2009 Summer Reports: Office

Priscilla Rasmussen
31 May 2008
 

ACL Business Office Report

John Kirby, my assistant, and I have been kept quite busy with the memberships
(especially February through mid-April, when most memberships are renewed) and
registrations for ACL 2008.

Graeme Hirst, Kathy McCoy and I are continuing the major task of transitioning
all financial records over to Graeme as he takes on the Treasurer role for the
next five years.  Summarizing and capturing all that has gone on over the past
ten years and communicating it in an understandable, but not overwhelming, way
is a challenge!

Publications:  Publications orders seem to be dropping off somewhat the first
half of this year over last year.  It will be interesting to see if there is a
large increase in orders of hardcopies of our conference proceedings once they
are available post-conference or whether the “world† has truly moved away from
hardcopies and we need to further reduce our hardcopy ordering for future
conferences.

Membership:  We had a record-breaking total of 2,123 members in 2006. For 2007,
after taking out fraudulent and conference no-shows who did not pay at all, we
ended the year with 2,104 total members.  I am optimistic that we are “holding
steady† at roughly 2,000 members now.  With NAACL hosting ACL this year and not
holding its own event, as well as EACL not holding a European conference this
year, there is a possibility we may not “hit† 2,000 in memberships by the end
of 2008 but I am confident we ought to be close.

Walker Fund:  Thanks to the Executive for their approval of increasing Student
Travel Awards funding beyond the previously typical 1-3 Walker Fund awards
(basically never exceeding 10% of the roughly $30,000 in the Walker Fund
account).  I received a total of 51 applications for Student Travel Awards and
was able to extend the $10,000 to make meaningful awards to 15 students.  

Conferences:  

ACL 2008 promises to be another great success!  So far, we have about 685
registrants and more come in each day.  There will be six tutorials and ten
workshops as satellite events before and after the conference.  Plans are
moving ahead with the great efforts and dedication of the entire conference
committee that we’ve come to enjoy.

I had provided the Executive Board with a report of my site visit to Singapore
for ACL/IJCNLP 2009.  The venues will be great, especially the convention
center which is very flexible to meet whatever additional needs might arise.
The local team is made up of many familiar people and their enthusiasm and
competence was evident.  This should turn into a very successful meeting!

EACL 2009, to be held in Athens, Greece, promises to also be a wonderful
meeting.  The Office continues to provide advice and support as requested.

And, NAACL 2009, in Boulder, Colorado, will be an exciting meeting, with the
beautiful mountains surrounding our venue.  Graeme Hirst and I met with Martha
Palmer and her capable local crew for a site visit and they will certainly do a
fine job to welcome us.

The Office has also been heavily involved in reviewing future conference bids
and offering input to the evaluation of the bids.  Thanks to the many who
accepted the challenge of submitting great bids, it is a difficult process to
select only one each year.

Conference Sponsorship:

A Sponsorship Committee was created to consolidate efforts in obtaining
sponsorships for our conferences.  The Office played a role in helping to set
our goals and policies, determine what we would and could offer as sponsorship
benefits and to what levels, and then began reaching out for ACL 2008 and the
three 2009 (ACL, EACL, and NAACL) conferences.  I am very pleased to report
that, for ACL 2008, we have commitments totaling $33,000 which is a very
healthy amount of support, indeed! Additionally, two workshops (BioNLP and
SIGdial) found their own support of their 2008 workshops, totaling $5,250.
Many thanks to all sponsors who helped to make our conference and workshops
successful!