ACL Resolutions

This is a partial list of ACL resolutions. Older resolutions will be added over time.

June 1, 2019

(PASSED)

We accept EquiCL as an ACL Broad Interest Group.

May 23, 2019

(PASSED)

We pass the motion to establish the ACL test-of-time award

Frequency: once/year.

Name of award and types of papers:

Name of award: Test-of-Time Paper on Computational Linguistics

Candidate papers: All papers published in venues under the auspices of ACL (including both journal and conference papers)

How many: 2 per year, one for papers published exactly 10 year back, one for those published exactly 25 years back.

Who nominates: Award committee: this committee should decide criteria (to be nominated by exec for two years)

Who judges: Expert committee: all ACL conferences’ general chairs, program chairs and ACL presidents in the interval ([current year-5]- [current year]) who don’t have COIs with the nominated papers.

At ACL: a session with winning paper presentations will be held

May 7, 2019

(PASSED)

We approve the following proposal concerning ACL members at-large:

According to the ACL Constitution, the ACL Executive Committee has three members at-large, elected for terms of three years by the members of the Association.
The ACL Exec recommends that the ACL Nominating Committee strive to nominate members-at-large from the three major geographic regions on an annual rotating basis.
The roles for the members-at-large will be assigned by the current ACL President on an as-needed basis, and may change throughout their terms. These roles will not require specialized knowledge beyond that of a well-informed, active member of the ACL community.
As set forth in the Process for Ad Hoc ACL Leadership Roles (https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Process_for_Ad_Hoc_ACL_Leadership_Roles), the ACL Exec will appoint additional positions that require specialized expertise.

April 19, 2019

(PASSED) We approve the 2019 ACL Distinguished Service Award (DSA) awardee [name withheld] selected by the Nominating Committee.

April 13, 2019

(PASSED) We accept the LTA Nominating Committee's recommendation to give the 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award to [name withheld].

March 15, 2019

(PASSED)

We pass the resolution that Graeme Hirst and Emily Bender are the co-chairs of the Professional Conduct Committee (PCC) of 2019.

December 23, 2018

(PASSED)

We adopt the Process for Ad Hoc ACL Leadership Roles.

December 12, 2018

(PASSED)

We approved: (1) the ACL anti-harassment policy implementation procedure, in the version of 2018-08-08, be adopted except for the first line of the section on handling complaints (page 4), and (2) the ACL anti-harassment policy implementation procedure be amended such that complaints will be considered only if received within 365 days of the alleged incident, or if the alleged incident occurred between 2016-10-18 and 2018-11-30.

December 3, 2018

(PASSED)

We accept the proposal from the nominating committee concerning new fellows for 2018.

November 1, 2018

(PASSED)

We remove the policy on funding workshops not held at one of the *ACL conferences.

October 25, 2018

(PASSED)

We approved the creation of ACL Special Interest Group on Representation Learning (SIGREP).

June 25, 2018

(PASSED)

We adopt a Distinguished Service Award.

June 6, 2018

(PASSED)

We accept the following motion:

the exec requests that the nominating committee select candidates for the next member at large that are uniquely qualified to serve as information chair, independent of geographic region.
The exec further requests that the nominating committee interview potential nominees to assess their qualifications, and only nominate members that have the time, willingness, and the experience to lead a software team to procure new digital services as well as maintain exiting legacy software, and oversee the transition from legacy software to newer software solutions.

May 2, 2018

(PASSED)

We approve the constitution and the initial slate of board members of Asia-Pacific Chapter of ACL (AACL)

March 14, 2018

(PASSED)

We approve the candidates of CL editor. The candidates will be asked in order.

February 23, 2018

(PASSED)

We approve the three candidates for a new TACL editor-in-chief, which will be approached by the search committee.

February 16, 2018

(PASSED)

We approve the proposal for training for harassment complaint responders:

(a) we accept Anne Grant's proposal;

(b) Emily M. Bender and Graeme Hirst liaise with Anne Grant to develop the course;

(c) we boot up a complaints committee forthwith so that as many of its members as possible can attend the training at ACL in Melbourne on the day before the tutorial day and Exec meeting.

February 7, 2018

(PASSED)

We adopt the following rules concerning conflicts of interest in the nominating committee when electing new fellows:

1. Members of the nominating committee are not allowed to contribute to new nominations (as nominators or recommenders) while serving on the committee.

2. Members who have earlier contributed to nominations that remain in the system should if possible ask other people to replace them (as nominator or recommender). If this is not possible, the concerned member should declare that they have a conflict of interest and not take part in the evaluation of that nomination (see point 3 below).

3. Members who have a conflict of interest with respect to a nomination should declare this and not take part in the evaluation of that nomination. Conflicts of interest are assumed to exist if committee members have contributed to the nomination (see point 2 above), if they have a close family relationship to the nominee, if they have co-authored a paper or collaborated with the nominee in the previous five years, if they are employed at the same company or institution as the nominee, or if they have other relations to the nominee that can be seen to constitute a conflict of interest.

4. If one or more conflicts of interest exist, the nominating committee shall first evaluate and rank the nominees for which no conflicts exist. The remaining nominees shall then each be evaluated and inserted into the ranking by the subset of the committee that does not have a conflict for that nominee.

