ACL-2000 PUBLICATIONS (David Yarowsky) ====================================== Comprehensive Proceedings on CDROM: ---------------------------------- ACL published the its proceedings electronically for the first this year, in the form of a comprehensive CDROM containing: * the complete proceedings of the main conference, including all papers in PDF format, panel summaries, demonstration notes and invited speaker and tutorial abstracts. * the complete proceedings of all 8 associated workshops, including the concurrent Student Research Workshop. * a complete archive of the ACL-2000 web pages and all workshop web pages as they existed on September 25, including local arrangements information, calls for papers and other announcements, instructions to authors and other information that will form a useful permanent record of the conference and its associated activities * a unified author index to the 392 papers in the 9 separate volumes, supporting rapid paper location in the collected proceedings (and an interesting summary of author productivity). Thanks to the careful and dedicated involvement of all of the main session and workshop chairs, 100% of the papers in every volume were successfully included in PDF format and accurately indexed. Silviu Cucerzan of Johns Hopkins University and Michaela Fok of HKUST deserve special acknowledgement for their extensive contributions to the design of the CDROM, and Samuel Harp and Zhao Jun of iSilk provided invaluable logistical support to its production. Development of Proceedings and CDROM Preparation Software: --------------------------------------------------------- In support of the proceedings production effort, I created a software toolkit that generates all of the tables of contents and indexes needed for both the hard copy proceedings and the CDROM from a single simple text file including paper title, author names and paper length. In the future this should save significant labor for all workshop and main session chairs preparing proceedings. It should improve accuracy by allowing a single compilation and proofreading of the basic data list to be propagated reliably to at least 5 different tables/indexes in both latex and html format. It should also improve consistency by automatically generating all workshop and main conference proceedings to the same common standard. Any year-to-year updates to the design, paper size or page formatting can be made once to the software templates, tested on the previous year's data files and then incorporated consistently in all proceedings for that conference. Overall the software should simplify and speed the proceedings creation process, allowing program chairs with no experience to create standardized printed and on-line volumes without style sheets, special training or frustrating layout hacking. Also, as a trial on the SIGDAT EMNLP/VLC-2000 proceedings, an interface was developed by Radu Florian to allow authors to submit their papers automatically in PDF and PS format and both enter and proofread the paper titles and author lists. We hope that this will save program chairs data entry and further automate the proceedings and CDROM creation process. In the future I am interested in developing full text and bibliographic search capabilities as a value-added component of the CDROM or other electronic proceedings. The New Position of Publications Chair -------------------------------------- This year the ACL Exec created the new position of Publications Chair both to coordinate the production of the 6 workshop proceedings and companion volume to the conference proceedings, and to design and create the new CDROM proceedings. Because a professional printer in Hong Kong was used this year, significant time was also spent working with the printers and chairs on issues such as cover design and production details. In the future, I would encourage that the publications chair's role be to (a) work closely with the main session and workshop chairs to establish and implement common design standards for the proceedings covers and internal page layouts, including helping to create standardized latex/MSword templates for authors, (b) coordinate the proceedings preparation process with the chairs and printer, ensuring that all parties have the information they need and ensuring that all proceedings are delivered to the printers on time and in the correct format, (c) coordinate and/or prepare any companion volumes to the main proceedings, (d) coordinate and create a CDROM compilation of all associated proceedings, conference web page archives and other appropriate content, and (e) investigate and coordinate any new proposals for electronic proceedings publication, including subscription-based on-line publication and support of indexing/abstracting by search engines and technical paper repositories. Future Concerns and Issues for Discussion ----------------------------------------- It is important to consider the possibility that electronic publication of main conference and workshop proceedings will cannibalize sales of hard-copy proceedings if all conference participants have complete copies of all workshop proceedings on a CDROM. It will be interesting to contrast such post-workshop sales with previous years to better estimate future printing needs. Should workshops be given the choice to opt-out of inclusion in any future electronic publications, especially if some may seek to republish as books? The pros and cons of offering discounted registrants (e.g. students) only CDROM versions of its proceedings should be discussed. The ACL should also consider whether it wants to control or encourage electronic distribution of its electronic proceedings. Is the economic impact to ACL of hard-copy and electronic sales of its proceedings so substantial that it wants to aggressively protect its copyright? Or is it equally or more important to encourage maximal dissemination of our community's scholarship? - David Yarowsky Johns Hopkins University yarowsky@cs.jhu.edu