NAACL-2001 (Lori Levin) ======================= General Chair: Lori Levin, Carnegie Mellon University NAACL 2001 will be held on June 2-7 at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. We have been consistently behind schedule, but otherwise on track to produce a pleasant and high quality conference. Because of several constraints on the dates of the conference, and CMU's requirement to have the conference on campus, the conference will be held only one month before ACL/EACL. The following should help to assure reasonable attendance (around 400 people). --Collocation with EMNLP --Something a little different: A special full day of industry exhibits, which should at least it will make money even if it doesn't attract many people. --Early deadlines for paper submission, well in advance of ACL/EACL. Following are reports from the sub-chairs: LOCAL ARRANGEMENTS ------------------ Alon Lavie, Carnegie Mellon University Local arrangements for the conference are well under way and are progressing nicely. Main actions already taken include: - We have a draft budget for the conference, that has as of yet not been finalized. Suggested registration fees for the main conference are $250 (regular members) and $100 (students). - We have made arrangements with Lorrie Safar from CMU Conference Services to coordinate dealings with the various internal and external organizations for the conference. - We have reserved and secured the space for the conference at the CMU University Center for the duration of the conference (including workshops and tutorials) - We have confirmed and reserved the banquet location - The Carnegie Museum of Natural History - for the night of June 6, 2001. A contract has yet to be signed. - We have made arrangements with the Holiday Inn University Center to be the main conference hotel. The Holiday Inn will reserve a block of 125 rooms for the conference, at a preferred rate. - We have made arrangements with CMU housing to have a block of 150 comfortable single dorm rooms (with shared bath) reserved for the conference. Dorm rooms will cost about $40 per night. - We have made tentative arrangements for the special Exhibits Session to be held on the second day of the main conference. - We have started to explore catering options for all events (reception, banquet and coffee breaks) PROGRAM ------- Kevin Knight, ISI 7/25. draft CFP to naacl exec, including proposed senior program committee (SPC). 8/09. SPC list approved by naacl exec. 8/14. started assembling SPC. 8/14. sent initial CFP to priscilla for distribution. 8/15. initial CFP sent out. 8/26. final SPC settled: Eric Brill (Microsoft Research) Ann Copestake (Cambridge University and CSLI) Marti Hearst (UC Berkeley) Aravind Joshi (University of Pennsylvania) Andrew Kehler (UC San Diego) Elliott Macklovitch (University of Montreal) Fernando Pereira (WhizBang! Labs) Owen Rambow (AT&T Research) Elizabeth Shriberg (SRI) Ralph Weischedel (BBN) 8/31. requested reviewer suggestions from SPC. 9/13. sent updated CFP (w/ SPC names) to priscilla for distribution. 9/19. received final reviewer suggestions ("program committee"). 9/22. sorted potential reviewers, handled duplicates, distributed backups among SPC. 9/23. asked each SPC member to recruit approximately 10 reviewers from their list, preferably within a week, certainly by 10/15. 9/23-10/1. now working with Yaser Al-Onaizan on the web form for "intention to submit", which will operate from October 1st to November 6th. The stub is at http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/naacl01/notification-of-submission.html (already linked to from the main conference page). STUDENT RESEARCH WORKSHOP ------------------------- Advisor: Deborah Dahl, UNISYS Co-Chairs: Lisa Michaud, University of Delaware Krzysztof Czuba, Carnegie Mellon University * We decided to continue the successful format of last year's presentations in Seattle, arranging the papers in a full-day workshop and pairing a longer presentation time with prepared comments from an invited "panel" of two accomplished researchers for each paper. We are planning for 10 student presentations. * To give our students extra exposure to people who will not be able to make it to the workshop, we are also planning a poster session which will probably take place during the opening reception of the conference. * Our current status is that we have built a website at: http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~aclstu/naacl01-student/ ...and we have distributed a preliminary Call for Papers (emailed by Priscilla on August 15th), using the same deadlines as the main session (included below). We are currently finalizing our list of prospective paper reviewers for validation by the executive committee, and we are nearly done preparing our grant proposal in order to provide travel, registration, and lodging scholarships to our participants. Our deadline schedule: Deadline for electronic notification of intent to submit: November 6, 2000 Submission deadline: November 9, 2000 Acceptance notification: January 24, 2001 Camera-ready papers due by: February 27, 2001 WORKSHOPS --------- Lillian Lee, Cornell University 8/25/00: call for proposals sent to Priscilla Rasmussen 8/28/00: CFWP circulated by Priscilla (not sure what lists, I just know I got a copy); ref@cs.cmu.edu posted it to the NAACL '01 web pg. 9/8/00: CFWP sent to the corpora mailing list. 10/24/00: Sub. deadline 11/13/00: acceptances out 1/5/01: wksp descriptions due to me 3/9/01: wksp materials for repro due to me TUTORIALS --------- Dekang Lin, University of Alberta The call for tutorials went out last week. Deadline is December 20, 2000. DEMOS ----- Ronnie Smith, East Carolina University --Plan to issue CFP by mid-Oct. --Talked to David Traum, demo chair for ACl '99 and got some advice from him. EXHIBITS -------- Lynn Carlson, Department of Defense 1. Lynn Carlson and Kurt Godden have been coordinating on a solicitation letter to be sent out to a wide-range of commercial vendors. This draft letter will be finalized this week and sent out shortly. Kurt and his team (Arendse Bernth, Jeff Allen) have compiled a large mailing list. 2. Lynn suggested to Lori that information on both sponsorship and exhibits be placed on the Language Technologies 2001 Web site, for maximum exposure. Lynn agreed to provide this information to Bob Frederking. 3. The following is the general plan for the exhibits, which has been coordinated with Alon Lavie and Lori Levin: --Exhibitors will pay a flat fee of $750.00 for the full day exhibits session on June 6. --The fee will include attendance at the conference for one person. --The fee will be waived for Gold and Silver level sponsors. --Exhibitors will be asked to state a preference between a) having a booth, b) doing a 15-20 minute presentation, or c) both. Final decisions will be made after assessment of the level of interest. We will have an application and deadline for potential exhibitors (to be determined). --Exhibitors will be considered on a first-come, first-serve basis. SPONSORSHIPS ------------ Kurt Godden, Sporgit Technologies --Assembled a sponsorship committee. --Assembled a mailing list of approximately 100 potential sponsors. --Solicitation letter will be sent out next week. PUBLICITY --------- Ralf Brown, Carnegie Mellon University --Checked for conference calendars to make sure NAACL 2001 was listed. Added it where necessary. --Brochures and posters to be distributed in Hong Kong and elsewhere. --Still need to look into advertising in magazines and journals. WEB SITE -------- Bob Frederking, Carnegie Mellon University http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ref/naacl2001.html September hits: (from log in /afs/cs/data/www/url_200009.tab) Sep 21 03:30 355 /~ref/naacl2001.html Sep 26 03:40 516 /~ref/naacl2001.html It appears we've gotten an average of 32 hits per day in the last five days, whereas we had on average 17 hits per day the first 21 days of September. The total number of hits before Sept. 21 was about 1200. Does anyone know of a correlation between web site hits and submissions or attendance? OUTREACH -------- We decided to do some outreach to research communities that do not send many submissions to ACL conferences including speech recognition, machine learning, and information retrieval. The program chair, Kevin Knight, has taken steps in this direction: (1) The call for papers mentions that submissions will be accepted in those areas, and (2) Those areas are represented on the senior program committee. We are arranging the following extras -------------------------------------- --On line registration courtesy of Dragomir Radev, ACL --CDRom proceedings --Ethernet connections and wireless internet connections (if you register your card in advance)