Program Co-Chair Duties
The Program Co-Chairs are responsible for assembling the main conference program. Duties include:
- deciding on the areas/tracks (for reviewing purposes)
- selecting the Area Chairs
- overseeing the work of the Area Chairs, especially in selecting the program committee (reviewers)
- constructing and distributing the Call-for-Papers
- deciding on how posters are to be used; how many poster sessions to have
- deciding on whether to have separate deadlines for long and short papers; what the split between long and short should be in the final program
- overseeing the reviewing process (taking into account the recent push by ACL and EACL to try and develop a more diverse program at conferences, including the use at ACL of different review forms for different categories)
- overseeing any author response period as part of the reviewing process
- making the final selection of accepted papers (in close consultation with the Area Chairs)
- communicating the review results to authors
- overseeing the Best Paper Award (if the chairs decide to have one); creating the process by which any awards are decided (e.g. form a separate committee to make the decision)
- selecting invited speakers
- creating the conference program, including how short papers/posters are to be presented (e.g. "one minute madness talks")
- potentially introducing new innovations to the conference program (e.g. "NLP idol" talks at NAACL-12)
- regularly communicating with the General Chair
Some suggestions made by Jan Wiebe and Su Jian (program chairs for ACL-AFNLP 2009): http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Program_chair_suggestions
See also the detailed set of notes from Jason Eisner on how to be a program chair: http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~jason/advice/how-to-chair-a-conference.html
Adapted from the ACL Handbook. Stephen Clark. October, 2013