Delivered by Chris Callison Burch (University of Pennsylvania), Regina Barzilay (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Min-Yen Kan (National University of Singapore). 31 Aug 2017. Vancouver, Canada

1. 2017
The 55th Annual Meeting of the
Association for Computational Linguistics ║
Vancouver, Canada ║ July 30 – August 4 ║
Welcome
General Chair: Chris Callison-Burch
Program Chairs: Regina Barzilay and Min-Yen Ka
ACL Vice President: Marti Hearst
ACL President: Joakim Nivre

2. ACL is family friendly
Professionally managed on-site childcare is available for kids
aged 6 months to 12 years old. Drop-ins are welcome. Stop by
the Oak Rooms or call Lisa on 1–450–466–6897. The Arbutus
Room is also available for nursing mothers.
Your registration includes full dinners at the poster and demo
sessions, and breakfasts and coffee breaks during the
conference. You are invited to bring your loved ones by
purchasing additional meals at the registration desk.
The social event will be held at the Vancouver Aquarium tomorrow
evening after the poster session. Your ticket is included. You may
purchase additional tickets for family members.

3. Recruitment lunch
Today from noon until 2pm there is a recruitment
lunch for job seekers. It is limited to 400 participants,
and it was paid for by 20 companies. Attending this
event requires an admission ticket (which is located
in your registration packet).
If you did not get an admission ticket, I encourage
you to visit our many sponsors who are exhibiting at
ACL 2017 throughout the main conference where
you can speak to them about employment
possibilities.

4. Conference App
This year have a smartphone app for the
conference. First download the GuideBook app,
then download the “ACL 2017” guide from within
that app.
https://guidebook.com/g/acl2017nlp/
Wifi Password:
ACL2017

5. Social Media
The conference social media channels are:
Facebook: @acl2017
Twitter: @acl2017
Instagram: @aclnlp
Please include hashtag #acl2017nlp in any
social media posts.

6. Live Captioning
Live captions are available for the conference
(with translations available if you want). Thanks
Microsoft! To access the captions, go:
http://www.aka.ms/2ACL
If you’re a speaker, please use the lapel mic. If
you’re an audience member please be sure to
use the handheld mic when asking your
question.

7. Thank you to our sponsors!ACL 2017
║We are grateful to our ACL 2017 Sponsors for their support!
Platinum
Gold

8. Gold
Silver
Bronze
Supporter

9. Organizing Team
Program Co-Chairs Regina Barzilay and Min-Yen Kan
Local Organizing Chairs Priscilla Rasmussen and Anoop Sarkar
Workshop Chairs Wei Xu and Jonathan Berant
Tutorial Chairs Maja Popović and Jordan Boyd-Graber
Publication Chairs Wei Lu, Sameer Singh, and Margaret Mitchell
Demonstration Chairs Heng Ji and Mohit Bansal
Student Research Workshop Organizers Spandana Gella,
Allyson Ettinger, and Matthieu Labeau Faculty Advisors SRW
Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Mark Dredze and Marine Carpuat
Publicity Chair Charley Chan
Conference Handbook Chair Christian Federmann
Student Volunteer Coordinator Maryam Siahbani
Webmaster & Appmaster Nitin Madnani

10. Aurélie Névéol
Karin Verspoor Roger Levy Anders Søgaard Ron Artstein
Raquel Fernandez Oliver Lemon Yangfeng Ji Sujian Li Bo
nnie Webber Eugene Agichtein Chia-Hui Chang Jing Jiang
Sarvnaz Karimi Zornitsa Kozareva Kang Liu Tie-Yan Liu
Mausam Alessandro Moschitti Smaranda Muresan Grzegorz
Chrupała Amir Globerson Tommi Jaakkola Sujith Ravi Wil
liam Yang Wang Yang Liu Minh-T
hang Luong Hai tao Mi Graham N
eubig Deyi Xio ng Michael Piot
rowski Karën F ort Omri Abend
Mona Diab Jaso n Eisner Hinric
h Schütze Soph ie Rosset Wajdi
Zaghouani Manaal Faruqui Hannaneh Hajishirzi Anna Korhonen Presla
v Nakov Mehroosh Sadrzadeh Aline Villavicencio Alexandra Balahur
Lun-Wei Ku Saif M Mohammad Zhiyuan Liu Shimei Pan Svitlana Volkov
a Chiori Hori Chia-ying Lee Wenjie Li Alexander M Rush Verena Rie
ser Emily Pitler Barbara Plank Yue Zhang Hai Zhao Mohit Bansal Na
te Kushman Dan Gildea Rebecca Passonneau Tim Baldwin Martha Palme
r Mark Johnson Zhang Min Kristina Toutanova Lu Wei Julia Hockenma

