Announcement of the 2025 ACL Lifetime Achievement Award and Dragomir Radev Distinguished Service Award

After a rigorous evaluation process, the recipients of the Lifetime Achievement Award and the Dragomir Radev Distinguished Service Award have been selected.

The Lifetime Achievement Award is bestowed upon Kathy McKeown, in recognition of her 43-year career marked by outstanding, creative, and prolific research in the field of Natural Language Processing, in the areas of natural language generation, summarization, and the analysis of social media.

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What is computational linguistics?

Computational linguistics is the scientific study of language from a computational perspective. Computational linguists are interested in providing computational models of various kinds of linguistic phenomena. These models may be "knowledge-based" ("hand-crafted") or "data-driven" ("statistical" or "empirical"). Work in computational linguistics is in some cases motivated from a scientific perspective in that one is trying to provide a computational explanation for a particular linguistic or psycholinguistic phenomenon; and in other cases the motivation may be more purely technological in that one wants to provide a working component of a speech or natural language system. Indeed, the work of computational linguists is incorporated into many working systems today, including speech recognition systems, text-to-speech synthesizers, automated voice response systems, web search engines, text editors, language instruction materials, to name just a few.

Popular computational linguistics textbooks include: