2016Q3 Reports: Tutorial Chairs
Prepared July 8, 2016
Alexandra Birch (University of Edinburgh)
Willem Zuidema (University of Amsterdam)
General Schedule
This year we had a joint call-for-tutorials, coordinated with the NAACL and EMNLP co-chairs (6 co-chairs in total).
In addition we coordinated the deadlines with Publication Chairs and Local Organizers.
Shared dates:
- Submission deadline for tutorial proposals: January 15, 2016
- Notification of acceptance: February 12, 2016
- Tutorial descriptions due: March 11, 2016
ACL:
- ACL Tutorial course material due: July 7, 2016
- ACL Tutorial date: August 7, 2016
Call and selection procedure
The call for proposals (CFP) was posted the 10th of September, both at the ACL website and sent to high-volume NLP/CL mailing lists. Tutorial co-chairs discussed interesting topics, and approached some experts to suggest they could submit proposals.
Softconf was used for proposal submission. We received 32 proposals which were reviewed by the 6 co-chairs according to the following criteria:
- relevance to ACL community (1=irrelevant, 5=great fit) (15)
- quality of instructor (1=poor, 5=great) (15)
- quality of proposal i.e. outline and whether depth/breadth is adequate (15)
- our estimate of potential attendance (not from proposal)
- newly emerging area not previously covered in an ACL related tutorial (yes or no)
- tutorials which provide introductions into related fields (yes or no)
- overall score (1=bad, 5=great) (15)
- 1st preference for venue as indicated in proposal
- comments
Each proposal was reviewed twice and given a total score. The procedure for selecting and assigning the tutorials to the three venues was the following:
- we ordered proposals by the venue preference expressed by proposers
- each subcommittee made a tentative decision for the venue they're assigned to
- we discussed the remaining/conflicting/redundant proposals, and tried to balance topics across venues
The 6 tutorial co-chairs reached consensus and agreed on selecting 8 half-day proposals for ACL. Acceptance letters were personalized by venue, then sent via softconf. We did not send feedback to proposers.