2012Q3 Reports: EACL

2012-Q3 EACL Report, June 2012

Sien Moens, Chair

Stephen Clark, Chair-elect

Joakim Nivre, Secretary

Mike Rosner, Treasurer

EACL 2012

Report by Sien Moens

The 13th Conference of the European Chapter for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2012) was held in Avignon, France from April 23 till April 27, 2012. The conference succeeded in constructing a program of high quality and diversity, within the tradition of EACL conferences (e.g., treating posters as first class events). More than 250 participants were registered for the main conference. Problems in previous EACLs with attracting a sufficiently large audience for tutorials were not the case in EACL 2012. All tutorial and workshop events have received an acceptable number of registrations. In accordance to the EACL tradition, we considered invited speakers representing "core computational linguistics" and a "neighboring relevant field". The two core NLP speakers were Regina Barzilay, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Raymond Mooney, University of Texas at Austin. The speaker for the NLP-related field was Martin Cooke, Ikerbasque (Basque Foundation for Science), who is an expert in speech perception. In total 82 papers were accepted for presentation at the conference (acceptance rate: 25.95%), 48 oral (15.19%) and 34 posters (10,76%). The paper "Spectral Learning for Non-Deterministic Dependency Parsing" by Franco M. Luque, Ariadna Quattoni, Borja Balle, and Xavier Carreras, has received the best paper award. All the conference chairs' reports are available at http://stp.ling.uu.se/~nivre/e2a0c1l2/.

EACL 2014

Report by Stephen Clark

Three bids were received for EACL 2014. For the evaluation process, the EACL Board was split into 3 groups, each group responsible for assessing particular aspects of the bids (e.g. financial feasibility, suitability of the location). At the first stage, all three bids were considered competitive and hence put through to the second round.

The second stage of the process involved some communication with the bidders, during which time the Board posed particular questions about each bid. It soon became apparent that, whilst all 3 bids could have been made to work, one of the bids was superior overall, and the Board was unanimous in its selection of Gothenburg for the location of EACL 2014.

Financial Report

Report by Mike Rosner

CHAPTER FINANCES 2011 Intermediate Report (SHADOW ACCOUNTING, June 2012) (all amounts are in €)

12/31/10 9,282

INCOME 0

EXPENSES ESSLLII sponsorship -1,500

       ACL10 sponsorship
       (paid late)                                   -200
       eacl.org.mt domain                    -73		

total expenses 2011 -1,773

12/31/11 7,509 01/01/12

INCOME 0

EXPENSES

       EACL 2012 sponsorship             -2,500           
                                                          

14/06/12 5,009

Nominations to ACL Sponsorship Committee for 2012

The EACL Board has nominated Idan Szpector of Yahoo! Haifa, Israel as a regional representative for the European region in the ACL sponsorship committee for 2012. Idan had already served in this committee for year 2011. The board is still seeking a second representative to be in service in the same committee for the years 2012-13.

EACL Sponsorships

EACL has supported the EACL 2012 conference (see above). An endorsement of 2500 € was given for the funding of student travel grants.

EACL Newsletter

Since 2006 EACL has been issuing one newsletter per year, reporting on main CL events taking place in Europe and geographically related areas. With the main goal of reviving its relationships with the several regional CL organizations in Europe, EACL has issued since 2010 a second newsletter per year, reporting on the regional conferences organized by these associations.

EACL Officers per June 1st, 2012

The EACL Board composition is as follows:

Chair: Sien Moens (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium)

Chair-elect: Stephen Clark (University of Cambridge, UK)

Secretary: Joakim Nivre (Uppsala University, Sweden)

Treasurer: Mike Rosner (University of Malta)

Advisory Board Members:

Toni Martí (University of Barcelona, Spain)

Alexander Koller (University of Potsdam, Germany)

Kemal Oflazer (Carnegie Mellon University, Qatar)

Vivi Nastase (Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, Germany)

Nominating Committee:

Anette Frank (University of Heidelberg, Germany)

Alex Lascarides (University of Edinburgh, UK)

Giorgio Satta (University of Padua, Italy)

Kiril Simov (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria)

Student Board Members:

Konstantina Garoufi (University of Potsdam, Germany)

Pierre Lison (University of Oslo, Norway)

Coskun Mermer (Bogazici University, Turkey)

Ivan Vuli? (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium) has been appointed to replace Pierre Lison from July 2012 onwards.