2016Q3 Reports: Program Chairs

Innovations

As compared to previous ACL conferences, this year’s main innovations were:

• In addition to best paper awards, a larger number of outstanding papers were selected. The original plan was to identify roughly 1-2% of submissions; ultimately 11 papers out of 1290 submissions (0.85%) were identified as outstanding by the awards committee.
• Instead of 20-minute talks, long papers were presented in 15-minute talks, plus 5 minutes for questions and changing speakers. Short papers were given 12 minutes plus 4 for questions and transition.
• Authors were allowed to submit an appendix of any length with their papers. Reviewers were not required to read appendices.
• Area chairs provided meta-reviews for all papers that were not obvious rejections.
• The deadline for short papers was ahead of the deadline for long papers.
• We introduced a new area labeled “Other” to handle papers that did not fit into traditional areas, as well as a few COI papers.

Rationale

Outstanding papers were added because the community is growing and so is the number of papers at each conference, including the number of papers that deserve recognition as being of particular importance and quality.

Appendices were added to help address the replication problem. The relevant passage in the Call for Papers reads as follows:

• ACL 2016 also encourages the submission of supplementary material to report preprocessing decisions, model parameters, and other details necessary for the replication of the experiments reported in the paper. Seemingly small preprocessing decisions can sometimes make a large difference in performance, so it is crucial to record such decisions to precisely characterize state-of-the-art methods.

• Nonetheless, supplementary material should be supplementary (rather than central) to the paper. It may include explanations or details of proofs or derivations that do not fit into the paper, lists of features or feature templates, sample inputs and outputs for a system, pseudo-code or source code, and data. The paper should not rely on the supplementary material: while the paper may refer to and cite the supplementary material and the supplementary material will be available to reviewers, they will not be asked to review or even download the supplementary material. Authors should refer to the contents of the supplementary material in the paper submission, so that reviewers interested in these supplementary details will know where to look.

area	long reviewed	long accepted	short reviewed	short accepted	total submissions	percentage of total submissions	total accepted	percentage of total accepted	area acceptance rate	outstanding papers
Semantics	114	43	66	13	180	14.0%	56	17.1%	31.1%	3
Information Extraction, Question Answering, and Text Mining	122	27	48	9	170	13.2%	36	11.0%	21.2%	1
Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining	77	9	28	3	105	8.2%	12	3.7%	11.4%
Document Analysis	53	13	49	8	102	7.9%	21	6.4%	20.6%
Machine Translation	58	15	36	9	94	7.3%	24	7.3%	25.5%	1
Tagging, Chunking, Syntax, and Parsing	48	18	33	9	81	6.3%	27	8.2%	33.3%	2
Social Media	39	6	30	8	69	5.4%	14	4.3%	20.3%
Machine Learning	46	15	22	6	68	5.3%	21	6.4%	30.9%	1
Resources and Evaluation	44	17	21	6	65	5.0%	23	7.0%	35.4%
Other	34	10	27	5	61	4.7%	15	4.6%	24.6%
Discourse and Pragmatics	42	15	18	4	60	4.7%	19	5.8%	31.7%
Summarization	29	5	19	2	48	3.7%	7	2.1%	14.6%
Multilinguality	19	6	24	5	43	3.3%	11	3.4%	25.6%
Phonology, Morphology, and Word Segmentation	23	6	10	4	33	2.6%	10	3.0%	30.3%	1
Generation	20	8	9	3	29	2.3%	11	3.4%	37.9%
Dialog and Interactive Systems	20	7	8	0	28	2.2%	7	2.1%	25.0%	1
Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics	17	7	8	1	25	1.9%	8	2.4%	32.0%	1
Vision, Robots, and Grounding	14	3	6	2	20	1.6%	5	1.5%	25.0%
Speech	6	1	1	0	7	0.5%	1	0.3%	14.3%
total	825	231	463	97	1288	100.0%	328	100.0%	25.5%	11