2018Q3 Reports: Office Manager

Priscilla Rasmussen 6 July 2018

ACL Business Office Report

As usual, the Office becomes extremely busy as conferences grow near.

In an effort to better distribute our efforts in the Office, I have decided to increase Pat Kirby’s time, when needed, and she has agreed. Pat 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 managing the conference student housing and working with me in preparation for and onsite at our conferences, especially with registrations. Since she enjoys anything financial and is great at doggedly reconciling any entries and discrepancies, I especially want her to begin to do more of the expenditure postings, monthly bank statement oversight, and following up on sponsorships. I have approached East Stroudsburg University to arrange interviews in August/September to add a more part-time position to communicate with the sponsors and exhibitors who take a lot of time and have a lot of questions, manage the exhibits onsite and possibly also manage the main conference and workshop poster sessions. I may have this second person also helping with other more standard communications in the Office since I seem to be spending over half of each day just handling emails (most of which I cannot hand off to others since these are advisory sorts of questions).

This year, with NAACL and EMNLP so far apart, the overlap for planning, management and registrations is a bit more minimal, especially since ACL is mostly managed by the local team and the PCO in Melbourne. Nevertheless, there has been quite a lot of questions and oversight required between the Melbourne local arrangements team, PCO and the ACL Office.

My hope is that by making the above suggested staffing adjustments there will be more time for me to offer the always-called-upon advice, attend and organize meetings, identify and pre-negotiate future conference venues, conduct site visits, pre-negotiate catering/av/social event and other contracts, develop working budgets, review bids, make initial approaches to potential sponsors, oversee Office operations, etc. I hope to have the second person in place sometime this fall to learn the division of duties so that we can start the new year with this new staffing scheme.

Publications, Journals and Royalties:

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates handling print-on-demand of our publications, I typically receive no requests for hardcopy publications in the office.

The Curran Associates agreement has turned out to be a good one for both them and the ACL. So far in 2018, we have received a total of $1,598.99 in royalties from them, covering the 4th quarter of 2017 and the 1st quarter of 2018. Copyright Clearance Center has not sent any earnings to ACL for CY 2017 or 2018, nor has MIT Press Journals.

MIT Press Journals should be sending us an invoice sometime in July for their fiscal year, July 2017 - June 2018, for their services related to the Computational Linguistics Journal. I expect this invoice to be a little less than $40,000.

Our journals pay editorial assistants to help with the process. The CL Journal’s assistant was paid $2,365 in January 2018 for her services for the fourth quarter of the 2017 calendar year and $3,311 in July for January-June, 2018. The TACL Journal’s assistant was paid $13,277.36 in April covering the 3rd and 4th quarters of 2017 and 1st quarter of 2018.

Membership:

I am pleased to report that we now have 1,540 members and should be on track to exceed 3,000 members by the end of the year. This indicates the continuing growth of our field and conferences. 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 60 and 70 countries on a regular basis and currently have a total of 49 countries being represented by our membership (prior to ACL 2018 and EMNLP 2018 being held).

We began 2018 with 162 members who were in a multi-year membership and about 157 members renewed on their own. As is becoming more standard, most memberships come from conference registrations. The NAACL 2018 attendees’ registrations included 1,019 total memberships. Both the upcoming ACL and EMNLP 2018 conferences are expected to generate an estimated 1,500 additional members, bringing the total for the year to around 3,000. SIGdial 2018 will instruct their attendees to pay memberships directly online at the portal so I will not have exact numbers for them. Between the growth in overall memberships and the increased number resulting from conference registrations, the newly automated input process now allows us to keep up with memberships very easily and quickly and have more time for other endeavors.

Occasionally inquiries come to the Office about what the benefits of ACL membership are and whether a particular country qualifies for the hard currency discount. It would be good to 1) update and more prominently post member benefits at the portal and 2) annually update the countries qualifying for hard currency discounts.

Fellows Program:

The only involvement the Office now has in the Fellowship nomination and selection process is to verify nominated members’ eligibility according to our new policy for future years.

Conferences:

NAACL 2018 was at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in New Orleans, June 1-6. The final number of attendees was 1,323 after removing all cancellations, which is a record high for NAACLs. This year a couple of innovations seem to have been successful. The organizers decided to add both an Industrial (parallel) Track and hold the poster sessions in parallel with the other main conference sessions. We also experimented with lowering the food/beverage orders by 1/3 to keep costs lower and avoid wasting leftover food. This seemed to work well and no complaints regarding a shortage of food were received, although a lack of water seemed to be a common complaint. For NAACLs (and possibly other conferences) in the future, trying to order food for breakfasts and breaks for about 50% of the expected attendance and requiring water be readily available may help the budget and be more pleasing to attendees. Internet seemed okay during the main conference and tutorials but, when we moved to the workshops area, the internet became more problematic. We need better assurances of adequate and reliable internet in the future. The Social Event seemed to be a success (although, again, a lack of water was an issue) and the dancing attendees seemed to enjoy the band.

Given the current concerns about possible travel restrictions going into the future, it may be interesting to note that NAACL 2018 had 8 cancellations specifically due to visas being denied compared to (NA)ACL 2017 which had 22 cancellations. There were many more cancellations, due to illness and work obligations, but these numbers represent the ones that were identified as being specifically visa issues. There are no records of authors who did not register and could not attend due to visa problems.

