Help Shape the ACL Anthology!

The ACL Anthology is a treasure. It is the repository of our community’s scientific contributions extending back over fifty years; its engine is nicely designed custom in-house software that still works well after almost two decades; and it has enabled research projects examining topics like author networks and topic shift over time. That all of this labor has been donated by its members further distinguishes the Anthology: it is not a found treasure, but one that has been crafted and shaped over countless hours, as if by a hundred Berninis, holding keyboards instead of chisels.

Over the next few years, we plan a focused effort to build on this remarkable achievement. To do this, we need your help, in the form of project leads and issue-based contributions to tasks in those projects. We have a number of short-term projects related to Anthology operations, and also ideas with longer time horizons that require input, shaping, and direction. In one of the project lead roles, you would have the opportunity to contribute to a substantial piece of the Anthology’s operations and future course.

• Anthology Publication Lead: Assist with the ingestion of conference proceedings and liaison with Softconf to improve and simplify the process (Apr/2019).
• Anthology Search & API Lead: Address issues with third-party search engines (Apr/2019). Help with the design and building of a custom Anthology-hosted search engine based on bibsearch (open-ended).
• Anthology Data Lead: Help ensure the integrity of existing and future data in the Anthology (Dec/2019).
• Anthology Aesthetics Lead: Improve the visual display of the Anthology on the web (Dec/2019).

These roles will be selected by the Director and persist as long or as short as you like.

If you do not have the interest or time to take on a leadership role, but are still interested in contributing, we are also looking for occasional contributors. People in such roles will work with Leads and the Director to dispatch issues on our GitHub page (which are often pieces of larger projects). Examples include:

• Investigate tools we might use for static site generation and write a small report.
• Write a Python script to convert the Anthology’s authoritative XML to a YAML database.
• Help crowdsource a list of name spelling variations so we can build consolidated author pages.
• Identify terms (ideally automatically) that should be protected for title casing, and issue a pull request.
• Handle individual requests for corrections (simple edits to authoritative XML)

We welcome volunteers with any relevant background and experience. You can register your interest or ask questions by emailing the Anthology Director, Matt Post, at anthology@aclweb.org.