Program Chair

The Program Co-Chairs are responsible for assembling the main conference program. This includes:

• managing the reviewing software
• communicating with the General Chair and the Executive Committee
• selecting area chairs
• reviewer selection: either done by program chairs (incl. load balancing) or area chairs
• constructing and distributing the Call-for-Papers
• selecting invited speakers
• overseeing the Best Paper Award (including making a best paper committee)
• overseeing the reviewing process
• finalizing the selection of accepted papers
• deciding on oral versus poster presentation
• communicating the review results to authors
• integrating TACL/CL papers whose authors have chosen to present at this conference
• possibly setting up the mentoring service for authors from countries where English is not the language of scientific exchange
• creating the conference program, to be publicized by publicity and handbook chairs
• recruiting session chairs
• compiling statistics on the conference for the ACL wiki and the business meeting
• providing updates to the Program Chair section of the Conference Handbook

General Guidelines

The following are guidelines for the program committee; some of it is extracted from a document prepared by Johanna Moore in 1993 summarizing issues that arose in past program committee meetings and the views of the program committees as to how they should be addressed. Other portions are the result of discussions following recent conferences.

• Program Committee:
  • ACL has a four-tiered program committee structure: the Program Committee Co-chairs (PC Chairs), the senior area chairs (SAC), the area chairs or senior PC members (AC), and the regular members of the program committee (reviewers).
  • SACs and ACs are selected by PC Chairs. ACL policy prohibits the ACL exec members from serving as ACs (including SACs); for joint conferences with a local chapter, the same restriction applies to members of that chapter's Executive Board. In selecting ACs, consideration should be given to prior experience as a reviewer, having new people as ACs, coverage of the areas of anticipated submissions, and geographical and gender distribution.
  • ACs should be informed of their responsibilites (including the selection of the recipient of the Best Paper Award) at the time they are invited to serve as ACs.
  • Area Chairs can cover more than one area and can overlap areas. In the Call for Papers, some past PC Chairs have preferred not to list the specific areas of ACs in order to avoid biasing the submissions.
  • ACs select reviewers, in consultation with PC Chairs. Consideration should be given to having a balance of experienced and new members of the program committee and geotraphical and gender distribution.
  • The conference proceedings should list PC Chairs, SACs, ACs, reviewers, and any additional reviewers who contributed to reviewing papers, using the headings "Program Committee Co-Chairs", "Senior Area Chairs", "Area Chairs" or "Senior PC Members", "Program Committee Members", and "Additional Reviewers". The names and affiliations for PC Chairs, SACs, and ACs should be given in the proceedings. For reviewers and additional reviewers, only the name is given. All lists should be compiled in alphabetical order.
  • Each reviewer is in charge of the review of 5-10 papers, whereas an additional reviewer reviews at most 2 papers. In the unlikely event that an additional reviewer is asked to review 5 or more papers he or she may, at the discretion of PC Chairs, be upgraded to the status of a regular reviewer. This upgrading process must be triggered by the reviewer who allocated so many papers to a single additional reviewer, by a suitable suggestion to PC Chairs.
  • Regular reviewers may recruit additional reviewers, but the responsibility to get adequate reviews for the allocated papers remains with the regular reviewers. The reviewers report to ACs, and they in turn report to PC Chairs. Additional reviewers report to the reviewer who recruited them.
• Use of the START conference software:
  • For the past years, ACL has used the START conference software for paper submission, reviewing, and helping with the publication process. PC Chairs should consult with the General Chair and the Executive Committee about whether a contract with START currently exists or whether a new contract should be negotiated. This needs to be settled very early, so that the conference software will be available for submissions.
• Relevance of papers to ACL:
  • In recent years, a broader range of papers have been solicited for ACL conferences, including papers in information retrieval, spoken language recognition and understanding, tools and language resources, and applications. ACL wants to continue to encourage papers in all areas related to language processing.
  • The authors have the burden of explaining a paper's relevance to the CL community.
• Mentoring service: ACL conferences provide a mentoring service to help authors, from countries where English is not the language of scientific exchange, produce a fluent paper. PC Chairs are responsible for setting up the mentoring service for the conference.
  • The mentoring service typically is chaired by an individual who is not an AC. The Chair of the mentoring service identifies a set of mentors. Papers are sent to the Chair of the mentoring service some weeks prior to the conference submission deadline, and the mentors work with the authors to improve the communication of their research.
  • The mentoring service should be announced in the Call for Papers and publicized on the conference web site, etc.
• Paper submission deadline:
  • Every year, PC Chairs receive several papers that arrive after the deadline. Although there have been variations in how such papers are handled, the majority opinion is that the deadline should be strictly enforced in the interest of fairness to those authors who could have improved their papers if they had extra time.
  • The policy on late submissions should be explicitly stated and well-publicized. It is important that the precise time zone for the deadline be clearly stated, such as 5pm Eastern Standard Time.
• Double blind reviewing:
