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Association for Computational Linguistics
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<h2 id="history">History</h2> <p>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 <i>Mechanical Translation and Computational Linguistics</i>. This journal was succeeded by many other journals: the <i><a href="/facts/American_Journal_of_Computational_Linguistics/U13XIEg5">American Journal of Computational Linguistics</a></i> (1974–1978, 1980–1983), and then <a href="/facts/Computational_Linguistics_(journal)/U13XIEg5"><i>Computational Linguistics</i></a> (1984–present).<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:8" href="#fn:8"><sup>8</sup></a> Since 1988, the journal has been published for the ACL by <a href="/facts/MIT_Press/eTerUM3c">MIT Press</a>.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:9" href="#fn:9"><sup>9</sup></a><a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:10" href="#fn:10"><sup>10</sup></a> </p><p>The annual meeting was first held in 1963 in conjunction with the <a href="/facts/Association_for_Computing_Machinery/abI2atlP">Association for Computing Machinery</a> National Conference.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:11" href="#fn:11"><sup>11</sup></a> 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 <i>Proceedings of the ACL</i> began in 1979 and gradually matured into its modern form.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:12" href="#fn:12"><sup>12</sup></a> Many of the meetings were held in conjunction with the <a href="/facts/Linguistic_Society_of_America/N0fA54pE">Linguistic Society of America</a>, and a few with the <a href="/facts/American_Society_for_Information_Science/9we7Czqx">American Society for Information Science</a> and the <a href="/facts/Cognitive_Science_Society/UGqYzoTG">Cognitive Science Society</a>.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:13" href="#fn:13"><sup>13</sup></a> </p><p>The <a href="/facts/United_States_government/VJCxUaf7">United States government</a> 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 <a href="/facts/Speech_recognition/z7S7Pgk6">speech recognition</a>, 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.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:14" href="#fn:14"><sup>14</sup></a> </p> <h2 id="annual-meeting-of-the-acl">Annual Meeting of the ACL</h2> <p>Every year, the ACL holds the Annual Meeting of the ACL.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:15" href="#fn:15"><sup>15</sup></a> The location lies in Europe in years zero modulo three, North America in years one modulo three, and Asia–Australia in years two modulo three. In 2020, the Annual Meeting received for the first time more submissions from <a href="/facts/China/lTjIXY5p">China</a> than the <a href="/facts/United_States/P0sCdLe5">United States</a>.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:16" href="#fn:16"><sup>16</sup></a> </p> <table><tbody><tr><th>Year</th><th>Location</th></tr><tr><td>2025 July 27-August 1</td><td><a href="/facts/Vienna/NSpIURsA">Vienna</a>, <a href="/facts/Austria/4qWIMIyc">Austria</a></td></tr><tr><td>2024 August 11–16</td><td><a href="/facts/Bangkok/WRxftcFz">Bangkok</a>, <a href="/facts/Thailand/GCUnN4JK">Thailand</a></td></tr><tr><td>2023 July 9–14</td><td><a href="/facts/Toronto/cnXH7881">Toronto</a>, <a href="/facts/Canada/cWWFM8oc">Canada</a></td></tr><tr><td>2022 May 22–27</td><td><a href="/facts/Dublin/Fv8ezm8a">Dublin</a>, <a href="/facts/Ireland/35vYxXdP">Ireland</a></td></tr><tr><td>2021 August 1–6</td><td><a href="/facts/Bangkok/WRxftcFz">Bangkok</a>, <a href="/facts/Thailand/GCUnN4JK">Thailand</a> Online due to <a href="/facts/COVID-19_pandemic/0xTsh7Ut">COVID-19</a></td></tr><tr><td>2020 July 5–10</td><td><a href="/facts/Seattle%2c_Washington/7lYIrCa6">Seattle, Washington</a> Online due to <a href="/facts/COVID-19_pandemic/0xTsh7Ut">COVID-19</a></td></tr><tr><td>2019 July 28–August 2</td><td><a href="/facts/Florence/Mx0uhNma">Florence</a>, <a href="/facts/Italy/tUf0PDYF">Italy</a></td></tr><tr><td>2018 July 15–20</td><td><a href="/facts/Melbourne/EHY9YxI0">Melbourne</a>, <a href="/facts/Australia/qLHpbppq">Australia</a></td></tr><tr><td>2017 July 30–August 4</td><td><a href="/facts/Vancouver/rn2AKA1n">Vancouver</a>, <a href="/facts/Canada/cWWFM8oc">Canada</a></td></tr><tr><td>2014 June 22–27</td><td><a href="/facts/Baltimore%2c_Maryland/ncJvTzBU">Baltimore, Maryland</a></td></tr><tr><td>2011 June 19–24</td><td><a href="/facts/Portland%2c_Oregon/wwBx1Hrv">Portland, Oregon</a></td></tr><tr><td>2008 June 15–20</td><td><a href="/facts/Columbus%2c_Ohio/mREa53Ub">Columbus, Ohio</a></td></tr><tr><td>2005 