2016Q1 Reports: ACL 2016

ACL 2016 - report by Christopher Manning

In 2016 there will be a joint ACL and EACL conference in (central) Berlin, with hosting and local arrangements organization by Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. The dates are: 7-12 August 2016. This report is mainly written by the key organizers, listed below, and other organizers (workshops, tutorials, etc.).

Coordinating Committee

The 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:

Observers:

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>

Key Organizers:

Antal van den Bosch, general chair, <a.vandenbosch@let.ru.nl>
Markus Egg, local co-chair <markus.egg@rz.hu-berlin.de>
Valia Kordoni, local co-chair <evangelia.kordoni@anglistik.hu-berlin.de>
Katrin Erk, program co-chair <katrin.erk@gmail.com>
Noah Smith, program co-chair <nasmith@cs.washington.edu>
Kostadin Cholakov, local website administrator <kostadin.cholakov@anglistik.hu-berlin.de>

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

Progress

Since the 2015Q1 report:

We are very pleased to announce that Katrin Erk and Noah Smith accepted our entreaties to be program co-chairs for the conference.
We have an involved Local Arrangements Committee of 3 people and a PCO, con gressa, where Ms. Delia Lemke is the main contact.
Contracts have been signed with Humboldt University, con gressa, the Maritim Hotel (for the poster session), and for blocks of rooms at four nearby hotels.
The local organizers, supported by the PCO and their web designer have created an attractive website for the conference. Kostadin Cholakov and Ms Lemke from the PCO are sharing the webmaster duties. The website is hosted on a Humboldt U. server. Initial content still needs to be added to the site before it is announced.
Local organizer Valia Kordoni will be the local sponsorship chair. She has a good network of contacts in the German IT industry.

Upcoming tasks

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

Presentation and video of ACL 2016 for presentation at ACL 2015. (Responsibility: Local Chairs.)
Launching an initial conference website and pointing the reserved domain name http://acl2016.org/ at it. The site still needs content, including preliminary local information and preparing an initial conference announcement. (Responsibility: Local Chairs.)
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.)
Publicize ACL 2016 including a Call for Participation. (Responsibility: General Chair & Local Chairs)
Finalize Program chairs' timetable of calls, paper due dates etc. This is under construction and should be circulated soon. (Responsibility: Program Chairs.)

After that, key tasks are to:

Develop conference budget. Estimate registration dates and costs. (Responsibility: General Chair, Local Chairs, and Priscilla)
Create Call for Papers, work on finding Area Chairs and Invited Speakers. (Responsibility: Program Chairs.)

General chair's report (Antal van den Bosch)

The general chair has been managing and helping out with issues of several magnitudes.

Questions that have come up and that require the opinion / decision of the ACL exec:

how to implement industry involvement in the student (‘recruitment’) lunch?
do we want publications to be available in XML format as in 2014?
will the proceedings be published online or also be transmitted on USB stick? Will the local wifi be powerful enough to handle people querying and downloading online proceedings?
the publication chairs will draw up a plan and budget request for student helpers for paper checking.

PC chairs report (acl16_pc_chairs@aclweb.org) - Katrin Erk, Noah Smith

The PC chairs have been acting on the following items, most recent at the top:

working on updates to the review forms (hoping to converge soon)
preparing tools to load-balance reviewers if the area distribution of papers is different from what area chairs expected
invited two plenary speakers -- Mark Steedman and Amber Boydstun -- both accepted
formed best paper award committee
review/decision timeline is set, including TACL accept-by date
call for papers is public
area chairs selected, each area has its slate of reviewers

Local chairs report (acl16_local_chairs@aclweb.org) - Valia Kordoni, Markus Egg, Kostadin Cholakov

The ACL website has been being updated promptly and constantly by Kostadin Cholakov by request from the other chair teams.

Contracts for the social event will be signed in the next couple of weeks maximum.

Poster space has been adjusted in collaboration with the Program Chairs, Graeme Hirst and Priscilla Rasmussen.

The sponsorship booklet for ACL 2016 is now ready for attracting (local) sponsors.

Rooms for the workshops have been allocated.

Publication chairs report (acl16_pub_chairs@aclweb.org) - Yannick Versley, Hai Zhao

Work has focused on paper template development. The chairs assume that the ACL-2016 proceedings will not be published on USB stick.

A LaTeX template for ACL-2016 has been devised, including an easy switch between the submission version (with line numbering) and camera-ready version. Minor tweaks and optimizations added. The style files are now available on the ACL-2016 website.

Both chairs can recruit students for paper checking and will develop a plan (and budget request) for this task.

The chairs have confirmed workshop camera-ready deadlines.

Workshop chairs report (acl16_workshop_chairs@aclweb.org) - Jun Zhao, Sabine Schulte im Walde

Joint Call-for-Workshop-Proposals (ACL/NAACL/EMNLP)

In coordination with the NAACL and the EMNLP workshop chairs for 2016, we set up a joint call for workshop proposals and distributed it twice (8/4 weeks before the proposal deadline) to Linguist List, Corpora List, SIGIR, SIGSEM, ACL web member portal, acl16-web, and naacl16-web. The call was also posted on the NAACL 2016 and the ACL 2016, which were up already.

