2019Q3 Reports: General Chair
================================== ACL 2019 report from the General Chair (for the ACL exec meeting)
The 57th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2019) will take place in one week time in Florence, Italy. ACL 2019 will be held at the Fortezza da Basso Convention Center from July 28 through August 2, 2019. This is the first time that the ACL annual conference visits Italy. Tutorials will be held on Sunday, July 28; the main conference on Monday, July 29 through Wednesday, July 31; and the workshops on Thursday/Friday, August 1-2.
The activities that I undertook as General Chair were:
- Selecting part of the organizing committee.
The Local Organization Co-Chairs (Alessandro Lenci, Bernardo Magninin, and Simonetta Montemagni), the venue, and the PCO (Maria Cristina Schiavone - MCI Group) which runs the local arrangements were already selected when I joined the team. I was invited to participate on the selection process of the Program Co-chairs (Anna Korhonen and David Traum), but the appointments were made by the ACL 2019 coordinating committee, as it corresponds. In my capacity of General Chair I appointed the following co-chairs: Workshop Co-Chairs (Barbara Plank and Sebastian Riedel), Tutorial Co-Chairs (Preslav Nakov and Alexis Palmer), Demo Co-Chairs (Enrique Alfonseca, Marta R. Costa-jussà), SRW Faculty Advisors (Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Aurelie Herbelot, Scott Wen-tau Yih and Yue Zhang), Student Research Workshop Co-Chairs (Fernando Alva-Manchego--from the EACL Student Board, Eunsol Choi and Daniel Khashabi), Publication Co-Chairs (Douwe Kiela and Ivan Vulić), Conference Handbook Co-Chairs (Elena Cabrio and Rachele Sprugnoli), and Mentorship Co-Chairs (Rada Mihalcea, Robert Frederking and Aakanksha Naik). In doing so, I tried to have a good balance, across the organizing team, on different dimensions (gender, seniority, academia vs. industry, geography, etc.). Some of the co-chairs were incorporated later, when we realized the actual size of the conference, and the amount of work involved. Shay Cohen and Kevin Gimpel, from ACL 2018, took an advisory role for the Publications Co-Chairs. The local organization team took care of appointing several other chairs: Local Sponsorship Co-Chairs (Roberto Basili and Giovanni Semeraro), Publicity Co-Chairs (Felice Dell'Orletta, Lucia Passaro and Sara Tonelli), Conference App Chair (Andrea Cimino), Web Manager (Sacha Bourdeaud'Hui), Student Volunteer Coordinators (Dominique Brunato, Marco Senaldi and Giulia Venturi), and Remote Presentations Chair (Alberto Lavelli).
- Coordination
My main activity was coordinating the different co-chairs and to support them in some of their decisions. Initially, the main interactions were with the Tutorials and Workshops Co-chairs, as they were involved in the joint selection process since September 2018, together with NAACL and EMNLP. During the last months there was a peak of interaction around the creation of all the conference materials (proceedings---main conference, SRW, Demos, Tutorials, workshops--- handbook, website program, conference app, etc.). This involved the coordination of all co-chairs in the previous areas, with a heavy pivot on the Publications Co-chairs, Handbook Co-chairs and Local organizers. During all the process, I had a regular communication with the Program Co-chairs, and I tried to provide useful advice and assist them in several decisions, especially regarding the novelties they implemented. The communication was generally via email, but we needed some coordination videoconf meetings along the process. I had also the opportunity to participate in the committee to select the best paper awards, together with the Program Co-chairs. I also spent also a considerable amount of time double checking a variety of materials being produced (calls, website content, program, handbook, etc.) and providing feedback when possible. One of the main headaches for the organization of ACL 2019 was adapting to the conference growth. The venue setting was planned with the size estimates from 2 years ago, which fell very short. After knowing the number of submitted papers we revised the projections and the plans for the conference venue. More space was booked (with updated contracts) to ensure a smooth conference with ~3,000 persons. We needed some coordination videoconfs to do this revision of plans with the Program Co-Chairs, The Local Organizers and the ACL Business Manager, Priscilla Rasmussen. Priscilla and the Local team worked very well to find reasonable solutions. The interaction with Priscilla was extremely useful on a variety of matters (logistics, estimations, sponsorship, registration, student grants, coordination, etc.) for me and for many other co-chairs. My communication with her was regular throughout the last months. Finally, I also coordinated some decisions with the ACL officers: President (initially Marti Hearst, then Ming Zhou), Secretary (Shiqi Zhao) and Conference Officer (Barbara Di Eugenio). They were very constructive and available always. My relation to ACL also involved the participation in the ACL exec meetings Q1 and Q3 of 2019.
