2021Q3 Reports: NAACL

Activities

• The Regional Americas Fund issued awards to three projects for 2022:
  • Helena de Medeiros Caseli, Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil
    • NLP textbook in/for Brazilian Portuguese (“Delas para PLN”)
    • Coordinated effort of 80 Brazilian women in NLP
    • Shaped by previous NAACL funding (R.A.F. & WiNLP grants, project initiated WiNLP 2020)
  • Francis Tyers, Indiana University, USA
    • Stipends for 8 speakers of different indigenous languages of Mexico & Guatemala to attend a tutorial on morphosyntactic annotation at Conference on Form and Analysis in Mayan Linguistics (FAMLi) in Chiapas Nov 2021
  • Evandro L. T. P. Cunha, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil
    • Development of three online Computational Linguistics courses in Portuguese
    • Follow-up to 2020 ERF/RAF grant

• NAACL Board discussion of regional pricing for virtual NAACL conferences.
  • Decision: no regional pricing this year, instead make D&I grants easy for presenters.

NAACL 2021 Conference

• NAACL 2021, originally intended for Mexico City, was hosted virtually from June 6–11, 2021.
• Business meeting had a healthy debate about proper handling of ethics review, which continued into our annual board meeting. I recommend reading the Conference blog posts on the topic:
  • https://2021.naacl.org/blog/ethics-review-process/
  • https://2021.naacl.org/downloads/pc-ethics-takeaway.pdf
  • https://2021.naacl.org/blog/ethics-review-process-report-back/

NAACL 2022 Conference

• The board finished appointing Program Chairs for NAACL 2022, to be hosted in Seattle, July 10 - 15, 2022.
  • General Chair: Dan Roth (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
  • Program Chairs:
    • Marine Carpuat (University of Maryland, USA)
    • Marie-Catherine de Marneffe (The Ohio State University, USA)
    • Ivan Vladimir Meza-Ruiz (National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico)

• Dan Roth has submitted a proposal to the ACL and NAACL boards regarding changes to the ACL Publication Process.

• As a new procedure for NAACL 2022, the NAACL board and the NAACL 2022 organizing committee issued an open call for D&I Committee members.

NAACL Officers as of January 1, 2020

• Chair: Colin Cherry (Google, Canada)
• Secretary: Heng Ji (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
• Treasurer: Jonathan May (University of Southern California / ISI, USA)
• Past Chair: Julia Hockenmaier (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
• Board Members:
  • Smaranda Muresan (Columbia University, USA)
  • Thamar Solorio (University of Houston, USA)
  • Aline Villavicencio (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil and the University of Sheffield, UK)
  • Luciana Benotti (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina)
  • Graham Neubig (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
• North American Sponsorship chairs:
  • Mohit Bansal (University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, USA)
  • Veselin Stoyanov (Facebook, USA)