June 25–30</td><td><a href="/facts/Ann_Arbor%2c_Michigan/hs3CBRJy">Ann Arbor, Michigan</a></td></tr><tr><td>2002 July 7–12</td><td><a href="/facts/Philadelphia%2c_Pennsylvania/2bFFCCTU">Philadelphia, Pennsylvania</a></td></tr></tbody></table> <h2 id="activities">Activities</h2> <p>The ACL organizes several of the top conferences and workshops in the field of computational linguistics and natural language processing. These include: </p> <ul><li><a href="/facts/Annual_Meeting_of_the_Association_for_Computational_Linguistics/0bE3QCge">Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics</a> (ACL), the flagship conference of the organization</li> <li><a href="/facts/Empirical_Methods_in_Natural_Language_Processing/swfWcw7j">Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing</a> (EMNLP)</li> <li>International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP), held jointly one of the other conferences on a rotating basis</li> <li>Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)</li> <li>Lexical and Computational Semantics and Semantic Evaluation (SemEval)</li> <li>Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM)</li> <li>Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (WMT)</li></ul> <p>Besides conferences, the ACL also sponsors the journals <a href="/facts/Computational_Linguistics_(journal)/U13XIEg5"><i>Computational Linguistics</i></a> and <i><a href="/facts/Transactions_of_the_Association_for_Computational_Linguistics/GKgP0Kh4">Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics</a></i> (TACL). Papers and other presentations at ACL and ACL-affiliated venues are archived online in the <a href="/facts/Open_access/r7rLYN6C">open-access</a> ACL Anthology.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:17" href="#fn:17"><sup>17</sup></a> </p> <h2 id="special-interest-groups">Special Interest Groups</h2> <p>ACL has a large number of Special Interest Groups (SIGs), focusing on specific areas of natural language processing. Some current SIGs within ACL are:<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:18" href="#fn:18"><sup>18</sup></a> </p> <table><tbody><tr><th>SIG</th><th>Description</th></tr><tr><td><a href="http://www.cs.vassar.edu/sigann">SIGANN</a></td><td>Linguistic Annotation</td></tr><tr><td><a href="http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=SIGBIOMED">SIGBIOMED</a></td><td>Biomedical Language Processing</td></tr><tr><td><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150413144200/http://www.aclweb.org/sigdat">SIGDAT</a></td><td>Linguistic data and corpus-based approaches</td></tr><tr><td><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150414043958/http://www.aclweb.org/sigdial">SIGDIAL</a></td><td>Dialogue Processing</td></tr><tr><td><a href="https://kitwiki.csc.fi/twiki/bin/view/KitWiki/SIGFSM">SIGFSM</a></td><td>Finite State Methods</td></tr><tr><td><a href="http://www.siggen.org">SIGGEN</a> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20080512005636/http://www.siggen.org/">Archived</a> 12 May 2008 at the <a href="/facts/Wayback_Machine/nmQ3a6JC">Wayback Machine</a></td><td>Natural Language Generation</td></tr><tr><td><a href="http://sighan.cs.uchicago.edu/">SIGHAN</a></td><td>Chinese Language Processing</td></tr><tr><td><a href="https://sighum.wordpress.com/">SIGHUM</a></td><td>Language Technologies for the Socio-Economic Sciences and the Humanities</td></tr><tr><td><a href="https://siglex.org/">SIGLEX</a></td><td>Lexicon: the umbrella organization for the <a href="/facts/SemEval/ATldaMIG">SemEval</a> semantic evaluations and SENSEVAL word-sense evaluations</td></tr><tr><td><a href="http://www.sigmt.org/">SIGMT</a> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20210426195959/http://www.sigmt.org/">Archived</a> 26 April 2021 at the <a href="/facts/Wayback_Machine/nmQ3a6JC">Wayback Machine</a></td><td>Machine Translation</td></tr><tr><td><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20191024200346/http://molweb.org/">SIGMOL</a></td><td>Mathematics of Language</td></tr><tr><td><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20161129022155/http://nlp.cs.swarthmore.edu/sigphon//">SIGMORPHON</a></td><td>Computational Morphology and Phonology</td></tr><tr><td><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150414041019/http://www.aclweb.org/signll">SIGNLL</a></td><td>Natural Language Learning</td></tr><tr><td><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150423215528/http://www.aclweb.org/sigparse">SIGPARSE</a></td><td>Natural Language Parsing</td></tr><tr><td><a href="http://www.sigsem.org">SIGSEM</a></td><td>Computational Semantics</td></tr><tr><td><a