Date:   Friday Feb 14, 2003.
Time:   4:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Place:  Phone meeting.  

Attendees:  Priscilla Rasmussen, Diane Litman, Claire Cardie,
Lynette Hirschman, Drago Radev, Kathy McCoy, Owen Rambow, Graeme
Hirst, Dekang Lin.

=====================================================================
4:00-4:10	NAACL 2004 Call For Bids (Diane, Lynette)

  Discussion of possibilities.

  University vs. hotel: When smaller, university was good; now we're
  too big and need more help from a professional conference staff.

4:10-4:20	Financial report (Drago, Kathy)

  $21K in account; we'll probably get $25K more from ACL02.

  Kathy will let us know when the ACL02 surplus is known for sure.
  
  
4:20-4:35	JHU summer school - courses, fellowships (Owen)

  ACL was shocked by $10k amount we spent on NAACL summer school.
  Owen talked to Sanjeev about the summer school.  Talked about
  courses, class topics.  Steering group maybe should pick
  lecturers/topics.

  9 days of lectures; 4 days are taken up by team leaders.

  Admin end. Lots of details, duplicated work last year. Agreed on a
  better protocol for this year.  Get NAACL names to Laura earlier
  with arrival/departure dates.  

  Graeme or Dekang are needed to volunteer to serve on our summer
  school committee since it's possible that none of its current
  members will be on the NAACL exec next year.

  Owen will check w/JHU to see if anything is needed in writing and,
  in general, will keep working with JHU as he has been doing.

  Claire will revise the web site, application, materials, etc. for
  this year.

  We agreed that it was good to make it a condition this year that
  students stay for both weeks.  We will aim for 10 students, as last
  year; and have allotted the same $10k budget.
    

4:35-4:40	NAASLI, Linguistics Institute (Diane)

  We agreed to offer NAASLI them something small ($750); but it's too
  late for us to get involved.  Diane will reply to NAASLI proposing
  this ESSLI-style deal.


4:40-4:55	HLT-NAACL 2003 (Diane using Ed's report, Graeme, Dekang)

  Dekang was surprised by the large number of tutorials/workshops.

  How do we decide whether the conference was a success?  At our
  summer meeting, do we meet up with the whole advisory board? Maybe
  on the last day of the conference? This would be in addition to our
  own executive meeting.  Do a survey for attendees.

  Talked about when the registration would begin --- 1-2 weeks after
  the paper decisions had been made.

  Large number of tutorials discussed; and their cost.  Advantage: of large
  # broad set of topics to choose from.  Disadvantage: base cost will be 
  high.

  Graeme: has a couple of things he's supposed to ask the advisory
  board about. 

  Someone (Graeme or Diane) will remind Mari/Marti to send out
  reminders to speech community about the short paper deadline.
 
  Lynette: will get old HLT paper distribution


4:55-5:00	Latin America

  ACL might provide some support for Latin American outreach.

  Additional item to think about: student board.

=================================================

Supporting Information:

Shadow Account: Almost $24K (after reimbursing summer school students
($6935) and JHU ($3150), but before loaning front money for Edmonton);
will also have a future deposit from ACL02 surplus

Ed's HLT NAACL 2003 report (excerpts) ===================================


HLT-NAACL03 conference
Status update
Eduard Hovy
February 9 2003


Chairs:
Program Chairs: Marti Hearst and Mari Ostendorf
Local Arrangements Chair: Dekang Lin
Workshops and Tutorials: James Allan, Jason Eisner, and Wayne Ward
Publications Chairs: Drago Radev and Steve Abney



Local arrangements
Hotel, meeting space, and reception are reserved.  We are planning
for 500 (±100) people.



Program at a glance
   Tuesday May 27, day: Tutorials and Reception
   Wednesday-Friday May 28-30: Main conference
   Saturday-Sunday, May 31 and June 1: One-day and two-day workshops



Papers

Full paper submissions
Long paper submission closed Dec 30.  Marti reports 162 submissions.
PC meeting Sat-Sun Feb 15-16 at Berkeley.

For comparison: prior conferences (paper submissions only, demos separate):
   HLT02: 141  -- all short papers, 28 accepted as papers and 21 as posters
   HLT01: 155   -- all short papers, 26 accepted as papers and 31 as posters
   NAACL01: 110   -- all long papers, 31 accepted as papers
At the more or less typical 20% acceptance rate, 162 submissions
gives 32 papers.

Long paper area distribution:
   Speech: 15
   IR: 18
   IR/NLP: 38 (20 QA and 18 IE)
   NLP/Other: 91
It's too early to tell if the somewhat low number of Speech papers is
a problem; the community is more used to late-breaking short/abstract
paper submission.

Short papers and demo submissions
Short papers, demos, etc., are still to be submitted (closing date
March 7).  This mode is more traditional for the Speech community and
we expect more participation.



Workshops

9 proposals submitted, all accepted, with provision that they receive
at least 15 paper submissions by April 1.

May 31 and June 1, 2003:
   WS1: CoNLL-2003: Seventh Conference on Natural Language Learning
   WS2: DUC03: Text Summarization Workshop
   WS3: Research Directions in Dialogue Processing
May 31:
   WS4: Building and Using Parallel Texts: Data Driven Machine
Translation and Beyond
   WS5: Software Engineering and Architecture of Language Technology
Systems (SEALTS)
   WS6: Text Meaning
   WS7: Building Educational Applications Using Natural Language Processing
   WS8: Learning Word Meaning from Non-Linguistic Data
   WS9: Analysis of Geographic References

They cover a diversity of topics (by primary focus or general
methodological approach):
   NLP/semantics: WS6, WS8
   Speech/dialogue: WS3
   IR/NLP: WS2. WS9
   Learning/statistical methods: WS1, WS4
   Software architecture: WS5
   Applications: WS7



Student Workshop
Committee:
   Faculty Advisor: Marc Light, Iowa, marc-light@uiowa.edu
   IR: Victor Lavrenko, UMass Amherst, lavrenko@cs.umass.edu
   Speech: Costas Boulis, Washington, boulis@ssli-mail.ee.washington.edu
   NLP: Eric Breck, Cornell, ebreck@cs.cornell.edu

They have instructions and are busy creating the CFP, which will go out soon.



Tutorials

7 submitted, 3 rejected, 1 still in deliberation, and 7 more solicited.

Web-based registration form

Kathy McCoy's student seems to be ready to compete the package.

I created a draft of one out of last year's ACL form and mailed it to
her.  I am waiting to read the feedback on especially pricing from
Kathy, Priscilla, and Drago.  (Doing all the levels, early, late,
on-site, for all the types of attendees, (ACL member, SIGIR/ISCA/AMTA
people, others) for all the various things (1- and 2-day workshops,
etc.) took a while!)



Budget
I have created a fairly detailed cross-referenced spreadsheet that
shows the conference operating at a surplus at the registration fees
I suggest.



Publications
Drago and Steve Abney will take care of this in their capable way.

Since Morgan Kaufman will after 22003 no longer handle distribution
of proceedings, ACL has decided to take over this function already
for HLT-NAACL03.  ACL was doing most of the distribution work already
anyway.  The new tasks are (1) acquiring ISBN numbers and (2)
performing certain mailings.  Drago Radev has acquired ISBN numbers
for all the various volumes produced by this conference.  The ACL
office will handle all mailings.