If you're reading this, it's likely because you've been asked to assemble an *ACL handbook. Congratulations!

You should start your preparation by clearing the entire week before the printed deadline --- really. The process of assembling the handbook is a little bit of scripting and auto-generation followed by an immense manual effort. You will take the proceedings from the various workshops and pieces of the main conference, use the scripts in the scripts/ subdirectory to generate some LaTeX, and then hand-assemble and munge everything until it is complete. Then you will pore through it finding and correcting errors. You will find many of these errors after you have uploaded the document to the printer, and the last errors will not be found until after printing has begun.

On the positive side, it can be a very satisfying endeavor, and you have the consolation that you are producing something very useful to all the conference attendees, and also something you will likely be credited for. Unlike the bulk of the work of conference organization, your labor is visible and immediate.

This guide is intended for Publications Chairs (who I think should be doing the job of assembling the handbook) and --- assuming my advice is not heeded --- the Handbook chair. I hope that the information provided here will be of some aid to you.

Contents of a good handbook

A good conference handbook should have the following

• A nice, customized cover
• Letters from the General Chair and PC Chairs
• Schedules for the main conference, workshops, and any co-located conferences
• Overviews for each day that summarize the main events
• An "at-a-glance" overview page for each parallel session listing times, locations, titles, and authors
• Abstracts for all papers presented in the main conference
• Full pages for special events (the banquet, business meeting, special awards and ceremonies)
• A perfect index, pointing to any and every mention of a name within the document, and containing no duplicate names (with spelling variations)
• A local guide with restaurants, area attractions, etc
• Sponsors and ads

Some terminology

• The conference proceedings is the book containing all the conference's accepted papers and hosted in the ACL anthology. This is also sometimes called the book. Typically, separate books are produced for short and long papers, the student research workshop, and demonstrations. This is in contrast to the conference handbook, which is used to navigate the actual conference, and which this repository helps you to build.

• ACLPUB is the tool used to assemble the proceedings for a conference. This was, I believe, written in the early 2000s by Jason Eisner and Philipp Koehn. It usually consists of a directory named proceedings/, within which are papers, paper metadata, files used to generate the proceedings PDF, and, most importantly for handbook, the order file, which specifies the conference schedule.

• START is the online system used to manage paper submission, reviewing, acceptance / rejection, and so on. It knows about ACLPUB, and provides interfaces for editing the order file (directly or via their ScheduleMaker tool) and for generating the proceedings.tgz files.

• Softconf is the company that develops START

• Subconferences. Conferences hosted in START are assigned a top-level directory, e.g., softconf.com/acl2014. Beneath this are individual "subconferences" representing the workshops and also pieces of the the main conference. Main conference papers are typically hosted at papers/, short papers at shortpapers, and so on for "demos", "srw", "tutorials", and "tacl". Different sessions are self-contained and isolated and do not know about each other or have the ability to reference each other. The main conference spreads across multiple sessions, while workshops are typically contained in a single one.

Main conference versus workshops

There are two main types of events you have to format for: the main conference, and workshops. The technical distinction pertinent to producing the handbook is that

• Main conferences are multi-track and require you to assemble schedules from multiple sessions whose schedules may be interleaved. Traditionally, these are main conference papers, short papers, demos, student research workshop papers, tutorials, and, since 2013, TACL papers.
• Workshops are single-track: the schedule and all papers are contained in a single session, e.g., softconf.com/acl2014/WMT14.

Workshops are fairly easy to format since everything is linear and typically abstracts are not printed. This can be done fairly automatically by generating the schedule from the order file, even if the workshop chairs are derelict in the their duties.

The main conference is another matter. The papers that are presented are contained in separate subconferences, whose separate schedules must be assembled and interleaved to produce the consolidated main conference schedule.

Notes for Publications Chairs

The downside of being the handbook chair is that there is all sorts of upstream events you have no power to enforce (except through friendly pub chairs) but that have a large impact on how difficult your job is. It will be helpful to read this section and pass this information on to the publications chairs, in the case where you are not them. In general, it is most helpful if the publications chairs are also responsible for the handbook (and this is what NAACL has done in 2013 and 2015), but if you are the "handbook chair" and are not also the pub chair, you should be in touch with them early and often to minimize the amount of hand-correction you'll have to do.

