Changes to Publication Pipeline

Dear all:

[TL;DR: DOI, Anthology Links, add Word format, no XML format] 

We are also planning to make changes to the publication pipeline for camera ready copies. In final accepted papers, authors will need to insert that uniform resource identifier (URI) for where to find the electronic version of the paper referenced. In many cases, papers outside of our field and older papers in our field will have Digital Object Identifiers (DOI). The DOI is the canonical, standardised format for identifying the archival version of a scholarly work, and is extensively used outside of our field. Ensuring that references in our papers contain such directly actionable links will encourage our field to have larger impact, as when the general public reads our paper they will be easily able to navigate the networked literature in our field.

In 2013, ACL became a CrossRef partner, meaning that it can assign DOIs for its scholarly materials by itself.  I, acting as your ACL Anthology Editor, have been slowly working towards making sure all of our scholarly publications (especially conference and workshop proceedings) have an actionable DOIs.  Our DOIs use our own discipline specific ACL Anthology identifier scheme, an eight-character identifier that is the year of publication and its publication venue as a letter code.

This change requires a little of attention on the part of the authors.  Authors must use the newly provided acl2017.sty BibTeX style file (kindly contributed in part by Dan Gildea), which will automatically include, for each paper, the URL to the DOI for the paper (or the ACL Anthology identifier as a fallback) for each reference. To assist in this effort, the ACL Anthology will be updating the complete BibTeX bibliography for the entire Anthology, that will include such fields properly in its records.

The ACL executive committee has also asked us to consider supporting Microsoft Word formatted submissions, to encourage people beyond our field to submit relevant to our conference.  We feel this is an important step to help make our conference more accommodating of cross-disciplinary work.  Our team of publication chairs (Meg, Sameer and Wei) is hard at work and hopefully be able to provide this format closer to the submission deadline. Please do spread the word out to your colleagues in other related fields whom may be considering submitting to our conference.

A final change is one that lessens work.  In an earlier pilot in 2014, the publication chairs Alexander Koller and Yusuke Miyao generated XML versions of accepted papers that were submitted in LaTeX, archived later in the Anthology.  This innovation was to help foster the machine-readable analysis of our own scholarly work (hey mission that I heartily support).  However this pipeline seems have generated little interest, and significantly increases the workload for publication chairs.  The ACL Anthology has also started to programmatically generate a similar, machine-readable XML format as a replacement, so that it can be done centrally instead of by each event’s separate publication chair.

We are working closely with the ACL 2017 publication chairs to ensure this process goes as smoothly as it can for this pilot run. We look forward to your support of these publication changes that will impact the prominence of our field in the future.

– Min-Yen Kan