EXCERPTS FROM THE NAACL EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE MEETING MINUTES
JUNE 2, 2001, PITTSBURGH


Date:   Saturday, June 2, 2001
Time:   9:00am-7:00pm
Place:  Rangos 1, University Center, CMU

Attendees: Claire Cardie, Ralph Grishman, Graeme Hirst, Daniel
Jurafsky, Diane Litman, Martha Palmer, Janyce Wiebe, Kathy McCoy.

Invited Visitors: Eduard Hovy, Alon Lavie, Lori Levin, Priscilla
Rasmussen.


(1) WELCOME TO NEW MEMBERS
Diane welcomed Graeme Hirst and Daniel Jurafsky to the NAACL executive
board.

(2) NAACL OFFICER REPORTS (The full, written reports on which these
oral reports were based are also available.)

CHAIR'S REPORT.  Diane led us through the main points of her written
report.  In particular, she summarized her primary NAACL activities
over the past year, which included NAACL'01 planning and monitoring; a
site visit to the proposed conference and banquet locations during
July of 2000; and leading various policy changes for the newly-created
chapter and NAACL conference.

Diane next provided summaries of the ACL exec meetings that she
attended in October 2000 and January 2001. The main points we
discussed w.r.t. the Hong Kong meeting (October) were the following:

Joint COLING/ACL-NAACL conferences.
- The ACL exec addressed a number of issues regarding the merging of
  COLING with the ACL conference. Discussions are still ongoing and
  there will be further meetings on this topic at ACL this summer.

- COLING-2004 will be in North America.  Will we want to co-locate
  with them and they with us? No one has contacted Diane yet about
  this.

- Diane asked whether we might co-host NAACL with HLT instead of
  COLING for that year. 

Other ACL decisions. Diane then quickly went through other decisions
made by the ACL exec.

Status of ACL conferences vs. chapter conferences.

- W.r.t. the current NAACL conference, Diane asked whether we liked
  the staggered deadline?  Everbody said: yes, yes, yes. It allows for
  the submission of work when it's ready. The coordination of
  notification/submission deadlines should be thought out though. The
  1-week difference between notification from one conference and
  submission to another might not be enough; maybe strive for a 2-week
  difference so that there's more time for re-writing.  Inconsistent
  reviewing means that it makes sense for people to be able to
  re-submit.  NAACL could even have an earlier submission date than
  this past year's November submission.


The ACL conference handbook.
- ACL is creating a handbook of its policies (Sandee is putting this
  together).  It will that will cover all kinds of conference issues
  among other things.  The idea is that, once written, the chapters
  should contact ACL when they're doing something against the ACL
  policy.

The main issues discussed w.r.t. the ACL exec meeting in New Jersey
are listed below: 

ACL workshop policies.
- Diane said that ACL will create a policy that requires workshop
  participants to have agreed before their names are associated with
  it.  Everyone agreed that this will be a policy that we also want to
  maintain.  Martha noted that workshops wanting more control than ACL
  policies might allow can be organized under one of the SIG's.


SECRETARY'S REPORT. Claire walked through the main points of her
written report. Particular issues that were discussed were the
following:

NAACL mailing list manager.

- Claire described some of the current problems in maintaining and
  accessing the mail list.  Kathy suggested that we get a volunteer to
  go through the existing mail list, find and fix errors, and update
  the list every couple of months by contacting Priscilla for new
  members.  For his/her efforts, the student would receive free
  registration to the NAACL conference. We will also need someone from
  the exec to supervise the student.  A proposal was made to announce
  the mailing list manager position at the business meeting.  As of
  June 12th, we do have a mailing list manager, Pablo Duboue from
  Columbia.  Work on updating the mailing list will commence in August
  or September.

- Diane noted that she has a larger list of jobs for which we need
  volunteers. We'll discuss them later in the day.

Student workshop.
- Should we adopt ACL'S policies for running the student workshop?  We
  will need to get a copy of the policy from Donia.  One issue in the
  ACL policy is that a student can attend only once. The exec asked
  Diane to suggest to the ACL that they include the poster session as
  part of their policy.

***Policy***: At Diane's suggestion we decided to provide to the next
  student workshop organizers the ACL policy as a starting point.  If
  they want to do something different than the ACL scheme, we can
  discuss it and contact the ACL exec as necessary.


