2023Q1 Reports: Anthology Director

The Anthology is doing fine.

What’s new

• We can now represent event-related metadata in the Anthology (e.g., keynotes and plenary events, handbooks). We have not actually ingested this yet, since it’s a lot of manual work
• New volumes: TAL, NEJLT,
• Ingested videos: NAACL 2021, ACL 2022, EMNLP 2021

Pain points

• EMNLP ingestion was rough. We typically ask for a full delivery of materials prior to ingestion. We still do not have all the volumes, e.g., the Industry track. At the end of January we simply merged the materials we had on hand. This created a lot of frustration that was directed at us. We still do not have an understanding of what happened.
• Processing corrections continues to be time-consuming. Ideally we should move to a dynamic, user-authenticated site where this could be managed by individuals without editorial intervention. However, there are many complexities involved. I doubt we could undertake such a rewrite based only on volunteer help. We lucked out last time.

I continue to recommend that ACL put together paid technical staff to manage the publications process across ACL, NAACL, AACL, EACL, and possibly EMNLP. It would ease the lives of all the volunteers (GC down) by easing their load and carrying institutional knowledge.