2008Q3 Reports: ACL 2008

ACL08:HLT Conference Chair Report 

Kathleen McKeown 
Columbia University 


This year's conference, ACL:HLT08, is jointly sponsored by the Association
for Computational Linguistics and the North American Chapter of the
Association for Computational Linguistics and it thus brings together the
traditions of both organizations. As is evident from the title, one of
those traditions is the focus on research from all areas of Human Language
Technology, including information retrieval, natural language processing
and speech. The conference features invited speakers in speech and
information retrieval and there are sessions devoted to all three of these
areas. 

Since I was last involved in organizing the ACL Conferences back in the
90's, the conferences have grown dramatically. This year there were eight
committees involved in the organization, most of which had two or more
chairs. This included the program committee, tutorial organizers, student
research workshop, demos organizers, publications, publicity and
sponsorship. For committees that were involved in putting together the
various aspects of the program, we had co-chairs drawn from the three main
areas of the conference. In order to facilitate organization, in most
cases, one chair was designated as the main coordinator and that person
drove the organization of their committee, was my main contact, and
communicated with the other co-chairs. This organization worked quite
well. I was quite impressed with the energy and commitment of the 
different chairs. This made my job much easier. 

One main issue that I think should be seriously considered for future
years of NAACL is the inclusion of speech and information retrieval. The
intention was to have a conference that is equally balanced between all
three areas. Submissions from the speech and IR area are low, however.
Thus, for the program committee, the workload is very unevenly balanced
between the co-program chairs. The vast majority of submissions came in NLP
and thus the NLP chairs were more heavily burdened, particularly in the
final week of decision making. Similarly, for tutorials and demos, while
there is the intent to equally balance the offerings between the different
areas, it is not clear whether either submissions or selection (of
tutorials) is equal in all areas. For future years, NAACL must either do
something different to raise participation from the other communities or
should change the structure of the committees to reflect what actually
happens. I don't think publicity is enough. This year we had three
publicity chairs, one for each area. They did a great job in posting the
event, developing a flyer and bringing it to other conferences. It is
possible that that work could begin earlier, which would mean selecting
those chairs in summer rather than fall, as I did. I believe, however,
that there needs to be some additional coordinated event that involves
invitations to members of the community in order to draw more
participation. 

There were several other changes that we tried this year. A new plan for
sponsorship was developed that would enable coordination among different
ACL Conferences and across the years. This plan was finalized during the
summer and thus, relatively late in the process of selecting chairs. It
is an ambitious plan and we are fortunate to have one person who has
agreed to serve in a multi-year, multi-conference capacity. However,
finding people who are willing to serve in this larger capacity is
difficult. I think the next conference chair needs to start finding
people early for this task and the ACL should think about how to make the
task more rewarding. 

We also instituted a change this year in the number of publication
chairs. In previous years, there was only one and this year, we expanded
that number to two. I think this change worked well. The task was divided
by proceedings with Joakim Nivre handling the main proceedings and Noah
Smith handling the workshop proceedings. Given the number of workshops, I
think an extra person was needed to handle this. We also made it possible
for them to find help within their local institutions, something that is
also needed for this particular job. There was a fair amount of
communication between the publication chairs to various other chairs and
the publishers. I found that it seamlessly switched between Joakim and
Noah and that when one was unavailable, the other would easily
substitute. So I would recommend again having two publications chairs in
future years. 

This year the number of student paper submissions was lower than usual
and for future years, I would recommend asking the student research chairs
to think about how to publicize. This was unexpected this year so we did
not think of doing this ahead of time. Faculty at different universities
should keep in mind that with a lower number of submissions, there is a
better chance for the students to have papers accepted. The student papers
are presented in a parallel track as are all other papers and students
will have equal exposure. 

In conclusion, I want to thank the many people involved. I thank the
committee chairs that I asked for agreeing to serve and for showing so
much responsibility. I also think local arrangements deserves a special
thanks for putting together such a nice event. 


