Minutes for 2022

Minutes from NAACL Exec Meeting on July 27

• Date: July 27, 2022, 12:00pm – 1:30pm (UTC -3)
• Slides or reading material:
  • ACL 2022Q3 regular report - Luciana
  • Business meeting Marie-Catherine and Ivan
  • Thoughts and Locations
  • ACL Exec for 7/22- Thamar
  • NAACL Exec Board Meeting – Anna’s slides- Anna

Participants

• Jennifer Rachford
• Priscilla Rasmussen
• Anna Rumshisky
• Colin Cherry
• Marie-Catherine de Marneffe
• Diyi Yang
• Eduardo Blanco
• Graham Neubig
• Heng Ji
• Ivan Vladimir
• Jonathan May
• Luciana Benotti
• Thamar Solorio
• David Yarowsky

NAACL 2022 program chairs debrief

• NAACL 2022 PC chairs gave an overview of the paper submission and review processes,
• PC chairs recommended to invest to streamline all processes, need more volunteers to chair subcommittees
• Some problems in proceedings
• Ready to answer questions related to ARR, confident about things will improve before NAACL2014. If NAACL was in 2013 the chairs have some concerns to continue fully adopt ARR
• ARR has a nice check list for ethical review, suggestions are welcome to further improve, need a more consistent procedure for ethical review, but overall it went well
• Suggestions to offer pre-reviewing ethics feedback
• It remains a challenge to have a hybrid format (e.g., not sure whether it’s ideal to have shared virtual session for onsite participants). PC chairs commented the work load is similar to organizing two conferences.
• Possibly make findings paper presentations mandatory, and hold findings paper presentations on workshop days
• Recommend to have more transparency on conference budget, need to make it clear to the community that NAACL is not trying to make money out of the conferences
• The underlying problem is the conference attending cost is too high for some participants, [DY] solutions include fewer platforms or more generous sponsorship to lower the cost
• (Priscilla) people have unrealistic expectations about the low cost of virtual platforms, because they need to coordinate with in-person attendance; breakfast cost is close to $70/person which is part of the contract, but it can be easily removed for future conferences; underline cost is higher than what the GC expected; need community to help the sponsorship chair (Chirs Callison-Burch) to get more sponsorship specifically for NAACL
• Underline has questions on when to make the site available - [JM] it’s beneficial to make the presentation videos available early
• (DY) concerns about the registration fee keeps increasing; replace virtual platform with zoom?

NAACL 2025 sites

• Jon May presented considerations for possible site choices, preferably in US since it will be three years that NAACL is not in US and most of our members are in US
• (AR) Need to balance the ease of access to the conference for people outside the US with people in the US (including international students who have single-entry visas, people that have funding restrictions on travel, etc.)
• (TS) consider to add cities from central and south America
• (Priscilla) recommend to remove cities with very high cost, we could reconsider Buenos Aires
• (DY) need to coordinate with SIGDAT about NAACL and EMNLP locations
• (CC) the board can form a committee to vote
• (Priscilla) the board should narrow down to three cities, Priscilla will visit these three cities and check facility

ARR discussion

• Presented by Thamar (slides)
• Proposal to create an ARR Board (5 people)
  • to approve ARR initiatives and coordinate btw ARR and conferences
• ARR one year plan to move forward with different changes (e.g., senior researcher as one of the reviewers, monthly blog, mentoring junior reviewers)
• Full-time tech person to support ARR
• Collaboration with conference chairs
• (CC): who gets to make the decision of hybrid submission (conference, ARR)
• Can we explicitly throttle the amount of submissions going through ARR vs. directly to the conference, until the kinks are worked out? If things get worked out with ARR, eventually, a smaller amount of submissions will can directly to the conference, and a larger amount would go via ARR. This requires close collaboration with conference chairs.

Review NAACL conference expenses, options for optimizing the hybrid format, Covid safety measures

• Presented by Anna
• COVID safety
  • EMNLP 2021 safety measures (e.g., vacination, negative test, outdoor social)
  • ACL 2022 and NAACL 2022 did not follow these measures.
  • [PR] EMNLP 2021 was an ideal situation. 5 people quarantined at hotel during NAACL 2022.
  • [PR] Guidelines from the Board to the GC, and then to PR/volunteer
  • [AR] Start a thread for subcommittee
  • Yonathan Bisk (POC for COVID)
    • There’s definitely a reporting bias, but at this point I only know of 20 cases. That includes people telling me in person that there was a little cluster or that they know someone who got it — which puts us at about 1%. That is 4x the background rate in Seattle per 100K (https://covidactnow.org/us/metro/seattle-tacoma-bellevue_wa
• Format
  • Virtual costs at NAACL are higher than icml/neurips
  • No interaction between online and offline at this moment
  • Check out ICASSP model (running virtual and onsite separately?)
  • Other platform issues/suggestions