Student Session Chairs Report for 2004
ACL-04 Student Research Workshop

Leonoor van der Beek, Dmitriy Genzel, and Daniel Midgley


1. Program Committee

The co-chairs of the ACL-04 Student Research Workshop, Leonoor van der Beek
(University of Groningen, Netherlands), Dmitriy Genzel (Brown University,
USA), and Daniel Midgley (University of Western Australia) were nominated
by this year's general chair, Donia Scott, and approved by the ACL
Executive Committee. Justine Cassell was appointed by the ACL Executive
Committee as Faculty Advisor. The program committee was formed by the
co-chairs and approved by the ACL Executive Committee. The final program
committee consisted of 21 student members and 36 non-student members. Of
the 38 reviewers, 13 were from North America, 20 from Europe, 3 from Asia,
and 2 from Oceania.


2. Submission and Acceptance

We received 43 submissions to the Student Research Workshop. The volume of
papers received caused some stretching of resources, but all papers were
assigned to at least three reviewers. In all, forty papers were assigned
three reviewers each, two papers were assigned four reviewers, and one
paper was assigned five reviewers. Reviews were done by e-mail.

We accepted 12 of the papers. All of our selected presenters were able to
attend, obviating the need for alternates. Statistics for submissions and
acceptance are shown below (Tables 1-3).


3. Presentation Format

The Workshop is organised into a day-long single session, running in
parallel with the two other main sessions. Papers have been grouped into
pairs by topic. A block will begin with both authors' presentations (15
minutes each), followed by 20 minutes for panelists' feedback and general
questions.


4. Panelists

The co-chairs have asked 15 conference attendees to be on the panel for the
Student Research Workshop. These panelists have been selected for their
knowledge of the research area, and for their availability during the
Workshop.


5. Funding

We submitted our request to Mary Harper, program director of Human Language
and Communication (HLC) at NSF in late November and received notice of
award in January. The grant totalled $22,400.

We were able to fund all 10 of the students who applied for funding. The
amount granted to each student varied because of varying distance and fares.


6. Suggestions

The process of organising the Student Research Workshop has been an
invaluable and rewarding learning experience. We wish to thank the ACL
conference organizers who helped us with the details of many issues such as
preparing materials for publication and student volunteering.  We would
like to thank the ACL general chair, Donia Scott, and the ACL Executive
Committee for allowing us the opportunity to serve as this year's co-chairs.

Here are some suggestions we would like to offer for future student sessions.


6.1 Soliciting submissions

Response to our call for papers was most gratifying, not only in number but
in coverage. We credit this mainly to the following factors:

- An aggressive publicity drive. We sent posters and the call for papers
not only to a wide array of CL-themed mailing lists, but also directly to a
large number of relevant departments in universities worldwide.

- Early publicity. The call for papers went to potential submitters in
early December, which gave potential submitters time to prepare. An even
earlier start would have been even more helpful.

- Announcing the availability of funding. Because funding was applied for
early on in the process, we were able to announce its availability directly
in the call for papers. This helped to attract the large number of
submissions from students.


6.2 Funding

As in previous years, we had students fill out a request for funding form.
However, unlike previous years, we gave out a lump sum to each student
rather than reimbursing tickets and housing.  This had advantages and
disadvantages.  The major advantage is that the faculty chair's university
does not need to get involved in complicated and very long-term
interactions with students around the world (many of whom, in the past, had
forgotten to save receipts).  The disadvantage is that the committee must
carefully investigate prices for tickets for each presenter in order to
announce to that person the amount of money being awarded.  We used
www.cheaptickets.com, Expedia, and similar websites for this purpose.


6.3 Communication between past and present chairs

Progress of the Workshop was facilitated by last year's chairs, who
nominated us in a very timely way -- in some cases, during ACL-03 itself.
Occasionally we had to scramble to find materials from last year, and we
recommend that the current year's co-chairs prepare a directory of
materials (documents, forms, mailing lists, and templates) to hand down to
next year's chairs.