NAACL survey results. It was decided that it would be ok to post the
counts and comments from last year's survey to the NAACL web site.

NAACL logo.  Martha offered to ask a digital arts student to design us
a logo!

Canada funding agencies.  Claire had contacted various U.S. funding
agencies to tell them of the existence of the NAACL since, e.g., we
might be a good source of names for reviewing proposals.  She wanted
advice on whether or not to contact in Canada for the same sort of
thing given that the federal funding works so differently in Canada.
Graeme said that the differences in funding make it not worth
contacting Canadian funding agents. 

Web site.  Claire could use help with the web site if it is to be much
expanded from its current form.  It was agreed to also try get student
volunteer for web site maintenance.

TREASURER'S REPORT.  Barbara could not make the meeting, but Kathy
provided a treasurer's report.

ANLP/NAACL2000 financial results. Kathy indicated via her handout that
last year's conference is coming in at -$222.

Shadow account policies.

- Each chapter will have a separate shadow account, seeded by ACL (if
  the chapter has no money). The ACL policy is that the chapter can
  spend the money only on things that ACL can, e.g. NOT student
  travel.  Once the policies are written down it will be easier to
  know, and follow, them...


NOMINATING COMMITTEE REPORT. Diane and Claire discussed the process
for last year's elections and possible changes for this year's election.

***POLICY***: Both the candidates and the nominating committee should
provide statements. The nominating committee statement should contain
a high-level description as to why the candidate was nominated
(e.g. region balance).  The candidate statement should describe why
they want to run or anything that he or she thinks is relevant. The
statements will be included in the elections mailing to NAACL
members. (Passed unanimously.)

Claire will contact Andy to get started on new elections.


(3) POLICY ISSUES

- Overview of ACL policies and handbooks. Diane described ACL's plan
  to write up all of the ACL policies. Sandee is doing this.

- NAACL policy issues. Claire summarized all of the NAACL policy
  issues decided during the last year.  These are listed below. More
  explanation for each is provided in the secretary's full report.

    INVOLVEMENT of NAACL EXECUTIVE BOARD in NAACL and ACL
    CONFERENCES. We are covered under the ACL policy.

    REIMBURSEMENT for DELIVERING NAACL TUTORIALS and
    INVITED TALKS. Policy: Use the ACL policy.

    CONFERENCE FREQUENCY.  The following 7-year tentative schedule for
    ACL, NAACL, EACL, and COLING conferences was adopted.

	 		North America	Europe		Asia
		2000	naacl/anlp	coling		acl
		2001	naacl		acl/eacl	-
		2002	acl/naacl	-		coling
		2003	naacl		eacl		acl
		2004	coling(/naacl?)	acl/eacl	-
		2005	acl/naacl	eacl		-
		2006	naacl		coling		acl


    JOINT NAACL/ACL CONFERENCES. Here, the amount of required ACL
    vs. NAACL input for each "joint" conference is the issue. Policy:
    The NAACL chair will voice the executive committee's opinions to
    the ACL exec since he/she sits on that committee.

    NAACL EXEC VETO POWER. Policy: Use Ed's detailed conference
    schedule to determine which decisions require NAACL Exec approval.

    TRAVEL SUPPORT. Policy: The treasurer will make travel support
    decisions.

    NAACL SENIOR PROGRAM COMMITTEE LUNCH. Policy: Make this lunch a
    tradition, adding it to the conference budget.

    ROLE of the EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE in the EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE
    ELECTION PROCESS.  Policy: The executive committee cannot override
    any of the nominations by the nominating committee. Self-
    nominations are ok.  The nominating committee also cannot filter
    any nominations.  


(4) JOB DESCRIPTIONS FOR YEAR 1 AND YEAR 2 EXEC BOARD MEMBERS.  There
    are a number of jobs that Diane would like to assign to board
    members.  She explained each and it was decided who should take on
    which jobs.  

- ACL/NAACL joint conference representation. In addition to the chair,
  secretary, and treasurer, we need one more member from the board to
  help with ACL/NAACL joint conference monitoring, approvals,
  etc. Graeme agreed to take on this job.

