2021Q1 Reports: Office

Priscilla Rasmussen, 19 March 2021

1st Quarter 2021 Executive Board Meeting

ACL Business Office Report

Although we have moved into the virtual world for 2020 and 2021 conferences, there is still a lot of work to be managed by the Office. Both Pat and I have been consumed with both ACL and EMNLP 2020, especially regarding registrations, memberships and sponsorships. It is a lighter load than when holding in-person conferences because the physical setup aspects are not needed but, to a lesser extent they have been replaced with a different set of questions and concerns.

And, with the tremendous growth of our conferences, we have been overrun with requests for invoices and more proper receipts. I hope that when Nitin has some free time, between the registration form builders and Nitin, they might come up with an automated application process, similar to the visa letter requests, for paid-in-full invoices/receipts and certificates of attendance to reduce the hundreds of requests currently handled individually.

We decided to continue more formally with Young Associates as the accountant and this means a fairly high learning curve for both Pat and me to learn Quickbooks and the process of working effectively with the Young Associates team. The teaching of Pat and me has not happened yet but, after the 2020 taxes are filed, we will turn our attention to this. In the long term, this should improve and expedite our accounting and payment functions. .

Pat Kirby continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations regarding membership entries, managing conference registrations as well as working with me in preparation for and during our conferences. Plus she continues to do more of the bank statement reconciliations and expenditure posting. She will be important for our conversion to Quickbooks. Cathy Magnusson, my more part-time second assistant, continues communicating with the sponsors and exhibitors (who take a lot of our time and have lots of questions) and she seems to excel in following up on sponsorship delinquent payments and registrations that are declined or invalid and is doing a great job in financial recovery.

For the ACL initiatives on anti-harassment and diversity & inclusion (D&I), we have continued to include most items requested to be included on the registration form, with refinements as we learned what works best. The anti-harassment effort is working quite well. For the D&I initiative, the highly successful mentoring option has been included for the ACL and EMNLP 2020 conferences as well as the question about needing assistance, etc. Overall, some very good and well received initiatives resulted from the D&I efforts in 2019 and are continuing in 2020 and 2021 and the dedication shown by the committees and leaders are impressive.

My hope is that by making the accounting move to Quickbooks, we will be better equipped to handle the ever-increasing numbers of conference attendees and there will be 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 and monitor working budgets, review bids, make initial approaches to potential sponsors, oversee Office operations, etc. As previously explained, very cyclical employees are difficult to find and/or retain and, with the COVD-19 pandemic, it is fortunate that additional employees were not hired. The office has been closed since early March except for bi-weekly visits I have made to check on things. Going to 100% virtual conferences for 2020 has shifted more of the complex planning and pre-conference management from the Office (planning space utilization, catering, and all onsite in-person arrangements) to the Organizing Committee and especially the General Chair and Infrastructure Team.

I am beginning to formulate some ideas which may include engaging a Professional Conference Organizer (PCO) to work on all conferences to greater or lesser extent, as needed. After I am able to discuss this idea and expand it into something more complete that I can propose, I will come back to this.

And, in November, I completed about 10 hours of being interviewed by a professional ethnographer. I believe Hinrich has the final report from her.

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 been good for both them and the ACL. We have received $1,937.27 covering the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th quarters of 2020.

MIT Press Journals has been paid for their invoices covering the 2019-2020 academic year for services supporting both the CL and TACL journals. These invoices totaled $82,379.07.

Our journals pay editorial assistants to help with the process. The CL Journal’s assistant has not submitted an invoice for work in 2020. The TACL Journal’s assistant was paid $13,755.00 for August 2020 through January 2021.

Membership:

We began 2020 with 94 members who were in a multi-year membership and about 274 members renewed on their own. I am very happy to report we ended 2020 with a total of 6,246 members which is an increase of 1,101 members over the close of 2019. As is becoming more standard, most memberships come from conference registrations. This includes most of the ACL and EMNLP 2020 members who renewed or joined along with their conference registrations. I believe the AACL-IJCNLP 2020 registrants were instructed to visit the ACL Member Portal to make their memberships. This indicates the continuing growth of our field and conferences...Only three years ago, membership was under 3,000. Additionally, it appears that holding virtual conferences allows more people, especially students, to be able to afford and attend conferences and pay memberships. Typically, regular vs student memberships had been 60/40% or even 65/35% but for 2020, the numbers are 49/51% regular vs student. This may indicate that there will be a continuing need/desire for some portion of our future conferences to be virtual or hybrid to broaden the possibilities for people who may be under-funded or for other reasons cannot travel to in-person meetings to still be able to benefit from our 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 70 or more countries on a regular basis. Countries represented in 2020 totaled 86, reflecting the increasingly successful WiNLP and Diversity & Inclusion outreach efforts. Please refer to the Membership Report and Members By Country report for full details.

