2018Q1 Reports: Office

Priscilla Rasmussen 4 March 2018

ACL Business Office Report

As usual, the Office becomes extremely busy as conferences grow near.

In an effort to better distribute our efforts in the Office, I have decided to increase Pat Kirby’s time, when needed, and she has agreed. Pat continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations (especially handling most of the membership entries into the portal) as well as managing the conference student housing and working with me in preparation for and onsite at our conferences, especially with registrations. Since she enjoys anything financial and is great at doggedly reconciling any entries and discrepancies, I especially want her to begin to do more of the expenditure postings, monthly bank statement oversight, and following up on sponsorships. I would also like to add a more part-time position to communicate with the sponsors and exhibitors who take a lot of time and have many, many questions. I have a local person in mind who managed a few Chico’s apparel stores before moving to our area. She is on vacation at the moment but, when she returns, I hope to engage her if the Board approves.

The Office was pressured much more than usual last year, mainly in having two conferences so very close to each other. The overlap of ACL and EMNLP increased the day-to-day workload and is one more reason (besides paper reviewing/acceptances) to be mindful of spacing the conferences as far apart as possible. This year, with NAACL and EMNLP so far apart, the overlap for planning, management and registrations will be minimal and ACL will be mostly managed by the local team and the PCO in Melbourne. Nevertheless, making the above suggested staffing adjustments will allow more time for me to offer the always-called-upon advice, attend and organize meetings, identify and pre-negotiate future conference venues, conduct site visits, pre-negotiate catering/av/social event and other contracts, develop working budgets, review bids, make initial approaches to potential sponsors, oversee Office operations, etc.

It may not be well understood the time it takes to sift through many, many venues looking for appropriately sized space and then doing pre-negotiations before making a list of acceptable possibilities for a Board’s consideration. It is encouraged that all larger conferences, especially ACLs, EMNLPs, and NAACLs lock in contracts close to two years out (before appropriate venues are otherwise booked).

Publications, Journals and Royalties:

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates handling print-on-demand of our publications, I typically receive no requests for hardcopy publications in the office.

The Curran Associates agreement has turned out to be a good one for both them and the ACL. In 2017, we have received a total of $3,885.48 in royalties from them, covering the 4th quarter of 2016 through the 3rd quarter of 2017 plus $683.27 paid to us in February 2018 covering the 4th quarter of 2017. Copyright Clearance Center has not sent any earnings to ACL for CY 2017, nor has MIT Press Journals.

MIT Press Journals has sent us an invoice for their fiscal year, July 2015 - June 2016 for their services related to the Computational Linguistics Journal. The invoice, for $35,968.50 was paid in February. And, in September, the July 2016-June 2017 invoice for $38,505.82 was also paid.

Our journals pay editorial assistants to help with the process. The CL Journal’s assistant was paid $4,730 in January 2017 for her services for the remainder of the 2016 calendar year. The CL Journal’s assistant was also paid $2,322.00 for January-April 2017 in May, $3,354.00 in September for May-August 2017 and $2,365.00 for September-December 2017. The TACL Journal’s assistant was paid $11,019.56 in February covering April-December 2016 and $7,975.33 covering January through June 2017 in July.

Membership:

I am pleased to report that we now have 2,949 members. This indicates the continuing growth of our field and conferences. The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be representing between 55 and 60 countries on a regular basis and currently have a total of 66 countries being represented by our membership.

We began 2017 with 177 members who were in a multi-year membership, added a little more than 350 members from EACL 2017 directly through portal membership payments, and about 260 members who renewed on their own. As is becoming more standard, most memberships come from conference registrations. The ACL 2017 attendees’ registrations included 1,327 total memberships. EMNLP 2017’s resulting memberships were 752 and both SIGdial 2017 and INLG 2017 instructed their attendees to pay memberships directly online at the portal so I do not have exact numbers for them. Between the growth in overall memberships and the increased number resulting from conference registrations, a larger burden is on the office to input new and renewing members into the portal but, with Jing-Shin’s and (especially) Pranav’s help in automating the input process, we are now able to keep up with memberships very easily and quickly and have more time for other endeavors. So, at the end of the year, conferences made up the bulk of members as follows: EACL 2017 memberships (11.9%), ACL 2017 memberships (45%), and EMNLP 2017 memberships (25.5%).

