2010Q3 Reports: Mentoring Service Chairs

This year, the mentoring service was extended to include student papers, system demonstrations, and all workshops associated with the conference as well as main conference papers. The mentoring deadline for each event was 6 weeks before each actual paper deadline and mentoring reviews were returned at least 2 weeks before that paper deadline. We used the START system to manage the deadlines and we advertised the mentoring service via the relevant calls for papers. We sent the relevant information on the mentoring service to the ACL 2010 workshop co-chairs so that they could pass on to workshop co-organisers for the various workshop calls for papers.

Mentors were recruited on the grounds that they are native English speakers, or near native speaker proficiency. They were also academics known to us and the ACL community so as to be familar with the style, content and format of an ACL paper. We recruited 21 mentors and each was asked to do 1 main conference or system demo paper and 1 other event at most. We only had 11 main conference papers and 1 CoNLL paper as mentoring submissions so the mentors were needed only once or not at all. We did not receive any submissions for the workshops, this is perhaps because people do not usually have a workshop submission ready 6 weeks in advance of the deadline.