2016Q3 Reports: Publications Chairs

Summary

The publication chairs produced the proceedings of the main conference (two volumes, for long and short papers) and coordinated the work of the 21 book chairs for the individual workshops.

This process went reasonably smoothly. We innovated over earlier years by producing machine-readable proceedings in an XML format, and by imposing a stricter paper testing regime on the upload of camera-ready papers.

Changes from previous years

This year, we have made two significant changes for style files. First, for the first time, only Latex template is provided for all authors, as previous experiences of ACL show that MS-Word template caused most problems and covers a few papers. Second, borrowing line indicators for the review version invented by NAACL-2016, we use line numbers to facilitate the review process.

We require authors to submit their Latex source code of their paper along with the camera-ready PDF file. We then automatically converted these Latex sources into XML using the LaTeXML tool, and are making them available alongside the PDF files in the Anthology. These XML files are meant to be machine-readable, in order to support future research using the ACL proceedings as a corpus.

Publishing papers in XML is becoming popular in other areas (e.g. PubMed Central), because it allows for automatic processing of content (e.g. combining running texts with online ontologies), as well as increases human accessibility in various media such as smart phones and speech synthesizers. In particular, our research field is focused on processing language data, and this effort should be encouraged. We do not intend to completely replace PDFs with XMLs, but we encourage future publication chairs to continue and improve this effort on producing machine-readable proceedings.

Further changes:

• In collaboration with the Softconf team, we included supplementary materials, such as datasets, software, and notes, in the CD-ROM proceedings and the ACL anthology. There was a discussion about how to make a choice between appendix and supplementary materials, program chairs and publication chairs have different views about this. Publication chairs of this year tend to use less and short appendix in case of the very necessary, as too long appendix is latently against the strict page limit setting. In practice, only a few camera-ready papers use the feature of appendix, and too long appendix has been asked to turn to the supplementary materials.
• We have suggested to only make the proceedings available as a download this year, instead of distributing them on a USB stick. This simplifies the production of the proceedings.
• We decided to stick to the A4 paper format, instead of the Letter format that has been customary for ACLs in North America. This became possible because the proceedings are electronic only, and allows us to remain consistent across years. Thought we use the newly introduced line number feature of NAACL, we set a more proper line number, 100, for each page, which makes the counting and location more friendly.

Problems

• Coordinating with the authors about enforcing the style requirements was a very substantial amount of work though only Latex template is adopted this time. Frequent problems were page size, too wide column, and improper reference formatting. Future publication chairs should continue to automate style checking as much as possible. We returned more than 30 long papers and 8 short papers for second-round format revisions. In addition, for 6 papers, we manually re-compile the sources to correct obvious format errors. The format checking function of the START system should be further improved, to enforce stricter validation, including margins and page size (this is not included, at least, we don’t find this function in the system), although it is a little difficult to include checking of page numbers.
• Checking that all papers had the correct copyright-transfer signatures was a minor amount of work, but it still felt unnecessary, which has been pointed out in ACL-2014. Perhaps this could be automated in the future, and camera-ready papers not even accepted if the signature is not there. In practice, we find 60 papers with incomplete copyright information.
• Including images (and any additional files) in proceedings volumes (e.g. sponsor logos, or a logo for the cover page) is tricky and not well documented. This should be simplified in the START system.
• The schedule of the conference remained stable, and did not cause major problems in regenerating the proceedings. However, we feel the during between the acceptance and camera-ready submission dates of this ACL are too close and a few authors require more time to fulfill the experiments given by reviewers, which should be taken into account by future ACLs.
• We believe that it is the responsibility of publication chairs to keep the deadline of camera-ready papers. However, too many exceptions have been made for late update requests, in fact, nearly all such request have been fulfilled except for those too late and too minor ones (20 papers were accepted for late updates and manually uploaded by publication chairs). Even during this report is writing, we still receive such requests from authors. We don’t know why this happened. If this comes from either too short camera-ready preparation for long papers or not strictly respecting the deadline at the very beginning, then the future ACL should consider to improve this from these two causes.
• There are two papers that were not submitted before the camera-ready deadline. The author of the first paper asked for a second chance on the next day of the deadline. After a long discussion, the general chair decided that it is the responsibility of program chair to determine if this paper should be still available, and so it was at last in the proceeding. The authors of the second missing-deadline paper communicated with publication chairs on July 16th, and the corresponding paper keeps outside the proceeding at the time of writing this report. These two cases bring a more important issue about how to control the status of camera-ready papers. There is a general loose view that these are whatever-accepted papers. Therefore publication chairs cannot do anything once the deadline is not really seriously respected. The responsibility share between program chairs and publication chairs should be also carefully designed. This year, program chairs got into the decision discussion if a paper violating the camera-ready deadline should be still accepted, which makes not a good enough balance between responsibility and workload. As a result of viewing camera-ready deadline not so seriously, dozens of papers were uploaded manually by publication chairs. From our experiences of this ACL, two improvements can be considered in future ACLs, 1) we should keep a strict deadline maintain scheme for all kinds of submissions, 2) let the publication chairs get a full control of papers after camera-ready submission.
• The method to obtain identifiers of proceedings from ACL anthology master (Min-Yen Kan) is not well documented. This should be given in the future.
• There is a discussion about how to set the handbook chair. This year, a co-publication chair at last agreed to take this job, though it is not a perfect solution, as all of us believe that publication chairs have little resources or good enough conditions to work out a handbook, which mostly depend on the information from local chairs. We’d like to suggest to the handbook chair should be pointed beforehand at the very beginning by considering the viewpoint of local chairs.