2016Q3 Reports: Publicity Chairs

Barbara Plank, University of Groningen, publicity chair ACL 2016 Berlin

In communication with the general chair (Antal van den Bosch), the local chairs (Valia Kordoni and her team at Humboldt), the PC chairs (Noah Smith and Katrik Erk), and the ACL backoffice (website chair Kostadin Cholakov, ACL officer Priscilla Rasmussen), the main responsibility of the publicity chair is to advertise ACL. Dissemination includes email and social media, and coordination with the website chair.

The biggest change regarding publicity of this years’ ACL is that a large part of the dissemination went through social media channels rather than the traditional way (email).

Social media accounts were set up:

• Twitter (https://twitter.com/acl2016)
• Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/Acl2016).

The social media channels attracted a large number of followers (status July 11, 2016): The Twitter account has a record number of 673 followers (!) and the ACL 2016 Facebook page 439 likes (compared to previous Twitter accounts: 172 @acl14_baltimore, 126 @emnlp2014, 334 @emnlp2015).

The call for participation (incl. newsletters) was distributed via email at the end of June, mid July and end of July via international mailing lists as (corpora, ML news, semeval, sig lists), local mailing lists and the social media channels. The call for papers for the main conference was only distributed via social media channels.

Additionally, the publicity chair helped Priscilla in recruiting companies and research groups for the new ACL recruitment lunch sponsorship.