An absolutely key ingredient for a successful conference is a stellar team of area chairs (ACs). What do we mean by stellar? We need people who take the task seriously, work hard to ensure fairness, bring their expertise to bear in selecting papers that make valuable contributions and constitute a vibrant program, can be effective leaders and get the reviewers to do their job well, and finally who represent a broad range of diverse interests and perspectives on our field. What a tall order!
On top of that, given the size of conferences in our field presently, we need a large team of such amazing colleagues. How big? We are planning for 2000 submissions (yikes!), which we will allocate evenly across 40 areas, so roughly 50 papers per area. We plan to have area chairs work in pairs, so we need 80 area chairs to cover 40 areas. In addition, we anticipate a range of troubleshooting and consulting beyond what we two as PC co-chairs can handle, and so we also want an additional 10 area chairs who can assist across areas, with START troubleshooting, handling papers with COI issues, and whatever else comes up. That means we’re looking for about 100 people total.
We decided to do the recruiting in two phases. The first phase involved recruiting 50 area chairs directly by invitation. Phase II is an open call for nominations (and self-nominations!) for the remaining 50 area chairs. The purpose of this blog post is to give you an update on how we are doing in terms of various metrics of diversity, and, more importantly, to alert you to the call for area chairs. If you would like to serve as area chair, or if you know someone who you’d like to nominate, please fill out this form.
As we select additional area chairs, we will be looking to round out the range of areas of expertise we have recruited so far (see below); maintain our gender balance; improve our regional diversity; improve the representation of area chairs from non-academic affiliations; and improve racial/ethnic diversity. The stats for our area chairs so far are as follows (based on a self-report survey we sent to the area chairs).
Research Interests
A diverse range of areas were described, from a free-text entry from. Those with multiple entries are shown in the chart, and the hapaxes listed below.
- Accent Variation
- Active Learning
- Argument Mining
- Aspect
- Authorship Analysis (Attribution, Profiling, Plagiarism Detection)
- Automatic Summarization
- Biomedical/clinical Text Processing
- BioNLP
- Clinical NLP
- Clustering
- Code-mixing
- Code-switching
- Computational Cognitive Modeling
- Computational Discourse
- Computational Lexical Semantics
- Computational Lexicography
- Computational Morphology
- Computational Pragmatics
- Conversational AI
- Conversation Modeling
- Corpora Construction
- Corpus Design And Development
- Corpus Linguistics
- Cross-language Speech Recognition
- Cross-lingual Learning
- Data Modeling And System Architecture
- Dialogue Pragmatics
- Dialogue System
- Dialogue Systems
- Discourse Modes
- Discourse Parsing
- Document Summarization
- Emotion Analysis
- Endangered Language Documentation
- Evaluation
- Event And Temporal Processing
- Experimental Linguistics
- Eye Movements
- Fact Checking
- Grammar Correction
- Grammar Engineering
- Grammar Induction
- Grounded Language Learning
- Grounded Semantics
- HPSG
- Incremental Language Processing
- Information Retrieval
- KA
- Korean NLP
- Language Acquisition
- Lexical Resources
- Linguistic Annotation
- Linguistic Issues In NLP
- Linguistic Processing Of Non-canonical Text
- Low-resource Learning
- Machine Reading
- Modality
- Multilingual Systems
- Multimodal NLP
- NER
- NLG
- NLP In Health Care & Education
- NLU
- Ontologies
- Ontology Construction
- Phonology
- POS Tagging
- Reading
- Reasoning
- Relation Extraction
- Resources
- Resources And Evaluation
- Rhetorical Types
- Semantic Parsing
- Semantic Processing
- Short-answer Scoring
- Situation Types
- Social Media
- Social Media Analysis
- Social Media Analytics
- Software And Tools
- Speech
- Speech Perception
- Speech Recognition
- Speech Synthesis
- Spoken Language Understanding
- Stance Detection
- Structured Prediction
- Summarization
- Syntactic And Semantic Parsing
- Syntax/parsing
- Tagging
- Temporal Information Extraction
- Text Classification
- Text Mining
- Text Simplification
- Text Types
- Transfer Learning
- Treebanks
- Vision And Language
- Weakly Supervised Learning
Gender
We asked a completely open-ended question here, which was furthermore optional, and then binned the answers into the three categories female, male, and other/question skipped.
Country of affiliation
Another open-ended question, which we again binned by region. Latin America is the Americas minus the US and Canada. Australia is counted as Asia. So far Africa is not represented.
Type of affiliation
Our survey anticipated five possible answers here: Academia, Industry – research lab, Industry – other, Government, Other; but only the first two are represented so far.
Race/ethnicity
We are interested in making sure that our senior program committee is diverse in terms of race/ethnicity, but it is very difficult to talk about what this means in an international context, because racial constructs are very much products of the cultures they are a part of. So rather than ask for specific race/ethnicity categories, which we would be unprepared to summarize across cultures, we decided to ask the following pair of questions, both of which were optional (like the question about gender):
As we work to make sure that our senior PC is appropriately diverse, we would like to consider race/ethnicity. Yet, at the level of an international organization, it is very unclear what categories could possibly be appropriate for such a survey. Accordingly, we have settled on the distinction minoritized (treated as a minority)/not minoritized (treated as normative/majority).
In the context of your country of current affiliation, and with respect to your race/ethnicity, are you: (optional)
- Minoritized
- Not minoritized
During your education or career prior to your current affiliation, has there ever been a significant period time during which you were minoritized with respect to your race/ethnicity? (optional)
- Yes
- No
Please join us!
We’re looking for about 50 more ACs! Please consider nominating yourself and/or other people who you think would do a good job and also help us round out our leadership team along the various dimensions identified above. Both self- and other-nominations can be done at this form. You can nominate as many people as you like (but only nominate yourself once, please 😉