2024Q3 Reports: General Chair
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) took place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024.
Program. We continue to see an increasing number of submissions. 940 regular papers and 975 Findings papers were selected and accepted from around 4,835 submissions. 2024 was the first year where all *CL conferences moved entirely to the ACL Rolling Review model. The special theme track was "Open science, open data, and open models for reproducible NLP research". We did not have an "Industry Track".
The program also includes 3 keynotes speakers, one pannel, 18 workshops, 6 tutorials, 38 demos and 60 SRW (Student Research Workshop) papers.
As was done in previous years, tutorial and workshop chairs from EACL 2024, NAACL-HLT 2024, ACL 2024, and EMNLP 2024 worked togethere to issue a joint CFP and select the proposals for each conference.
Participation. As of now (10 days before the conference), there are 3,644 registered participants (1,523 Regular, 2,121 Students).
Online Conference. Following NAACL experiment, and to encourage all attendees, both virtual and in-person, to join the virtual conference, the virtual poster session takes place a few days after the in-person conference ends (August, 22nd). All in-person papers accepted to the main conference were given a poster slot. In addition, 102 papers were assigned oral presentations. These papers were selected by the program chairs and the decision was motivated by the goal of having a well-rounded program with a diverse set of topics. Additionally, all Findings papers were also assigned a poster presentation in separate.
Virtual Infrastructure. We continued to use Underline to support the hybrid conference. To enable chat interactions among participants, we dropped MiniConf and Rocketchat using Whova instead.
Money. Sponsorship was handled by the ACL sponsorship director Chris Callison-Burch, the conference Sponsorship Chairs, the Local chairs and Jennifer Rachford. The sponsors include 5 Diamond Sponsors (Apple, Google, LG AI Research, Meta, NewsBreak), 11 Platinum (Alibaba Cloud, Amazon, Baidu, ByteDance, IBM Research, Megagon, Meituan, Oracle, SCB 10X, Sony, Thailand Conference and Exhibition Bureau, TCEB), 6 Gold (Ahrefs, Chen Institute, Cohere, exa.ai, Kasikorn Business Technology Group (KBTG), Xiaomi Group), 2 Silver (Ant Group, Electronics Transaction Development Agency EDTA), 4 Bronze (Adobe, Babelscape, Data Ocean, Translated), 1 Diversity (Apple).
Communication. We asked Nitin Madmani (ACL Information Officer) to create an account for ACL 2024 on acl Slack account and used this for communication between chairs. We used Freshdesk to handle and route the flow of incoming emails. We created two googlegroup adresses, editors@aclrollingreview.org for questions related to paper submission and acl2024-programchairs@googlegroups.com for all other questions.
Handbooks. Two versions were produced, a printed one which contains only partial information about the program as it is sent to the printer before all information is available and an online one which is updated up to the conference days.
Proceedings. The publications chairs coordinated the production of all proceedings (Main, Findings, Demos, SRW, Workshops, Tutorials).
SRW funding. 15K was allocaed by ACL. These were distributed to 18 students, with each receiving up to $700. In addition, a grant from Google was secured to cover their registration fees.
Diversity & Inclusion. The D&I subsidies ($14,250 in total) were allocated to 8 participants from a total of 162 applications, which is hope to provide full support. At the time of writing, 7 accepted the awards. In addition, ACL provided registration waiver to 4 more participants. So 11 benefit from the D&I subsidies, 7 with full support and 4 with free registration.
Student Volunteers. TBC