EMNLP '11 Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
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Welcome back to Europe at ACL 2010! After three years, the ACL crowd is meeting again in Europe, this time at the very north, to escape from the Central European heat it experienced in 2007. This year, some significant changes can be found under the hood. The call for papers was formulated much more broadly than usual, and this idea brought up by the ACL membership and the Exec and then developed in detail by this year's program chairs, Sandra Carberry and Stephen Clark, really caught on - the number of submissions has been the highest of all times, forcing us to put some activities, such as the SRW, as the fifth track on Tuesday morning. The number of reviewers is hard to compute exactly - but a glimpse into their lists in this year's and previous years' proceedings reveals that we almost certainly set a new record here, too (thank you all!). Also, the proceedings have switched to electronic-only for all events, and adaptation of the START conference automation software has begun towards a fully automated workflow from submission to the production of the final proceedings in pdf format. It has been made possible thanks to Philipp Koehn's and Jing-Shin Chang's willingness to serve as Publication Chairs two years in a row in order to ensure a smooth transition from the semi-manual process employed in the past. However, there was one thing that overshadowed it all: the enthusiastic, meticulously precise and absolutely professional yet in every situation very polite approach of the local arrangements committee headed by Joakim Nivre. His efforts have made my job, as the General Chair, a piece of cake, limited essentially to watching the tons of emails exchanged between the local and other committees and to answering emails like "why wasn't I asked to be an invited speaker?" (obviously, from people no one would consider for this honor anyway).