2009Q3 Reports: General Conference Chair
General Chair Report (Su, Keh-Yih)
ACL-IJCNLP-09 is the first joint conference sponsored by ACL and AFNLP. To mix the spirit from both ACL and AFNLP, we have one co-chair from Asia and one co-chair from US/Europe for each position (except the general chair).
Among our hard working organizers, I would like to thank the Program Chairs, Jan Wiebe and Jian Su, who has carefully selected papers from our record high submissions, and the Local Arrangements Chair, Haizhou Li, who has shown his excellent capability in smoothly organizing various events and details. My thanks will also go to other chairs for their competent and hard work: The Webmaster, Minghui Dong; the Demo Chairs, Gary Geunbae Lee and Sabine Schulte im Walde; the Exhibits Chairs, Timothy Baldwin and Philipp Koehn; the Mentoring Service Chairs, Hwee Tou Ng and Florence Reeder; the Publication Chairs, Jing-Shin Chang and Regina Barzilay; the Publicity Chairs, Min-Yen Kan and Andy Way; the Sponsorship Chairs, Hitoshi Isahara and Kim-Teng Lua; the Student Research Workshop Chairs, Davis Dimalen, Jenny Rose Finkel, and Blaise Thomson; also the Faculty Advisors, Grace Ngai and Brian Roark; the Tutorial Chairs, Diana McCarthy and Chengqing Zong; the Workshop Chairs, Jimmy Lin and Yuji Matsumoto; last, the ACL Business Manager, Priscilla Rasmussen, who not only provides useful advice but also helps to contact more sponsors and get their support. The reports from various chairs are compiled separately as follows.
Almost all working items, except that of Exhibits and Sponsorship, have progressed smoothly according to the schedule. On the other hand, due to the bad global economic situation, the sponsorship and the exhibition could not meet our original target. Which is beyond our control regardless of our effort. Furthermore, the publication chairs report that the paper size setting of the source PDF files remains the major problem in compiling the proceedings, and suggest the START system to detect incompatible paper size in advance (please refer the report given by the publication chairs below).
One particular thing that is worth to mention: To share and exchange information among various team members, a bulletin board has been set up this year in my own website (http://www.bdc.com.tw/kysu/ACL_IJCNLP-09_Bulletin_Board/index.htm), which includes a check list to trace the progress of working items that each chair is expected to complete (about 180 working items). The spreadsheet of the check list helps me greatly to monitor the progress of various chairs. According to the feedback from various chairs, this check list is also helpful for them to trace their own progress and that of other related chairs. It is suggested to have this set up in future conferences. Last, a few related statistics from some chairs are given as follows for your reference.
(1) Program Chairs (Jan and Jian):
Total 925 submissions (record high!!): 569 submissions for full papers (99 + #ACL-08), 120 of them are accepted (21%); 356 submissions for short papers (81 + #ACL-08), 93 of them are accepted (26%).
Some other reference numbers: CoLing-ACL 2006 has 618 submissions (no short papers category), ACL-2007 has 588 submissions (no short papers category), ACL 2008 has 470 full papers 275 short papers.
(2) Student Workshop Chairs (Brian and Grace): 25 submissions, 12 of them are accepted (48%)
(3) Demo Chairs (Gary and Sabine): 23 submissions, 11 of them are accepted (48%)
(4) Tutorial Chairs (Diana and Chengqing): 19 proposals received, 6 of them are accepted (30%)
(5) Workshop Chairs (Jimmy and Yuji): 18 Top-1 preference for us, 12 of them are accepted (67%)
(6) Mentoring Service Chairs (Hwee-Tou and Florence): 10 full papers and 2 short papers request for mentoring service.