2009Q3 Reports: NAACL

Report from NAACL, June 2009 Owen Rambow, Chapter Board Chair http://www.naacl.org

1. Elections

The NAACL election was held electronically in the Fall of 2008. Chris Brew (Ohio State University) and Ted Pedersen (University of Minnesota, Duluth) replaced Bill Dolan and Jennifer Chu-Carroll. The board continues to have only eight members (as Graeme Hirst is both past chair and ACL treasurer).

2. Executive Committee Meetings

The Board converses regularly by e-mail. In addition, the Board met in person at the NAACL HLT 2009 conference in Boulder.

3. Shadow Account Status

See attached summary below.

4. North American conferences in 2008 and 2009

The 2008 North American conference was an ACL conference. The cooperation in the coordinating committee went smoothly and to NAACL's satisfaction. A full account of the conference can be found elsewhere.

The 2009 NAACL HLT conference took place in Boulder, Colorado in early June 2009. The conference was the best attended NAACL HLT conference ever. NAACL thanks the General Chair, Mari Ostendorf, and all other chairs for an outstanding organizational effort. Th conference report can be found elsewhere.

5. North American conference in 2010

The 2010 conference will take place in Los Angeles in early June 2010. Ron Kaplan (Microsoft) is General Chair, and David Chiang (ISI) is in charge of the local team. http://naaclhlt2010.isi.edu/

6. North American conference in 2011

The conference is being jointly organized with ACL by a Coordinating Committee under the leadership of Ido Dagan.

7. Shaping future NAACL HLT conferences

The NAACL Board continues to support a closer integration among the various *ACL conferences when it is beneficial (workshops, sponsorship). The NAACL Board continues to explore ways to make our conference more lively and diverse, through an extended use of the short paper track. An additional interest remains the possibility of involving industry more, while retaining our basic academic outlook.

8. Support for Summer Schools and Other Educational Outreach

We have increased our support for NACLO (the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad) and again supported student participation at the Johns Hopkins summer school. We have established a small fund to support Latin American activities and a small fund to support regional student conferences.

Appendix: NAACL Treasurer Report

NAACL Treasurer's report May 2009

The Chapter's bank account held $71,530.32 at the end of Apr 2008, little changed from the same time last year ($67,093.88). Income for the year is about $8K as NAACL's 50% share of the surplus from ACL 2005 (in Michigan), and expenses of $3K to support NACLO 2008 and about $1K to support student travel to the JHU workshop. There's more of interest in the things about to happen to the bank account: we've just sent $5K for support of NACLO 2009, JHU might eventually get around to cashing our checks for about $12K in total for support of JHU WS 2007 and 2008, and maybe we'll work out some other spending items at the NAACL Executive Committee meeting. Most excitingly, after lots of staring at spreadsheets, I can report that NAACL HLT 2006 brought in a surplus of $57K (!).

Action items: Assuming, I get the data, I'm hoping to catch up a little and do NAACL HLT 2007 accounting over the summer. (With the change of ACL Treasurer, there has been some discontinuity in my ability to get necessary financial data for accounting, but I hope to clear up those issues while in Boulder.) ACL 2008 accounting is the responsibility of the ACL treasurer. There is no reason why NAACL cannot continue to operate financially just as it has for the last few years. However, there is mounting evidence that NAACL should be more proactive in finding good ways to use money to promote the field. Hence I'm interested in initiatives like student travel support, support for Central and South America, etc. On the other hand, I think we should also reflect a little on trends in corporate sponsorship and opportunities for links with the broader text mining/processing/search community.

Christopher Manning, NAACL Treasurer; May 27, 2009, Palo Alto, CA.