January 24, 2018

(PASSED)

The Exec approve the following proposal concerning rules and procedures for electing Fellows:

1. Members of the Exec and the Nominating Committee are not be eligible to become Fellows while serving. People should be informed about this before being nominated to the Exec.

2. Nominators should be informed about the outcome of their nominations but without specific information about why a particular nominee was not elected.

3. Information about criteria and conditions for selection (including the 0.2% rule) should be provided in the instructions for nominators.

January 13, 2018

(PASSED)

We approved the following two changes concerning ACL membership registration/renewal: (1) We open the registration for the next membership year on December 1, instead of January 1. (2) For all members who registered after December 1, 2017, their memberships can be rolled over to 2018.

December 30, 2017

(PASSED)

The ACL Exec will publish the the diversity statistics of 2017.

December 21, 2017

(PASSED)

We accept the offer from MIT Press to give ACL members a discount.

December 2, 2017

(PASSED)

We accept the proposal from the nominating committee concerning new fellows for 2017.

November 29, 2017

(PASSED)

We accept the proposal from MIT Press to publish both CL and TACL (for an annual flat fee + expenses as specified in the proposal).

November 22, 2017

(PASSED)

We approved the proposal for creating the Asia-Pacific Chapter of ACL.

October 30, 2017

(PASSED)

Recommendations for submission, review and citation for *ACL conferences and TACL:

We approved the amendment to the policy, by changing the first paragraph from:

   The following policies are adopted for *ACL conferences (ACL, NAACL, EACL) and the TACL journal in the interest of maintaining and protecting double-blind review without sacrificing the positive effects of preprint publishing.

to:

   The following policies are adopted for *ACL conferences (ACL, NAACL, EACL) and the TACL journal in the interest of maintaining and protecting double-blind review without sacrificing the positive effects of preprint publishing. We recommend conferences and workshop that are co-located with *ACL conferences and use double-blind review to adopt the same policies unless this conflicts with other policies they have.

October 13, 2017

(PASSED)

Recommendations for submission, review and citation for *ACL conferences and TACL:

We accept the proposal for new policies and guidelines and charge the working group with making necessary changes to the document based on the comments from the exec.

September 25, 2017

(PASSED)

We approved the extension of the deadline for fellows nominations by one month, to November 1, 2017.

September 7, 2017

(PASSED)

We adopt the amendment of the resolution on the search committee for the TACL editors by replacing

2. The search committee shall consist of the 6 members of the existing TACL steering committee + the current editors-in-chief + Graeme Hirst + Yejin Choi + Joakim Nivre (all three representatives of the ACL exec).

with

2. The search committee shall consist of the 6 members of the existing TACL steering committee + the current editors-in-chief + the CL editor + Graeme Hirst + Yejin Choi + Joakim Nivre (all three representatives of the ACL exec).

The resolution after the amendment is as follows:

1. An ad hoc search committee shall be formed to appoint to new editors in chief for TACL, to replace the resigning editors.

2. The search committee shall consist of the 6 members of the existing TACL steering committee + the current editors-in-chief + the CL editor + Graeme Hirst + Yejin Choi + Joakim Nivre (all three representatives of the ACL exec).

3. The search committee shall be chaired by Ido Dagan.

4. The search committee shall discuss names and come up with a ranked list of acceptable suggestions to the ACL exec.

5. The exec shall then vote on the ranked list.

6. The chair of the search committee shall contact the people on the ranked list, in order, until two have accepted. Should less than two invitees accept, the search process will restart with step 4.

August 31, 2017

(PASSED)

We adopt the following plan for finding a new editor for CL with Lori Levin as the chair of the search committee:

1. Form a search committee: The search committee should consist of people who are knowledgeable about a broad range of areas in computational linguistics and human language technologies and are committed to the genre of long, comprehensive journal articles as valuable documents in a research community.

1a. All past CL editors are invited to be on the search committee.

1b. TACL editors are invited to join the search committee.

1c. Members of the ACL exec are invited to join the search committee.

1d. If not enough members of the ACL exec are available to join the search committee, or if not enough people with experience from the CL editorial board have joined, we will extend the invitation to NAACL and EACL boards.

1e. If the committee does not meet our new diversity requirements, the CL editor will be asked to propose additional people with experience from the CL editorial board who can be invited to balance the representation.

2. Formulate a job description: The CL editor will be asked to provide a first draft, which the search committee can review and possibly modify.

3. Send the job description to the ACL mailing list and ask for nominations/volunteers with a deadline one month after the call (but preferably not later than November 1).

4. Identify additional candidates and ask all candidates to submit a vision statement.

5. Rank all candidates by email vote.

6. Contact candidates starting from the top ranked candidate.

August 21, 2017

(PASSED)

1. An ad hoc search committee shall be formed to appoint new editors in chief for TACL, to replace the resigning editors.

2. The search committee shall consist of the 6 members of the existing TACL steering committee + the current editors-in-chief + Graeme Hirst + Yejin Choi + Joakim Nivre (all three representatives of the ACL exec).

