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

Minutes for 2023

Minutes from NAACL Exec Meeting

  • Date: Friday September 8, 2023
  • Time: 10:00am - 11.30am Central Time (UTC-5)

Participants

  • Jennifer Rachford
  • Anna Rumshisky
  • Colin Cherry
  • Diyi Yang
  • Heng Ji
  • Jonathan May
  • Luciana Benotti
  • Thamar Solorio
  • Wei Xu
  • Yarowsky
  • Yunyao Li

NAACL’25 location, budget update, RAF update (15 minutes)

  • (Jon May) NAACL Budget Update: Current Budget is about $90K, 10K for support of khipu, 2.5K for NACLO, 10.7K for RAF awardees
  • (David Yarowsky) We need to think about ways to effectively spend the NAACL budget
  • (Jennifer Rachford) We have found several options in Miami with around $40K+ budget, and still look at other options San Juan and Albuquerque. We haven’t visited Albuquerque yet and haven’t received a strong proposal about the venue in Albuquerque yet. Jennifer is continuing site visits.
  • (David Yarowsky) Any general preferences if the budgets are similar?
    • Jennifer: if ACL2026 will be in the US, we prefer the NAACL2025 location to be outside of the US
    • Jon and Thamar: prefer San Juan because it’s cheaper and a new place for many NAACL attendees.
    • David: need to avoid Hurricane season and avoid conflicts with other ACL family conferences.
    • Jon: slightly prefer San Juan over Miami, Miami has rich culture and activities, and easier to access.
  • (Jon May) RAF update:
    • 15 applications, 8 awards (total $14K)
    • Thamar joins the effort. Thanks Thamar!
    • Eduardo will continue helping on the RAF effort.
    • One payee has yet to receive funds - Jennifer will look into it.

Transparency of the board (14 minutes)

  • Wei: release meeting notes?
  • Jon and Heng: we will wait for one week for the NAACL board to check meeting notes, and release the notes from this meeting and previous meetings on NAACL website.
  • Wei: more frequent communications with ACL and NAACL members, including motion, vote, work-in-progress?
  • Anna: how can we know what is happening in ACL exec?
    • Heng: Luciana is part of ACL exec as a NAACL chair
    • Luciana: ACL exec meeting notes are online
    • Thamar: suggest Luciana to send NAACL board reminder about the ACL executive meetings
    • David: ACL can do better at communicating with and between chapters
    • Wei: can NAACL chair give monthly reports about ACL exec decisions?
      • Colin: it’s a lot of time commitment and work for chairs, let’s read the ACL reports regularly and give them feedback to reduce burden.
      • Wei: we need to be better informed about new initiatives by ACL exec, such as forming a new committee.
      • Wei: change NAACL quarterly report four times instead of twice per year. Can we have someone dedicated to communicate with ACL exec:
      • Luciana: I completely agree more transparency is needed, in particular financial transparency. Send proposals by email on how to do this collaboratively, the chair alone cannot do it. I agree with Colin that this is an incredible amount of work. Also some important decisions are not consulted to the ACL exec. The anonymity group members were not selected by the ACL exec board. There is no representative from EquiCL and the Global South.
      • Anna: can we have a platform across boards such as slack to communicate?

Future of the JSALT scholarship (10 minutes)

  • Colin: goal is to send 3rd and 4th American undergraduate student to JHU summer workshop or other workshops. It got forgotten this year.
  • Colin is leaving the board by December 2023, we need a new volunteer to be in charge of it.
    • Diyi: willing to help but her term is finishing too
      • Colin: consider re-election!
  • Colin: Workshop pros and cons: students can greatly benefit from the workshop; but need strategies to lower down cost.
  • Luciana: bring speakers instead of students to the workshop from underrepresented regions?
    • Jon: It might be possible to let the workshop take over some coordination efforts such as how to best use the funds
    • David: It’s not only the financial needs, but it also needs instructors and facilities. Perhaps we could also offer undergraduates from other fields but need NLP knowledge this opportunity to apply.
    • David: The targets are also often students who do not have NLP programs in their home schools, to provide outreach to talented students who are underserved and disadvantaged by their access to a quality NLP education.
      • Colin: That has been one of the criteria when evaluating applicants.
    • Thamar: the NAACL board needs to know how the funding is spent
    • Jon: may need to ask JSALT to see whether they can take over the coordination efforts
      • David will talk to JSALT organizers

Possible events to discuss how industry can benefit academia (13 minutes)

