2014Q3 Reports: Local Arrangements Committee

Local Arrangements - ACL 2014

David Yarowsky, Local Arrangements Chair

ACL 2014 local arrangements are going smoothly on all fronts. We will be well prepared for our likely record ACL attendance this year. As always, extraordinary thanks goes to Priscilla for all she does to make our conferences run successfully at all levels, and for her expert advice, experience and negotiation skills during this entire multi-year planning process.

Particular thanks is due to Matt Post, Ann Irvine and Juri Ganitkevitch, editors of the Conference Handbook. This job is really two parts; one is the local section (with restaurant, activity, venue and transportation advice, for example), written by Ann and Juri, as well as sponsor advertising and other conference logistical details. The second part is the title/abstract/timings/session-room section of the handbook, which is in effect a small proceedings, and Matt Post has skillfully extracted and assembled the nearly complete START database plus schedule information for the main conference and all workshops, replicating much of what the publications chairs have done. Given the similarities of these tasks to the job of the full Publications Chairs, we would encourage that in the future the prparation of the Proceedings section of the handbook be considered part of the official job of the Publications Chairs, while the local arrangements team focuses on the local aspects of the conference.

Yuan Cao has productively served as the Student Volunteer Chair, including the selection of student travel awards, along with Svitlana Volkova, fortunately synergistic with her role as Student Research Workshop co-chair.

The design of the conference bag was prepared by Jeff Hayes, with substantial contributions from Meg Mitchell and Keisuke Sakaguchi.

Naomi Saphra and others have contributed to organization of the ACL social and dancing at the National Aquarium. We have received positive feedback on the novel ACL experiment of making the "banquet" accessible to all as in the LREC model, via a combination of 2nd poster session buffet dinner plus the social event a few blocks away in the aquarium. It will be interesting to see how this combination works; the model may be viable for future conferences where a banquet venue (museum, etc.) is close to the main conference venue.

We'd also like to thank Laura Graham and Baltimore's acclaimed Single Carrot Theater for providing a customized showing of the highly regarded Czech play about language called The Memo, on Thursday evening on the Johns Hopkins campus as part of our broader entertainment ensemble for the conference, along with the Tuesday aquarium social and Wednesday Exec++ dinner at the historic Evergreen House and Library.

This year we also experimented with the novel idea of a survey of which talks people likely wished to attend, both to estimate attendance (to fit sessions to rooms) and to help prepare the schedule itself via an optimization algorithm utilized by Kristina. Overall this was a substantial success, with over 350 attendees completing the survey (a remarkably high participation rate), yielding a schedule with reduced parallel paper conflicts. The survey also yielded some surprising results with respect to the likely most popular sessions, which tend to be cross-cutting areas of broad interest (such as Semantics, IE and machine learning), as opposed to topics which draw a more focused core audience, such as machine translation, which is becoming increasingly specialized. Finally a third motivation of this process was to encourage potential attendees to review the list of accepted papers and begin to plan their conference talk schedule. As part of the value-add we can offer those who complete the survey, I'd like to also give back an annotated completed schedule with talks marked with the participant's survey response (likely/maybe/unlikely) so they can avoid duplication of effort and facilitate a participant's session-by-session attendance planning.

There are certainly many more things that we will be doing in the next month right before the conference; our job is unfortunately not done as of these reports.