3. The search committee shall be chaired by Ido Dagan.

4. The search committee shall discuss names and come up with a ranked list of acceptable suggestions to the ACL exec.

5. The exec shall then vote on the ranked list.

6. The chair of the search committee shall contact the people on the ranked list, in order, until two have accepted. Should less than two invitees accept, the search process will restart with step 4.

August 18, 2017

(PASSED)

We appointed a working group to work out revised policies and guidelines for handling preprint papers in the review process for *ACL conferences.

The working group is composed of twelve people:

Jennifer Foster (ACL Exec)

Marti Hearst (ACL Exec)

Ming Zhou (ACL Exec)

Joakim Nivre (ACL Exec)

Paola Merlo (ACL Exec, CL editor)

Lillian Lee (TACL editor)

Iryna Guryvech (ACL2018 program co-chair)

Yusuke Miyao (ACL2018 program co-chair)

Amanda Stent (NAACL2018 program co-chair)

Heng Ji (NAACL2018 program co-chair)

Chris Manning

Jason Eisner

1. The working group shall submit a proposal for policies and guidelines that can be adopted for the 2018 conferences no later than October 1, 2017. The proposal shall specify under what conditions preprint papers (and other papers that have already been published in some form) can be submitted to *ACL conferences. It shall also provide guidelines for the citation of such papers and for the review of the papers themselves as well as papers that cite or fail to cite them.

2. The working group may in addition propose actions to be implemented as part of a long-term strategy to evolve our publishing and reviewing models over time.

3. The working group shall be chaired by Joakim Nivre.

August 13, 2017

(PASSED)

The ACL Exec approves the extention of Lillian Lee's term as the co-editor-in-chief of TACL to the end of 2019.

April 17, 2017

(PASSED)

We approve the guideline on remote conference participation: ACL Guidelines on Remote Conference Participation.

April 9, 2017

(PASSED)

(1) We approve revising the SIG creation guidelines, changing "hold elections for these positions every two years" to "hold elections for these positions at least every three years".

(2) We approve the creation of the special interest group on NLP and Education (SIG EDU).

April 1, 2017

(PASSED)

The ACL Exec adopts the ACL policy on political statements and actions (https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Policy_on_Political_Statements_and_Actions)

March 15, 2017

(PASSED)

The ACL Exec adopts the new rules and criteria for ACL fellows.

February 4, 2017

(PASSED)

The ACL Exec approves the statement about the immigration ban.

January 25, 2017

(PASSED)

We approve the procedure for composing the new Nominating Committee

January 8, 2017

(PASSED)

The ACL shall create an Ad Hoc Committee on Anti-Harassment Procedures for the 2017-18 period, including representatives of the ACL Exec as well as each chapter board, with a remit as follows:

Ad Hoc Committee on Anti-Harassment Procedures

The charge of the committee is to research and document best practices for handling complaints under the new anti-harassment policy and to make concrete recommendations to the ACL Executive on what procedures should be followed. The ACL Exec requests that a preliminary report be made to by June 30, 2017 in order to support discussion at the 2017 ACL Exec meeting with a final report by June 30, 2018.

November 24, 2016

(PASSED)

The ACL exec accepts the recommendations of the 2016 Fellows Selection Committee.

November 24, 2016

(PASSED)

ACL adopts the ACL Conflict-of-interest policy, Whistleblower Policy and ACL Document Retention and Destruction Policy.

October 18, 2016

(PASSED)

The ACL exec approves the Anti-Harassment Policy: Anti-Harassment Policy.

September 14, 2016

(PASSED)

We approve that the ACL Executive Committee proposes to the Membership that the ACL Constitution is amended by replacing the current Article V, Item 5, reading as follows:

   There shall be a Nominating Committee consisting of the three most recent Past Presidents, each serving for the three years following their own Presidency. The member whose term is about to expire shall chair the Committee. In case of a vacancy the Executive shall appoint a member to serve for the appropriate period.

with the following text:

   There shall be a Nominating Committee consisting of the three most recent Past Presidents, each serving for the three years following their own Presidency, and six ACL Fellows selected subject to diversity requirements set forth by the Executive.  The Past President whose term is about to expire shall chair the Nominating Committee for a period of one year. In case of a vacancy on the committee, the Executive shall appoint a member to serve for the remainder of the term of the vacating committee member.

September 12, 2016

(PASSED)

In order to better disseminate the outcomes of ACL Executive meetings to the ACL Membership and ACL Exec Members, for future meetings, the ACL Exec will make available public minutes of its meetings. These minutes may exclude portions covering discussion of matters that are deemed sensitive, personal or confidential. For ACL Exec members, the Secretary shall make known to new members of the Exec how they can access the archive of minutes of ACL Exec meetings. In addition, resolutions and agreed decisions (of policy or practice, even though they do not have the formal status of a resolution) made at ACL Exec meetings will be extracted and placed on public web pages. This extraction of resolutions and decisions (only) will be applied retrospectively, beginning with the ACL Exec meetings of 2011.

September 8, 2016

(PASSED) The ACL exec approved adding Stuart Shieber as a member of the TACL Steering Committee.

