Session Chair Duties

We wrote some basic guidelines about how to be a good session chair for the oral presentations. Hope it will be helpful for junior chairs who are serving this task for the first time. 

The main conference program schedule is at:
http://naacl2018.org/program.html
Please take a look and identify your session.

By May 20:

• Email the contact author of each paper, confirm that at least one author will present the paper. If there is any paper without authors attending the conference, please email the PC chairs (Heng and Amanda).

By May 31:

• Please read, at least scan through, the papers in your session and come up with a few good questions for each paper.

At the conference:

• Come to the session room 15 minutes before the session starts.
• Make sure all paper presenters are present before the session starts, greet them, help them test slides. We will have at least one local tech staff available in each session room to solve any technical problems.
• Ask the presenters to sign agreements if they agree their talks to be recorded. The local organizers will put the agreement hard copy at the presenter desk, or they will bring it to the session before it starts.
• If any presenter is absent before the session starts, please ask the student volunteer to tell Priscilla at the registration office, and/or email or call Heng and Amanda.
• Announce the start and end of each session, introduce yourself.
• Make sure each paper finishes on time:
  • Long, short or TACL papers: 18 minutes (15 minutes + 3 minutes QA);
  • Test-of-Time papers: 25 minutes (20 minutes + 5 minutes QA)
• Remind the presenter 5 minutes, 2 minutes and 1 minutes before the presentation should be finished.
• QA: ask the audience to always use microphone for questions, and introduce themselves before ask questions.
• We will have at least one student volunteer at each session. You can ask the volunteer to sit beside you to help on timing check and handing over microphones.
• Ask your questions and lead discussions if no one else in the audience asks questions.
• If any presentation finishes early, wait until the start time of next presentation to synchronize with other sessions. But please try to fill in the time slot by asking your questions if all possible.

 

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