2024Q1 Reports: Anthology Director

This report covers roughly August 2023 through February 2024. I continue to spend 3–5 hours a week with management and also low-level technical duties. I am assisted by two paid assistants who help with ingestion and the backlog of issues.

Management proceeds through our Github issue tracking system. In addition, I have begun organizing ingestions into quarterly milestones (https://github.com/acl-org/acl-anthology/milestones), and triaging work on a project page (https://github.com/orgs/acl-org/projects/7).

Here are some highlights:

- With the permission granted last October and the help of Ryan Cotterell, I have hired a staff programmer. His first tasks will be to help clean up old ingestions that remain incomplete (such as EMNLP ingestion backlog), and then we will move to more development-oriented projects. I hope to have more to report on this by the next update.

- EMNLP 2023 ingestion went very well. This is due largely to excellent organizational work on the part of publications chairs (in particular, Atsushi Fujita with EMNLP). The newish Github-based model, where every volume receives a separate repository, has helped immensely. We are still plagued by last-minute changes and requests that would benefit from hard, no-exceptions deadlines, but it is more manageable.

- We have caught up on video ingestion for ACL and EMNLP 2023. The next goal on this project is to have complete self-hosting of videos currently hosted on Vimeo (https://github.com/acl-org/acl-anthology/issues/2637).

- We had a DMCA takedown request pertaining to a copyrighted image in a paper. The authors responded immediately and the issue was resolved to the satisfaction of the complainant.