Occasionally inquiries come to the Office about what the benefits of ACL membership are and whether a particular country qualifies for the hard currency discount. It would be good to 1) update and more prominently post member benefits at the portal and 2) annually update the countries qualifying for hard currency discounts. I would also recommend making the location for posting job announcement more prominent at the portal.

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 new policy for future years.

Conferences:

For the 2020 conferences as well as the upcoming 2021 conferences, the Office focus is on advising, helping select virtual platforms for the conference, creating and monitoring the working budget, creating and managing registrations as usual, working with sponsors and exhibitors to ensure they still received promotion and recognition of their support, working with the Organizing Committee members (especially the general, program, tutorial, workshop chairs and D&I chairs).

ACL 2020, intended to be in Seattle, was held 100% virtually due to the COVD-19 pandemic and was a difficult decision. We were successful in avoiding very large penalties by negotiating the contracts to reschedule both the hotels and the social event space and caterers to now be NAACL 2022 This dramatically changed my role in particular in that I did not have to be concerned with the physical conference setup, space requirements, av and catering contracts and arrangements, exhibits’ physical setups, etc. I worked very closely with Dan Jurafsky as General Chair and the marvelous infrastructure team and other organizers. With this team, one of my largest ongoing interactions was in providing lists of the registrants so they could be sent individualized conference access information. Overall, this went well but there were a couple of snags which were overcome and will hopefully be avoided for upcoming meetings. The Office was always available to offer advice and registration lists and statistics, track and approve the budget expenditures, monitor registrations and work with the tutorial and workshop chairs and organizers; these became the primary roles of the Local Arrangements Chair. The more successful D&I initiatives (mentoring, preferred names, accessibility/assistance, registration payment assistance, helping to purchase greater bandwidth for some attendees in Africa, coordination for time zones and scheduling, etc.) were incorporated into this conference.

ACL 2019 in Italy ended with 3,283 registrations and Virtual ACL 2020 ended with a total of 4,973 registrations, with regulars accounting for 47% and students numbering 51% of all registrations (the 2% was staff, organizers, sponsors and exhibitors). I believe a part of this increase was due to our need for 250-300 volunteers rather than the normal 75-100. This large increase in volunteer awards and the much lower cost of registration allowed for many more students and younger attendees.

For Virtual EMNLP 2020, Bonnie Webber as General Chair, and her team of Program Chairs seemed to have managed almost all parts of the conference with little outreach to the Office. Again, due to COVD-19, the decision was made to hold this as a 100% virtual meeting and we were fortunate enough to be able to negotiate moving the in-person meeting to 2021 at the same all-inclusive resort, the Barcelo Bavaro Resort in Punta Cana, thereby avoiding large penalties. Bonnie and her team have been communicating with Dan and watching closely what was involved in holding our first virtual meeting of ACL 2020. And, I acted as Local Arrangements Chair in doing the same sort of things as for ACL 2020, working with the sponsors and exhibitors, managing registrations, maintaining the working budget, but with little overall involvement. EMNLP 2019 numbered 1,939 final registrations and EMNLP 2020 closed with a total of 4,069, of which 46% were regular and 52% were students (the other 2% were sponsors, exhibitors, etc.).

EACL 2021 is well under way as a 100% virtual meeting rather than being in-person in Kiev. Paola Merlo, as General Chair, plus her team are expecting to open registration any day now. Paola had consulted with both Bonnie Webber and Dan Jurafsky to learn what worked well and what to avoid and, of course, has been in close communication with the Office for ideas, answers and making payments when necessary. They have brought in close to $19,000 in sponsorships so far and more is expected. The hope, I think, is to possibly hold an in-person meeting in Kiev in the future.

NAACL 2021, led by Kristina Toutanova, was contracted to be held in-person in Mexico City but, again due to COVID-19 instability, the contracts are being negotiated to now be NAACL 2024 in Mexico City in June with no penalties for these changes. The negotiations and NAACL Board’s decision were only made this week and being 100% virtual will be announced within a few days. Kristina and her team are beginning to put the virtual plan in place and the Office is coordinating the building of the registration form and working budget.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021 was decided this week to be 100% virtual rather than in-person or hybrid in Bangkok, with no apparent penalties being incurred. The virtual planning will now begin. It is hoped that a future ACL meeting can take place in Bangkok. And, the Office stands ready to help in any way, the first thing being to pull together registration fees, expenses (especially virtual platforms costs) and contracts to help guide both NAACL and ACL-IJCNLP 2021 organizers in their planning.