- New Chair Positions
ACL 2019 maintained most of the Chair positions from 2018, with the following exceptions:
- We incorporated Mentoship Co-Chairs (Rada Mihalcea, Robert Frederking and Aakanksha Naik). The goal of the Mentorship program is to help newcomers to navigate the conference, and to provide career advice to young researchers. This is a replica of what was done at NAACL 2019 under the activities organized by the Diversity & Inclusion Co-Chairs. After talking to NAACL 2019 co-chairs (Jason Eisner and Natalie Schluter) we considered also having a full-fledged Diversity & Inclusion committee, but it was a bit late and part of the activities run by them were already taken care by the Local organizers (e.g., onsite options for childcare) and Priscilla, so we decided to focus on the Mentorship program only for 2019. This is a matter to be discussed by the Chairs of ACL 2020.
- We did not feel the need for a Video Chair, given that most of the job is taken under the contract with the venue.
- Some teams incorporated additional co-chairs, because of the extra work involved.
- The need for a Remote Presentation chair was identified very late. The local organizers appointed two co-chairs (Alberto Lavelli and Simone Filice). Their name will appear in the website and on our reports, but unfortunately they will not appear in the proceedings or handbook.
- Topics for discussion for ACL and the organizers of future conferences.
- Conference growth: the conference is growing to a size that involves *a lot* of work (from Program Chairs to Local Organization). The organization relies mainly on volunteers, who work based on their personal experience and collective memory. The chairs are doing an amazing job, but sometimes lack some expertise and resources to do their job more efficiently. I believe ACL should invest in improving the resources provided to the conference organizers, especially to support very complex processes (like the compilation of proceedings) and very time-demanding tasks.
- The ACL conference handbook needs to be updated (to better support some of the following points).
- We need a better description of the process to coordinate the generation of the proceedings and associated materials as this is a very complex process involving many different co-chairs (Publications, Program, Demos, SRW, Tutorials, Workshops, Handbook, App, Webmaster). There are numerous sub-tasks to be performed and many interrelations among them, most of the time operating under a tight schedule. I believe we need a description of all these tasks and dependencies in a timeline, describing who owns what, and what is the flow of the data. We also need more standardized software (scripts) to support several of the tasks involved, especially to generate the input needed for conference app and website program. See more information in the reports by the Publications Chairs, Local Organizers, etc.
- Having the webmaster task run by the PCO has some advantages (e.g., the look of the website is more professional), but also requires more interaction and continuous feedback to explain them what is what we want exactly. This is because they are not familiar with our type of conferences. Maybe it would be interesting to have a second co-chair from the scientific side to support the PCO webmaster. I invested a lot of time myself on this task.
- We generated a Handbook one more time, but my impression is that this can be the last printed version of the handbook in ACL. Even though there is percentage of people who like the hard copy, with the current size of the program the handbook is becoming impractical, more costly, and unfriendly for the environment. Moreover, it adds a lot of stress to the compilation process (printing deadlines are really hard) and makes it very difficult to include last minute changes. We should seriously consider a final transition to the electronic version.
- Communication happens more and more on the social media channels and less on email. For instance we did not send any email with a reminder of the early-registration deadline. We announced it on the website and on twitter, and we missed (unintentionally) the email. This generated some complaints. I believe we need more clear indications in the handbook about the ways to communicate each of the messages.
- Internal communication. We used slack and email. The idea was to use slack channels for faster interaction among sub-teams of people, but the lack of consistency and low traffic in slack made us to slowly shift to the more traditional email. I am probably the main culprit for that, because I personally did not find the interaction through slack very practical (especially regarding information search, and also as a means to keep a stable repository of information). But keeping both communication media in parallel was confusing.
- Keep in mind that the communication between the Workshop Co-chairs and the workshop organizers is also very important. We need very pro-active Workshop Co-chairs because the workshop organizers tend to make unilateral decisions without telling about deadlines, workshop schedule, generation of proceedings, etc. Some flexibility can be adopted but a unified calendar and scheduling for all workshops has to be encouraged. BTW, this year the Workshop Co-Chairs did an excellent job on this aspect, but it can be really a mess if this is overlooked.
- The coordination for student grants between SRW co-chairs and the Student Volunteer Coordinators has to be improved too.