ACL 2017 materials

Regina Barzilay and Min-Yen Kan

For ACL 2017, we pioneered a few innovations that we have documented as part of the PC Chairs Blog. We highly recommend reading through it and the ACL 2017 report (the section marked Innovations) as these contain reports about the successful and unsuccessful processes.

In this page, we give links to two supplemental materials that we think will be helpful for other PC chairs to consider:

1. START Email templates - these are important as the START system has too generic templates and needs to be customised. We have recorded all emails sent out and list the templates here which you can adapt for your reuse.
2. Template Google Spreadsheets - to work with the downloaded START materials. Using the spreadsheet tools in START you can download all of the data about submissions, users (reviewers), acceptances, and reviews, which are all important for building the necessary statistics for reporting (and in our case, for disclosing to the general public about transparency)

START Email Templates

If you want these templates as a basis to start, you might find it easier to just email support@softconf.com and ask Rich or Paolo to populate these into your START installation from the ACL 2017 START archive.

1. 2017_ACL_2017:AC Info
2. 2017_ACL_2017:Update for ACs
   1. 2017_ACL_2017:START Invitation
3. 2017_ACL_2017:Reminder Information
4. 2017_ACL_2017:Survey and TPMS Reminder
5. 2017_ACL_2017:AC reminder for reviewers
6. 2017_ACL_2017:Invitation the the event, second
7. 2017_ACL_2017:AC to start checking
8. 2017_ACL_2017:ACs to start checking, 2nd
   1. 2017_ACL_2017:170208-acl17-inviteGeneric.txt
9. 2017_ACL_2017:ACs at bidding stage
10. 2017_ACL_2017:ACs before assignment
11. 2017_ACL_2017:ACs before assignment, 2
12. 2017_ACL_2017:TPMS
13. 2017_ACL_2017:AC, first reminder to reviewers
14. 2017_ACL_2017:AC 2nd update for discussion period
15. 2017_ACL_2017:Author Response Period: Inform Authors

Post acceptance correspondence

1. 2017_ACL_2017:ACs: Reviewers on responses
2. 2017_ACL_2017:ACs to Rank
   1. [Google Doc AC Ranking Template]
3. 2017_ACL_2017:ACL program: Oral Monday - this is a sample; we did one for each day of the conference (We had accept statuses: Oral Monday, Oral Tuesday, Oral Wednesday, Poster Monday, Poster Tuesday, TACL)
4. 2017_ACL_2017:AC for session chairs
5. 2017_ACL_2017:Reminders to all authors
6. 2017_ACL_2017:ACs proofcheck reviewers listing
7. 2017_ACL_2017:AC vet schedule, best papers
8. 2017_ACL_2017:Presenter Information
9. 2017_ACL_2017:AC Thank you

Google Sheets Templates

START also allows downloads of the database tables from which it computes its processes. These are useful for plugging into Google Sheets for your own checking. We advise this method because it makes any intermediate computation visible and transparent.

There's even an START API to programmatically download this data afresh, but we didn't use this. You might find more documentation about it in the rest of the conference handbook.