The single-most important thing you can do is to ensure that the "order" files are properly formatted, for the workshops, but most importantly, for all parts of the main conference proceedings.

The "order" file is a human- and machine-readable file that is part of the ACLPUB package (which Softconf's START system helps you assemble). It is used to generate the schedule in the proceedings, where computer-readability isn't very important, but it is also used to generate the schedules in the handbook, where computer-readability is very important, since the schedules from many different workshops and pieces of the main conference (papers, shortpapers, SRW, demos, tutorials, and, since 2013, TACL) are assembled.

Publications chairs should ensure the following:

• If at all possible, convince the PC chairs not to use START's "ScheduleMaker" tool. This is a complicated Excel front-end setup that generates the "order" file, which is already fairly simple to edit. They should just edit the order file directly. It is much simpler.

• The order files should be machine readable. Workshop chairs are sometimes tempted to play with the formatting lines in order to get a custom look, but this introduces a host of problems generating the handbook.

  To help ensure compliance, a script has been provided:

  cat papers/order | ./scripts/verify_schedule.py

• The main conference schedule --- the one containing all sorts of non paper-related events like "Lunch" and "Coffee Break" and "Keynote address" --- should be placed in the "papers" subconference, which represents the main conference proceedings. The other order files should contain only events relevant to those workshops. For example, do not repeat coffee breaks and lunches in the "shortpapers"; "shortpapers" should contain only lines listing days, session titles, and the papers that are presented in those sessions. This is to aid in merging the schedules for these subconferences into a single unified schedule: the code in scripts/ will group papers in identically-named sessions across files. While events like lunches could also be merged, it is better to just list them in one place so that changes to one file (e.g., you decide to rename "Coffee Break" to "Tea time" for this year's meeting in Cambridge) do not require changes to be made all over the place.

• Parallel sessions should be named using the convention "Session NL: NAME", where N is a session number (1..as many as necessary), L is a letter (A..number of parallel tracks), and NAME is the session name. Session names should be globally distinct. For example,

   = Session 6D: Machine Translation II
  

  This aids immensely in generating the handbook and also the poster placards that sit outside the rooms and provide a summary of all papers in each track.

• If papers are mixed across workshops (e.g., SRW papers mixed into a regular session), the session headers should be identical across the order files. e.g., in papers/order, you could have

   = Session 1D: Syntax, Parsing, and Tagging I 
   247 11:00--11:25 # Tagging The Web: Building A Robust Web Tagger with Neural Network   
  

  and in srw/order, you would put

   = Session 1D: Syntax, Parsing, and Tagging I
   6 10:10--10:35 # A Tabular Method for Dynamic Oracles in Transition-Based Parsing
   5 10:35--11:00 # Joint Incremental Disfluency Detection and Dependency Parsin
   12 11:25--11:50 # A Crossing-Sensitive Third-Order Factorization for Dependency Parsing
  

  The identical session name allows them to be merged and formatted automatically when you generate the handbook.

• TACL papers are a recent addition to *ACL conferences. Since TACL papers are published elsewhere, and are therefore not included with the conference proceedings, there is no ACLPUB package for them, and you must come up with an alternative. NAACL 2013 and ACL 2014, a fake subconference was created and the TACL papers were imported as if it TACL were a workshop. In NAACL 2015, we instead do the following:

  • Add the TACL papers to the file input/tacl_papers.yaml. This is a YAML-formatted document that is processed by the file scripts/tacl_builder.py to pull out the abstracts and paper metadata so they can be seamlessly integrated into the conference handbook.

  • Run the script:

    $ python2.7 ./scripts/tacl_builder.py Reading from file input/tacl_papers.yaml Write bibtex entries to auto/tacl/papers.bib Writing abstract auto/abstracts/tacl-485.tex ...

    This will generate the papers bibliography and the abstracts, which can then be treated like any paper.

  • In the main schedule (data/papers/order), you can now reference TACL papers using the format XXX/TACL, e.g.,

    498/TACL 11:05--11:30 # TACL-498: Extracting Lexically Divergent Paraphrases from Twitter %by Wei Xu, Alan Ritter, Chris Callison-Burch, William B. Dolan, and Yangfeng Ji

    The scripts that process this file will know how to transform this into a TACL paper reference, so long as it has been built from the TACL YAML file.

