2009Q3 Reports: Program Chairs

Program Chairs Report (Su, Jian and Wiebe, Jan)

This year, we received a record number of 925 valid paper submissions -- a 24% submission increase over ACL-08: HLT -- with 569 full papers and 356 short papers. The significant submission increase shows how vigorous our field is.

20 Area Chairs worked with 489 Program Committee members and 85 additional reviewers to come up with 2,551 reviews, in total, for the final paper selection. 21% of the full paper submissions are accepted; all of these will be presented orally. 26% of the short paper submissions are accepted; some of these will be presented orally and some will be given as poster presentations. While short papers are distinguished from full papers in the proceedings, there is no distinction in the proceedings between short papers presented orally and those presented as poster presentations. Furthermore, the short-paper posters are clustered together by topic and assigned poster numbers, to provide better information access for the audience and easier logistics for the Local Arrangements Committee.

Submissions and acceptances by areas are as following:

Full papers #sub #accepted Phonology/morphology, POS tagging and chunking, Word Segmentation 31 8 (26%) Syntax and Parsing 49 14(29%) Semantics 67 14(21%) Discourse, Dialogue and Pragmatics 43 9 (21%) Summarization and Generation 44 8 (18%) Statistical and Machine Learning Methods 40 6 (15%) Machine Translation 82 23(28%) Information Retrieval 28 4 (14%) Information Extraction 49 10(20%) Sentiment Analysis, Opinion Mining and Text Classification 45 7 (16%) Spoken Language Processing 19 6 (32%) Question Answering 25 3 (12%) Text Mining and NLP Applications 21 4 (19%) Language Resource 26 4 (15%) Total 569 120(21%)

Short papers #sub #accepted Phonology/morphology, POS tagging and chunking, Word Segmentation 16 4 (25%) Syntax and Parsing 28 8 (29%) Semantics 33 9 (27%) Discourse, Dialogue and Pragmatics 21 7 (33%) Summarization and Generation 24 8 (33%) Statistical and Machine Learning Methods 21 7 (33%) Machine Translation 57 13(23%) Information Retrieval 26 4 (15%) Information Extraction 26 5 (19%) Sentiment Analysis, Opinion Mining and Text Classification 44 13(30%) Spoken Language Processing 16 5 (31%) Question Answering 25 3 (25%) Text Mining and NLP Applications 16 3 (19%) Language Resource 16 4 (25%) Total 356 93(26%)

The geographical distribution of the first authors of all submissions is shown below. We received submissions from 41 countries: about 51% from 20 countries in Asia Pacific, 27% from Canada, Cuba and the United States, 22% from 15 countries in Europe, less than 1% from Argentina and one anonymous submission.

Distribution for Full Papers # submission # accepted Asia & Pacific 288 46

19 Countries,  288/569= 50.62% of submissions, 46/120 = 38.33% of accepted papers

Australia 12 2 China 98 15 Hong Kong S.A.R. 11 3 India 20 1 Indonesia 2 0 Iran 4 0 Israel 16 3 Japan 73 12 Malaysia 1 0 Oman 1 0 Pakistan 1 0 Philippines 2 0 Republic of Korea 15 2 Singapore 15 7 Sri Lanka 1 0 Taiwan 12 1 Thailand 1 0 Turkey 1 0 Vietnam 2 0

Europe 115 18

16 countries, 115/569 = 20.21% of submissions, 18/120 = 15.00% of accepted papers

Belgium 3 0 Czech Republic 4 0 Denmark 4 1 Finland 1 0 France 12 1 Germany 24 6 Isle of Man 3 0 Italy 10 1 Netherlands 2 1 Portugal 1 0 Romania 2 0 Russian Federation 2 0 Spain 12 2 Sweden 8 1 Switzerland 3 1 United Kindom 24 4

North America 163 56 2 countries, 163/569=28.65% of submissions, 56/120=46.67% of accepted papers Canada 10 6 United States 153 50

South America 2 0

	0.35%	0.00%

Argentina 2 0

Anonymous 1 0

	0.18%	0.00%

Overall Total 569 120

Distribution for Short Papers # submitted # accepted Asia & Pacific 183 48 15 countries, 183/356=51.40% of submissions, 48/93=51.61% of accepted papers Australia 6 2 China 51 9 Hong Kong S.A.R. 12 4 India 16 5 Japan 42 11 Malaysia 2 0 New Zealand 1 0 Republic of Korea 16 8 Singapore 7 2 Taiwan 15 3 Thailand 2 0 Vietnam 4 1 Iran 2 0 Israel 3 1 Turkey 4 2

Europe 85 21 14 countries, 85/356=23.88% of submissions, 21/93=22.58% of accepted papers Belgium 1 1 Czech Republic 4 2 Denmark 4 0 France 8 1 Germany 21 7 Isle of Man 4 0 Italy 8 1 Netherlands 3 0 Poland 1 0 Portugal 1 1 Spain 14 3 Sweden 2 0 Switzerland 2 0 United Kingdom 12 5

North America 88 24

3 countries, 88/356=24.72% of submissions, 24/93=25.81% of accepted papers

Canada 5 2 Cuba 1 0 United States 82 22

Overall Total 356 93

The best (student) papers will be announced at the end of the conference. This will allow time for the decision process, which involves soliciting suggestions from the area chairs, and forming a committee to read and judge the camera ready papers.