Added short conference names

[mjpost]

This adds short conference names.

[akoehn]

Very good idea, I like it! Only two small comments.

[akoehn]

Maybe add a comment that the short title should have no year because it is usually used together with the year field?

[mjpost]

Sure.

[akoehn]

ACL -> Proceedings / Proc. of ACL ?

[mjpost]

"Proceedings of" could always be added automatically, and I think there are many situations where one just wants "ACL".

[davidweichiang]

What do you think about a separate field (<shortbooktitle>) rather than an attribute?

Should the short name be the name of the conference, or of the proceedings? If the conference, I think it should say "ACL" and not "Long Papers"; if the proceedings, I think it should say "Proceedings of."

Regarding the year, sometimes the official short name of the conference includes the year and can't always be removed easily, like "ACL-08: HLT". I think I've usually written "ACL: HLT" in bibliographies, but am not sure I would want that decision frozen in the Anthology. I think it's better to include the year and let a postprocessor remove it if desired.

Conference names aren't always consistent, especially with joint conferences (ACL vs ACL-EACL), two-digit vs four-digit years, and punctuation (ACL '97, ACL 97, ACL-97). Then there are unusual cases, like ACL-COLING 1984, whose short name was just "Coling84". We may have to make some guesses, and maybe we should have some principles for making those guesses (e.g., prefer four digit years, prefer a space before the year, prefer to hyphenate joint conferences, prefer to put volume name in parentheses).

[mjpost]

What do you think about a separate field () rather than an attribute?

I was wondering about this and like it better, so I'll switch it.

Should the short name be the name of the conference, or of the proceedings? If the conference, I think it should say "ACL" and not "Long Papers"; if the proceedings, I think it should say "Proceedings of."

I assumed that the short name was of the conference, and that it should still distinguish the volumes of the conference. Otherwise, we could do this much more succinctly at the venue level. In this case, I guess you and Arne are right that it should be "Proceedings of...".

Regarding the year, sometimes the official short name of the conference includes the year and can't always be removed easily, like "ACL-08: HLT". I think I've usually written "ACL: HLT" in bibliographies, but am not sure I would want that decision frozen in the Anthology. I think it's better to include the year and let a postprocessor remove it if desired.

I have only done a few of these, but I was trying to choose short names that were consistent with the original long volume name. Unfortunately there hasn't been a convention for this, and some conference proceedings names are a real mess (e.g., NAACL). I recently proposed to the ACL Exec and to chapters to standardize this, and we came up with an agreement. We also discussed about going back and standardizing old volumes (specifically for NAACL) but did not have consensus.

Conference names aren't always consistent, especially with joint conferences (ACL vs ACL-EACL), two-digit vs four-digit years, and punctuation (ACL '97, ACL 97, ACL-97). Then there are unusual cases, like ACL-COLING 1984, whose short name was just "Coling84". We may have to make some guesses, and maybe we should have some principles for making those guesses (e.g., prefer four digit years, prefer a space before the year, prefer to hyphenate joint conferences, prefer to put volume name in parentheses).

How do you know what its short name was?

I suggest that we ask Softconf to add a field to the meta file that specifically asks pubchairs for a short conference name, and provides some guidance.

[davidweichiang]

The guidelines that you made for future conferences look really good. For past conferences, I'd suggest deciding on an ordered list of where to look for the short name.

1. Proceedings title
2. Title page, cover, spine (I don't know how to rank these three)
3. Conference website banner
4. Retroactively apply the guidelines for current conferences

How do you know what its short name was?

Are you asking about ACL 1984? It's on the title page. Also, wow, check out that logo.

[mjpost]

Are you asking about ACL 1984? It's on the title page.

I didn't realize that books themselves sometimes specified what might be considered as the short title, in which case there is an official variant. I was just making up reasonable abbreviations.

Also, wow, check out that logo.

Interestingly, the ACL "C+L=a" is bolded, suggesting that this logo has a much earlier inception than a 2006 contest.

[akoehn]

I kind of forgot about this discussion until I saw the shortbooktitle in #586.

I assumed that the short name was of the conference, and that it should still distinguish the volumes of the conference. Otherwise, we could do this much more succinctly at the venue level. In this case, I guess you and Arne are right that it should be "Proceedings of...".

I don't know which case "this case" is, the first or the second?

The shortbooktitles are currently on the same level as the booktitles. In that case (and due to the naming) I would assume that they can be used interchangeably, .i.e. when writing something like this:

Great Author. Some great paper. 2020, ${booktitle}

then the following should look okay as well:

Great Author. Some great paper. 2020, ${shortbooktitle}

[mjpost]

I don't know which case "this case" is, the first or the second?

I meant that if we used a venue-level name, we should add "Proceedings of". But (a) I don't think we should use a venue-level name and (b) I am in favor of not having "Proceedings of" or "Proc.\ of" at all, since I think it adds nothing and undermines the goal of shortening. See for example the "In ACL" citation in this paper (last reference in the references section).

Yes, your idea of using $booktitle or $shortbooktitle interchangeably is exactly what I had thought. We could output both fields in the bibtex and then a style file could even choose which to use. We could also make use of it with acleanbib.

[davidweichiang]

What's a venue-level name?

One would have to count to check, but I believe "In ACL" citations are less common than "In Proc. ACL" or "In Proceedings of ACL". I personally find "In ACL" odd, like a type mismatch; "In ACL (Short Papers)" even more so.

Ideally, I think we should provide the raw information and let users reshape it according to their preferences. Since there's no standard short booktitle, I think we should give the full booktitle and (our best guess at) the short conference name, but not specify that the booktitle and short conference name should be interchangeable. So either

<booktitle>Proceedings of the 123rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers</booktitle>
<shortconf>ACL 2085</shortconf>

or possibly

<booktitle>Proceedings of <conference short="ACL 2085">the 123rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics</conference>: Volume 2, Short Papers</booktitle>

which might make it a bit easier to algorithmically generate a short booktitle.

Something similar could be done with the volume number/name, like

<booktitle>Proceedings of the 123rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers</booktitle>
<shortconf>ACL 2085</shortconf>
<volume>2</volume>
<voltitle>Short Papers</voltitle>

or

<booktitle>Proceedings of <conference short="ACL 2085">the 123rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics</conference>: Volume <volume>2</volume>, <voltitle>Short Papers</voltitle></booktitle>

[mjpost]

Closing until some later date.