 




		ACL-08: HLT Program Chairs Report

The program for ACL-08: HLT features a wide variety of avenues for
authors to present their latest work in computational linguistics,
information retrieval, and speech technology.  The program includes:
full papers, short papers, posters, demonstrations, and a student
research workshop, as well as pre- and post-conference tutorials and
workshops.  In our program design, we attempted to combine the successful 
approach of ACL07, which had four parallel oral sessions of 
25-min full paper presentations, with the HLT model of presenting
late-breaking results in parallel sessions of 15-min short paper
presentations.  We also experimented with an idea adopted from
Interspeech, in which authors can choose their desired
mode of presentation, oral or poster, based on their assessment of
how best to present their work.   There is no distinction between
posters and oral presentations in terms of quality or in terms
of how they appear in the Proceedings.   Although it will take
more than one year to see this change fully taken up by the
membership, we were happy to see some authors choose the poster 
option from the very outset.  Area chairs also used their
discretion in indicating which submissions would benefit from
which mode of presentation.   If the number of submissions continues
to grow as it has done in the past few years, poster sessions will
be one way to managing this growth without creating a large number
of parallel sessions.

This year, the program committee received yet another record-breaking
number of submissions, with 470 full and 275 short paper submissions.
Full papers were due in mid-January, and the program committee 
accepted 119 (25%) of these, 95 as oral presentations and 24 as posters.
Short papers were due in mid-March, and the committee accepted 64 (23%)
of these, 32 for oral presentation and 32 for poster presentation.
(A breakdown by area is included at the end of this report.)

We recruited 34 area chairs who recruited 720 reviewers, and who managed 
the reviewing process of both full and short papers in their areas.  
Reviewers  wrote three reviews for each full paper submission, and two 
reviews for each  short paper submission, for a staggering total of just 
under 2000 reviews! Miraculously, there were only a handful of late reviews.  

As the number of submissions and, consequently the number of area
chairs, has risen over the last few years, the ACL program committee
has moved away from having a face-to-face meeting of all area chairs.
For ACL08: HLT, two of the program co-chairs met for two days at
Edinburgh University, using email and teleconferencing to get input
from the two program co-chairs not based in Europe, and all of the
area chairs.  For short paper decision making, three of the four
program co-chairs held a teleconference, with input from the fourth
co-chair by email as time zone differences permitted. 

Another first this year was our decision to award several outstanding
paper prizes, rather than trying to identify a single best paper.  We
did this because we felt that it is typical for conferences as large
as this to have several particularly exciting, innovative, and
well-crafted papers, and it is extremely difficult to compare quality
across areas.  We asked area chairs to nominate papers for the various
awards and then formed an  Outstanding Paper Committee, who wish to 
remain anonymous, and to whom we owe a great debt of gratitude for their 
hard work at very short notice.

There were three things that made our job possible.  First,
we were helped immensely by Jason Eisner, who has compiled an
excellent web site on "How to Serve as Program Chair of a Conference"
(http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~jason/advice/how-to-chair-a-conference.html).
This saved us more than once!  Second, we employed a recent PhD, James
Clarke, to help us get started with START, and to simply deal with the
large volume of work that must be processed within the first few days
after submissions are received. Third, there is the invaluable START 
system for managing paper submission, reviewing, and decision making.  
Rich Gerber and the START team responded to questions/problems quickly, 
even modifying START overnight to provide functionality we asked for.

Submissions and acceptances by area:

LONG Papers    #subm   #accept	#oral	            
--------------------------------------------------------
Dialogue		16	4 (25%)	3 (19%)	
Discourse		12   	3 (25%)	3 (25%)	
Eval			13   	3 (23%)	3 (23%)	
IE			34   	8 (24%)	7 (21%)	
IR			28   	9 (32%)	8 (29%)	
LanguageGen		13   	3 (23%)	3 (23%)	
LanguageRes		12   	3 (25%)	2 (17%)	
MT			87    20 (23%)	15 (17%)	
Multimodal		 5    2 (40%)	2 (40%)	
Phon/Morph		32   	8 (25%)	7 (22%)	
QA			11    13 (27%)	2 (18%)	
Semantics		63    18 (29%)	13 (21%)	
Sentiment		20    3 (15%)	3 (15%)	
Speech		13   	4 (31%)	4 (31%)	
Stat ML		42   	9 (22%)	6 (14%)	
Summarisation	21   	5 (24%)	3 (14%)	
Syntax		54    14 (26%)	12 (22%)	
--------------------------------------------------------
total		     476    119 (25%)	96 (20%)	



SHORT Papers    #subm   #accept     #oral
------------------------------------------------------
 
