*SEM publication chairs.*SEM (Q from CCB)
*SEM is joint between SIGLEX and SIGSEM.*SEM is 2 days. Total of 3 days.NOTE FOR ANOOP 2011 does not have the conference reports online.
Daniel Marcu is next year’s ACL 2014 general chair.
ACTION ITEM Priscilla will look into places to do a two year contract with a hotel chain for 2015 and 2016. Likely will be East Coast and West Coast alternating.
From the NAACL constitution:
Elections shall be conducted annually as follows: the Nominating Committee shall by the first of September preceding the end of a term of office nominate at least one person for each position to be filled, including any necessary new Nominating Committee member. The Secretary shall send to the Chapter Members notice of the nominations by September 15, at the same time requesting additional nominations. Additional nominations, supported by at least three Chapter Members, may be submitted by the fifteenth of October; evidence must be presented that the nominee will serve if elected. If there is more than one nominee for any position, the Secretary shall send ballots for that position to the Members. A majority vote of the ballots received by the fifteenth of December shall determine the results of such contests. Those elected shall take office on the first of January following.
and
The Chair must have served on the Board for at least one year during the past five years.
Outgoing members:
Nomination committee for 2013 elections:
The previous nominating committee already got many names to run in the 2012 elections.
ACTION ITEM CCB will email the nominating committee to get started. Nominations will be sent to the membership by September 15th, 2013.
Two requests from Ted:
*SEM on NAACL.
Discussion on the adoption of the SIGPLAN Conference Anti-Harassment Policy by the NAACL conferences.
ACTION ITEM The NAACL Board voted to accept a suitably modified version of the SIGPLAN policy and change it to ask anyone who thinks they are affected by the actions covered by this policy to contact any person of the NAACL board or Priscilla Rasmussen.
LSA sent us an email with survey questions to get the perspective of computational linguists to NAACL.
ACTION ITEM CCB will email the questions to the board. CCB and Emily will answer the questions (including feedback from members of the board).
A survey collecting information from NAACL attendees will be sent out. The results will help us plan for future NAACLs.
ACTION ITEM Ask for a budget of $1000 max. Total budget of $2000.
Discussion about picking general chair and program chairs for NAACL 2015.
The NAACL board unanimously voted to approve funding of $5000 for NACLO in 2013 as in previous years.
Matt Post, the publications co-chair for NAACL 2013 proposed the creation of a digital version of the program handbook for NAACL 2013. This would be a mobile app that would allow conference goers to view and organize their schedules, see which talks are being held where, and provide the information that a hard copy program handbook usually provides. The chair (Chris Callison-Burch) called for discussion on this proposal on Mar 11, 2013.
There was a discussion among the board members. The issue of cost came up. There is a savings of $10K from discontinuing thumb drives for distributing the proceedings. We cannot save money on printing fewer hard copy program hanbooks as there is a contract in place with Omnipress to have handbooks printed this year for all attendees of NAACL 2013 (at a cost of around $3,800, about $4.50 per book). So, this year, we cannot give the option to either have the mobile app or the hardcopy program handbook. But in future conferences, there is the potential to save on printing costs if most people will use the app version of the program handbook. The development of the app for NAACL 2013 was priced at $6900 from CrowdCompass.
The board unanimously approved the expenditure for the development of the program handbook app for NAACL 2013 (only Rebecca Hwa abstained but she was away from her email). Chris Callison-Burch negotiated a better price than the earlier quote with the price for two conferences (this year’s NAACL and the next year’s) for $5K each. The board hopes to recover $7K extra this year, either from registration fees or from increased sponsorships to cover the additional cost.
Chris Callison-Burch called for a discussion and subsequent vote on discontinuing thumb drives at NAACL conferences.
Matt Post, one of this year’s publications co-chairs has been in contact with our publisher (Omnipress) about producing the thumb drives. He provided them with an initial estimate of 850 USB thumb drives, based on previous years’ attendance. The estimate for producing and shipping the drives is $8,580 ($10.09 per drive).
Matt suggested that we should consider discontinuing the thumb drive or making it an optional extra that could be added at the time of registration, and that the savings could be re-directed to other distribution means (e.g. better WiFi on-site, or an App for interacting with the proceedings and conference schedule).
This matter discussed with the NAACL-HLT 2013 Program Chairs and General Chair. It was pointed out that when Hal Daume was the publication chair for ICML, they disbanded the memory sticks. There were few complaints and the saved a lot of money.
The vote was taken by email and the following members voted YES.
Votes in favor:
Abstained:
There were no NO votes, so NAACL is going to implement this motion.
A few points arose during the discussion.