2015Q1 Reports: Office

Priscilla Rasmussen 18 February 2015

ACL Business Office Report

As usual, the Directors/Officers and Office insurances are in place for CY2015 so we are protected against unforeseen problems.

In mid-October, another audit was conducted by Nisivoccia, LLP, both in the office and through emails with Graeme and me for our 2013 tax forms to be completed and filed. It was a successful audit that did not turn up anything out of line in our practices. Graeme can comment further on the audit.

Pat Kirby continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations as well as onsite at our conferences.

Otherwise, the Office is running smoothly.

Please note, under Sponsorship Committee, my request that we need to add one sponsorship chair for Europe and one for Asia to the International Sponsorship Committee. Please send recommendations to me.

Publications, Journals and Royalties:

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates now handling print-on-demand of our publications, I received no requests for hardcopy publications in the office this year.

We have received royalties in 2014 from Curran Associates, through the 3rd quarter 2014, of $3,150.88. In Janurary 2015, Curran Associates sent another $1,120.20 covering the 4th quarter of 2014. This agreement has turned out to be a good one for both them and the ACL. Copyright Clearance Center has not sent any earning to ACL for the CY 2014.

MIT Press Journals has sent us an invoice for their fiscal year, July 2012-June 2013 in the amount of $38,728.28 for their services related to the Computational Linguistics Journal. It still remains a problem to receive timely invoicing unless we make the request but, for now, we are up-to-date with payments.

Membership:

Since 2009 we have consistently numbered over 2000 members. We ended 2014 with 1,990 members. I believe the main reason for this is not having held a separate NAACL meeting in 2014. Generally, with separate ACL, NAACL, EMNLP and possibly EACL meetings, more attendees become members so, this slight drop is not alarming. The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be representing between 55 and 60 countries on a regular basis and, in 2014, exceeded this with a total of 64 countries being represented by our membership. It is interesting to note that we began 2014 with around 150 members who were in the middle of a multi-year membership and added 456 members from SIGdial/INLG, EMNLP, or direct membership payments. This means that almost 57% of all 2014 memberships were generated by ACL 2014 attendance and over 18% was generated by EACL 2014 attendance. Please see Membership spreadsheets for the final 2014 details on countries represented and statistics.

We may have lost a few potential members this year from the Joint SIGdial/INLG and EMNLP conferences since both sent any non-current-members to the portal to make their memberships up-to-date rather than collecting the memberships as part of the registration fees. This practice may not be a good idea to continue.

Pat and I continue to do our best to keep the membership information updated and as correct as possible from information gathered on conference registration forms. The portal continues to give us problems that vary from time to time. This causes me to have doubts sometimes of the accuracy of the information and I do my best to double-check numbers through other means. And, of course, Min and Pranav (our current webmaster) are extremely responsive to and helpful with all of my requests.

Fellows Program:

The Fellows for 2014 were selected after gathering nominations and recommendations through the fall 2014. Six Fellows were named: Walter Daelemans, Kevin Knight, Daniel Marcu, Ray Mooney, Martha Palmer, and Junichi Tsujii. We will begin the nomination, recommendation and selection process again this fall to name next year’s fellows.

Conferences:

EACL 2014, in Gothenberg, Sweden, went quite well. The final number of registrations was 518, making this EACL the highest attended ever. EACL 2014 generated a surplus of $25,134.78, after returning to ACL $30,758.19 in collected membership fees.

ACL 2014 was held in Baltimore, Maryland at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront Hotel, June 22-27. This conference set an all-time record attendance for ACLs with 1,439 registered attendees (about a 30% increase) after taking out people who did not show up and others who cancelled. I am not sure what caused this huge increase in attendance but it may have something to do with proximity to the Washington DC area or our research endeavors being hot topics now. Having such a large number of attendees had caused some additional work in planning and communications (over 200 visa invitations issued, re-planning both catering and space configurations, hotel being sold out at our conference rates, etc.). With Option C of the Task List having been chosen, a major amount of the organizational work was managed by the Office. While the financials are not completed for ACL 2014, I have every expectation of reaping a surplus.

