2018Q3 Reports: Publications Chairs

Summary

The publications chairs produced the proceedings for the two main conference volumes (long papers and short papers) and coordinated with the SRW organizers, demo chairs, tutorial chairs, and workshop organizers to produce their volumes.

We would like to thank Meg Mitchell and Stephanie Lukin for writing and maintaining the github instructions for book chairs as well as for their assistance at several stages in the process.

Changes from previous years

We made minor changes to the style files. The main changes we introduced were: (1) making the color of the line numbers on the margins slightly lighter to permit note taking on a printed copy; (2) a small bug correction that caused errors in certain bibtex implementations; (3) adding text about using \citealp for no-parentheses citations.

Problems

While much of the work is done by the START system, several steps in the process involve manual intervention or must be done on a local machine. These include adding sponsor logos, separating the proceedings into long and short volumes, handling supplementary material files for inclusion in the ACL anthology, and including DOI strings in the front footer. We did not include DOI strings in the front footer this year because that function was not automated in START and the deadline was very tight. It would be good to have such features fully supported in the START system in the future. It would also be good to come up with a better way to handle generating separate long and short paper volumes when there is only a single “papers” softconf URL. The solution we used was to create two “order” files from the main conference order file, one for long papers and one for short. This required a few additional steps, including finding a list of long and short paper IDs, for which we used a hack shared by Meg Mitchell, as well as manually editing the filtered order files to ensure there were no empty sessions after filtering. We edited the fields in the “Templates” and “CDROM” tabs on the “ACLPUB” screen in START to be those for the long paper volume, used the long paper order file, and compiled/downloaded the long paper volume. Then we edited those same fields to be those for the short paper volume, used the short paper order file, and compiled/downloaded the short paper volume. A similar approach was already used by the NAACL 2018 publication chairs.

The question arose of standardizing the style files across the *CL/EMNLP conferences. There is a tension between letting the program/publications chairs of a given conference have some control over the style files for their conference vs standardizing them across conferences. One area in which this has become an issue is regarding permitting supplementary material as appendices exceeding the ordinary submission page limit. Individual sets of program chairs may wish this to be permitted for their conference, while others may disagree. Some of these issues could be resolved if the ACL were to establish a policy governing all conference style files in various ways, e.g., a policy on the inclusion of supplementary material as appendices in the same submission pdf exceeding the page limit.

Since tutorial submissions were done through a centralized system (i.e., using a single softconf URL) for multiple conferences, this posed difficulties for compiling the tutorial abstracts volume containing only the ACL18 tutorials. The program chairs created a new softconf URL for ACL18 tutorials and the tutorial chairs asked softconf support to copy over the ACL18 accepted tutorials to the new softconf URL. The publications chairs and tutorial chairs set up the new softconf site with a final submission page and solicited final tutorial abstracts submissions from the tutorial presenters. It would be good to improve this process in the future.

All of the workshop proceedings had problems which required back-and-forth between us and the organizers of those workshops. These problems were mostly due to the use of incorrect field values in the “Templates” and “CDROM” tabs on the “ACLPUB” screen in START.