- HLT committee.  We also need a board member to put together a call
  for bids for the next NAACL conference to be held jointly with HLT
  (in 2003). Jan agreed to do this.

- Compiling reports.  Next year's new member to the board will be
  responsible for compiling all of the end-of-year reports from NAACL
  officers and NAACL conference organizers for the NAACL exec meeting.

- E-mail volunteer supervisor.  Ralph agreed to supervise the mailing
  list maintenance volunteer.

- Web site volunteer. In his absence, Philip was volunteered to
  supervise the web site manager volunteer, should we ever find one...

- Site visit for NAACL/HLT-2003.  Dan agreed to represent the NAACL
  exec for the site visit for the 2003 NAACL/HLT conference.

Diane also discussed some new initiatives for the NAACL exec. These
were discussed separately later in the day. (See below.)

(5) NAACL03/HLT (See attachment: Memo of Understanding).  (Ed Hovy and
    Priscilla Rasmussen attended this part of the meeting.)

- Diane provided some background on the NAACL and HLT conferences by
  way of motivating a discussion on possibly merging the two
  conferences. Briefly, part of last year's exec vision for the NAACL
  conferences included outreach to the speech, IR, NLP applications
  communities; and an effort to allow a mechanism for reporting on
  preliminary as well as polished work, etc.  Although we were
  somewhat successful on those fronts, combining our conference with
  the newly revived HLT conference might allow us to do better
  outreach.  It would also mean that there's less competition for
  these audiences.

- Ed then presented the Memo of Understanding drawn up by
  representatives from ACL, NAACL, DARPA, and NSF.  

- Main options available. In short, Ed believes that there are 3
  alternatives for what to do w.r.t. HLT conferences:

  1- do nothing; hold separate conferences.
  2- co-locate NAACL and HLT conferences.
  3- merge the two conferences.

  A number of open issues were then discussed including: program
  committee issues, reviewing issues, conference format and
  organizational structure, issues for ACL, timing of the joint
  conference, fee structure.


LUNCH BREAK


(6) NAACL-2001 REPORTS (See attachment: NAACL01 reports from
    Lori. Lori Levin, Alon Lavie, Kevin Knight, and Priscilla Rasmussen
    attended this portion of the meeting.)

- General Chair Report: Lori.

  Lori acknowledged all of the people who worked on the conference and
  listed contents of conference...all of the workshops, etc.  Some key
  principles that guided a number of decisions in organizing the
  conference were (1) to hold the conference on CMU campus, (2) to
  attract as many people to the conference as possible because of its
  closeness in time to ACL, (3) to encourage diversity in submissions,
  and (4) to hold an exhibits session.  They assumed that the
  conference would be fairly small because of ACL.

  There were lots of worries about money and about a low number of
  submissions. As noted above, Lori thought that attendance would be
  low, but it's not. The reasons for that might be (1) lots of demos
  accepted, (2) Pittsburgh has a lot of local CL/NLP people that are
  coming to the conference, (3) the workshops, tutorials, and EMNLP
  are bringing in additional attendees, and (4) the location is
  reasonably accessible.

  She then presented summaries of reports from subchairs.

  Publications. The companion volume was done late; so was the CD-ROM, but
  it came out well.

  On-line Registration.  On-line registration was only available for
  late registration, which was a big problem.  Alon noted that ACL
  should get an easily adaptable package to handle conference
  registrations.  Kathy said that ACL could definitely pay someone,
  say a student for the summer, to create the software.

  Sponsorships.  There were different levels of sponsorship "packages"
  made available. $35000 had been committed in January, but 3 big
  sponsors withdrew because of the downturn in the tech economy. We
  ended up with $15000 in sponsorships.  Cornell's IISI gave $6000 to
  EMNLP, and $5000 to the main conference, which really helped. The
  remaining sponsors each gave $1000. The School of CS at CMU will
  help out if money is needed in the end and they've organized the
  opening reception. WhizBang is sponsoring an EMNLP reception. 

  Student research workshop. 6 papers were accepted; only 15
  submissions were received.  A poster session featuring the student
  papers was held during the main conference.  They also held a career
  panel for the students at the workshop.

