2013Q3 Reports: Tutorial Chairs

CL 2013 Tutorial Chairs Report

Prepared July 8, 2013
Keith Hall (Google Research)
Johan Bos (University of Groningen)

General Schedule

Submission deadline for tutorial proposals: March 6, 2013
Notification of acceptance: April 3, 2013
Tutorial descriptions due: May 15, 2013
Tutorial course material due: June 7, 2013
Tutorial date: August 4, 2013
We coordinated the deadlines with Publication Chairs and Local Organizers.

Call and selection procedure

The call for proposals (CFP) was first posted at the ACL website in December 2012 and a final call was also sent to high-volume NLP/computational linguistics mailing lists (e.g., CORPORA list, linguist list, SIGSEM members). Additionally, the chairs have approached experts in the field and contacted researchers who expressed an interest in giving a tutorial and provided the details of the submission and reviewing process.

We received 25 proposals and accepted seven tutorials; six of these were accepted as half-day tutorials and one as a full-day tutorial. Submissions were handled through the start system (https://www.softconf.com/acl2013/tutorials).

We used the following criteria for evaluation: appropriateness, technical fit, novelty, potential interest, presenters, and experience. All proposals were evaluated by both chairs; the final selection was based on the scores we assigned through start. The final selection was uncontroversial (we agreed on the best of the submissions).

Selected tutorials

DECIPHERMENT
Kevin Knight

EXPLOITING SOCIAL MEDIA FOR NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING: BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN LANGUAGE-CENTRIC AND REAL-WORLD APPLICATIONS
Simone Paolo Ponzetto and Andrea Zielinski

ROBUST AUTOMATED NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING WITH MULTIWORD EXPRESSIONS AND COLLOCATIONS
Valia Kordoni and Markus Egg

SEMANTIC PARSING WITH COMBINATORY CATEGORIAL GRAMMARS
Yoav Artzi, Nicholas FitzGerald and Luke Zettlemoyer

THE MATHEMATICS OF LANGUAGE LEARNING
Andras Kornai, Gerald Penn, James Rogers and Anssi Yli-Jyrä

VARIATIONAL INFERENCE FOR STRUCTURED NLP MODELS
David Burkett and Dan Klein

VISUAL FEATURES FOR LINGUISTS: BASIC IMAGE ANALYSIS TECHNIQUES FOR MULTIMODALLY-CURIOUS NLPERS
Elia Bruni and Marco Baroni

Proceedings

We have received the final abstracts for the tutorials (which include a description as well as a schedule). These were submitted through the START system and have been passed along to the publications chair. We are currently in the process of collecting all of the course materials from each of the presenters. There has been some confusion as to what will be done with this material and what form it should take. Many presenters have hundreds of slides for their courses and no other course information. In the future, if we wish to have separate course-notes in addition to the slides, we recommend making this clear to the authors from the start.

Acknowledgements

We am grateful to Michael Strube, the ACL 2012 General Chair, the Local/Publications Chairs, and Priscilla Rasmussen for their help and advice in the organization of the Tutorials program.