11. Statistics
1318 Submitted Papers
302 Accepted Papers
Overall 22% Acceptance Rate (Main Conference)
367 Presentations

12. Statistics
1318 Submitted Papers
302 Accepted Papers
Overall 22% Acceptance Rate (Main Conference)
367 Presentations
… 36 Blog Posts

16. Improving Paper Selection Process
ACL Survey:
I was really disappointed by the reviewing quality of ACL
sometimes. Many reviewers are actually not qualified to review
papers and many did not spend enough time on the papers.
A substantial number of respondents express
concern about the current conference
reviewing process with increasing reviewer load
and decreasing review quality.
16
I believe the lack of good reviewers is a much more severe
problem that may ruin the standard of ACL in the near future.
We reject a lot of good papers, and let in a lot of bad ones

17. • 10% of paper were rejected due to formatting violations
• In most cases, violations were honest mistakes
• Disproportionally impacts newcomers from developing communities
Rejection Without Review
length, margins, font, anonymization, …
Solution: Use on-line format checker as part of submission

18. • Challenge: large number of reviewers, many unfamiliar to ACs
• Solution tried: Toronto Paper Matching System (TPMS)
• Mixed outcomes due to limited TPMS enrollment (50%)
Improving Review Quality:
Matching Papers and Reviews
Proposed Solution: Create an up-to-date reviewer database, keeping
institutional memories across conferences
Dear Regina,
I just want to bring to your attention our situation that might bring to
light lack of appropriate reviewers for papers….

19. • Hierarchical Area Organization, with fewer papers per AC
• Short review period vs long discussion period
• Run scripts to flag problematic reviews
• Enable direct communication between authors and ACs
Improving Review Quality:
Towards Journal-like Reviewing
Proposed Solution: Create more effective tools for ACs to identify
problematic reviews and calibrate individual reviewers.

20. Impact of Rebuttal/Discussion

21. • Approach: compare ranking obtained from the original reviews and
accepted papers
• Finding: 78% of papers ranked based on the original reviews are accepted
• Average score of upgraded papers — 3.14, downgraded — 3.4
Impact of Discussion Period
Conclusions:
1. Original reviews drive the acceptance process.
2. Discussion does determine the fate of 22% of submissions
Place to reduce unnecessary load,
focusing on challenging papers

22. • Approach: train a classifier to predict review sentiment (two
classes, with 3s excluded)
• Accuracy: F-measure is 79%
Rationales behind Decisions
This is nice ongoing work that attempts to explore understanding
of XXX. The focus on the role of XXX is well motivated, and the
treatment of the various ways in which YYY is comprehensive
and methodical ….

23. • Approach: train a classifier to predict review sentiment (two
classes, with 3s excluded)
• Accuracy: F-measure is 79%
Rationales behind Decisions
unclear, hard, lacks
novelty, enough,
baseline, writing,
compare, missing,
novelty, description,
well written, good,
solid, well, nice, liked,
interesting, useful,
paper well, novel,
evaluation

24. • Approach: train a classifier to predict review sentiment (two
classes, with 3s excluded)
• Accuracy: F-measure is 81%
Rationales behind Decisions
unclear, hard, lacks
novelty, enough,
baseline, writing,
compare, missing,
description,
well written, good,
solid, well, nice, liked,
interesting, useful,
paper well, novel,
evaluation

25. ACL 1997