https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?action=history&feed=atom&title=Newsletter_2008Newsletter 2008 - Revision history2026-06-28T22:37:40ZRevision history for this page on the wikiMediaWiki 1.43.6https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Newsletter_2008&diff=266&oldid=prev128.250.34.121: New page: == 2008 ACL NEWSLETTER == ''The newsletter of the Association for Computational Linguistics'' Dear ACL members, Our annual conference, ACL-08:HLT (Human Language Technologies) is still ...2008-12-02T06:43:04Z<p>New page: == 2008 ACL NEWSLETTER == ''The newsletter of the Association for Computational Linguistics'' Dear ACL members, Our annual conference, ACL-08:HLT (Human Language Technologies) is still ...</p>
<p><b>New page</b></p><div>== 2008 ACL NEWSLETTER ==<br />
<br />
''The newsletter of the Association for Computational Linguistics''<br />
<br />
Dear ACL members,<br />
<br />
Our annual conference, ACL-08:HLT (Human Language Technologies) is<br />
still two months away so let me take the time in this newsletter to<br />
send you some updates about ACL. Please contact me at<br />
sekrettary@org.aclweb (spellcheck and unscramble before writing) by<br />
April 30 if you have any suggestions for interesting activities. I<br />
will bring them to the ACL exec for discussion.<br />
<br />
'''1. Changes to the executive board (as of January 1, 2009)'''<br />
<br />
Our former president, Bonnie Dorr, will stay on as past president<br />
for a year. We welcome former vice-president Steven Bird to the<br />
position of ACL president for 2009. Three new researchers will join the<br />
ACL exec:<br />
<br />
* Kevin Knight (ISI) - vice-president-elect<br />
* Lori Levin (CMU) - member<br />
* Giorgio Satta (U. Padua) - ex officio as chair of EACL<br />
<br />
They replace Mark Steedman, Claire Cardie, and Alex Lascarides whose<br />
terms ended. The exec wants to thank them for the tremendous amount of<br />
attention that they devoted to ACL while on the exec.<br />
<br />
'''2. ACL 2007'''<br />
<br />
ACL 2007 was the largest ACL conference ever with almost 1,100<br />
participants. It took place in beautiful Prague. The ACL exec wants to<br />
thank Eva Hajicova, who was the local chair, and John Carroll, who was<br />
general chair. We are also greateful to Annie Zaenen and Antal van den<br />
Bosch for chairing the program committee as well as dozens of other<br />
chairs and volunteers who made the conference a huge success. The LTA<br />
award went to Lauri Karttunen for his long list of contributions to<br />
Computational Linguistics. Earlier recipients of this great award<br />
include Aravind Joshi (2002), Makoto Nagao (2003), Karen Sparck Jones<br />
(2004), Martin Kay (2005), and Eva Hajicova (2006).<br />
<br />
'''3. The 2008 Annual Conference'''<br />
<br />
ACL-08:HLT will be held in Columbus, OH from June 15 to June 20,<br />
2008. The list of accepted papers is shown here:<br />
http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/acl08/accepts.html Registration is now<br />
open. Check this site for more information:<br />
http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/acl08/ The general chair is Kathy<br />
McKeown. Local arrangements are by Chris Brew, Donna Byron, Eric<br />
Fosler-Lussier, Detmar Meurers, Michael White, and DJ Hovermale<br />
(webmaster). The program chairs are Johanna Moore, Simone Teufel,<br />
James Allan, and Sadaoki Furui. The conference will include a<br />
presentation by the ACL's seventh lifetime achievement award winner.<br />
<br />
'''4. Additional conferences'''<br />
<br />
Two additional conferences in NLP/CL are coming up. COLING 2008 is in<br />
Manchester, UK (http://www.coling2008.org.uk/) in August and EMNLP<br />
2008 (the conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language<br />
Processing) is in Honolulu, HI<br />
(http://conferences.inf.ed.ac.uk/emnlp08/) in October. The deadline<br />
for submissions to COLING has passed but the EMNLP deadline is still<br />
open (July 3, 2008).<br />
<br />
'''5. The ACL Anthology and the ACL Anthology Network (AAN)'''<br />
