REPORT OF LOCAL ARRANGEMENTS CHAIR

Toni Badia

ACL chose Barcelona as the site for the ACL'2004 meeting after a joint proposal
by people belonging to all the universities in the Barcelona area having a
computational linguistics research group. Accordingly, the local arrangements for
ACL'2004 are being handled by a committee formed by people from all these
universities:

        Toni Badia (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) (chair)
        Sergi Balari (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona)
        Ignasi Iriondo (Universitat Ramon Llull)
        David Farwell (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya)
        Joaquim Llisterri (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona)
        Toni Marti (Universitat de Barcelona)
        Jose B. Marino (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya)
        Horacio Rodriguez (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya)
        Enric Vallduvi (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

Some of these people have had responsibilities in the committees of the ACL'2004
meeting:
        Sergi Balari (local publications co-chair)
        Toni Marti (local sponsorship co-chair)
        Horacio Rodriguez (local poster & demos co-chair)

The Local arrangements committee has worked in a collegiate way and has
distributed specific tasks to their members (institutional relations, banquet
and gifts, newsletter, web-page...). The committee has been meeting regularly
once a month for the last year, and fortnightly since May 2004.

This distribution of tasks and working arrangements has helped to bear the
workload that the committee has faced at some specific moments. Our experience
is satisfactory and we would recommend that in the future cooperative bids are
promoted.

We have had a company producing the basic design of the web page. They
implemented the general structure of the web, and produced specific interfaces
for the pages with high content modification. After their work was finished,
most of the modifications in the web have been performed by the local committee
people. This arrangement has not implied a high expenditure, has worked well,
and has balanced the null design capacities of the committee members.

The ACL'2004 conference is held as part of the general programme of the Forum of
Cultures that takes place in Barcelona from May to September 2004. And the
meeting takes place within the premises of the Forum, specifically within the
brand new Barcelona Convention Centre. This has determined to a large extent
the work of the local arrangements committee.

The organisation of ACL'2004 has been eased considerably by the fact that it is
held in a specialised environment operated by specialised people, with all
facilities needed when organising an up-to-date conference. On the other hand,
the main burden of the preparation work has consisted in the relations with the
Forum: specifying all the requirements in the contract, negotiating the
contract, preparing the site visit of the Donia Scott and Priscilla Rasmussen
so that we could discuss all relevant issues there, fixing the details once the
building had been finished...

All in all, we hope that the fact that the conference is held within the Forum
is going to contribute to its success: the attendees will be able to benefit
from the activities that are organised by the Forum during the days of the
conference.

As of 28th June, the registration figures are the following:
total registrants is 541

300 regular
152 students
29 student volunteers
60 workshop only

312 (61%) have bought tickets for the banquet
173 people have indicated that they will attend the student lunch

detailed figures:

MAIN CONFERENCE: 481

TUTORIALS:
T1. Beyond Syntax: Predicates, Arguments, Valency Frames and Linguistic
Annotation: 44
T2. Building linguistically motivated speech recognisers with Regulus: 10
T3. Kernel Methods in Natural Language Processing: 68
T4. Adaptive Learning: From Supervised to Active Learning of statistical
models for Natural Language and Speech Processing: 59

ASSOCIATED CONFERENCE:
EMNLP 2004 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: 132

WORKSHOPS:
W1. Current Themes in Computational Phonology, and Morphology, 7th Meeting of
the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Phonology: 13
W2. Discourse Annotation: 40
W3. Incremental Parsing: Bringing Engineering and Cognition Together: 30
W4. Multiword Expressions: Integrating Processing: 37
W5. Question Answering in Restricted Domains: 26
W6. RDF / RDFS and OWL in Language Technology: 4th Workshop on NLP and XML
(NLPXML - 2004): 17
W7. Reference Resolution and Its Applications: 20
W8. SENSEVAL-3 Third International Workshop on the Evaluation of Systems for
the Semantic Analysis of Text: 58
W9. 2nd Workshop on Text Meaning and Interpretation: 23
W10. Text Summarization Branches Out: 32
W11. Third SIGHAN Workshop on Chinese Language Processing: 15

The social events foreseen for ACL'2004 are the following:
Reception: July 21
at 19:00 on the ground floor of the Conference Building

Banquet: July 23
at 19:00, in the medieval 'Salo de Contractacions' (Contracts Hall) of the
'Llotja' (the Exchange Building)
address: passeig Isabel II, 1
nearest underground station: Barceloneta

Other special events:
ACL Exec Meeting: July 21
in room 131 in the conference building (main floor)

Exec+ dinner: July 22
in the restaurant El Principal
address: carrer Provenca 286-288
nearest underground station: Passeig de Gracia

CL Editorial Board Meeting: July 23
in room 131 in the conference building (main floor)

Student Lunch: July 23
in the coffee breaks area in the conference building (main floor)

After Conference breakfast: July 24
in room Montjuic (3rd floor) of the AC Hotel (next to the conference building)