Reports to the ACL Exec: 1993
ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS
Date: 19 June 1993
To: Fernando Pereira, Karen Sparck Jones, Martha Pollack,
Bente Maegaard, James Allen, Julia Hirschberg, Aravind Joshi,
Jerry Hobbs, Ralph Grishman, Kathy McKeown, Graeme Hirst,
Robert Berwick, James Pustejovsky, Robert Ingria, Martha
Evens, Susan Armstrong, Louis des Tombe, Annemarie Mineur,
Lenhart Schubert, Terry Patten, Robert Kasper, Philip Cohen,
Linda Suri, Sandra Carberry, Janyce Wiebe, Eric Iverson,
Masaru Tomita, David McDonald, Kent Wittenburg, Brian Joseph,
Bran Boguraev, Johanna Moore, Betty Walker, Beth Craig
From: Don Walker and Judith Klavans
Subject: EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE DINNER and MEETING
Time: Wednesday, 23 June 1993, 7pm
Place: Ohio Union, 1739 High Street, OSU Campus
Agenda: 1. President and Special Executive Committee (Fernando Pereira)
2. Secretary-Treasurer (Don Walker, Judith Klavans)
3. Nominating Committee (Jerry Hobbs)
4. Computational Linguistics (James Allen, Julia Hirschberg)
The FINITE String
Book Reviews (Graeme Hirst)
Squibs and Comments (James Pustejovsky, Bob Ingria)
5. Book Series (Aravind Joshi, Karen Sparck Jones)
6. European Chapter (Susan Armstrong)
7. EACL-93, 21-23 April, Utrecht, Netherlands (Louis des Tombe)
8. ACL-93 (Len Schubert, Terry Patten, Bob Kasper, Phil Cohen,
Linda Suri)
9. ACL-94, 27 June - 1 July, Las Cruces, New Mexico (Jan Wiebe,
Eric Iverson)
10. Future Meetings:
ACL-94 program chair (Fernando Pereira)
ACL-95 site selection (Karen Sparck Jones)
Applied NLP Conference
Program Committee guidelines (Johanna Moore)
11. 1993 Linguistic Institute (Brian Joseph)
12. COLING-94, 5-9 August, Kyoto, Japan
13. Special Interest Groups (Fernando Pereira with Bob Berwick,
James Pustejovsky, Tommy Tomita, David McDonald, Kent Wittenburg)
14. Text Encoding Initiative (Don Walker)
15. Consortium for Lexical Research (Jan Wiebe)
16. Data Collection and European Corpus Initiatives (Susan Armstrong)
17. Graduate Directory (Martha Evens)
18. Course Survey
19. NLP Software Registry
20. Membership issues: supporting the unemployed; multiple-year dues
payments; student issues; electronic dissemination (Don Walker)
21. New and other business (Fernando Pereira)
1. PRESIDENT'S REPORT
Fernando Pereira
17 June 1993
Here are the main matters that the Executive Committee has worked on
since January, and which will be the subject of the Executive
Committee's special meeting on Wednesday morning.
1. Journal Editor
After 10 years of outstanding service, James Allen asked to step down
as CL editor, to be able to concentrate on his other activities. I am
happy to announce that Julia Hirschberg was elected by the Executive
Committee and has agreed to take the position of CL Editor. The
transition has already started, and will be complete by the end of the
year. Because of the increased submission load, it may at some point be
desirable to add Associate Editors to distribute the process of getting
papers through the reviewing process. We expect that geographical
diversity will be an important criterion for the choice of Associate
Editors.
2. Secretary-Treasurer
Given the increasing workload on the Secretary-Treasurer as ACL becomes
more diverse in its membership and activities, and the wish of Don
Walker to considerer retirement from this demanding position, the
Executive has started to put in place mechanisms for a smooth
transition of the Secretary-Treasurer duties. The first step has been
the proposed amendment of the bylaws to create the position of
Associate Secretary-Treasurer, and the interim appointment of Judith
Klavans to that position pending the vote on the amendment and her
candidacy at the meeting. Judith has been working closely with Don and
Betty Walker to learn the main procedures that keep ACL running
efficiently. We have also started to look into additional secretarial
support, and into contracting out the distribution of proceedings.
3. Program Chair for ACL-94
James Pustejovsky has been chosen for program chair for the 1994
Meeting, and has agreed to serve.
4. Book Series
Due to changes in its editorial policies and priorities, MIT Press
decided to terminate its agreement with ACL for the publication of the
ACL-MIT Series in Natural Language Processing. This unexpected
development has led to extensive discussions in the Executive of the
role of the series and alternatives for its continuation. We should
thank Aravind Joshi, Karen-Spark Jones and Mark Liberman for their
efforts in making the series a valuable and respected outlet for
computational linguistics titles. They have graciously agreed to
continue to advise the Executive Committee on book series matters
during this transition period. Discussions are under way with other
publishers to investigate possible collaborations.
5. SIGs
As Vice-President last year, I had started to study SIG organization,
procedures and needs, with particular attention to arrangements for
rotation in SIG leadership and to the interaction between SIG-organized
meetings and ACL's existing meetings. I have written a draft report on
these matters based on input from the SIGs and discussions with
members. This will be discussed at the Executive Committee meetings
with a view to starting to establish standard SIG procedures. Karen
Spark-Jones, as Vice-President, will continue this activity.
5. Program Committees
It has been noted from time to time that no written guidelines exist
for the running of ACL program committees, with the result that
procedures and criteria have to be recreated from year to year. Joanna
Moore, who was in this year's program committee, kindly volunteered to
collate views of program committee members and chairs and has written a
detailed report on the main policy questions facing a program
committee. After discussion, we expect this to be the basis for a set
of written guidelines for future program committees.
2. SECRETARY-TREASURER'S REPORT
Don Walker
19 June 1993
ACL 1992 FINANCIAL STATUS
-------------------------
INCOME EXPENSES
Membership 56,020 128,446
Proceedings 35,192 1,363
Meetings 65,080 46,142
Workshops 245 3,520
CLR 8,793
Prague Workshop 17,013
TEI 20,000
DCI/CDROM 1,760
NSF Grant 7,184 7,302
Royalties 427
Interest 11,930
European Bonds 40,926 49,826
Foreign Exchange 6,700
------- -------
TOTALS 218,764 289,135
Difference 70,371
1991 1992
ASSETS 397,751 327,380
ACL 1992 MEMBERSHIP ACCOUNT
---------------------------
INCOME EXPENSES
Dues 44,444 Services 34,036
Back orders 3,378 Journal 55,350
Mail fees 4,966 Editorial 6,000
Labels 1,563 Post/Ship 12,572
International Fund 1,669 Equipment 3,223
Supplies 1,365
Phone 828
Travel 13,825
Legal 380
Bank 486
Refunds 381
------- -------
TOTALS 56,020 128,446
ACL MEMBERSHIP STATUS
---------------------
YEAR PERSONAL REGULAR STUDENT INSTITUTIONAL
1977 500 201
1978 444 218
1979/80 658 249
1981 1208 264
1982 1545 296
1983 1384 319
1984 1355 325
1985 1969 366
1986 1960 410
1987 2104 1786 318 454
1988 1959 1690 269 (408)
1989 2001 1729 272 (538)
1990 1932 1656 276 (564)
1991 2065 1744 321 (620)
1992 1991 1705 279 (???)
6/93 1807 1503 297 (???)
ACL MEMBERSHIP DISTRIBUTION
---------------------------
US CANADA EUROPE OTHER PACIFIC RIM ASIA/AFRICA/SA
1987 63% 4% 25% 9%
1988 63% 4% 25% 9%
1989 57% 4% 29% 9%
1990 57% 4% 30% 9%
1991 53% 4% 34% 8% 1%
1992 51% 4% 34% 10% 1%
6/93 46% 4% 39% 10% 1%
2. SECRETARY-TREASURER (TRANSITION TO ASSOCIATE SECRETARY-TREASURER
Judith Klavans
18 June 1993
1. Recording Activities and Timetable of the S-T
An effort to make a written record of the activities Don and Betty
perform over the year was started. I have written down what needs to
be done by whom, and at what time of year. There is a month by month
breakdown, by activity (eg CFP, proceedings, membership, site visit,
pick pc, pick pc chair, solicit exec committee reports, pick officers,
site for meetings, financial summary, tax report, etc) of what to do.
Not listed in this document is the number of times people have to be
reminded to do things, which is an ongoing issue. Over the next year,
I will be able to revise and add to that document so we have a more
complete record of jobs that need to be taken care of.
2. Site visit
I accompanied Don and Betty to the visit to OSU in March to finalize
conference details for the 93 meeting. Any local arrangements person
will attest to the many items that need to be taken care of, and as I
have been told, a diffferent thing goes wrong at each conference. This
visit was a help in seeing the kinds of issues to be resolved for
arranging the conference, and for helping the local arrangements
people. The visit was important for helping me run the 94 meeting in
Las Cruces.
3. Other Guidelines
In keeping with item 1, although Don has notes on different activities
of the officers, and although he has guidelines written up, in order to
help document some of the ongoing activities that Don performs, and in
order to document some of the ACL's general policies, I have initiated
documentation in several areas. The most imporatant this year has been
the documentation of the pc meeting, that Johanna Moore has put
together. Other pieces of documentation and policy will be emerging
over the year. I consider it my job to record ACL policy, and to
continue that policy as long as our consituency is in favor of it.
4. Exec and ACL Officers
I worked closely with the executive committee to help in ongoing
decisions on issues such as the bookseries, the distribution of the
proceedings, SIGs, and most of the points we are discussing at this
dinner. In addition I have been in contact with some of the officers
of the EACL to discuss many of their issues. In fact, what I have been
dealing with this year can be summarized on the agenda of the exec
dinner and exec committee meetings. It's all there.
3. NOMINATION COMMITTEE REPORT
Jerry Hobbs
10 June 1993
The nominating committee, consisting of Jerry Hobbs, Ralph Grishman,
and Kathleen McKeown, after considerable deliberation, nominated Karen
Sparck-Jones for President, Douglas Appelt for Vice-President, Donald
Walker for Secretary-Treasurer, Judith Klavans for Associate
Secretary-Treasurer, Eduard Hovy for the Executive Committee, and
Fernando Pereira for the Nominating Committee. All nominees have
accepted their nomination.
1. COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS: BOOK REVIEW EDITOR
Graeme Hirst
15 June 1993
TIMELINESS OF PUBLICATION
We are continuing to get most reviews published in a timely manner --
or, at least, get them sent off to The MIT Press in a timely manner.
In general, reviewers are responding to the specific deadlines that I
set. The distribution of response time is bi-modal: those who are
overdue tend to be many months or even years overdue.
VOLUME OF REVIEWS PUBLISHED
I am continuing to be fairly strict in deciding if a book is to be
reviewed. The ``Briefly noted'' section is a compromise between a full
review and total neglect.
In volume 18 (1992), we published 20 reviews and 15 brief notes. (In
1991, it was 20 reviews, and 8 brief notes).
PRODUCTION MATTERS
It would save me (and The MIT Press staff) lots of time if the complete
LaTeX style file for book reviews were made available to reviewers and
editors, and if there were a consistent, published style guide for
references.
I continue to be indebted to Chrysanne DiMarco for long hours of
reading out loud with me to check the galleys.
8. ACL-93 PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Lenhart K. Schubert
17 June 1993
The 1993 Program Committee consisted of
Bob Carpenter, Garrison Cottrell, Robert Dale, Bonnie Dorr,
Julia Hirschberg, Paul Jacobs, Bob Kasper, Slava Katz,
Judith Klavans, Bernard Lang, Diane Litman, Mitch Marcus,
Kathleen McCoy, Marc Moens, Johanna Moore, John Nerbonne,
James Pustejovsky, Uwe Reyle, Lenhart Schubert, Richard Sproat,
Jun-ichi Tsujii, Gregory Ward, and Janyce Wiebe
for a total of 23 people, including the chair (7 women and 16 men; 17
from the US and 6 from Europe). This is significantly larger than in
previous years (e.g., 14 last year), the intention being to reduce the
load on PC members and increase expertise within the committee. I
believe that more careful, more expert reviewing resulted.
The deadline for submission was January 6th.
We received a total of 170 submissions, of which nine were too late for
consideration and two were withdrawn before consideration. Also, two
papers were considered as one, leaving a total of 158 papers reviewed.
Of the 158 papers, 34 were accepted and one was later withdrawn to be
presented at another conference (AAAI), so the final number of papers
to be presented is 33.
Here is a breakdown by region of the 158 papers reviewed:
Region submitted accepted success rate
North America 97 (61%) 27 (79%) 28%
Europe 33 (21%) 3 ( 9%) 9%
Japan 15 ( 9%) 2 ( 6%) 13%
Asia (ex. Japan) 8 ( 5%) 2 ( 6%) 25%
Near & Mid. East 3 ( 2%) 0 ( 0%) 0%
Australia & Pacific 2 ( 1%) 0 ( 0%) 0%
Total 158 34 22%
The only noticable change here is the low acceptance rate for papers
from Europe (3 out of 33, vs. last year's 7 out of 36). Note (the
possibly but not necessarily relevant fact) that last year's committee
had 6 Americans and 7 Europeans.
