2016Q1 Reports: Conference Officer
Conference Management
There have been efforts to improve conference managements and to add new functionalities into the START system. Many thanks to the NAACL program chairs this year (Nenkova and Rambow) who have spearheaded the efforts by implementing several innovative methods to improve the overall conference management. More specifically, (a) dynamic area definitions, (b) semi-automatic management of the reviewer pool, (c) automatic paper-to-area assignment, and (d) semi-automatic reviewer-to-area assignment. Thus far, the START support team has implemented (c), which is based on weighted key-word based matching and it has been already used by NAACL 2016. The START support team is willing to implement (d), which we expect to be a relatively easy extension to the algorithm implemented for (c). As these changes are somewhat exploratory, the ACL 2016 coordinating team will stay with the traditional approaches and focus on other innovative fronts (new distinguished paper awards, reversed ordering of short & long paper deadlines). Some of these changes will be picked up by the EMNLP 2016 coordinating committee. The specific plans for the 2017 conferences are TBD based on the feedback survey from the NAACL 2016 experience.
Timeline of Conference Deadlines
The timeline of deadlines has continued to be a tricky matter for years when we have both NAACL and ACL. As a result, the NAACL coordinating committee last year had proposed the ACL to merge the long and short deadlines. However, initial investigation suggested that merging of the deadlines may not be practical to implement due to the recent substantial growth of the ACL submissions. Thus, as an alternative solution, the ACL 2016 program chairs have decided on the reverse ordering of long and short paper deadlines (short first, long next). This will potentially ease out the tight scheduling between NAACL and ACL long-paper deadlines and lessen the reviewing overhead caused by short papers converted from the rejected long papers.