Nations of the Americas ACL Nations of the Americas Chapter of the ACL

Minutes from the 2011 board meeting

  • Date: June 20, 2011
  • Location: ACL-HLT 2011 in Portland, USA

Attendance

  • Rebecca Hwa (Chair)
  • Chris Manning (Treasurer)
  • Anoop Sarkar (Secretary)
  • Owen Rambow (Past Chair)
  • Chris Callison-Burch (Board member)
  • Kristina Toutanova (Board member)
  • David Chiang (Board member)
  • Dan Gildea (Board member)

Financial Discussions

  1. Link to Treasurer’s report
  2. NAACL 2010 – strategies to prevent huge losses in the future.
    1. NAACL 2010 in LA led to a huge loss, roughly half of the contingency fund was depleted.
    2. The various reasons were discussed including the lower than expected registration and the budget negotiated with the hotel.
  3. Discussion on the proposed financial redistribution with respect to ACL (discussion led by Graeme Hirst who is ACL treasurer)
    1. The proposed change would lead to a less control by NAACL over the overall NAACL budget which would be controlled by ACL, but ACL would continue to shoulder the risk at a conference loss.
    2. This would amortize risk across the different ACL chapters (NAACL and EACL) to a central ACL budget
    3. After discussion, no particular decision was reached.

NAACL-HLT 2013

  1. STATUS: signed with Westin, Atlanta for June 9 – June 14. Will ICML take place in the following week?
  2. TODO items:
    1. Recruit local arrangements oversight committee (contact members in Gatech, Emory, etc.)
    2. Still need to fix banquet venue (e.g., coca cola museum, aquarium)
    3. Find General Conference Chair (GCC) & PC co-chair.
      1. Past conference chairs list: http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=Conference_Chairs
      2. Past other chairs list: http://www.aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=Additional_conference_chairs

NAACL-HLT 2012

  1. Montreal Sheraton for the week of June 3 – June 8.
  2. Guy Lapalme and Sabine Bergler have both agreed to be on the advisory committee.
  3. Discussion issuess:
    1. The board discussed the handling of double submissions. Current solution: general double submission ok, but not with ACL
    2. The board discussed potential problems with having the submission deadline one week before ACL deadline? It was proposed to discuss this further with the program chairs and general chair.
  4. GCC – Jennifer Chu-Carroll has agreed to be the general conference chair
  5. PC Chairs nominated:
    1. Eric Fosler-Lussier
    2. Ellen Riloff
    3. Srinivas Bangalore

ACL/NAACL 2014

  1. Bid just went out. Haifeng Wang is the coordinating committee chair.
  2. Appoint Sponsorship Committee Representative
    1. We have two reps: currently Michael Gamon (2010-2012) and Patrick Pantel (2011-2013).
    2. We replace one each year – term begins in August.

Nomination Committee Reform

  1. Draft a short job description written up for each Board position. TO DO (Anoop)
    1. Draft nomination letter template:
    2. The aforementioned restriction on serving in various conference capacities.
    3. The aforementioned fact that nominees are committing to three years on the Nominating Committee after their Board service, if elected.
    4. That they will need to write a candidacy statement and biosketch, and by what date.
    5. The expectation that they will attend the Board meetings that occur at the annual NAACL conferences, at their own expense
  2. Draft initial wordings of constitution changes (circulate within the Board for comments).
    1. Idea: past board members should expect 2-3 years of commitment. Members may leave after 2 years if nomcom has at least 3 members without them. This happens in practice anyway as busier members of the official nom-com committee do not contribute as much as those who can spare the time.

Emerging Regions Funds (was: Latin American Funds & Regional Workshop Funds)

  1. Time frame: deadline on 3/15 and 9/15 (default point persons: David)
  2. STATUS: Budget for 2010-2011: $5000
  3. Committed support for 2010-2011
    1. IBERAMIA workshop on NLP and Web Based Technologies (November 1, 2010) : $1,500, post-event report pending
    2. STIL 2011: $1500
    3. ELiC 2011: $1500
    4. NLPW 2011: $500
  4. Outreach programs – what can we support given the reduced coffer size?
    1. emerging regions funds: $5,000 – reword guideline to give priority to new efforts
    2. NACLO – $5,000
    3. NAACL/JHU summer workshop – $10,000
    4. NAACL student travel fund – $4K?

SRW at NAACL-HLT 2010

  1. Quite a bit of airtime during business meeting. DISCUSSION: Who is the intended audience?
  2. Hal pointed out an interesting model used at ICML – each first time first author student gets 3 mentors regardless of whether the paper appears in the main session
  3. STATUS: for 2011, we’re joint with ACL, so the ACL SRW chair (Thamar Solorio) might something a little different. We might see how they do before making a decision for NAACL 2012.

NAACL-HLT 2010

  1. The chair (Rebecca Hwa) summarized lessons learned to ACL 2011 committee.
  2. Conference logistics:
    1. short papers – same deadline as long? Yes.
    2. should the authors be given an extra page to address reviewer comments? Yes.
    3. exhibits/demo track? Continue. Need proactive chair. DISCUSSION: Possibly merge with poster?
    4. registration fee structure: built-in member fee or separate member/non-member reg. fee? Built-in member reg. fee
    5. updating info to the authors so that they expect that they should consider the deadline for camera ready as the “public release” date.
    6. authors whose papers have been nominated best papers would like to make public this information. Fine
    7. deadline coordination with ACL: The chair should bring up this discussion at ACL Exec.
  3. Student Travel Fund (2011, $6000. Default point person, Chris CB)
    1. STATUS 2010 committee: Chris Callison-Burch (point person), Chris Manning, and Kristina Toutanova. 3 awards (1 US, 2 Europe) out of 7 applications.

