ACL Lifetime Achievement Award Recipients
Recipients and their acceptance speeches
- Kathleen McKeown (2025) - Retrospective and Future Views
- Ralph Grishman (2024) - MUCking In, or Fifty Years in Information Extraction
- Martha Palmer (2023) - My Big, Fat 50-Year Journey
- Martha Evens (2022) - Martha Palmer and Barbara Di Eugenio Interview Martha Evens
- Junichi Tsujii (2021) - Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics
- Bonnie Webber (2020) - Kathy McKeown Interviews Bonnie Webber
- Ron Kaplan (2019) - Computational Psycholinguistics
- Mark Steedman (2018) - The Lost Combinator
- Barbara Grosz (2017) - Smart Enough to Talk With Us? Foundations and Challenges for Dialogue Capable AI Systems
- Joan Bresnan (2016) - Linguistics: The Garden and the Bush
- Sheng Li (2015) - Translating Today into Tomorrow
- Robert L. Mercer (2014) - (Video) A Computational Life
- Jerry Hobbs (2013) - Influences and Inferences
- Charles Fillmore (2012) - Encounters with Language (Video)
- Eugene Charniak (2011) - The Brain as a Statistical Inference Engine—and You Can Too
- William A. Woods (2010) - The Right Tools: Reflections on Computation and Language
- Fred Jelinek (2009) - The Dawn of Statistical ASR and MT
- Yorick Wilks (2008) - On Whose Shoulders?
- Lauri Karttunen (2007) - Word Play
- Eva Hajicova (2006) - Old Linguists Never Die, They Only Get Obligatorily Deleted
- Martin Kay (2005) - A Life of Language
- Karen Sparck Jones (2004) - Some Points in a Time
- Makoto Nagao (2003)
- Aravind Joshi (2002)
A sampling of other papers that touch on the history of computational linguistics:
- Some of the "Last Words" opinion essays in the journal Computational Linguistics:
- Mark Steedman - On Becoming a Discipline (ACL presidential address, 2008)
- Karen Sparck Jones - Computational Linguistics: What About the Linguistics? (2007)
- Ehud Reiter - The Shrinking Horizons of Computational Linguistics (2007)
- W. John Hutchins (ed.) - Early Years in Machine Translation: Memoirs and Biographies of Pioneers (2000).
- Book review by Warren J. Plath
- Book review by Jörg Schütz
- Aravind Joshi and Philip Hopely - A Parser from Antiquity (1999)