2021Q3 Reports: AACL-IJCNLP 2020

‘’’Final Report of AACL-IJCNLP-2020’’’

By Kam-Fai Wong, General Chair

(May 2021)

Introduction

The 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (AACL-IJCNL-2020) virtually hosted by Soochow University, China, December 4-7 2020.

After a long period of observation since the beginning of 2020, due to the growing severity of the pandemic worldwide, the local organizing committee recommended to organize AACL-IJCNL-2020 virtually in September 2020. This was a difficult decision; but for safety reason, the team and I believed this was the right choice. Organization of a virtual conference was unconventional. It created a new set of challenging problems unfamiliar to the team. Fortunately, ACL2020 took place before AACL-IJCNLP-2020 and we learned much from their experience.

The Conference was participated by 488 members (172 regular and 316 students), out of which 69 and 61 are respective new members. Overall, the Conference made a net income of CNY 107,530.93.

This report summarizes the work of the (a) program, (b) tutorial, (c) workshop, (d) student workshop, (e) demo, (f) diversity & inclusion (D&I), (g) local organization committees. Reports of these committees are presented in the appendixes, respectively. Also, the final finance report is presented in a separate excel file. The file also included a list of new ACL members recruited by the conference.

Program

The program co-chairs Kevin Knight and Hua Wu did an excellent job in putting together a very interesting program with 92 papers from 392 submission worldwide. The program also includes two star keynote speakers, Percy Liang, Stanford University, and Song-Chun Zu, UCLA, to share with us their insights in “semantic parsing” and “explainable AI” respectively. These are hot topics both in pure and applied research. Selecting the papers from nearly 400 submissions was itself a difficult task but it was compounded by the complication in the design of the virtual program. Kevin and Hua had to take into account of the different time zones of the authors and audience and was rather tricky. Nevertheless, after many iterations, they came up with the current exciting program.

Workshops, Tutorials, Demo, Student Workshops and D&I

The conference is accompanied by 7 workshops and 6 tutorials. We participated in the joint selection processes with other ACL related conferences. The workshop co-chairs, Wei Gao and Lu Wang as well as the tutorial co-chairs Timothy Baldwin and Fei Xia did a wonderful job to select these very educational and trendy topics. In addition, despite the busy program schedule, with the dedication of the student workshop co-chairs, Lun-Wei Ku and Vincent Ng, we also put up a student research workshop; and with the dedication of the demo co-chairs, Douwe Kiela and Derek Wong, we accepted 7 system projects out of 15 for demonstration. As a part of ACL’s Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) initiative, we introduced the Widening NLP (WiNLP) session in the first day of the conference. Xiangyu Duan and Tirthankar Ghosal, the D&I co-chairs, were very creative in organizing the session and other virtual D&I gathering events.

Publications

The publication co-chairs Steve DeNeefe and Satoshi Sekine worked diligently and carefully to collect the accepted papers for compilation of the electronic proceedings. Following the ACL guidelines, the papers are also included in the ACL Anthology. Since AACL-IJCNLP-2020 is a virtual conference, we decided not to compile a physical handbook. As such, information about the conference is made available online.

Local Organization

The local organization committee was chaired by Min Zhang. As usual, LOC is the committee which does all the ‘dirty’ jobs, ie hands-on work. Under Min’s leadership, LOC did a fantastic job in looking after all the details in local arrangement. Organizing a virtual conference was new to Min and the LOC. They put extra time and effort to ensure every single organization details were properly arranged. I also appreciated the frustration of the LOC at the beginning. They booked all the venues while the spreading of the COVID19 pandemic showed no sign of slowing down. We waited until September before we decided not to go for the face-to-face option, which left us with rather little ime to prepare for the virtual conference. I am glad that we finally make it.

Working closely with the LOC, the remote presentation co-chairs, Nanyun Peng, Zhongqing Wang and Muyun Yang liaised with the program committee, demonstration committee, workshop committee, and tutorial committee to ensure presentations would be done smoothly. The webmaster, Junhui Li, was also part of the LOC, to ensure information related to the conference was timely distributed. Mirella Lapata, Haizhou Li and Qun Liu, the publicity co-chairs, made use of this conference information for international publicity through different channels, eg ACL, SIGIR, AAAI etc communities, and media. Eg. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Email, Wechat, etc.

Sponsorship

I would like to thank Baidu and Huawei for their generous sponsorship. In addition, Baidu also sponsored the Best Paper Award. Thanks are due to the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) for sponsoring the ZOOM licenses, which are essential for the virtual conference; Bloomberg for supporting D&I activities; and Grammarly for free licenses which helped authors to improve the readability of their papers.