2015Q3 Reports: General Chair
Yuji Matsumoto
ACL-IJCNLP-2015 At A Glance
- This year's conference is the joint conference of ACL and AFNLP. The Conference Coordinating Committee was organized by the representatives of ACL and AFNLP. The Chairs for each Conference Committees are selected mainly by the General Chair in consultation with the Coordinating Committee. Selection of chairs is based on the policy that one of the chairs is selected from Asian region and the other from other regions if a committee has two chairs. Some exceptions are the Local Organizing Committee and Publication Committee Co-Chairs.
- ACL-IJCNLP-2015 received 692 long paper submissions and 648 short paper submissions, of which it accepted 173 long papers (acceptance rate: 25%) and 145 short papers (acceptance rate: 22.4%). Adding 13 TACL papers, 7 Student Research Workshop papers and 25 system demonstration papers, the main conference is organized with five parallel sessions of oral presentations and two big evening poster sessions. There is also the Presidential Address, two Keynote Addresses and ACL Lifetime Achievement Awardee's speech as usual. The details will be reported from the Program Committee Co-Chairs (Chengqing Zong and Michael Strube).
- Workshop proposals were handled jointly with workshop co-chairs from NAACL and EMNLP. Based on the workshop organizers' preferences and the quality of the submissions, ACL-IJCNLP-2015 selected 15 workshops (14 one-day workshops and 1 two-day workshop). The ACL-IJCNLP-2015 Workshop Co-Chairs (Hang Li and Sebastian Riedel) have also collaborated with the CoNNL 2015 organizers to make CoNNL 2015 a collocated conference.
- Turorial proposals were handled jointly with tutorial co-chairs from NAACL and EMNLP. Our Tutorial Co-Chairs (Kevin Duh and Eneko Agirre) selected 8 tutorials (all half-day tutorials) for ACL-IJCNLP, which will be presented on the first day, July 26th. They are listed at: http://acl2015.org/tutorials.html
- ACL-IJCNLP-2015 has received an impressive number of sponsorships: Six Platinum Sponsors (CreditEase, Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba Group, SAMSUNG, and Microsoft), four Gold Sponsors (Google, Facebook, SinoVoice, and Huawei), three Silver Sponsors (Nuance, Amazon, and Sogou), one Bronze Sponsor (Yandex), one Oversea Student Fellowship Sponsor (Baobab), and one Best Paper Sponsor (IBM). Sponsorship Committee was organized by a Local Sponsorship Chair (Yiqun Liu) recommended from the local organizers, and the International Sponsorship Committee (Ting Liu, Hideto Kazawa, Asli Celikyilmaz, Julia Hochenmaier, and Alessandro Moschitti), who worked for the sponsorship of NAACL and EMNLP as well. This structure has functioned very well.
- The total number of submissions 1340 and accepted presentations 318 are larger than those of the previous year (1123 and 275), and the sponsorship is also higher than the previous year, with a larger number of platinum sponsors.
- The organizing committee was outstanding: The chairs of each individual committee have acted largely autonomously with high professionalism.
- ACL Executive Committee, especially Gertjan van Noord, Graeme Hirst, Dragomir Radev, and Priscilla Rasmussen have been greatly helpful. I am extremely grateful to them and all the members in the Conference Coordination Committee.
Organization and innovations of the main program:
- We scheduled two large poster sessions on two evenings of the conference, to accommodate the large number of poster presentations of long, short, TACL, system demonstration and student research workshop papers, and to give participants more time to socialize. This structure is inherited from the previous ACL meetings.
- Instead of a paid banquet, we will have a light social event with no fee, consisting of tranditonal performance for 30-40 minutes and then music for dance. We hope this will provide a better environment for socializing and sharing ideas with more number of participants. The overall structure is also inherited from the previous ACL meeting.
- We had difficulty in accommodating Student Research Workshop oral presentations. Initially, we plan to include short oral presentations during the Student Lunch time. However, because of the logistic difficulty, we decided to assign initial one hour of the second day poster session for the SRW paper oral presentations and the remaining time for poster presentation with other posters.
- We decided to install another format for mentoring. The most innovative point is to include a new evaluation item in the review form to ask reviewers if the paper needs mentoring in case the paper is accepted. If two or more reviewers judged it necessary, the Mentoring Chair offered mentoring to the authors. The detail will be reported by Mentoring Chiar (Francis Bond).