Newsletter 2016

Dear colleagues,

On behalf of the ACL exec, I would like to wish everyone a happy holiday season and an exciting New Year.

I want to share some of the exciting news related to ACL this year.

1. Membership

I am pleased to announce that we have been growing and now have close to 3000 members by the end of 2016, which exceeds the membership numbers of all the prior years. After January 1st, you are highly encouraged to renew your membership through the ACL portal: http://www.aclweb.org/portal/

2. Thanks to the outgoing members of the ACL exec

Dragomir R. Radev, Chris Manning, Hermann Ney and Lluís Màrquez left the ACL executive committee at the end of 2016 after their terms expired. I would like to thank all of you for your hard work as members of the exec and wish you luck in your future endeavors.

3. Three new members of the ACL exec

Three new members will join the exec as of January 1, 2017.

http://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/acl-2016-election-results-congratulations-ming-zhou-and-jennifer-foster

These are:

• Ming Zhou, Microsoft Research Asia, China (Vice President-elect, replacing Chris Manning)
• Jennifer Foster, Dublin City University, Ireland (SIG Overseer, replacing Hermann Ney)
• Walter Daelemans, University of Antwerp, Belgium (the new EACL chair, ex officio, replacing Lluís Màrquez)

Welcome to Ming, Jennifer, and Walter!

The full list of exec members is here:

http://www.aclweb.org/portal/about

The next elections will take place in the Fall. Openings for 2018 include Vice President-elect, Treasurer and Conference Officer.

4. ACL Lifetime Achievement Award

The winner of the ACL 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award (LTA) was Prof. Joan Bresnan of Stanford University.

http://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/joan-bresnan-receives-2016-acl-lifetime-achievement-award

The 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award will be announced in August during ACL 2017 in Vancouver.

For a list of past winners, visit:

http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Lifetime_Achievement_Award_Recipients

5. ACL Fellows

I am happy to announce that the Fellow selection committee has selected four new ACL Fellows for 2016.

http://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/four-acl-fellows-recognized-2016

• Bonnie J. Dorr (Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC))
  • For significant contributions to machine translation, summarization and human evaluation.
• Marilyn Walker (University of California Santa Cruz)
  • For fundamental contributions to statistical methods for dialog optimization, to centering theory, and to expressive generation for dialog.
• Haifeng Wang (Baidu)
  • For significant contributions to MT, NLP and search engines in both academia and industry, and to the growth of the ACL in Asia.
• Ralph Weischedel (Raytheon BBN Technologies)
  • For significant contributions in information extraction technologies and for quiet but effective and wide-ranging strategic leadership

Congratulations to these established ACL members!

6. Nominating Committees and ACL Fellows Program

The Amendment to the ACL Constitution (Article V, Item 5) has been approved by a majority of the members who voted. It is therefore ratified according to the ACL Constitution.

To view the ACL Constitution after the amendment’s adoption, please visit:

https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Constitution

The ad hoc committee that examines the organization’s nomination and selection procedures will continue its work on the implementation plan. The new system will be put in place in 2017 once the implementation plan is approved by the ACL Executive Committee.

7. EACL 2017 will be in Valencia, Spain

http://eacl2017.org/

EACL 2017 will take place in April 3-7, 2017 at the Valencia Conference Center from the Mediterranean city of Valencia, Spain.

• General Chair:
  • Mirella Lapata, University of Edinburgh
• Program Co-Chairs:
  • Phil Blunsom, University of Oxford
  • Alexander Koller, University of Potsdam
• Local Organizing Team:
  • Paolo Rosso (Chair), PRHLT, Universitat Politècnica de València
  • Francisco Casacuberta (Co-chair), PRHLT, Universitat Politècnica de València
  • Jon Ander Gómez (Co-chair), PRHLT, Universitat Politècnica de València

8. ACL 2017 will be in Vancouver, Canada

http://acl2017.org/

The 55th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) will take place in Vancouver, Canada. ACL 2017 will be held at the Westin Bayshore Hotel in downtown Vancouver from July 30th through August 4th, 2017.

Important dates:

• Submission Deadline (Long & Short Papers): February 6, 2017
• Author Response Period: March 13 - March 15, 2017
• Notification of Acceptance: March 30, 2017
• Tutorials: July 30, 2017
• Main Conference: July 31 - August 2, 2017
• Workshops: August 3 - 4, 2017

• General Chair:
  • Chris Callison-Burch, University of Pennsylvania
• Program Co-Chairs:
  • Regina Barzilay, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Min-Yen Kan, National University of Singapore
• Local Organizing Committee:
  • Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL
  • Anoop Sarkar, Simon Fraser University

9. EMNLP 2017 will be in Copenhagen, Denmark

http://emnlp2017.net/

EMNLP 2017 will take place in Copenhagen. The main conference is September 9 - 11, preceded by two days of workshops and tutorials, September 7 - 8.

• General Chair:
  • Martha Palmer, University of Colorado
• Program Co-Chairs:
  • Rebecca Hwa, University of Pittsburgh
  • Sebastian Riedel, University College London
• Local Arrangement Co-Chairs
  • Dirk Hovy, University of Copenhagen
  • Anders Søgaard, University of Copenhagen

10. ACL 2018 will be in Melbourne, Australia

http://acl2018.org/

The Association for Computational Linguistics is pleased to announce that ACL 2018, its 56th Annual Meeting, will be held in Melbourne, Australia at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre July 15-20 2018.

• General Chair:
  • Claire Cardie, Cornell University
• Local Chairs:
  • Tim Baldwin, The University of Melbourne
  • Karin Verspoor, The University of Melbourne
  • Trevor Cohn, The University of Melbourne

The other chairs will be announced shortly

11. ACL 2019 call for bids

http://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/call-bids-host-acl-2019

The Association for Computational Linguistics hereby invites proposals to host the conference in the Europe/Middle East/Africa region in July or August 2019. At this time, we seek preliminary draft proposals from prospective bidders in the relevant region. Promising bidders will be asked to provide additional information for the final selection.

The deadline for notifying intention to submit a proposal is January 31, 2017, and the deadline for submitting the draft proposal is March 15, 2017. Please send the notifications and draft proposals to Marti Hearst (hearst@berkeley.edu), the Coordinating Committee chair of ACL 2019.

12. Upcoming events

http://www.aclweb.org/portal/acl_sponsored_events

13. 2016 reports from ACL officers

Winter reports: http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2016Q1_Reports

Summer reports: http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2016Q3_Reports

14. ACL Resolutions

The list of ACL resolutions:

https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Resolutions

15. Conference Sponsorship

ACL welcomes sponsorship for ACL-related conferences in various forms and amounts from any member.

The 2017 sponsorship booklet:

https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2017_sponsorship_booklet

Sincerely,

Shiqi Zhao

ACL Secretary