<br />
Over the last year, the ACL Anthology has been migrated to its new<br />
home on the ACL's own website http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/ . The<br />
original site, hosted at the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), now<br />
redirects visitors to the new site. The ACL would like to express its<br />
gratitude to the LDC for hosting the Anthology over the past 6 years.<br />
<br />
Steven Bird has passed on the editorship of the ACL Anthology to<br />
Min-Yen Kan, from the National University of Singapore. Steven<br />
founded the anthology in 2001, and is stepping down as he takes on his<br />
new role as vice-president. Steven invited Min-Yen to take on the<br />
editorship, given Min-Yen's expertise in digital libraries, IR and<br />
NLP, and his leadership in work on extracting plain text from the<br />
anthology.<br />
<br />
The ACL Anthology Network (www.aclweb.org/aan) is a new resource<br />
that includes a manually curated database of all citations and<br />
collaborations in the ACL Anthology as well as a number of statistics<br />
generated from it.<br />
<br />
'''6. The Web site'''<br />
<br />
The membership web site http://www.aclweb.org/membership is open for<br />
business. You can enroll using our secure server or use the<br />
printable form. You can also decide to contribute to the Walker Fund<br />
which ACL uses to sponsor student activities and travel to annual<br />
conferences. Finally, you can order old proceedings from ACL and some<br />
COLING conferences using the order form available on the site.<br />
<br />
'''7. The Wiki'''<br />
<br />
The ACL Wiki has grown a lot since it was inaugurated last year. It<br />
currently includes (www.aclweb.org/aclwiki) 1984 pages and 221<br />
articles on a variety of topics including "Competitions and<br />
challenges", "State of the art", "Conference acceptance rates",<br />
"Blogs", "Conference Chairs", etc.<br />
<br />
'''8. NACLO 2008'''<br />
<br />
The North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO) 2008<br />
finished recently. 763 students from the US and Canada worked on hard<br />
problems in linguistics and computational linguistics. The top 8 will<br />
participate at the International Linguistics Olympiad in August. Check<br />
www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu for more details as well as a copy of the<br />
problems and their solutions. Canada participated for the first time<br />
in 2008 and Australia will also participate for the first time later<br />
this year.<br />
<br />
'''9. The ACL video archive'''<br />
<br />
The ACL video archive (www.aclweb.org/videoarchive) run by Chris<br />
Biemann and Reinhard Rapp has made its debut. I hope that the<br />
community will support this initiative and contribute to it.<br />
<br />
'''10. Address changes'''<br />
<br />
If your address changes, please write immediately to Priscilla<br />
Rasmussen at acl@org.aclweb (unscramble me). And, please note that<br />
the address of our ACL offices is now the following: ACL, 209<br />
N. Eighth Street, Stroudsburg, PA 18360.<br />
<br />
'''11. New mailing lists'''<br />
<br />
Priscilla had to start using two new mechanisms for sending important<br />
announcements to the ACL membership. The first mechanism is used for<br />
conference announcements. Email comes from an address at aclweb.org<br />
ACL members can opt out of that mailing list.<br />
The second mechanism is used for the most important messages related<br />
to ACL such as this newsletter, election notices, membership<br />
reminders, etc. Email here comes from an address at umich.edu and is<br />
signed by the ACL Webmaster, Ali Hakim.<br />
<br />
'''12. Acknowledgments'''<br />
<br />
Our archivist, Eric Fosler-Lussier did an amazing job of updating the<br />
archives - please visit them here: http://www.aclweb.org/archive<br />
The ACL webmaster, Ali Hakim has been very helpful with timely updates<br />
to the ACL site.<br />
<br />
<br />
''Drago''<br />
<br />
ACL Secretary</div>128.250.34.121