2012Q3 Reports: Workshop Chairs

ACL 2012 Final Report: The Workshops

Massimo Poesio & Satoshi Sekine

The ACL Workshop Chairs (Massimo Poesio and Satoshi Sekine) worked together with the EACL and NAACL worskhop chairs to jointly select workshops for ACL, EACL and NAACL. The first joint call went out on the 19th of August 2011, and the last on the 18th of October. The deadline was October 28th. Proponents were asked to indicate their preferences regarding the venue (e.g., EACL, NAACL) and the duration of the workshop.

We received 44 proposals in total. Of these, two expressed no preference for a particular venue, 5 exclusively wanted EACL, and 8 exclusively wanted NAACL. No proponent identified ACL as the only possible venue, but 14 had ACL as their first choice, and 10 had ACL as the second. Each workshop received a score from all the workshop chairs of the venues that had been indicated by that proposal. The selection process went very smoothly, resulting in 11 workshops being accepted for ACL (1 being the merge of two proposed workshops), 12 for EACL (of which again the merge of two proposed workshops), 17 for NAACL, and two proposals being rejected. The only problem at this stage was that in the end NAACL found itself with a lot of workshops so there was an attempt to move some of the workshops to ACL which didn't work as the workshop organizers had already announced the venues. The following workshops were accepted for ACL: SP-SEM-MRL, SMIAE, The LAW VI, WASSA, ExProM, MM, The People's Web Meets NLP, TextGraphs-7, SSST-6, DSSD, and NEWS2012. Of these, LAW, People's Web Meets NLP, TextGraphs, SSST, and NEWS are long-standing series,and the other workshops all focus on topics of great interest.

Deciding the dates for the ACL workshops was straightforward. There were a few glitched while setting the softconf pages for the workshops (typically accounts set up with the wrong password) but nothing major. The main problems were originated by the deadlines for the authors to submit the papers to the organizers, and by the organizers to send the camera ready copies to the publication chairs. Unfortunately an early postponement of the deadline for submitting the camera ready versions of the workshop proceedings resulted in it being set to the day after the end of LREC, which many workshop organizers found problematic. Some coordination with EMNLP re: dates would also be desirable.

Finally, we would like to raise again the issue of co-presence between EMNLP and the other workshops that we're sure has been raised before - it creates serious conflicts, we appreciate that having EMNLP before (say) would make for a very long event but it is definitely an issue.