Here is a breakdown by subject area of the 158 papers reviewed;
Subject area submitted accepted success rate
Syntactic theories/formalisms 16.7 (11%) 6.5 (19%) 39%
Parsing theory & practice 19.7 (12%) 3.3 (10%) 17%
Semantic theories/formalisms 13.3 ( 8%) 1.3 ( 4%) 10%
Morphology 2.5 ( 2%) .5 ( 1%) 20%
Lexicon 4.2 ( 3%) .5 ( 1%) 12%
NLU/dialog strategies and systems 11.5 ( 7%) .8 ( 2%) 7%
Superficial discourse phenomena 11.2 ( 7%) 2.8 ( 8%) 25%
Underlying discourse phenomena 10.7 ( 7%) 1.5 ( 4%) 14%
Speech 7.2 ( 5%) 1.0 ( 3%) 14%
Generation 11.0 ( 7%) 1.5 ( 4%) 14%
Corpus-based processing 31.5 (20%) 12.5 (37%) 40%
Psycholinguistics 2.5 ( 2%) .3 ( 1%) 13%
Learning, connectionism 4.7 ( 3%) .8 ( 2%) 17%
Information retrieval 2.8 ( 2%) 0 ( 0%) 0%
Machine translation 7.2 ( 5%) .5 ( 1%) 7%
Miscellaneous 1.5 ( 1%) 0 ( 0%) 0%
158 34 22%
(The fractions are the result of counting papers as belonging to up to
3 subject areas. ``Superficial discourse phenomena'' refers to anaphora,
indexicality, tense and temporal reference, word sense ambiguity, etc.;
``underlying discourse phenomena'' refers to discourse structure and
relations, speech acts, discourse plans, NMR, implicature &
presupposition, style, etc.; these groupings proved convenient in terms
of reviewer interests.)
The overall number is up from last year's 144, as a result of slightly
increased submission rates for North America, Japan, and Asia (ex.
Asia). The overall acceptance rate is somewhat lower than in most
previous years. It would have been possible to accept two or three
additional papers without compromising the quality of the conference,
but this would have had the undesirable consequence of making the
conference run rather late on Saturday.
Last year's trend toward high submission rates (20%) and relatively
high acceptance rates (40%) in corpus-based/statistical processing is
still very much in evidence. Note that exclusive of this area, the
acceptance rate was only 17%.
Papers with broad scope, describing strategies and systems for NLU and
dialog, were up in number (from 2 papers to 11 or 12) but had a notably
low success rate (7%). Perhaps it's very hard to write a short paper on
a broad topic, or perhaps reviewers tend to look for things of specific
interest to them, and find the pickings slim when the topic is broad.
The success rate in semantics was also quite low. (However, the numbers
involved are too small to lend much statistical significance to these
observations.)
Here is a breakdown by sex of author (or first author) of the 158 papers:
Sex submitted accepted success rate
women 28 5 18%
men 130 29 22%
Total 158 34 22%
(**Actually, the rate of success may have been higher or lower for
women, depending on the gender of the following first names -- can
anyone help?? Kemal (Turkey), Zelal (Turkey), Rey-Long (China), Kjetil
(Norway), Relja (Yugosl.), Tetsuya (Japan), Kwangseob (Korea),
Hyuk-Chul (USA), Marti (USA).)
``Blind'' Reviewing
Reviewing was ``blind'' this time, in the hope of increasing actual and
perceived fairness of the reviewing process. The acceptance rates do
not give any clear indication whether the blind reviewing in any way
affected acceptance patterns. An attempt was also made to address the
question of just how accurately reviewers can guess authorship of
anonymous papers, by asking committee members to supply guesses, with
confidence ratings. However, after some of the responses had been
collected (emanating from 6 committee members), the ``guessing game''
was cut short, since it was reportedly making reviewers (who had not
finished their reviews) give too much thought to authorship, contrary
to the intent of blind reviewing! Time constraints and the need to
write up a program with names on it prevented completion of this data
collection effort. Nonetheless, here are the partial results, with
guesses weighted by their confidence rating (e.g., a wrong guess made
with 60% confidence counts as .6 wrong guesses):
Correct guesses Incorrect guesses No guess attempted (too unsure)
24.5 6.2 70 out 116 papers
Thus the guessing accuracy where guesses were attempted was 80%, and
this is not too far off the average confidence of the guesses, 87%.
Some reviewers scored close to 100% on their guesses, others were much
less accurate. Perhaps the most significant fact here is the number of
papers for which no guess was attempted (70/116, i.e., 60%). This may
have been somewhat distorted by the reviewers still having a few papers
left over (for review); but nonetheless it appears that reviewers
hesitated to guess authors for at least half the papers they received.
Thus it is not the case, as sometimes claimed, that a majority of
authors can be guessed.
Author anonymity could be further improved by more specific guidelines
for authors. In particular, some of the correct identifications were
based on authors' referencing preliminary versions of their papers or
companion papers by name.
Reviewing Procedure
The procedure worked as follows: Each paper was sent to two members of
the committee (with each member receiving roughly 11-17 papers). The
two referees for each paper exchanged electronic reviews and requested
third referees for any case in which their recommendations could not be
reconciled. With the increased committee size, it was possible to do
most of the third reviews within the committee.
At the program committee meeting (19 February), final decisions were made
based on the 2 or 3 reviews and further discussion (and in rare cases,
4th reviews). As usual, invited speakers and other program matters were
discussed as well; the discussion of invited speakers was based on
proposals and discussion previously collected by email. This led to an
unusually varied and sparkling invited speaker program, we think. The
meeting lasted a full working day and ran somewhat overtime. The
following day a prearranged ``mini-symposium'' was held, with several
of the committee members giving talks attended by graduate students and
faculty at the University of Rochester, as well as many of the other
committee members. A thoroughly delightful event!
8. ACL-93 PREREGISTRATION INFORMATION
Don Walker
17 June 1993
17 June 1993 ANNUAL REGISTRATION STATISTICS Page 1
CLASS REG# REG $$ ET# ET $$ LT# LT $$ BQT# BQT$$ PR$$ PAID$$ DUE$$
------ ---- ------ --- ------ --- ------ ---- ----- ---- ------ -----
---- ------ --- ------ --- ------ ---- ----- ---- ------ -----
Total: $0 $0 $570 $0 $30 $600 $0
Count: 5 0 5 0
Guest
---- ------ --- ------ --- ------ ---- ----- ---- ------ -----
Total: $0 $0 $0 $120 $0 $120 $0
Count: 9 1 1 6
Member
---- ------ --- ------ --- ------ ---- ----- ---- ------ -----
Total: $16440 $1710 $4770 $2320 $420 $25340 $320
Count: 137 19 53 113
Member Late
---- ------ --- ------ --- ------ ---- ----- ---- ------ -----
Total: $320 $90 $90 $40 $30 $570 $0
Count: 2 1 1 2
Nonmember
---- ------ --- ------ --- ------ ---- ----- ---- ------ -----
Total: $10880 $1530 $3060 $920 $150 $16020 $520
Count: 68 17 34 46
Student
---- ------ --- ------ --- ------ ---- ----- ---- ------ -----
Total: $3420 $450 $850 $740 $0 $5350 $110
Count: 57 9 17 37
Student Nonmember
---- ------ --- ------ --- ------ ---- ----- ---- ------ -----
Total: $2880 $400 $300 $500 $0 $3850 $230
Count: 36 8 6 23
Student Nonmember Late
---- ------ --- ------ --- ------ ---- ----- ---- ------ -----
Total: $100 $0 $0 $20 $0 $120 $0
Count: 1 0 0 1
====== ==== ====== === ====== === ====== ==== ===== ==== ====== =====
Total: $34040 $4180 $9640 $4660 $630 $51970 $1180
Count: 315 55 117 228
HEADERS: #=count, $$=money, ET=early tutorial, LT=late tutorial, BQT=banquet
PR=Proceedings
TUTORIAL PREREGISTRATIONS
Brain & Language 29
Mathematics of Language 26
Multimedia & Multimodal 46
NLP & Information Retrieval 71
8. ACL-93 LOCAL ARRANGEMENTS DEMONSTRATIONS AND EXHIBITS
Bob Kasper
16 June 1993
DEMONSTRATIONS
The demonstrations listed below are planned. Two of them are being
presented by authors of papers at the conference (Hinrich Schuetze,
Dekang Lin). Equipment is being provided by Sun Microsystems, and two
departments at the Ohio State University (Computer and Information
Sciences, Linguistics). Some additional equipment has been rented
locally, using funds donated by the demonstrators.
1. Michael O'Donnell, Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney,
Australia. (A Systemic Parser, Systemic WorkBench).
2. Ken Litkowski, CL Research, Gaithersburg, MD. (DIMAP-2 dictionary
maintenance utilities).
3. Hinrich Schuetze, Center for the Study of Language and
Information Stanford University. (Distributed Representations for
Part of Speech).
4. David McDonald, Arlington MA.
(Sparser: a system for partial ("sparse") parsing of unrestricted text).
5. Marie Mateer, Sage Lab, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Troy, NY.
(SAGE Simulation and Generation Environment)
6. Dekang Lin, Department of Computer Science, University of
Manitoba Winnipeg, Canada. (a parser for Government-Binding Theory).
7. Lew Norton, Paramax Systems Corporation, Paoli, PA. (PUNDIT, CBAS:
Text Processing in Multi-Sensor Data Fusion Applications, IDUS: An
Intelligent Document Understanding System).
8. Rodolfo Delmonte, Dept. Linguistics and Language Teaching,
University of Venice, Italy. (GETA_RUN, integrated system for
reference resolution and text understanding).
9. David Carter and Manny Rayner, SRI International, Cambridge UK.
(SLT Spoken Language Translation system).
10. Jerry Hobbs, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA. (FASTUS: A System
for Extracting Information from Natural-Language Text).
PUBLISHERS EXHIBITS
Cambridge University Press, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, and
University of Chicago Press are sending their own representatives to
staff their exhibits. Blackwell Publishers, Kluwer Academic
Publishers, MIT Press, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, and Oxford
University Press are sending materials, with local student help hired
to staff their exhibits.
SUGGESTIONS
Although we have eight publisher exhibits (the same number as ACL-92),
I believe that we should consider whether the means of contacting and
negotiating agreements with the publishers can be improved. Several
publishers have commented that they would like to have greater
continuity in their relationship with ACL, or more communication about
our meetings further in advance. To a significant degree, this problem
may stem from the fact that I did not have clear expectations about
some of the details that need to be communicated to the publishers far
enough in advance. I suspect that the people handling local
arrangements are usually, like myself, doing it for the first time and
not familiar with the process and the expectations of the publishers.
Under our present system, the local arrangements person winds up
rediscovering many details each year, including who to contact at
various publishers, when they need information in order to allocate
funds for an exhibit in their budgets, etc. If ACL had more paid
staff, this problem would be largely solved by having a more permanent
person handle the ongoing relations and publicity with the publishers,
leaving only the logistics of setting up the local site and hiring
exhibit monitors to local arrangements. I realize that this logical
division of labor may not be easily realized in our current
organization, and I certainly do not expect the few dedicated
volunteers in the ACL office to do more than they now do. We should,
however, consider how to make the communications with publishers more
effective.
I had few similar difficulties with the arrangements for
demonstrations. The group of demonstrators varies considerably from
year to year, unlike the publisher exhibits, which represent largely
the same companies each year, so less continuity is needed to handle
demonstrations effectively. The specific requirements and resources
available to handle demonstrations at the local site also change
rapidly from year to year, so I think it is still entirely appropriate
for local arrangments to assume most of the responsibility for
orchestrating the demonstration program.
8. ACL-93 STUDENT SESSION
Linda Z. Suri
16 June 1993
1 Background
Background on the ACL Student Sessions can be found in David Traum's
1992 ACL Student Session Report.
2 Planning the 1993 Session
2.1 Forming the 1993 Student Session Committee
At the 1992 student session luncheon meeting, and in email to the 1992
student authors, David Traum, the 1992 coordinator, asked volunteers
for participation on the 1993 committee to send him email. Once I was
appointed as the 1993 coordinator, it was suggested that the holdovers
from the 1992 committee (Tilman Becker and Cameron Shelley) and I
select the rest of the committee. We formed the committee from the
list of volunteers, trying to strike a balance for area of interest,
geography, gender, expected length of service (so we could have
holdovers for the next committee). We also wanted some members who had
been a student authors previously. Furthermore, we wanted someone from
the host institution.
The 1993 planning committee consisted of:
Member Institution
Tilman Becker University of Saarbruecken
Beth Ann Hockey University of Pennsylvania
David Hutches University of California, at San Diego
Andy Kehler Harvard University
Vibhu Mittal University of Southern California (replaced C. Shelley)
Sheila Rock University of Edinburgh
Cameron Shelley University of Waterloo (resigned due to break in studies)
Jim Skon Ohio State University (local arrangements liaison)
Linda Suri University of Delaware
Keith Vander Linden University of Colorado
2.2 Few Changes from 1992
We made few changes in the 1993 student sessions. This was because the
committee felt that people seemed happy with the 1992 student
sessions. This impression was partly based on the 1992 student author
survey replies and discussion at the 1992 student luncheon meeting.
