2015Q1 Reports: ACL 2016

ACL 2016 - report by Christopher Manning

In 2016 there will be a joint ACL and EACL conference in Berlin, with local arrangements organized by Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Coordinating Committee

The current, just updated, conference coordinating committee is:

• Lluís Màrquez, EACL chair <lluism@lsi.upc.edu>
• Caroline Sporleder, EACL secretary <secretary@eacl.org>
• Mike Rosner, EACL treasurer <treasurer@eacl.org>
• Walter Daelemans, EACL chair-elect <walter.daelemans@ua.ac.be>
• Christopher Manning, ACL past president in 2016, chair <manning@stanford.edu>
• Drago Radev, ACL secretary <radev@umich.edu>
• Graeme Hirst, ACL treasurer <gh@cs.toronto.edu>
• Yejin Choi, ACL conference officer <yejin@cs.washington.edu>

Additional non-voting members of the committee are:

• Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL business manager <acl@aclweb.org>
• Stephen Clark, EACL past chair <sc609@cl.cam.ac.uk>
• Jian Su, past ACL information officer <sujian@i2r.a-star.edu.sg>
• Pushpak Bhattacharyya, ACL past president in 2017 <pushpakbh@gmail.com>
• Joakim Nivre, ACL past president in 2018 <joakim.nivre@lingfil.uu.se>
• Antal van den Bosch, general chair, <a.vandenbosch@let.ru.nl>
• Markus Egg, local chair <markus.egg@rz.hu-berlin.de>
• Valia Kordoni, local chair <evangelia.kordoni@anglistik.hu-berlin.de>
• Kostadin Cholakov, local chair <kostadin.cholakov@anglistik.hu-berlin.de>

The committee email list address is: acl16cc@aclweb.org .

Progress

In the last report, we reported the selection of Humboldt University to host ACL 2016. We thank the local organizers for preparing a fantastic bid and Humboldt University for their generous support of the bid. The proposed location is in the central campus buildings of Humboldt University, which are very well situated with respect to the Berlin city center. The dates are: 7-12 August 2016.

Since that report:

• We are very pleased to report that Antal van den Bosch accepted our entreaties to be general chair for the conference.
• In early July 2014, Graeme Hirst, Priscilla Rasmussen and Antal van den Bosch visited Humboldt U. and met with the local organizers. Together, they made good progress on working out the shape of a contract with con gressa, the Berlin-based professional conference organizer (PCO). They made good progress on a contract with Humboldt U., and settled on a nearby hotel with enough space for our poster session. They developed a shortlist of hotels for room blocks, and decided that boats on the Spree River should be workable for a social event, whatever precise shape it takes.
• Subsequently, between October 2014 and January 2015, the treasurer, Graeme Hirst or his representative have signed contracts with Humboldt University, con gressa (the PCO), the Maritim Hotel (for the poster session), and for blocks of rooms at four nearby hotels.
• The local organizers have started creating the website for the conference, supported by the PCO and their web designer. It will be hosted on a Humboldt U. server.

Upcoming tasks

We hope to finish these goals in the next couple of months:

• Launching an initial conference website. The domain name http://acl2016.org/ has been reserved, and initial design work has begun, but the site is not yet live. We should identify a webmaster. (Responsibility: Local organizers.)
• We have begun discussion of Program Chair candidates. We should decide the program chairs. (Responsibility: Coordinating Committee.)
• We need to select Student Workshop Chair(s) and Faculty Advisor, Publications Chair(s), Tutorial Chair(s), Workshop Chair(s), and Demo Chair(s), Exhibits Coordinator, and Publicity Chair(s) soon. (Responsibility: General Chair.)
• Set up an email address for conference chairs. (Responsibility: General Chair.)

Further ahead, we should start on finding a local sponsorship chair, and collecting preliminary local information, and preparing an initial conference announcement.