August 23 2016

(PASSED) The ACL exec decides (i) that talks at the ACL, NAACL, EACL and EMNLP conferences shall be video-recorded, (ii) that the recordings shall be given persistent storage and made available through links in the ACL anthology, and (iii) that the cost for making and storing the recordings shall be covered by the ACL as an organization outside the specific conference budgets.

August 19 2016

(PASSED) We accept the criteria for selecting the General Chair and Program Co-Chair:

Selecting a General Chair

Selecting a Program Co-Chair

August 7 2016

(PASSED) ACL no longer gives best student paper award.

August 7 2016

(PASSED) The exec accepts the report of the ad hoc committee on actions for equity and diversity and agrees with all seven recommendations in principle. The exec directs the ad hoc committee to proceed with an implementation plan for the recommendations to be presented to the exec for discussion and approval.

May 29 2016

(PASSED) We accept the LTA Nominating Committee's recommendation to give the 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award to [name withheld].

May 8 2016

(PASSED)

The ACL exec approves the policy on COI handling: http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Conflict-of-interest_policy.

March 21 2016

(PASSED)

The ACL exec approves the policy that TACL editors-in-chief are allowed to be appointed for a third term of up to three years.
Lillian Lee is appointed to a second term of 1 year and 9 months (January 2017 to September 2018)

March 17 2016

(PASSED)

The ACL exec approves the policy that all ACL conferences and sub-events must use START.
We will make a deal with Softconf that covers all ACL events for a single annual payment.

November 25 2015

(PASSED)

We approve the creation of the Ad Hoc Committee on Nominating Committees and ACL Fellows

The charge of the committee is to re-examine ACL policies and practices on the make-up of and procedures of nominating committees and the ACL Fellows program, and to make concrete recommendations to the ACL Executive on whether and how the current policies and practices should be changed. The remit encompasses the lifetime achievement awards election committee, the ACL Executive Nominating Committee, the ACL Fellows selection committee, and the ACL Fellows program. A primary concern is to consider whether there are appropriate ways of improving the actual or perceived openness, inclusiveness, diversity, and impartiality of these programs. The committee may also want to consider roles and responsibilities for ACL Fellows. The ACL Exec requests that the committee make a final report by June 30, 2016, so that any changes can be considered at the 2016 ACL Exec meeting, and put in place for the following year.

August 17 2015

(PASSED)

We approve the creation of SIGUR, a Special Interest Group on Uralic Languages.

June 26, 2015

 1. An ad hoc search committee shall be formed to appoint a new editor in chief for TACL, to join the current editor(s)-in-chief.

 2. The search committee shall consist of the 6 members of the existing TACL steering cmte + the current editor(s)-in-chief
    + Graeme Hirst + Gertjan van Noord + Chris Manning (all three as representatives of the current ACL exec).

 3. The search committee shall be chaired by Ido Dagan.

 4. The search committee shall discuss names and come up with a ranked list of acceptable suggestions to the ACL exec.

 5. The exec shall then vote on the ranked list.

 6. The chair of the search committee shall contact the people on the ranked list, in order, until one accepts.
    Should all invitees decline, the search process will restart with step 4.

May 20, 2015

(PASSED)

Until 2020, Transactions of the ACL shall have three co-editors in chief in order to complete the work needed to bring TACL out of start-up mode into a fully established state.

May 3, 2015

(PASSED)

We approve the CL publication agreement change proposed by Oracle for an article authored by Oracle employees. In summary, this replaces the second sentence of the agreement:

       By your signature below you hereby grant to the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), effective as of the date of this agreement, all your right, title, and interest including copyright in and to the Article.

by:

       By your signature below you hereby grant to the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), effective as of the date of this agreement, a five-year exclusive license in and to the Article according to the  terms of this Agreement.

Later parts of the agreement already give ACL non-exclusive rights to publish the article without time limit. The full red-lined agreement is attached.

I propose this on the understanding that we will move expeditiously towards providing a similar (but likely not identically worded) arrangement, not involving copyright transfer, for all authors, following further discussion by the Executive.

March 3, 2015

(PASSED)

ACL will split the surplus or loss on ACL 2015 with AFNLP

February 10, 2015

(PASSED)

Pushpak Bhattacharyya is hereby appointed as the representative of the ACL executive committee to AFNLP (Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing) for the duration of his term on the ACL executive committee.

January 2015

1. An ad hoc search committee shall be formed to find a replacement for Michael Collins as TACL co-editor-in-chief.

2. The search committee shall consist of the 6 members of the existing TACL steering cmte + Lillian Lee (TACL co-editor-in-chief) + Graeme Hirst + Gertan van Noord + Haifeng Wang (all three as representatives of the current ACL exec).

3. The search committee shall be chaired by Ido Dagan.

4. The search committee shall discuss names and come up with a ranked list of acceptable suggestions to the ACL exec.

5. The exec shall then vote on the ranked list.

6. The chair of the search committee shall contact the people on the ranked list, in order, until one accepts. Should all invitees decline, the search process will restart with step 4.

January 15, 2015

(PASSED)

The Executive Board of the Association for Computational Linguistics expresses its gratitude to Chiaki Nemoto for her work as bookkeeper for the Association for the last five years. Chiaki has been instrumental in bringing order to the Association's bookkeeping and financial records, and we are deeply appreciative of her work.