ACL 2018 promises to be a success. The Office continues to offer advice as needed. It was agreed to be more fiscally reasonable to have the local professional conference organizers (PCO) manage registrations to avoid complicated and costly taxation. Between the Local Arrangements Chairs, the PCO, the Local Sponsorship Chairs, and myself, we have been communicating on a regular basis, especially regarding sponsors and exhibitors as well as registration and other policy questions. And, while at NAACL 2018, Tim Baldwin and I met to go over a great many questions so the local team could move forward with their plans. Post-conference, reports on registration numbers and breakdowns will be sent to the Office for our records and memberships captured through conference registrations will also be sent so we can add these memberships to the portal.

EMNLP 2018 is moving along well. Ellen Riloff (the General Chair), Sien Moens and the local team, and I are in frequent communication and planning is moving forward. This venue will also be able to handle an increase in participation if needed—we currently are expecting close to 1,400 total attendees. The local team is currently working on their portion of the budget to set registration fees and we are hoping to open registration in early August.

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 2-3 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. We may be at a point where most conference hotels no longer are large enough and we will have to specifically consider convention centers for future conferences.

ACL, NAACL and EMNLP 2018 are keeping in mind Michael Strube’s schema to optimally lay out the posters, demos and food/beverages for the poster sessions to allow ample walk space and overall comfort. However, for NAACL, it was decided to move to EMNLP’s recent model of holding the poster sessions throughout the main conference days as a parallel session. It will be interesting to see the survey results to know whether this is the preferred model for the future.

Workshops continue to be more challenging in finding adequate space for the growing attendance at some workshops and the many poster sessions and numbers of posters within a workshop that they plan to present. Careful advance planning is essential for these events and may be something the new second Office person can handle while attending the conferences to manage the exhibits.

Conference Sponsorship:

ACL 2018 has proven to be quite popular, with sponsorship commitments of $264,660 through the International Sponsorship Committee (ISC) plus local sponsorships gathered within Australia and reported elsewhere. Our faithful sponsors (Amazon, Apple, Baidu, ByteDance, Facebook, Google, Huawei Technologies, IBM Research, Microsoft, NAVER, Nuance, Recruit Technologies, Tencent, Yandex) plus sponsors we have not seen before or are returning (CVTE, Duolingo, Elsevier, ISI, Jingdong, Roam Analytics, SAP, Samsung Electronics, Uber) continue to help us thrive. The local team is actively pursuing companies to participate in the Recruitment Lunch. There are also companies supporting individual workshops: Representation Workshop for $10,500, Neural MT and Generation Workshop for $1,000, CALCS Workshop for $4,000 and the NLP-OSS Workshop for $11,000.

EMNLP 2018 has $149,342 in sponsorship commitments so far. Many were the result of 2-Pack or 3-Pack sponsorship agreements so many of the same companies as listed above for ACL (Amazon, Baidu, Facebook, Google, Huawei Technologies, Microsoft, NAVER, Nuance, Tencent, Yandex) plus Bloomberg, CVTE, Duolingo, ebay, Figure 8, Grammarly, Jingdong, NEXT Canada, Oracle, and PolyAI generously donated. Additionally, the Abusive Language Workshop has received $9,500, the Argument Mining Workshop received $4,000 and the Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks Workshop has $1,500 in sponsor commitments.

NAACL 2018 received a total of $128,758.92 in main conference commitments. As with ACL and EMNLP 2018, many were the result of 2-Pack or 3-Pack sponsorship agreements so many of the same companies as listed above (Amazon, Bloomberg, ByteDance, ebay, Facebook, Google, Grammarly, IBM, ISI, Nuance, Oracle, PolyAI) plus Capital One, Duolingo, Figure 8, iMerit, KPMG, Tulane University, and Two Sigma generously donated. A childcare donation was also made by Airbnb. Additional workshop-specific donations were made to WiNLP for $43,500, BEA for $2,600, Ethics for $12,500, CLPsych for $3,000, TextGraphs for $600 and *SEM for $1,000.

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 2018 Sponsorship Booklet that the International Sponsorship Committee and the Office pulled together, we continue to offer these multi-pack options, resulting in some first-time as well as repeating commitments and at higher levels (Amazon and Baidu at Platinum, last year for example). We made a few changes to the Sponsorship booklet for 2018, partially based on ideas I gathered while sitting in on the various executive board meetings and having been an officer for ICML for a few years. We added a higher “Diamond” level which includes exhibiting. Apple, ByteDance, Google, Facebook, and Samsung have chosen to be at the Diamond level. Now the Platinum and Gold levels pay a discounted per-day “Manned Exhibit” fee (much as many other conferences would do) and Silver and below as well as non-sponsors would pay the full per-day “Manned Exhibit” fees as before. And, for the first time, we received a Social Event sponsor (Jingdong at $6,000 in support of ACL and EMNLP). We also added an option to sponsor Childcare. My one concern is that it seems some companies are opting for a 2-Pack for ACL and EMNLP and fewer have opted for NAACL 2018.

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!