This report will not describe the details of the student session
planning, but just note some important points. The committee
unanimously agreed that, as in 1992, we wanted podium presentations (as
opposed to poster sessions), and that we wanted 3-page papers published
in the proceedings. Students would also be given the chance to revise
their papers after receiving reviewer comments, as in 1992. The
committee was very happy that, as in 1992, the student sessions were
scheduled during an afternoon, rather than during a lunch.
2.3 Blind Reviewing
The most significant change this year was that the papers were
blind-reviewed. Blind reviewing was suggested at the ACL-92 student
session luncheon meeting. Blind reviewing made handling email
submissions more difficult; the co-chairs had to ensure that the files,
including postscript files, we were mailing to reviewers did not
contain identifying information. Whether the difficulty of blind
reviewing is justified by its benefits needs to be determined.
2.4 Email submissions
While the 1992 committee felt that email submissions worked well, the
1993 program co-chairs did not think it worked particularly well. As
in 1992, we allowed authors to submit email only, hardcopy only, or
email and hardcopy. All but 3 reviewers had at least one hardcopy
submission, and one reviewer could not print all the papers sent to
him by email. Thus, we had to photocopy and mail hardcopies of papers
to all but 2 reviewers. Once one is mailing hardcopies of some papers
to a given reviewer, one might as well mail hardcopies of all papers
to that reviewer since it doesn't cost additional money and it
alleviates the possibility that a paper can not be printed by that
reviewer.
Additional notes: There were a handful of other papers where I had to
ask the authors to resend their submissions, provide style files or
(in the case of postscript submissions) reformat their pages to
8.5x11 inches (rather than A4). There was one email submission that I
was never able to print; the author supplied a hardcopy by FAX.
In sum, we feel email submissions, especially under blind reviewing,
were more of a hindrance than a benefit.
2.5 Email reviews
We do think that having the reviewers submit their comments by email
was helpful. It eliminated postal costs and saved a little time in
the review process.
2.6 Formation of Program Committee and the Use of Special Reviewers:
The members of the planning committee served as the student members
of the program committee. The non-student members of the program
committee were nominated and agreed on by student members of the
planning committee, taking into account balance in terms of research
areas and geography.
Non-student members of the ACL program committee:
Member Institution
Sandra Carberry University of Delaware) (co-chair)
Mary Dalrymple Xerox PARC
Chrysanne DiMarco University of Waterloo
Donald Hindle AT&T Bell Labs
Robert Ingria BBN
John Lafferty IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Cecile Paris USC/ISI
Rebecca Passonneau Columbia University
Donia Scott University of Brighton
Karen Sparck Jones University of Cambridge
Hans Uszkoreit University of Saarbruecken
Peter Van Beek University of Alberta
David Weir University of Sussex
Philip Resnik (University of Pennsylvania) and Christina Tortora
(University of Delaware) served as special (student) reviewers.
3 Results of 1993 Student Session
We received 30 submissions. We hope and believe the drop in
submissions reflects a fluctuation in the number of students at the
appropriate stage of graduate studies for submission to the student
sessions.
Given the reduced number of submissions, we were able to have each
paper reviewed by two students and two non-students. Based on the
reviewers comments and ratings of the papers, we decided to accept 11
papers (an acceptance rate of 37%), close to that for 1992 (41.6%).
Each author will have 15 minutes for presentation and 3 minutes for
questions. We eliminated meet-the-author time since last year's
authors did not find that time to be particularly beneficial or
necessary. With the reduced number of submissions, it was not
necessary to have parallel sessions this year.
Appended to this report is information on submissions and acceptance
rates based on gender and geography. Because the numbers are so
small, it is not clear how significant these figures are.
4 Student Directory
Unfortunately, the student directory has not been put together yet.
We hope that this project can be completed in 1994.
5 Planning for the Future
5.1 1993 Luncheon meeting
To help the ACL'94 Student Sessions committee, we will ask students at
the ACL'93 luncheon meeting to fill out forms asking for opinions
about blind reviewing, names and contact information for other ACL
student members, and suggestions for future ACL student sessions.
5.2 Forming the Planning Committee:
Proposed method (same method used for forming 1993 committee):
* List of volunteers is gathered by asking for volunteers
at the ACL'93 Student Luncheon Meeting, and through
a survey of the 1993 Student Session authors.
1993 coordinator nominates a coordinator from the list of
volunteers (and may seek advice from whomever seems appropriate).
Once a coordinator is approved by the ACL executive
committee, the 1994 coordinator chooses other members
with help of holdover members (and may seek advice from whomever seems
appropriate). Final membership approved by ACL executive committee.
6 Appendix: Data on Submissions
Because the numbers are so small, it is not clear how significant
these figures are. Also, the gender statistics may be inaccurate
since I had to guess the gender of some submitters based on their names.
30 papers submitted, 11 accepted, 37% acceptance rate.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gender (by author) submitted accepted acceptance rate
Female 8 (24%) 4 (31%) 50%
Male 24 (71%) 9 (69%) 37%
Unsure 2 ( 5%) 0 ( 0%) 0%
All authors 34 (100%) 13 (100%) 38%
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Region submitted accepted acceptance rate
(by institution)
Asia 4 (13%) 3 (27%) 75%
Canada 3 (10%) 0 ( 0%) 0%
Europe 4 (13%) 1 (09%) 25%
U.S.A. 19 (63%) 7 (64%) 37%
Total 30 (100%) 11 (100%) 37%
9. ACL-94 LOCAL ARRANGEMENTS
Janyce Wiebe (local arrangements)
Eric Iverson (student coordinator)
16 June 1993
ACL-94 will be held at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, NM
from Tuesday June 28 through Friday July 1, with tutorials on Monday
June 27. Las Cruces is 40 miles north of El Paso, which is easily
accessible by air. Las Cruces is also conveniently located at the
intersection of two interstate highways. A group rate of $25 round
trip per person has been set up with the Las Cruces Shuttle for travel
between El Paso and Las Cruces.
The primary ACL-94 site is New Mexico State's 500-seat Music
Auditorium, which is just off University Ave. and which is a 5-minute
walk from the Computing Research Laboratory (CRL), located in the
Science Hall.
Additional meetings will be held in the Corbett Center Ballrooms,
about a 10-minute walk from the auditorium. If needed, these
ballrooms can be configured to hold 500 as well. It is possible that
more conveniently located lecture hall space will be obtained instead,
but this has yet to be resolved.
Exhibit space for software demonstrations and book exhibits will be
located in the Mini Center in the Science Hall. Net access for
participants will also be available in the Mini Center. Security will
be provided.
The Las Cruces Hilton will be our primary conference hotel and will
cater the banquet. The Las Cruces Hilton is located 2 miles north
of the university, and shuttle buses will be available. Shuttle
service will also be available to the Holiday Inn de Las Cruces, Plaza
Suites, and Days Inn, all located 4 blocks to the west of NMSU. The
following blocks of rooms have been reserved:
Location Rooms Rate/night
Las Cruces Hilton 150 $65 deluxe
$57 standard
Holiday Inn de Las Cruces 50 $54 flat
Plaza Suites 40 $50 flat
Days Inn 60 $44 flat
NMSU Dormitories 200 $12.75 single
$8.75 double
Total Rooms 500
On-Campus meal service will be available to those who wish it. In
addition, we are exploring the possibility of arranging with local
restaurants and the shuttle to accommodate large groups for lunch.
As the conference falls directly before the 4th of July weekend, we
are looking into arranging optional trips to the nearby Gila Widerness
area and/or White Sands and Cloudcroft. In addition, afternoon tours
to Juarez, Mexico will be available.
We look forward to welcoming ACL to New Mexico State.
10. GUIDELINES FOR ACL PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Johanna Moore
14 June 1993
PURPOSE OF DOCUMENT:
Many policy questions came up during the two ACL program committee (PC)
meetings I attended (1992 and 1993). In many cases, individuals who
had served on the ACL PC in the past or had served on the PCs of other
major conferences were able to provide suggestions that enabled
decisions to be made and the meeting to progress. These individuals
typically cited what was done in the past in similar situations.
Unfortunately, what has been done from year to year has not always been
consistent, and this led to a general sense that a set of guidelines
should be collected and written down to act as a kind of institutional
memory that can be passed from PC to PC each year.
To this end, an e-mail message was sent to all members of the ACL '93
PC and to several past PC chairs asking for views on a set of
questions/issues that came up at the meeting and inviting comments on
other PC-related issues. The document that follows is my summary of
the responses that I received. I viewed my task to be the collection
and organization of information to be passed on to the ACL Executive
Committee (EC) in order to aid them in setting policy. I have tried to
represent all views on the topics. Additional comments and suggestions
are welcome and encouraged.
DEFINITION OF THE AREA:
When is a paper relevant for ACL? In some cases, there were papers
submitted that seemed like good work in a given discipline (e.g.,
"pure" linguistics or formal language theory), but it was not clear how
that work related to Computational Linguistics.
Suggestions:
- We should take an historical view as to whether the subject of the
paper has grown within the CL community and thus ACL is the only
reasonable forum for the work.
- The burden of explaining how the work is relevent to CL is on the
authors and must be explained in the paper.
What to do with ``Tools'' papers:
There was some discussion about what to do with papers that describe
tools. Those surveyed suggested that tools papers should be allowed
and encouraged if:
- the tool is demonstrably useful for Computational Linguistics, or
- the tool is based on linguistically interesting methods.
In either case, the paper should not be just an advertisement, but
should communicate substantial information about the technology used so
that
* others could build the tool too
* it may give people ideas about how to build other useful tools
Some expressed interest in a special section in the ACL proceedings for
tools papers, along the lines of the student sessions. Ultimately
they'd like to see a special issue of CL on tools too, but suggested we
experiment with a session in the ACL for 2--3 years first to see how it
works.
SUBMISSION DEADLINE
Every year the PC chair receives several papers that arrive after the
deadline and must decide what to do with these. There seems to have
been an informal understanding among some in the ACL community that
papers received within a ``reasonable'' time after the deadline would
be reviewed and considered for publication in the conference as if they
had arrived on time. The decision to review papers received after the
deadline and the determination of what constitutes a ``reasonable''
time are typically left to the discretion of the program chair who
could consult the entire committee if he or she chose. In 1993, Len
Schubert consulted the committee about this issue and a large majority
of the PC members felt strongly that papers received after the deadline
indicated in the Call for Papers (CFP) should be returned to the
authors unopened. Everyone agreed that a policy for late submissions
must be set and made explicit in the CFP. There is a general sense
that the rules should be well known and apply equally.
By far the majority still feels that the deadline should be strictly
enforced. Many authors work long and hard to submit papers on time.
They stay up late working round the clock and send papers via express
mail. These papers could no doubt be improved if the author(s) had
another few days or a week to polish them. The majority feel that in
the interest of fairness, all authors should be subject to the same
deadlines.
A very small minority feel that there should be a few days' grace
period, whose exact length should be covertly determined by the PC
chair, based on her or his judgement and constraints at the time.
How the Deadline Should be Stated:
Several suggested that in the future the deadline be given in terms of
a ``postmarked by'' date, rather than a ``must be received by'' date.
Advantages:
- Would allow the members to save literally thousands of dollars on
express mail service.
- Would even out the discrepancy between US and overseas submissions.
Potential Problems:
- The main concern is that the worldwide airmail system varies so
greatly that this will create unmanagable logistical problems for
reviewing. Ordinary airmail even from Canada can take weeks ESPECIALLY
in the holiday season. We would have to set the postmark deadline in
mid-December to get the usual schedule to work out. This would give
authors significantly less time to finish research and write good
papers, and they would be doing it in the pre-holiday tumult. Given
the vagaries of the world's postal systems, how could a program chair
and his or her committee ever schedule their reviewing? How long do we
wait? We will need *some* cut-off date. For this reason, several
people thought the ``postmarked by date'' was a TERRIBLE IDEA.
E-mail submissions?
Several members of the committee suggested that We
allow electronic submissions. This would:
- cut down on shipping costs
- ease distribution to the program committee.
- make it possible for PC members to view the abstracts (or full
papers) of all the papers submitted, without ACL or authors incurring
massive photocopying bills.
Apparently EACL used standard style files and e-mail submission and
distribution in '93 and it worked astoundingly well. Reviewers
received all of their papers electronically in a tar file, and just had
to unpack them and send the postscript images to a printer.
Some pointed out that electronic submission is feasible only for
authors who have the capability to get papers into postscript form and
to e-mail or ftp their papers to the PC chair. Although this is true
of the majority of authors in the USA, Western Europe and Japan, we
cannot assume that this is true for all authors. Therefore, we must
continue to allow hardcopy submissions. However, we should try to use
electronic mail to the extent possible.
For those who do not have access to appropriate e-mail tools for
submission, FAXing is an option.
LENGTH RESTRICTIONS:
Submissions that Violate Restrictions:
Every year the PC must tackle the question of what to do with papers
that clearly violate the length restriction. While a small number of
PC members felt that handling of such papers should be left up to the
individual reviewers that received them, the majority felt that all
papers should be checked for compliance with length restrictions by an
administrator and those that are in clear violation should be returned
to authors without review. Many felt strongly that this decision
should NOT be left up to individual reviewers as this would lead to
inconsistent treatment of papers violating length restrictions.
