Ethics Policy

Authors are required to honor the ethical code set out in the ACL Code of Ethics. The consideration of the ethical impact of our research, use of data, and potential applications of our work has always been an important consideration, and as artificial intelligence is becoming more mainstream, these issues are increasingly pertinent. We ask that all authors read the code, and ensure that their work is conformant to this code. Where a paper may raise ethical issues, we ask that you include in the paper an explicit discussion of these issues, which will be taken into account in the review process. We reserve the right to reject papers on ethical grounds, where the authors are judged to have operated counter to the code of ethics, or have inadequately addressed legitimate ethical concerns with their work.

Guidelines and Conventional Wisdom

Through experience and discussions among the Steering Committee members, the following traditions have been formed to facilitate organization of PACLIC conferences and publication of the proceedings volumes.

Local organizing chair:

• A local organizing chair represents the local community in charge of a PACLIC conference and is responsible for proposing and holding a conference, publishing a proceedings volume, and submitting a post-conference report to the steering committee in due time. A local organizing chair will participate in the PACLIC Steering Committee meetings and mailing list exchanges, in order that the conference and the proceedings volume conform to the mission, traditions and customs of the PACLIC conference series.
• A proposals to host a PACLIC conference should include: the proposed dates and venue for the conference, host institutions and supporting academic organizations, funding possibilities and estimates for budgets, expected number of participants, presentations and papers, and registration fees for various categories.
• A post-conference report should contain, the number and regional distribution of submissions, number of accepted papers and acceptance rates, number of participants for various categories and a financial report with a statement of income and expenditure in reasonable details.
• From PACLIC 18 until PACLIC 26, local organizing chair served a two-year term as an Ex-Officio member in the Steering Committee, starting one year in advance of the conference and ending one year afterward. (Here, “one year” means “one conference” and/or “one Steering Committee meeting”.)
• Starting with PACLIC 27, local organizing chair will serve a three-year term as an Ex-Officio member in the Steering Committee, starting two years in advance of the conference and ending one year afterward. (Here, “one year” means “one conference” and/or “one Steering Committee meeting”.)

Conference dates:

• default dates: Early winter, specifically around the beginning of December, is our established default conference dates to accommodate for different academic calendars of various regions. Organizers of each PACLIC conference should respect this schedule, unless there is strong reason(s) to change them.
• local decisions: The actual dates of each conference should be decided upon taking into consideration various local constraints and other relevant factors, such as local holiday schedules, international air travel seasons, climate and weather, religious and other constraints and availability and and rates of the conference venue and visitor accommodations.

Conference names and proceedings volume titles: The names of the conferences and the titles of the proceedings volumes should respect the following guidelines.

• conference names: The Xth Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation
• acronym: PACLIC X (YYYY): one space between PACLIC and X followed by another space and four digits for the year in parentheses For web page URLs and other designators, we allow for the omission of the space in between and the year designation may be optional.
• proceedings volume titles: Proceedings of the Xth Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation

Preventive measures for no-shows and compilation of proceeding volumes:

• collection of papers to be presented: The local organizers will distribute an electronic compilation of papers to be presented in the conference.
• proceedings volume: The local organizers will publish an electronic compilation of the proceedings volume within one month of the conference. This proceedings volume will contain only those papers that are actually presented.
• indexing: The local organizers will contact the ISI-indexing office as soon as the proceedings volume is published.
• electronic archiving: The local organizers will send the proceedings volume, together with its meta data to the Digital Archivist, as soon as the proceedings volume is published.

Policies regarding multiple submissions (of the same or substantially similar contents) to PACLIC and other conferences or collection of papers:

1. Starting with PACLIC 29, we require that author(s) declare upon submission any multiple submission(s) or intention to submit to multiple conferences, with a caution that failure to do so may lead to immediate disqualification of the paper.
2. Starting with PACLIC 28, the pro-formal letter for the authors to sign to confirm acceptance should include lines stating that the paper is original and does not contain any materials that may be considered to constitute copyright infringement or plagiarism; and the paper will be immediately withdrawn from any other conference(s) that it has been submitted to.

Policies regarding multiple submissions (of the same or substantially similar contents) to PACLIC and other conferences or collection of papers:

1. Starting with PACLIC 29, we require that author(s) declare upon submission any multiple submission(s) or intention to submit to multiple conferences, with a caution that failure to do so may lead to immediate disqualification of the paper.
2. Starting with PACLIC 28, the pro-formal letter for the authors to sign to confirm acceptance should include lines stating that
   • the paper is original and does not contain any materials that may be considered to constitute copyright infringement or plagiarism; and
   • the paper will be immediately withdrawn from any other conference(s) that it has been submitted to.

Policies regarding multiple submissions (of substantially different contents) to one PACLIC conference by the same author(s):

1. Starting with PACLIC 29, we will implement a policy of one unique first author for every paper in the final proceedings volume.
   • The program committee is responsible for making sure that this requirement is met.
   • We will not add new restrictions upon submission but let the authors know of our policy.
   • The program committee contacts any first author with two or more accepted papers and let her/him make their decisions.
2. Every first author needs to pre-register to be included in the program and to have the paper published in the proceedings volume.
   • The first author registration requirement will be checked at the time when the programme is to be finalized.
   • If needs arise, this registration requirement can be transferred to a yet unregistered co-author (especially, when the co-author will be the presenter).

Compilation of the proceedings volumes:

• Starting with the Proceedings of the 31st Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, the ISSN for the proceedings is 2619-7782.
• Each contributor(s) for a given proceedings volume should keep the copyright for their contribution. Publishers of the proceedings volumes (paper-bound, electronic, and/or online), namely the organizing committees (and/or the steering committee) are licensed to publish those contributed papers in the proceedings volumes and hold their copyright as compiled work. This understanding has to be recorded as signed license agreements between the contributors and the publishers.
• The examples for non-English languages should appear in the papers in the following format:
  1. (optional) in the parochial scripts such as Chinese characters, Hangul, Kana and so on
  2. (obligatory) in alphabetized form
  3. (obligatory) gloss
  4. (obligatory) translation into English
• file formats: Authors should be allowed to prepare their files both in Word formats and using LaTeX. As a middle ground, the local organizing committee should accept PDF files and provide sample Word files and LaTeX style files to the authors. Those sample files have been passed on from one PACLIC conference to another, but we may consider adopting some other formats established elsewhere in the related community such as Springer LNC format.
• copyright license agreement: Editors of each PACLIC proceedings volume should obtain and keep a signed copy of copyright license agreement with author(s) of each contributed paper in the volume, to the effect that copyright of those papers (inclusive of their titles and abstracts) is licensed jointly to the pertinent Organizing Committee (or some such entity) and PACLIC Steering Committee, and any organization or entity that may inherit functions of those committees, for publication in Proceedings, paper-based, CD-ROM and/or on the web archives, and on the relevant web pages produced for the pre-announcement and post-report of the PACLIC conference, while authors retain copyright of the contributed papers. Use of electronic submission systems with which a third party can presume such license agreement between the authors and the committees may substitute exchange of signed agreements.
• copyright notices:
• Each contributed paper should contain a copyright notice in the first page of their camera-ready version, so that when readers download electronically archived files, copyright information would accompany those files and their hard-copies. An example follows:
  • Copyright © 2009 Sachiko Shudo and Yasunari Harada All rights reserved.
• Each proceedings volume should contain a copyright notice designating the publisher and copyright holder of the proceedings volume and those of each paper in the volume. An example follows:
• Copyright © 2010 PACLIC 24 Organizing Committee and PACLIC Steering Committee All rights reserved. Copyright of contributed papers reserved by respective authors.
• electronic versions of the proceedings volumes:
  • A CD-ROM compilation or other electronic version should be produced for each conference.
  • Those electronic versions should contain all pages for the paper-bound proceedings volumes, including covers, foreword, copyright notice(s), committee member listings, acknowledgements, a table of contents and so on.
  • The PDF files for the papers should contain headers, footers and page numbers so that any page in the paper-bound version can be reproduced in its entirety from the electronic version.
  • The PDF files for the papers should be named in such a way that would make it easier for various parties to identify the files with the papers and meta-data. A possible generic format for file names might be something like:
    • PACLICX-sss-nnn where X stands for the number of the conference, sss the first page of the paper, nnn the last page of the paper.
• meta-data compilation: The local organizing committee should compile meta-data for each paper in the proceedings volume for digital archiving including:
  • author(s): family_name (surname) followed by a comma followed by a blank space followed by given_name (first name), in case of multiple authors, delimited by a semi-colon and a blank space example 1 (single author), Huang, Chu-Ren example 2 (multiple authors), Yasunari Harada; Coe, Jae-Woong
  • rights: same as authors above
  • title
  • start page
  • end page
  • type: Conference Paper
  • language ISO 639-2 (Library of Congress): eng
  • issue date: common to all papers in the same volume
  • example: 2009
  • publisher: common to all papers in the same volume example: PACLIC 14 Organizing Committee
  • Journal title example: PACLIC 14 : 14th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation : Proceedings : February 15-17, 2000, Waseda University International Conference Center, Tokyo, Japan
  • type.dcmi: text
  • textversion: publisher
• archiving and indexing: The local organizing team should make sure to supply necessary information and material to the following archiving and indexing parties.
  • digital archiving: The local organizing team should send one paper-bound volume (if applicable) and one electronic version to the digital archivist along with a compiled set of meta-data for the papers and the volume for archiving in the Waseda University Library D Space Collection.
  • ACL Anthology archiving: The local organizing team should send one electronic version with a compiled set of meta-data to the ACL office for archiving.
    • The ACL anthology format is available at: [http://aclweb.org/anthology//importing.html]
    • PACLIC Proceedings Code is ‘Y’.
  • ISI Indexing: The local organizing team should send one paper-bound volume (if applicable) and one electronic version to the ISI office for indexing.
  • SCOPUS Indexing: The local organizing team should contact the SCOPUS office for indexing.
  • physical archiving: The local organizing team should donate one copy to be kept at the university library of the conference host institution, if applicable. Another copy should be sent to the British Library to be included in the databases Proceedings First. Ohio State University Libraries welcome PACLIC proceedings volumes.

Program organizations:

• sessions: In order to promote interactions among researchers working in related but different research fields regarding languages in the Pacific-Asia and other areas of the world, it is desirable that the main conference program run along single plenary sessions, although the local organizing committee should make the final decisions. Recent increase in paper submission seems to necessitate multi-track program organization.
  • Setting up poster and/or interactive and/or student sessions are encouraged.
  • Setting up multiple para-sessions are not encouraged but seems unavoidable.
• “Keynote Speaker(s)” and “Invited Papers”: Organizers should consult among themselves and with the Steering Committee members regarding recommendation and selection of “Keynote Speaker(s)” and “Invited Papers.”
  • One up to three “Keynote Speaker(s)” should be invited to give a talk in the conference, depending on funding. Round trip travel expenses, local accommodation and daily expenses should be covered and the registration fee(s) should be waived. Local organizers can consider one from within the host country/region both to reduce cost and to promote local research excellence.
  • Around three “Invited Papers” should be selected in the conference. The registration fees for one presenter of “invited papers” should be waived and if funding allows accommodation and daily expenses could be covered. “Invited papers” are typically invited to increase visibility and impact of outstanding and/or promising academic leaders from within the PACLIC community. Invited papers are required to submit full papers to PACIC proceedings.

Considerations when choosing conference sites:

• local support in terms of funding and facilities
• location: international access to the conference venue and cost for attending the meeting, such as air-tickets, hotels, conference fee, taxi fares, food and so on
• local attractions and potential for pre- and post-conference activities
• past records of hosting international conferences
• proposed conference programs
• other touristic issues such as visa applications, environment, health issues and so on
• rotation: Initially, PACLIC conferences rotated among Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Japan, and continued with occasional changes of orders and insertion of other sites. Recently, China, Philippines and Indonesia joined in the rotation.