2021Q3 Reports: Local Chairs

Thepchai Supnithi and Thanaruk Theeramunkong

Task I) Local Venue and Social Event

After COVID-19 situation, we started to negotiate with conference venue and local social event and request for pending the contract until we have a final decision whether we will have onsite, hybrid or virtual conference. Since we finally decided to have virtual conference. It is necessary to deal with Conference venue and Local social event site. We had a discussion with both of them and finally they understand the situation and waive all expenses.

Task II) Sponsorship

We started to advertise the virtual conference and call for local sponsorship. We contacted around 60 organizations for the sponsorship. Since a lot of organizations have a policy to support only for onsite conference. Finally, there are two companies decide to support us for 1500 US$. We are waiting for some more organizations to support.

Task III) Virtual Conference Platform decision

We had an online conference with general chair, PC chairs, Priscilla and other chairs member for the decision of virtual platform. Finally. we decide to use underline.io for the virtual platform

Task IV) Support Web Conference Chairs

Since there are multiple requests from chairs to making a program in website, we help the web conference team to solve the character problems based on GitHub and launch the website. We are currently check all the workshop links and time schedule for the consistency.

Task V) Announcement and broadcasting

We advertise ACL-IJCNLP 2021 events to Thai NLP communities. We organized on event called “Natural Language Processing and the opportunity of Thailand” on July 29, 2021. There are two topics 1) Past, Present and Future of NLP in Thailand and 2) NLP research in Thailand and the opportunity for world level research. There are more than 100 peoples join from WebEx live, Facebook live and YouTube live.

Task VI) Social Events

We are looking for doing social events through underline to contribute local content to communities. The tentative events are two cultural activities.

• Tourism Challenge
  • Asking to find some hidden items in Thai cultural buildings or places.
• Thai Cooking with Thai language learning
  • Asking about food ingredients

Task VII) Finding Presents as Awards to the winners of the social events

We are on the way to arrange presents as awards to the winners of the social events. The presents will be some local handmade items.