By far the majority feel that length restrictions must be adhered to.
One of the most difficult parts of writing an abstract for something
like ACL is compressing ideas into 3200 words. Some PC members were
appalled by the fact that the PC reviewed, and even accepted some
papers that were more than double the length specified in the CFP.
This was considered extremely unfair to authors who may have lessened
their chances for acceptance by cutting their papers to meet the length
restrictions.
Specification of Length Restrictions:
If we are going to enforce length restrictions, then we need to specify
length restrictions in such a way that we can easily check whether or
not a paper conforms. Word count is a very hard measure to check.
Specifications that detail the font size, margin size, page size, and
number of pages seem better. To help authors make sure they meet these
guidelines we should provide Latex, Scribe, and MS Word style files
that meet ACL specifications. (We could get these from DARPA.)
A problem that many authors have noted is that the abstact length is
often longer than the final paper length, leaving authors no room to
address reviewers' comments. If we gave out style files from the
beginning, we could alleviate this problem (since authors would know
the final camera-ready paper length from the outset, and/or we could
require that submissions be 1/2 page shorter than final papers.)
Of course, even if we move to style files, we will need to provide
specifications for authors who do not have access to Latex, Scribe, MS
Word,etc. Since we expect the number of people in this category to be
small and dwindling, this should not be a problem.
SUBMISSION TO MULTIPLE CONFERENCES:
A small number of PC members feel that ACL (and other conferences)
should not allow multiple submissions. They feel that submitting to
multiple conferences is an abuse of the reviewing process. It wastes
reviewers' time and causes problems with the conference schedule if
authors retract their paper from ACL after it has been accepted.
However, the majority feel that allowing multiple submissions is good
compromise between conference's desires to get their programs finalized
and authors' desires to get their work published while it is still
fresh. Due to the number of relevant conferences that have submission
deadlines in November - February, authors must be allowed to submit to
multiple conferences.
All agree that if multiple submissions are allowed, authors must
declare this fact up front and agree to publish in only one place.
Failure to explicitly declare multiple submissions should be grounds
for rejection.
Most feel that it's up to the PC chair to coordinate with other
conferences (e.g., AAAI, COLING, EACL, Cognitive Science) to see that
the same paper isn't going to be presented at more than one of them,
and it's up to reviewers to make sure that papers haven't been
published (outside of workshop proceedings) before.
Managing the Schedule if Multiple Submissions are allowed:
A serious problem is what to do with multiply submitted papers that are
accepted to ACL as well as one or more other conferences. There was
concern about how this will affect the schedule. Here are several
suggestions for the EC to consider:
- Authors of multiple submission MUST declare their intention to
withdraw from the OTHER CONFERENCE(s) if their paper is accepted to
ACL. This way, the ACL schedule will not be impacted, and this may cut
down on multiple submissions.
- Keep some of the papers that were borderline on a waiting list to be
used in case any papers are withdrawn.
- Have the program be shorter by N fewer papers if N papers are withdrawn.
WHAT CONSTITUTES PRIOR PUBLICATION?:
A number of questions arose regarding the nature of prior publication
of work that would make a paper ineligible for publication in the ACL
proceedings. The following suggestions were almost unanimous:
- Workshops were the hardest to deal with.
One person suggested that guidelines for workshops should take
account of:
(i) the REFEREEING process for the workshop, and
(ii) WHO MAY ATTEND, and
(iii) AVAILABILITY of proceedings.
Most felt that prior presentation at a workshop that did not publish a
proceedings, or did not have a serious refereeing process should not
prevent a paper from appearing in the ACL proceedings. For example,
EVERYONE agrees that workshops like the AAAI symposia for which there
are no published proceedings should not preclude publication at ACL.
For these workshops, papers are minimally reviewed, participants
receive a set of photocopied notes, but these are not published and are
not widely available. Some suggest that the criterion should be that
``all papers published without further editing'' should be eligible for
ACL.
However, if papers from a workshop are reviewed, authors are
given time to revise their papers, and the papers are published
in a book or proceedings, then these papers should not be
eligible for publication in ACL. (For example, the AI and
Planning Systems Workshop is almost indistinguishable in format
from ACL, but it's called a workshop, so we can't simply go by
the title the organizers give.)
- Papers that are under review for a journal can be submitted to ACL.
A gray area that the EC should discuss is how to handle papers that
have been accepted to a journal, but won't appear before ACL.
- The most objectively verifiable approach is to use some notion of
what it means to be published. Some suggested that appearance in
something with an ISBN or ISSN number constitutes publication. This
means previous (or soon to be) appearance in a DARPA proceedings or in
a Springer-Verlag-published workshop or conference proceedings counts
as a publication.
Some PC members believe that there is an ordering (total?) of forums
(i.e., journal > conferences > no-proceedings workshop)>, so that a
publication accepted in a "higher or equal level" forum should not be
submitted/published again at lower level. This seems reasonable, since
ideas become refined as feedback is gained at lower level meetings, and
workshops have shorter turnaournd times than conferences and journals,
so one can get their work aired while it is new and exciting. However,
there seems to be alot of confusion about ordering. Most agree that it
is all right to publish in a conference before a journal, but not vice
versa. The EC should take this under consideration.
Whatever is decided, it has been suggested that the following are good
rules of thumb:
* for conference organizers: make the policy clear to authors * for
authors: always inform the program chair, or the editor in chief of any
submission or prior publication of any similar work (like another paper
with a whole section in common).
Special consideration for DARPA workshop?
There is no agreement on this question. Here are some comments the EC
may want to take into account when making their decision on this
issue:
- The DARPA workshops pose a special problem because in some sense they
are not really "optional" for DARPA contractors. With other workshops,
it is possible for an author to keep their paper out of the published
proceedings to save it for other, more formal, publication, but for
DARPA there are political complications.
- DARPA is becoming more and more like a conference, and papers
presented at DARPA should not be permitted at ACL.
- The DARPA workshop should not count as a publication, and therefore
can be resubmitted. The main reason is that DARPA conferences are not
open, for submission or for attendance. (Note: this should also apply
to counting a DARPA publication in one's CV.)
HOW TO COMPARE DIFFERENT REVIEWER'S SCORES:
Several people felt that different reviewers were using different
metrics for scoring and therefore it was difficult to compare scores
given by different reviewers.
Several suggestions about how to alleviate this problem were made:
1) Papers should be available to all committee members.
Some PC members feel that it is crucial that every PC member have a
chance to browse through all the abstracts and review whichever they
wish to review. This year PC members saw only the papers they were
officially asked to review and, since the committee was large, this
number was very small (15-20). Without the context of the other
abstracts, PC members felt that they couldn't tell whether their sample
of a given field was representative, or whether a given paper was
better or worse than another similar paper that they weren't officially
reviewing and didn't even know existed until the PC meeting. Some felt
that it was this problem that made the PC meeting itself seem rather
extraneous, since it was very hard to participate in discussions of
papers one hadn't even seen, and it was hard to have any idea whether
the decisions overall were fair.
It was generally agreed that if all papers are made available to all PC
members, other PC members might provide useful additional comments on
papers for which they were not the primary reviewers, and this would
likely strengthen the basis for decisions. However, it was noted that
this could allow very "aggressive" PC members to have undue influence
in the process by reading all papers and voicing their opinions on
them.
2) Some past PC chairs have used spread sheets to calculate statistics
such as the mean, mode, and median of each PC members' scores. This was
done at the ACL '92 PC meeting and the ACL Applied meeting and was very
useful in interpreting reviewers' ratings.
3) Some PC members said they were accepting papers with technical
problems, because the idea was interesting, while others would reject
such a paper. Clearly, we want to encourage new and interesting ideas,
but being incorrect seems very different than having correct but
somewhat preliminary results. We need to attempt to operationalize /
standardize the meaning of ratings such as "accept," "marginal" etc.
4) The discrepancy may not be so much between individual reviewers, but
between subareas of the programme committee. One way to overcome this
might be by having more discussion between reviewers, before the
plenary programme committee meeting. If reviewers in each subarea
identify what they think are the best papers in that area, possibly in
some kind of order, then the plenary session can be devoted to
constructing a program out of that, without having to compare numbers
on individual papers issued by individual reviewers.
5) One person suggested that reviewers just be forewarned that for a
5-point scale from definite accept to definite reject, experience shows
that very few papers with ratings less than second-highest will
ultimately be included. That should discourage reviewers from employing
standards they subsequently regret.
BLIND REFEREEING:
Although many felt that this was less than successful because they were
able to guess who the authors of papers were, most felt that ACL should
continue this practice. If continued, ACL should give authors more
guidelines about how to avoid recognition. In many cases, reviewers
were able to identify authors because authors lack experience about how
to reference their own work or deal with acknowledgements when
submitting a paper for blind review.
SUBMISSION BY PROGRAM COMMITTEE:
Most agree that members of the PC should be allowed to submit papers
and that their papers should be treated in the same manner as all other
submissions, with additional care to keep reviewers anonymous.
Some PC members thought this was handled very well in '93, where the PC
chair notified authors of accept/reject decisions by handing out slips
of paper.
SELECTION OF INVITED SPEAKERS:
Many felt that this is often handled in an ad hoc fashion because it is
left to the time that remains after the decisions on papers are made.
One person suggested that choosing invited speakers be done by e-mail
as soon as the PC is formed in November/December. This will increase
our chances of getting the speakers we want. As it is now, we end up
asking a relatively famous person in mid-March to commit to speaking in
late June. Several times our first choice(s) are already booked.
As to the criteria for selecting invited speakers, several PC members
feel that it is preferable to invite speakers outside of the general
range of ACL topics.
COMMITTEE SIZE:
Although a couple of people found the '93 committee consisting of 22
members to be too large, some felt that the larger size had many
advantages. It made the reviewing load more modest, allowing more
careful reviewing. It also allowed all of the reviewing (save a few
instances of delegation) to be done within the committee. This has the
crucial advantages that (a) PC members have already set aside time for
the job and made a commitment to be punctual, whereas finding reviewers
ad hoc and holding them to deadlines is much harder, and (b) all the
papers get discussed by all the reviewers at the meeting. Even with the
committee of 22, some problems arose in trying to find 3 expert
reviewers for some papers.
NEED FOR PC MEETING:
Comments in favor:
- The whole point of having an in-person meeting is to take advantage
of as much of our expertise as possible. Yet it is virtually
impossible for a person to have a reasonable opinion to contribute if
he or she hasn't seen a paper. The problems this year were largely due
to the fact that most PC members saw only 15-20 of the papers. To make
sure every good paper has ample chance to be discovered and every
not-so-good paper has ample chance to be correctly evaluated, we should
maximize papers' exposure to members of the PC rather than concluding
that we don't need a PC meeting. We do need a PC meeting, but we need
to come to it having looked at, if not laboriously reviewed, more
papers. This is what makes ACL different from other conferences, and
different in a good way. It also makes the reviewing process fairer.
If we make all the papers available to everyone (see above), the
meeting will potentially provide new information.
- This year the number of papers accepted pre-meeting was just about
the right quantity. Other years might have way too many or too few
papers accepted on a first pass. The meeting is useful if papers have
to be reconsidered.
- Many rating errors come more from personal biases that are overcome
by discussion.
- The sense of group ownership of the process is very
important, and this would be lost in an electronic approach.
- The face-to-face meeting is important -- unless you have a
program committee consisting solely of people who really know each
other very well already. It's perhaps only in retrospect that we
think we could have done it all via email since we now know
everyone on the program committee. However, I would have liked
to have seen more discussion of the program that was emerging,
rather than just have discussion of single papers by two or
three committee members at a time.
Comments against:
- The PC meeting can be held via e-mail. The ACL '93 PC committee
assigned 2 reviewers to each paper. Reviewers were given a deadline by
which they were expected to have written up their reviews and exchanged
them with their co-reviewer. If the 2 reviewers could not come to
consensus, they asked for a third review. The PC chair selected a
third reviewer and typically a decision could be reached. A few
members felt that this was sufficient and that no meeting was
necessary.
Specific suggestions for how to manage an all electronic PC meeting:
1) Titles for ALL papers should be advertised to the entire PC via
email: that way, if there are papers that a committee member definitely
wants to review, then they can alert the program chair of this.
Otherwise, the program chair will assign papers according to specified
areas of interest, as was done this year. (Obviously, there will be
SOME cases where the program chair has to adjudicate if several people
want to review the same paper.)
2) As was done this year, the pair of reviewers for each paper will
come to a consensus by a specified date, or else will ask for a third
reviewer if they cannot reach a consensus. After the third reviews are
all in (again by a specified date), the decisions for ALL of the papers
will be sent to the entire committee via email (modulo some mechanism
to handle the anonymity issue -- X may not want Y to know X reviewed
Y's paper). Anyone who wants to object to a decision should have an
opportunity to do so, and if necessary should be able to get a FAX of
the relevant paper: however, since said person would have had the
opportunity the first time around to pick the papers for review, such
instances should be relatively infrequent.
