The best paper committee should contain four to six experts from the NLP community. No two should represent the same subfield of NLP, defined broadly by “area chair”-like categories. All should be known in the community, but preferably represent different parts of the NAACL membership, for instance: academia, industry, government. The committee will be selected by the program chairs in consultation with the general chair, and may include area chairs but need not.
The best paper committee will select best papers for the conference. The precise number and names of these are specified elsewhere; these guidelines discuss what “best” means. When making selections, the committee should keep in mind that there are many ways for a paper to strongly contribute to the body of knowledge in our field. Examples are:
* Provide new algorithms, corpora, or technology * Introduce a new insight into language or people * Facilitate reproducibility via code, infrastructure, or data * Provide new evaluation methods and standards
The papers selected by the committee should be good for different reasons. A paper need not be flawless in order to be best; being interesting and/or introducing a new idea or methodology to the community can be more important. The committee must write one or two sentences stating why each paper has been selected, for the program chairs to use during their announcement of the best paper awardees.