2013Q3 Reports: NAACL

Report from NAACL, June 2012

Chris Callison-Burch - Chapter board chair

Joel Tetreault - Treasurer

Executive Committee Meetings

The Board met on June 9th, at the NAACL HLT 2013 conference in Atlanta, GA. Additionally, the Board converses regularly by e-mail.

Treasurer's Report

The Chapter’s bank account held $36,580 at the end of April 2013. This is the lowest balance since 2006. It finally reflects the deficit made by NAACL 2010 in LA. Last year's conference in Montreal looks to have broken even or made a slight surplus, thanks in part to a tax refund from the Government of Canada for $18,997.27 CAN. Our bookkeeper Chiaki Nemoto pointed out that we were eligible to apply for the rebate. We do not yet have the numbers to definitively determine the financial outcome the NAACL 2013 conference in Atlanta, but Joel estimates that it is likely to make a surpluss.

The activities that NAACL sponsored over the past year were LSA 2013 ($10k), JHU 2012 Workshop Support ($10k), NACLO 2013 ($5k) and a conference in Uruguay ($1.5k).

North American conference in 2013

NAACL-HLT 2013 was held in Atlanta, GA. It took place June 9 -- June 15 2012, at the Westin Peachtree. J Lucy Vanderwende (MSR) was the general chair. Hal Daume (U of Maryland) and Katrin Kirchhoff (U of Washington) were the program committee co-chairs. Priscilla Rasmussen served as the local arrangements chair. You can find a report from the general chair on the NAACL web site: http://naacl.org/minutes/2013/NAACL2013finalreport.html You can also find a report on the registration numbers on the web site: http://naacl.org/minutes/2013/2013-NAACL-registration-stats-June11.pdf

New initiatives at the NAACL 2013 conference

We hired a professional videographer to record all of the main session talks and all of the tutorials. The cost was $12k to hire Weyond Conferencing LLC. We received $6k in additional sponsorship to cover part of the costs. This was provided by Google and Intel.

We create an iPhone/Android App for the conference handbook. It cost $5k, which was offset by the fact that we stopped distributing the proceedings on USB drives (a savings of $8k). The app was quite popular. Publications chair Matt post lead the effort to create it.

NAACL elections

Elections will be held in September to replace 2 outgoing board members, the NAACL chair, and the NAACL secretary. Chris Brew is the chair of the nominating committee. The other nom com members are: Ted Pedersen, Kristina Toutanova, Owen Rambow, Christopher Manning, David Chiang, and Dan Gildea. Some of them may recuse themselves if they stand for Chair.

North American conference in 2014

ACL will be held in Baltimore, MD in 2014.