2017Q1 Minutes (public version)

ACL exec meeting (2017 winter)

Saturday, February 18, 2017

(by phone)

• Present:
  • Exec: Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Joakim Nivre, Marti A. Hearst, Graeme Hirst, Shiqi Zhao, Yejin Choi, Jing-Shin Chang, Paola Merlo, Emily M. Bender, Walter Daelemans, Jennifer Foster, Ming Zhou, Priscilla Rasmussen.
  • ACL2017: Chris Callison-Burch, Min-Yen Kan, Regina Barzilay, Anoop Sarkar
  • TACL: Kristina Toutanova
• Absent:
  • AFNLP rep.: Kam-Fai Wong

00:00-00:20 Discussion of conference-related issues

Archive and double-blind reviewing [Marti] [Guests: Chris, Min, Regina, Anoop]

• Cannot simply say no to arxiv, which may make us lose some good papers
• Suggestion: study the correlation between the good papers and arxiv papers
• People are not satisfied with the policy adopted by acl2017, which is the same as TACL
• Suggestion: poll the members and ask the members to vote for it, so as to get the majority sentiment on arxiv
• Long-term issue: do we want to maintain the double-blind reviewing; short-term issue: clearly explain the current policy to area chairs
• Suggestion: have a separate session to discuss it in the business meeting (Graeme)
• Suggestion: contact other communities, have dialogue with them. Different conferences should act in concert
• Regina invited Marti to write about the issues on the ACL 2017 PC chair blog; Marti accepted

Action:

• Organize poll and meta session at ACL 2017 [To be discussed by the Exec]

Remote conference participation [Joakim][Guests: Chris, Min, Regina, Anoop]

• Will incur additional cost
• Bad experience for people who come to the conference if there’re a lot of recorded talks. Should not encourage it
• Should not open it to all people. In the circumstances precluding travel to present their paper (someone being denied a visa or being sick or a death in the family), we could set up a Skype interactive presentation if we have advance warning. This would mean they should pay their registration and we would help them to make their presentation. Be not in favor of some sort of general, reduced registration fee, allowing anyone to not attend but still be a participant. This eliminates the face-to-face interactions that are so much a part of conference attendance as well as being costly to implement.
• Don't need to do anything special in addition to what we have already done at the moment
• Should make it clearer what the current practice is, i.e. let the community know what their options are if they find that they cannot travel to ACL because of visa issues, illness, or similar.

Action:

• Clarify current practice/policy [To be discussed by the Exec]

00:20-00:40 ACL 2017

Reports from CC, GC, and PC + discussion [Guests: Chris, Min, Regina, Anoop]

• GC: whether we should make the conference more friendly for people with young children, ways including: (1) providing childcare option, (2) allowing conference goers to purchase meals for family, and (3) allowing people to take family members to the poster session.
  • The price is high per person, which is about 75$ per meal.
  • Not sure if the kids can get discount, which may depend on different restaurants or different ages of the kids.
  • Might be disruptive to take kids to the poster sessions (Priscilla). Don't need to preemptively worry about them being disruptive. Parents with kids in a professional context would not stick around if the kids are being obnoxious.
  • Will incur incremental cost for extra people for the dinner at Aquarium, for both catering and admission charge.
  • Ask when registration "how many people you want to take to the aquarium?".
  • If this is popular with the conference goers, we need to reconsider the size of the places for future conferences.
• PC: changes this year: (1) select area chairs based on community nomination and self-nomination, (2) larger areas, with a meta AC in each area, (3) shorter reviewing time (two weeks), whereas longer time for discussion and for AC, (4) allow authors to directly contact the ACs if needed, (5) use Toronto system this year for assigning reviewers to papers, with a lot of difficulties to make it work. The system will become more useful in the future.
  • Suggestion: record the contributions of people, such as how many papers they have reviewed before becoming AC. Can work with SoftConf to get such information.
  • Institutional memory is important. It's PC chairs' duty to pass on the knowledge.

Actions:

• Look into child rates for meals [local chairs?]

00:40-01:00 ACL Anthology Discussion based on the issues raised by Mark Steedman [Guest: Min]

Long term: think about the issue how to organize the work related to Anthology.

Short term: transfer the service and update the system, to enable papers on anthology to be indexed by Google Scholar, and resolve the speed issue (as soon as possible). Consider to pay someone professional to finish the work sooner.

Actions:

• Upgrade our web hosting service [Jing-Shin?]
• Migrate ACL anthology to our web server as soon as possible [Exec]

01:00-01:30 Implementation plan for equity and diversity [Joakim]

- Submission software and database for fellow nominations

- Publishing diversity statistics

- Selection criteria for Fellows

- Diversity and bias training

• Will develop a new software system for fellow nomination. One option is to use START system, but other systems should be surveyed. The system needs to be in place by this summer when the nominating committee starts to call for nominations of fellows. Ming volunteers to do the survey, probably with the help of Jing-Shin.
• Publication of diversity statistics: try to add a (brief) questionnaire to the registration form of ACL to collect the statistics information. Will experiment in the ACL conference this year.
  • Question: what to do if only part of people fill in the forms and supply their information?
  • The questionnaire, whatever form it takes, be circulated among the exec before being implemented so as to benefit from our diverse perspectives.

Actions:

• Survey suitable software systems for fellows nominations [Ming, Jing-Shin]
• Redesign nomination form for fellows [Joakim, Marti]
• Collect info on gender and geography in registration form for ACL 2017 [Priscilla, Joakim]
• Organize publication of diversity statistics after ACL 2017 [Exec]

01:30-01:40 10 min break

01:40-02:00 Code of conduct and anti-harassment procedures

- Code of conduct document [Pushpak]

Salient observations:

• Have non-US members in the committee.
• Not have code of conduct (only un-mentored ones need it); we already have lots of rules, why more?
• Have only a guideline document, not binding
• Have conversation on meta things like what our field is like
• To note: there will be an upcoming workshop on ethics in ACL
• Start conversation on principles etc,

Conclusion:

• Put 'the committee' in place inviting members (ensuring diversity)
• Start conversation on defining exactly what the committee will do, keeping in view the questions of conduct, ethics, nature and progress of our field etc.

Actions:

• Convene CoC committee and discuss scope of committee’s work [Pushpak]
• Formulate proposal before summer meeting [Committee]

- Ad hoc committee on anti-harassment + current issues [Joakim/Marti]

• ACL should not try to answer so many political questions. Should be very cautious to make political statements. May have a separate committee for the political issues, as ACM does, or encourage people with political energy to join some other organizations. Will follow up via email.
• Ad hoc committee on Anti-harassment will wait until June. This committee and the CoC committee should be charged differently.

Actions:

• Convene anti-harassment committee in June [Emily]
• Make recommendations on how to deal with political issues [To be discussed by the Exec]

02:00-03:00 Q&A on selected reports

- Journals: TACL [Guest: Kristina], CL

- Future conferences: 2018, 2019, 2020

- Chapters: NAACL, EACL, AFNLP

- Exec: Office, Treasurer, Info, SIG, Conference

• TACL: three things that need help: copy editing, getting indexed, software. The OJS system is working but not perfect/stable. Can only contact OJS people if the system is down or it has some big problem (Paola). The problems of systems/platforms should not be solved by the journal editors.
• CL: Paola's term as the EiC of CL will expire next year in July. A new appointment has to be made by this December, to guarantee that there is a six-month overlap with Paola. Need a search committee to search for candidates.

Actions:

• Start search for new editors for CL and TACL [Exec]
• Move TACL to professional publishing house [To be discussed by the Exec]
• Provide better OJS support for both CL and TACL [To be discussed by the Exec]