Newsletter 2015

December 31, 2015

Dear colleagues,

On behalf of the ACL exec, I would like to wish everyone a happy holiday season and and an exciting New Year.

I want to share some of the exciting news related to ACL this year.

1. Thanks to the outgoing members of the ACL exec

Min-Yen Kan, Gertjan van Noord, and Hal Daume left the ACL executive committee at the end of 2015 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.

2. Four new members of the ACL exec

Four new members will join the exec as of January 1, 2016.

http://www.aclweb.org/website/node/458

These are:

Marti Hearst (vp-elect, replacing Gertjan van Noord) Jing-Shin Chang (information officer, replacing Min-Yen Kan) Shiqi Zhao (secretary, taking over for me; I will remain on the exec as past secretary in 2016) Emily Bender (the new NAACL chair, ex officio, replacing Hal Daume)

Welcome to Marti, Jing-Shin, Shiqi, and Emily!

The full list of exec members is here: http://www.aclweb.org/website/about

The next elections will take place in the Fall. Openings for 2017 include vp-elect and SIG chair (special interest group coordinator).

3. ACL Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

http://www.aclweb.org/website/node/445

The winner of the ACL 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award (LTA) was Li Sheng from Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) in China.

The 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award will be announced in August in Berlin.

For a list of past winners, visit: http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Lifetime_Achievement_Award_Recipients

4. ACL Fellows

I am happy to announce that the Fellow selection committee has selected four new ACL Fellows for 2015.

http://www.aclweb.org/website/node/457

Claire Cardie (Cornell University)

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

Kenneth W. Church (IBM)

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

Janyce Wiebe (University of Pittsburgh)

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

Salim Roukos (IBM)

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

Congratulations to these established ACL members!

Nominations for 2016 can be made through this page: http://www.aclweb.org/portal/nominations

5. New ACL Ad Hoc Committee on Nominating Committees and ACL Fellows

We have set up an Ad Hoc Committee on Nominating Committees and ACL Fellows to re-examinine policies and practices of the nominating committees and ACL Fellows program, with an emphasis on diversity and impartiality. Any approved changes will come into effect in 2017. Please contact Joakim Nivre, chair, if you have any suggestions or input for the committee.

This and other ACL resolutions can be found here:

http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Resolutions

6. NAACL HLT 2016 will be in San Diego, California

This conference will take place from June 12 to June 17, 2016.

http://naacl.org/naacl-hlt-2016/

General Chair

   Kevin Knight, ISI

Program Chairs

   Ani Nenkova, University of Pennsylvania
   Owen Rambow, Columbia University

Local Arrangements Chair

   Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL

7. ACL 2016 will be in Berlin, Germany

ACL 2016 will take place from August 7 to August 12, 2016.

http://www.aclweb.org/website/node/452

General Chair

   Antal van den Bosch, Radboud University Nijmegen Program Co-Chairs
   Katrin Erk, University of Texas at Austin
   Noah Smith, University of Washington Local Organizing Committee
   Valia Kordoni (co-chair), Humboldt University
   Markus Egg (co-chair), Humboldt University
   Kostadin Cholakov, Humboldt University
   Manfred Stede, University of Potsdam
   Anke Lüdeling, Humboldt University
   Manfred Krifka, Humboldt University
   Ulf Leser, Humboldt University

8. EMNLP 2016 will be in Austin, Texas

EMNLP 2016 will be in Austin from November 2 to November 6, 2016. More information TBA.

9. ACL 2017 will be in Vancouver, Canada

http://www.aclweb.org/website/node/456

The Association for Computational Linguistics is pleased to announce that ACL 2017, its 55th Annual Meeting, will be held in Vancouver, Canada from 30 July 2017 to 4 August 2017. The conference will take place in the Westin Bayshore Hotel. The conference chairs will be announced shortly.

10. ACL 2018 call for bids

http://www.aclweb.org/website/node/448

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) hereby invites proposals to host the conference in the Asia-Australasia-Oceania region in July or August 2018. At this time, we seek preliminary draft proposals from prospective bidders in the Asia-Pacific region. Promising bidders will be asked to provide additional information for the final selection.

The deadline for bids is March 15, 2016, with obligatory notification before January 31, 2016.

11. Upcoming events

http://www.aclweb.org/portal/acl_sponsored_events

http://www.cs.rochester.edu/~tetreaul/conferences.html

12. 2015 reports from ACL officers

Winter reports:

   http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2015Q1_Reports

Summer reports:

   http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2015Q3_Reports

13. ACL volunteers

We are looking for volunteers to help with the ACL Web site, ACL Anthology, ACL Wiki (http://www.aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=Main_Page), and some other initiatives.

Please contact Shiqi Zhao, the new ACL Secretary, at secretary@aclweb.org if you are interested in volunteering.

Sincerely,

Dragomir Radev Outgoing Secretary (2006-2010, 2011-2015), ACL