ACL 2014 made a few experimental changes to ACL’s normal way of holding a conference. The most successful change was to hold two evenings of poster sessions/dinners (main conference days 1 and 2), eliminate the traditional banquet on the second main conference day, and hold a “social event” on the second poster session evening (at the Baltimore National Aquarium) which was open to all attendees at no additional cost. Another innovation was to send out a post-conference questionnaire immediately after the conference to gather valuable feedback on how to improve the attendees’ experience. Overall, both of these changes were successful and could be used as models for future events.

EMNLP 2014, held in Doha, Qatar, October 25-29, went well. We are awaiting their final conference report and financials to be submitted.

The planning for ACL/IJCNLP 2015, to be held in Beijing, July 26-31, is in full swing. After the difficulties of competing events at the convention center that forced a change of conference dates, we were fortunate to find alternate acceptable dates rather than having to find a different venue. The office is working closely with the local organizers in Beijing.

As I continue as Local Arrangements Chair for NAACL 2015 and 2016, contracts for the venues are already in place: NAACL 2015 will be at the Sheraton Denver Downtown, May 31 – June 5, and NAACL 2016 will take place at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina, June 12 – 17. Planning for NAACL 2015 is well under way and we plan to follow the ACL 2014 poster session and social event scheme.

EMNLP 2015 will be in Lisbon, September 17 – 22. The venue contract has been negotiated and signed and the Office is providing advice, general support, and will manage the registrations.

It is difficult to project attendance at ACL/IJCNLP, NAACL and EMNLP for 2015 since both EACL 2014 and ACL 2014 each had their highest attendance on record. And, while EMNLP 2014 had a lower attendance, EMNLP 2013 was also their highest attended conference. Planning for each conference based on previous years in general and being prepared for more than expected numbers is critical this year.

ACL 2016 will be held in Berlin, August 7-11, at Humboldt University. The General Chair is Antal Van Den Bosch and local arrangements will be led by Valia Kordoni and Markus Egg along with an already selected PCO. After Graeme and I conducted a site visit to Berlin in July, contracts were negotiated and signed with the University, PCO, and a few hotels. Initial planning has begun and this promises to be an excellent venue and interesting city to explore.

As a side note, it is good to remember that workshops are becoming more and more mini-conferences complete with poster sessions. These are often more difficult to coordinate and organize, and for which finding adequate space is essential.

Conference Sponsorship:

ACL 2014 had sponsorships totaling $110,554 plus $11,050 sponsoring various workshops and the SRW. This, again, was record for ACL sponsorship income for one conference and does not include the generous in-kind support provided by Johns Hopkins University, who provided staff and faculty time and other support. Since we have never been successful in getting Welcome Reception or Conference Dinner or Entertainment sponsors, we added Student Lunch Sponsorship to our Sponsorship Booklet where only Platinum or Gold level sponsors could add $6,000 to their sponsorship and be able to present themselves at the Student Lunch. This resulted in $12,000 additional sponsorship income from Bloomberg and Nuance. In addition to our ever faithful sponsors (Baidu, Google, IBM Research, Microsoft, Nuance, University of Washington, USC/ISI, Xerox Research Centre Europe, Yahoo!, Yandex, etc.), we welcomed new and hopefully continuing sponsors (A9.com, Amazon.com, Bloomberg, Brandeis University, Facebook and IBM Watson).

For EACL 2014, the office received sponsorships totaling 4,246.90 euros and an additional 3,300 euros were sent directly to the local organizers. And, $10,250 was collected as EMNLP 2014 sponsorships. Other funds may have also been collected locally for both EACL and EMNLP.

In December, the International Sponsorship Committee and I pulled together the Sponsorship Booklet for 2015 with a couple of new options included. First, as agreed in the last Executive meeting, EMNLP was added to the list of ACL, EACL, and NAACL as potential conferences to be sponsored. This led to offering 2-Pack and 3-Pack options to the potential sponsors where they can opt to support a single conference or a 2-Pack (ACL/NAACL or ACL/EMNLP or NAACL/EMNLP) or a 3-Pack supporting all three 2015 conferences. The 2-Pack and 3-Pack options are discounted by 20% and are hoped to make it easier for companies to make one commitment in their budget year and cover more of our conferences.

We need to add one sponsorship chair for Europe and one for Asia to the Sponsorship Committee. Please send recommendations to me.

The area Sponsorship Chairs and the Local Arrangement Sponsorship Chairs are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them. And, many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!