ACL Lifetime Achievement Award Recipients

Recipients and their acceptance speeches

• Robert L. Mercer (2014) - (Video) A Computational Life
• Jerry Hobbs (2013) - Influences and Inferences
• Charles Fillmore (2012) - Encounters with Language (Video)
• Eugene Charniak (2011) - The Brain as a Statistical Inference Engine—and You Can Too
• William A. Woods (2010) - The Right Tools: Reflections on Computation and Language
• Fred Jelinek (2009) - The Dawn of Statistical ASR and MT
• Yorick Wilks (2008) - On Whose Shoulders?
• Lauri Karttunen (2007) - Word Play
• Eva Hajicova (2006) - Old Linguists Never Die, They Only Get Obligatorily Deleted
• Martin Kay (2005) - A Life of Language
• Karen Sparck Jones (2004) - Some Points in a Time
• Makoto Nagao (2003)
• Aravind Joshi (2002)

Of related interest

A sampling of other papers that touch on the history of computational linguistics:

• Some of the "Last Words" opinion essays in the journal Computational Linguistics:
  • Mark Steedman - On Becoming a Discipline (ACL presidential address, 2008)
  • Karen Sparck Jones - Computational Linguistics: What About the Linguistics? (2007)
  • Ehud Reiter - The Shrinking Horizons of Computational Linguistics (2007)
• W. John Hutchins (ed.) - Early Years in Machine Translation: Memoirs and Biographies of Pioneers (2000).
  • Book review by Warren J. Plath
  • Book review by Jörg Schütz
• Aravind Joshi and Philip Hopely - A Parser from Antiquity (1999)