NAACL-HLT 2012

  1. STATUS as of 6/18/2011
    1. We have signed the hotel contract for Montreal Sheraton for the week of June 3 – June 8.
    2. RH has contacted Guy Lapalme and Sabine Berger to see if they would be willing to serve as local arrangements advisors.
    3. Guy and Sabine have both agreed to be on the advisory committee.

Emerging Regions Funds

  1. Formerly called the Latin American Funds & Regional Workshop Funds
  2. On the agenda was to determine the budget for next year
  3. STATUS: Budget for 2010-2011: $5000 (default point person: David Chiang)
  4. March 2011: funded 3/5 proposals
  5. Already committed support for 2010-2011
    1. IBERAMIA workshop on NLP and Web Based Technologies (November 1, 2010) : $1,500, post-event report pending
    2. TODO : Follow up with the IBERAMIA workshop if a report hasn’t been received by then.
    3. STIL 2011: $1500
    4. ELiC 2011: $1500
    5. NLPW 2011: $500
    6. Not funded in 2010-2011: Proposals from Peru and Colombia where events that were rather unclear and organizers seemed not terribly well focused - not funded, but suggested they hold very small local events first just to get some experience in staging events.
  6. Historical records: Committed supports in 2009-2010
    1. PROPOR (April Brazil) - funded for $1,000 TO DO : Transfer occurred March 16. (report received)
    2. ELiC (July Argentina) - funded for $1,500. Transfer occurred March 9. (report received)
    3. NAACL-HLT 2010 Young Investigator Workshop (June) - funded for $1,000 (report received)
    4. STIL 2009 – past. link added, post-event report posted (done)
    5. Northwestern NLP Workshop – (report received)
    6. Not funded in 2009-2010: NLP in Psychology (Argentina) - notified Feb 27 not funded
  7. General guidelines:
    1. Link to the CFP (also contains evaluation guidelines)
    2. Two proposal deadlines: September 1, 2010 and March 1, 2011
    3. Event should fall within 2-9 months of deadline
    4. brief summary of basic criteria:
      1. Whether the budget is primarily used for students
      2. The “bang for the buck” – how well will the event encourage researchers to collaborate?
  8. Anoop posted the resulting info on the main NAACL webpage.

Outreach programs

  1. JHU Summer School
    1. 2011 with budget $10,000, point person (Ted in 2010, Chris CB in 2011)
    2. 2010 Current schedule: deadline April 1st, decision April 22nd. We received 23 applications to our call. We were also willing to consider up to 10 “near miss” students from the JHU summer workshop application process, but only 2 of them expressed interest in the scholarship program (and so they were added to the pool, bringing the total number of applications evaluated to 25). Seven students were funded, six with “full” scholarships for travel, registration and lodging, and one local student got a registration only scholarship.
    3. Fate of videos from 2010? Did we fund that?? Were they recorded, and will they be made available?
    4. Call for scholarship applications posted to corpora, ir-list, naacl list, naacl-latin-america list Feb 26. Call also posted on web page by Anoop.
    5. Five of seven students responded to our survey, results mailed to board members July 19. TDP
    6. Fate of videos from 2008 and 2009 (recorded but not distributed) and plans for 2010. Updated by Ted : As of Feb 21 CCB has uploaded some of the video content from summer 2009, and has replaced Jason E. as JHU contact person.
  2. NACLO (north american computational linguistics olympiad – for high schoolers, budget $5000)
    1. [ChrisM: Unless we’re taking a more pro-active role, I’m not sure that this needs a point person. Up until now, I’ve just written a check every year, and the organizers have dealt with contacting NLP people and encouraging them to sign up to host competitions, etc.]
  3. LSA Linguistic Institute 2011
    1. STATUS – Thanks to Anoop Sarkar and Kristina Toutanova for the ad design.
    2. We agreed to sponsor the program at $10K.
    3. We will not be selecting graduate student fellowships. We will sponsor courses.

Sponsorship representatives

  1. Background: overall organization is that there is an ACL-wide sponsorship committee that consists of two regional representatives from each chapter. Each representative serves for two years. The terms are staggered so that we need to recommend one person every year.
  2. STATUS:
    1. Our current two representatives are: Srini Bangalore (2009-2011) and Michael Gamon (2010-2012). Srini will be replaced by Patrick Pantel this July.
    2. Past representatives Christy Doran (2009-2010).

Industry Relations

  1. Point person: Kristina
  2. Discussion of plans for 2011 or 2012.
    1. Ron Kaplan was a keynote speaker at Text Analytics (2010). Maybe there is some future ties to be made there?
    2. Recruit technology showcase with exhibitions and demos?
    3. Set up spaces for companies to recruit?
  3. STATUS:
    1. NAACL had an industrial panel at NAACL-HLT 2010
    2. Some feedback from business meeting: people would like to see more involvement from industry members who are not affiliated with a large research lab