2008Q3 Reports: ACL 2007

Report on ACL 2007

John Carroll, General Chair for the conference

ACL 2007, the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, was held in Prague, Czech Republic, at the TOP Hotel. The main conference was June 25-27, workshops June 23-24 and 28-30, and tutorials June 24. There were two co-located events: IWPT 2007 on June 23-24, and EMNLP-CoNLL 2007 on June 28-30. In terms of attendance, this was was the biggest ACL conference yet, with a final total of 1101 participants registered for one or more of the main conference, co-located conferences, workshops and tutorials. Participants came from 50 countries, making the conference a truly international event.

Running such a large event required an enormous amount of work behind the scenes, which was coordinated by an exceptional local organisation team, led by Eva Hajicova, and assisted by Jan Hajic and Anna Kotesovcova. From the ACL itself, Kathy McCoy, Dragomir Radev, Priscilla Rasmussen, Mark Steedman and Jun'ichi Tsujii played strong roles in making decisions and giving advice.

The chairs responsible for organising various aspects of the conference all played their roles to the full. The Program Chairs, Antal van den Bosch and Annie Zaenen did a great job in managing the almost 600 submissions for the main conference and putting together a high quality program. Sophia Ananiadou, as Demo/Poster Chair oversaw the selection of a high quality set of presentations. The Student Research Workshop Chairs, Chris Biemann, Violeta Seretan and Ellen Riloff assembled an excellent program of papers and posters, and obtained sponsorship from the US National Science Foundation. Workshops Chair Simone Teufel was in charge of 15 workshops -- the most ever at an ACL conference -- which received an aggregate total of 470 submissions. Joakim Nivre put together a program of 5 attractive and complementary tutorials. Jian Su, Publications Chair, did a fantastic job in producing the hardcopy and electronic record of the conference.

Sponsorship was another success story, thanks to Martha Palmer, Gabor Proszeky and Jan Hajic, who recruited a number of sponsors: Google, Microsoft Research, Textkernel, NewsTin, Yahoo, Powerset, BBN, IBM Research, Xerox Research Centre Europe, Morphologic, Language Weaver, ÄŒeská spoleÄ nost pro kybernetiku a informatiku, ELRA, and Kilgray Translation Technologies. Many thanks to them for their financial support.

I would like to thank the people mentioned above, the many others who also generously gave their time and effort, and all of the presenters and attendees who contributed to making the conference a success.