Dialogue		12	4 (33%)	1 (8%)
Discourse  	 	 7	3 (43%)    	1 (14%)
Evaluation    	10	2 (20%)    	1 (10%)
IE			18	4 (22%)	1 ( 6%)
IR              	19	4 (21%)	3 (16%)
QA		 	 4	1 (25%)    	1 (25%)	
Sentiment  		18	4 (22%)	1 ( 6%)
Lang res 	 	 5	1 (20%)	1 (20%)
NLG		 	 5	2 (40%)	2 (40%)
MT	 		42	10 (24%)	4 (10%)
Multimodal  	 4	0 (0%)	0 (0%)
Phon/Morph		12	4 (33%)	1 ( 8%)
Semantics		30	6 (20%)	5 (17%)
Speech 		15	4 (26%)	3 (20%)
Stat ML		33	7 (21%)	1 ( 3%)
Summ			20	5 (25%)	1 ( 5%)
Syntax 		21	7 (33%)	5 (24%)
-----------------------------------------------------
		     275	68 (25%)	32 (12%)


Johanna Moore, Simone Teufel, James Allan, Sadaoki Furui
ACL-08:HLT Program Committee Chairs


 


Report from ACL-HLT 2008 Workshop chair:

 

The committee consisted of myself, Helen Meng, Chengxiang Zhai. We received
14 applications for workshops. The committee chose 11 Workshops including 2
two-day workshops and 9 one-day workshops. From the ratio of acceptance, the
selection process is not very competitive. The review process was very simple:
First the reviews were made by the committee members independently and then
group discussion was made for the unsure cases. The dropped 3 applications were
primarily due to the mismatch of the topics. For instance, some applications
were not core-CL related. After the paper submission, we decide to cancel
ACL08-Semantic-Evaluation based on the email by the organizer Eneko Agirre who
reported just one submission was received.

 

The final list of workshops are:

Two days:

1.     SIGDIAL, ACL08-SIGDIAL (two days)

2.     The Third Workshop on Issues in Teaching Computational Linguistics,
ACL08-Teaching-CL, (two days)

 

One-day:

1.     Third Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation, ACL08-SMT

2.     SSST-2: Second Workshop on Syntax and Structure in Statistical
Translation, ACL08-SSST

3.     Software engineering, testing, and quality assurance for natural
language processing, ACL08-NLP-Software

4.     BioNLP 2008, ACL08-BioNLP

5.     Computational Morphology and Phonology(SIGMORPHON), ACL08-SIGMORPHON,

6.     Natural language processing and mobile devices, ACL08-Mobile-NLP

7.     The 4th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational
Applications,  ACL08-NLP-Education

8.     Workshop on German Parsing, ACL08-German-Parsing

 

I want to give special thanks to Chris Brew, Priscilla Rasmussen, Kathy
Mckeown, Simone Teufel who provided fast and professional support for the WS
organization.

  

Ming Zhou,

June 1st, 2008

 




This year we received 13 submissions for tutorial proposals. Of these,
3 covered topics on machine learning with applications to natural
language processing, 5 dealt with information retrieval/information
extraction/data mining, 3 were related to speech processing or
dialogue systems.
 
Some of the submissions were very similar to other tutorials given in
past ACL and NAACL conferences. While we tried to avoid repetition of
topics, the question came up of whether it is a good idea to accept
"repeats" in cases where there was a big audience at the previous
offering. Having an explicit agreement about this can facilitate the
decision process for future tutorial chairs.
 
After considering the various constraints: clarity of the proposal,
covering of NLP, IR and speech, offerings in previous years, 6
tutorials were selected for presentation.
 
T1: Introduction to Computational Advertising
T2: Building Practical Spoken Dialog Systems
T3: Semi-supervised Learning for Natural Language Processing
T4: Advanced Online Learning for Natural Language Processing
T5: Speech technology from research to industry
T6: Interactive Visualization for Computational Linguistics
 
Covering the speech area tutorials was most problematic as there were
fewer submissions. We intentionally chose two---one for the morning
(T2 on dialogue)
and one for the afternoon session (T5 focusing more on underlying technologies
for spoken language-based applications). In previous years the speech
tutorials were often not very popular, sometimes because of coinciding
with other highly popular tutorials. The offerings of two very
interesting presentation this year would make possible to assess if
the problem is general lack of interest. If this is the case, it will
be good to discuss what can be done differently in future years.
 
Core information retrieval proposal (as opposed to information
extraction) were also not many. For both Speech and IR tutorials the
chairs solicited proposals personally, beyond the general advertising
of the conference. Some of these were rejected eventually, but the
above is worth mentioning so that the number of submissions does not
seem misleading.
 
