ACL Fellows

The ACL Fellows program has been established in 2011 by the ACL. The rules and nomination procedures have been revised in 2017. The Fellows program recognizes ACL members whose contributions to the field have been most extraordinary in terms of scientific and technical excellence, service to the association and the community and/or educational or outreach activities with broader impact. To be named a Fellow, a candidate must have been a member of the ACL for three out of the past five years and be nominated by a current ACL member. Below is the current list of fellows.

If you would like to nominate a candidate, please make your nomination at https://www.aclweb.org/portal/acl-fellows. If you are unsure about a candidate's eligibility, please send a query to acl@aclweb.org. A nominator must provide a comprehensive case for the candidate and solicit two additional recommendations. The nominator should direct the recommenders to fill out recommendation forms (ACL will not contact individual recommenders or solicit letters). All forms submitted by October 1 of a given year will be considered by the ACL nominating committee, and submitted forms will be kept confidential. For more information about the ACL Fellows Program, please refer to https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Fellows_Program.

2024 Fellows

11 December, 2024

The ACL Nominating Committee has selected nine ACL fellows for 2024:

• Philipp koehn
  • Johns Hopkins University
  • For significant contributions to statistical and neural machine translation, MT evaluation, and for leadership in open-source software and datasets.

• Scott Wen-tau Yih
  • Meta Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR)
  • For significant contributions to information extraction and question answering, neural retrieval and retrieval-augmented generation.

• Jianfeng Gao
  • Microsoft
  • For significant contributions to machine learning for web search, natural language processing and conversational systems.

• James Pustejovsky
  • Brandeis University
  • For significant contributions to computational semantics and predicate argument structures and the formalization of lexical, spatial and temporal relations.

• Dilek Hakkani-Tur
  • University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  • For significant contributions to Conversational Dialogue Modeling, Spoken Language Understanding, and Machine Learning Methods for Dialogue Systems.

• Massimo Poesio
  • Queen Mary University of London, and the University of Utrecht
  • For significant contributions to the theory and practice of anaphora and reference resolution, and to sound methodologies of corpus development.

• Jimmy Lin
  • University of Waterloo
  • For significant contributions to question answering and information retrieval.

• Lucy Vanderwende
  • Microsoft
  • For significant contributions to semantic knowledge acquisition from free text, summarization, and information extraction from biomedical text.

• Min Zhang
  • Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)
  • For significant contributions to MT, Parsing and sustained service to the growth of NLP in China and Southeast Asia.

2023 Fellows

12 December, 2023

The ACL Nominating Committee has selected the following new fellows for 2023:

• Mona Diab
  • Carnegie Mellon University
  • For contributions to Arabic language NLP, to lexical semantics, and for democratizing NLP to wider and less privileged communities.

• Barbara di Eugenio
  • University of Illinois at Chicago
  • For outstanding contributions to natural language generation; intelligent tutoring systems; discourse; intercoder agreement; and applying multimodal interactive systems to health.

• Anna Korhonen
  • University of Cambridge
  • For significant contributions to lexical acquisition, multilingual and low resource NLP, socially beneficial language applications, and services to the ACL community

• Roberto Navigli
  • Sapienza University of Rome
  • For significant contributions to multilingual lexical-semantic resources and a unifying vision for multilingual lexical and sentence-level semantics.

• Ming Zhou
  • Langboat Ltd.
  • For significant contributions to machine translation, language learning, text generation as well as the growth of NLP community in China and Asia

2022 Fellows

11 December, 2022

The ACL Nominating Committee has selected the following new fellows for 2022:

• Hinrich Schütze
  • University of Munich (LMU)
  • For significant contributions to statistical and neural language representation models below, beyond and above the word level.

• Marti Hearst
  • University of California Berkeley
  • For significant contributions to semantics, discourse structure and text data mining.

• Claire Gardent
  • Lorraine Research Laboratory in Computer Science and its Applications (LORIA), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
  • For significant contributions to linguistically informed computational models for natural language generation, and the curation of NLG benchmarking and evaluation resources.

• James F Allen
  • University of Rochester
  • For significant contributions to natural language dialogue research, planning and plan recognition.

• Owen Rambow
  • Stony Brook University
  • For significant contributions to syntax, Tree Adjoining Grammars, dependency processing, natural language generation, and Arabic language processing.

• Yejin Choi
  • University of Washington and Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
  • For significant contributions to research in natural language generation, language and vision, and commonsense reasoning.

• Maosong Sun
  • Tsinghua University
  • For significant contributions to Chinese NLP, and sustained service to the growth of computational linguistics in China.

• Tomek Strzalkowski
  • Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
  • For significant contributions to computational sociolinguistics, metaphor extraction, interactive question answering, and natural language information retrieval.

2021 Fellows

6 January, 2022

The ACL Nominating Committee has selected the following new fellows for 2021:

• Joakim Nivre
  • Uppsala University
  • For significant contributions to algorithms, models and data resources for dependency parsing, pushing the field to the forefront of multilingual syntactic analysis.

