With a heavy heart, the ACL exec announces the premature passing of one of our own, Dragomir Radev, ACL Fellow 2018, ACM Fellow 2015, AAAS Fellow 2020, and AAAI Fellow 2020. Drago was the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of Computer Science at Yale University. He joined Yale in 2017 after spending 16 years at the University of Michigan as a professor in computer science. He surged into the NLP field with seminal research on multi-document text summarization, the topic of his PhD dissertation in 1999. His later work has been equally influential, from his widely cited paper on LexRank to his most recent papers providing datasets, benchmarks and evaluation of metrics for summarization. Along the way, he touched on summarization of a wide range of genres including news, dialog, scientific articles, and citation surveys. His research was wide-ranging, touching on many areas beyond summarization. He worked on graph-based methods for NLP, question answering, interfaces to databases, and language generation. Drago was an exceptional individual who embodied the qualities of kindness, generosity, intelligence, and dedication in every aspect of his life. He had a huge impact on ACL and was recognized for his service to the field with the Distinguished Service Award in 2022. He served as ACL Secretary from 2006 to 2015. He co-founded and co-organized NACLO (North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad), an exam of linguistic brainteasers for high school students, traveling each year with the top-ranking contestants to the international event. He was responsible for attracting students of all levels into our field and was committed to training the next generation of computational linguists.
What follows is the fundraiser for Drago's daughter:
https://gofund.me/2d5604fa
Sincerely,
ACL Executive Committee