2018Q1 Reports: ACL 2018

General Chair

Claire Cardie, Cornell University

The 56th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2018) will take place in Melbourne, Australia at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre July 15th-20th, 2018. I believe that we have an excellent team for putting together the conference. For the organizing positions that I had primary control over (Workshops, Tutorials, Demos, Publications, Student Research Workshop), I attempted to recruit an even number of women and men. Among these, there are 7 female organizers (not including me) and 8 male organizers.

We have been using Slack for most intra-committee communication, and especially for requests to the Webmaster.

This report is structured around the activities associated with each Chair position, each with a separate section below.

Aravind Joshi tribute: In addition to what is reported below, I am hoping that we can incorporate some kind of tribute to Aravind Joshi and am working with the Local Arrangements and Program Chairs to determine what would be best. One option would involve making use of about 30 minutes of an interview that Joel Tetrault and Ellie Pavlick did with Aravind in 2016 (as part of a funny video they did to introduce the Poster Madness session of NAACL 2016 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQxQ25x24nw)). According to Joel,

“...I have a lot of unused footage from that interview - maybe 30+ minutes. At a certain point I just started asking him random questions about what he likes, his past, etc. I'll have to make sure I still have it (switched computers) but pretty sure I do. If this seems like it could be nice/fun to include as a memoriam, just let me know and I can find it and clean it up.”

The idea would be to run this video --- either as part of a plenary session or continuously at a location where people could view it at their leisure. Getting feedback on this from the Executive Committee would be great!