2021Q3 Reports: General Chair

2021Q3 Reports: General Chair

The Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2021) will be held online on August 1-6, 2021.

Originally, many people were expecting to participate in this year’s conference onsite in Bangkok, Thailand. We were also considering a combination of online and in-person participation. However, given the serious COVID-19 pandemic situation, we realized that these alternatives would not be feasible. Accordingly, we were finally forced to decide that the conference would employ an exclusively virtual format. This has been a truly difficult decision, but clearly a wise one. We announced the news on May 17, 2021.

There are many organizational differences between in-person and online conferences. We can briefly summarize the related events and actions as follows:

• We built a great organization committee, with 68 co-chairs distributed in 19 sub-committees.
• Tutorial chairs and workshop chairs selected relevant proposals in coordination with the corresponding chairs of NAACL’2021, EMNLP’2021 and EACL’2021. This cooperation has been beneficial to all of these conferences. Ultimately, 23 workshops and six tutorials have been selected. The workshop organizers and tutorial presenters were given full freedom to consider the various time zones and to decide independently whether their workshops and tutorials will take place live or be pre-recorded.
• Demo chairs received 133 paper submissions, among which 131 papers were judged valid, with full paper submissions. Ultimately, they have accepted 43 papers and rejected 88, giving an acceptance rate of 32%.
• As our platform for online conferencing, we selected Underline.io, which was also employed by COLING’2020 and NAACL’2021. Many functions – including pre-recording, playing, and storing of videos, handling of discussions and chat, etc. – are integrated in this platform. Equally importantly, Underline.io can also assist in the performance of many necessary tasks, including handling of contact with committee chairs, chairs of workshops, tutorials, and demos; collection of videos; and so on.
• To ensure the success of the virtual conference, we assembled a wonderful virtual infrastructure committee (VIC), comprised of one advisor and six chairs, who coordinated with other teams, e.g., the social media team, the student volunteer chair, the PCs, the Underline.io staff, the social media committee, the remote presentation committee, and others. In addition, the VIC will pay close attention to the status of the Underline.io platform during the conference to deal with any potential harassment issues. Dr. Hao Fang leads the committee as an advisor, having previously served ACL’2020 as VIC chair. With the benefit of his experience and responsibility, the VIC has done an outstanding job.
• This year, Findings papers are accepted by ACL for the first time. After discussions with Hinrich, Rada, and some conference organizers, the PC Chairs conducted a survey to determine whether the authors agree that their papers will be published as Findings papers. The announcement of this survey was sent to the ACL mailing and to all ACL 2021 authors, reviewers, ACs, and SACs. Based on the survey results and following renewed discussion with some conference organizers, the PC chairs reached this decision: if authors want to present in an ACL workshop, this will be allowed, but they must make arrangements with individual workshops directly. The authors of Findings papers need to register as authors of normal accepted papers will do. All accepted Findings papers will be collected in a section of the Proceedings to be named “Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2021.” I think this resolution to the question of Findings will prove successful.
• The Ethics Advisory Committee (EAC) seems indispensable to enable organization of a successful and fair academic conference.
• With the great help of Chris Callison-Burch and Priscilla Rasmussen, a new version of the Sponsorship booklet has been well prepared and is announced on the conference homepage. Nineteen sponsors – including five Diamond sponsors, six Platinum sponsors, one Gold sponsor, three Silver sponsors, and four Bronze sponsors – have given the conference their strong support.

Some suggestions for future conferences:

• It will be advisable to decide the conference format (online vs. onsite) and its virtual infrastructure as early as possible. This decision will determine whether certain committees (e.g., the remote presentation and sustainability committees) need to be established or how many chairs will be needed.
• If there are several chairs in a committee, for example three or more, it will be helpful to appoint a leader.
• It will be advisable to clearly distinguish the tasks of different committee chairs, such as those of the publicity vs. the social media committees, or of the VIC vs. the remote presentation committee. This clarification will also affect the number of chairs needed for these committees.
• At least one of the Website Chairs should be affiliated with the PC chairs, or at least should keep in close touch with the PC chairs, so that important news from the latter can be very quickly announced or updated. The PC Chairs play the most important role in successfully organizing the main conference, and need to frequently announce or update data on the conference webpage. If the Website Chairs can’t quickly react to, and cooperate well with, the PC chairs, frustration will result.
• If possible, tutorials and workshops should be selected in coordination with other ACL conferences, such as NAACL, EACL and EMNLP, for the benefit of all.
• Backup committee chairpersons will always be needed, because there will always be some chairs who accept the invitation but ultimately cannot perform their duties for various reasons. This situation will not come about frequently, but is nevertheless to be expected, and psychological preparation can prevent panic.