  Workshops. 5 proposals were submitted and accepted; 2 were merged
  into one. One issue that came up was that it is not possible to
  register just for a workshop.  Martha suggested that, in the future,
  we provide workshops with budget guidelines, guidelines for number
  of pages in their proceedings, etc.  Priscilla wanted to mention how
  good it was to work with Lillian as the workshop organizer.

  Tutorials. 11 submitted; 4 accepted.  

  Demos. Ronnie smith was a really enthusiastic demo chair. He
  established a rigorous submission procedure (abstract and demo
  script). In the end, he accepted all 29 submissions.  They will be
  held in 9 sessions; 4 per session; 75 minutes per session. Some
  suggestions for the next demo chair: he/she should stay in close
  touch with local arrangements chair; locate the demos near the main
  session; have large monitors available; have internet connections
  available.

  Exhibits. This conference used different fees depending on
  sponsorship level. Priscilla said to encourage the exhibits and
  sponsorship chairs to stay in touch with her so that she can collect
  the right amount of money.  Kathy noted that Lyn did a really good
  job with the exhibits --- there are many more than usual.  Some
  problems that came up: (1) again, the economy; (2) exhibitors didn't
  really want to meet us as much as we wanted to meet them presumably
  because NAACL didn't have what they were looking for (e.g. press
  coverage, customer base, VC). Priscilla suggested that we might want
  to officially have a way for companies to recruit our students.  

  Publicity. Lori listed the means used for publicity including
  e-mail, newsgroups, the web page, brochures, etc. One suggestion for
  the next conference: get higher resolution logos from sponsors.

Local Arrangements and Treasurer Report: Alon.
 
  The key local arrangements decision was to hold the conference on
  the CMU campus.

  Alon is using CMU's conference support services, and contacted them
  very early in the planning.  (Kathy noted the difference between
  university conference service vs. a professional one.) The written
  report lists the advantages of doing this (e.g. liasoned with
  catering, housing, hotel, A/V). There were also financial advantages
  in that conference services set up an internal account and put
  pre-charges there; tax-free.

  Diane made a site visit to CMU in July. Many decisions were
  finalized in early fall. Alon assembled local arrangements team of
  volunteers and students by early fall. (The report lists the
  specifics.)

  Alon sent out a call for student volunteers for the conference.
  Priscilla appreciated the way that the student volunteers were
  organized, e.g. registration desk run by some "repeat" volunteers.

  Alon obtained cd-rom-related code from David Yarowsky.  

  His crew held regular meetings.

  Late-breaking help was obtained from School of CS development office
  (e.g. in organizing the opening reception when problems came up
  w.r.t. original plans at LTI).

  Priscilla thought that the regular meetings with the local crew were
  critical for the success; also breaking down the tasks small enough
  so that the volunteers could really handle them was important.  Alon
  pointed out that having such a large group of people to draw from
  really helped.

  Lessons/problems:
  - Assign some tasks earlier, especially the on-line registration
  chore.

  - Using conference services was good overall, but the 2-person
  office was overwhelmed in the last weeks before the conference,
  causing a number of problems (including problems producing the name
  tags).
  
  - It was very difficult to estimate how many people would come.


Program Chair Report: Kevin.

  Program stats:

  NAACL-2001 had 110 submissions; 31 accepted for a 28% accecptance
  rate. NAACL-2000 had 166 submissions; 43 accepted for a 24%
  accecptance rate.

  73% of submission came from North America; Asia 10%; Europe/Africa
  17%.  Acceptance rates were the following: North America 22/80;
  Europe/Africa 8/19; Asia 1/11. These numbers were based on the
  submitting author for each paper.  Diane asked how the application
  papers or non-traditional papers fare? Kevin didn't really know, but
  noted that there were some papers on really new topics that fared
  well.

  Reviewing process. Kevin implemented a blind review process. The
  chair sent papers to a broad senior PC; they choose the PC members
  to whom to send each paper. Highlights of the reviewing process
  included (1) authors' notification to submit was done
  electronically; (2) the chair manually identified conflicts at
  submission time; (3) the senior program committee assigned 4
  reviewers per paper, using chart sent by chair (Kevin provided 4
  suggested reviewers); (4) chair smoothed assignments (down to 3 per
  paper) and sent out hardcopy to reviewers.

  Kevin then thanked lots of people.
  
