2016Q3 Reports: Tutorial Chairs
Prepared July 8, 2016
Alexandra Birch (University of Edinburgh)
Willem Zuidema (University of Amsterdam)
General Schedule
This year we had a joint call-for-tutorials, coordinated with the NAACL and EMNLP co-chairs (6 co-chairs in total).
In addition we coordinated the deadlines with Publication Chairs and Local Organizers.
Shared dates:
- Submission deadline for tutorial proposals: January 15, 2016
- Notification of acceptance: February 12, 2016
- Tutorial descriptions due: March 11, 2016
ACL:
- ACL Tutorial course material due: July 7, 2016
- ACL Tutorial date: August 7, 2016
Call and selection procedure
The call for proposals (CFP) was posted the 10th of September, both at the ACL website and sent to high-volume NLP/CL mailing lists. Tutorial co-chairs discussed interesting topics, and approached some experts to suggest they could submit proposals.
Softconf was used for proposal submission. We received 32 proposals which were reviewed by the 6 co-chairs according to the following criteria:
- relevance to ACL community (1=irrelevant, 5=great fit) (15)
- quality of instructor (1=poor, 5=great) (15)
- quality of proposal i.e. outline and whether depth/breadth is adequate (15)
- our estimate of potential attendance (not from proposal)
- newly emerging area not previously covered in an ACL related tutorial (yes or no)
- tutorials which provide introductions into related fields (yes or no)
- overall score (1=bad, 5=great) (15)
- 1st preference for venue as indicated in proposal
- comments
Each proposal was reviewed twice and given a total score. The procedure for selecting and assigning the tutorials to the three venues was the following:
- we ordered proposals by the venue preference expressed by proposers
- each subcommittee made a tentative decision for the venue they're assigned to
- we discussed the remaining/conflicting/redundant proposals, and tried to balance topics across venues
The 6 tutorial co-chairs reached consensus and agreed on selecting 8 half-day proposals for ACL. Acceptance letters were personalized by venue, then sent via softconf. We did not send feedback to proposers.
Selected tutorials
Tutorials were assigned by the tutorials chairs to morning or afternoon slots, in a way that tried to minimize overlap in potential audience between tutorials.
Morning Tutorials
Multimodal Learning and Reasoning
Desmond Elliott, Douwe Kiela and Angeliki Lazaridou
NLP Approaches to Computational Argumentation
Noam Slonim, Iryna Gurevych, Chris Reed and Benno Stein
Computer Aided Translation
Philipp Koehn
Semantic Representations of Word Senses and Concepts
José Camacho-Collados, Ignacio Iacobacci, Roberto Navigli and Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Afternoon Tutorials
Neural Machine Translation
Thang Luong, Kyunghyun Cho and Christopher D. Manning
Game Theory and Natural Language: Origin, Evolution and Processing
Rocco Tripodi and Marcello Pelillo
Understanding Short Texts
Zhongyuan Wang and Haixun Wang
MetaNet: Repository, Identification System, and Applications
Miriam R L Petruck and Ellen K Dodge