North American Chapter
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| The Association for Computational Linguistics North American Chapter |
Chris Brew
Statement:
The role of ACL is to represent computational linguistics to the
wider academic and non-academic world, and to promote research and
development in our field. NAACL is responsible for carrying the part
of that charge which falls within the Americas, and especially the
annual NAACL conference. The role of the executive board is to
provide oversight for the conference, as well as other activities
that promote the health and success of computational linguistics in
the Americas. I see the primary role of the Chair as facilitating the
necessary discussions, both face-to-face and at a distance, and the
secondary role as acting as initial contact point for issues that
might need quick resolution.
I am new to the board this year. My candidacy statement for board membership declared a goal of pushing NAACL to focus on the "why" of computational linguistics as well as the "how", emphasizing scientific as well as technological goals. As Hal Daume III mentioned in his candidacy statement, as a community we are definitely beginning to develop our own technologies, rather than simply adopting those of others. This drive to independence from other fields needs to continue for the science too. My brief experience on the board suggests that NAACL should address the "why" of CL by means of the "who". Thus, NAACL sponsorship of summer schools, young researchers workshops and regional conferences are all important as way of broadening the base of scientifically minded CLers, as is serious expansion into the whole of the Americas. The board is already on top of these issues, so the chair should help make sure that the initiatives do not stall.
Nevertheless, the annual conference remains the main focus. The key challenge for the board is to get the best people into leadership roles for the conference, then making it easy for them to do their jobs in an effective and satisfying way. The board needs to play a role in capturing the good ideas that make the conference work well, ensuring that they do not have to be rediscovered anew by every conference committee, and yet giving those key volunteers scope to make each conference work well in new ways. For me, one of the most exciting things about the board meeting was the push to share more conference-management knowledge and experience with other ACL conferences. This should continue, as should coordination on matters such as deadlines. This is tough to do well, and the board should continue to help.
Bio: Chris Brew has a B.Sc in Chemistry from the University of Bristol and an M.Sc and D.Phil from the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Sussex, where his advisor was Stephen Isard. He did postdoctoral work at the Center for Cognitive Science and Human Communication Research Centre in Edinburgh, then spent a year in industry with Sharp Laboratories of Europe, before returning to Edinburgh as a research staff member in the Language Technology Group. In 2000 he moved to Ohio State, where he is an Associate Professor both in Computer Science and Engineering and in Linguistics. His research interests extend to more or less any aspect of language that can plausibly be claimed to be learnable from data. So far, this has not excluded much.
Rebecca Hwa
Statement: My experience over the past two years as a member of the NAACL
executive board has emphasized to me that our organization has many
responsibilities in addition to maintaining a high quality scientific
conference and supporting the NAACL summer school. I seek the
opportunity to further serve NAACL as the chairperson of the executive
board so to sharpen our mission of promoting cooperation with an
increasingly broader set of related communities as our organization
grows. Recently, the board has begun several exploratory programs such
as the sponsorship of regional workshops, the Latin America Fund, and
the student tutorial fund. If elected, I will work with the board to
formalize and scale up the successful programs. I also strongly
believe in our mission to encourage participation from students. While
the NAACL summer school and the student research workshop are both
successful programs that have received enthusiastic participant
feedback, they reach a relatively small percentage of students. I
would like to explore ways of reaching out to students from schools
that do not have a strong computational linguistics presence. For
instance, the board can help expand the community's student friendly
online resources. Finally, I will work with both the ACL executive
board and the NAACL board to ensure the continued success of our
conferences.
Bio: Rebecca Hwa is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Her recent research focus is on multilingual processing and machine translation. Before joining Pitt, she was a postdoc at University of Maryland. She received her PhD from Harvard University and her B.S. from UCLA. She is a current NAACL executive board member; she has been an area co-chair for NAACL/HLT (2007) and for EMNLP (2005,2008); and she has served on the editorial board of Computational Linguistics (2003-2005).
James Rogers
Statement:
I've been a member of ACL since 1992, a period that spans the emergence,
growth and flowering of empirical and statistical methods in NLP. It's no
coincidence that the same period has seen dramatic growth in the size
(and, with the emergence of new chapters, number) of general ACL meetings.
At the same time, there has been a substantial decrease in the number of
papers in traditionally symbolic areas such as Syntax, Parsing, Semantics,
Dialogue, Generation, etc., a decrease not just in the number presented
but also in the number submitted.
