Minutes from NAACL Exec Meeting on March 28
- Date: March 28, 2022, 5pm ET
- Slides
Participants
- Priscilla Rasmussen
- Anna Rumshisky
- Colin Cherry
- Diyi Yang
- Eduardo Blanco
- Graham Neubig
- Heng Ji
- Jonathan May
- Luciana Benotti
- Thamar Solorio
- David Yarowsky
Agenda
- Round robin of introductions and everyone answers the questions “Do you have one or more things that you’re excited about and want support for? Or are you already involved in some effort that could benefit NAACL or ACL?” - everyone (20 minutes)
- D&I statistics at the ACL and ACL exec March meeting - Luciana (5 minutes)
- Tiered Registration & Survey on challenges to pursue NLP research in current status - Thamar (10 minutes)
- Treasurer report - David and Jon (7 minutes)
- RAF - Eduardo and Jon (7 minutes)
- JSALT Summer Scholarship - Colin, Diyi, Eduardo (7 minutes)
- Closing and next steps (4 minutes)
Introductions
- Jon: manage fund, assist NAACL fund and conference organization
- Eduardo: assist Jon, promote and select applications for NAACL initiatives
- Thamar: academic integrity policy
- Heng: election, paper KB and ‘who is who’ KB construction, collaborations with Graham on using the KBs for improving review matching
- Colin: summer workshop scholarship
- Graham: Make review process more smooth, lead ARR effort, willing to support other initiatives, help on technology and infrastructure to support hybrid options for conferences
- Diyi: coordinate NLP and other related fields, such as NLP+HCI, NLP+vision, involved in DEI initiatives
- Anna: support hybrid option of conferences, initiatives to support reproducibility, ethical issues/social impact for NLP papers, willing to coordinate with ACL on these issues
- David: ACL treasurer, better accessibility for ACL conferences
Diversity and Inclusion Statistics - Luciana
- presented to ACL exec
- lack of D&I statistics, only did it for one year since 2017
- NAACL D&I coordination and scoping
- Natalie offered to revise guidelines
- Cecilia shared report
- Pranav offered to revise guidelines
- Special interest group for Equity in ACL, 23 members now
- ACL exec board has an equity director
- Jon suggested to collect statistics from NACLO as the starting point of the pipeline
- Heng suggested to gather statistics from conference attendees from Priscilla
- Thamar: EMNLP may benefit from these guidelines
Tiered Registration & Survey on challenges to pursue NLP research in current status - Thamar
- tiered conference registration
- allow option do donate while registering
- Understanding the challenges in pursuing NLP research
- Most academic research groups are facing challenges in their ability to pursue mainstream research
- Form a working group to understand the challenges, and analyze and report to the community
- Diyi: Ask companies to support several registrations for attendees from underrepresented groups in addition to supporting the conference
- Diyi: gather stats from other conferences about how to make donation work
- Diyi: support similar to Widening NLP workshop?
Treasurer report - David and Jon
- Jon: Recent trends: NAACL lost more money than ACL
- David: usually one year delay to get numbers from conferences, long-standing problem; virtual conferences are successful given the current financial structure
RAF - Eduardo and Jon
- 2021 recipients
- UFSC update: timeline to spend the fund
- UFMG update: no update since fund confirmation, they still have time for report
- Eduardo replaces Aline for the committee
- We only have 3 applications so far, need to re-promote it, perhaps in other developing countries
- Luciana/Thamar: try to fund as many as we can
- Jon to send proposals on promoting the initiative
JSALT Summer Scholarship - Colin, Diyi, Eduardo
- move to offline discussion