Area Chairs – and Areas

Traditionally, areas are prescribed by program chairs, in anticipation of the field’s interests. This can lead to last minute scrambles as the number of submissions ends up varying widely across areas.  To avoid this, we chose to follow the methodology developed by  Ani Nenkova and Owen Rambow for NAACL 2016 in sunny San Diego, CA, USA.  For COLING 2018 we have not defined areas directly, but rather will let them emerge from the interests of the area chairs, expressed in keywords. These keywords are then also used to allocate reviewers to areas, and later, papers. That’s why at COLING you won’t be directly asked to select an area for your paper at all; this is managed automatically. You will only be asked to select the type of your paper and describe its focus in keywords, to make sure it’s reviewed correctly. If you don’t know what paper types are available, we highly recommend you see the list of paper types and review questions. The keywords are exposed through the submission interface.

Each area has two area chairs, as previous experience has shown that it’s helpful to have a collaborator with whom to discuss decisions and to share the workload, but that larger groups can lead to lack of clarity in who’s doing what work.  We created the AC pairings automatically, keeping the following in mind:

  • We want to maximize similarity of AC research expertise (as captured by the keywords provided) in each pair, across the global pairing.
  • We want to minimize AC pairs where there is a large timezone difference, to foster quick troubleshooting and discussion (in the end, we ended up with one pair not in the same global region).

In addition, seven of the ACs have been designated not to a specific area but as “Special Circumstances” chairs, who can be called on to troubleshoot or advise as necessary.

Our final AC roster is as follows:

  • Afra Alishahi
  • Alexandre Rademaker
  • Alexis Palmer
  • Aline Villavicencio
  • Alvin Grissom II
  • Andrew Caines
  • Ann Clifton
  • Anna Rumshisky
  • Antske Fokkens
  • Arash Eshghi
  • Aurelie Herbelot
  • Avirup Sil
  • Barry Devereux
  • Chaitanya Shivade
  • Dan Garrette
  • Daniel Lassiter
  • David Schlangen
  • Deyi Xiong
  • Eric Nichols
  • Francis Bond
  • Frank Ferraro
  • Georgiana Dinu
  • Gerard de Melo
  • Gina-Anne Levow
  • Harry Bunt
  • Hatem Haddad
  • Isabelle Augenstein
  • Jiajun Zhang
  • Jose Camacho Collados
  • Klinton Bicknell
  • Lilja Øvrelid
  • Maja Popovic
  • Manuel Montes-y-Gómez
  • Marcos Zampieri
  • Marie-Catherine de Marneffe
  • Meliha Yetisgen
  • Michael Tjalve
  • Miguel Ballesteros
  • Mike Tian-Jian Jiang
  • Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
  • Na-Rae Han
  • Naomi Feldman
  • Natalie Schluter
  • Nathan Schneider
  • Nikola Ljubešić
  • Nurit Melnik
  • Qin Lu
  • Roman Klinger
  • Sadid A. Hasan
  • Sanja Štajner
  • Sara Tonelli
  • Sarvnaz Karimi
  • Sujian Li
  • Sunayana Sitaram
  • Tal Linzen
  • Valia Kordoni
  • Vivek Kulkarni
  • Viviane Moreira
  • Wei Xu
  • Wenjie Li
  • Xiang Ren
  • Xiaodan Zhu
  • Yang Feng
  • Yonatan Bisk
  • Yue Zhang
  • Yun-Nung Chen
  • Zachary Chase Lipton
  • Zeljko Agic
  • Zhiyuan Liu

With the following ACs in Special Circumstances, spread across the world’s timezones:

  • Anders Søgaard
  • Andreas Vlachos
  • Asad Sayeed
  • Di Jiang
  • Karin Verspoor
  • Kevin Duh
  • Steven Bethard

We are grateful to these distinguished scholars for the time and effort they are committing to COLING 2018!

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