COMMITMENT BY PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Several PC members stated that based on their own ACL experiences, and
comments they have heard from others at different ACL program committee
meetings, it is imperative that all PC members be present at the PC
meeting. Having the review is not the same as having the reviewer for
the difficult cases.
MAKEUP OF PROGRAM COMMITTEE
In recent years there has been an attempt to bring new faces onto the
ACL PC. While everyone agrees this is important for the community, we
must be careful to ensure continuity. Therefore several have suggested
that there be an attempt to balance the number of new PC members with
persons that have served on the ACL PC in the past.
PANELS, TUTORIALS:
There was a proposal for a panel, yet many committee members felt that
panels were not solicited in the CFP so it was unfair. However, in the
past there have been panels and no solicitation, and workshops and
tutorials seem to be done without a proposal solicitation. AAAI and
IJCAI have explicit calls for these things, and many PC members suggest
that ACL do the same. A panel, workshop, or tutorial chair could still
seek out people as is done now.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST:
Some PC members heard of three cases where PC members were sent papers
from their home institution to review. In one case the PC member knew
there was a conflict and returned the paper. In another case the paper
was kept even though the reviewer suspected it was from their
institution (and it was). The members that reported this feel that
this must be prohibited in the future. NSF has quite an explicit
policy regarding what constitutes a conflict of interest, which might
prove instructive.
11. 1993 LINGUISTIC INSTITUTE
Brian D. Joseph, Director
June 15, 1993
The 57th Linguistic Institute, sponsored by the Linguistic Society of
America and co-sponsored by the ACL (and by AAAI) will take place June
28 until August 6 in Columbus, beginning right after the ACL Annual
Meeting.
The theme of the 1993 Institute is ``Interfaces'', construed broadly so
as to include both grammatical interfaces and disciplinary interfaces.
Thus, courses will be offered by regular OSU faculty and distinguished
invited scholars in core areas of linguistics (phonetics, phonology,
morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis,
historical linguistics), in areas that represent an interface within
the field of linguistics or across different fields (e.g.,
psycholinguistics, mathematical linguistics, computational
linguistics), and on special topics pertaining to interfaces between
different components of gdammar (e.g. syntax-semantics,
syntax-lexicon).
Several offerings specifically in Computational Linguistics are planned:
LISP for Linguists (Ted Gibson, MIT); Linguistic Knowledge
Representation (Carl Pollard & Robert Kasper, OSU); Parsing (Robert
Kasper, OSU); Principle-based Parsing (Mark Johnson, Brown Univ. &
Edward Stabler, UCLA); Generation (Robert Dale, U Edinburgh);
Computational Discourse (Bonnie Lynn Webber, U Pennsylvania);
Nonmonotonicity in Linguistics (Richmond Thomason, U Pittsburgh);
Processing of Large Corpora (Judith Klavans, Columbia U); The
Computational Lexicon and its Interfaces (John Nerbonne, U
Saarbruecken); Speech Synthesis (Susan Hertz, Cornell U); Speech
Recognition (Terrence Nearey, U Alberta).
Courses in related areas include the following:
Categorial Grammar (Pauline Jacobson, Brown U); Phrase-Structure
Grammars (Georgia Green, U Illinois); Intro to Government & Binding
(Peter Culicover, OSU--NOTE: this is a change from earlier
announcements, as G. Cinque has withdrawn for personal reasons);
Phrase-Structure Grammar Seminar (Robert Levine, OSU & Thomas Hukari, U
Victoria); Government-Binding Seminar (David Pesetsky, MIT); Intro to
Formal Semantics (Chris Barker, OSU); Intermediate Formal Semantics
(Fred Landman, Cornell U); Anaphora and Dynamic Interpretation (Gennaro
Chierchia, Cornell U); Situation Theoretic Grammar (Robin Cooper &
Jonathan Ginzburg (note: this is a change from previous announcements,
as Elisabet Engdahl had to withdraw for personal reasons); Thematic
Roles (David Dowty , OSU); Islands and Scope: The Syntax/Semantics
Interface (Anna Szabolcsi, UCLA); Point of View (Edit Doron, Hebrew U);
Formal Pragmatics (Nirit Kadmon, Tel Aviv U); Mathematical Methods for
Linguists (William Rounds, U Michigan); Strong Generative Capacity
(Philip Miller, U Lille); Intro Psycholinguistics: Syntax/Semantics
(Julie E. Boland, OSU); Intro Psycholinguistics: Phonetics/Phonology
(Anne Cutler, MRC App. Psych, Cambridge); Acquisition of Syntax and
Semantics (Stephen Crain, U Connecticut).
A course on Linguistics and Cognitive Science, originally planned for
the Institute, to be taught by Peter Culicover, has been cancelled,
since Culicover will now be teaching the Introduction to Government and
Binding course (due to Cinque's withdrawal).
Attendance for the Institute should be very strong, with over 300
registered students, nearly 100 registered Institute Affiliates, many
others coming in for conferences (such as ACL), etc. While it is hard
to gauge directly the impact of the ACL meeting, it seems that a
significant number of people coming to ACL will stay on for at least
part of the Institute; the symbiosis between the two events seems to
have been healthy.
Preliminary registration figures for the computational linguistics
classes from late May are available, with about 75% of the students
registered. These figures do NOT include anyone who might be taking
the course just as an auditor or Institute and OSU faculty who will
be sitting in on courses without any official registration (there
being no mechanism at OSU to ``count'' their participation). Thus
these figures give only a rough indication of the attendance that can
be expected in a given class. To judge from the experience of other
Institutes, the number of non-credit auditors and visitors is usually
about the same as the number of credit students in a class, so that
doubling these figures should give an indication of their potential
draw:
LISP for Linguists -- 10
Linguistic Knowledge Representation -- 15
Parsing -- 4
Principle-based Parsing -- 6
Generation -- 5
Computational Discourse -- 3
Nonmonotonicity in Linguistics -- 4
Processing of Large Corpora -- 9
The Computational Lexicon and its Interfaces -- 5
Speech Synthesis -- 6
Speech Recognition -- 4
ACL's generous contribution to the Institute was directed towards support
of 4 classes: Lisp for Linguists, Principle-Based Parsing, The Computa-
tional Lexicon and its Interfaces, and Speech Synthesis. Indirectly also,
ACL's contribution made it possible for another course, Processing of
Large Corpora, to be added, for money that had been committed to other
courses was freed up and made available after ACL made its contribution.
ACL made available a large number (c. 100) of pamphlets on the Annual
Meeting that the Institute mailed out to those students likely to be
interested in the meeting (e.g. those who had signed up for
computational classes). The Department of Linguistics is making
available a few machines for demo purposes during the ACL Meeting, as a
small gesture of appreciation for all ACL has done for the Institute.
The Institute promises to be quite successful, and the presence of ACL
will have contributed to that success through the financial support and
through the holding of the Annual Meeting in Columbus adjacent to the
Institute.
For the future, it would seem that a continued connection between ACL
and the Linguistic Institute would be good for all concerned, as long
as the Institutes continue to have a significant computational
component (as they are likely to). Better coordination in planning
between Institute representatives (who change from year to year, as the
Institute moves to other locations) and ACL representatives is
essential, and it is regrettable that the Institute organizers were not
more cognizant of the potentially significant role that ACL can play in
the planning process. Steps have been taken to ensure that there will
be better communication between the two groups, through the ratification
of an agreement between LSA and the ACL about future Institutes, the
appointment of an ACL-Institute liaison (Judith Klavans, this year), and
the continuing involvement of the ACL-LSA representative (Terry
Langendoen). In the future, any Institutes that are seeking ACL
support will involve ACL representatives directly in the planning of
the computational linguistic courses.
12. COLING 94 CALL FOR PAPERS
Makoto Nagao and Yorick Wilks
20 April 1993
Conference dates: August 5(Fri) -- 9(Tue), 1994
Conference place: Miyako Hotel, Kyoto, Japan
General Chairman: Prof. Makoto Nagao
Department of Electrical Engineering
Kyoto University
Tel. +81-75-753-5344
Fax. +81-75-751-1576
Email. coling94@pine.kuee.kyoto-u.ac.jp
Program Chairman: Prof. Yorick Wilks
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, S10 2UH, England
Program Committee: Yorick Wilks (Sheffield)
Louise Guthrie (Las Cruces) Graeme Hirst (Toronto)
Margaret King (Geneva) Judith Klavans (New York)
Wendy Lehnert (Amherst) Candy Sidner (Cambridge, MA)
Hozumi Tanaka (Tokyo) Henry Thompson (Edinburgh)
Jun-ichi Tsujii (Manchester) Michael Zock (Paris)
The International Committee on Computational Linguistics invites the
submission of papers for COLING 94, the 15th International Conference
on Computational Linguistics, in Kyoto, Japan.
TOPICS OF INTEREST:
Papers are invited on substantial, original, and unpublished research
on all aspects of computational linguistics, including, but not
limited to, the followings.
- syntax - parsing
- semantics - generation
- phonetics - language understanding
- phonology - speech analysis/synthesis
- morphology - computational lexicons
- discourse - electronic dictionaries
- pragmatics - terminology
- quantitative/qualitative linguistics - text database and retrieval
- mathematical linguistics - documentation
- contrastive linguistics - machine translation
- cognitive linguistics - machine aids for translation
- large text corpora - natural language interface
- text processing - dialogue systems
- hardware/software for NLP - multimedia systems
REQUIREMENTS FOR SUBMISSION:
Papers should be either topical papers (maximum six pages in final
format) or project notes with demonstration (maximum four pages),
preferably in English. Both should describe original work. The
project note should specify the computer platform that will be used.
They should emphasize completed work rather than intended work, and
they should indicate clearly the state of completion of the reported
results. A paper accepted for presentation at the COLING Conference
cannot be presented at another conference.
FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION:
Authors should submit four copies of preliminary versions of their
papers with the page limits above, on A4 paper with the title,
author(s), addresses (including email if possible), affiliation across
the page top, a short (five line) summary, the words: topical paper or
project note, and a specification of the topic area preferably drawn
from the list above. As well, authors are strongly urged to email the
title page information by the deadline date. Send the papers and
emails to:
COLING 94
Department of Computer Science
University of Sheffield
Sheffield S10 2UH, England
Email: coling@dcs.sheffield.ac.uk
IMPORTANT DATES:
Preliminary paper submission due: 6 January, 1994
Acceptance notification: 15 March, 1994
Camera-ready copies due: 1 May, 1994
REVIEW SCHEDULE:
Preliminary papers are due by 6 January 1994. Papers received after
that date will be returned unopened. Notification of receipt will be
mailed to the first author (or designated author) soon after receipt.
All inquiries regarding lost papers must be made by 27 January 1994.
Designated authors will be notified of acceptance by 15 March, 1994.
Camera-ready copies of final papers prepared in a double-column
format, preferably using a laser printer, must be received by 1 May
1994 at
Prof. Makoto Nagao
Department of Electrical Engineering
Kyoto University
Sakyo, Kyoto, Japan
along with a signed copyright release statement. Papers received
after that date may not be included in the proceedings.
OTHER ACTIVITIES:
(1) Tutorial program will be presented on 3(Wed) -- 4(Thu), August,
1994.
(2) Invited talks and panels will be included in the program.
Proposals and suggestions for invited talks and panels should be sent
to Prof. Yorick Wilks as soon as possible.
(3) Anyone wishing to arrange an exhibit or present a demonstration
should send a brief description, together with a specification of
physical requirements (space, power, telephone connections, tables,
etc.) to Prof. M. Nagao.
(4) Many attractive social programs will take place for the occasion
of the 1200th anniversary of Kyoto.
13. SIG ISSUES
Fernando Pereira
16 June 1993
Here's my summary of SIG issues and possible solutions, from the
material I got from SIGs and my own observations:
1. Steering Committees
SIGs are typically organized and run by whoever felt the need for the
SIG. No formal policies for rotation of SIG organizers seem to exist in
any SIG, although SIGMOL seems to have had more deliberate rotation
arrangements (I do not know them in detail since I never got a reply
from SIGMOL to my inquiries). Some members believe that lack of formal
rotation can make SIGs the private club of their initial organizers.
While I do not believe that this is a widespread problem, the
perception of lack of democracy is one we should avoid. A reasonable
model would formalize the arrangements of some of the current SIGs,
such as SIGGEN. Each SIG would have a small organizing committee whose
members would have a limited term of no more than 4 years. Some subset
of the committee would be replaced every two years or so. The electoral
mechanics could be either a business meeting at a SIG workshop or
e-mail voting based on a mailing list of SIG(+ACL) members.
SIG committees are in charge of organizing SIG meetings, overseeing the
choice of meeting committees, and maintaining SIG communication
channels and membership information. It is not clear that formal titles
(chair, secretary, etc.) are needed for committee members, and in fact
that may be too bureaucratic for the lightweight organizations that
everyone seems to want SIGs to be.
2. Membership
Who is a SIG member? The question was raised that some SIGs (most?)
reach outside the current ACL community, and benefit from the
contributions of non-ACL members. Clearly, we want to reach as widely
as possible, so SIG newsletters, electronic mailing lists, etc. might
well extend outside the ACL membership. However, for management
matters, to stand or vote for SIG committee members ACL membership
should be required.