href="http://cl.haifa.ac.il/semitic">SIGSEMITIC</a></td><td>Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages</td></tr><tr><td><a href="http://sigslav.cs.helsinki.fi/">SIGSLAV</a></td><td>NLP for Slavic Languages</td></tr><tr><td><a href="http://www.slpat.org/">SIGSLPAT</a></td><td>Speech & Language Processing for Assistive Technologies</td></tr><tr><td><a href="http://sigtyp.github.io">SIGTYP</a></td><td>Typology</td></tr><tr><td><a href="https://acl-sigur.github.io/">SIGUR</a></td><td>Uralic Languages</td></tr><tr><td><a href="http://www.sigwac.org.uk/">SIGWAC</a></td><td>Web as Corpus</td></tr></tbody></table> <h2 id="presidents">Presidents</h2> <p>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:<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:19" href="#fn:19"><sup>19</sup></a> </p> <table><tbody><tr><th>Year</th><th>Name</th></tr><tr><td>2024</td><td><a href="/facts/Emily_M._Bender/XqsJCUm9">Emily M. Bender</a></td></tr><tr><td>2023</td><td><a href="/facts/Iryna_Gurevych/8WEeQq7Q">Iryna Gurevych</a></td></tr><tr><td>2022</td><td>Tim Baldwin</td></tr><tr><td>2021</td><td><a href="/facts/Rada_Mihalcea/88vksTbw">Rada Mihalcea</a></td></tr><tr><td>2020</td><td>Hinrich Schütze</td></tr><tr><td>2019</td><td><a href="/facts/Zhou_Ming_(linguist)/JL41hRyA">Zhou Ming</a></td></tr><tr><td>2018</td><td><a href="/facts/Marti_Hearst/k5IcBjsQ">Marti Hearst</a></td></tr><tr><td>2017</td><td>Joakim Nivre</td></tr><tr><td>2016</td><td><a href="/facts/Pushpak_Bhattacharyya/ftRfX3b3">Pushpak Bhattacharyya</a></td></tr><tr><td>2015</td><td><a href="/facts/Christopher_D._Manning/Qgz8RuIb">Christopher D. Manning</a></td></tr><tr><td>2014</td><td>Gertjan van Noord</td></tr><tr><td>2013</td><td>Haifeng Wang</td></tr><tr><td>2012</td><td>Ken Church</td></tr><tr><td>2011</td><td>Kevin Knight</td></tr><tr><td>2010</td><td>Ido Dagan</td></tr><tr><td>2009</td><td>Steven Bird</td></tr><tr><td>2008</td><td><a href="/facts/Bonnie_Dorr/gqP6ruzK">Bonnie Dorr</a></td></tr><tr><td>2007</td><td><a href="/facts/Mark_Steedman/FqgTaSL6">Mark Steedman</a></td></tr><tr><td>2006</td><td><a href="/facts/Jun%2527ichi_Tsujii/D9RwVQc6">Jun'ichi Tsujii</a></td></tr><tr><td>2005</td><td><a href="/facts/Martha_Palmer/1KFpH3xh">Martha Palmer</a></td></tr><tr><td>2004</td><td><a href="/facts/Johanna_Moore/bUHmWsYh">Johanna Moore</a></td></tr><tr><td>2003</td><td>Mark Johnson</td></tr><tr><td>2002</td><td><a href="/facts/John_Nerbonne/UsIvhhjb">John Nerbonne</a></td></tr><tr><td>2001</td><td><a href="/facts/Eduard_Hovy/kveNqgaA">Eduard Hovy</a></td></tr><tr><td>2000</td><td><a href="/facts/Wolfgang_Wahlster/LGpQrIAp">Wolfgang Wahlster</a></td></tr></tbody></table> <h2 id="see-also">See also</h2> <ul><li><a href="/facts/Sociedad_Espa%25C3%25B1ola_para_el_Procesamiento_del_Lenguaje_Natural/ajzUuuvB">Sociedad Española para el Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural</a> (SEPLN, Spanish Association for Natural Language Processing)</li></ul> <h2 id="external-links">External links</h2> <ul><li><a href="https://www.aclweb.org/">Official website</a> <ul><li><a href="http://www.aclweb.org/anthology">ACL Anthology</a></li> <li><a href="http://aclweb.org/aclwiki">ACL Wiki</a></li></ul></li> <li><a href="http://www.eacl.org">EACL</a></li> <li><a href="http://www.naacl.org">NAACL</a></li> <li><a href="https://aaclweb.org/index.html">AACL</a></li></ul> <h2 id="references">References</h2> <ol> <li id="fn:1"><p>"What is the ACL and what is Computational Linguistics? | ACL Member Portal". aclweb.org. Retrieved 22 March 2022. <a href="https://www.aclweb.org/portal/what-is-cl" target="_blank">https://www.aclweb.org/portal/what-is-cl</a> <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> <li id="fn:2"><p>"The Top 10 NLP Conferences | jungle light speed". Retrieved 22 March 2022. <a href="https://www.junglelightspeed.com/the-top-10-nlp-conferences/" target="_blank">https://www.junglelightspeed.com/the-top-10-nlp-conferences/</a> <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> <li id="fn:3"><p>"Natural Language Processing (NLP) Conferences 2022/2023/2024". conferenceindex.org. Retrieved 22 March 2022. <a href="https://conferenceindex.org/conferences/natural-language-processing-nlp" target="_blank">https://conferenceindex.org/conferences/natural-language-processing-nlp</a> <a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> <li id="fn:4"><p>"What is the ACL and what is Computational Linguistics? | ACL Member Portal". aclweb.org. Retrieved 21 October 2017. <a href="https://www.aclweb.org/portal/what-is-cl" target="_blank">https://www.aclweb.org/portal/what-is-cl</a> <a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> <li id="fn:5"><p>"EACL Home". www.eacl.org. Retrieved 21 October 2017. <a href="http://www.eacl.org/page.php?id=about" target="_blank">http://www.eacl.org/page.php?id=about</a> <a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> <li id="fn:6"><p>Sarkar, Anoop. "NAACL: North American Chapter of the ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics)". naacl.org. Retrieved 21 October 2017. <a href="http://naacl.org/about/index.html" target="_blank">http://naacl.org/about/index.html</a> <a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> <li id="fn:7"><p>"AACL: Asia-Pacific Chapter of the ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics)". aaclweb.org. Retrieved 15 February 2022. <a href="https://aaclweb.org/index.html" target="_blank">https://aaclweb.org/index.html</a> <a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> <li id="fn:8"><p>Jones, Karen Sparck (1994). "Some Notes on ACL History". ACL. Retrieved 10 February 2021. <a href="https://www.aclweb.org/archive/misc/History.html" target="_blank">https://www.aclweb.org/archive/misc/History.html</a> <a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> <li id="fn:9"><p>"List of Issues | Computational Linguistics | MIT Press Journals". mitpressjournals.org. Retrieved 21 October 2017. <a href="http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/coli" target="_blank">http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/coli</a> <a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> <li id="fn:10"><p>"Computational Linguistics". cljournal.org. Retrieved 21 October 2017. <a href="http://cljournal.org/" target="_blank">http://cljournal.org/</a> <a href="#fnref:10" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> <li id="fn:11"><p>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. S2CID 6224861. <a href="https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P82-1017/" target="_blank">https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P82-1017/</a> <a href="#fnref:11" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> <li id="fn:12"><p>Jones, Karen Sparck (1994). "Some Notes on ACL History". ACL. Retrieved 10 February 2021. <a href="https://www.aclweb.org/archive/misc/History.html" target="_blank">https://www.aclweb.org/archive/misc/History.html</a> <a href="#fnref:12" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> <li id="fn:13"><p>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. S2CID 6224861. <a href="https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P82-1017/" target="_blank">https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P82-1017/</a> <a href="#fnref:13" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> <li id="fn:14"><p>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. <a href="https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W12-3202" target="_blank">https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W12-3202</a> <a href="#fnref:14" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> <li id="fn:15"><p>"Annual Meetings of the Association for Computational Linguistics | ACL Member Portal". ACL HomeAssociation for Computational Linguistics. Archived from the original on 22 December 2022. Retrieved 22 December 2022. <a href="https://www.aclweb.org/portal/acl" target="_blank">https://www.aclweb.org/portal/acl</a> <a href="#fnref:15" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> <li id="fn:16"><p>Chai, Joyce; Schluter, Natalie; Tetreault, Joel (4 June 2020). "ACL2020: General Conference Statistics". ACL2020. Association for Computational Linguistics. Retrieved 10 February 2021. <a href="https://acl2020.org/blog/general-conference-statistics/" target="_blank">https://acl2020.org/blog/general-conference-statistics/</a> <a href="#fnref:16" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> <li id="fn:17"><p>"ACL Anthology". Association for Computational Linguistics. <a href="https://aclanthology.org/" target="_blank">https://aclanthology.org/</a> <a href="#fnref:17" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> <li id="fn:18"><p>"Special Interest Groups | ACL Member Portal". aclweb.org. Retrieved 21 October 2017. <a href="https://www.aclweb.org/portal/sigs" target="_blank">https://www.aclweb.org/portal/sigs</a> <a href="#fnref:18" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> <li id="fn:19"><p>"ACL Officers – Admin Wiki". aclweb.org. Retrieved 21 October 2017. <a href="https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Officers" target="_blank">https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Officers</a> <a href="#fnref:19" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> </ol>