ACL Privacy Policy
The Association for Computational Linguistics, Inc. (“Association,”, “ACL”, “we,” “us,” and “our”) respects individual privacy and values the confidence of our members, conference attendees, program participants, and our community. This Privacy Policy sets out the privacy principles that we follow with respect to the collection, use, and disclosure of information that you may provide through the Association’s websites (including aclweb.org, emnlp.org, cljournal.org, transacl.org, ACL special interest group (SIG) sites, and ACL annual conference websites), conference registration platform, as well as through other channels, and at our events you may attend.
Please read this entire Privacy Policy before submitting information to ACL through any submission channels.
Contact Details
If you have any questions regarding our Privacy Policy and our practices regarding information you provide to us. Please contact:
Association for Computational Linguistics, Inc.
Re: Privacy Inquiry
Email: acl (at) aclweb.org
Association’s Mission Purpose; Legitimate Interests
The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language. ACL’s mission is to promote research and development activities and facilitate collaboration and information exchange among its members and technical societies in the field of computational linguistics. Any information ACL collects serves to further our mission, including but not limited to the following:
- Provide relevant information to our potential members, active members, our professional community, sponsors, and the public
- Respond to inquiries relating to the ACL
- Promote ACL events, programs, and activities
- Develop programs and services that are relevant and valuable to our members and community
- Perform our contractual obligations with members in good standing, registered attendees at our events/conferences, and subscribers of our journals and publications
Information We Collect About You; Purposes
You can access ACL websites without submitting any information to us. However, if you wish to participate in our events and programs, we may ask that you provide us personal data for the following purposes:
A.Register to attend ACL conferences and events
B.Join ACL as a member or renew membership
C.Submit papers for publication in the ACL Journals, conferences and workshops
D.Make audio and video recordings for presentation at ACL conferences and for publication
E.Subscribe to ACL’s publications and newsletters
F.Create a website account at aclweb.org or a profile on a conference management platform
G.Management of ACL’s Conflicts-of-Interest (COIs) mechanism
H.Contact ACL
As ACL may have contractual obligations in connection with carrying out some of the activities described above, it will be necessary for ACL to collect your personal data in order to perform such contractual obligations.
Personal Data That You Voluntarily Provide To Us. ACL only collects personal data you voluntarily submit to us. The types of personal data we collect vary based on the programs, services, and products you wish to engage in, but generally include your name, email address, postal address, affiliation (business/institutional), gender (optional), and credit card information (when payment is due).
Website Portal: when you create a profile on our portal, aclweb.org, we will collect the information that you elect to upload to your profile, such as biography, your education and contact information.
Conference Management Platform Profile: when authors and reviewers of ACL conferences/journals create their profiles on conference management platforms we use (e.g., START hosted by Softconf), we will collect the information users elect to upload to their profile, such as biography, education and contact information. In order for ACL to conduct the conferences/journals review process, authors/reviewers also submit the following information:
- Their reviews
- Posts on discussion forums during the review process
- Responses to reviews
ACL Conference Mobile App: when you attend ACL conferences, you may have the option to download the conference mobile app built on the applicable event management platforms offered by companies such as conference4me.eu, guidebook.com, and whova.com. When users download the ACL conference mobile app, users are asked to provide their email address, usernames, and passwords, and could add their affiliations and other information for networking purposes. ACL may collect the information users provide in connection with using the ACL conference mobile app.
Management of ACL Conflicts of Interest (COIs) Mechanism: to ensure fairness of ACL’s journal peer review process, as well as decisions concerning conference program planning and nominations, ACL community members are requested to disclose/declare potential conflicts of interest to ACL’s Professional Conduct Committee (PCC) according to the ACL Conflict-of-interest policy.
When you disclose/declare potential COIs to the PCC, you are asked to provide names, email addresses, affiliations, and conference management platform IDs (e.g. START IDs) of yourself and the other member who has a potential COI. Validated COIs are recorded and shared with the appropriate ACL committee or working group (e.g., nomination committees and organizers of ACL conferences) to ensure that decisions are unaffected by COIs. Validated COIs do not expire and will be retained until the declaring member asks the PCC to remove the COI from their record. Information collected and processed in connection with ACL’s COI mechanism is kept confidential, and may be disclosed only on a need to know basis consistent with the intended purpose. Individuals involved in the COI Mechanism and other PCC matters may be subject to nondisclosure obligations.
You should carefully consider whether you wish to submit personal data and tailor any content you submit appropriately.
It is ACL’s general policy to keep our members’ personal data for a period of five (5) years following the last contact with us. Notwithstanding the foregoing, ACL may keep your personal data for a longer period as required by law or as needed in legal proceedings or to fulfill ACL’s legitimate interest.
No Collection of Special Data
We do not generally seek to collect any special categories of personal data such as personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious beliefs, genetic data, etc. Nor do we collect any information about criminal convictions and offences. In the limited cases where we do seek to collect such data, such as for purposes of complying with employment related anti-discrimination laws (if applicable) and organizing events, we will obtain explicit consent from you.
How We Use Information
We will use the information you provide to us in order to carry out ACL’s mission purpose and relevant programs and activities, to fulfill our contractual obligations, and for internal use by ACL executives, board/committee members, consultants, and appropriate volunteer staff, such as performing marketing studies, research projects, and program development in support of ACL’s mission purposes. Depending on the type of personal data collected and purpose of use, you may elect to opt out of or adjust the categories of personal data ACL may use for internal research purposes.
