Following the decision of the ACL Executive Committee, which was announced at the ACL Business Meeting this year in Portland, we are now happy to launch the TACL journal - Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

TACL targets papers of quite similar scope to our current (long) conference papers. Papers published at TACL will also receive a presentation slot at the annual ACL conference. TACL is thus intended to become an additional submission venue for presentation at the conference, coupled with fast turnaround journal-style reviewing and a journal publication. In the future, additional conferences may join as presentation venues for TACL papers. While coupling with a conference presentation is a major feature of TACL, authors may choose to avoid such presentation.

The first two co-editors of TACL are Michael Collins and Dekang Lin, who will lead the journal setup and operation. The journal is expected to open for submissions in spring 2012, with papers accepted by a pre-set deadline receiving a presentation slot at ACL-2013. Additional details will be provided in the near future on the journal website and in a call for papers.

You are all welcome to plan your submissions to TACL!

Ido Dagan
Past President of the ACL
On behalf of the ACL Executive Committee

I am happy to announce that the ACL Executive Committee has approved the creation of an ACL Fellows program, which recognizes ACL members whose contributions to the field have been most extraordinary. To be named a Fellow, a candidate must have been a member of the ACL for the past three consecutive years and be nominated by a current ACL member.

Seventeen ACL members are among the founding group of Fellows. Each of these 2011 Fellows has been a major force in computational linguistics, and each has been a member of ACL for the last three years. Please see the list at http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Fellows and congratulate them!

A small group of new Fellows will be announced each year. If you would like to nominate a candidate, please make your nomination at http://www.aclweb.org/portal/nominations. If you are unsure about a candidate's eligibility, please send a query to . A nominator must provide a comprehensive case for the candidate and solicit two additional recommendations. The nominator should direct the recommenders to fill out recommendation forms (ACL will not contact individual recommenders or solicit letters). All forms submitted by October 1 of a given year will be considered, and submitted forms will be kept confidential.

Regards,
Kevin Knight, ACL President
on behalf of the ACL Executive Committee

I am happy to announce that two new ACL members will join the exec as of January 1, 2012:

• vice-president-elect: Gertjan van Noord, University of Groningen, the Netherlands
• member: Jian Su, Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore

They replace Ido Dagan (current past president) and Lori Levin (member). The ACL exec acknowledges Lori and Ido for their for the hard work they devoted to ACL during their terms.

Our 2011 president, Kevin Knight, will stay on the board as past president for a year. We welcome our current vice-president Ken Church to the position of ACL president for 2012.

We are pleased to announce the outcome of the elections for new members of the ACL board for 2011:

• VP-Elect: Haifeng Wang
• Board Member: Renata Vieira
• Secretary: Dragomir Radev

We congratulate the elected candidates, and we thank all those members who voted in the election.

CICLing 2012, www.cicling.org/2012, will be held in New Delhi, India, on March 11–17, 2012. Submission deadline: October 31. Keynote speakers: Srinivas Bangalore, John Carroll, Salim Roukos, Bonnie Webber.