3. Workshops
SIGs have a variety of connections to workshops, from sole organization
to sponsorship. Some of the SIGs arose from existing meetings, rather
than the other way round. Clearly, this is a very healthy intellectual
activity that ACL should continue to encourage. One concern that has
been repeated often is that workshops start tending towards
conferences, with reviewing and proceedings publication, that may take
papers away from the main ACL meetings and thus contribute to
centrifugal tendencies in ACL. The views from the SIGs and my own
discussions with members suggest that there is a reasonable compromise
between SIG diversity and ACL unity. If the SIG activity and membership
is essentially a focused subset of ACL activity, it is to be expected
that conference- or journal-level work will be part of ACL meetings and
CL. Then workshops would play their more informal role for extensive
discussion of work in progress, and workshop proceedings publication
would be the exception. Let's call just these "workshops". On the other
hand, for SIGs whose activities include a large component outside ACL's
usual constituency (eg. SIGMEDIA), more formal meetings bridging ACL
interests to interests of other communities (eg. multimedia graphics)
would be quite appropriate, and proceedings publication desirable.
Let's call these "conferences" and act accordingly. In particular, it
makes a lot of sense to limit the attendance of real workshops so that
extensive discussion is possible, but conferences should be open,
properly refereed and published so that they serve as a sound record of
the state of a subfield.
The practice of having workshops immediately adjacent to ACL, EACL or
COLING meetings should be encouraged, to increase interactions between
SIG groups and the rest of the community and to save on travel costs.
4. Publication
In relation to SIG workshops/conferences, there has been a lot of
discussion about the type of proceedings publication would be
appropriate. As noted above, that varies with the formality of the
workshop which depends on the community that the workshop is aimed at.
For *real* workshops (as opposed to conferences), we might eventually
want to follow the model adopted by AAAI for its symposia. Unedited
workshop preprints (abstracts or extended abstracts) are made available
to society members as a cheaply produced tech report, but are not
distributed outside as books. Copyright stays with authors. ACL does
not have currently the paper-handling resources to do this, but if and
when some additional clerical help is brought in we might want to
consider this possibility.
It has been suggested that preparing a paper, even a workshop preprint,
requires so much work that publication (citable and includable in
resume) should follow. However, following from the notion of workshops
as forums for discussion of work in progress, there is no reason why
preprints should be anything but papers-in-progress. As the work is
refined, hopefully with input from workshop discussion, the
papers-in-progress will turn into conference, journal or collection
papers, with proper publication and credit.
5. Communications
All SIGs that responded to my questions mentioned the importance of
electronic communications and mailing lists, as well as the labor
involved in managing them. I believe that the new ACL LISTSERV
arrangements, which should be soon fully operational, will help make
mailing list maintenance more efficient as well as providing a
centralized means for communication between ACL and all the SIG
members. As soon as the final kinks in the LISTSERV service are ironed
out, we should ask SIG committees to investigate using it for their
membership communications.
13. SIGMOL (MATHEMATICS OF LANGUAGE)
Robert Berwick
15 June 1993
PRESIDENT: Walter J. Savitch, UCSD (mol3@ucsd.edu)
ACL Liason: Robert C. Berwick, MIT
Official Membership: 78. This has remained relatively stable
over the past 2 years.
This year, Walter Savitch was elected President via email nomination
and subsequent poll of the SIGMOL members. We plan to continue to have
an elected President with a term of 1, perhaps 2 years.
The main activity of SIGMOL during the past year was the Mathematics of
Language Meeting, MOL3, held at the University of Texas at Austin,
November 20-21, 1992.
LOCAL ARRANGEMENTS CHAIR
Robert Wall, Univ. of Texas
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Robert Berwick (MIT) Nelson Correa (U. de los Andes) David
Johnson (IBM) Aravind Joshi (Penn) Philip Miller (Ohio State)
Carl Pollard (Ohio State) Walter Savitch (UCSD, Co-Chair)
Thomas Wasow (Stanford) Wlodek Zadrozny (IBM, Co-Chair)
Local arrangements and the spirt of the conference were excellent. The
papers were considered to be of generally high quality; see the final
program schedule below.
As with past MOL meetings, a selection of papers from MOL3 have been
invited to submit to a special issue of Linguistics and Philosophy;
this is still working through the journal machinery.
Some details on the conference:
37 submissions
22 accepted
20 papers agreed to be given.
18 finally given.
Attendance: 31
Both submissions and attendance were lower than the previous MOL
meeting, but not far off from MOL1. The conjectured reasons were:
1. There was a shorter time span since the last MOL.
2. We had to move the date once (due to a football game
causing hotel problems; this is Texas, remember).
At least one of the two
acceptances who did not come was lost because of this.
3. The location was not near any large source of local people
who might want to attend. MOL2 was in the NY area and did
attract people from local IBM installations and NY schools.
In Austin we only had U of Texas as a source.
FUTURE ISSUES: There was a great deal of interest in holding MOL3 in
Europe, and we will be focusing on an international location for our
next meeting.
FINAL PROGRAM SCHEDULE--MOL3
NOTE: Talks are 20 minutes long, not 25 minutes long. There are 5
minutes between talks to allow for some questions and the transition to
the next speaker.
Information on how to get to the sessions on the University of Texas
campus follows the program.
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 1992
Friday morning and afternoon sessions will be held in the Dobie Room of
the Flawn Academic Center on the University of Texas campus.
9:15 OPENING REMARKS
9:30 James Barnett
Strong Equivalence in CFGs, TAGs, and CSGs
9:55 Aravind K. Joshi
TAGs in Categorial Clothing
10:20 DISCUSSION
10:30 BREAK
10:50 Peter A. Bensch and Walter J. Savitch
An Occurrence-Based Model of Word Categorization
11:15 Rens Bod
Mathematical Properties of the Data Oriented
Parsing (DOP) Model
11:40 Paul Smolensky
Harmonic Grammar: A Progress Report on
Connectionist Mathematical Linguistics
12:05 DISCUSSION
12:20 LUNCH
1:45 Eric Sven Ristad
Complexity of Anaphoric Agreement
2:10 Andras Kornai
Phonological Representation Theory
2:35 DISCUSSION
2:45 BREAK
3:05 Nelson Correa
Context-free Language Recognition on a CAM
3:30 Michael Latta
The Intersections of Context-Free Languages.
3:55 DISCUSSION
4:05 BREAK
4:25 Owen Rambow, Tilman Becker, and Michael Niv
Scrambling Is Beyond LCFRS
4:50 William B. Dolan
Morphology is Not Noncontext-Free
5:15 DISCUSSION
5:25 DINNER
8:30 DISCUSSION--The Longhorn Room at the Guest Quarters Hotel
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 1992
All sessions on Saturday will be held in
the Bluebonnet Room at the Guest Quarters Hotel
9:30 R.T. Oehrle
String-Based Categorial Type Systems
9:55 Bob Carpenter
Plural Noun Phrases as Motivation for
Lambek Abstraction
10:20 DISCUSSION
10:30 BREAK
10:50 David Milward
Dynamic Dependency Grammar
11:15 Jan Tore Loenning
Categorial or Unification-Based
Syntax-Semantics Interface
11:40 DISCUSSION
11:50 LUNCH
1:45 Sebastian Shaumyan and Frederique Segond
Discontinuous Constructions
and Applicative Universal Grammar
2:10 M. Andrew Moshier and Carl Pollard
The Domain of Set-Valued Feature Structures
2:35 DISCUSSION
2:45 BREAK
3:05 A. Manaster-Ramer and W. Zadrozny
Systematic Semantics
3:30 Rohit Parikh
Utilities and the Semantics of Common Noun
3:55 David E. Johnson and Lawrence S. Moss
Dynamic Syntax
4:20 DISCUSSION
4:45 CLOSING REMARKS
13. SIGPARSE (PARSING)
Masaru Tomita
16 June 1993
SIGPARSE is organizing the following workshop this summer.
IWPT-93:
THIRD INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON PARSING TECHNOLOGIES
10 - 13 August 1993
Tilburg/Durbuy
The Third international Workshop on Parsing Technologies (IWPT'93) will
take place this year on August 10 through 13. Like IWPT'89, this
workshop will take place in two locations: on August 10-11 on the
premises of Tilburg University in Tilburg, in the South of The
Netherlands; the workshop then moves to Le Sanglier des Ardennes, a
resort in the Ardennes in Durbuy, Belgium.
Provisional program listing
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The following submitted papers will be presented:
* Rens BOD (Amsterdam, Netherlands):
Monte Carlo parsing
* Eric BRILL (Philadelphia, USA):
Automatic Grammar Induction and Parsing Free Text:
A Transformation-Based Approach
* Harry BUNT and Ko van der SLOOT (Tilburg, Netherlands):
Parsing as dynamic evaluation
* Bob CARPENTER (Pittsburgh, USA):
Compilation of Typed Attribute-Value Logic Grammars for Parsing
* Gennaro COSTAGLIOLA (Salerno, Italy)
LR Parsing from an Arbitrary Starting Point
* Nigel R. ELLIS, Roberto GARIGLIANO and Richard G. MORGAN (Durham, England):
A New Transformation into Deterministically Parseable Form for
Natural language Grammars
* Joe GARMAN, Jeffery MARTIN, Paola MERLO and Amy WEINBERG
(Geneve, Switzerland):
A Parameterised Principle-based Parser for Foreign Language Training
in German and Arabic
* Karin HARBUSCH (Saarbruecken, Germany):
Parsing Multi-Component Tree-Adjoining Grammars with Quasi Trees
* G.F. van der HOEVEN (Enschede, Netherlands):
An algorithm for the construction of dependency trees
* Tanaka HOZUMI, Tokunaga TAKENOBU and Aizawa MICHIO (Tokyo, Japan)
Integration of Morphological ans Syntactic Analysis based on the LR
Parsing Algorithm
* Sadao KUROHASHI and Makoto NAGAO (Kyoto, Japan):
Structural Disambiguation in Japanese by Evaluating Case Structures
based on Examples in Case Frame Dictionary
* Alon LAVIE and Masaru TOMITA (Pittsburgh, USA):
An Efficient Word-Skipping Parsing Algorithm for Context-Free Grammars
* Rene LEERMAKERS (Eindhoven, Netherlands):
The use of bunches in parsing theory.
* Rudi LUTZ (Brighton, England):
"Dual" Chart Parsing of Flowgraphs for Program Understanding
* David D. McDONALD (Brandeis U., USA):
The interplay of syntactic and semantic node labels in partial parsing
* M.J. NEDERHOF and J.J. SARBO (Nijmegen, Netherlands):
Increasing the Applicability of LR Parsing
* Michael O'DONNELL (Sydney, Australia):
Parsing with Systemic Grammar
* Stephan RAAIJMAKERS (Tilburg, Netherlands):
A proof-theoretic reconstruction of HPSG
* James ROGERS and K. VIJAY-SHANKER (Newark, Delaware, USA):
Towards a Formal Understanding of the Determinism Hypothesis
in D-Theory
* Ralph ROENNQUIST and Mats WIREN (Saarbruecken, Germany):
Fully Incremental Parsing
* Klaas SIKKEL and Rieks op den AKKER (Enschede, Netherlands):
Context-Free Head-Corner Parsing in Cubic Time
* Daniel D. SLEATOR and Davy TEMPERLEY (Pittsburg, USA):
Parsing English with a Link Grammar
* Tomek STRZALKOWKSI (New York, USA):
Evaluation of TTP parser: a preliminary report
* Hideto TOMABECHI (Tokushima, Japan):
A Soft Graph Unification Method for Robust Parsing
* Paul OUDE LITTIGHUIS and Klaas SIKKEL (Enschede, Netherlands):
Generalized LR Parsing of Attribute Grammars
* Akira USHIODA, Alex WAIBEL, Ted GIBSON, David EVANS (Pittsburgh, USA):
The Automatic Acquisition of Frequencies of Verb Subcategorization
Frames from Tagged Corpora
* A. Ruvan WEERASINGHE and Robin P. FAWCETT (Cardiff, UK.):
Incremental Parsing in Systemic Functional Grammar
* Fuliang WENG (Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA):
Handling Syntactic Extra-Grammaticality
* Kent WITTENBURG (Bellcore, USA):
Adventures in Multidimensional Parsing: Cycles and Disorders
Time schedule
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The workshop will begin Tuesday 10 August at 9.00 a.m. at Tilburg
University. There will be paper presentations in the morning and in the
afternoon. At the end of the day there will be a reception at Tilburg
City Hall.
The workshop continues Wednesday morning. In the afternoon there will
be presentations of research at ITK, after which the workshop moves by
bus to Durbuy. There will be welcome drinks and dinner in the
conference hotel in Durbuy.
There will be a full workshop day on Thursday, with a conference dinner
in the evening.
On Friday August 13 the last workshop sessions are in the morning; a
closing lunch is included in the programme. We intend to arrange bus
transportation to Brussels and Tilburg immediately after lunch.
The bus should get to Brussels at approx. 4 p.m.
