Association for Computational Linguistics
The Association for Computational Linguistics is the international scientific and professional society for people working on problems involving natural language and computation. An annual meeting 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. It became the ACL in 1968.
The ACL has a European and a North American chapter.
The ACL journal, Computational Linguistics, is the primary forum for research on computational linguistics and natural language processing. Since 1988, the journal has been published for the ACL by MIT Press.
Special Interest Groups
ACL has a large number of Special Interest Groups, focusing on specific areas of natural language processing. Some current SIGs within ACL are:| SIG | Description |
| Linguistic Annotation | |
| Biomedical Language Processing | |
| Linguistic data and corpus-based approaches | |
| Dialogue Processing | |
| Finite State Methods | |
| Natural Language Generation | |
| 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 |
| Machine Translation | |
| Mathematics of Language | |
| Computational Morphology and Phonology | |
| Natural Language Learning | |
| Natural Language Parsing | |
| Computational Semantics | |
| Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages | |
| NLP for Slavic Languages | |
| Speech & Language Processing for Assistive Technologies | |
| Typology | |
| 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:| Year | Name |
| 2018 | Marti Hearst |
| 2017 | Joakim Nivre |
| 2016 | Pushpak Bhattacharyya |
| 2015 | Chris 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 |