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

The call, submission, reviewing and selection of tutorials was coordinated jointly for 4 conferences: ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, COLING and EMNLP. We recruited a review committee of 19 members, including the 8 tutorial chairs and 11 external members selected for their large understanding of the NLP domain and a good experience in reviewing and/or tutorial teaching:

Review Committee

Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne, Australia) - AACL-IJCNLP 2020 tutorial chair
Daniel Beck (University of Melbourne, Australia) - COLING 2020 tutorial chair
Emily M. Bender (University of Washington, WA, USA)
Erik Cambria (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
Gaël Dias (University of Caen Normandie, France)
Stefan Evert (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)
Yang Liu (Tsinghua University, Beijing, China)
Agata Savary (University of Tours, France) - ACL tutorial chair
João Sedoc (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA)
Lucia Specia (Sheffield University, UK)
Xu SUN (Peking University, China)
Yulia Tsvetkov (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA)
Benjamin Van Durme (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA) - EMNLP 2020 tutorial chair
Aline Villavicencio (University of Sheffield, UK and Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) - EMNLP 2020
Taro Watanabe (Google, Inc., Tokyo, Japan)
Aaron Steven White (University of Rochester, NY, USA)
Fei Xia
Yue Zhang
Meishan Zhang

In total, we received 43 submissions. Th We accepted 31 proposals for the 4 conferences, 2 proposals were further withdrawn by the authors.

The final selection for the ACL 2020 consists of the following 8 tutorials of 3 hours each (each of them had the ACL as the preferred or the second preferred venue):

Morning Tutorials

T1: Latent Structure Models for Natural Language Processing

André F. T. Martins, Tsvetomila Mihaylova, Nikita Nangia and Vlad Niculae

Latent structure models are a powerful tool for modeling compositional data, discovering linguistic structure, and building NLP pipelines. They are appealing for two main reasons: they allow incorporating structural bias during training, leading to more accurate models; and they allow discovering hidden linguistic structure, which provides better interpretability

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

Starting from the style files from ACL 2019, we have produced new LaTeX style files for ACL 2020. Most of the description was retained, but the order of sections was overhauled to make sure that important information wasn't scattered so haphazardly across the document. Other improvements were also made, like using the recommended citation style consistently throughout the LaTeX source, and separating out all the LaTeX-specific stuff into clearly marked sections. The MS Word version was derived from these LaTeX versions to match as closely as possible. The LaTeX version was also posted to the Overleaf gallery. The most recent .bib file for the entire ACL Anthology was included in the style file distribution to encourage authors to use the official citations for ACL Anthology publications. All style file changes were merged into https://github.com/acl-org/acl-pub/tree/gh-pages/paper_styles.

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

Our main goal for this new focus area is to engage the ACL community in discussions about how best to reduce the carbon footprint of future ACL conferences in order to contribute to sustainable and livable conditions on this planet. One of the main directions we are currently envisioning is to encourage and support conference attendees in virtual participation using live streaming of conference events as air travel is the main contributor to the carbon footprint of international conferences.

Website & Conference App Chairs

Sudha Rao, Microsoft Research, Redmond

Yizhe Zhang, Microsoft Research, Redmond

Business Office