For any inquiries please contact:
IWPT'93 Secretariat
phone + 31-13-663113
fax + 31-13-662537
email: iwpt@kub.nl
Harry Bunt, Workshop Chair
ITK, Institute for Language Technology and Artificial Intelligence
Tilburg University, POBOX 90153,
5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands
13. SIGGEN (NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION)
Karen Kukich
18 June 1993
MEMBERSHIP
SIGGEN membership, which currently stands at 170, is open to any member
of the ACL whose dues are paid for the current year. Anyone wishing to
become a SIGGEN member may contact David McDonald at
siggen@cs.brandeis.edu or at the postal address below. The SIGGEN
mailing/membership list is available to SIGGEN members.
SIGGEN BOARD OF DIRECTORS
The SIGGEN Board of Directors is in transition. Volunteer nominations
were solicited and an election was held in May and June of 93 to
replace two members of the SIGGEN committee with one new professional
member and one new student member. Karen Kukich and Marie Meteer
volunteered to vacate their positions to create new openings. The
results of the nominations and voting were as follows:
PROFESSIONAL VOLUNTEERS:
-----------------------
Michael Elhadad 23
Cecile Paris 21
Koenraad Desmedt 17
GRAD STUDENT VOLUNTEERS:
-----------------------
Manfred Stede 25
Nicolas Nicolov 24
Massimo Fasciano 9
Thus, the new SIGGEN Board of Directors will be comprised of the following:
David McDonald Johanna Moore
Content Technologies University of Pittsburgh
14 Brantwood Road 520 LRDC
Arlington, MA 02174-8004 USA Pittsburgh, PA 15260 USA
Mcdonald@cs.brandeis.edu jmoore@cs.pitt.edu
Robert Dale Michael Elhadad
University of Edinburgh Dept of Mathematics and Computer Science
Centre for Cognitive Science Ben Gurion University of the Negev
2 Buccleuch Place Beer Sheva 84105
Edinburgh EH8 9LW Scotland Israel
R.Dale@edinburgh.ac.uk elhadad@bengus.BGU.AC.IL
Manfred Stede
Department of Computer Science
University of Toronto
Toronto M5S 1A4, Canada
mstede@cs.toronto.edu
Board members are meeting at the ACL-93 meeting to plan for the
transistion.
SIGGEN QUERY BOARD
The SIGGEN QueryBoard address will change. During 1993 the QueryBoard
served as a forum for a lengthy discussion of SIGGEN's raison d'etre
and its role in various activities. SIGGEN has sponsored various
workshops and mtgs in the past, but SIGGEN as not itself organized such
meetings. Some SIGGEN members feel strongly that SIGGEN itself should
NOT organize or govern such mtgs, tho it might help coordinate the
scheduling of such mtgs with other ACL functions. Other SIGGEN members
have suggested that some SIGGEN committee, perhaps analogous to the
AAAI secretariate, be set up, by election, to oversee the organization
of such mtgs. These issues will be addressed by the new SIGGEN board
members.
SIGGEN SPONSORED WORKSHOPS
SIGGEN co-sponsored the following workshops during the past year:
1) The Nato Advanced Research Workshop on Burning Issues in Discourse,
Maratea, Italy, 13th - 15th April, 1993. A notice was posted to the
SIGGEN mailing list that proceedings are available for a fee of 8 US
dollars or 5 pounds sterling from:
Donia Scott,
Information Technology Research Institute,
University of Brighton,
Brighton Bn1 4AT,
England
2) The Fourth European Workshop on Natural Language Generation,
Pisa - Italy - April 28-30, 1993. An informal report on this
workshop written by Robin Fawcett and Koenraad de Smedt was posted
to the SIGGEN mailing list.
3) The ACL Workshop on Intentionality & Discourse Structure, Columbus,
Ohio, June 21, 1993. Proceedings will be available from Owen Rambow,
rambow@unagi.cis.upenn.edu.
SEVENTH INTERNATIONAL NLG WORKSHOP
The International NLG Workshop has been the primary mtg for NLG
researchers. The SIGGEN community has been discussing various issues
concerning how this and related mtgs might be organized in the future.
A committee consisting of McDonald, de Smedt, Fawcett, Hovy, Meteer,
and Scott will be making a recommendation soon.
NLG BIBLIOGRAHY
A new revised version (23rd February 1993) of Robert Dale's NLG
bibliography, in compressed PostScript form, is available by anonymous
ftp from scott.cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Internet 129.215.144.3). This version
includes new material that has appeared within the last year, plus a
significant number of additions and corrections provided by members of
the NLG community.
13. SIGPHON (COMPUTATIONAL PHONOLOGY)
Steven Bird
10 June 93
The purpose of the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational
Phonology is to (i) place computational phonology firmly on the
research agenda in computational linguistics, (ii) develop links
between researchers in computational phonology, and (iii) facilitate
the dissemination of research results and software.
Current membership stands at 110 people and members generally have an
active interest in the field rather than just being onlookers. Members
receive a bimonthly newsletter and have access to an FTP directory
which houses the membership directory, newsletter back-issues, research
papers and software. This year, the SIG proposed and was granted a
special issue of _Computational Linguistics_, and 22 papers are
currently under review. The SIG has recently been advertised in
_Phonology_ and in _Computer Speech and Language_, as we try to build
on our membership and promote dialogue between the speech and language
communities.
For further information, contact:
Steven Bird.
University of Edinburgh, Centre for Cognitive Science
2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, Scotland, U.K.
Telephone: (031) 650-4421/4432. Fax: (031) 650-4587.
13. SIGMEDIA (MULTIMEDIA LANGUAGE PROCESSING)
Kent Wittenburg
16 June 1993
In late fall of 1992, a new ACL Special Interest Group on Multimedia
Language Processing (SIGMEDIA) was approved by the ACL executive
committee. Charter members were the approximately 50 ACL members that
attended a meeting called at the 1992 annual ACL convention to explore
the possibility of setting up such an interest group. There are now 83
ACL members in the SIG. The coordinator is Kent Wittenburg, Bellcore.
On December 2, 1992 an unmoderated mailing list was established to
serve the group. The list initially included the charter SIGMEDIA
members. It has grown substantially since its inception. As of June
14, 1993, there are a total of 131 subscribers. Besides the ACL
members, researchers outside the ACL in related organizations such as
ACM and IEEE who are interested in ACL SIGMEDIA activities have been
encouraged to join.
In January a call went out to all subscribers to send a short file that
contained a self-introduction including name, affiliation, interests,
and sample publications. These self-introductions have been collected
and made available to the membership. Approximately 50 of the
subscribers have so far have provided introductions.
On January 18, 1993, a SIGMEDIA ftp server was established that
supports anonymous login. Its current contents are:
ACL-info Information about the Association for Computational Lingistics.
ACL-dues-info-92
Dues form (outdated but still serviceable) for joining ACL or
ordering publications.
charter Charter for SIGMEDIA. [included below]
contribs Subdirectory containing contributions from the membership.
Currently contains a bibliography on multimedia and multimodal
parsing submitted by Kent Wittenburg.
member-intros Subdirectory containing self-introductions by SIGMEDIA members.
sigmedia-info Information about SIGMEDIA including how to join.
During the 1993 annual ACL meeting there will be a gathering for current
and prospective SIGMEDIA members. Agenda items will include:
1. Governance structure including making provision for a rotating executive
committee.
2. A report on SIGMEDIA activities since its inception.
3. Reports on activities in other ACL and non-ACL interest groups and
organizations that are relevant to SIGMEDIA interests.
4. Establishing a working committee to consider the prospect of
organizing a workshop during 1994.
ACL SIGMEDIA Charter
As computational technologies rapidly expand into media other than
text, the ACL is faced with an opportunity to take a leading role in
defining an emergent field. Many members of the ACL community feel
that the theories and practice of computational linguistics can
contribute much to characterizing the nature of nonverbal as well as
verbal media in addition to enabling suitable multimedia human-computer
dialogues. Those dialogues which include natural language as data or
input modality are of course of special interest to the ACL
membership.
The need for SIGMEDIA as an interest group separate from SIGCHI is
motivated by the difference in focus that computational linguists bring
to issues involved in multimedia communication. SIGMEDIA will not in
general be concerned with the hardware of new and developing media, the
software protocols required to deploy media on different platforms, the
(semi-)automated construction of multimedia interfaces (unless these
methods employ linguistic techniques), or the details of human factors
studies needed for media development. Instead, SIGMEDIA members will
address issues that spring from the application of generic questions of
communication (morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, discourse,
Speech Acts, etc.) to different types of media.
A suggested list of research topics to be included within the domain of
the SIG follows, where nonverbal media is taken to include (non-speech)
sound, 2D/3D graphics, pen-based input, animation, and video; and
verbal media includes text and speech:
o Foundational work for representation of nonverbal media and
concurrent media streams at these levels:
o morphology
o syntax
o semantics
o discourse
o Parsing and generation algorithms for nonverbal and mixed
verbal and nonverbal media
o Media integration in interface design based on language
models
o Media selection and integration in automatic presentation
o Media translation, e.g.,
o natural language text -> 3D animation
o voice + gesture -> 2D graphics
o Data extraction from verbal together with nonverbal media
The following services are envisioned:
1. Facilitate communication between researchers in the area.
2. Help in the organization and planning of workshops and symposia.
3. Distribute information regarding research and resources
pertaining to multimedia.
4. Interact with other professional organizations and governmental
agencies to further the support of research and development activities.
5. Interact with publishers and software developers to encourage publication
of ACL sponsored work and publicize relevant software.
For more information on joining the SIG, contact:
Kent Wittenburg
Bell Communications Research, MRE 2A-347
445 South St.
Morristown, NJ 07962-1910
(201)829-4382
email: kentw@bellcore.com
OR
sigmedia-request@bellcore.com
14. TEXT ENCODING INITIATIVE
Susan Hockey
14 June 1993
Work has continued on preparing Version 2 of the TEI Guidelines. Chapters
are being released on the TEI's listserv TEI-L@UICVM as they are completed.
During the past year the following chapters have been published:
1. (AB) About These Guidelines
3. (ST) Structure of the TEI Document Type Declarations
4. (CH) Characters and Character Sets
5. (HD) The TEI Header
6. (CO) Tags Available in all TEI DTD's
7. (DS) Default Text Structure
13. (TE) Base Tag Set for Terminological Data
16. (SA) Segmentation and Alignment
26. (CC) Additional Tag Set for Language Corpora
Drafts of other chapters have made substantial progress.
A meeting of the TEI's Technical Review Group was held outside Oxford in
mid-May at which the following chapters were also considered in addition to
the chapters listed above and Chapter 10 (Spoken Texts) which was published
early in 1992.
2. (SG) Concise Summary of SGML7
7(2) (PR) Base Tag Set for Prose
8. (VE) Base Tag Set for Verse
9. (DR) Base Tag Set for Drama
11. (LM) Letters and Memoranda
12. (DI) Printed Dictionaries
17. (AI) Simple Analytic Mechanisms
18. (FS) Feature Structure Analysis
19. (CE) Certainty
21. (TC) Text Criticism and Apparatus
22. (ND) Names and Dates
23. (23) Graphs, Digraphs and Trees
27. (SH) Structured Header
29. (FD) Feature System Declaration
30. (TD) Tag Set Declaration
31. (CF) TEI Conformance
32. (MD) Modifying DTDs
As a result of this meeting, some further amendments were suggested which
are now being incorporated.
A meeting of the TEI Advisory Board will be held in Chicago on 28-29 June
at which representatives of the Participating Organizations will be asked to
endorse the Guidelines.
Publication of Version 2 is planned for fall 1993. This publication will
take the form of a detailed technical document and reference specifications
of all the tags. Tutorial and case book material will follow.
15. CONSORTIUM FOR LEXICAL RESEARCH (CLR)
Louise Guthrie
16 June 1993
The Consortium for Lexical Research (CLR), established by the
Association for Computational Linguistics, with funding from DARPA, is
now in the middle of its third year. The Consortium is sited at the
Computing Research Laboratory, New Mexico, USA and is advised by a
board consisting of Roy Byrd, Ralph Grishman, Mark Liberman and Donald
E. Walker. During the past two and a half years, Yorick Wilks has
served as director of the CLR with Louise Guthrie as associate
director. As of June 1, 1993, when Professor Wilks took up his new
position at Scheffield University in England, Louise Guthrie assumed
the role of director and Jim Cowie that of associate director.
The objective of the Consortium for Lexical Research is to act as a
clearinghouse, in the US and internationally, for lexical data and
software. It shares lexical data and tools used to perform research on
natural language dictionaries and lexicons, as well as communicating
the results of that research, thus accelerating the scale and speed of
the development of natural language understanding programs via standard
lexicons and software.
The task of the CLR is primarily to facilitate research, making
available to the whole natural language processing community certain
resources now held only by a few groups that have special relationships
with companies or dictionary publishers. The CLR, as far as is
practical, accepts contributions from any source, regardless of
theoretical orientation, and makes them available as widely as possible
for research.
RECENT RESULTS
Our focus this year has been on the acquisition of new materials and
the recruiting of new members. Response to the Consortium has been
enthusiastic and continuous. The repository has grown significantly
and the consortium membership has quadrupled in the last year.
Information about the CLR including the catalog of offerings, the
membership or provider agreements or any previous newsletter can be
obtained from lexical@nmsu.edu.