November 26, 2014

(PASSED)

The ACL exec approves the creation of the SIGSLAV Special Interest Group on Slavic Natural Language Processing

August 15, 2014

(PASSED)

The ACL exec appoints Hwee Tou Ng from the National University of Singapore as book review editor for Computational Linguistics. The position has a term of five years.

June 1, 2014

(PASSED)

The Executive Board of the Association for Computational Linguistics,

Inc., a not-for-profit organization registered in New Jersey as charity number CH-0820600, hereby confirms that it has authorized the Treasurer of its European Chapter to operate and be responsible for all its euro-denominated bank and investment accounts in Europe. The Board further confirms that the present Treasurer of its European Chapter is Dr Michael Rosner of the University of Malta.

January 10, 2014

(PASSED)

An ad hoc search committee shall be formed to find a replacement for Dekang Lin as TACL co-editor-in-chief.
The search committee shall consist of the 6 members of the existing TACL steering cmte + Michael Collins (TACL co-editor-in-chief) + Graeme Hirst + Gertan van Noord + Haifeng Wang (all three as representatives of the current ACL exec).
The search committee shall be chaired by Ido Dagan.
The search committee shall discuss names and come up with a ranked list of acceptable suggestions to the ACL exec.
The exec shall then vote on the ranked list.
The chair of the search committee shall contact the people on the ranked list, in order, until one accepts. Should all invitees decline, the search process will restart with step 4.

July 16, 2013

(PASSED) The exec engages Mr Tom Dartnell of Nisivoccia LLP as our new accountant as per his letter of engagement and we accept his recommendation that he start with an audit.

June 10, 2013

(FAILED) The program chairs of the ACL 2013 conference will be authorized to participate in the JAIR award track in 2013 http://www.jair.org/awardedpapers.html

May 7, 2013

(PASSED) The ACL exec approves the ACL Policy for DOI assignment and the ACL Information Office budget in separate resolutions

ACL policy for digital object identifier (DOI) assignment:
1. Allow the ACL Information Officer to revoke the current ACM/ACL agreement regarding DOIs he/she sees fit within the next twelve (12) months;
2. Allow the ACL Information Officer to pursue registering the ACL to become a DOI granting authority;
3. Allow the ACL Information Officer to register DOIs on the behalf of the Transactions of Computational Linguistics journal (TACL).
ACL Information Office budget (Note: supersedes / revokes previous resolution (Aug 2, 2011):
1. Approve a budget of 10,000 USD for the ACL Information Office to use during the 2013-2014 year (Apr 2013 -- Mar 2014), where surpluses from the budget can be rolled over to subsequent years;
2. Approve that the ACL Webmaster part-time position be given a salary of up to 30 USD / hour.

Oct 16, 2012

(PASSED) The editors of any ACL journal may submit to that journal, but in such cases the submitted paper will be handled by a third party. The same procedure will be followed for any papers submitted by those who work in the editor's laboratory, or who are otherwise closely associated with the editor in such a way that a conflict of interest might arise or be perceived.

For the purposes of this proposal, the third party handling the submitted paper will generally be one of the other editors. In the case of Computational Linguistics, the panel of editors consists of the editor-in-chief, the squibs editor and the book review editor; in the case of TACL, the panel of editors consists of the two editors-in-chief. In any circumstances agreed as exceptional by the relevant panel of editors, some other party may be asked to handle the submitted paper; the guiding principle is that there should be no perceived conflict of interest.

Aug 20, 2012

(PASSED) A person can register for ACL and CIPS simultaneously and receive a 20% discount on the membership fee from each organization.

June 15, 2012

(PASSED) The ACL exec approves the creation of a new SIG on Language Technologies for the Socio-Economic Sciences and the Humanities (SIGHUM).

Mar 18, 2012

(PASSED) We accept the LTA Nominating Committee's recommendation to give the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award to [name withheld].

(PASSED) The ACL executive committee approves the request from the editors of ACL TACL that reviewing of paper submissions to TACL should be double blind. More specifically, reviewers will not know the identities of the authors. Action editors and the journal editors will have access to the author identities.

Dec 23, 2011

(PASSED) The ACL exec approves the creation of Sections as internal structures of SIGLEX, each having an elected representative as an additional officer, with the corresponding change of their constitution. The first Section will be on Multiword Expressions. New Sections can be introduced when necessary.

Nov 23, 2011

(PASSED) The ACL exec approves the creation of the SIGSLP special interest group on speech and language processing for assistive technologies.

Aug 2, 2011

(PASSED)Motion regarding Ongoing Maintenance of the ACL Portal Website

Background: Currently we do not have any programming support allocated to the Portal. We either have to abandon the Portal by default (eventually it will need some maintenance) or develop it further, if only minimally.

Proposal:

1. We email the membership to see if we can find someone who has a student who knows Drupal (the content management system used by the website) and is able to work on a casual basis paid for between 4 and 8 hours per week. An appropriate rate of payment would be $30 per hour. The total cost of this would be between $6000 and $12000 per year.

2. We establish an ad hoc 'information services committee' consisting of three people who take responsibility for determining and directing the activities of the portal maintainer.