The six co-chairs were - NAACL-2016 (Radu Soricut, Adrià de Gispert) - ACL-2016 (Sabine Schulte im Walde, Jun Zhao) - EMNLP-2016 (Annie Louise, Greg Kondrak)

Capacities of ACL/NAACL/EMNLP

We checked the number and sizes of the rooms that will be available for the workshop days. ACL contracted a large number of rooms with various sizes, but the number of participants is restricted (minimum/maximum of 400/600 participants per day).

Integration of co-located CL conferences into workshop organisation

An extensive discussion took place about which CL conferences should be co-located with which ACL event (ACL/NAACL/EMNLP) in 2016. There is a wiki page about the special status of some CL conferences, and how their choice of locations should be handled: http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=SIG_Creation_Guidelines. According to no. 14 on that page, larger SIG-related workshops (>100 participants) should send pre-approval requests to the ACL Exec Committee by February 1st of the year PRIOR to the year for which the workshop is requested. Effectively, the largest CL conferences have taken turns over the years to pick their venue first.

The conferences are organisationally treated as workshops, because they need to be taken into account regarding room and participant issues. Regarding their deadlines, softconf accounts, proceedings, etc. they however work on their own.

We gathered a list of potentially large workshops: CoNNL, *SEM, WMT, BioNLP, checked the numbers and participants from previous years (with Priscilla's help), and the room capacities at ACL/NAACL/EMNLP 2016. It was decided by the six co-chairs that CoNNL and *SEM should be co-located with ACL; both had asked for that venue and could be confirmed. We asked them for a light-weighted proposal regarding organisational issues (number of participants, number of posters, contacts, shared task, etc.).

Workshop proposals: evaluation and selection

We collected the proposals in a spread sheet, taking notes about the workshop length, the expected number of attendees, the organisers, the contact, the prefered venue(s), the number of past editions, and the shared tasks.

Each of the six co-chairs ranked half of the proposals (such that each proposal received three evaluations) on a 4-point scale regarding - description and motivation - relevance to the community - organising team and program committee - expected impact - overall judgment

Some statistics: In total, we received 61 workshop proposals (excluding CoNLL and *SEM), and we accepted 37 workshop proposals + CoNLL and *SEM (total 39), acceptance rate 37/59 = 62%. Out of the 37 accepted proposals, 28 of them had at least one previous edition (not necessarily at ACL conferences). Out of the 23 rejected proposals, 10 of them had at least one previous edition. Out of 14 SIG proposals, 2 were rejected.

Except for the large conferences/workshops mentioned above (CoNNL,

SEM, WMT), all other workshops were restricted to one day this time,

to allow for a variety of workshop topics, and to take into account the large number of submissions.

We set up an accept/reject letter and distributed the notifications over the six of us. We also set up a letter to respond to workshop organisers who were disappointed about our decisions (rejection; shortage of days). After confirmations from all workshop organisers, we announced the workshops for ACL, NAACL and EMNLP on Corpora List and the conference web sites. At this point, the six co-chairs separated into the ACL/NAACL/EMNLP co-chairs.

Organisation of ACL workshops so far

(Nov 11, 2015) We sent a mail to all workshop organisers to welcome them and announce the ACL, NAACL and EMNLP workshops.

(Dec 12, 2015) The workshop organisers have been asked to address Katrin Erk, who offered to set up the softconf accounts.

(Dec 14, 2015) The workshop organisers have been reminded of the common workshop dates.

(Dec 14, 2015) The workshop organisers have been asked to send their web site to Kostadin Cholakov.

(Dec 16, 2015) The exact workshop days have been decided and announced to the workshop organisers.

(Dec 21, 2015) The workshop schedule has been announced to the organisers, based on Priscilla's experience: typical start-time is 9am, typical end-time is 5-5:30pm, morning break is 10:30-11am and afternoon break is 3:30-4pm.

(Dec 21, 2015) The workshop organisers were asked to send us information regarding posters. We are still collecting this information.

(to be solved) The workshops were selected such that the number of participants should not go beyond 600 per workshop day, but our estimate is only based on the estimates of the workshop organisers. Valia and Priscilla are discussing about how to ensure the contracted number of participants per day.

Tutorial chairs (acl16_tutorial_chairs@aclweb.org) - Alexandra Birch, Willem Zuidema

The tutorial call is on track. A first call was posted in September; a second around New Year. It has also been published on the ACL member portal, the ACL and NAACL 2016 websites.

The submission page is up and has been tested. The deadline was 15 January. There were 32 submissions. The notification of acceptance will occur on the 12 February.

Demonstration chairs (acl16_demonstration_chairs@aclweb.org) - Sameer Pradhan, Marianna Apidianaki

The demonstration call is on track. The first call was sent out at the end of November. 38 reviewers are recruited at this point.

Student Research Workshop chairs (acl16_studentworkshop@aclweb.org) - Will Roberts, Tao Lei, He He

Faculty Advisors to the SRW: Yang Liu, Chris Biemann, Gosse Bouma

A splendid group of people have been recruited to serve on the student workshop program committee. The SRW website is finalized in January (https://sites.google.com/site/aclsrw2016/committee). The call will be sent out in January.

Publicity chair: Barbara Plank

Barbara Plank took on the Publicity Chair position at the beginning of the new year. Barbara will collaborate with the local chairs on press attention, and will work on the visibility of ACL-2016 and its calls within and outside the ACL community.

An ACL-2016 Facebook account (https://www.facebook.com/Acl2016/ - 239 likes on January 17) and Twitter account (@acl2016 - 148 followers on January 17) have been set up.