• Qun Liu
  • Huawei
  • For significant contributions to machine translation and Chinese natural language processing.

• Luke Zettlemoyer
  • University of Washington
  • For significant contributions to grounded semantics, semantic parsing, and representation learning for natural language processing.

• Anette Frank
  • Heidelberg University
  • For integrative work in linguistically informed, technically well-founded semantics- and discourse-oriented natural language processing.

• Joyce Chai
  • University of Michigan
  • For significant contributions to grounded natural language processing and the interaction between language processing and robotics.

• Eneko Agirre
  • University of the Basque Country
  • For significant contributions to word sense disambiguation, semantic textual similarity, unsupervised machine translation, Basque resources and services to the ACL.

• Chengqing Zong
  • Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences
  • For significant contributions to machine translation and sentiment analysis and sustained service to the growth of natural language processing in China.

• Amanda Stent
  • Colby College
  • For significant contributions to computational models of multimodal and spoken dialogue, natural language generation and summarization.

2020 Fellows

30 November 2020

The ACL Nominating Committee has selected the following new fellows for 2020:

Philip Cohen (Openstream, Inc.)

• For significant contributions to the study of communicative action and dialogue, and to the theory and practice of multimodal interaction.

Pascale Fung (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)

• For significant contributions toward statistical NLP, comparable corpora, and building intelligent systems that can understand and empathize with humans.

Iryna Gurevych (Technische Universität Darmstadt)

• For theoretical and practical contributions to deep learning models for NLP, and computational argumentation, and for services to the ACL and the German NLP Community.

Dan Jurafsky (Stanford University)

• For contributions to computational linguistics that both broaden its societal impact and advance our understanding of human communication.

Hermann Ney (RWTH Aachen University)

• For significant contributions to machine translation and speech recognition.

Philip Resnik (University of Maryland)

• For significant contributions to symbolic-statistical methods for natural language processing, multilinguality, and the interdisciplinary study of language.

Donia Scott (University of Sussex)

• For significant contributions to natural language generation, particularly in the areas of discourse processing, multilinguality, and knowledge-editing.

Noah Smith (University of Washington)

• For significant contributions to linguistic structure prediction, computational social sciences, and improving NLP research methodology.

Kam-Fai Wong (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)

• For significant contributions to social media processing, particularly in Chinese information retrieval, opinion mining, microblog processing and rumour detection.

2019 Fellows

26 November 2019

The ACL Nominating Committee has selected the following new fellows for 2019:

Barbara Grosz

• For foundational contributions to the computational study of discourse, including discourse structure, centering, and dialogue, as well as for service to ACL and related professional organizations, and energetic support of women in science.

Graeme Hirst

• For deep and influential work in numerous topics in NLP, Knowledge Representation, Linguistics, and related areas, as well as for sustained service of ACL as Treasurer and other positions, and for teaching and advising over many years.

Mirella Lapata

• For significant developments in methods to extract and represent domain knowledge to support machine and human learning, and for strong contributions to natural language generation.

Hang Li

• For foundational contributions in information retrieval, notably learning to rank, for strong contributions on deep learning and generation in dialogue, and for enabling the growth and commercialization of NLP in China.

Paola Merlo

• For pioneering research on the fundamental problem of verb predicate-argument structure and the automatic acquisition of the lexical, syntactic and lexical semantic properties of verbs, as well as for valuable service to ACL as editor of the CL journal.

Michael Strube

• For valuable contributions to the computational treatment of discourse, coreference, and evaluation, for sustained service to ACL in numerous roles, and for effective outreach to the public.

2018 Fellows

15 December 2018

The ACL Nominating Committee has selected the following new fellows this year:

Robert Dale

• For significant contributions to research in the generation of referring expressions and in natural language generation more broadly.

Jason Eisner

• For significant contributions to probabilistic models and algorithms for finding linguistic structure, especially lexicalized syntax and morphology.

Mari Ostendorf

• For significant contributions to prosody, pronunciation, acoustic, language modeling, and developments in using out-of-domain data and discourse structure.

Dragomir Radev

• For significant contributions to text summarization and question answering, as well as large scale efforts to expand and diversify the computational linguistics pipeline.

Ellen Riloff

• For significant contributions to information extraction, and the analysis of sentiment, subjectivity and affect.

2017 Fellows

12 December 2017

The ACL Nominating Committee has selected the following new fellows this year:

Regina Barzilay

• For ground-breaking contributions to language generation, text summarization, reinforcement learning for language applications and multi-lingual core technology.

Ralph Grishman

• For significant contributions to information extraction and in particular his leadership role in defining the architecture of modern information extraction.

Lillian Lee

• For significant wide-ranging contributions to the rigorous analysis of human social communication and for advancing the field of computational social science.

Diane Litman

• For key contributions to dialog systems research, especially the application of reinforcement learning and multimodal analysis to tutoring dialog.

Fernando Pereira

• For wide-ranging contributions to sequence modeling, finite-state methods, and dependency and deductive parsing.

Stuart Shieber

• For significant contributions to constraint-based grammar formalisms, synchronous grammars, parsing algorithms, and understanding of the formal properties of natural languages.

2016 Fellows

28 November 2016

The ACL Fellows selection committee has selected the following new fellows this year:

Bonnie J. Dorr (Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC))

• For significant contributions to machine translation, summarization and human evaluation.

Marilyn Walker (University of California Santa Cruz)

• For fundamental contributions to statistical methods for dialog optimization, to centering theory, and to expressive generation for dialog.

Haifeng Wang (Baidu)

• For significant contributions to MT, NLP and search engines in both academia and industry, and to the growth of the ACL in Asia.

Ralph Weischedel (Raytheon BBN Technologies)

• For significant contributions in information extraction technologies and for quiet but effective and wide-ranging strategic leadership

2015 Fellows

9 December 2015

The ACL Fellows selection committee has selected the following new fellows this year:

Claire Cardie

• For foundational contributions to co-reference resolution, information and opinion extraction, and to machine learning methods in natural language processing.

Kenneth Church

• For significant contributions to computational lexicography, statistical natural language processing and the SIGDAT community.

Salim Roukos

• For seminal contributions in statistical methods for parsing, machine translation, and information extraction.

Janyce Wiebe

• For seminal contributions to Subjectivity and Sentiment analysis, Discourse Processing, and Lexical Semantics.

2014 Fellows

9 December 2014

We are pleased to announce the ACL Fellows chosen for 2014 who are:

Walter Daelemans

• For significant contributions to the theory, methodology, and applications of machine learning of language.

Kevin Knight

• For significant contributions to statistical machine translation, automata for natural language processing, and decipherment of historical manuscripts.

Daniel Marcu

• For significant contributions to discourse parsing, summarization, and machine translation and to kickstarting the statistical machine translation industry.

Raymond Mooney

• For significant contributions to machine learning for semantic parsing, language generation, and multimodal integration.

Martha Palmer

• For significant contributions to computational semantics and the development of semantic corpora.

Junichi Tsujii

• For significant contributions to MT, parsing by unification-based grammar and text mining for biology.

2013 Fellows

5 November 2013

We are pleased to announce the ACL Fellows chosen for 2013 who are:

Dekang Lin

• For significant contributions to natural language parsing and lexical semantics.

Candace Sidner

• For seminal contributions to discourse focus and collaborative dialog.

Ido Dagan

• For initiating and developing the textual entailment paradigm, contributions to lexical semantics, and leading the creation of the TACL journal.

David Yarowsky

• For significant contributions to word-sense disambiguation, the SIGDAT community, and the development of the decision-list learning method.

2012 Fellows

18 February 2013

We are pleased to announce the ACL Fellows chosen for 2012 who are:

Hwee Tou Ng

• For significant contributions to coreference resolution and semantic processing, and for the development of semantic corpora.

Dan Roth

• For significant contributions to machine learning and inference in natural language processing.

Richard Sproat

• For significant contributions to computational morphology, text normalization, text-to-speech synthesis, Chinese language processing, and computational approaches to writing systems.

Mark Steedman

• For the development of Combinatory Categorial Grammar, and for significant contributions to grammar induction and parsing.

Bonnie Webber

• For significant contributions to discourse structure and discourse-based interpretation.

2011 Fellows

We are pleased to announce the ACL Fellows chosen for 2011 who are:

Nicoletta Calzolari

• For significant contributions to computational lexicography, and for the creation and dissemination of language resources.

Eugene Charniak

• For significant contributions to natural language parsing.

Michael Collins

• For significant contributions to natural language parsing and discriminative training.

Eva Hajičová

• For significant contributions to theoretical linguistics and topic-focus models of discourse structure.

Julia Hirschberg

• For significant contributions to intonation, discourse, text-to-speech systems, and labeling standards for speech corpora.

Eduard Hovy

• For significant contributions to natural language generation, summarization and ontologies.

Mark Johnson

• For significant contributions to natural language parsing and its applications to text and speech processing.

Aravind Joshi

• For significant contributions to the mathematics of natural language and for the development of TAGs (tree-adjoining grammars).

Ronald M. Kaplan

• For significant contributions to augmented transition networks, lexical functional grammar, and finite-state models of morphology and phonology.

Lauri Karttunen

• For significant contributions to finite-state morphology and parsing.

Christopher D. Manning

• For significant contributions to the probabilistic modeling of natural language syntax and semantics.

Mitch Marcus

• For significant contributions to deterministic parsing and The Penn Treebank.

Yuji Matsumoto

• For significant contributions to ChaSen and bottom-up parsing.

Kathleen R. McKeown

• For significant contributions to natural language generation and multi-document summarization.

Robert L. Mercer

• For significant contributions to machine translation and speech recognition.

Robert C. Moore

• For significant contributions to unification-based grammar and machine translation.

Dekai Wu

• For significant contributions to machine translation and the development of inversion-transduction grammar.