2014Q3 Reports: Workshop Chairs

ACL 2014 Report: Workshop Organization

Jill Burstein and Lluís Màrquez; Contact info: jburstein@ets.org and lmarquez@qf.org.qa

1. Organization and Schedule

The ACL Workshop Chairs (Jill Burstein and Lluís Màrquez) worked together with the EACL and EMNLP Workshop Chairs (Anja Belz and Reut Tsarfaty for EACL, and Enrique Alfonseca and Eric Gaussier for EMNLP) to jointly organize the selection of workshops for ACL, EACL and EMNLP. Finding a schedule that worked for everyone was difficult because there were conflicting interests with EACL’s early date (April 2014) and EMNLP’s much later date (October 2014). The initial conversations with EMNLP were carried out with its General Chair (Alessandro Moschitti), as the EMNLP Workshop Chairs were still being decided. There were some tensions during the negotiation process before we could agree on a common schedule. We think, however, that this coordinated effort for workshop selection has more advantages than disadvantages and is an advisable strategy. Future chairs should keep in mind that the coordinated process, while desirable, requires significant attention, patience, and negotiation.

The final schedule was as follows:

Shared ACL , EACL, and EMNLP dates

• Initial Joint Call for Workshops: posted to the EACL website in early July

• First Joint Call for Workshops: Thursday, August 1, 2013

• Second Joint Call for Papers: Tuesday, September 3, 2013

• Final Joint Call for Papers: Tuesday, October 1, 2013

• Deadline for Proposals: Sunday, October 20, 2013

• Notification of Acceptance: Monday, November 4, 2013

ACL-specific dates (followed by workshop organizers)

• First Call for Workshop Papers: Monday, November 18, 2014

• Workshop Paper Due Date: Friday, March 21, 2014 (suggested to ensure at least a 3-week review period)

• Notification of Acceptance: Monday, April 11, 2014

• Camera-ready papers due: Monday April 28, 2014 (firm deadline; fixed in coordination with the Publications Chairs)

• Workshop Dates: June 26-27, 2014

We reused materials from the previous editions to produce the Joint Call for workshops. Proposers were asked to indicate their preferences regarding the venue (e.g., ACL, EACL, EMNLP), the duration of the workshop and expected attendance, among others. First, Second and Final calls for workshop proposals were sent out through the standard listservs, e.g., corpora, ACL portal, etc. Calls were also posted on the EACL and ACL websites. Postings were coordinated with EACL and EMNLP co-chairs to avoid multiple postings. A workshop gmail account was also established for communication and submissions.

2. Acceptance process and workshops for ACL 2014

There were a total of 42 workshop proposals submitted to the Joint Call, 4 more than in the previous year. Twenty-four workshops expressed first preference for ACL, 13 for EACL, and 5 for EMNLP. All Workshop co-chairs reviewed all proposals and filled in a fixed review form in a Google shared document. That was labor-intensive, but very useful. Following some internal meetings at the level of conference, the team of co-chairs met on Skype to make decisions about workshop acceptances on October 30, 2013. A second meeting was necessary to make fine-grained adjustments, but, in general, the acceptance and assignment of workshops was a smooth and reasonably easy task. Seventeen workshops were accepted for ACL, 16 for EACL and 7 for EMNLP. The remaining 2 workshops were rejected. Workshop notifications were sent on November 3, 2013 and the Accepted Workshops list was sent to the ACL 2014 Local Chair (David Yarowsky) for their publication in the ACL 2014 website. Priscilla was also immediately given a list with the approximate number of participants, so that she could start to think about room logistics.

Special cases:

• The SIGNLL flagship conference CoNNL is also co-located with ACL 2014 during the workshops days. Although it was accepted without going through the workshop review process, we requested them to provide a simplified workshop proposal by the same deadline as the regular workshops. The goal was to collect information on CoNLL basic needs in terms of room size, equipment, schedule, etc. and to inform Priscilla jointly with the rest of workshops. The event appears in the ACL website for workshops, but listed as a “co-located conference”.

• An additional workshop was added during March 2014 entitled: “Frame Semantics and NLP: A Workshop in Honor of Chuck Fillmore (1929-2014)”. The proposal came in March, and was organized in memory of Chuck Fillmore’s recent passing. The acceptance was organized in agreement with David Yarowsly and Priscilla Rasmussen, once it was verified that it would be logistically possible. The workshop organizers coordinated logistics directly with Priscilla and they were in contact with David and also the ACL Publications Chairs to catch up on several things.

• During April 2014, two workshops decided to merge due to very similar topic areas and overlapping attendee interest. The chairs of both workshops requested to create a more natural full single day joint program to ensure strong attendance. The merged workshop is [W12]: “Joint Workshop on Social Dynamics and Personal Attributes in Social Media”. We approved the merging.

The complete list of ACL 2014 workshops including the CoNLL conference are posted in the ACL website, together with their dates [http://www.cs.jhu.edu/ACL2014/Workshops.htm]. There are 15 one-day workshops, 2 two-day workshops and also the two-day CoNLL-2014 conference.

3. Post-acceptance work

The work of the Workshop Chairs after the acceptance and notification consisted basically of coordinating with the workshop organizers to make sure that they were following all the necessary steps in the schedule (produce CFPs, workshop websites, handlig of the reviewing process through START, technical requirements submitted to Priscilla, etc.), and to provide some assistance or guidance. Also, we served sometimes as a communication channel and helped to coordinate interactions between workshop organizers and the following individuals:

• Local Chair (e.g., for posting links to the workshops websites)
• Program Co-chairs (e.g., setting START accounts for workshops and provide usage instructions)
• ACL-Priscilla (e.g., collecting logistic information from workshops in order to prepare the necessary infrastructure)
• Publications Chair (e.g., instructions and timeline for proceedings preparation)

As per requirement of the ACL General Chair (Daniel Marcu), we were also providing monthly reports (starting on May 2013) to describe tasks completed each month.

4. Other comments and recommendations

We identified some small aspects we think could have gone better:

• The creation of START (SoftConf) initial websites for the workshops with their admin users and basic information, etc. was kindly done by Kristina Toutanova (Program Co-chair). This is an important thing to do ASAP since the complete reviewing process (PC members, submission of papers, reviews, discussion, acceptance decisions, proceedings compilation, etc.) is being done through this software. Also because several workshop organizers are not experienced at using this software. When they had doubts we had to resort many times to Kristina to solve the practical situations, since only she had the necessary permissions. This was clearly beyond her work as PC chair. So, we think it would be better if in the future Workshop Co-chairs take this responsibility from the beginning.

• We were communicating with workshop organizers with a list of email addresses collected through the workshop proposal forms. That was typically one corresponding organizer per workshop, decided by them. Although we were telling them explicitly in every email to share the information among all workshop organizers it happened quite often that they did not and the rest of the team was not receiving our communications (some of them important and referring to deadlines, START, proceedings, etc.). An alternative idea might be to collect and use email addresses for all workshop organizers from the very beginning, or preferably, once a workshop is accepted, to ask co-organizers for a single correspondence e-mail which could be a single e-mail created for the workshop that organizers would regularly check. This latter solution would create significantly less work for the Workshop Chairs.

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