President's Report
Edouard Hovy

In the near-decade since Don Walker's passing, the ACL has undergone an
almost continual series of changes.  Mostly the changes were required to
make the Association run more smoothly.  Many of them resulted form the
fact that except for the Business Office manager, all its operations are
performed by volunteers, often inexperienced, all with limited time.

The first phase of these changes focused simply on understanding how to run
the Association: how the bank accounts were managed, how conferences were
initiated and managed, even just where the archives were.  In 1996, a
report written by Eduard Hovy and Kathy McCoy (available at
http://www.aclweb.org/archive/HovyReport.html) outlined a number of
problems plaguing the Association, and recommended changes.  Over
subsequent years, many of these problems were addressed: ACL now has a
North American Chapter, and is in discussion with several NLP associations
and groups in Asia about forming some kind of regional presence there;
elections for ACL officers now have more than one candidate per position;
the VP-Elect position provides a longer training runway for the eventual
President; the position of Secretary-Treasurer has been split into two, and
so on.

Throughout this time, despite a period of decline in membership, the ACL
has remained financially and interpersonally healthy, and has succeeded in
maintaining its conference series as the venue of choice for a growing
number of different research directions.

Still, certain challenges have arisen, and other long-standing challenges
remain.  I list some of the ones addressed over the past year, or currently
being dealt with.

1. Bank accounts for chapters and SIGs.  Although ACL funds are
administered centrally, certain political reasons make it necessary for
chapters (and eventually, other affiliated groups) to hold some funds
independently.  In addition, chapters and SIGs that bring in funds (through
conferences, workshops, etc.) need to have the amounts recorded, for their
subsequent use.  The Executive is in the process of formalizing 'shadow
accounts' for this purpose.

2. Relationships between the International ACL and its chapters (and
potential later affiliations).  The specifics of the duties and powers of
the chapter Boards, especially with regard to chapter conferences, has been
formalized.  The policy will be posted on the ACL website.

3. Conference organization.  As our conferences grow larger and more
diverse, it is becoming increasingly difficult to organize them, especially
for volunteers who may not have had similar experiences before.  A
Conference Organizing Handbook has been compiled and is being maintained
and updated with recent experiences; it will be posted on the ACL website
soon.

4. DARPA HLT conferences.  Last year, the US Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency DARPA revived its Human Language Technology conference
series, but decided to make them open technical conferences, rather than
closer fundee meetings.  As a result, the meetings have come into direct
competition with the conferences of the North American chapter NAACL.
Negotiations are underway among DARPA, the NAACL Board, and the ACL
Executive, in order to try to merge the two meetings whenever an NAACL
conference is held.

Other challenges remain.

1. COLING.  The ACL's more explicitly international orientation, and the
broadening of its conference into parallel tracks and a wider range of
topics, has made it resemble the COLING conferences much more closely.
While these changes have helped stem the drift of members from ACL, they
raise the question of how the ACL and COLING conferences relate.
Discussions between the ACL Executive and the ICCL, the self-perpetuating
body that oversees COLING, were begun in 2000 and are still underway.

2. Outreach to Asia.  The ACL Executive recently decided to reach out
explicitly to Asia, whose considerable Computational Linguistics has
traditionally been represented much more at COLING conferences.  The fist
ACL conference in Asia was held last year, and the international ACL
conference will be held there every third year.  Although an ACL chapter
for Asia is unlikely in the near future for several reasons, researchers in
Asia have formed an umbrella organization for the sharing of Asian-language
resources.  A representative of this organization acts as liaison with the
ACL Executive.

3. Outreach to related research fields.  For a long time, ACL has acted as
if it lived in a vacuum.  So have a number of related technical
associations.  By however creating explicit links with the organizations as
SIGIR, ISCA, IAMT, and the groups of people organizing related conferences,
including ICASSP, PACLING, RANLP, TMI, etc., we cxan promote the spread of
ideas and the connection of software to our mutual benefit.  ACL has
entered into discussions of reciprocity with ISCA and AMTA, and should
continue with the other organizations as well.

4. Greater visibility to the public.  The recent blossoming of
language-related companies on the internet has underscored the importance
of Computational Linguistics.  At present, ACL has no organized method of
publicizing the aims, work, and achievements of its members, of
computational linguists at large.  The benefits of such publicity range
from more new students and increased funding for research to, eventually,
greater impact on society.  This is a matter that has to be addressed.


It is with considerable pleasure that I can report that the ACL is in a
good and healthy state, thanks especially to the very hard work of the
members of recent ACL Executives (particularly of Kathy McCoy, the former
Secretary-Treasurer and current Treasurer), of the volunteers who organized
our past conferences, and of Priscilla Rasmussen, who runs our Business
Office in exemplary fashion.

Eduard Hovy, President 
Marina del Rey, California 
June 2001