Our current status can be summarized as follows:
Membership: We now have 52 members of the CLR which include 20
domestic universities, 9 foreign universities, 6 government agencies
and 17 commercial companies (including Apple, Microsoft, Xerox and
Siemens). We have had over 1,200 ftp accesses in the last four months
from more than 25 countries around the world. The government has
sponsored a subscription to the CLR for research groups participating
in the 5th Message Understanding Conference (MUC5).
Collection: The CLR currently has over 150 contributions
for lexical use. Of these, some are restricted to MUC5 participants,
eight are restricted to "members only" and the others are available to
anyone. A catalog is available to anyone with descriptions of the
resources. Approximately 50 other contributions are in various stages
of negotiations at this time.
Contracts: Together with our university lawyers, we have developed
contracts for members and providers. Negotiations with dictionary
publishers have been difficult, but we now have arrangements with
Longman and Harper-Collins publishers which facilitate the purchase of
their machine readable dictionaries by members. At present the
distribution of the dictionaries is still in the hands of the
publishers and is slow. We are working on ways to expedite the process
and we are now turning to the major U.S. publishers.
Publicity: The Consortium has begun a newsletter which is distributed
via email to members and to anyone who has requested information about
the CLR. The newsletter highlights a different piece of software or
data each month, and informs its readers of any new items which are
available.
Conferences: In December 1992 the Computing Research Laboratory hosted
the second workshop of the Consortium for Lexical Research:
U.S./European Cooperation. The workshop was sponsored jointly by NSF
and the European Commission to discuss international cooperation of
lexical computation. Twenty-five researchers participated in the
workshop. A report is available through the Computing Research
Laboratory.
PLANS FOR THE COMING YEAR
We plan to expand membership and holdings steadily over the year, and
progress toward our long term goal of establishing the Consortium as a
self-supporting entity. We hope to do this by signing agreements with
other dictionary publishers to make their products available through
the CLR and by more actively seeking contributions of software or data
from researchers. Our membership drive will focus on obtaining more
international members, and members from the community of researchers
and language specialists who may not have everyday access to the
internet.
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
Renewals: Many members join the CLR just to obtain a particular piece
of software. We'd like ideas for renewals. The rate of enhancement of
individual items is slow, and although some have been updated
regularly (Wordnet, Juman), most items have not changed since they were
loaded into the CLR. The rate of acquisitions is also slow due to the
time it takes to negotiate and finalize agreements.
Why should members renew?
Publishers: We are successfully mediating between dictionary
publishers and users, but it does not seem reasonable to assume that
publishers will relinquish control of their dictionaries. It seems
likely we'll have to learn to live with this state of affairs although
we will continue to work increase accessibility to all researchers.
Any support or ideas ACL can give in this matter would be appreciated.
American publishers may prove more amenable than British ones.
Viability: Given the current projections for running CLR and continuing
the level of support we now give to members (which includes handholding
for ftp and for the use of software), we project we'll need to maintain
our current level of staffing. It is our opinion that although the CLR
is not a self-supporting enterprise, it is providing a useful function
to the research community and we are exploring ways of ensuring its
existence after the DARPA funding ceases at the end of this year.
Comments and suggestions on this point are welcome.
11. EUROPEAN CORPUS INITIATIVE (preliminary draft)
Susan Armstrong
18 June 1993
The European Corpus Initiative (ECI) was established in January 1992 to
collect corpora for languages other than English as a complement to the
ACL/DCI. The work has been supported by the ACL, ELSNET, HCRC, ISSCO,
NERC, and the LDC. A first phase of the initiative is nearing
completion which will result in a CD-ROM pressing this summer. The
CD-ROM will be prepared by the LDC, distribution in Europe will be
taken care of by ELSNET and in the States by LDC.
Most of the collection and clean-up work has been done at HCRC, ISSCO
and LDC with some help from other centers on an ad-hoc basis.
Currently, HCRC has some 40-50 sub-corpora varying in size between 12K
words and 5 million words. The total size of the corpus to be made
available on the CD-ROM will be more than 50 million words. The texts
will provide a representative sample of all major Western European
languages plus a number of Eastern European languages. A set of
parallel texts in English, French, German, and Spanish are also in
preparation. Unfortunately, a number of recently acquired parallel
texts may not be included due to lack of resources.
Future plans include a continued effort to acquire more texts in
general, and also to focus on more representative corpora for given
languages, text types and limited domains. With the growing interest
in using textual resources and the increased funding level of
corpus-based projects, both in Europe and in combined efforts across
the Atlantic, the community can look forward to an ever larger set of
texts for research purposes.
As soon as the first ECI CD-ROM is ready for distribution, a public
announcement will be made via all appropriate channels. For more
information contact Susan Armstrong at ISSCO or
Henry Thompson at HCRC.
17. GRADUATE DIRECTORY
Martha Evens
10 June 1993
In December, 1992, ACL published the third edition of the
Directory of Graduate Programs in Computational Linguistics.
It includes 81 entries for programs in the United States and
64 entries for the rest of the world.
I would like to raise some questions about the future of the
Graduate Directory that the Board may wish to consider (at some
more convenient moment):
1. Do you wish to continue the Graduate Directory?
2. If you wish the Graduate Directory to continue, would you wish it to
come out on some regular schedule (every year or every other year)?
3. The schedule that best fits the academic year in the United States
is September or October. Is this timing appropriate around the world?
4. Could the functions of the Directory be handled by maintaining a
file available for ftp on a computer somewhere? (I could maintain
such a file on a Sun in my laboratory at IIT, for example and date
the information for individual entries.)
5. Could the functions of the Directory be handled by creating a
membership list available in print or ftp form sorted by on location
as well as by alphabetical order, plus a list of names and addresses
(email and conventional) of institutions whether they are members or
not?
18. COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS COURSE SURVEY
Bonnie Dorr
14 June 1993
We have now completed the Survey of Computational Linguistics courses,
which serves as a follow-on to the Directory of Graduate Programs
compiled and published as a special CL issue by by Martha Evens. We
are in the process of converting both on-line and hardcopy responses
into LaTeX. In addition, we are compiling a bibliography (in BibTeX)
containing all citations given by respondents. We expect to be done
with this compilation by the end of the summer. Three points need to
be discussed at the executive committee meeting. If possible, we would
like to have some input from the committee on these; please contact
Bonnie Dorr (bonnie@umiacs.umd.edu) with comments.
A. Confusion over intent of CL Survey
Many respondents were confused about the intent of this survey. The
survey is a systematic compilation of syllabi from individual classes
that teach computational linguistics --- it is not intended to be an
enumeration of classes taught in CL programs as in the Survey of
Graduate Programs. Several institutions sent us 6-15 syllabi for their
programs; we had expected to publish only 1 or 2 per institution and an
upper bound of 3 in certain (rare) cases. We requested that these
institutions pare down the responses to 2 or 3. Many responded that
they could not do this because it would not provide a representative
description of a whole curriculum in CL. As stated at the outset, this
survey was not intended to provide a listing that would be
representative of entire CL curricula; we feel that this objective was
fulfilled, to a certain extent, by the Survey of Graduate Programs.
Rather, this survey was intended to give a detailed description of a
small set (preferably 1) of classes that teach computational
linguistics more generally.
In cases where a large number of course syllabi were sent to us, we had
to make a decision as to which ones should be included in the final
listing. For example, Saarbrueken sent us responses for the following
15 courses:
Introduction to Computational Linguistics
Grammar Formalisms
Grammar Development
CL and AI in Society
Mathematical Methods in Linguistics I
Parsing
Introduction to Logic Programming
Introduction to text theory
Syntax und Morphologie
Word Order
Lisp for linguists
Semantic Formalisms
Semantic Processing
Computational Lexicon
Mathematical Foundations of Linguistics II
In order to keep the compilation task tractable, we decided to include
the introductory course (i.e., the first one) and to list the others as
part of the COMMENTS section at the end of the questionnaire (including
the names of the professors who teach these courses). We would like
comments from the Executive committee concerning this point; is this an
appropriate solution to the problem?
Our suggestion for the next round on this survey is to be more
specific in our instructions, in particular, with respect to the
following line: "We are eager to include two types of classes: those
that teach computational linguistics as the sole topic and those that
teach computational linguistics as one of many topics." If we decide
that these two types of classes are acceptable, we still need to be
careful to exclude those courses that are peripherally related (e.g.,
"Lisp for linguists") or that are too narrowly focused on a specific
topic (e.g., "Word Order").
B. Incomplete bibliographic references
Many respondents did not give complete references for their citations.
Here are two examples:
- Winfried, Handbuch der Semiotik (Handbook of Semiotics)
- Zock and Sabah (1988)
Incomplete references are slowing down the bibliography compilation
considerably. We are using the citation mechanism provided by BibTeX,
which helps us to compile statistics about most frequently references
material, etc. However, without complete references, we will not be
able to achieve this goal fully.
We are in the process of tracking some of these down; in some cases we
will be contacting respondents and asking them to be more specific. In
order to expedite the process, we would also like to ask the executive
committee members what they think of the idea of electronically posting
the incomplete references so that others can help us out. We're sure
that, with the aid of ACL members (as well as others who read the
network), we could obtain a complete citation for many of these
references. What mechanism should be used to post this request?
The next time we conduct the survey, we should be more explicit about
requesting complete references (perhaps in a BibTeX format) so that we
can provide as complete a bibliography as possible.
C. Future plans
Two important questions have been raised: does ACL want to do this, and
if so, how often? In addition, Martha Evens has offered some
suggestions concerning future instantiations of the CL Survey. One is
that we might be able to satisfy this need with a file available for
anonymous ftp --- which we advertise in the Finite String --- plus
printouts that could be mailed to people who did not access to net
mail. What is the executive committee's response to this suggestion?
If the survey were made electronically available how would updates be
executed? Who would maintain the compiled listing?
-------------------------------------------------------------------
To the committee: Please send Bonnie Dorr your comments, suggestions,
tips, etc. regarding these three points. (See the e-mail address
given above.)
19. NATURAL LANGUAGE SOFTWARE REGISTRY
Elizabeth Hinkelman
17 June 1993
Second edition: the second edition of the Registry contains nearly one
hundred software descriptions, in large part due to participants of the
1992 survey of natural language processing software conducted for the
German Ministry for Research and Technology by DFKI inc. under Prof.
Wolfgang Wahlster. The Registry now encompasses not only software for
various levels of linguistic analysis, large systems that perform
several levels of analysis, and application programs, but also a full
section on systems for natural language generation. We look forward to
a third edition with cooperation from the software survey conducted by
the University of Pisa.
Pan-european activities: the Registry is supplying its experience with
software to various european activities, from which it will derive
infrastructural benefits. The Registry is establishing a test site at
DFKI for ELSNet's software repositories and distribution mechanism. By
the end of the summer, the Registry will also begin conducting
experiments in software evaluation and distribution for the
EC-sponsored RELATOR project, which has as its mandate the coordination
of natural language data and tools.
We hope that the participation of the Registry (a fully international
project) in these efforts will result in improvements in access to
software for researchers located outside of the EC as well.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Substantially revised Secretary-Treasurer Report
2. SECRETARY-TREASURER'S REPORT
Don Walker
6 July 1993
ACL 1992 FINANCIAL STATUS
-------------------------
INCOME EXPENSES
Membership 58,185 121,846
Proceedings 35,192 1,363
Meetings 64,376 46,142
Workshops 245 3,520
CLR 8,793
Prague Workshop 17,013
TEI 20,000
DCI/CDROM 1,760
NSF Grant 7,184 7,302
Royalties 427
Interest 19,289
European Bonds 40,926 49,826
Foreign Exchange 6,700
------- -------
TOTALS 227,584 282,505
Difference 54,921
1991 1992
ASSETS 375,746 320,825
ACL 1992 MEMBERSHIP ACCOUNT
---------------------------
INCOME EXPENSES
Dues 44,444 Services 34,036
Back orders 3,378 Journal 55,350
Mail fees 4,966 Editorial 6,000
Labels 1,563 Post/Ship 12,572
International Fund 3,834 Equipment 3,223
Supplies 1,365
Phone 828
Travel 7,225
Legal 380
Bank 486
Refunds 381
------- -------
TOTALS 58,185 121,846
ACL MEMBERSHIP STATUS
---------------------
YEAR PERSONAL REGULAR STUDENT INSTITUTIONAL
1977 500 201
1978 444 218
1979/80 658 249
1981 1208 264
1982 1545 296
1983 1384 319
1984 1355 325
1985 1969 366
1986 1960 410
1987 2104 1786 318 454
1988 1959 1690 269 (408)
1989 2001 1729 272 (538)
1990 1932 1656 276 (564)
1991 2065 1744 321 (620)
1992 1991 1705 279 (???)
6/93 1807 1503 297 (???)
ACL MEMBERSHIP DISTRIBUTION
---------------------------
US CANADA EUROPE OTHER PACIFIC RIM ASIA/AFRICA/SA
1987 63% 4% 25% 9%
1988 63% 4% 25% 9%
1989 57% 4% 29% 9%
1990 57% 4% 30% 9%
1991 53% 4% 34% 8% 1%
1992 51% 4% 34% 10% 1%
6/93 46% 4% 39% 10% 1%