2009Q3 Reports: Tutorial Chairs

Tutorial Chairs Report (McCarthy, Diana and Zong, Chengqing)

ACL-07 Tutorials Co-Chairs Report.

Diana McCarthy (University of Sussex, UK) Chengqing Zong (Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA), China)

Submission deadline for tutorial proposals: February 2, 2009 Notification of acceptance: March 2, 2009 Tutorial descriptions due: April 24, 2009 Tutorial course material due: June 7, 2009 Tutorial date: August 2, 2009

We negotiated the deadline of June 7th after conferring with publication chairs and local organizers. However, due to requests from the tutorial presenters we settled on a deadline of 21st June for the tutorial course materials which was acceptable to the local organizer responsible for printing.

The call for proposals (CFP) was broadcast twice i) 1st Oct 2008 and ii) 18 Jan 2009. We received 19 proposals before the deadline of February 2. Email was used for handling submissions with email acknowledgement of receipt of proposals as stated in the CFP. Following advice from previous tutorial chairs and the ACL-ICNLP-2009 general chair, we solicited 6 proposals. We were very careful to encourage these proposals but at the same time warn that there was no guarantee of acceptance because all proposals would be subject to the same reviewing process. 4 out of the 6 solicited proposals were accepted. All 19 proposals were reviewed by both co-chairs, with the general chair as adjudicator. We also sought expertise from external reviewers where necessary. For example, because 2 proposals were on the same topic.

Based on the following criteria we selected 6 proposals, including 4 of the 6 solicited proposals:

- Quality: the content and scope of the proposal, and the competence and experience of the presenters. - Diversity: We sought a range of different topics, also with regard to workshops and other events to be help at ACL-IJCNLP 2009. - Appeal: Whether the tutorial topic would be likely to attract a reasonable number of participants - Novelty: Tutorial topics featured at recent ACL events were dispreferred (unless the content was clearly novel and different).

The selected tutorials:

Morning Tutorials:

T1: Fundamentals of Chinese Language Processing Presenters/organisers: Chu-Ren Huang and Prof. Qin LU (both from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)

T2: Topics in Statistical Machine Translation Presenters/organisers: Kevin Knight (USC/Information Sciences Institute) Philipp Koehn (University of Edinburgh)

T3: Semantic Role Labeling: Past, Present and Future Presenter/organiser: Lluis Marquez (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya)

Afternoon Tutorials:

T4: Computational Modeling of Human Language Acquisition Presenter/organiser: Afra Alishahi (Saarland University)

T5: Learning to Rank Presenter/organiser: Hang Li (Microsoft Research Asia)

T6: State-of-the-art NLP Approaches to Coreference Resolution: Theory and Practical Recipes Presenters/organisers: Simone Paolo Ponzetto (University of Heidelberg) and Massimo Poesio (Universita' di Trento)

We liased with publicity chairs and local organisers who advertised the tutorials with a short listing by email and full descriptions on the web page: