2008Q1 Reports: NAACL

Report from NAACL, January 2008   Owen Rambow, Chapter Board Chair
http://www.naacl.org

1. Elections

The NAACL election was held electronically in the Fall of 2007.   
Rebecca Hwa (Pitt) and Hal Daume (Utah) replace Regina Barzilay and  
Mary Harper on the Board.  Suzanne Stevenson (Toronto) replaces  
Lillian Lee as secretary, and Chris Manning (treasurer) and Owen  
Rambow (chair) ran unopposed for re-election.  Kathy McCoy as ex- 
officio member is replaced by Grame Hirst, who now is board member  
for two reasons (past NAACL chair and ACL treasurer), but with only  
one vote.  The board thus now has only eight members.


2. Executive Committee Meetings

The Board converses regularly by e-mail.  In addition, in 2008, the  
Board will meet in person at the ACL2008:HLT conference in Columbus.   
This needs to be scheduled asap (competition with ACL Board for time).


3. Shadow Account Status

The NAACL bank balance stood at $66,868 at the end of 2007. The  
increase reflected accounting for HLT-NAACL 2004 (large surplus). A  
more modest surplus from ACL 2005 will be finalized and added soon.  
We aim to account for NAACL 2006 finances before ACL 2008, and  
another surplus is expected.  We assume NAACL 2007 made a loss.  The  
other major expenses for the past year were supporting the Johns  
Hopkins summer school, the Stanford LSA Linguistic Institute, and the  
computational linguistics olympiad (NACLO).


4. North American conference in 2007

A detailed report on the NAACL HLT 2007 conference is on the
NAACL website:
http://www.naacl.org/archives/2007/conf-chairs-and-subchairs-report.html
The conference drew a disappointingly small number of attendants,  
which we attribute to the early paper submission deadlines, the early  
conference data (April), the small number of workshops (5), and  
perhaps the location.  We have concluded that the NAACL conference  
should never be that early again.


5. North American conference in 2008

The 2008 conference is being organized jointly with ACL and a summary  
of progress can be found here: http://tangra.si.umich.edu/~radev/ 
aclsec/reports-winter08/ACL2008-report.doc .


6. North American conference in 2009

NAACL HLT 2009 will take place in Boulder, Colorado, in June 2009.   
Mari Ostendorf is conference chair, Martha Palmer and James Martin  
are local organizers.  Jennifer Chu-Carroll is the NAACL Board member  
in charge of coordination.


7. North American conference in 2010

A call for proposals will go out shortly.


8. Support for Summer Schools and Other Educational Outreach

There was enormous interest in our scholarships at the LSA Summer  
Institute; we will probably change the procedure if we do it again,  
there seemed an inordinate amount of administrative overhead.  NACLO  
(the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad) was  
apparently a great success, and we intend to be involved again,  
perhaps increasing our participation.  As usual, we will also be  
sponsoring students to attend the summer
courses in computational linguistics that is held in conjunction with  
the summer
CLSP workshops at the Johns Hopkins University .