Jun 28, 2011

(PASSED) A summer school on NLP & IR is being held in cooperation with SIGIR just before SIGIR-2011 (see reference to http://nlp.blcu.edu.cn/others/nlpir-ss/ in http://www.sigir.org/events/events-upcoming.html).

We hereby approve 1 and 2.

(1) The summer school will be held in cooperation with the ACL

(2) The ACL will sponsor the summer school for $1000

Jun 3, 2011

(PASSED) The ACL executive committee appoints Haifeng Wang as its liaison to AFNLP for the remainder of his term on the ACL executive committee.

Dec 17, 2010

(PASSED) New eligibility criteria for reduced membership fees to start in 2011:

Regular rates: U.S., Canada, E.U. (except Romania and Bulgaria), Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, European microstates, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, U.A.E.

Reduced rates: All other countries.

Dec 15, 2010

(PASSED)

1 Background

Historically our journal production costs have consisted of two elements: the part-time editorial assistance hired by the editor, and the production work executed and managed by MIT Press. The part-time editorial assistance costs around A$15k per annum; this pays for one day a week of Suzy Howlett, our editorial assistant. The MIT Press costs, which cover copyediting, proofreading, typesetting, web hosting plus ancillary things like marketing and the handling of rights permissions have typically been on the order of US$45-50k per annum.

2 The New Model

We have worked out a new cost structure for the MIT Press production costs. There are a number of details here, but the major substantive elements are that (a) we are reducing some of the production costs by using a LaTeX-aware copy editor; and (b) MIT Press has agreed to substantially reduce its management overhead. Consequently, the new target per annum MIT Press cost is about US$28k, representing a saving of at least US$17k per annum. This figure assumes the journal stays the size that it currently is (640 pages per annum), so the number will go up if we publish more; but the per-page production costs are now vastly improved (note that the total costs include a relatively fixed-cost management element and a variable production cost based on # of pages).

3 The Proposed Package

My proposal consists of two elements.

[1] We sign up to the new MITP model for a five year period; and [2] we invest some of the savings -- I would suggest somewhere around US$5k per annum for the period-- in further developing our instance of the Open Journal System web-based manuscript management machinery.

The aim of this second element is to further streamline our processes with two aims in mind: (a) to enable us to handle larger volumes (and in particular to cater for some possible outcomes of the ongoing conference-->journal discussions), and (b) to build infrastructure that will make it easier for us to at some point go completely independent of third party publishers, should we choose to do that.

4 Risks and Benefits

I considered trying to replace MITP with our own resources; my estimate is that this would require us, amongst other things, to hire a one-day-per-week production manager. MIT Press has got very close to matching the costs of that by reducing their management overhead. For us this is less risky, since it's quite hard for us to find people to do this kind of work, but under the proposal model, that's MIT Press's problem. Similarly, I explored hiring our own LaTeX-aware copy editors; I found an excellent candidate (who it now looks like MIT Press will use for CL) and had him to do some test editing; he's very good. But accessing this resource through MIT Press again has the benefit that if he goes sick or otherwise becomes unavailable, it's MIT Press's job to find a replacement.

Nov 5, 2010

(PASSED) The ACL executive committee approves a new procedure for the sponsorship committee as set forth in the following document.

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Apr 14, 2010

(PASSED) Following the election of a Vice President Elect for 2010 from outside the Asia-Pacific region, which was the target region for last year's nominations by the nominating committee, the ACL Exec guides the nominating committee to nominate again candidates from that region. As implied by the ACL constitution, nominations from the floor will not be limited to any region.

Mar 22, 2010

(PASSED) The ACL executive committee allocates $3600 to Min Yen Kan for work on curating the ACL Anthology.

Mar 11, 2010

(PASSED) The ACL Exec would like to explore in depth the initiative for establishing a journal venue for conference publications, following the guidelines and open issues discussed at its teleconfernce on February 22, 2010. To that end, a committee is formed which will prepare a detailed proposal that can be brought up for vote by the exec. The target deadline for the committee to present the detailed proposal and recommendations to the Exec is April 15, 2010. The committee will consist of the following members:
Ido Dagan and Hwee Tou - co-chairs
Robert Dale - as CL editor
Graeme Hirst - as Treasurer
Dragomir Radev - as Secreatary
Paola Merlo and Ken Church

Jan 27, 2010

(PASSED) That Ben Phelan be paid the sum of A$15000 for the development of the ACL Member Portal, with this payment being made in two stages; one payment of AUD10000 by end January 2010, and the remaining A$5000 paid on June 30, 2010, this being the end of the six month period during which any bugs and problems identified in the portal are to be attended to.

November 13, 2009

(PASSED) ACL Endorsement of Scientific Meetings

The ACL is pleased to endorse scientific meetings organized by other bodies, so long as the following criteria are met:
1. It is an open scientific conference related to computational linguistics
2. Acceptance of submissions is based on genuine peer review
3. The conference appears to be competently organized
4. ACL membership materials are distributed at the conference
5. Understanding that there is no implication that ACL will host proceedings in the ACL Anthology

In order to receive ACL endorsement, please contact the ACL Secretary at secretary@aclweb.org. Please indicate how the conference meets the ACL's criteria.

