2018Q1 Reports: Secretary

1. Membership

I am pleased to announce that we have been growing and now have about 3000 members by the end of 2017. After January 1st, you are highly encouraged to renew your membership through the ACL portal: http://www.aclweb.org/portal/

2. Thanks to the Outgoing Members of the ACL Executive Committee

Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Yejin Choi and Emily M. Bender left the ACL Executive Committee at the end of 2017 after their terms expired. I would like to thank all of you for your hard work as members of the exec and wish you luck in your future endeavors.

3. Welcome to the New Members of the ACL Executive Committee

Four new members will join the Exec as of January 1, 2018.

https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/acl-2017-election-results-congratulations-hinrich-sch-tze-david-yarowsky-and-barbara-di

These are:

Hinrich Schütze, LMU Munich, Germany (Vice President-Elect, replacing Pushpak Bhattacharyya)
Barbara Di Eugenio, University of Illinois, Chicago, USA (Conference Officer, replacing Yejin Choi)
David Yarowsky, John Hopkins University, USA (Treasurer. Graeme Hirst will remain on the Exec as Past Treasurer in 2018)
Julia Hockenmaier, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA (NAACL Chair, ex officio, replacing Emily M. Bender)

Welcome to Hinrich, Barbara, David and Julia!

The full list of Exec members is here: http://www.aclweb.org/portal/about

The next elections will take place in the Fall. Openings for 2018 include Vice President-Elect and Information Officer.

4. ACL Lifetime Achievement Award

The winner of the ACL 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award (LTA) was Professor Barbara Grosz of Harvard University.

https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/barbara-grosz-receives-2017-acl-life-time-achievement-award

The 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award will be announced in July during ACL 2018 in Melbourne.

For a list of past winners, visit: https://aclweb.org/aclwiki/ACL_Lifetime_Achievement_Award_Recipients

5. ACL Fellows

Starting from this year, the selection of ACL Fellows based on nominations from the membership is handled by the new and enlarged Nominating Committee, consisting of the three most recent past ACL Presidents and six ACL Fellows. In addition, ACL has adopted new rules and criteria for ACL Fellows. For more details, please refer to:

https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Fellows_Program

I am happy to announce that the ACL Nominating Committee has selected six new ACL Fellows for 2017.

https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/acl-fellows-2017

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.

Congratulations to these established ACL members!

6. New Policies for Submission, Review and Citation

The ACL Executive Committee has adopted new policies for submission to *ACL conferences and the TACL journal. The policies specify under what conditions papers available as preprints can be submitted for double-blind review, and also clarify the status of preprints with respect to citation and review. The new policies have been developed by a working group appointed by the Executive Committee, taking into account the results of our membership survey and discussions at the ACL business meeting in Vancouver.

https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/new-policies-submission-review-and-citation

7. NAACL HLT 2018 - New Orleans, USA

http://naacl2018.org/

NAACL HLT 2018 will take place in New Orleans, June 1 to June 6, 2018 at the Hyatt Regency New Orleans hotel.

General Chair:
- Marilyn Walker, University of California, Santa Cruz
Program Co-Chairs:
- Heng Ji, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
- Amanda Stent, Bloomberg
Local Arrangements Chair:
- Priscilla Rasmussen

8. ACL 2018 - Melbourne, Australia

http://acl2018.org/

ACL 2018 will be held in Melbourne, Australia at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre from July 15th to 20th, 2018.

Important dates:

February 22nd, 2018: Submission Deadline
March 26th–28th, 2018: Author Response Period
April 20th, 2018: Notification of Acceptance
May 11th, 2018: Camera-ready Due
July 15th, 2018: Tutorials
July 16th–18th, 2018: Main Conference
July 19th–20th, 2018: Tutorials and Workshops

General Chair:
- Claire Cardie, Cornell University
Program Co-Chairs:
- Iryna Gurevych, TU Darmstadt
- Yusuke Miyao, National Institute of Informatics
Local Chairs:
- Tim Baldwin, University of Melbourne
- Karin Verspoor, University of Melbourne
- Trevor Cohn, University of Melbourne

9. EMNLP 2018 - Brussels, Belgium

EMNLP will be held in Brussels, Belgium on October 31 - November 4th, 2018.

General Chair:
- Ellen Riloff, University of Utah
Program Co-Chairs:
- Julia Hockenmaier, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Junichi Tsujii, AIST
Local chair:
- Sien Moens, KU Leuven

10. ACL 2019 - Florence, Italy

www.acl-2019.com/

The Association for Computational Linguistics is pleased to announce that ACL 2019, its 57th Annual Meeting, will be held in Florence, Italy at the Palazzo dei Congressi and Palazzo degli Affari di Firenze / 'Florence Congress Palace' July 28 – August 2, 2018.

Local Organization:
- Alessandro Lenci, University of Pisa
- Bernardo Magnini, Bruno Kessler Foundation, Trento
- Simonetta Montemagni, ILC-CNR, Pisa

11. ACL 2020 Call for Bids

The Association for Computational Linguistics invites proposals to host the conference in the America region in July or August 2020. At this time, we seek preliminary draft proposals from prospective bidders in the relevant regions. Promising bidders will be asked to provide additional information for the final selection.

The deadline for notifying intention to submit a proposal is January 31, 2018, and the deadline for submitting the draft proposal is March 15, 2018. Please send the notifications and draft proposals to Ming Zhou (mingzhou@microsoft.com), the Coordinating Committee Chair of ACL 2020.

https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/call-bids-acl-2020

15. Conference Sponsorship

ACL welcomes sponsorship for ACL-related conferences in various forms and amounts from any member.

The 2018 sponsorship booklet: https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2018_sponsorship_booklet

2018Q1 Reports: Secretary

Contents