To all “book chairs”, i.e., those who are organizing workshops or special sessions held in conjunction with NAACL HLT 2009.

Once you have finished reviewing your papers and putting together your programs, you are ready to collect camera-ready copy from your authors. This message will help you take the next steps. Please consider this page to be your handbook.

Christy Doran and I are the publications chairs for NAACL-HLT 2009. In addition to assembling the proceedings for the main conference, part of our job is to help you assemble your own camera-ready proceedings for your workshop or special session. In the jargon of ACL publications, you are a “book chair”. Our objective is to help you to produce your digital proceedings in the right format for the printer and for electronic media. We provide the tools, answer questions, and give feedback. Once you have built your digital proceedings, we take it from there and work with the printer to produce the volumes in hard copy, on DVD-ROM, and on the ACL anthology. We also coordinate with the printer to have the materials delivered to the conference venue.

To help you succeed, we are providing the following recipe. Please read this now and take action.

We assume that you are using START to collect camera-ready papers. If you have not already done so, please log in now, and update the START page that accepts the camera-ready copy. This will improve the page so that it collects copyright transfer signatures and revised author/title information, as was done for the main conference.

You should log into your START account, go to the Manager's Console, under the heading “Final Submissions”, click on the tool/link called “Setup Final Submissions”, push the SAVE button at the bottom of the page, and continue as appropriate.

You want to do this before your authors upload their final papers.

If you are not planning to use START to collect camera-ready papers, you will need to make alternative arrangements for collecting copyright forms and to manually organize your data for use by the publications scripts.

Please tell your authors to visit the following site for instructions about camera-ready formatting and copyright:

http://nlp.cs.byu.edu/mediawiki/index.php/NAACL_2009_Publications

Note that this page is designed for the main conference. If you would like, you may copy this page and adapt it specifically to your workshop.

Also remind your authors that they must click through ACL's Copyright Transfer Agreement. If any of them uploaded to START before you followed the instructions in step #1 above, then they won't have had a chance to do this and should re-upload.

The scripts make production relatively easy, especially if you are using START. If you are uncomfortable using command-line tools, you will want to recruit someone to help you with the assembly of the proceedings.

The scripts help you produce a LaTeX book that includes all of the individual PDF papers together with a preface, table of contents, session schedule, author index, etc. You can edit the LaTeX directly if you want to do something non-standard.

The scripts also feed into our DVD-ROM production process and into the ACL Anthology.

Download the ACLPUB tools from the JHU CVS repository by following the directions here:

http://www.cis.udel.edu/~carberry/ACL/publications-repository-access.txt

Another copy of those directions is located here:

http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~ringger/naacl09/howto.html

As you can see from this guide, there are a number of things that you will have to do as a book chair in order to get a satisfactory proceedings. It should only take a few hours. Beyond producing a preface, other steps include setting the times of the program, adjusting the vertical offset of non-compliant papers, checking for copyright signatures, etc.

Ask us questions if you get stuck (reach us at [mailto:naacl09pub@gmail.com naacl09pub@gmail.com] )

For the workshops, we need your proceedings by April 26. For the other special sessions, we will follow up with you regarding workable deadlines. If you can produce them sooner, we would definitely appreciate that, as it will help us detect problems early.

During production we will add cover art and an ISBN number for your proceedings

For the workshops:

• Mar 30, 2009 Notification of paper acceptances (alert us if you are deviating significantly from this)
• Apr 12, 2009 Camera-ready copies due to workshop chairs
• Apr 26, 2009 Proceedings due to publications chairs (Christy & Eric)
• June 4-5, 2009 NAACL HLT 2009 workshops

Feel free to send questions.

Best regards,<br> Eric Ringger and Christy Doran<br> [mailto:naacl09pub@gmail.com naacl09pub@gmail.com]<br> Your NAACL-HLT 2009 Publications Chairs