2008Q3 Reports: NAACL

Report from NAACL, June 2008 Owen Rambow, Chapter Board Chair http://www.naacl.org

1. Elections

The NAACL election was held electronically in the Fall of 2007. Rebecca Hwa (Pitt) and Hal Daume (Utah) replace Regina Barzilay and Mary Harper on the Board. Suzanne Stevenson (Toronto) replaces Lillian Lee as secretary, and Chris Manning (treasurer) and Owen Rambow (chair) ran unopposed for re-election. Kathy McCoy as ex- officio member is replaced by Graeme Hirst, who now is board member for two reasons (past NAACL chair and ACL treasurer), but with only one vote. The board thus now has only eight members.

2. Executive Committee Meetings

The Board converses regularly by e-mail. In addition, in 2008, the Board will meet in person at the ACL2008:HLT conference in Columbus. This needs to be scheduled asap (competition with ACL Board for time).

3. Shadow Account Status

The NAACL bank balance stood at $75,226 at the end of May, 2008. The increase reflected accounting for HLT-NAACL 2004 (large surplus) and ACL 2005. We aim to account for NAACL 2006 finances soon, and another surplus is expected. We assume NAACL 2007 made a loss. The other major expenses for the past year were supporting the Johns Hopkins summer school, the Stanford LSA Linguistic Institute, and the computational linguistics olympiad (NAMCLO).

4. North American conference in 2007

A detailed report on the NAACL HLT 2007 conference is on the NAACL website: http://www.naacl.org/archives/2007/conf-chairs-and-subchairs-report.html The conference drew a disappointingly small number of attendants, which we attribute to the early paper submission deadlines, the early conference data (April), the small number of workshops (5), and perhaps the location. We have concluded that the NAACL conference should never be that early again.

5. North American conference in 2008

The 2008 conference is being organized jointly with ACL and a summary of progress can be found here: http://tangra.si.umich.edu/~radev/ aclsec/reports-winter08/ACL2008-report.doc .

6. North American conference in 2009

NAACL HLT 2009 will take place in Boulder, Colorado, in June 2009. Mari Ostendorf is conference chair, Martha Palmer and James Martin are local organizers. Jennifer Chu-Carrol is the NAACL Board member in charge of coordination.

7. North American conference in 2010

A call for proposals has been issued. We have had excellent bids, and will shortly make a decision which will be announced promptly.

8. Support for Summer Schools and Other Educational Outreach

There was enormous interest in our scholarships at the LSA Summer Institute 2007; we will probably change the procedure if we do it again, there seemed an inordinate amount of administrative overhead. NACLO (the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad) was apparently a great success, and we ares supporting NACLO 2008 with $3,000. As usual, we will also be sponsoring students to attend the summer courses in computational linguistics that is held in conjunction with the summer CLSP workshops at the Johns Hopkins University; acceptance notices are about to be sent out.

NAACL Treasurer’s report

May 2008

The Chapter’s bank account held $67,093.88 at the end of Apr 2008, and we are imminently expecting $8,132.29, NAACL’s share of the surplus on ACL 2005 (in Michigan), which will bring the balance to $75,226.17. This is over double the $31,684.97 balance at the end of Apr 2007. This principally reflects the Treasurer’s hard work in dredging through all the records and doing the accounting for HLT-NAACL 2004 (in Boston), which produced a large surplus for the chapter. I plan to do the accounting for HLT-NAACL 2006 over the summer.

The major outgoings of the Chapter were limited to 3 items: supporting students to attend the JHU 2007 tutorials/workshop, supporting students to attend the Linguistic Society of America 2007 Linguistic Institute, and support of NAMCLO (The North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad). We welcome suggestions from members of other ways that NAACL can support the interests of computational linguistics and the membership.

There is no reason why NAACL cannot continue to operate financially just as it has for the last few years. However, I continue to believe that NAACL should be more proactive in raising income, by exploiting commercial connections and other fund raising opportunities, and then finding good ways to use that money to promote the field.

Christopher Manning, NAACL Treasurer; May 22, 2008, Palo Alto, CA.