On behalf of the ACL exec, I would like to wish everyone a happy holiday season and an exciting New Year.
We have updated the ACL admin wiki, and now that this update is complete, I would like to share some exciting news related to ACL in 2025.
1. Thanks to the outgoing members of the ACL exec
Emily M. Bender, Shiqi Zhao, Vera Demberg and Graham Neubig left the ACL executive committee at the end of 2025 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.
2. Three new members of the ACL exec
Three new members will join the exec as of January 1, 2026.
These are:
VP-elect: Jing Jiang, Australian National University, Australia (replacing Emily M. Bender)
Member-at-large: Raffaella Bernardi, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy (replacing Vera Demberg)
NAACL chair: Anna Rumshisky, University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA (replacing Graham Neubig)
Welcome to Jing, Raffaella, and Anna!
The full list of exec members is here:
https://www.aclweb.org/portal/about
The next elections will take place in the Fall. Openings for 2027 include vp-elect, secretary and member-at-large
3. ACL Lifetime Achievement Award Winner
The winner of the ACL 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award (LTA) was Kathleen McKeown from Columbia University in USA.
For a list of past winners, visit:
http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Lifetime_Achievement_Award...
4. ACL Fellows
I am happy to announce that the Fellow selection committee has selected 11 new ACL Fellows for 2025.
Rada Mihalcea
- University of Michigan
- https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~mihalcea/index.html
- For significant contributions to graph-based language processing, computational social science, and the advancement of NLP for social good.
Hanna Hajishirzi
- University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI
- https://hannaneh.ai/
- For significant contributions to question answering, scientific applications, multimodal artificial intelligence, and fully open language models.
Heng Ji
- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- https://blender.cs.illinois.edu/hengji.html
- For significant contributions to information extraction, multimodal and multilingual knowledge extraction and AI for science.
Mohit Bansal
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- https://www.cs.unc.edu/~mbansal/
- For significant contributions to multimodal NLP foundations, faithful language generation and summarization, and model interpretability methods.
Nizar Habash
- New York University Abu Dhabi
- https://www.nizarhabash.com/
- For significant contributions to Arabic NLP, open-source tools and resources for Arabic and morphologically-rich languages, and community building and service.
Peter Clark
- Allen Institute for AI
- https://pclark425.github.io/
- For pioneering contributions to knowledge-based NLP, question answering, and commonsense reasoning, including influential datasets and open AI systems.
Yue Zhang
- Westlake University
- https://frcchang.github.io/index.html
- For his contributions to structured prediction and generalization in NLP, services to the Chinese and global NLP communities, and NLP education.
Sadao Kurohashi
- National Institute of Informatics
- https://nlp.ist.i.kyoto-u.ac.jp/member/kuro/
- For significant contributions to Japanese NLP and MT, and advancement of the Asian NLP community.
Saif Mohammad
- National Research Council Canada
- https://www.saifmohammad.com/
- For significant contributions to computational affective science, emotion detection and sentiment analysis, and responsible NLP.
Lori Levin
- Carnegie Mellon University
- https://www.lti.cs.cmu.edu/people/faculty/levin-lori.html
- For pioneering work on the use of phonetics, syntax, lexical semantics and dialogue modeling in machine translation and in the transfer of NLP technologies to low resource languages, as well as an enduring contribution to the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad.
Alexander Koller
- Saarland University
- https://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~koller/
- For foundational contributions to computational semantics, grammar formalisms, and neurosymbolic architectures.
For a list of past-year ACL fellows, please visit:
https://www.aclweb.org/aclwiki/ACL_Fellows
Nominations for 2026 can be made through this page:
https://www.aclweb.org/portal/acl-fellows
5. The ACL Exec has approved some updates to ACL policies
All ACL resolutions can be found here:
http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Resolutions
6. ACL 2026 will be in San Diego, California
ACL 2026 will take place from July 2-7, 2026.
General Chair
Philipp Koehn, Johns Hopkins University
Program Chairs
Maria Liakata, Queen Mary University of London
Viviane P. Moreira, Institute of Informatics at UFRGS, Brasil
Jiajun Zhang, Chinese Academy of Sciences
David Jurgens, University of Michigan
7. EACL 2026 will be in Rabat, Morocco
EACL 2026 will be in B Rabat from March 24-29, 2026.
General Chair
Aline Villavicencio, University of Exeter
Program Chairs
Vera Demberg, Saarland University
Kentaro Inui, MBZUAI/Tohoku University/RIKEN
Lluís Marquez Villodre, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Local Organization Chairs
Karim Bouzoubaa, Mohammadia School of Engineers
Si Lhoussain AOURAGH, Mohammed V University
Khalid Choukri, ELRA/ELDA
8. EMNLP 2026 will be in Budapest, Hungary
EMNLP 2026 will be in Budapest from October 24-29, 2026. More information TBA.
9. Upcoming events
http://www.aclweb.org/portal/acl_sponsored_events
10. 2025 reports from ACL officers
Winter reports:
http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2025Q1_Reports
Summer reports:
http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2025Q3_Reports
Sincerely,
Yang Feng, ACL Secretary