October 21, 2009

(PASSED) The ACL exec extends the contract for the Computational Linguistics journal with MIT press by one more year, to include the 2010 calendar year.

July 7, 2009

(PASSED) The ACL exec approves the creation of the SIGFSM special interest group on finite-state methods.
Ido Dagan

March 11, 2009

(PASSED) The ACL exec approved the creation of the SIGMT special interest group on machine translation.
Ido Dagan

September 3, 2008

(PASSED) A Proposal for an ACL Member Portal
Robert Dale 6th August 2008

This document proposes that we put in place an ACL Member Portal on the web by 1st January 2009.

August 2008

(PASSED) The ACL exec approved the creation of the SIGBIOMED special interest group on biomedical NLP.
Steven Bird

June 10, 2008

(PASSED) Shadow Account Practices
Eduard Hovy, Donia Scott, Kathy McCoy, Mike Rosner, Diane Litman (reconstructed by Kathy McCoy 2/3/04)
Goal

To set up limited financial independence for ACL's daughter organizations (ACL chapters and SIGs).

1. Basic Structure: Shadow Accounts

1.1 All funds brought in by any ACL activity (conference, chapter conference, workshop, SIG workshop, grant, donation, membership, journal fees, etc.) ultimately belong to the ACL, unless explicitly specified to the contrary.

1.2 To give chapters and SIGs a certain amount of operational flexibility, and to facilitate affiliation of the ACL with other organizations, so-called Shadow Accounts will be set up. These accounts will record the amount of funds `belonging' to the daughter organizations.

1.3 The funds in a shadow account might be held either in a bank account separate from the principal ACL account, or they might simply be an amount earmarked as `belonging' to the daughter organization, or a mixture of the two. That is, the shadow account is a (possibly) virtual sub-account of the accounts of the international ACL.

1.4 A shadow account must be dissolved and its funds returned to the ACL either upon request of the ACL Executive, or when the daughter organization is dissolved.

2. Signature Authority and Usage

2.1 The shadow accounts will be managed by the ACL Treasurer, unless he or she allocates (partial or full) management to the daughter organization.

2.2 If management of a shadow account is allocated to the daughter organization, both the ACL Treasurer and the Treasurer of the organization will have signature authority over the shadow account.

2.3 Funds in shadow accounts can be spent by the daughter organizations without requiring formal approval from the central ACL Executive or its Treasurer, as long as this usage is consistent with the policies of the ACL. Usage of the funds in unusual ways requires approval from the ACL Executive.

2.4 To ensure consistency with ACL policies, the ACL Secretary will maintain a list of approved purposes for which shadow account funds can be used.

3. Satellite Shadow Accounts

3.1 All funds brought into a shadow account under conditions that explicitly forbid the funds to belong to the International ACL as a whole (for example, grants made by national institutions for local usage), will reside in satellite shadow accounts.

3.2 Such satellite shadow accounts will also include any monies brought in for activities that are independent of the International ACL (e.g., a grant to set up a website of training in CL within the chapter area) or monies tied to other specific projects (e.g., a grant specifically for students within the chapter area to attend ACL conferences).

3.3 Satellite accounts will be managed by the Treasurer of the daughter organization.

4. Reporting

3.1 Every year at the annual business meeting of the ACL (and also at the ACL Executive meeting that precedes it during the ACL conference), the daughter organization must provide full accounting of its financial activities during the past year, including the activity of satellite shadow accounts.

4.2 The daughter organization must provide full accounting of its financial activities to its own members at least once a year.

5. Maintaining a Minimum

5.1 At the beginning of every financial year, the ACL Treasurer will ensure that each shadow account contains a specified minimum, by transferring from the ACL central account the requisite amount. This minimum will not take into account the contents of satellite shadow accounts.

5.2 At the time of writing, the minimum for chapters is US$5000 and for SIGs is US$0.

6. Income and Loss

6.1 Unless explicitly designated otherwise by the giver, income derived from the activities of a daughter organization will be added to its shadow account. In the case of joint ACL-chapter conferences, the income will be split. A portion of the income will go to the shadow account and the remainder will belong to the ACL and be held in its central account.

6.2 At present, the above mentioned split will be 50-50 for chapters.

6.3 In a similar way, unless explicitly designated otherwise, any loss resulting from the activities of a daughter organization will be borne against the shadow account if the daughter. In the case of a joint ACL-chapter conference, any will be borne according to the same split proportion as the income. Any loss beyond the amount in a shadow account will be taken over by the central ACL. In such a situation, the central ACL will continue to ensure that the involved shadow account contains the agreed-upon minimum at the beginning of each financial year. However, it is expected that the portion of loss incurred by ACL will be paid back to ACL by the chapter, on the basis of the surplus from subsequent chapter activities.

6.4 Should the ACL Exec deem that the shadow account is consistently in a loss situation (e.g., because of the chapter acting in a fiscally irresponsible manner), the ACL may decide to resume control of the shadow account, at its discretion.

