We thank our phenomenal group of Area Chairs for their willingness to serve in this role!
As your submissions come in, they will be assigned to an area chair using a combination of factors: the area(s) you specify in the submission form, any conflicts of interest with the corresponding area chairs, the match between your submission and the individual area chairs’ interests, and the overall load across chairs in the area.
Here is what our area chairs will be doing over the next few months:
Initial Review
After the submission deadline, your area chair will look over your submission using a checklist that asks:
- Does the content of your submission adhere to the ACL and NAACL HLT 2018 guidelines for authors? Is it relevant and original? Does it accurately represent contributors and describe research review and data management? Does it reference prior and related work appropriately? Is it anonymized? If there is a preprint or prior publication, did you identify it? The area chair will have access to the information you provided in the submission form as well as to additional tools kindly supplied by START.
- Does the format of your submission adhere to the NAACL HLT 2018 format and style guidelines? Is it of an appropriate length? Does it appear to be complete?
The area chair will bring any issues to our attention and violations of the guidelines may lead to rejection without review.
Reviewer Assignment
Your submissions will be automatically assigned an initial set of reviewers using the match between your submission and the reviewer interests as determined through the Toronto Paper Matching System, the reviewer bids, and the overall reviewer load. The area chair for your submission will make a final assignment of reviewers.
Review Tracking
The area chair for your submission will track review progress. If a review is missing, incomplete, or has significant issues of quality, the area chair will communicate with the reviewers. If reviewers disagree (in the case of long paper submissions, after the author response period), the area chair will encourage discussion.
Decision Making
The area chair will coordinate with other chairs in their area to make accept/reject suggestions. For papers that are controversial or do not fall clearly into “accept” or “reject”, the area chair will write a meta-review that you will receive with final notification. The program co-chairs are ultimately responsible for all decisions regarding your submission and communications should be addressed to us at naacl2018-program@googlegroups.com.
Relation to our goals
In our program chairs’ introduction, we talked about our goals as program chairs for NAACL HLT 2018.
As part of our goal to construct a great program, we are giving area chairs more structured views of submissions. Authors and reviewers separately will categorize the contributions of each submission, and the area chairs will weigh these multifaceted views in making accept/reject suggestions. Our area chairs have also contributed suggestions for keynote speakers and suggestions for program committee members. We will continue to rely on them to provide input on other aspects of the research program.
As part of our goal to manage the integrity and quality of the publication process, we have recruited enough area chairs so that each area chair should be assigned no more than 30 submissions even if submissions to NAACL HLT break the records set by ACL 2017 and EMNLP 2017. We hope that the close attention area chairs will pay to their assigned papers, along with structured guidelines for assessing submissions, will lead to substantial and informative reviews for your submission. As part of our goal to ensure broad participation, we have recruited area chairs from across academia and industry, including both experienced area chairs and younger researchers. Here are some statistics about this year’s group of Area Chairs[1]:
- They are ⅔ male, ⅓ female
- The majority are currently resident in North America (47). The remainder are currently resident in Europe (14), Asia (9) or South America (1).
- The majority are from academia (49). The remainder have industry (18) or other (4) affiliations.
- Seven of our area chairs were on the senior program committees for one or more of the first four NAACLs: Michael Collins, Eric Fosler-Lussier, Dan Gildea, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Chin-Yew Lin, Daniel Marcu and Giorgio Satta.
- Ten of our area chairs are serving on a senior program committee for the first time: Yun-Nung (Vivian) Chen, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Ozan Irsoy, Junyi (Jessy) Li, Bonan Min, Vicente Ordonez, Sara Rosenthal, Kristy Hollingshead Seitz, William Yang Wang and Yi Yang.
Amanda Stent
[1] Any errors in the compilation of these statistics are ours; we welcome corrections.
NAACL HLT 2018 Chairs Blog 