ACL Computational Linguistics Doctoral Dissertation Award
The ACL Computational Linguistics Doctoral Dissertation Award (short form: ACL Dissertation Award) was established in 2024 through a proposal from the Computational Linguistics journal, as a new initiative by the ACL. This was also the year in which the Computational Linguistics journal celebrated its 50th anniversary.
The award aims to recognize and promote outstanding doctoral research in the field of computational linguistics and natural language processing. Starting in 2025, the award will be presented annually at the ACL conference. It includes a monetary prize and funding to cover the recipient's travel expenses to attend the conference. Additionally, the recipient will deliver an oral presentation during a special session at the conference and receive a certificate presented by the current President of the ACL. Each year, one winner will be selected, with the possibility of several honorable mentions.
The winning dissertation will be published in the Computational Linguistics journal.
2025 Awards
Review Committee
Chair: Kathleen McKeown (Columbia)
| NAACL | EACL | AACL |
|---|---|---|
| Jason Eisner (JHU) | Ivan Titov (Edinburgh) | Yang Liu (Tsinghua) |
| Julia Hockenmaier (UIUC) | Anna Korhonen (Cambridge) | Alice Oh (KAIST) |
Advisory/Organizing Committee
Wei Lu (EiC, CL Journal), Mohit Bansal (ACL Exec)
ACL is delighted to give the 2025 award to:
- Sewon Min, Rethinking Data Use in Large Language Models. Min’s dissertation provides key insights into the behavior and capabilities of large language models, in particular in-context learning. Its findings have impacted the core of NLP today.
ACL also recognizes three dissertations with honorable mentions:
- Manling Li, Event-Centric Multimodal Knowledge Acquisition. Li's dissertation offers a comprehensive framework for multimodal event extraction and reasoning, advancing important tasks such as video question answering and future event prediction;
- Ashish Sharma, Human-AI Collaboration to Support Mental Health and Well-Being. Sharma's dissertation pushes the boundaries of human-AI collaboration along with research in empathy detection and generation, advancing the application of NLP to mental health; and
- Tom Sherborne, Modeling Cross-lingual Transfer for Semantic Parsing. Sherborne's dissertation develops sophisticated methods for cross-lingual transfer into low-resource languages, demonstrating their effectiveness in the context of semantic parsing for integration with database APIs.
These four excellent works model different styles of dissertation in today’s NLP/CL landscape. They were selected from 29 nominees that were completed during September 1, 2022 – August 31, 2024. The committee favored well-written and coherent dissertations that raised substantial novel questions relevant to ACL, investigated them through rigorous scholarship, and are worth reading in full.
The winner, Sewon Min, will have her thesis published in the Computational Linguistics journal later in 2025, and the award will be presented during a special session at the ACL 2025 conference.