ACL-10 Workshop Instructions

Dear X,

First of all, congratulations again on submitting a successful workshop proposal to ACL 2010.
Below we provide some more information about the conditions for organizing an ACL workshop.  
Please study this information carefully and let us know if anything is unclear. In order to
have a smooth workshop session at ACL 2010, it is important that we all work together and
try to solve any practical problems that may arise as early as possible. Many of your initial 
questions may be answered by referring to the ACL Workshop Policies at:
http://www.aclweb.org/archive/policies/current/Workshops/Overview-workshop.html


Best regards,

Pushpak Bhattacharyya and David Weir
Workshop Co-Chairs ACL 2010

Jan Hajic
General Chair ACL 2010

--------------------
Financial conditions
--------------------

Every workshop is entitled to a lecture room with standard equipment and to free refreshments 
for their participants during two coffee breaks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. 
Every workshop is also entitled to one (1) free registration for an invited speaker. Please 
note that the registration is only for the workshop itself, not the main conference, and that 
you must inform Priscilla Rasmussen who should get the free registration. 

Any other expenses, such as additional free registrations, travel and accommodation for 
additional invited speakers, or catering for a lunch or reception, have to be covered by the
workshop organizers themselves, either by securing sponsorship for the workshop or through
the shadow account of an ACL SIG. In both cases, you must get approval from Priscilla 
Rasmussen before you can contact the local organizers regarding the practical arrangements.

All questions regarding the financial conditions should be directed to Priscilla Rasmussen
(email).

------------------
Local arrangements
------------------

Every workshop will be allocated a lecture room appropriate in size for the number of 
registered participants. All rooms will be equipped with laptop, screen and beamer. Larger
rooms will also be equipped with microphones and speakers. If you need any other equipment,
you must contact the local organizers to find out what the possibilities are and whether 
any additional costs are involved. 

Note that the standard arrangement does not provide space for a poster session. If you 
want to have a poster session as part of your workshop, you must therefore contact the
local organizers and let them know how many posters you need and at what time. The 
conference venue has good space for poster sessions, so we should be able to accommodate
all requests, provided that we get them at least two months before the conference.

Some workshops may already have been instructed by the workshop chairs that they need
to share a room with another workshop and must therefore have a poster session during
one morning or afternoon. Even if this is the case, you need to inform the local 
organizers of the time of this session and of the number of posters needed.

Break refreshments will be served during the morning and afternoon breaks. If you want
additional catering for a lunch or a reception, you must first contact Priscilla 
Rasmussen about the finances (see above) and then contact the local organizers to have
the catering arranged. Such requests must be made at least two months before the 
conference.

The preliminary schedule for both workshop days (both Thursday, July 15 and Friday, 
July 16) is as follows:

09:00-10:30 Session
10:30-11:00 Morning break
11:00-12:30 Session
12:30-14:00 Lunch break
14:00-15:30 Session
15:30-16:00 Afternoon break
16:00-17:30 Session

There is some flexibility in this schedule, especially concerning start and end times,
but the morning and afternoon breaks must be 10:30-11:00 and 15:30-16:00 for logistic
reasons.

While each workshop has been allocated a maximum duration, we would only expect workshop 
organizers to make use the full duration if this is justified by the quality and number of 
submissions that are attracted.

All questions regarding the local arrangements should be directed to X
(email) and Y (email), who are the workshop
liaisons in the local arrangements committee.

-------
Website
-------

Each workshop needs to set up its own website. As soon as you have done this, please
send the URL to local@acl2010.org, so that a link can be put on the workshop page on
the main conference website at http://acl2010.org.

-----------
Submissions
-----------

We have created a START V2 submission and review site for your workshop. You will be
receiving an email about this very soon.

Note also that ACL 2010 provides a mentoring service, which is open to authors not
only for the main conference but also for workshops, so you may want to advertise
this service in your call for papers. Questions about the mentoring service can be
sent to mentoring@acl20XY.org.

-----------
Proceedings
-----------

Each workshop has to compile its own proceedings (including a subdirectory of the 
CD-ROM image containing individual pdf papers, their index files and bibdata), then 
send the compiled CD-ROM image (including the compiled full version of the proceedings) 
to the Publication Chairs to produce the CD-ROM proceedings. (There will be no printed
hardcopy proceedings at ACL 2010.)

If you have a separate publication chair or book chair who is responsible for compiling 
the proceedings, please forward this message to the person responsible, and inform the 
Publication Chairs of the right person to contact in the future.

Compiling the proceedings simply means re-sorting the pdf files by your program 
schedule, adding page numbers, citation stamps, creating the TOC, and author index, 
and including your organizational information and prefaces from your chairs to
the proceedings, ..., etc. 

For details on what should be compiled into the proceedings and some sample online 
proceedings (coling-acl06 & acl-08), please find the extended outline for the major 
working items of the publication committee, which is available online at:

http://nlp.csie.ncnu.edu.tw/~shin/acl-ijcnlp2009/publication/howto/Working.Items.txt.

This online document and its references were produced for the recent ACL-IJCNLP 2009 
conference (Singapore). While some details may be changed for the ACL 2010 
conference, it provides typical working items for proceedings publication.

The Publication Chairs will post the most updated changes online, and will have a 
similar Working Items for ACL 2010 soon. Contact the Publication Chairs if you have 
any early questions.  

In particular, you should pay special attention to the sections related to "workshop" 
program committee/chairs and the "book chair". (A book chair is a person responsible 
for compiling the proceedings, if the workshop/program chairs do not take this 
responsibility.)

Most of the publication work can be automated if you use the ACLPUB package,
which is a set of Perl scripts and some LaTex templates, running under unix/linux. 
If you are not familiar with the package, you should try to run it on some test data 
from the START submission system as early as possible to avoid unexpected compilation
problems earlier.

** ACL is working with the team who developed the START conference
  management system to integrate the ACLPUB publication tools into
  the START system. Therefore, ACL-2010 is likely to use the integrated
  system for producing the conference proceedings. However, since the integration may
  not be finished in time, it would be safer if you know how to use ACLPUB to produce 
  the proceedings.

You can do most of the compilation tasks using the ACLPUB package. But you also need 
to do some manual editing work on the provided templates to include the newest workshop 
specific information for your workshop.

A few quick steps are available in the above URL as well. It also point you to a more 
complete document set of the ACLPUB, which is included in the ACLPUB package itself.

Using other tools (such as Acrobat) to compile the proceedings is possible but not 
really recommended in terms of consistent style for all proceedings of the conference. 
According to our previous experience, this approach also needs more human effort. 
So it is not really recommended.

The authors also need to sign the copyright transfer form in order for their work 
to be included to the proceedings. In ACL-IJCNLP-2009, the main conference adopted 
an e-signature practice, which is also used in some recent conferences.
We may use the same practice for ACL-2010 to simplify the copyright
transfer process.

An e-copy of the copyright transfer form will be installed on the final submission 
page; the authors can transfer their copyright by typing their names in the signature 
field of the e-form. No hardcopy copyright transfer form will be collected under this 
practice.

All questions regarding the workshop publications should be directed to the ACL 2010
Publications Chairs, X and Y (publications@acl20XY.org).