Newsletter 2021
Membership
The ACL membership continues to grow rapidly in 2021. We expect to close 2021 with almost XXX members! You can now renew your membership through the ACL portal: http://www.aclweb.org/portal/ or you can renew when you register for an ACL affiliated conference.
Outgoing Exec Members
The following people are leaving the exec:
- Hinrich Schütze (ACL VP-elect (2018), VP (2019), President (2020), Past President (2021))
- Nitin Madnani (ACL Member at-large, 2019-2021)
- Colin Cherry (NAACL Chair, 2020-2021)
I would like to thank all of you for your hard work as members of the exec and wish you luck in your future endeavors!
New Exec Members
We have four new members joining the exec as of January 1, 2022. These are:
- Emily M. Bender (ACL VP-elect)
- Mohit Bansal (ACL member at-large)
- XXX (NAACL Chair)
Welcome to Emily, Mohit, and XXX!
The full list of Exec members is here: http://www.aclweb.org/portal/about
The next elections will take place in the Fall of 2022.
New Exec-plus Positions and Directors
The ACL Exec approved the second term of Nitin Madnani as ACL Information Director, from 2022 to 2024.
The ACL Exec approved Donia Scott as PCC Chair (replacing Emily M. Bender) starting 1/1/2022 for a term of five years.
The full list of Exec-plus members can also be found here: http://www.aclweb.org/portal/about
ACL Ethics Committee
ACL has established an Ethics Committee. The members of the committee are as follows:
- Chairs:
- Karën Fort, Min Yen Kan, Yulia Tsvetkov
- Members:
- Luciana Benotti, Mark Dredze, Pascale Fung, Dirk Hovy, Jin-Dong Kim, Malvina Nissim
The term of the co-chairs is five years, through the end of 2026, while the term of the members is three years, through the end of 2024.
The ACL Ethics Committee is formed to provide a continuous and consistent platform for dealing with potential ethical concerns raised within ACL events and the ACL community. The focus of this committee is to provide guidance and address considerations of what constitutes ethical research.
ACL Lifetime Achievement Award
The winner of the ACL 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award (LTA) was Junichi Tsujii.
https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/junichi-tsujii-receives-2021-acl-lifetime-achievement-award
The 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award will be announced during the ACL 2022 conference.
For a list of past winners, visit: https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Lifetime_Achievement_Award_Recipients
ACL Distinguished Service Award
The 2021 winner of the Distinguished Service Award is Lillian Lee, for continuous sustained and extended service to the Transactions of the ACL (TACL).
https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/lillian-lee-receives-2021-acl-distinguished-service-award
The 2022 Distinguished Service Award will be announced during the ACL 2022 conference.
For a list of past winners, visit: https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Distinguished_Service_Award_Recipients
ACL Test-of-Time Awards
The ACL Test-of-Time Paper Award recognizes up to four papers for their long-lasting impact on the field of Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics: two papers from 25 years earlier, and two papers from 10 years earlier.
The 2021 winners of the 1996 Test-of-Time Paper Award are:
- Adam Berger, Stephen Della Pietra, Vicent Della Pietra. A Maximum Entropy Approach to Natural Language Processing. Computational Linguistics, Volume 22, Number 1, March 1996.
- Jean Carletta. Assessing Agreement on Classification Tasks: The Kappa Statistic. Computational Linguistics, Volume 22, Number 2, June 1996.
The 2021 winners of the 2011 Test-of-Time Paper Award are:
- Maite Taboada, Julian Brooke, Milan Tofiloski, Kimberly Voll, Manfred Stede. Lexicon-Based Methods for Sentiment Analysis. Computational Linguistics, Volume 37, Issue 2, June 2011.
- Myle Ott, Yejin Choi, Claire Cardie, Jeff Hancock. Finding Deceptive Opinion Spam by Any Stretch of the Imagination. Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies.
For a list of past winners, visit: https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Test-of-Time_Papers_Award_Recipients
ACL Fellows
The ACL Nominating Committee has selected the following new fellows for 2020:
Philip Cohen (Openstream, Inc.)
- For significant contributions to the study of communicative action and dialogue, and to the theory and practice of multimodal interaction.
Pascale Fung (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
- For significant contributions toward statistical NLP, comparable corpora, and building intelligent systems that can understand and empathize with humans.
Iryna Gurevych (Technische Universität Darmstadt)
- For theoretical and practical contributions to deep learning models for NLP, and computational argumentation, and for services to the ACL and the German NLP Community.
