President's Report
John Nerbonne

Just a little over forty years ago, on June 13, 1962, Victor Yngve,
David Hayes, Harry Josselson, Ida Rhodes, Paul Garvin, Winfred Lehman,
Richard See, Anthony Oettinger and Sydney Lamb met to establish the
Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics
(AMTCL), which held its first Annual Meeting the following year.
These pioneers wished to "encourage high standards by sponsoring
meetings, publication and other exchange of information." The
Association changed its name, but not its goals or organization, in
1968 to the Association for Computational Linguistics.

The year July, 2001 through June, 2002 is thus the fortieth
anniversary year of the ACL, and two activities were initiated to
celebrate this appropriately.

Naturally, several ongoing projects continued to occupy the
association throughout this period.
Finally, I note issues of importance which were not foci of attention
in 2001-2002.
The organization continues to be healthy in its membership numbers and
its balance sheet, and for this we should be grateful to Treasurer
Kathy McCoy, and Office Manager Priscilla Rasmussen, who are now
complemented essentially by Association Secretary Sandee Carberry.

John Nerbonne, Groningen
ACL President, 2002