7. Definitions

1. "ACL" -- International Association for Computational Linguistics
2. "Chapter" -- a regional chapter of the ACL (EACL, NAACL)
3. "SIG" -- Special Interest Group of the ACL, formally accepted
4. "daughter organization" -- ACL chapter or SIG
5. "Central account" -- bank accounts, etc., held by ACL
6. "Shadow account" -- real or virtual bank accounts managed by daughter
7. "Satellite shadow account" -- bank accounts, etc., held by daughter for funds explicitly earmarked by provider for daughter usage only

May 31, 2008

(PASSED) The AFNLP representative to ACL will be invited to all ACL exec meetings but not included in the ACL exec mailing list.
(PASSED) Prof. Kam-Fai Wong's position as AFNLP representative to ACL is hereby approved, starting immediately and for the duration of his membership on the AFNLP board.

April 14, 2008

(PASSED) Copyright Transfer Agreement

Copyright to the above work (including, without limitation, the right to publish the work in whole or in part in any and all forms and media, now or hereafter known) is hereby transferred to the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), effective as of the date of this agreement, on the understanding that the work has been accepted for presentation at a meeting sponsored by the ACL and for publication in the proceedings of that meeting. However, each of the authors and the employers for whom the work was performed reserve all other rights, specifically including the following: (1) All proprietary rights other than copyright and publication rights transferred to ACL; (2) The right to publish in a journal or collection or to be used in future works of the author's own (such as articles or books) all or part of this work, provided that acknowledgment is given to the ACL and a full citation to its publication in the particular proceedings is included; (3) The right to make oral presentation of the material in any forum; (4) The right to make copies of the work for internal distribution within the author's organization and for external distribution as a preprint, reprint, technical report, or related class of document.

Exceptions: Some of the foregoing conditions will not apply if the work is not copyrighted or has a non-transferrable copyright, because it has been produced by government employees acting within the scope of their employment. In this case, exceptions can be made by ticking the appropriate box below:

[ ] The work has been produced by government employees acting within the scope of their employment and is not copyrighted

[ ] The work has been produced by government employees acting within the scope of their employment and has non-transferrable copyright

[ ] The work has been produced by government employees acting within the scope of their employment and the government reserves the right to reproduce the work for government purposes

By typing my signature below, I confirm that all authors of the work have agreed to the above and that I am authorized to sign this form on their behalf.

Signature (type your name):

Your job title (if not one of the authors):

Name and address of your organization:

April 9, 2008

(PASSED) The ACL exec appoints Mark Steedman as representative to AFNLP for the rest of his term on the exec.

September 14, 2007

(PASSED) The initial SIG organizer(s) may serve as the de facto officers for the first year, while a nomination/election process is being established; official elections must be held within the first year after approval of the SIG.

June 24, 2007

(PASSED) The ACL exec approves the creation of a new SIG, SIGANN for Annotation. The officers of SIGANN are Nancy Ide and Adam Meyers.

June 18, 2007

(PASSED) In order to clearly separate discussion from voting, the voting on ACL resolutions will be done via sending the vote via email to the ACL secretary. When the vote is over, the secretary will send a summary of the vote (including the names and votes) back to the executive committee and also record the status of the vote (minus the names) on the resolutions page.

In special circumstances, the exec can decide *in advance of the vote* to change this procedure for valid reasons.

June 8, 2007

(PASSED) To accept Singapore's bid for the 2009 ACL/IJCNLP conference.
(PASSED) The surpluses or deficits (as the case may be) will be shared 50-50 between ACL and AFNLP. AFNLP chooses to share its share 50-50 with the local organizers.

May 16, 2007

Three related proposals about ACL's 2008 conference:

(PASSED) PROPOSAL 1 : long and short tracks. The 2008 conference maintains the NAACL HLT distinction between long and short papers, where short papers have a serious submission number, a serious reviewing, a Coling-level acceptance rate (about 40%), and a different profile (new ideas, smaller results, smaller experiments) with different submission and reviewing requirements (completed work not required) and a much later submission deadline.
(PASSED) PROPOSAL 2 : the structure of the PC. There are 4 PC co-chairs: 1 NLP for long papers, 1 NLP for short papers, 1 Speech (for both long and short), 1 IR (for both long and short). The senior PC will be different for long and short papers (though potentially with overlap). The short paper PC will also handle demos. The Speech and IR co-chairs should have at least some visibility in the general NLP field.
(PASSED) PROPOSAL 3 : name. The conference has a name that (a) includes "HLT" in its short name and (b) "Human Language Technologies" in its long name. For specificity, this proposal is: "ACL-08:HLT" and "The 46th Annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies".

May 2007

Free registration for some conference officials

(PASSED) The General Chair, all PC co-chairs, and all local chairs (up to three) get free registration (not including the banquet) to ACL conferences. The free registration does not include ACL membership (it is assumed that people in these positions would already be ACL members).

July 2006

Internet access at conferences

(PASSED) Some recent conferences have not provided quality internet access. It was either too slow or limited. It was proposed that future conferences should provide easy access to fast internet (either as part of registration or for a separate fee). It is important that internet access is not restricted to a small number of ports (e.g., port 80) but rather to allow all ports normally used by mainstream internet protocols, including ssh, vpn, and remote desktop access.