to other attendees at ACL this year is that the new format for the business meeting was much better than last year's. Everyone that I talked to (except for the author of one of the rejected proposals) was enthusiastic about the new format. Note too that in Sydney, there were fewer than 100 people in the audience whereas in Prague, I counted 198 attendees. I would like to keep a similar format in the future: some brief time for reports and then more time for discussion. Of course, next year, we can propose some other formats and topics for discussion. - I have collected and grouped all ACL07-related reports and documents here: http://tangra.si.umich.edu/~radev/aclsec/exec-meeting-summer-2007/ - One possible direction for our membership/reviewing/etc database http://dblife.cs.wisc.edu/ - I helped negotiate an agreement between SIGDAT and SIGNLL about taking turns at having first pick for a conference site. This agreement does not supersede any ACL policies and decisions about the actual locations. - A web page was established where to store ACL resolutions: http://www.aclweb.org/policies/resolutions.html The full list of recent resolutions is listed at the end of this document. I was personally involved in two additional activities of interest to the exec. - The ACL Anthology Network (http://belobog.si.umich.edu/clair/anthology/). This is a manually curated citation and collaboration database. It includes degree, pagerank, h-index, collaboration centrality, and other bibliometric values (http://belobog.si.umich.edu/clair/anthology/rankings.html). - NACLO (http://www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu). I spent most of my time on this project. In 2007 we had 200 participants and 8 were selected for the ILO in Russia. I was the team coach and program chair while Lori Levin and Tom Payne were the two general co-chairs. One of the two US teams tied for first place in the team contest and one US student (Adam Hesterberg) finished first in the individual contest. See here: (http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=109891) This year, we expect more than 800 participants (see below) to take part in round one on Feburary 5. The top 100 contestants will advance to round two on March 11. Site # Students (Coordinator) At their high schools 288 (Dragomir Radev) Carnegie Mellon University 188 (Lori Levin) University of Pennsylvania 68 (Mitch Marcus) Brandeis University 58 (James Pustejovsky) Columbia University 50 (Kathy McKeown) University of Oregon 29 (Tom Payne) University of Toronto 14 (Elaine Gold) San Jose State University 12 (Roula Svorou) University of Wisconsin 12 (Catherine Arnott-Smith) Cornell University 11 (Lillian Lee and Claire Cardie) University of Michigan 8 (Steve Abney and Sally Thomason) University of Illinois 6 (Richard Sproat and Roxana Girju) Middle Tennessee State University 2 (Aleka Blackwell *) University of Ottawa 2 (Stan Szpakowicz and Diana Inkpen) Total 748 About 5 of the students in the first category above are from Canada, for a total of about 21 currently registered Canadians. Aleka is hosting a local contest on February 2 and expects about 20 participants to then sign up for the NACLO. The registration for the NACLO closes on Monday but we will be also accepting walk-ins at existing sites. Questions - organize similar contests elsewhere - I approahed UK and Australia but found little interest. -------------------------------------------------------------------- ACL Resolutions This is a partial list of ACL resolutions. Older resolutions will be added over time. September 14, 2007 1. (PASSED)The initial SIG organizer(s) may serve as the de facto officers for the first year, while a nomination/election process is being established; official elections must be held within the first year after approval of the SIG. June 24, 2007 1. (PASSED) The ACL exec approves the creation of a new SIG, SIGANN for Annotation. The officers of SIGANN are Nancy Ide and Adam Meyers. June 18, 2007 1. (PASSED) In order to clearly separate discussion from voting, the voting on ACL resolutions will be done via sending the vote via email to the ACL secretary. When the vote is over, the secretary will send a summary of the vote (including the names and votes) back to the executive committee and also record the status of the vote (minus the names) on the resolutions page. In special circumstances, the exec can decide *in advance of the vote* to change this procedure for valid reasons. June 8, 2007 1. (PASSED) To accept Singapore's bid for the 2009 ACL/IJCNLP conference. 2. (PASSED) The supluses or deficits (as the case may be) will be shared 50-50 between ACL and AFNLP. AFNLP chooses to share its share 50-50 with the local organizers. May 16, 2007 Three related proposals about ACL's 2008 conference: 1. (PASSED) PROPOSAL 1 : long and short tracks. The 2008 conference maintains the NAACL HLT distinction between long and short papers, where short papers have a serious submission number, a serious reviewing, a Coling-level acceptance rate (about 40%), and a different profile (new ideas, smaller results, smaller experiments) with different submission and reviewing requirements (completed work not required) and a much later submission deadline. 2. (PASSED) PROPOSAL 2 : the structure of the PC. There are 4 PC co-chairs: 1 NLP for long papers, 1 NLP for short papers, 1 Speech (for both long and short), 1 IR (for both long and short). The senior PC will be different for long and short papers (though potentially with overlap). The short paper PC will also handle demos. The Speech and IR co-chairs should have at least some visibility in the general NLP field. 3. (PASSED) PROPOSAL 3 : name. The conference has a name that (a) includes "HLT" in its short name and (b) "Human Language Technologies" in its long name. For specificity, this proposal is: "ACL-08:HLT" and "The 46th Annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies". May 2007 Free registration for some conference officials 1. (PASSED) The General Chair, all PC co-chairs, and all local chairs (up to three) get free registration (not including the banquet) to ACL conferences. The free registration does not include ACL membership (it is assumed that people in these positions would already be ACL members).