6.4 Coordinating between the main session and the student session

As in previous years, we invited distinguished faculty members and
researchers to join the panel and offer suggestions to the student
presenters. Our program schedule was due at the same time as that of the
Main Session, and as a result, we had to quickly shift our program around
to avoid clashes and double-bookings for our panelists. In future, it would
be helpful if the program for the Student Research Workshop could be
required rather later than that of the Main Session, in the interest of
keeping the programs accurate.


6.5 Division of labor

Each of the co-chairs tended to gravitate toward certain areas of
organisation (student liaison, paperwork, getting reviewers, etc.) and took
over the duties of these areas. In hindsight, we can see the value of
assigning task areas to co-chairs in a more explicit way.


6.6 Review form

We found last year's review form largely satisfactory, though we didn't
seem to use all the detail it contained. Perhaps a less fine-grained
categorisation would have been sufficient. We did, however, add another
category: in addition to "Comments to the Author" section, we added a
section for comments to the committee, not to be seen by the author. This
allowed the reviewers to give extra information that we found very useful.


6.7 Student status

We required a email or fax from the advisors of all potential presenters,
stating that all authors were students, and had not presented at an ACL
Student Research Workshop before. In previous years, students could send a
CV, but we required only a supervisor letter. This ensured that all
presenters met the eligibility guidelines.


7. Submission statistics

Table 1: Papers by Country

------------------------------------------|
| Country        | Submissions | Accepted |
|----------------+-------------+----------|
| UK             |   9 (21%)   |    3     |
| USA            |   7 (16%)   |    4     |
| Australia      |   3 (7%)    |    0     |
| France         |   2 (5%)    |    0     |
| Germany        |   2 (5%)    |    1     |
| Korea          |   2 (5%)    |    1     |
| India          |   2 (5%)    |    0     |
| Thailand       |   2 (5%)    |    0     |
| Russia         |   2 (5%)    |    0     |
| China          |   1 (2%)    |    0     |
| Czech Republic |   1 (2%)    |    1     |
| Finland        |   1 (2%)    |    0     |
| Italy          |   1 (2%)    |    0     |
| Japan          |   1 (2%)    |    1     |
| Mexico         |   1 (2%)    |    0     |
| Netherlands    |   1 (2%)    |    1     |
| Spain          |   1 (2%)    |    0     |
| Sweden         |   1 (2%)    |    0     |
| Tunisia        |   1 (2%)    |    0     |
| Turkey         |   1 (2%)    |    0     |
| Ukraine        |   1 (2%)    |    0     |
|------------------------------------------


Table 2: Papers by Geographical Area

------------------------------------------|
| Area           | Submissions | Accepted |
|----------------+-------------+----------|
| Europe         |   23 (53%)  |    6     |
| North America  |    8 (19%)  |    4     |
| Asia           |    8 (19%)  |    2     |
| Oceania        |    3 (7%)   |    0     |
| Africa         |    1 (2%)   |    0     |
|------------------------------------------


Table 3: Papers by Topic

-------------------------------------------------------------|
| Topic                             | Submissions | Accepted |
|-----------------------------------+-------------+----------|
| Machine Translation            |      0      |    0     |
| Generation                        |      0      |    0     |
| Information Extraction            |      3      |    0     |
| Lexicon                           |      2      |    1     |
| Models of language                |      1      |    0     |
| Corpus based Language Modeling    |      3      |    0     |
| Morphology                        |      1      |    1     |
| Syntax                            |      6      |    0     |
| Discourse/Dialogue                |      3      |    1     |
| Information Retrieval             |      4      |    2     |
| Semantics                         |      6      |    3     |
| Speech Recognition/Synthesis      |      4      |    0     |
| Summarization                     |      2      |    1     |
| Message & narrative understanding |      3      |    1     |
| Pragmatics                        |      0      |    0     |
| Phonetics and Phonology           |      0      |    0     |
| Question Answering                |      0      |    0     |
| Multilingual processing           |      1      |    1     |
| Language in multi-modal systems   |      1      |    0     |
| Text classification               |      3      |    1     |
|-------------------------------------------------------------