2024Q1 Minutes (public version)

• ACL Policy on synthetic reviews & ACL Publication ethics committee

The ACL needs to develop a policy & procedures for handling cases of reviewer misconduct, including the use of LLMs to generate reviews without actually reading the paper.

The full details of an initial policy will be discussed over email after the meeting and then refined by the new Publication Ethics Committee.

It was noted that the policy should be designed so as not to have a chilling effect on the beneficial use of automation in reviewing (e.g. systems for finding potential related work to consider).

• ACL standing reviewing committee

Propose to establish the ACL Peer Review Committee, which is a working group dedicated to the development of peer review policies across ACL venues.

Concerns are mainly about the coordination between this committee and the new publication ethics committee, the interface between the committee and exec, and the term of service of the co-chairs and members.

Will revise the proposal according to the feedback from the exec meeting. (Iryna)

• Enhancements on CL. Setting up ‘Computational Linguistics’ Dissertation Award

Discussed the initiative to create a CL dissertation award.

This award is indeed proposed for the ACL community, rather than for the CL journal. "Computational Linguistics" is not only the name of our journal but also the name of our discipline. We are open to using other names. CL could be the ideal venue for publishing dissertations due to their lengths.

Next step: Wei and Mohit will work together to have a formal proposal, which will be discussed by the exec.

• Issues related to EACL

EACL 2024 issues: (1) Survey of Submission statistics and ARR outcomes, (2) Financial Sustainability and registration fee policies

Renaming EACL as EMEA chapter of ACL (The EACL board tends to favor the choice of not applying changes, but discussion is on going and no formal decision has been formed yet)

Initiative: More involvement of the national CL associations (SEPLN (Spain), AILC (Italy), ATALA (France), CLIN (Netherlands), ...) is in progress also related to the sustainability issue related to recent EACL 2024 events

Policies on endorsement/sponsorships: a specific reference regulation is needed as for the diversity of the annual requests

• Possible renaming of NAACL to be more inclusive of the rest of the Americas

Renaming of NAACL: there are three candidates now, and is still collecting ideas of the new names.

David: decompose the name of the organization, and the name of the conferences. (branding of the conference is important, impact factor of the conference)

Roberto: the name of the conference should be preserved for the reason of branding

Graham: I heard that Latin America considered having their own chapter in 2021, but finally decided against it.

• Onboarding

It is difficult for the new members of the exec to find the instructions about the duties, procedures, as well as other useful materials (and whether some of the material is just accessible to the exec).

It would be helpful if there is besides email a more efficient communication channel (such as slack) and one that allows for search (e.g. of prior discussion outcomes). An onboarding "landing" page with pointers to material would be helpful, too.

Each exec member is encouraged to conscientiously hand over their work to their successor.

• CL EiC committee chairing; (2) Under-resourced GPU Credit Awards Program

CL EiC committee chairing: Wei Lu (SUTD) was selected as the new EiC of the CL journal, who started his term from Feb. 2024.

Under-resourced GPU Credit Awards Program: Have sent detailed draft information on tentative CfP, award size, number of awards, etc. and is being currently reviewed by the GPU division/department. Should hear back likely in 1 month.

• Granting certificates to ACL Fellows

There need be a person in the office who is in charge of this, but the office needs a clear checklist or procedure from the ACL exec.

Chengqing will come up with a procedure about how to convey the information to the new fellows, post the announcement to the membership, and grant certificates to the fellows.