In printing the one page abstracts for the proceedings, it will be
useful for future chairs to provide a sample style file with the
necessary section titles and formatting in order to achieve
consistencies. When given instructions, regardless of how clear they
might, different people come up with different interpretations.
 
ACL:HLT 2008 Tutorial Chairs
Ani Nenkova
Marilyn Walker
Eugene Agichtein




 


ACL-08: HLT --- Demo Chair Report
(Jimmy Lin, University of Maryland)

As the demo chair for the conference, I was responsible for arranging
the demo program.  This year, 21 submissions were received, 9 of which
were selected for inclusion in the program after review by at least
two members of the program committee.  Care was taken to ensure a
balanced demo program encompassing as many areas of HLT as possible.





ACL-08: HLT Publications Co-Chairs Report

As publications co-chairs for ACL-08: HLT, we have been responsible
for producing the conference proceedings (in hardcopy, on DVD, and
for the ACL Anthology) and for processing copyright transfer agreements.
Below we report on the work done and suggest improvements for the future.


1. Preparatory work

In order to facilitate the work on the proceedings, both for ourselves and
for authors, we made several revisions to the style files and formatting
guidelines in order to (a) make some of the more common space-saving
devices part of the official guidelines, and (b) make the style files consistent
with the guidelines. In addition, we promoted the idea, pioneered by Jason
Eisner at last year's EMNLP-CoNLL, of allowing 8 pages of content + an
unlimited number of pages for references, in order to encourage thorough
citation. In the end, the limit for long papers (and for many of the workshops)
was set at 8 pages of content + 1 page of references. We think this was a
perfectly reasonable compromise for ACL-08: HLT, but we see no reason to
restrict the length of the bibliography for future conferences, given that
the demand for printed proceedings seems to be declining steadily. The
revised style files and guidelines will be included in the ACLPUB repository
for the benefit of future publications chairs.

We also tried to make sure that important revisions to the ACLPUB software,
made by the chairs of previous years, were actually committed into the
repository. We are especially grateful to Eric Ringger and Jason Eisner for
contributing several important improvements during this conference cycle
that they had made previously. During the whole process we have fixed a
number of bugs ourselves, and improved the functionality for converting
LaTeX to HTML for the DVD. All these changes have been committed to the
ACLPUB repository.


2. Main conference publications

The main conference proceedings are divided into five logical books:
main proceedings (containing all long papers), short papers, SRW, demos,
and tutorial abstracts. When printed, the last four of these are bound
together in a single companion volume.

The main proceedings and short papers were handled by the publications
co-chairs themselves. This work involved the usual fixing of papers that
were not correctly formatted or did not have all fonts embedded. We decided
not to be overly strict in the application of formatting guidelines, which
resulted in 25 out of 119 long papers and 9 out of 68 short papers having
to be sent back to the authors for correction. (Applying the guidelines
strictly would have meant sending back more than two thirds of the papers.)
Given that more than 90% of the problematic papers were produced using
Word, rather than LaTeX, it is worth discussing whether we should provide
Word document templates in addition to LaTeX style files in the future.
A key issue here is whether adequate support for all character sets exists
for LaTeX.

The SRW and demos were handled by the respective chairs, while the tutorial
abstracts were handled jointly by the publications co-chairs and the tutorials
chairs. Overall, these volumes caused relatively few problems, but we question
whether it is worth the effort to produce a 15 page volume containing the
one-page tutorial abstracts. If this practice is continued in the future,
this should be the responsibility of the tutorials chairs.  Providing templates
to the tutorial presenters will also make this a simpler job.


3. Workshop publications

All ten workshops have printed proceedings. One workshop decided to take
care of their own printing to allow for a later submission deadline for
camera-ready papers. Unfortunately, this also meant that the proceedings
of that workshop is not available on the DVD (although it will of course
be available in the ACL Anthology). In the end, the difference between the
two deadlines turned out to be less than two weeks, and we believe that
it should be possible in the future to get all workshop proceedings printed
in the same process and included on the DVD provided that deadlines are
fixed earlier.

The remaining nine workshop proceedings were produced by the respective
chairs and delivered to the publications co-chairs. Despite some minor
technical problems with the installation of the ACLPUB software on
different sites, the production of each individual book went rather
smoothly. However, a substantial amount of work had to be done afterwards
to achieve consistency with respect to title pages, spine texts, citation
stamps and pdf meta-data. We believe that some of this work can be avoided
in the future with a slightly different work flow, where the publications chair
provide all book chairs with customized templates.


4. DVD

Generating the content for the DVD from the (files for the) printed version
of the proceedings is largely automated by the ACLPUB software. However, it
is our impression that this part of the ACLPUB package is less mature than
the tools for producing the proceedings, and we had to make several
improvements especially for the generation of the program and table of
contents for the DVD.


5. Future work

We believe that some of the problems we encountered along the way could
have been avoided if the instructions for publications chairs in the conference
handbook had been more complete and up to date. This should not be seen as
criticism of our predecessors, only as recognition of the fact that the whole
publication process has changed with the advent of the ACLPUB package,
and that it has not been possible to update the documentation at the same pace.

We therefore intend to create a "publications chair instructions" document,
which will basically recapitulate what we did and what advice we have about
each step. This will be included in the ACLPUB repository but can also be
integrated into the conference handbook, perhaps in condensed form. The
most important thing we want to leave behind is a timeline that eliminates
all of the surprises and helps the next publications chair to know what he/she
is in for. 


Joakim Nivre and Noah A. Smith
Uppsala and Pittsburgh, May 2008




 

Report for ACL 2008 Student Research Workshop  

Student co-chairs:
Ebru Arisoy <arisoyeb@boun.edu.tr>, Bogazici University, Bebek, Istanbul, Turkey
Wolfgang Maier <wo.maier@uni-tuebingen.de>, University of Tuebingen, Tuebingen, Germany
Keisuke Inoue <kinoue@syr.edu>, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, USA 

Faculty Advisor:
Jan Wiebe <wiebe@cs.pitt.edu>, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

1. Program Committee
The co-chairs of the ACL 2008 Student Research Workshop are Ebru Arisoy
(Bogazici University, Turkey), Wolfgang Maier (University of Tuebingen,
Germany) and Keisuke Inoue (Syracuse University, USA). Jan Wiebe
(University of Pittsburgh, USA) is the faculty advisor. The program committee
is formed by the co-chairs by asking previous SRW reviewers, previous SRW
participants and other researchers from the community.  The final program
committee consists of 61 reviewers, of which 27 are students or young
researchers and 34 are senior researchers. 

2. Paper Submission and Acceptance  
We received 27 submissions from 10 countries (see Table 1). All papers were
assigned 5 reviewers (at least 1 senior and 1 student reviewer). We accepted
12 papers, of which 5 are regular (oral) presentations and 7 are posters.

Country	     Submission       Accepted
------------+------------+---------
Australia	1			1
China		1			1
France		3			1
Germany		1			0
India		2			0
Japan		2			1
Korea		1			0
Spain		1			0
Switzerland	1			0
UK		2			1
US		12			7
-----------------------------------
Total:		27			12

Table 1: Submission and acceptance by countries

3. Presentation Format
The Student Research Workshop poster session is colocated with the main
conference poster session on Day 1 of ACL (June 16, 2008). The five oral
presentations are held in a single session parallel to the last main
conference sessions on the same day. Each oral presentation consists of
15 minutes of talk, and 5 minutes each for panelist feedback and for
general audience questions.


4. Panelists
The co-chairs asked senior conference attendees to be on the panel to
provide feedback to student authors. The panelists were selected for
their knowledge in the area and availability during the workshop. At the
time of this report, most papers have been assigned at least one panelist.
Further positive responses are still expected.

5. Funding
We submitted our request to the National Science Foundation in January
2008 and received the award in April 2008. The grant totaled $18,180,
of which $15,950 was budgeted for student travel, registration,
accommodation and meals. The remaining $2,230 will be used to cover the
student co-chairs registration and to partially defray costs associated
with the student research workshop such as refreshments during the breaks. 

We will be able to provide funds to every SRW participant. Because the
cost of traveling to Columbus varies depending on the student's location,
the level of funding is determined based on the cost of travel. We will
award a guaranteed $305 in funds to students from Columbus, $1,505-$1,705
to students from Europe and $3,105 to students from Australia. In the
distribution of the grant, we aim to cover student's expenses for airfare,
ACL registration, and membership fee. We also aim to contribute toward 4
nights stay in a shared room in one of the conference hotels and meals
during the conference. 