  • Yunyao: how can we make industry tracks more beneficial to academia? e.g., Can we hold close-room career panels to also benefit faculty and their collaborators in industry? As the directors of university relations in industry to give direct feedback?
  • Heng: great idea, but need some panels / discussions that actually take actions (e.g., donate GPUs to academia)
  • Luciana: Mohit Bansal is in charge of similar efforts in ACL exec, suggest to coordinate/consult him
  • Yunyao: Industry partners will also benefit from feedback from academia, we need more discussions to figure out the best practice for industry-academia collaborations
  • Diyi: let’s setup a discussion forum to include everyone and students in these discussions too
  • Thamar: I’m interested in engaging in these discussions as I have feedback I would like to share regarding how to make the internship programs more friendly toward advisors

Conference pricing and speakers program for emerging regions (23 minutes)

  • Thamar: high pricing is making conferences difficult to access, can we add more industry support?
  • David: need volunteers to help manage industry fund and review applications
  • Thamar: can we have a new paid position at ACL dedicated to make the conferences more accessible
  • Yunyao: need to understand the support levels? an alternative way is to reimburse some applicants afterwards to reduce admin overhead. Can we get more help from industry partners?
    • Jon: understand better on how we could benefit more from sponsors
    • David: need a centralized messaging system to figure out how we can call for sponsorship better
    • Jennifer: food and beverage is usually a very large portion of the cost. AV cost, Internet charge, venue cost are often hard cost. ACL is open to share the cost information. ACL is working on reducing cost such as reducing presenter fees.
    • Luciana: it’s useful analyze carefully the detailed budget that was shared with the NAACL board before ACL 2023 on the expenses and how the registration fees were calculated. I got this process approved as a resolution at the ACL exec https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php/ACL_Resolutions#November_15.2C_2022. There was a considerable amount of sponsoring at ACL 2023, more than 400K. This amount is used for lowering everyone’s fees. Only 20K was devoted to DEI. I wish the whole budget was shared with all the NAACL members.
    • David: the venues and food are usually much chapter if we ask universities to host conferences (but now conference too big to be hosted in universities)
      • Wei: cost of having virtual (hybrid) part of the conference?
      • David: perhaps $50-60 for virtual attendees, $100 for regular attendees.
    • Thamar: suggest other initiatives such as creating NAACL Distinguished Speakers Series, to support speakers to travel to underrepresented regions; Another idea is to support students from underrepresented communities to do internships at high-ranked research labs (ideally for a semester long program).
      • Jon: ISI has a regular summer intern program, need to cautiously consider time and cost, some support will be welcome
      • Jason Eisner created a NLP teaching slack for NLP instructors, maybe we can create a larger platform for the whole community?
      • Colin: support all academic internship programs
      • Yunyao: boarden the effort to include all regions; also target at junior faculty
      • Thamar and Jon: we need to work out concrete plans/ logistics such as host and student matching and applications

NAACL conference surveys and ArXiv policy (21 minutes)

  • Diyi: Should NAACL send out a before and after conference survey and share the survey results?
    • Heng and Thamar: we need to design questions carefully and need to tell people the survey results will be shared publicly
  • Diyi: Should NAACL2024 drop the anonymity period?
    • Pros: support more timely sharing of work
    • Cons: review bias, double-blind review
    • ACL will release a survey soon to all ACL members and ask all members to vote
    • David: Consider ACL and NAACL to talk to arxiv about anonymous preprint option
      • Diyi: some previous proposals were rejected by arxiv
      • Luciana: If the policy is removed, double blind is no longer possible. This will benefit prestigious authors and affiliations and goes against DEI. Will the survey include affiliation information and will the information be disclosed?
        • Diyi: will check and definitely suggest to the committee to add if it’s not there yet
      • Colin: Breaking NAACL from ACL will be a logistics nightmare and very confusing to the community
        • Wei: Can we not use ARR for NAACL2024 because it might not be a challenge logistically (as ACL 2023 and EMNLP 2023 are not using ARR and are doing pretty well)?
      • Thamar: It’s important to propose a better solution to protect double-blind review. The ACL working group is trying to get the survey out very soon.
      • Anna: how the decision on moving to ARR was made?
      • Wei: do we want to vote on waiting for ACL policy?
        • Diyi and Anna: maybe we should not rush and wait for ACL working group’s survey results
        • Wei: will the policy be applied across all conferences?
        • Thamar: the survey will be extended to the entire NLP community including non-ACL members (researchers who did not pay for ACL membership)