[ACL-2010] Proceedings Publication - Tools, Format & Copyright

Dear Workshop Chairs, Workshop Organizers and Book Chairs,

Each workshop has to compile its own proceedings (including a
subdirectory of the CD-ROM image containing individual pdf papers,
their index files and bibdata), then send the compiled CD-ROM image
(including the compiled full version of the proceedings) to the Publication Chairs
to produce the CD-ROM & proceedings.

If you have a separate publication chair or book chair
who is responsible for compiling the proceedings, please foward
this message to the responsible member, and let the Publication Chairs informed of
the right person to contact in the future.

Compiling the proceedings simply means to re-sort the pdf files
by your program schedule, adding page numbers, citation stamps,
creating the TOC, and author index, and including your
organizational information and prefaces from your chairs to
the proceedings, ..., etc. 

For details on what should be compiled into the proceedings
and some sample online proceedings (coling-acl06 & acl-08),
please find the extended outline for the major working items
of the publication committee, which is available online at:

http://nlp.csie.ncnu.edu.tw/~shin/acl-ijcnlp2009/publication/howto/Working.Items.txt.

This online document and its references are intended for the recent
ACL-IJCNLP 2009 conference (Singapore). Therefore, some details may
be changes and applied for the current ACL-2010 conference.
But it is good to know the typical working items for proceedings
publication from the above document.

The Publication Chairs will post the most updated changes online,
and will have a similar Working Items for the ACL-2010 soon.
Contact the Publication Chairs if you have any early questions.  

** Memo: 2010/5: ACL-2010 working list is now available at:
** http://nlp.csie.ncnu.edu.tw/~shin/acl2010/publication/howto/Working.Items.ACL-2010.html
** The publication instructions and other resources are available at:
** http://nlp.csie.ncnu.edu.tw/~shin/acl2010/publication/

In particular, you should pay special attentions to the sections
related to "workshop" program committee/chairs and the "book chair".
(A book chair is a person responsible for compiling the proceedings,
if the workshop/program chairs do not take this responsibility.)

Most of the publication works can be automated if you use the ACLPUB package,
which is a set of Perl scripts and some LaTex templates,
running under unix/linux. If you are not familiar with the package,
you should try to run it on some test data from the START submission
system as early as possible to avoid unexpected compilation
problems earlier.

** ACL is working with the team who dveloped the START conference
   management system to integrate the ACLPUB publication tools into
   the START system. Therefore, ACL-2010 is likely to use the integrated
   system for producing the conference proceedings. But it would be
   safer if you know how to use ACLPUB to produce the proceedings.
   Just in case the integration cannot be finished in time.

You can do most of the compilation tasks using the ACLPUB package.
But you also need a few manual editing works on the provided templates
to fill the newest workshop specific information for your workshop.

A few quick steps are available in the above URL as well.
It also point you to a more complete document set of the ACLPUB,
which is included in the ACLPUB package itself.

Using other tools (such as Acobat) to compile the proceedings is possible
but not really recommended in terms of consistent style for all proceedings
of the conference. According to my previous experiences, this approach
also need more human effort. So it is not really recommended.

The authors also need to sign the copyright transfer form in order for
their works to be included to the proceedings.

In ACL-IJCNLP-2009, the main conference adopted an e-signature practice,
which is also used in some recent conferecnes.
We may use the same practice for ACL-2010 to simplify the copyright
transfer process.

An e-copy of the copyright transfer form will be installed to the final
submission page; the authors can transfer their copyright by typing
their names in the signature field of the e-form. No hardcopy copyright
transfer form will be collected under this practice.

For more specific problems related to publication agenda,
tchniques and tools, please send your questions to the
publication chairs: publications@acl2010.org.

Regards,

Jing-Shin Chang -^^-
Publication Co-chair

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The above "Letter to Workshop Chairs & Organizers" is abstracted
and revised from its counterpart for ACL-IJCNLP-09.

The full online version of the original document is available at
the following URL:

http://nlp.csie.ncnu.edu.tw/~shin/acl-ijcnlp2009/publication/howto/acl-ijcnlp09.workshop.proceedings.publication.txt

Book chairs may find more detailed technical information, which
was deleted in the above letter, from the full document.
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