2020Q1 Reports: ACL 2020
General Chair
Dan Jurafsky, Stanford University
The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) will take place in Seattle, Washington at the Hyatt Regency Seattle in downtown Seattle from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.
We have a great set of chairs! We are continuing 2019's new roles (Diversity and Inclusion chairs, Remote Presentation Chairs, AV Chairs) and adding new ones: (Sustainability chair), and we are doing well in demographic representation among our chairs (gender and region).
Following advice from last year, we have been using Slack for most intra-committee communication (and we put the Slack channel into the ACL pro space, so it can be preserved for future years), and using email only when absolutely necessary.
As usual, the growing size of the conference (both in papers and attendees) is a challenge, but both in papers and space we have been doing well (see the individual chair summaries below).
[this summary in progress]
Program Chairs
Joyce Chai, University of Michigan
Natalie Schluter, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Joel Tetreault, Dataminr, USA
Local Organisation Chairs
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL
With advice from:
Jianfeng Gao, Microsoft Research
Luke Zettlemoyer, University of Washington
Tutorial Chairs
Agata Savary, University of Tours, France
Yue Zhang, Westlake University
Workshop Chairs
Milica Gašić, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf
Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Amazon Alexa AI
Saif M. Mohammad, National Research Council Canada
Ves Stoyanov, Facebook AI
Student Research Workshop Chairs and Faculty Advisors
Rotem Dror, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
Jiangming Liu, The University of Edinburgh
Shruti Rijhwani, Carnegie Mellon University
Omri Abend, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Sujian Li, Peking University
Zhou Yu, University of California, Davis
Audio-Video Chairs
Hamid Palangi, Microsoft Research, Redmond
Lianhui Qin, University of Washington
Conference Handbook Chair
Nanyun Peng, University of Southern California
Demo Chairs
Asli Celikyilmaz, Microsoft Research, Redmond
Shawn Wen, PolyAI
Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chairs
Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Rochester Institute of Technology
Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Google
Local Sponsorship Chairs
Hoifung Poon, Microsoft
Kristina Toutanova, Google
Publication Chairs
Steven Bethard, University of Arizona
Ryan Cotterrell, University of Cambridge
Rui Yan, Peking University
Publicity Chair
Emily M. Bender, University of Washington
Dissemination
Durable accounts for the ACL meeting on Twitter and Facebook have been created:
* https://twitter.com/aclmeeting * https://www.facebook.com/aclmeeting/
These will be passed along to the ACL 2021 publicity chair(s) so that they don't have to build up followers separately. As of Feb 4, 2020 the Twitter account has 4,061 followers and the Facebook account has 181. We have not yet been making use of the Instagram account, but we have been using the Twitter and Facebook accounts to publicize important dates as well as blog posts. The Twitter account especially has been useful for fielding questions from the community. Calls for papers have also gone out over the ACL member portal and several mailing lists, as well as websites such as WikiCFP. (These are maintained in a spreadsheet which can be handed off to the ACL 2021 publicity chair(s)).
Next Steps
* Recruit co-chairs, especially to coordinate live-tweeting of the conference * Contact local media for coverage * Develop land acknowledgement in consultation with the Duwamish Tribe (on whose land the meeting will take place). The Duwamish publish this information about land acknowledgments: https://www.duwamishtribe.org/land-acknowledgement
Remote Presentation Chairs
Hao Fang, Microsoft Semantic Machines
Yi Luan, Google AI Language
Sustainability Chairs
Ananya Ganesh, Educational Testing Service
Klaus Zechner, Educational Testing Service
Website & Conference App Chairs
Sudha Rao, Microsoft Research, Redmond
Yizhe Zhang, Microsoft Research, Redmond
Business Office
Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL