Organization:Association for Computational Linguistics
 | |
| Founded | 1962 |
|---|---|
| Type | Professional organization |
| Focus | Computational linguistics and natural language processing |
| Origins | Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics |
Area served | Worldwide |
| Method | Conferences, publications |
| Website | www |
The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is a scientific and professional organization for people working on natural language processing.[1] Its namesake conference is one of the primary high impact conferences for natural language processing research, along with EMNLP.[2][3] The conference is held each summer in locations where significant computational linguistics research is carried out.
It was founded in 1962, originally named the Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics (AMTCL). It became the ACL in 1968.[4] The ACL has a European (EACL),[5] a North American (NAACL),[6] and an Asian (AACL)[7] chapter.
History
The ACL was founded in 1962 as the Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics (AMTCL). The initial membership was about 100. In 1965, the AMTCL took over the journal Mechanical Translation and Computational Linguistics. This journal was succeeded by many other journals: the American Journal of Computational Linguistics (1974–1978, 1980–1983), and then Computational Linguistics (1984–present).[8] Since 1988, the journal has been published for the ACL by MIT Press.[9][10]
The annual meeting was first held in 1963 in conjunction with the Association for Computing Machinery National Conference.[11] The annual meeting was, for a long time, relatively informal and did not publish anything longer than abstracts. By 1968, the society took on its current name, the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). The publication of the annual meeting's Proceedings of the ACL began in 1979 and gradually matured into its modern form.[8] Many of the meetings were held in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America, and a few with the American Society for Information Science and the Cognitive Science Society.[11]
The United States government sponsored much research from 1989 to 1994, characterized by an increase in author retention rates and an increase in research in some key topics, such as speech recognition, in ACL. By the 21st century, it was able to maintain authors at a high rate who coalesced in a more stable arrangement around individual research topics.[12]
In 2020, the annual meeting of the ACL received more submissions from China than from the United States for the first time.[13]
Conference Locations
From ACL website[14]
ACL 2023, Toronto, Canada
ACL 2022, Dublin, Ireland
ACL 2021, Bangkok, Thailand (moved online due to COVID-19)
ACL 2020, originally Seattle, Washington, United States (moved online due to COVID-19)
ACL 2019, Florence, Italy
ACL 2018, Melbourne, Australia- ACL 2017, Vancouver , Canada
Activities
The ACL organizes several of the top conferences and workshops in the field of computational linguistics and natural language processing. These include:
- Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), the flagship conference of the organization
- Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
- International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP), held jointly one of the other conferences on a rotating basis
- Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)
- Lexical and Computational Semantics and Semantic Evaluation (SemEval)
- Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM)
- Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (WMT)
Besides conferences, the ACL also sponsors the journals Computational Linguistics and Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL). Papers and other presentations at ACL and ACL-affiliated venues are archived online in the open-access ACL Anthology.[15]
Special Interest Groups
ACL has a large number of Special Interest Groups (SIGs), focusing on specific areas of natural language processing. Some current SIGs within ACL are:[16]
| SIG | Description |
|---|---|
| SIGANN | Linguistic Annotation |
| SIGBIOMED | Biomedical Language Processing |
| SIGDAT | Linguistic data and corpus-based approaches |
| SIGDIAL | Dialogue Processing |
| SIGFSM | Finite State Methods |
| SIGGEN | Natural Language Generation |
| SIGHAN | Chinese Language Processing |
| SIGHUM | Language Technologies for the Socio-Economic Sciences and the Humanities |
| SIGLEX | Lexicon: the umbrella organization for the SemEval semantic evaluations and SENSEVAL word-sense evaluations |
| SIGMT | Machine Translation |
| SIGMOL | Mathematics of Language |
| SIGMORPHON | Computational Morphology and Phonology |
| SIGNLL | Natural Language Learning |
| SIGPARSE | Natural Language Parsing |
| SIGSEM | Computational Semantics |
| SIGSEMITIC | Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages |
| SIGSLAV | NLP for Slavic Languages |
| SIGSLPAT | Speech & Language Processing for Assistive Technologies |
| SIGTYP | Typology |
| SIGWAC | Web as Corpus |
Presidents
Each year, the ACL elects a distinguished computational linguist who becomes vice-president of the organization in the next calendar year and president one year later. Recent ACL presidents are:[17]
| Year | Name |
|---|---|
| 2022 | Tim Baldwin |
| 2021 | Rada Mihalcea |
| 2020 | Hinrich Schütze |
| 2019 | Zhou Ming |
| 2018 | Marti Hearst |
| 2017 | Joakim Nivre |
| 2016 | Pushpak Bhattacharyya |
| 2015 | Christopher D. Manning |
| 2014 | Gertjan van Noord |
| 2013 | Haifeng Wang |
| 2012 | Ken Church |
| 2011 | Kevin Knight |
| 2010 | Ido Dagan |
| 2009 | Steven Bird |
| 2008 | Bonnie Dorr |
| 2007 | Mark Steedman |
| 2006 | Jun'ichi Tsujii |
| 2005 | Martha Palmer |
| 2004 | Johanna Moore |
| 2003 | Mark Johnson |
| 2002 | John Nerbonne |
| 2001 | Eduard Hovy |
| 2000 | Wolfgang Wahlster |
See also
- Sociedad Española para el Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural (SEPLN, Spanish Association for Natural Language Processing)
References
- ↑ "What is the ACL and what is Computational Linguistics? | ACL Member Portal". https://www.aclweb.org/portal/what-is-cl.
- ↑ "The Top 10 NLP Conferences | jungle light speed" (in en-US). https://www.junglelightspeed.com/the-top-10-nlp-conferences/.
- ↑ "Natural Language Processing (NLP) Conferences 2022/2023/2024". https://conferenceindex.org/conferences/natural-language-processing-nlp.
- ↑ "What is the ACL and what is Computational Linguistics? | ACL Member Portal". https://www.aclweb.org/portal/what-is-cl.
- ↑ "EACL Home" (in en). http://www.eacl.org/page.php?id=about.
- ↑ Sarkar, Anoop. "NAACL: North American Chapter of the ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics)" (in en). http://naacl.org/about/index.html.
- ↑ "AACL: Asia-Pacific Chapter of the ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics)". https://aaclweb.org/index.html.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Jones, Karen Sparck (1994). "Some Notes on ACL History". ACL. https://www.aclweb.org/archive/misc/History.html.
- ↑ "List of Issues | Computational Linguistics | MIT Press Journals" (in en). http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/coli.
- ↑ "Computational Linguistics". http://cljournal.org/.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 Walker, Donald E. (1982). "Reflections on 20 Years of the ACL: An Introduction". 20th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics): 89–91. doi:10.3115/981251.981273. https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P82-1017/.
- ↑ Anderson, Ashton; Jurafsky, Dan; McFarland, Daniel A. (2012). "Towards a Computational History of the ACL: 1980-2008". Proceedings of the ACL-2012 Special Workshop on Rediscovering 50 Years of Discoveries (Association for Computational Linguistics): 13–21. https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W12-3202.
- ↑ Chai, Joyce; Schluter, Natalie; Tetreault, Joel (4 June 2020). "ACL2020: General Conference Statistics". Association for Computational Linguistics. https://acl2020.org/blog/general-conference-statistics/.
- ↑ "Annual Meetings of the Association for Computational Linguistics | ACL Member Portal" (in en). https://www.aclweb.org/portal/acl.
- ↑ "ACL Anthology". Association for Computational Linguistics. https://aclanthology.org/.
- ↑ "Special Interest Groups | ACL Member Portal". https://www.aclweb.org/portal/sigs.
- ↑ "ACL Officers – Admin Wiki" (in en). https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Officers.
External links
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