In the event ACL reports on its program/research analysis publicly, all statistics and data in such reports will be presented in anonymous aggregated form.
We do not share, sell, or rent information to any third party processors for their promotional use or for marketing purposes except in the circumstances described below:
- ACL Agents/Selected Vendors: your personal data may be used within ACL or by a company acting as an agent of ACL for operational support purposes, including but not limited to event registration and conference/journal reviews (e.g., Softconf), content management and analysis (e.g., GitHub, Netlify, AWS, and Office365), system maintenance (e.g., Bluehost), email distribution, printing, and mailing. ACL agents and selected vendors are obligated to process personal data according to the contracted purpose and implement appropriate safeguards in connection with such data processing.
- Meeting Attendee list: The list of ACL conference and meeting registrants, including the attendees’ contact information provided as part of registration, is provided to authorized exhibitors and sponsors for that one conference/meeting. Attendees may opt-out of being included on the foregoing list at the time of registration.
- ACL Business Partners and Affiliates: ACL may share your information with carefully selected business partners and affiliates whose products and services may be of interest to our members and community. All ACL business partners and affiliates are obligated to implement opt-out mechanisms and honor any opt-out requests by recipients in compliance with applicable laws.
When you terminate your membership or cancel the website account or conference management platform access, ACL may continue to share information about you according to our legal and regulatory requirements.
Notwithstanding the foregoing, ACL may disclose your personal information as required by law or as needed in legal proceedings when ACL believes in good faith that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights, protect your safety or the safety of others, investigate fraud, or respond to a government request.
In addition, in the event of a merger, acquisition, or any form of sale or transfer of some or all of our assets to a third party, we may also disclose your personal information to the third parties concerned or their professional advisors. In the event of such a transaction, the personal information held by ACL will be among the assets subject to the transaction.
Credit Card Information
ACL does not disclose credit card information provided by its members and customers. When members and customers choose to pay using their credit cards, ACL submits the information needed through a secure payment gate site (e.g., PlugNPay) to conduct the transactions.
Cookies
Cookies are files that contain information created by a web server that can be stored on a user’s hard disk for future use. The ACL website uses functional cookies to keep the content of our website up-to-date and running. This means that these cookies are essential to the proper functioning of the ACL website. It is not possible to refuse these cookies if you want to visit the ACL website. The aclweb.org website does not use cookies for analytical purposes. However, ACL conference websites (e.g. acl2019.org, acl2020.org) may use Google Analytics to determine content that users deemed helpful.
We use the foregoing information in form of summary or aggregated statistics to help us make our website more useful to our visitors, such as assessing what information is of most and least interest.
Communications From ACL/How to Update Preferences
Except for transactional emails necessary to perform ACL’s contractual obligations, we will not send you promotional information without your consent, and you can withdraw consent at any time or update your preferences by following the instructions included in each communication, by logging in your website account and utilizing the communication preference settings at aclweb.org, or by contacting us at acl (at) aclweb.org
How to Access, Correct, and Update Information
You may access, correct, or update your personal information by logging in your website account or conference management platform account, or by contacting us at acl (at) aclweb.org. We may ask you to provide sufficient evidence of your identity for your own protection so we can ensure that information is being released to the correct person. In some cases, our business requirements and legal obligations may prevent us from being able to delete your information.
Children’s Information
The website is not intended for children under 13 years of age. ACL does not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13 years of age. If ACL discovers that a child under the age of 13 has provided us with personal data, we will delete the child’s personal data unless a parent or guardian provides verifiable consent to ACL.
Security Measures
Our website has security measures in place to protect the loss, misuse, and alteration of the information under ACL’s control. When you enter sensitive information (such as a credit card number) as part of the purchase process, we encrypt the transmission of that information using secure socket layer technology (SSL).
When you submit information to ACL through our website, you should be aware that your information is transmitted across the Internet and that no method of transmission over the Internet is 100% secure. Although we take reasonable security measures to protect your information when we receive it, you also need to ensure you take appropriate steps to protect your information.
International Website Access and Cross-Border Data Transfers
ACL is incorporated in the United States and required to maintain good corporate standing and comply with applicable tax reporting obligations. If you are visiting ACL websites from outside the United States, your information may be transferred to, stored, and processed in the United States. In addition, information that ACL collects may be stored and processed in and transferred between any of the countries in which ACL members reside to enable the use of the information in accordance with this Privacy Policy.
Privacy Issues and Links to Other Sites
The website may contain links to other third party websites that are not affiliated with ACL, such as links to university courses that contain content in Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics. ACL has no control over and is not responsible for the privacy policies or content of such sites.
Social Media Widgets
The ACL conference website includes social media features, such as the Twitter and GitHub buttons that run on the conference website. These features may collect your Internet Protocol address and which page you are visiting on our website, and may set a cookie to enable the feature to function properly. Social media features and widgets are either hosted by a third party or hosted directly on our site. Your interactions with these features are governed by the privacy policy of the company providing it.
ACL participates in social media platforms, e.g., Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. ACL utilizes social media platforms to promote ACL program offerings, but does not collect personal data through use of those channels.
Amendments and Updates
ACL will occasionally update this Privacy Policy. Any changes to our Privacy Policy will be posted here so that users will know what information we gather, how we might use that information, and whether we will disclose it to anyone. We encourage you to periodically review this page for the latest information on our privacy practices and this Privacy Policy.
Effective Date: November 2020