The ACL Lifetime Achievement Award was instituted in 2002 and has been given every year since. The award is conferred to recognize the work of a researcher who has made sustained and impactful contributions to the field of computational linguistics and natural language processing.
The ACL Test-of-Time awards recognize two papers each year for their lasting
impact on the Computational Linguistics field: one paper from 25 years earlier,
and one paper from 10 year earlier.
2019 is the first year that these awards are officially presented by the ACL,
building on a grass-roots initiative at NAACL 18.
I am delighted to announce that the following two papers have respectively won
the 1994 and 2009 ToT award. The motivation for the honor is also included.
The 2019 winner of the 1994 Test-of-Time Award is:
Dear ACL members,
I am happy to announce the ACL Publicity Director and Deputy Director:
- Director: Barbara Plank (IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
- Deputy Director: Sarvnaz Karimi (CSIRO, Australia)
Congratulations to Barbara and Sarvnaz, whose term starts from the date of announcement. Thank you to the other candidates for running, and to the working group for searching for the Publicity Director and Deputy Director.
Ming Zhou, ACL President
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) has appointed Ani Nenkova, of University of Pennsylvania, PA, USA, the new Co-Editor-in-Chief of the ACL-sponsored journal, Transactions of the ACL (https://www.transacl.org). Her term starts July 1, 2019 and runs for three years. She is replacing Lillian Lee, whose term expires at the end of 2019, and joining Brian Roark and Mark Johnson, who continue to serve as TACL EiCs.
Richard Kittredge passed away in early April, 2019. Richard had been a long-standing member of the ACL community. He obtained his PhD in 1969 at the University of Pennsylvania with Zellig Harris and Henry Hiz, working on tense and aspect. He subsequently became a professor at the Université de Montréal, where he spent his entire academic career. In the 1970s, Richard became a member of the TAUM research group on machine translation. The TAUM effort enabled one of the first commercial applications of machine translation, the METEO system in Canada.
With sadness, the ACL exec announces the premature passing of one of our own, Janyce M. Wiebe, ACL Fellow 2015. Jan was a professor of Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and a former director of the Pitt Intelligent Systems Program. She was a pioneer in the now burgeoning fields of sentiment, affect and subjectivity. Her PhD thesis (1990) -Recognizing Subjective Sentences: A Computational Investigation of Narrative Text- was an early computational investigation of subjectivity in NLP.
Dear ACL members,
I am happy to announce the results of the elections for members of the ACL executive committee:
- Rada Mihalcea (University of Michigan, USA) has been elected as VP-Elect of ACL.
- Nitin Madnani (Educational Testing Service, USA) has been elected as Information Director.
Dear ACL members,
I am happy to announce the new ACL Anthology Director:
- Matt Post (Johns Hopkins University, USA)
Congratulations to Matt, whose term starts on January 1, 2019. Thank you to the other candidates for running, and to the ACL Anthology Advisory Board, headed by Dragomir Radev, for their hard work on this process.
Marti Hearst, ACL President
I am delighted to announce that the Nominating Committee has selected five new ACL fellows for 2018:
To the ACL Community,
Scammers are targeting the ACL community, using fake emails to impersonate ACL officers, especially the current ACL President. The scammers sometimes follow up the emails with phone calls.
ACL never requests transfers of money in this way. Please do NOT pay money and do NOT respond to the individuals trying to conduct this fraud.
Marti Hearst and David Yarowsky