2021Q3 Reports: EACL 2021

EACL 2021 was held from the 21st to the 23rd of April, 2021. While we were planning to hold the conference in Kyiv, due to the current COVID situation the conference was held entirely online. EACL 2021 was also an anchor conference to several workshops and tutorials, held on April 19th and 20th, also online. We were able to benefit from ACL 2020 and EMNLP 2020 experience with online conferences and their advice, especially on how to build the infrastructure team and what services to outsource, and hurdles, and the conference ran without glitches.

EACL 2021 received 1,400 submissions, which required recruiting 1691 reviewers, 149 area chairs, and 34 senior area chairs. After the reviewing process, 326 papers were accepted, for an acceptance rate of 24.7 percent.

At conference time, we had a whopping number of 1331 participants, from 71 different countries.

A few decisions were different from usual and deserve discussion:

- on advice from previous online conference organisers, we hired a professional conference organiser to handle registration. This is also needed to abide by European regulations, a current solution used elsewhere based on an American private provider (Amazon) not being compliant.

- fees were set at a higher rate than ACL 2020 or EMNLP 2020, mostly because 1) it was hard to estimate how many people would participate in the conference since we did not have any recent statistics, the last recent EACL dating back to 2017 and also not in a Covid online situation; 2) we did not expect, correctly, high levels of sponsorship.

- in compensation, we distributed a large number of free registrations to 128 student and non-student volunteers and 143 D&I award recipients. A little less than a third of registrations were late registrations.

- on advice from previous workshop organisers, and to reduce costs, we had a fixed set of provided online services for all workshops.

- we did not have a 24-hour schedule, but centered the schedule on European time, with duplication of presentations, oral and posters for everybody, to make up for time-zone differences. The smaller set of opening hours was chosen to limit zoom-bombing and other disruptions, as we could guarantee volunteers at all times.

For our virtual infrastructure we chose to mostly follow the EMNLP 2020 model, with some modifications:

pre-recorded talks recorded using the SlidesLive web-based tools, with ASR-based captions hand-corrected by authors.

a website based on the Miniconf package, with a schedule page that can be adjusted to each timezone, a separate webpage for each paper that gives its pre-recorded video, paper, zoom channel, and Rocketchat link.

Livestreamed plenary sessions, also run by SlidesLive, with a mix of recorded talks and live presentations, and live QA sessions

Rocketchat sessions associated with each talk and all kinds of events.

Grouped Zoom Q&A sessions for groups of 4 talks with a little oral presentation in preview. This worked very well.

All talks had a poster in Gather.town. This palliated the time-zone problem.

Tutorials that were a mix of live sessions for QA and pre-recorded talks.

Workshops that also used a mix of live sessions and gather.town poster sessions.

We had a virtual social chair and D&I chairs who worked in unison and organised great events.

We were happy with the interactions with all the providers, who were incredibly accomodating and helpful.

Comments for future reference

After the conference, the organising committee had several meetings to take stock of the experience, here are some of the main comments that deserve to be borne in mind for the future:

- management of workshops and sponsorship: If EACL is to become a yearly conference held in April, the current schedule to allocate workshops to conferences and solicit sponsorship is too late. Workshop organisers do not have enough time to organise the workshops, some of the workshops had to resort to not publishing the proceedings to be able to have a later deadline and some simply declined to be associated with EACL. In general, the workshop chairs find themselves between a rock and a hard place to try to reconcile different requirements and their task is very difficult. From the point of view of the general chair, late workshop allocation and late sponsorship mean one does not really know how much sponsorship one can count on to set fees, which also has repercussions on how late we can close contracts with service providers and what we can pay for. Also, sponsorship chairs and sponsors themselves need more time to prepare the materials. For workshops, it was requested to have the deadlines two months earlier than the current ones, so, to avoid a deadline that is too late for EMNLP and other conferences later in the year, I suggest keeping the centralized workshop allocation, but having two yearly deadlines. Also, the sponsorship needs to be decided earlier to be included in the budget planning. Maybe multi-year packets can be offered.

- for fees: I think a reflection needs to be had on how much ACL-related conferences want to rely on private sponsorship and what that means for our scientific association.

- Zoom links: some organisers of satellite events or workshops had open zoom links which we had to request to close (a request that was immediately satisfied) and participants shared zoom links via social media, which we could not control. These actions rendered vacuous our considerable efforts to guarantee a safe environment. Luckily, no incident was reported. I believe current ACL conferences have already taken action about this, but it might be worth introducing a clause at paper/workshop submission, for future online conferences.

- Personal opinion of the EACL general chair: I believe, as a general chair, that the organization of our online and even offline conferences relies too much on volunteer work, requires inordinate amounts of time and commitment from what are in most cases graduate students and junior colleagues, and in the end exploits those whom we should support the most. I think it is time to think about outsourcing work to professional organisers or devising a fixed package of services and paying our own organisation team.