2021Q3 Reports: Social Media Committee Co-Chairs

ACL 2021 15 July-conference report: Social Media Co-Chairs

Luciana Benotti (Argentina), Lidong Bing (Singapore), Zhumin Chen (China), Rachele Sprugnoli (Italy), Mark Seligman (US)

The social media co-chairs team for ACL 2021 was set up so that the five members covered different time zones. The team's activities were divided on different social media.

Pre-conference tasks

The initial phases of the social media chairs role involved disseminating information about the conference to potential authors, reviewers, and attendees well ahead of the event. This was done via social media: Twitter, Facebook, WeChat, Sina Weibo and Zhihu.

Beginning with ACL 2020, there are stable social media accounts that will persist from year to year, avoiding the need to build up a following each time around. As of July 12, 2021, the @aclmeeting account on Twitter has 9,387 (it had 6,333 followers in July 2020) and the Facebook page has 605 (it had 349 in July 2020). The Weibo account has 1,945 followers (it had 1,638 followers in July 2020). We did not make use of Instagram this year.

Twitter

Rachele Sprugnoli was the main poster on the official ACL Twitter account before the conference. Luciana Benotti will also post during the conference. We posted announcements coming from the PCs, reminders for conference events, and tips about participating in the virtual conference.

We are organizing a team of live microblogging volunteers with the goal of making research presented at the conference visible to a wider community. The microblogging efforts were inspired by previous conferences (especially NAACL 2019 and ACL 2020), and some aspects were added/changed:

1. Since talks are pre-recorded, microbloggers are able to watch and summarize them at their own convenience. We encourage microbloggers to do so before the Q&A associated with the paper, if possible.
2. Microbloggers are invited to post in other languages than English. (We used the format #ACL2021xx where xx was the BCP-47 language code; all languages in our sample had two-letter codes through BCP-47.) This initiative was well-received in ACL 2020, with microbloggers reporting connections to NLP research communities they hadn’t been connected to before because of their non-English tweets, which led to the use of roughly 20 different language-specific hashtags.
3. Microbloggers were not restricted to Twitter as in past conferences, but were free to choose platforms on which to post. The platform with the highest number of microbloggers for the conference is Twitter, we will ask some volunteers whether they can post on Weibo.
4. Microbloggers are not assigned to conference sessions (impossible in the virtual format), but instead to topic areas. They are asked to cover at least 5 papers from their area. With the help of Fei from the ACL 2021 PC, we made a list of papers whose first author was affiliated in a country with less than 5 papers at ACL 2021. We will share it with microbloggers, and ask them to include at least two of these "minorities" among the first three papers they covered.

We will hold a one-hour microblogging tutorial over Zoom in the week leading up to the conference, and provide written notes to the volunteers to guide them. We will record this presentation to share with microbloggers who cannot attend live and can share it with the next social media or publicity chair(s) should that be helpful. Information (profile URLs, names, etc.) was collected from live microbloggers using a Microsoft Office form.

During the conference, we will retweet Twitter threads about papers from the official @aclmeeting Twitter account. We plan to use an automation service (Zapier) to watch the hashtag on Twitter and add information to a spreadsheet to help us keep track of which tweets had already been retweeted. This provides one kind of benefit to the microbloggers, in the form of increased visibility. We believe that the retweeting of the non-English tweets also raises the visibility of ACL as an international and inclusive organization. One suggestion we have for future conferences that adopt this is to establish a system to allow the “official” microbloggers to signal to the publicity chairs that specific tweets are just personal commentary about an ACL paper and shouldn’t be retweeted. (For the most part, we took the lack of inclusion of the language-specific hashtag to signal this, but when the tag for English was left off, and the microblogger was tweeting about a specific paper, it was less clear.)

Weibo

The official ACL account on Weibo, https://weibo.com/aclmeeting was used before and will be used throughout the conference, with Zhumin Chen as the main poster on that account and Lidong Bing as the assistant during the conference. We posted announcements from the PCs, reminders for conference events, and tips about participating in the virtual conference, most of which was coordinated with Twitter posts.

During conference tasks

Whova

Whova is the chat interface used by ACL 2021 for participants interaction. It belongs to the Underline platform which was hired by ACL 2021 to organize the virtual conference infrastructure.

The activities of the social media team on Whova will fall mainly into three categories:

1. Making announcements in the #announcements channel, usually containing the same information as announcements posted on Twitter. In contrast to pre-conference announcements, where members of the organizing committee sent info to the publicity chairs for social media, for the in-conference Whova, we encouraged committee members to also make announcements directly (to reduce latency).
2. Coordinating the social co-chairs posts during the conference efficiently by communicating in real time in a private channel on Whova.

1. We will create a #live-microblogging channel for the micro-bloggers to discuss their experience and provide feedback. We will collect (anonymized) insights from this discussion and can share them with future social media chairs.

Twitter

We will prepare text for posts with important announcements in advance and (to the extent possible) scheduled via tweetdeck, to reduce the load for social media co-chairs during the conference itself. We also encourage the PCs (or whomever knows it ahead of time) to write a textual version of posts to share with the social media chairs as soon as the information is available for us to use to produce the tweets.

In the acceptance notification for microblogging volunteers, we will clarify that they would not receive registration discounts or other benefits, apart from the reach we provided by boosting people's posts. As of July12, 16 volunteers have applied. The student volunteer co-chair also assigned 5 extra volunteers that will receive a fee waiver because they applied through the usual conference volunteering procedure for ACL. We will clarify to them the distinction between microblogging and serving as a conference volunteer. We will also remind them that microblogging requires registering for the conference.