  • ACL requires that papers be blind reviewed. Consequently, clear instructions must be provided about omitting references that will disclose the author's identify.
  • PC Chairs must decide how to handle papers that violate author anonymity for blind reviewing. In recent years, such papers have been returned to the authors without review.
• Length/format restrictions on papers:
  • Length restrictions should be stated in terms of font size, margin size, page size, and number of pages. The provision of style files makes it easy for the authors to adhere to these guidelines. PC Chairs should communicate with publication chairs to determine the detailed format restrictions and the style files.
  • PC Chairs must decide how to handle papers that violate the length restrictions on submissions. It is generally felt that length restrictions must be adhered to, and that papers that violate these restrictions should not be reviewed; the basis for this view is that most authors would have liked extra pages to explain their work, but have worked hard to cut their papers down to the requisite length. Thus reviewing papers that violate the length restrictions gives an advantage to the authors of those papers.
• Double submission policy:
  • Papers presented at an ACL conference must represent new work that has not been previously published. It is the responsiblity of the author to inform the program chair of any potential problem with respect to this requirement, as noted in the following guidelines.
  • Papers that have appeared at a conference with published (archival) proceedings constitute previously published work.
  • Papers that overlap other papers that have appeared at a conference with published (archival) proceedings must contain significant new results. Authors must include on the title page a list of any previous papers that the current paper overlaps or extends, and must identify the significant new results contained in the new submission. PC Chairs have the final decision about what constitutes significant new results.
  • Papers that have appeared at a (non-archival) workshop do not constitute previously published work, as long as the paper submitted to ACL is an extension of the workshop paper. Extensions might include new results, more in-depth analysis, evaluation that was not part of the workshop paper, or further experiments. Authors must include on the title page a list of any previous workshop papers that the current paper extends, and must identify how the current submission extends the previous workshop papers. The program co-chairs have the final decision about whether the ACL submission represents an extension of the workshop papers.
  • Papers being submitted both to ACL and another conference or workshop must note this in submission. (This includes submissions that are extensions of papers currently being submitted to a workshop.) A paper to be presented at ACL must be withdrawn from other conferences and workshops.
  • For details, refer to ACL Policies for Submission, Review and Citation.
  • Authors are expected to adhere to the ACL policy on double submission of papers. However, double submissions that do not follow this policy have been problematic at recent conferences. For ACL-05, the program chairs consulted with the program chairs of other major conferences (such as IJCAI) to determine when authors had submitted to multiple conferences. The submissions were checked, and papers that were multiply submitted (ie., not substantially different) and accepted by more than one conference were rejected from one or both of the conferences.
• Paper reviewing and acceptance:
  • ACL Policy on Conflicts of Interest:
    • ACL has adopted a formal conflict-of-interest policy. It is essential that PC Chairs, SACs, ACs, and reviewers be familiar with the policy.
    • Submissions by PC Chairs or their students pose special problems. Although there is not an ACL policy prohibiting PC Chairs from submitting to the ACL conference for which they are serving as PC Chairs, PC Chairs and their students are encouraged to submit papers to a different conference to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest in the paper acceptance process.
  • Review forms from recent conferences are available. Although the content of the review form is at the discretion of PC Chairs, the ACL executive committee suggests the following in order to provide a good evaluation of application and tools papers:
    • "Does this paper provide data, software, or source code that will be useful to other researchers in this area?"
    • "How useful to the community are any resources released along with the paper."
  • PC Chairs and SACs/ACs are responsible for ensuring a high quality technical program. Since the quality of submissions is not uniform from year to year, the acceptance rate for papers may vary from one ACL conference to another. As a guide, an acceptance rate below 20% would be unusually low and an acceptance rate of 30% would be unusually high; however, it is the perogative of PC Chairs to evaluate the quality of the submissions and, in consultation with the General Chair, to determine what is an appropriate acceptance rate for the particular conference.
• Best Paper Award:
  • The PC Chairs and SACs/ACs are responsible for selecting the recipient of the ACL Best Paper Award and other awards.
  • The Best Paper Award is presented to the recipient, along with a framed award certificate, at the conference.
  • The award selection process should follow the ACL conference awards policy.
• Visas: To address the visa problem, PC Chairs should notify the authors of submitted papers that if a visa will be needed to attend the conference, authors should do the following:
  1. set up an appointment with the appropriate consulate for shortly after the acceptance notification date, and
  2. contact the ACL Office for a letter of invitation when the paper is accepted.

Documents

More documents, including email templates, instructions to SACs/ACs/reviewers, managing START, etc. will be added.

• ACL 2017 materials by Regina Barzilay and Min-Yen Kan
• Some suggestions made by Jan Wiebe and Su Jian (program chairs for ACL-AFNLP 2009)
• How to be a program chair by Jason Eisner (2007)