Dan Jurafsky (Stanford University)
- For contributions to computational linguistics that both broaden its societal impact and advance our understanding of human communication.
Hermann Ney (RWTH Aachen University)
- For significant contributions to machine translation and speech recognition.
Philip Resnik (University of Maryland)
- For significant contributions to symbolic-statistical methods for natural language processing, multilinguality, and the interdisciplinary study of language.
Donia Scott (University of Sussex)
- For significant contributions to natural language generation, particularly in the areas of discourse processing, multilinguality, and knowledge-editing.
Noah Smith (University of Washington)
- For significant contributions to linguistic structure prediction, computational social sciences, and improving NLP research methodology.
Kam-Fai Wong (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
- For significant contributions to social media processing, particularly in Chinese information retrieval, opinion mining, microblog processing and rumour detection.
Congratulations to the new fellows!
For more information about the ACL Fellows Program, please refer to https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Fellows_Program
The list of current ACL fellows can be found here: https://aclweb.org/aclwiki/ACL_Fellows
EACL 2021
EACL 2021 will be held from 19 to 23 of April, 2021. While we were planning to hold the conference in Kyiv, due to the current COVID situation the conference will be held entirely online.
Important Dates
- Submission deadline (long and short papers): 7 October 2020
- Tutorials and workshops: 19–20 April, 2021
- Main conference: 21–23 April, 2021
For more information of EACL 2021: https://2021.eacl.org/
NAACL-HLT 2021
NAACL-HLT 2021 is currently scheduled to take place in Mexico City, Mexico from June 6th to June 11th, 2021. The Organizing Committee is monitoring the ongoing global pandemic and will update the conference plans (e.g. moving to a virtual or hybrid format) as needed closer to the conference dates.
Important Dates
- Author Response Period: January 20 – 25, 2021
- Notification of acceptance: March 10, 2021
- Camera ready papers due: April 11, 2021
- Final notification for papers requiring ethics re-review: April 30, 2021
- Publication date: May 24, 2021
- Conference date: June 6–11, 2021
For more information of NAACL-HLT 2021: https://2021.naacl.org/
ACL-IJCNLP 2021
The Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2021) is being organized and will be held in Bangkok, Thailand, from August 1st to 6th, 2021. However, the format of the ACL-IJCNLP 2021 conference will depend on the situation of pandemic.
Important Dates
- Anonymity period begins: January 1, 2021
- Abstract deadline (long & short papers): January 25, 2021
- Submission deadline (long & short papers): February 1, 2021
- Author response period: March 25-31, 2021
- Notification of acceptance: May 5, 2021
- Camera-ready due: June 1, 2021
- Tutorials: August 1, 2021
- Main Conference: August 2–4, 2021
- Workshops: August 5–6, 2021
For more information of the ACL-IICNLP 2021 conference: https://2021.aclweb.org/
EMNLP 2021
EMNLP 2021 will take place from the 7th to the 11th of November 2021, hopefully in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, but possibly online depending on the development of the covid situation.
For more information of the EMNLP 2021 conference: https://2021.emnlp.org/
ACL 2022
ACL 2022 will be held in Dublin, Ireland, May 22-28, 2022.
ACL 2023
ACL invites proposals to host the annual ACL conference in the Americas in July or August 2023. At this time, we seek preliminary draft proposals from prospective bidders in relevant regions. Promising bidders will be asked to provide additional information for the final selection.
ACL 2023 will be organized in collaboration with NAACL. The ACL 2023 Coordinating Committee will select the General Chair and the Program Committee Co-Chairs for the conference. Draft proposals should identify Local Arrangements Chair(s), who will work with the General Chair and the Coordinating Committee to develop a detailed plan and budget.
Important dates:
- December, 2020: Call for bids
- February 26, 2021: Notify intention to submit proposal
- April 23, 2021: Draft proposals due
- Through June 1, 2021: Feedback to bidders
- June 25, 2021: Final bids due
- August, 2021: Bid selected and site announced during ACL 2021
For any queries please contact Tim Baldwin (tb@ldwin.net: ACL2023 Coordinating Committee Chair), or Priscilla Rasmussen (acl.rasmussen@gmail.com).
Please send notifications of intent and draft proposals to: Tim Baldwin (tb@ldwin.net)
Read more: https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/call-bids-host-acl-2023
2020 Reports from ACL Officers
Q1 reports: http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q1_Reports
Q3 reports: http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports
ACL Resolutions
The list of ACL resolutions: https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Resolutions
Sincerely,
Shiqi Zhao, ACL secretary