Fellows Program:

The only involvement the Office now has in the Fellowship nomination and selection process is to verify nominated members’ eligibility according to our old policy for this year and our new policy for future years.

Conferences:

EACL 2017 was held in Valencia, Spain, at the Valencia Conference Center, April 3-7. This conference set the highest attendance for EACLs with about 690 final attendees. Although the Office is not typically involved in this conference’s planning, the organizers and General Chair had requested much more guidance than in years past. There was some confusion between the local organizers, PCO, and the Office about collection of membership fees, sponsorships, and other things. Better communication or more explicit division of duties might be recommended for future EACLs with the Office.

The ACL 2017, held in Vancouver, July 30-August 4 was a bit larger than ACL 2016 in Berlin (which set an all-time record at 1,650 attendees), with 1772 total attendees. While growth of our ACL conference is a great thing, this year the venue became overcrowded for some sessions and workshops and especially during the common break events. Adding to the crowding this year was up to 24 exhibitors, most of whom are also our sponsors. This is an increase of almost 10 exhibitors over previous years. After our site visit, we knew this venue would be tight but did not quite expect it to be as bad as it was, showing that a larger-than-necessary and possibly cold, impersonal and boring convention center may be what we must look at in the future to be sure to accommodate our growing needs. We repeated the Recruitment Lunch which was very successful, charging a $500 fee for each recruiting company to help defray some part of the lunch costs. We had 17 companies signed up for the lunch. Also, although we offered childcare as a first-time experiment, very few children (9 from last report) were signed up for this and yet there seemed to be many families coming to Vancouver as shown by the 150 accompanying people registered and paid for the Social Event at the Aquarium. Nevertheless, we received positive feedback on offering childcare and should offer it again in the future. Adding a Handbook Chair this year was a great idea.

EMNLP 2017, was held in Copenhagen, Denmark, September 7-11. The venue, in the old meat packing district offered ample space (Øksnehallen) but it was awkward to plan the arrangements to maximize the limited soundproofing. Overall, the meeting space was conveniently located and the attendees seemed to enjoy themselves and the conference. EMNLP 2017 ended with 1,233 total registrants, making it even larger than Lisbon and Austin and any NAACL. The Office provided advice, general support, and registration management.

Given the current concerns about possible travel restrictions going into the future, it may be interesting to note that ACL 2017 had 22 cancellations specifically due to visas being denied and EMNLP 2017 had only 4 visa problems. There were many more cancellations to both conferences but these numbers represent the ones that were identified as being visa issues.

Planning for NAACL 2018 and 2019 has begun with the signing of two contracts. NAACL 2018 will be at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in New Orleans, June 1-6 and NAACL 2019 will be at the Hyatt Regency in Minneapolis, June 2-7. Bundling the negotiations and using the same hotel chain produced extra leverage in obtaining better pricing and concessions for both conferences. As Local Arrangements Chair for NAACL 2018, I am planning a site visit to New Orleans in April to make sure all of our planning is correct for the venue space and that the Social Event/Dinner on the steamboats will work well. This year, the organizers have decided to add a poster track in parallel with the other main conference sessions rather than having an evening poster/dinner on two nights. There will also be an experimental fourth parallel track on two of the three main conference days for an Industrial Track. We are expecting about 1,200 attendees but, if it grows larger, the hotel can easily handle higher numbers.

ACL 2018 planning is under way. Venue and Social Event (Aquarium) contracts have been signed, with special care given to assuring the proper space for all possible conference events. I will continue to offer advice as needed but it was agreed to be more fiscally reasonable to have the local professional conference organizers (PCO) manage registrations to avoid complicated and costly taxation. Between the Local Arrangements Chairs, the PCO, the Local Sponsorship Chairs, and myself, we are all in good communication and moving along quite well. This should be a lovely conference and venue!

EMNLP 2018 is also moving along well. It helped that a site visit had been conducted earlier to Brussels and the recommended PCO was also met at that time. The office is and will be working closely with Ellen Riloff (the General Chair) and the PCO and will manage the registrations. The venue is quite good and modern and is adjacent to the old district of Brussels. This venue will also be able to handle an increase in participation if needed—we currently are expecting 1,200-1,400 total attendees.

While it is always difficult to project attendance at conferences, we seem to be settling into a new higher level of attendance, after a growth spurt the last 2-3 years. Being prepared for more than expected numbers is extremely important for the next couple of years until we can again trust our newly-adjusted predictions. We may be at a point where most conference hotels no longer are large enough and we will have to specifically consider convention centers for future conferences.

