2019Q3 Reports: EACL

Finances:

Nothing has changed since the Q1 report.

After 3 years, EACL is still awaiting the transfer of our share of the Berlin surplus to the European account. We will need these funds to pay for EACL 2021 preparations and for student sponsorships next year, as our account is now virtually empty. While ACL has offered to directly pay immediate costs such as the EACL 2021 venue down payment, this issue is now impacting our ability to operate independently in cases such as sponsorships, since our budget is not known and funds are not immediately available.

Website:

The new website has now gone live at eacl.org, thanks to the efforts of our student members.

EACL 2020 Conference:

(This item should have been included in the previous quarterly report.)

After considerable effort to get the EACL 2020 conference bid in shape, it ultimately became clear late last year that this bid could not go ahead. This was mainly due to the venue's restrictions on PCO, and the unresponsiveness and uncooperativeness of the required PCO. This left us in a very difficult position, as this was the only bid under consideration and we were already far behind schedule after spending time attempting to work with this bid. In the end the board decided that it was simply not feasible to find another location for EACL 2020 in time while also starting the bidding process for EACL 2021. Therefore we will not be holding a conference in 2020, but we are now making good progress with plans for EACL 2021 (see below).

This issue was partly created through a decision early on to curate only a single bid that looked promising, so as to avoid extra work and disappointment for some parties by soliciting competitor bids. We have therefore returned to the approach of multiple bids for EACL 2021. However this experience has also prompted a larger ongoing re-think of the conference bidding process -- see under Plans below.

EACL 2021 Conference:

We assessed two final bids in early April and have chosen one of these as the site of EACL 2021. We have confirmed the dates and overall costs with the venue and are currently in the process of negotiating a contract. We plan to announce the location publicly once the contract has been signed. We have also begun the process of nominating and recruiting a General Chair.

Plans:

As the size of the EACL conference has grown, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find potential venues and hosts willing to provide the local organization. We plan to investigate ways to improve this in the future, including alternatives to the traditional bidding and organization model.

EACL Officers as of 1 July 2019:

Chair: Sharon Goldwater (University of Edinburgh, UK)

Chair-elect: Shuly Wintner (University of Haifa, Israel)

Secretary: Lucia Specia (Imperial College and University of Sheffield, UK)

Treasurer: Claudia Borg (University of Malta)

Past Treasurer: Mike Rosner (University of Malta)

Advisory Board:

• Angeliki Lazaridou (DeepMind, UK)
• Barbara Plank IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
• Preslav Nakov (QCRI, Qatar)
• Ivan Titov (University of Edinburgh, UK)

Nominating Committee:

• Walter Daelemans (University of Antwerp, Belgium)
• Iryna Gurevych (TU Darmstadt, Germany)
• Lluís Màrquez (Amazon)
• Caroline Sporleder (GCDH, Göttingen)

Student Board:

• Fernando Alva-Manchego (University of Sheffield, UK)
• Michael Schlichtkrull (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
• Madhumita Sushil (University of Antwerp, Belgium)