2014Q3 Reports: Tutorial Chairs

ACL 2014 Tutorial Chairs Report

Prepared June 4, 2014
Alexander Fraser (University of Munich)
Yang Liu (Tsinghua University)

General Schedule

Submission deadline for tutorial proposals: January 24, 2014
Notification of acceptance: February 28, 2014
Tutorial descriptions due: March 28, 2014
Tutorial course material due: April 25, 2014
Tutorial date: June 22, 2014
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 January 2014 and a final call was also sent to high-volume NLP/CL/AI mailing lists (e.g., CORPORA list, linguist list, UAI, ML-News). 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 19 proposals and accepted 8 as half-day tutorials. Submissions were initially handled via emails and Dropbox. We used the start system (https://www.softconf.com/acl2014/tutorials) to generate the proceedings. 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

Gaussian Processes for Natural Language Processing
Trevor Cohn, Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro, and Neil Lawrence

Scalable Large-Margin Structured Learning: Theory and Algorithms
Liang Huang, Kai Zhao, and Lemao Liu

Semantics for Large-Scale Multimedia: New Challenges for NLP
Florian Metze and Koichi Shinoda

Wikification and Beyond: The Challenges of Entity and Concept Grounding
Dan Roth, Heng Ji, Ming-Wei Chang, Taylor Cassidy

New Directions in Vector Space Models of Meaning
Phil Blunsom, Edward Grefenstette, Karl Moritz Hermann, and Georgiana Dinu.

Structured Belief Propagation for NLP
Matthew Gormley and Jason Eisner

Semantics, Discourse and Statistical Machine Translation
Deyi Xiong and Min Zhang

Syntactic Processing Using Global Discriminative Learning and Beam-Search Decoding
Yue Zhang, Meishan Zhang, and Ting Liu

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. Some presenters want to keep improving the course materials until the tutorial date. They do not think it is necessary to print handouts in advance and prefer to put a link to the latest slides on their websites. We discussed with David Yarowsky and Priscilla Rasmussen and set the deadline for printing handouts to June 10th. If tutorial presenters cannot match the deadline, they have to print out the handouts themselves and bring them to Baltimore before the registration starts.

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to David Yarowsky (local chair), Alexander Koller and Yusuke Miyao (publication chairs), Daniel Marcu (general chair), Johan Bos and Keith Hall (the ACL 2013 tutorial chairs), and of course Priscilla Rasmussen, for various kinds of help, advice and assistance offered during the process of putting the tutorial programme and materials together. Most importantly, we would like to thank the tutorial presenters for the time and effort in preparing and presenting the tutorials.