NORTH AMERICAN CHAPTER (Diane Litman)
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Report from NAACL
Diane Litman, Chair

The NAACL Executive Committee met on May 1, 2000, at the NAACL
conference in Seattle, WA. The agenda discussed included:

* NAACL-00 Conference Report
* NAACL-01 Conference Planning
* Reports from NAACL officers and setup committee
* Formulation of Chapter Policies 
* Constitutional Issues
* Discussion of Goals

The minutes of this meeting can be found on the NAACL webpage at
http://www.naacl.org/minutes.htm.

The NAACL-00 conference was very successful. The NAACL-2000 Program
Chair's Report provides details, and can be found at
http://www.aclweb.org/archive/naacl2000.html.

The NAACL-01 conference planning is well underway.  This spring we ran
a site selection process, by mailing a Call for Bids to all members
and also directly contacting a small number of sites.  Our efforts
resulted in one bid from CMU.  After some negotiation, the meeting was
accepted for June 2-7, 2001, with Lori Levin and Alon Lavie as the
General and Local Arrangement Chairs, respectively, and with EMNLP as a
co-located event. To avoid potential submission conflicts with ACL
2001 (to be held a month later), we have made our deadlines earlier
than needed.  The NAACL exec also selected Kevin Knight as Program
Chair, and selected the student workshop chairs.  We modified Ed
Hovy's ACL conference planning document for NAACL, and have been
actively using this to attempt to keep people on schedule.  This
summer, Diane Litman and Priscilla Rasmussen conducted a site visit
with Lori Levin and Alon Lavie. The current conference status (e.g.,
sub chairs, the calls, etc.) can be found at
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ref/naacl2001.html.

The job duties for the NAACL officers were created based on modifying
the ACL job duties.  The officers have been executing their duties as
discussed in this report.  Our chapter web page can be found at
http://www.naacl.org

We have spent much of the year formulating policies for the NAACL
organization, the NAACL conference, and how to manage financial and
other interactions with ACL.

We have contacted the NAACL nominating committee about running the
next NAACL elections.  This process, as well as some startup issues,
have exposed some problems with the current constitution.  A set of
amendments will be voted on by the membership.

We are currently working on other goals of our organization, e.g. how
to attract wider participation of researchers in areas that are
outside the traditional foci of ACL meetings. For example, we have
again used the term "Language Technologies" for the NAACL conference
to further outreach.