The order file

The script scripts/verify_schedule.py provides some minimal sanity-checking on the order file. Here is more detail on how to produce it and how to handle some common limitations.

The order file permits four types of lines

• Comments
• Papers. Papers are either presented in oral sessions or in poster sessions. They are denoted by a number, which is tied to the paper submission ID, and is used to locate the paper and the paper's metadata in proceedings/final/NUM/NUM_metadata.txt. Papers presented as part of oral sessions have time ranges, while papers presented as posters do not.
• '+' events, which are single events that have a time range but that are not associated with a paper. For example, lunch.
• Session headers, denoted by lines starting with '=', which are used to group together papers presented in a parallel track.

Here is an example schedule (from data/papers/proceedings/order):

+ 7:30--18:00 Registration
+ 7:30--9:00 Breakfast
+ 9:00--10:00 Invited talk II: Zoran Popovic
+ 10:00--10:30 Coffee break
= Session 4A: Machine Learning for NLP
321 10:30--10:55 # Kneser-Ney Smoothing on Expected Counts
605 10:55--11:20 # Robust Entity Clustering via Phylogenetic Inference
377 11:20--11:45 # Linguistic Structured Sparsity in Text Categorization
510 11:45--12:10 # Perplexity on Reduced Corpora

If you want to mix papers between sessions, make sure the session titles are the same. Here are snippets from data/papers/order

= Session 1D: Syntax, Parsing, and Tagging I
247 11:00--11:25 # Tagging The Web: Building A Robust Web Tagger with Neural Network

As mentioned above, we can also refer to TACL papers using something like the following (where the IDs correspond to those listed in input/tacl_papers.yaml):

= Session 1D: Syntax, Parsing, and Tagging I
6/TACL 10:10--10:35 # A Tabular Method for Dynamic Oracles in Transition-Based Parsing
5/TACL 10:35--11:00 # Joint Incremental Disfluency Detection and Dependency Parsin

These will be assembled automatically. Here's how to do a poster session:

+ 18:50--21:30 Poster and Dinner Session I: TACL Papers, Long Papers, Short Papers, Student Research Workshop; Demonstrations
249  # Interpretable Semantic Vectors from a Joint Model of Brain- and Text- Based Meaning
416  # Single-Agent vs. Multi-Agent Techniques for Concurrent Reinforcement Learning of Negotiation Dialogue Policies
161  # A Linear-Time Bottom-Up Discourse Parser with Constraints and Post-Editing
178  # Negation Focus Identification with Contextual Discourse Information
...  

Missing features

In START, the code used to verify the order file is not suited to the handbook. Their verification ensures only that each paper in the final version of the proceedings is listed exactly once. This prevents a number of common situations that people require.

1. Listing a paper more than once in the schedule.

   Some people want this, say, when a paper is provided with both an oral presentation and is also present in a poster session. This can't be done, however, in the current ACLPUB packages, which assert a bijection between accepted paper IDs and papers listed in the schedule (the schedule is used to determine the paper's order in the proceedings, and this helps ensure that no paper is forgotten or has an ambiguous place). In EMNLP 2014, working with the SoftConf folks, Yuval Marton arranged for a new notation, !, which is used to denote events that are a little more complicated than typical things like breaks, lunches, and so on, which use the '+' designator. You can use this to list a paper more than once and get it past START's verifications, e.g.,

   ! 11:05--11:30 Extracting Lexically Divergent Paraphrases from Twitter %by Wei Xu, Alan Ritter, Chris Callison-Burch, William B. Dolan, and Yangfeng Ji

   The '!' notation also permits keywords, some of which are parsed by the conference handbook code to create special formatting and to automatically add people to the index. e.g.,

   ! 09:00--10:10 Invited Talk: "A Quest for Visual Intelligence in Computers" %by Fei-fei Li

2. Publishing a paper in the proceedings but not listing it in the schedule.

   START won't allow this, but you can just comment out the paper in the schedule for the handbook and all will be well.

3. Listing a paper in the schedule that is not present in the proceedings.

   Sometimes there are papers not in the proceedings, but in the schedule, and you want the formatting to look the same. To accomplish this, you have to manually create new numbered entries for those papers in a separate proceedings tarball. Create new numbered entries and then the corresponding metadata in

   SUBCONF/final/NUM/NUM_metadata.txt
   

   The handbook code will then find what it needs, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

Layout

Now we get to assembling the handbook.

