2017Q1 Reports: Conference Officer

Ad Hoc Committee for Diversity

About a year ago, an ad hoc committee was formed to investigate current practices and policies for nominating and selecting various roles and awards in ACL, including ACL Fellows, life time achievements awards, and ACL chairs. A report was presented and discussed at ACL 2016. The revised policy on ACL fellow nomination will be effective starting from 2017. The committee continues to work on preparing more detailed recommendations and a new system to better support the execution of the new policy.

START support for Toronto Matching System

As there has been a considerable growth in the number of submissions made to ACL conferences in recent years, we has been increasing need to better automate core functions of the conference management system. In response to the enthusiastic request from ACL 2017 organizers and others, SoftConf has agreed to integrate Toronto Matching system to automate topic-based reviewer-to-paper assignments. The expectation is that Toronto matching system, which has been successfully used for several other conferences with considerably larger submissions, will have repeated uses for future ACL conferences. This feature complements the already existing reviewer-to-area assignments newly introduced for NAACL 2016. While the reviewer-to-area assignments work based on a manually specified set of keywords to match expertise, new Toronto matching system will match reviewers to papers based on automatically parsed information from publication records, which in turn can be automatically downloaded from people's homepages, Google Scholar, and other pages that have links to pdf papers.