2016Q3 Reports: Office Manager

Priscilla Rasmussen 28 July 2016

ACL Business Office Report

As usual, the Office is running smoothly.

We will look forward to another financial audit to be conducted by Nisivoccia, LLP, both in the office and through emails with Graeme and me for our 2015 tax forms to be completed and filed. The exact date of the audit is not yet set but we hope it will be as productive as it was last year. This may not happen until September so we may have to request a second no-cost extension.

Pat Kirby continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations (especially handling most of the membership entries into the portal) as well as onsite at our conferences.

Publications, Journals and Royalties:

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates now handling print-on-demand of our publications, I typically receive no requests for hardcopy publications in the office. However, one long-time member has asked to fill in gaps in his personal CL Journal library and will pay for the long list of journals and shipping costs.

The Curran Associates agreement has turned out to be a good one for both them and the ACL. We have received a total of $2,397.84 in royalties from them, covering the 4th quarter of 2015 through the 2nd quarter of 2016. Copyright Clearance Center has not sent any earnings to ACL for CY 2015, nor has MIT Press Journals.

MIT Press Journals has not yet sent us an invoice for their fiscal year, July 2015 - June 2016 for their services related to the Computational Linguistics Journal. I expect the invoice to come soon.

Our journals pay an editorial assistant to help with the process. The CL Journal’s assistant was paid $2,634 for November 2015 through February 2016 services so far this year. And just over $1,000 was spent to upgrade their online reviewing system. The TACL Journal’s assistant was paid $7,345 covering August 2015 through March 2016.

Membership:

Since 2006 we have consistently numbered over 2000 members and exceeded any previous final year numbers by ending 2015 with 2,536 members. I am pleased to report we already have 2,161 members which exceeds membership numbers at this point in prior years. The membership should grow even more when ACL 2016 onsite registrations and EMNLP 2016 memberships are added. The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be representing between 55 and 60 countries on a regular basis and currently exceed this with a total of 61 countries being represented by our membership.

We began 2016 with 271 members who were in a multi-year membership and added 316 members directly through portal membership payments for a total of 587 so far this year. As is becoming the more standard, most memberships come from conference registrations. At the end of 2015, about 78% of the 2015 memberships were generated by NAACL 2015 attendance (29%), ACL/IJCNLP 2015 attendance (30%), and EMNLP 2015 (19%). So far in 2016, 31% of memberships were generated by NAACL 2016 and 56% by ACL 2016. Of course these percentages will change considerably by the end of the year when all three conferences are completed.

As always, Min and Pranav (our current webmaster) have been extremely responsive to and helpful with any requests I have. I now look forward to working with Jing-Shin Chang, our new Information Officer.

Fellows Program:

A committee has been formed, headed by Joakim Nivre, to review and possibly adjust the selection process before this coming fall when the next group of fellows will be nominated.

Conferences:

NAACL 2016 was held in San Diego, California, at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina, June 12-17. This conference set the second highest attendance for NAACLs with 877 final attendees (just under the 908 attendees achieved in 2015) after taking out people who did not show up and others who cancelled. Having such a large number of attendees has caused some additional work in planning and communications (over 125 visa invitations issued, re-planning both catering and space configurations, etc.). Acting as Local Arrangements Chair means that both the organizational work and registrations were managed by the Office. One thing that worked out well was that the hotel was willing to give a small number of rooms at a deeper discount to be used for students. After those rooms were filled, we were able to get a small number of rooms at the nearby Hilton to also serve as student housing. The Office managed a list of student reservations for each hotel plus facilitated student room sharing.

The ACL 2016, to be held in Berlin, August 7-12, has been managed quite well by Valia Kordoni and her local team, along with Antal van den Bosch as General Chair stepping in when needed. The office had worked closely with the local organizers in Berlin on all aspects of the organization. The combined total pre-registration is 1590, with 178 attending only tutorials or workshops, setting a new all-time high. Last year it was decided to eliminate the Student Lunch. We decided to hold a Recruitment Lunch, charging a $500 fee for each recruiting company to help defray some part of the lunch costs. There are 11 companies at the lunch, making this first-time experiment a success that we recommend being tried again.

EMNLP 2016, to be held in Austin, Texas, November 1-5 will be co-located with AMTA 2016 which immediately precedes EMNLP. Due to difficulties with the hotel, both AMTA and EMNLP were forced to shift their conferences one day earlier than previously advertised. Please tell all you know of these new dates. The last day of AMTA and first day of EMNLP purposely overlap with workshops, one of which (SSST) is being co-located with AMTA to foster cross-over attendance. The Office acts as Local Arrangements Chair as well as providing advice, general support, and registration management.

Planning for (NA)ACL 2017 will begin in earnest after ACL 2016 concludes. The venue contract has been signed and initial plans are in place. Anoop Sarkar has agreed to be co-Local Arrangements Chair to help with the more local aspects of our planning. SIGDAT is considering venues for 2017 but the exact location is still undecided. EACL 2017 will be held in Valencia next April but the Office is not involved in this conference’s planning. NAACL has requested that I begin searching for one or two years (2018 and 2019) potential venues and this search will begin in the Fall/Winter. Sometimes, negotiating a two-year contract with the same hotel chain can result in better pricing so it is worth exploring.