ACL, NAACL and EMNLP 2018 are keeping in mind Michael Strube’s schema to optimally lay out the posters, demos and food/beverages for the poster sessions to allow ample walk space and overall comfort. Workshops continue to be more challenging in finding adequate space for the growing attendance at some workshops and the many poster sessions and numbers of posters within a workshop that they plan to present. Careful advance planning is essential for these events.

Conference Sponsorship:

EACL 2017 had sponsorships through the Office totaling $18,259 plus $3,500 from Google sponsoring the Ethics in NLP workshop. The Office has no record of local sponsorships obtained and kept within Europe.

ACL 2017 has proven to be quite popular, not only in numbers of registrations but also in having an all-time record breaking $306,912 in conference sponsorship commitments. Our faithful sponsors (Amazon, Baidu, Bloomberg, Brandeis University, ebay, Facebook, Google, Huawei Technologies, IBM Research, Microsoft, Nuance, Recruit Technologies, University of Washington, Yandex) plus sponsors we have not seen before or are returning (Adobe, Alibaba, Apple, Columbia University, CVTE, Duolingo, Elsevier, Grammarly, KPMG LLC, Maluuba/Microsoft, NAVER Corporation, NEC, NYU, Oracle, Robert Bosch LLC, SAP, Samsung Electronics, Sogou, Tencent, Textkernel, Toutiao, VoiceBox, @Newsela) continue to help us thrive. We also have $66,200 in sponsorships supporting workshops (primarily $50,000 to the WiNLP). Exciting commitments are from seventeen companies who each promised $500 for the Recruitment Lunch, for a total of $8,500. Five of these companies, including Twitter, are not also sponsors of the main conference. Special thanks to the General Chair, Chris Callison-Burch, and the Asian International Sponsorship Committee representative, Wanxiang Che, for eagerly pursuing additional and often new sponsors!

$124,955.80 in EMNLP 2017 sponsorships were committed. Many were the result of 2-Pack or 3-Pack sponsorship agreements so the same companies as listed above (Apple, Amazon, Baidu, Bloomberg, Brandeis University, CVTE, Duolingo, ebay, Facebook, Google, Grammarly, Huawei Technologies, IBM, Maluuba/Microsoft, Microsoft, Nuance, Oracle, Recruit Institute of Technology, SAP, Sogou, Textkernel, Yandex) plus deloitte, NEXT Canada, Siteimprove, SnapChat, Trust Pilot and Wizkids (mostly local companies) generously donated. Additionally, the BEA Workshop and W-NUT have $4,100 in sponsor commitments.

The idea of offering 2-Pack or 3-Pack options and including EMNLP allowed sponsors to make one payment to support two or all three events rather than one at a time. This made sponsoring easier, especially for our ongoing sponsors. For the 2018 Sponsorship Booklet that the International Sponsorship Committee and the Office pulled together, we continue to offer these multi-pack options, resulting in some of the first commitments and at higher levels (Amazon and Baidu at Platinum, last year for example) to come in. We made a few changes to the Sponsorship booklet for 2018, partially based on ideas I gathered while sitting in on the various executive board meetings and having been an officer for ICML for a few years. We added a higher “Diamond” level which includes exhibiting (so far, Google has chosen to be at the Diamond level). Now the Platinum and Gold levels pay a discounted per-day “Manned Exhibit” fee (much as many other conferences would do) and Silver and below as well as non-sponsors would pay the full per-day “Manned Exhibit” fees as before. We also added an option to sponsor Childcare. To date, we have $84,205.75 sponsorship for ACL 2018 plus $7,500 toward workshops; $45,020.45 sponsorship for EMNLP 2018 plus $1,500 toward workshops; and $29,913.80 sponsorship for NAACL 2018 plus $6,100 toward workshops. This may seem low compared to ACL 2017 but, that was an exceptionally high amount and I am currently talking with a few of our repeat/large sponsors (Tencent, Samsung, Baidu, Alibaba, etc.) which I am sure will turn into firm commitments. My one concern is that it seems some companies are opting for a 2-Pack for ACL and EMNLP and fewer are opting for NAACL 2018.

The area Sponsorship Chairs and the Local Arrangement Sponsorship Chairs are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them. And, many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!