ACL 2014 had five parallel sessions. This should be useful for any handbook where parallel sessions are listed one per page with abstracts.

Directories:

• input/: fixed inputs

  • input/conferences.txt: list of conferences (used for auto-download)

• data/: where the ACLPUB tarballs are downloaded and unpacked to

• scripts/: scripts used to generate the handbook sections from the ACLPUB proceedings.

• content/: handbook tex files used to build the handbook

• auto/: the output of scripts, used to generate first-pass LaTeX that is then pulled manually into the handbook content.

Task list

• Download all the main conference proceedings and workshops using scripts/download-proceedings.sh (after editing input/conferences.txt). This creates a proceedings tarball in each of data/SUBCONF/proceedings.

• Verify each of them with scripts/verify_schedule.py:

    for file in $(ls data); do 
      num=$(cat data/$file/proceedings/order | ./scripts/verify_schedule.py > /dev/null 2>&1; echo $?) 
      if test $num -ne 0; then 
        echo -e "$file\t$num"
      fi
    done
  

• Generate the bibtex metadata from each workshop's paper metadata:

    for dir in $(ls data); do 
      [[ ! -d "auto/$dir" ]] && mkdir auto/$dir
      ./scripts/meta2bibtex.py data/$dir/proceedings/final $dir
    done
  

  This creates abstracts in auto/abstracts (read in via LaTeX calls to \paperabstract) and BibTeX metadata used for the index and other things (in auto/SUBCONF/papers.bib)

• Generate the workshop schedules:

   for dir in $(ls data); do 
     [[ ! -d "auto/$dir" ]] && mkdir auto/$dir
     cat data/$dir/proceedings/order | ./scripts/order2schedule_workshop.pl $dir > auto/$dir/schedule.tex
   done
  

  This leaves you with a ton of schedule.tex files which can be \inputed via LaTeX

• Edit content/workshops/overview.tex and content/workshops/workshops.tex to include these files and to be correct.

• Create the workshops bibtex entries in content/workshops/papers.bib. This is included in the main handbook.tex so that you can cite the workshop chairs and title automatically.

• Next, fill in the tutorials manually, editing content/tutorials/tutorials-001.tex and so on. Also edit the tutorial overview page in content/tutorials/tutorials-overview.tex.

• Generate the paper and poster session files (which you'll have to edit a bit afterwards):

   for name in tacl demos papers srw; do
       cat data/$name/order | ./scripts/order2schedule.perl $name
   done
  

• Generate the daily overviews, munge them a bit, pull them in

    cat data/{papers,shortpapers,demos,tacl,srw}/order | ./scripts/order2schedule_overview.py
  

• Email Dragomir Radev, who will run your index against the ACL Anthology Network, correcting spellings and collapsing redundancies.

Miscellaneous notes

• Take care to ensure the index is correct. Email Drago Radev who can help you consolidate names against the ACL Anthology.

• Mausam will cause you trouble. Grep for him. You want just the name, no {}s

• Also special characters in abstracts (e.g., a real alpha, funny latex, chinese, etc). Really this should all be converted over to XeTeX.

Suggestions for the future

The ACL proceedings and handbook play complementary roles. In one sense, the proceedings are the main product of a conference; their life is a long one, stretching into the future, serving up papers from the Anthology for years to come. However, if that were the only purpose of a conference, it would be a journal. The handbook is what allows people to quickly and easily navigate the physical space of the conference. Its utility may be rooted in a particular time and place, but it is equally a product of the conference and plays an important if ephemeral role in bringing people together.

Perhaps in part because of this rooting in a physical space, the task of generating the handbook in past years has fallen under the purview of the local arrangements chair. This is a mistake. The job is much better suited to the publications chair. This is true conceptually, but also because many of the tasks of handbook generation (in particular, ensuring machine-readable format of the order files) are redundant with work already undergone by the publications chairs, since a version of the schedule is also published in the proceedings.

Credits

This document was written by Matt Post during assembly of the NAACL 2013 and ACL 2014 handbooks. I inherited from Ulrich Germann the code and data he used to assemble the 2012 NAACL handbook. I don't know about any history prior to that.