While it is always difficult to project attendance at conferences, we seem to be settling into a new higher level of attendance, after a growth spurt the last couple of years. Being prepared for more than expected numbers is extremely important for the next couple of years until we can again trust our newly-adjusted predictions.

As a side note, it is good to remember that poster sessions are always very difficult to set up in a way that pleases the majority of attendees. Michael Strube, the ACL/IJCNLP 2015 co-Program Chair, developed a schema to optimally lay out the posters, demos and food/beverages, allowing ample walk space, and this is now the guide to be used for all future conferences. It is included at the ACL wiki in the Conference Handbook. Additionally, workshops are becoming more and more mini-conferences complete with poster sessions. These are often more difficult to coordinate and organize, and for which finding adequate space is essential.

Conference Sponsorship:

NAACL 2016 had sponsorships totaling $70,020 plus $5,700 sponsoring various workshops. Once again, our usual sponsors (Amazon, Baidu, Baobab, ebay, Facebook, Google, IBM Research, Microsoft, Nuance, Yahoo and the University of Washington) plus newer sponsors (Adobe, Brandeis University, Civis Analytics, Grammarly, Huawei Technologies, Maluuba, Open Table, United Health Group, VoiceBox, @newlea) lent their support. Quite a few sponsors also opted to be exhibitors in addition to KITT.AI and Quora who exhibited but were not sponsors.

ACL 2016 has proven to be quite popular, not only in numbers of registrations but also in having $100,806 in conference sponsorship commitments. Our faithful sponsors (Amazon, Baidu, ebay, Facebook, Google, IBM Research, Microsoft, Nuance, Yandex) plus sponsors we have not seen before or are returning (Elsevier, Grammarly, Maluuba, Textkernel, VoiceBox) continue to help us thrive. We also have $10,120 in sponsorships supporting workshops. The most exciting commitments are from eleven companies who each paid $500 for the experimental Recruitment Lunch, for a total of $5,500. Two of these companies also decided to be a Silver and a Bronze sponsor of the main conference.

$53,389 has been committed so far in EMNLP 2016 sponsorships. Many are the result of 2-Pack or 3-Pack sponsorship agreements so the same companies as listed above (Amazon, Baidu, Bloomberg, Brandeis University, ebay, Facebook, Google, IBM, Maluuba, Microsoft, Nuance, Yandex) plus Oracle Labs generously donated.

The idea of offering 2-Pack or 3-Pack options and including EMNLP allowed sponsors to make one payment to support two or all three events rather than one at a time. This made sponsoring easier, especially for our ongoing sponsors. For the 2016 Sponsorship Booklet that the International Sponsorship Committee and I pulled together, we continue to offer these multi-pack options, resulting in some of the first commitments and at higher levels (Amazon and Baidu at Platinum, for example) to come in.

The area Sponsorship Chairs and the Local Arrangement Sponsorship Chairs are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them. And, many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!

MEMBERSHIP REPORT 2007-2016 STATISTIS(July 28, 2016)

(full year final totals except 2016)	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016
TOTAL MEMBERSHIP	2104	1602	2151	2136	2028	2064	2093	1990	2536	2161
TOTAL REGULAR	1365	1137	1402	1162	1111	1252	1232	1345	1488	1388
TOTAL STUDENTS	729	463	749	974	917	812	861	645	1048	773
DISCOUNTS APPLIED TO ABOVE:
REDUCED RATES	12	8	4	282	276	81	84	41	188	53
AMTA DISCOUNTS	0	0	1	1	4	0	0	1	2	1
ISCA DISCOUNTS	3	3	3	3	14	4	1	5	2	4
HLT/NAACL FREE YEAR	324	0	535	548	0	0	0	0	0	0
COLING/ACL FREE HALF YEAR	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
COLING/ACL FREE FULL YEAR	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
TOTAL BY WORLD AREA:
TOTAL ASIA/PACIFIC RIM	314	214	384	569	552	539	355	277	793	361
TOTAL CANADA/MEXICO	83	59	54	60	51	82	56	65	68	54
TOTAL EUROPE	803	439	639	614	564	694	786	709	776	921
TOTAL SOUTH AMERICA	10	10	9	22	16	17	9	8	12	10
TOTAL USA	894	880	823	871	845	732	887	931	887	815
HOW MEMBERSHIPS CAME IN:
MEMBERSHIPS-ONLY	981	1602	2151	2136	2028	2064	2093	1990	2536	2161
MEMBERSHIPS + ORDERS	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
ORDERS (FROM OUTSIDE ACL)	64	24	17	5	8	4	2	0	0	0
ORDERS (From ACL Membership)	223	7	5	0	2	4	0	0	0	0
THROUGH CONFERENCES: