Association for Computational Linguistics
 | |
| Founded | 1962 |
|---|---|
| Type | professional organization |
| Focus | Computational linguistics / natural language processing |
| Origins | Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics |
Area served | Worldwide |
| Method | Conferences, publications |
| Website | www |
The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the international scientific and professional society for people working on problems involving natural language and computation. An annual meeting is held each summer in locations where significant computational linguistics research is carried out. It was founded in 1962, originally named the Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics (AMTCL). It became the ACL in 1968.[1]
The ACL has a European (EACL)[2], a North American (NAACL)[3], and an Asian (AACL)[4] chapter.
The ACL journal, Computational Linguistics, is the primary forum for research on computational linguistics and natural language processing. Since 1988, the journal has been published for the ACL by MIT Press.[5][6]
History
The ACL was founded in 1962 as the Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics (AMTCL). The initial membership was about 100. In 1965 the AMTCL took over the journal Mechanical Translation and Computational Linguistics. This journal was succeeded by many other journals: American Journal of Computational Linguistics (1974—1978, 1980—1983), and then Computational Linguistics (1984—present).[7]
The annual meeting was first held in 1963 in conjunction with the Association for Computing Machinery National Conference.[8] The annual meeting was, for much time, relatively informal and did not publish anything lengthier than abstracts. By 1968, the society took on its current name, the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). The publishing of the annual meeting's Proceedings of the ACL began in 1979, and gradually matured into its modern form.[7] Many of the meetings were held in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America, and a few with the American Society for Information Science and Cognitive Science Society.[8]
The United States government sponsored much research from 1989 to 1994, leading to a maturing of the ACL, characterised by an increase in author retention rates and an increase in research in some key topics, such as speech recognition. By the 21st century, the society was able to maintain authors at a high rate who coalesced in a more stable arrangement around individual research topics.[9]
In 2020, the annual meeting of the ACL for the first time received more submissions from China than from the United States, reflecting the increasing geographical diversity of the society.[10]
Special Interest Groups
ACL has a large number of Special Interest Groups (SIGs), focusing on specific areas of natural language processing. Some current SIGs within ACL are:[11]
| SIG | Description |
|---|---|
| SIGANN | Linguistic Annotation |
| SIGBIOMED | Biomedical Language Processing |
| SIGDAT | Linguistic data and corpus-based approaches |
| SIGDIAL | Dialogue Processing |
| SIGFSM | Finite State Methods |
| SIGGEN | Natural Language Generation |
| SIGHAN | Chinese Language Processing |
| SIGHUM | Language Technologies for the Socio-Economic Sciences and the Humanities |
| SIGLEX | Lexicon: the umbrella organization for the SemEval semantic evaluations and SENSEVAL word-sense evaluations |
| SIGMT | Machine Translation |
| SIGMOL | Mathematics of Language |
| SIGMORPHON | Computational Morphology and Phonology |
| SIGNLL | Natural Language Learning |
| SIGPARSE | Natural Language Parsing |
| SIGSEM | Computational Semantics |
| SIGSEMITIC | Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages |
| SIGSLAV | NLP for Slavic Languages |
| SIGSLPAT | Speech & Language Processing for Assistive Technologies |
| SIGTYP | Typology |
| SIGWAC | Web as Corpus |
Presidents
Each year the ACL elects a distinguished computational linguist who becomes vice-president of the organization in the next calendar year and president one year later. Recent ACL presidents are:[12]
| Year | Name |
|---|---|
| 2021 | Rada Mihalcea |
| 2020 | Hinrich Schütze |
| 2019 | Zhou Ming |
| 2018 | Marti Hearst |
| 2017 | Joakim Nivre |
| 2016 | Pushpak Bhattacharyya |
| 2015 | Chris Manning |
| 2014 | Gertjan van Noord |
| 2013 | Haifeng Wang |
| 2012 | Ken Church |
| 2011 | Kevin Knight |
| 2010 | Ido Dagan |
| 2009 | Steven Bird |
| 2008 | Bonnie Dorr |
| 2007 | Mark Steedman |
| 2006 | Jun'ichi Tsujii |
| 2005 | Martha Palmer |
| 2004 | Johanna Moore |
| 2003 | Mark Johnson |
| 2002 | John Nerbonne |
| 2001 | Eduard Hovy |
| 2000 | Wolfgang Wahlster |
References
- ^ "What is the ACL and what is Computational Linguistics? | ACL Member Portal". www.aclweb.org. Retrieved 21 October 2017.
- ^ "EACL Home". www.eacl.org. Retrieved 21 October 2017.
- ^ Sarkar, Anoop. "NAACL: North American Chapter of the ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics)". naacl.org. Retrieved 21 October 2017.
- ^ "AACL: Asia-Pacific Chapter of the ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics)". aaclweb.org. Retrieved 15 February 2022.
- ^ "List of Issues | Computational Linguistics | MIT Press Journals". www.mitpressjournals.org. Retrieved 21 October 2017.
- ^ "Computational Linguistics". cljournal.org. Retrieved 21 October 2017.
- ^ a b Jones, Karen Sparck (1994). "Some Notes on ACL History". ACL. Retrieved 10 February 2021.
- ^ a b Walker, Donald E. (1982). "Reflections on 20 Years of the ACL: An Introduction". 20th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- ^ Anderson, Ashton; Jurafsky, Dan; McFarland, Daniel A. (2012). "Towards a Computational History of the ACL: 1980-2008". Proceedings of the ACL-2012 Special Workshop on Rediscovering 50 Years of Discoveries. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- ^ Chai, Joyce; Schluter, Natalie; Tetreault, Joel. "ACL2020: General Conference Statistics". ACL2020. Association for Computational Linguistics. Retrieved 10 February 2021.
- ^ "Special Interest Groups | ACL Member Portal". www.aclweb.org. Retrieved 21 October 2017.
- ^ "ACL Officers - Admin Wiki". www.aclweb.org. Retrieved 21 October 2017.
