[HPSG-L] business meeting at hpsg 2015 Singapore

[Arnold, Doug]

Dear Colleagues,

This is a very brief note about what happened at the Business Meeting that took place at the 22nd International Conference on HPSG in Singapore a few days ago.

- I gave a short report on the activity of the Standing Committee, the main item of which was to re-announce that next year the conference will take place in Warsaw, jointly with LFG. There are still quite a lot of open questions (e.g. what will it be called? who will the PC chair(s) be?), but the meeting expressed thanks to Anne (Abeillé), and Aaron (Broadwell) for the work they put in working out how many other aspects of the conference should work, and to Adam (Przepiórkowski) for offering to host the conference in Warsaw.

- Emily (Bender) gave a short report as Programme Chair. The acceptance rate was very high but this is not a bad thing so long as the papers are relevant and of presentable quality. Apart from thanking her and the Programme Committee for putting together an interesting, and well-themed conference.

- Francis (Bond) gave a short report as Chair of the Local Organising Committee. We thanked him, and the rest of the committee, and there was general agreement that the whole event had been very well organised, and that many things (like the food, the room, and the technical support) had been excellent.

- Any Other Business. 

 1. This year, the refereeing process was only partly anonymous, in the following sense. Submissions were reviewed anonymously, but during the discussion phase, the identity of reviewers was visible to other reviewers (but not, of course to authors). This is standard practice in many conferences, where it seems to raise the standard of reviews by eliminating really dreadful (e.g. rude or dismissive) ones (though this has not generally been a problem with reviews for HPSG). Views were expressed on both sides, including the observation that de-anonymising might make the reviewing processes more demanding, because referees might feel the need to respond to named to comments from other named referees, where they would not feel such a need if the process were anonymous. I think everyone agreed that this year’s procedure had been a useful experiment, but that the issue was complicated enough, and balanced enough, that one should not impose a changed procedure on future PCs or PC chairs.

2. Gert (Webelhuth) raised the issue of length of abstracts. Our current, and historical, practice is to require 5 page abstracts. This has advantages, but may put off some potential contributors, especially younger ones. It was noted that in LFG the practice is to have 2-page abstracts, and that the current proposal for next-year’s going conference is to call for abstracts of between 2 and 5 pages, so it might serve as a kind of experiment. It was suggested that the Standing Committee should keep the matter under review.

I am stepping down as Chair of the Standing Committee, the Standing Committee rules say that the Standing Committee chooses the Chair from among the committee members, and they are doing that at the moment. So this may be my last mail as Chair (though I suppose I might send another telling you who the new Chair is). It’s been an honour, and a privilege, and it’s been fun.  

Best wishes
Doug
(Chair of Standing Committee for HPSG) 


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Doug Arnold,                       doug at essex.ac.uk
Dept. of Language & Linguistics,   http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~doug
University of Essex,               Room: 4.412
Wivenhoe Park,                     Tel: +44 1206 872084 (direct)
Colchester, CO4 3SQ, UK.           Fax: +44 1206 872198
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