To a large extent this just reflects the turning of energy to a new, exciting and highly productive area. But there also seems to have been a trend for work in the traditional areas to withdraw into specialized conferences of their own. In my own experience, I have become much less actively involved in ACL over the last 10 years while I have become much more active in the Mathematics of Language and the Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI and NASSLLI summer schools) communities. This is regrettable not only because we risk losing the breath of research that is our heritage but because we risk losing opportunities to develop synergies between these approaches.
I have worked some, on the MoL side, to encourage authors to submit their papers to the ACL annual meetings and I'm aware of similar efforts within the broader ACL community. I'd like to see a coordinated effort on all fronts, not to directly increase the representation of these areas in the conferences, but rather to increase their representation in the pool of papers submitted.
In addition to serving on the Chapter Board, the NAACL constitution assigns a few specific duties to the Secretary, most significantly to facilitate these elections. Past Secretaries also have been responsible for (overseeing) the maintenance of the NAACL website and the archive of official documents. I can assure you that (like most of us, I'm sure) I have experience in doing these things and that I will be able to discharge these duties faithfully.
Bio: Jim Rogers completed his PhD., under K. Vijay-Shanker, in 1994, spent two years as a Post-Doc at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science and four years teaching at the University of Central Florida before moving to Earlham College, a small Liberal-Arts college affiliated with the Society of Friends (Quakers), where he is Convener of the Department of Computer Science. In the 2005-6 academic year he was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He has been a member of the ACL since 1992.
He is a past president of SIGMoL, the special interest group for Mathematics of Language, and continues to be an active participant in the MoL and the Logic, Language, and Information communities as well as a passive member of SIGSem and SIGFSM.
His doctoral work was some of the earliest work in the area now known as Model-Theoretic Syntax, in which the tools of Model Theory and Descriptive Complexity Theory are applied to the study of frameworks for formal Linguistics. He continues to work and teach in this area. At Earlham, he has worked, as well, extensively on incorporating experiential education into the undergraduate Computer Science curriculum and on developing methods of sustaining substantive undergraduate research across the annual changes in the membership of the group that is characteristic of this setting.
Anoop Sarkar
Statement: I am running for the job of Secretary of the North American chapter
of the ACL. One important responsibility of the Secretary is running the
elections (the kind you are voting in right now). Ever since Ulrich
Germann has automated the election process, the elections have
become very easy to run. However, there are some other things the
Secretary does: maintain the NAACL web page (naacl.org), write up
the minutes for the NAACL executive meetings, and help with the
organization of the annual conference. The Secretary is usually
hidden from view but keeps the NAACL humming.
I attended ACL 1993 as an undergraduate student on a Don Walker scholarship that funded my travel from India to Columbus. Having benefitted from that experience, I have an interest in encouraging student participation at NAACL including the CL Olympiad (NACLO) and the NAACL summer schools.
In the Preface of the ACL 2002 Proceedings, Eugene Charniak and Dekang Lin said, "Of course no one reads these things." They tested this hypothesis and found that some, like you now, do read these things. Now go on and cast your vote for the best candidate!
Bio: I am an Associate Professor of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002, under Prof. Aravind Joshi.
My research has focused on combining labeled and unlabeled data for statistical parsing and machine translation. I am also interested in formal language theory and stochastic grammars, in particular tree automata and tree-adjoining grammars.
For my service to NAACL and to other ACL conferences please see my Curriculum Vitae.
Christopher Manning
Current Treasurer
Statement: During my time as NAACL treasurer I've worked on
getting NAACL doing more to support the field while keeping the fees
to members low. We have a number of initiatives now: as well as the
traditional JHU workshop support, we've started supporting some
student travel to NAACL, regional workshops, and activities in Latin
America, and supporting the NACLO competition. And the fees at NAACL
2009 were the lowest in several years. I can't take much credit for
most of these things, but I have done the necessary work of crunching
through the accounting, and respond to new spending proposals by
saying "Yes, we can."
Bio: Brief bio on Chris's web page.
As a member of the NAACL executive board, I would also work to increase mentoring and networking activities for graduate students and recent PhDs at our annual meeting. Providing a casual setting for young researchers to network with funding agency representatives and managers of industry labs, at a lunch or reception, could help them navigate the transition from student to independent researcher. Finally, to engage younger students, shared tasks and challenges that can be attempted by undergraduate and possibly highschool teams should be a standard part of our annual gathering. The NAACL executive board can help promote these activities and provide resources, such as fundraising for student travel.