  Advantages of the reviewing process. Overall, it was a smooth
  process. Worked bubbled up to top. No deadlines were missed in spite
  of the holidays. SPC/PC worked well. Hardcopy worked well --- it let
  the reviewers review rather than worry about downloading papers,
  etc. Resulted in a set of excellent papers.

  Disadvantages of the reviewing process.  The very early deadline
  (Nov 9) was a problem for some people.  Maybe the early deadline
  needed more promotion? He ended up with too many reviewers; some
  were put on standby. There was a lot of e-mail for the SPC, who had
  to coordinate e-mail discussions and coordinate reviews (since
  reviews went to SPC).


ACL Office Report: Priscilla.

  Total number of registrations (as of today/Saturday): 451 (313
  regular; 138 students). [***Numbers will be replaced with the final
  numbers after we get them from Priscilla.***]

  Main conference: 444 Tutorials: 26 Help; 93 Open QA; 56 SIGDAT; 11
  Voice.

  EMNLP: 165

  Workshops: Summarization 57; MT 17; Dialogue 55; Wordnet 99.

  Banquet: 147 regular; 68 students.

  Preregistrations: USA 337, 24 Canada, 56 Europe, 34
  Asia/PacRim. Graeme noted that the Canada numbers might be lower
  than one might expect since we're competing with the Canadian AI
  conference this week.


(7) NAACL02/ACL02 (attachment: Joint Conference Policy from ACL, ACL02 report) 

Local Arrangements Report: Martha.  

   NAACL02/ACL02 will be held July 7-12.  Accommodations will be at
   the Inn at Penn ($119) and the Sheraton ($99 doubles).  Tutorials
   will be held on July 7; the main conference will be a 3-day
   meeting, July 8-10; workshops will run July 11-12.

   The conference sites are all located on Perelman Quad.  They plan
   to have parallel sessions (Houston Hall) and an exhibit hall (Logan
   Hall).  Plenary sessions will be held in Irvine Auditorium.  The
   opening reception will be in the upstairs of Houston Hall.

   Room costs seem reasonable: $125/room/day (similar to the CMU
   costs).  Right now they're thinking about where to hold the
   banquet. Some possibilities include the Franklin Institute; the
   Hard Rock Cafe ($4000 for the night).

   IRCS staff will be helping to organize.

   Diane noted that Martha will have to not go up for re-election this
   fall unless ACL exempts the local arrangements chair from
   involvement in joint conference organization.  

Joint conference policy and impact for Philadelphia. (Diane)
Diane ask whether the joint conference statement from ACL was ok with
us and with the Penn folks organizing next year's joint
conference. Martha suggested that ACL consult the conference
organizers in their selection of the general chair. 


(8) NAACL CONSTITUTION (attachment: EACL constitution)
	
Claire reviewed last year's changes to the constitution.  Diane
suggested that we consider adopting all of the recent EACL
constitution changes to our constitution.

***Proposed constitution change.*** Claire described one place where
the constitution has to change because of changes in the ACL exec
structure. Our constitution states that the ACL secretary-treasurer be
an ex-officio member of the NAACL exec.  Now that there are two
separate offices, secretary and treasurer, we need to decide which of
the two should be on our exec.

It was proposed that both the ACL secretary and treasurer be
ex-officio members of the NAACL exec. The proposal was approved
unanimously. Claire will write up the change and send it to the ACL
for approval before submitting the change to a vote by the membership.


(9) NEW INITIATIVES (Diane) (attachment: survey, Donia Scott on Latin America)

A number of possible new initiatives for NAACL were discussed
including: running a contest like the AAAI robot competition at a
future NAACL conference; starting a summer school in NLP/CL similar to
those done for LSA or the Hopkins or IRSC workshops; options for Latin
America outreach and the possibility of including a representative
from there as an unofficial member of the NAACL exec; offering
copy-editing for international submissions to NAACL conferences.


(10) NEXT NAACL MEETINGS (Diane)

We then briefly discussed what should be covered during the very short
business meeting during the conference and what topics might be
discussed, if any, at the thank-you lunch.

The next NAACL executive committee meeting will be at
NAACL-2002. Holding the meeting on the tutorials day won't work,
though, because the ACL exec meeting will be held then.

The meeting was adjorned at some unknown time...maybe 7:00p.m.