6. Organization and Planning
The Workshop was publicized by sending CFPs to mailing lists of
computational linguistics and related fields. The Workshop webpage was
placed prominently on the main conference website. We are grateful to
the webmaster for swift updating on request. In addition, the ACL
Newsletters helped to disseminate information on the Student Research
Workshop.  We are grateful to the main conference organizers for the
support. We used the START system and Google Docs to manage the
submission and review process. Both proved immensely helpful for
managing the coordination among 27 submissions and 61 reviewers.
None of the submissions showed formal problems, i.e., there were no
double submissions without indication, all copyright forms were
correctly signed, etc.  

7. Suggestions and Considerations
a) We believe that the success of the Student Research Workshop
depends on the quality of the reviewer and panelist feedback to
students. We were happy to find 61 reviewers and 12 panelists who
are supportive of this educational goal. The community was very
responsive, which shows that the Student Research Workshop is
widely accepted and recognized. Also for students whose work could
not be accepted, the elaborate reviews will be of great help. We
recommend that future Workshop organizers continue the tradition of
concentrating their efforts on assembling good reviewers and panelists.

b) For many Workshop presenters, this is their first major conference
attendance. Therefore, we thought it would be beneficial for students
if we could arrange their poster/regular sessions early during the
conference, such that they can begin networking and get the most out
of the duration of the conference. We suggest that future Workshop
planners communicate with the main conference organizers in the early
stages of planning to ensure that the logistics for this situation
work out. Both oral and poster presentations were scheduled and
located to make the SRW look like a part of the main conference rather
than a separate event. We believe this is beneficial for the students,
as they get more attention from the general audience. 

c) This year, the submission deadline as well as the notification of
acceptance for the SRW was set to be at the same time as that of the
main conference. In the call for papers we clearly state that the
students should indicate if a paper has been submitted to another
conference or workshop. We did not receive papers that indicated
double submissions. We also manually searched the authors of the
accepted papers and their previous publications on the web to make
sure that their papers are unpublished and original works.

d) Since our funding came from the National Science Foundation, in
order for students to be reimbursed for their airfare their flights
have to comply with the Fly America Act. This essentially means that
the flights have to be on a U.S. carrier or code-shared by a U.S.
carrier, unless no such options are available (there are a few
exceptions, primarily when the travel time would be dramatically
increased). We announced this fact to the students in a few weeks
after the notification of acceptance. Since the workshop will be held
in the USA, students won't have any problems to find flights from U.S.
carriers.




 


ACL 2008 Sponsorship Report

Based on email discussions with officers of the ACL, NAACL, and EACL, the
Sponsorship Chairs developed a sponsorshop prospecturs, located at:

http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/acl08/files/ACLSponsorshipProspectus2008-2009.pdf.  

The total amount of sponsorship received was $33,500.

The sponsorship details are as folows:

Gold Level: Ohio State University.
Silver Level: BBN Technologies, Google, Microsoft Research, PowerSet.
Bronze Level: Center for Next Generation Localisation.
Supporter: Thomson Reuters.

In addition, IBM Yorktown Heights supported the Best Student Paper to the
tune of $1000.Cincinatti Children's Hospital supported $700 for the
reception and $500 for the keynote speaker.

Google and PowerSet also sponsored booths. LanguageWeaver sponsored a
conference bag. The University of Michigan School of Information Sciences
sponsored an ad in the brochure along with a conference bag insert.
Thomson Reuters also sponsored a conference bag insert.

For a complete list of sponsors, please visit this webpage  
http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/acl08/sponsors.html

The Sponsorship Chairs:
Inderjeet Mani imani@mitre.org
Michael White  mwhite@ling.osu.edu
Josef van Genabith  josef@computing.dcu.ie





 
Publicity for ACL 2008 (Diane Kelly, Hal Daume III, Eric Fosler-Lussier)
 
This year, we tried to extend the reach of ACL by not only  
advertising to the NLP community, but also the IR, ML, and Speech  
communities as well.   We made an 8.5 x 11 printable flyer, which was  
put up at NIPS, IEEE ASRU,  Digital Libraries, several research labs,  
and the SIGIR PC meeting.  The flyer and CFP were also distributed on  
several mailing lists (ACL, IR, Digital Libraries, Info Science,  
several machine learning/statistics lists), as well as mailings to  
many of the major labs.
 
One issue that came up is that it would be good to coordinate with  
the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee on cross-advertising  
of events.  It might be a positive development if some deal could be  
worked out where events that might interest the other community are  
advertised via the other group's mailing list(s) as related events.