So far, it seems that EMNLP 2021, November in Dominican Republic, may stay as an in-person event or at least as a hybrid. No decisions have been made yet but it is hoped that COVID-19 might be less threatening and people will mostly be vaccinated so it may be safe enough by November to travel. The other reason to be somewhat optimistic is that, once there, there is little reason to leave the resort. With many restaurants, beaches, nightclub, bowling alley, theaters, etc. there are ample things to keep people occupied and safely catered to without going outside “the bubble”.

While it is always difficult to project attendance at conferences, we now face the difficulty of having to negotiate and enter into venue contracts at least two years in advance for in-person meetings but cannot predict whether our conferences will continue to grow substantially or if the numbers will level out. Now that we have held our first virtual conference, there may be a demand for fully virtual or hybrid conferences in the future. This has implications in how much space we contract and, if too much, be locked into space we may not need at a convention center with very high costs. Also, whatever space is contracted for a particular conference tends to lock the Program Chairs into presenting the posters in a certain way and removes their flexibility in planning the program. And, if hybrid conferences are desired, we could run the danger of defaulting on contracts we are in or may negotiate before this decision is made. The space/catering/av may not be required at the amounts contracted, placing us in a position of not meeting contracted amounts. Or, conversely, we may need to pay space rental if our catering and guest rooms are not at a high enough level to gain complimentary space as we do now.

Conference Sponsorship:

ACL 2020 ended their conference with $260,440 in main conference sponsorships plus WiNLP 2020 with $57,500 and other workshops had a combined total of $6,000 and the D&I received $17,247. EMNLP 2020 ended their conference with $152,270 in main conference sponsorships plus $13,600 brought in by various workshops. These donations were from many of our faithful continuing sponsors such as Amazon, Apple, Bablelcape, Baidu, Bloomberg, Bytedance, Deep Mind, Facebook, G-Research, Google, Grammarly, IBM, ISI, Johns Hopkins, Megagon, Microsoft, Naver Labs Europe, Poly AI, and Two Sigma plus newly returning sponsors including Adobe and Alibaba. We did lose one sponsor at the Platinum level (Duolingo) and one Exhibitor (Flitto) due to COVD-19 but, given the pandemic, we were fortunate that our sponsors stayed with us and contributed at similar levels to what they had done in the past.

AACL-IJCNLP had two main conference sponsors totaling $8,500 from Baidu and Bloomberg. There may have been other sponsorships donated directly to the local organizing team. A report of this conference’s registrations and financials has been requested.

The idea of offering 2-Pack or 3-Pack options and including EMNLP allows sponsors to make one payment to support multiple events in a given year rather than one at a time. This has made sponsoring easier, especially for our ongoing sponsors. For the 2020 Sponsorship Booklet we continued to offer these multi-pack options including AACL 2020, ACL 2020, and EMNLP 2020, which has resulted in some first-time as well as repeating commitments and sometimes at higher levels. With the new Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) initiative continuing since NAACL 2019, we kept and updated the section giving options to sponsor this. However, once it was decided that, due to COVD-19, both ACL and EMNLP 2020 would be 100% virtual, about half of the benefits assured to sponsors could no longer be promised since they were in-person benefits (exhibit space, inserts into conference bags, logos emblazoned on conference bags, ads in conference handbooks, etc.). To encourage sponsors to continue their support, the benefits were adjusted to include what could be offered from the in-person Sponsorship Booklet and add the additional benefits of free virtual exhibit space to all but Bronze, Supporter and Publisher levels, ability to receive a list of registrants who indicated they were looking for employment and wanted their information shared, full Participant List (with those who expressed not wanting to share contact information culled from the list), and exhibiting allowed for the full 6 days rather than just the main conference 3 days.

Chris Callison-Burch, our new Sponsorship Director, has already had an impact on our sponsorship efforts. We now have a sleek new and updated 2021 Sponsorship Booklet which looks more professional and appealing. Most all of the levels and benefit remain the same except, even for virtual meetings, only Diamond and Platinum levels receive complimentary exhibiting and all others must pay for this option. Chris has also been very successful in finding and getting commitments for regional sponsor co-chairs to serve (there should be 2 from Asia, 2 from Europe and 2 from the Americas, plus Chris and Priscilla rounding out the full committee). And, he has taken a good part of the growing demands of working with the individual sponsors off of the Office’s list of duties. We have been working closely and very successfully to gather 2021 sponsors for all ACL conferences in 2021.