STUDENT RESEARCH WORKSHOP (Olivia Kwong and Sergey Pakhmov) =========================================================== ACL-2000 Student Research Workshop 1. Program Committee The co-chairs of the ACL-2000 Student Research Workshop, Olivia Kwong (University of Cambridge) and Sergey Pakhomov (University of Minnesota) were nominated by last year's co-chairs, Melanie Baljko and Anna Korhonen, and approved by the ACL Executive Committee. Philip Resnik was appointed by the ACL Executive Committee as Faculty Advisor. The program committee was initially formed from volunteers at the ACL'99 conference. The ACL Executive Committee approved of it but also asked the co-chairs to invite additional members from Asia and some for statistical NLP. The final program committee thus consisted of 15 student members and 27 non-student members. Of the 42 reviewers, 15 were from North America, 14 from Europe, and 13 from Asia. 2. Submission Thirty-six papers were submitted to the Student Research Workshop. The submission length was increased to 2,500 words, considering the very different arrangements this year regarding the workshop format and the publication of the proceedings. Each paper was assigned one student reviewer and two non-student reviewers. Reviews were mostly done on-line. We accepted 10 of the papers and reserved 4 on the waiting list, and it turned out that none of the accepted papers withdrew. Some statistics for the submissions and acceptance are shown below (Tables 1-3). 3. Presentation Format The papers would be presented in half-hour slots (and in parallel sessions) allocated from the main conference. To mark the difference of this year's workshop from conventional ACL student sessions (apart from NSF funding application and a separate volume of proceedings), for each accepted paper we have invited two senior researchers to act as panelists to give detailed feedback to the student author(s). Each slot would thus start with author presentation (18mins), followed by panelists feedback/discussion (7mins) and general Q&A (5mins). 4. Panelists We have recruited 2 panelists for each presentation. The panelists are listed below: Kevin Knight; Jean Pierre Chanod; Diane Litman; Eric Brill; Nicoletta Calzolari; John Carroll; Robert Dale; Owen Rambow; Adam Kilgariff. 5. Problems Both co-chairs found the experience from organizing the workshop invaluable and rewarding. We would like to thank ACL for offering us this opportunity. Although the work had not been as smooth as expected at times, we learned a lot from it. 5.1. Format and Scheduling In particular we were immersed in uncertainty most of the time, right from the beginning when there was much confusion on the change from conventional ACL student sessions to a student research workshop, regarding its format and scheduling. Discussion about the publication of the proceedings was stirred up again right before the hard copies were due, and we were never given any conclusion. 5.2. Walker Fund The administration of the Walker Fund also brought up a lot of misunderstanding, and the delayed outcomes from other funding resources left us (and the student applicants) difficult to plan ahead. The delay in the Walker Fund administration was primarily caused by the fact that our tasks and responsibilities ragarding the Fund were not clearly delineated. We believe that for the future the following steps need to be taken to make administering the Walker fund go smoother: a. The role of the student co-chairs in the administration of travel funds should be better defined, to minimize confusion as to who should apply the selection criteria, who should make the decision, and so on. b. Selection criteria ought to be revised and clearly stated to avoid possible further disputes. c. This year, one of the main selection criteria was the applicant's admittance to the main conference, not the student workshop. Since other grants (other than Walker) such as the NSF grant and the European grant applied for this year are applied specifically for the student session/workshop, they should be distributed differently from the Walker Fund. In particular, the highest priority should be given to the students whose work has been accepted to the student event, not the main event. d. Other grants (other than Walker) should be advertized and applied for separately from the Walker Grant or the application for funding should be made more general to include all possible grants. The eligibility should be determined and made very clear in advance. Despite all these problems, we have come through with the event settled as it is now. Table 1: Papers by country Country Submitted Accepted USA 11 (30.56%) 3 UK 5 (13.89%) 2 Japan 5 (13.89%) 1 France 4 (11.11%) 0 Germany 2 (5.56%) 1 Spain 2 (5.56%) 0 Bulgaria 1 (2.78%) 0 Czech Republic 1 (2.78%) 0 Malaysia 1 (2.78%) 0 Netherlands 1 (2.78%) 1 Sweden 1 (2.78%) 1 Switzerland 1 (2.78%) 0 Turkey 1 (2.78%) 1 Table 2: Papers by geographical area Area Submitted Accepted Acceptance rate North America 11 3 27.27% Europe 19 6 26.32% Asia 6 1 16.67% Table 3: Papers by topics Topic Submitted Accepted 1. Syntax and Parsing 6 (16.67%) 0 2. Knowledge acquisition/extraction 1 (2.78%) 0 3. Generation 7 (19.44%) 3 4. Statistical language processing 4 (11.11%) 2 5. Natural language systems 2 (5.56%) 0 6. Discourse and pragmatics 2 (5.56%) 2 7. Grammar 3 (8.33%) 0 8. Semantics 2 (5.56%) 0 9. Corpus analysis 2 (5.56%) 2 10. Machine translation 1 (2.78%) 0 11. Speech 0 (0.00%) 0 12. Other 6 (16.67%) 1 Olivia Kwong and Sergey Pakhomov ACL-2000 Student Research Workshop Co-Chairs