Bio: Donna Byron completed a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Rochester in 2002, working in the spoken dialog systems lab. Her research has focused on reference resolution, especially pronoun resolution, for dialog agents. From 2002 - 2008 she was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Ohio State University. There, her lab focused on building dialog capabilities for situated, embodied agents. Since February 2008, she has worked as a Senior Research Scientist in the Relational Agents lab at Northeastern University. In a previous life, prior to graduate school, she worked as a software engineer in corporate IT, designing and building in-house financial and accounting software at Texas Instruments. She has served as the NAACL Student Workshop co-Chair in 2000, Demonstrations co-Chair for EMNLP/HLT 2005, local arrangements committee member for ACL/HLT 2008, and Program Co-Chair for SigDial 2009.
Chris Callison-Burch
Statement: I am standing on a simple platform: I will try make
our reviewing process more effective. I propose to work with the
softconf team to adapt the START software in the following ways: (1)
persistent reviewer accounts for ACL members that have a single login
and that show how many papers each reviewer has done in the past year,
(2) a facility to flag papers that have been rejected from previous
ACL conferences, along with a link back to previous reviews, and an
author response saying how the paper has been subsequently updated,
(3) the ability for reviewers or area chairs to nominate conference
papers for fast-track publication in the Computational Linguistics
journal, where a paper could be expanded and reviewed a second time.
Bio: Chris Callison-Burch is an assistant research professor at Johns Hopkins University at the Center for Language and Speech Processing. He received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh, and BS from Stanford. He co-organizes the annual Workshop on Statistical Machine translation, which promotes publicly available training and test data and open source software with the aim of lowering the barrier to entry into the field of statistical machine translation.
Patrick Pantel
Statement: It is an exciting time to be a researcher in
computational linguistics. I’ve grown up in this community from my
undergraduate days through my early career as a scientist. Our field
has grown, our scientific impact is increasing and our technologies
are starting to bear fruit in industry. In order to maintain our
tradition of excellence, we must continue to facilitate impactful
scientific advances and prepare our future colleagues for academic and
professional life. The current board has a clear mandate to improve
the dissemination of our community knowledge to other scientific
fields, to reach out to students earlier in their training, to improve
our reviewing process, and to abide by our constitution. I strongly
support these efforts. On preparing our students for industry careers,
we must do better. If elected, I will focus my time on increasing
engagement with industrial partners. We would benefit from more
tutorials focusing on the key problems and technologies relevant to
industry, from special panels targeting issues such as interviewing
skills and expectations in industrial laboratories, and from
increasing our collaborations through industry-sponsored shared
tasks. The result would be higher interview success rates, a
broadening of our problem sets and research directions, and in time
increased funding for NLP research.
Bio: Patrick Pantel is a Senior Scientist at Yahoo! Labs and a Research Assistant Professor at the USC Information Sciences Institute, where he conducts research in large-scale natural language processing, text mining, and knowledge acquisition. In 2003, he received a Ph.D. in Computing Science from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.
Kristina Toutanova
Statement: If elected to the NAACL board I would like to focus
on 1) increasing the connection between our research community and
industry and 2) reforming the review process for NAACL/HLT.
Strengthening our ties with industry will be beneficial on multiple
levels: increased and broader sources of funding, new interesting
applications, and good real-world data. The quality of the conference
reviewing process has been brought up at several conference meetings
this year. There is large variance in reviewing standards among
sub-areas and there are often highly divergent evaluations of the same
paper by different reviewers or at different times. I have worked on
many NLP sub-areas and have extensive reviewing experience in NLP as
well as related conferences such as NIPS, ICML, and IJCAI. I would
like to use my experience to work toward implementing procedures for
improving the consistency and quality of evaluations.
Bio: Kristina Toutanova received an MS in Computer Science from Sofia University and a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University. Her dissertation was on machine learning models for syntactic and semantic analysis (her advisor was Christopher Manning). She has been a researcher in the Natural Language Processing group at Microsoft Research, Redmond, since 2005.
Her research interests focus on modeling the structure of natural language, with the goal of improving the quality of NLP applications. Specific topics she has worked on include morphological analysis and part-of-speech tagging, syntactic parsing, semantic role labeling, machine translation, language modeling, summarization, and information retrieval.
The voting period is scheduled to close on December 15th.
For more information about the NAACL, NAACL officer responsibilities, and NAACL election and constitution-amendment procedures, please see the NAACL home page, www.naacl.org, and the NAACL constitution.