Newsletter 2020

Membership

The ACL membership continues to grow rapidly in 2020. We expect to close 2020 with almost 6,500 members! You can now renew your membership through the ACL portal: http://www.aclweb.org/portal/ or you can renew when you register for an ACL affiliated conference.

Outgoing Exec Members

The following people are leaving the exec:

• Ming Zhou (ACL VP-elect (2017), VP (2018), President (2019), Past President (2020))
• Barbara Di Eugenio (ACL Member at-large, 2018-2020)
• Sharon Goldwater (EACL Chair, 2019-2020)
• Haifeng Wang (AACL Chair, 2018-2020)

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!

New Exec Members

We have four new members joining the exec as of January 1, 2021. These are:

• Iryna Gurevych (ACL VP-elect)
• Yusuke Miyao (ACL member at-large)
• Shuly Wintner (EACL Chair)
• Keh-Yih Su (AACL Chair)

Welcome to Iryna, Yusuke, Shuly and Keh-Yih!

Shiqi Zhao is re-elected as the ACL Secretary and will serve for a second term.

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

The next elections will take place in the Fall of 2021.

New Exec-plus Positions

In 2020, we set up two new Exec-plus positions:

• Equity Director: Natalie Schluter
• Sponsorship Director: Chris Callison-Burch

The full list of Exec-plus members can also be found here: http://www.aclweb.org/portal/about

ACL Lifetime Achievement Award

The winner of the ACL 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award (LTA) was Bonnie Webber.

https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/bonnie-webber-receives-2020-acl-life-time-achievement-award

The 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award will be announced during the ACL-IJCNLP 2021 conference.

For a list of past winners, visit: https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Lifetime_Achievement_Award_Recipients

ACL Distinguished Service Award

The 2020 winner of the Distinguished Service Award is Graeme Hirst, who was ACL's treasurer for 10 years from 2008 until 2017.

https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/graeme-hirst-receives-2020-acl-distinguished-service-award

The 2021 Distinguished Service Award will be announced during the ACL-IJCNLP 2021 conference.

For a list of past winners, visit: https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Distinguished_Service_Award_Recipients

ACL Test-of-Time Awards

The ACL Exec approved modifications to the ACL Test-Of-Time Papers Award: https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Test-of-Time_Papers_Award

Each year, the ACL Test-of-Time awards recognize up to four papers for their lasting impact on the Computational Linguistics field: two papers from 25 years earlier, and two papers from 10 years earlier.

The 2020 winners of the 1995 Test-of-Time Award are:

• Barbara J. Grosz, Aravind K. Joshi, Scott Weinstein. Centering: A Framework for Modeling the Local Coherence of Discourse. Computational Linguistics, 21(2), June
• David Yarowsky. Unsupervised Word Sense Disambiguation Rivaling Supervised Methods. 33rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

The 2020 winners of the 2010 Test-of-Time Award are:

• Marco Baroni, Alessandro Lenci. Distributional Memory: A General Framework for Corpus-Based Semantics. Computational Linguistics, 36(4), December
• Joseph Turian, Lev-Arie Ratinov, Yoshua Bengio. Word Representations: A Simple and General Method for Semi-Supervised Learning. 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

For a list of past winners, visit: https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Test-of-Time_Papers_Award_Recipients

ACL Fellows

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.

Congratulations to the new fellows!

For more information about the ACL Fellows Program, please refer to https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Fellows_Program

The list of current ACL fellows can be found here: https://aclweb.org/aclwiki/ACL_Fellows

EACL 2021

EACL 2021 will be held from 19 to 23 of April, 2021. While we were planning to hold the conference in Kyiv, due to the current COVID situation the conference will be held entirely online.

Important Dates

• Submission deadline (long and short papers): 7 October 2020
• Tutorials and workshops: 19–20 April, 2021
• Main conference: 21–23 April, 2021

For more information of EACL 2021: https://2021.eacl.org/

NAACL-HLT 2021

NAACL-HLT 2021 is currently scheduled to take place in Mexico City, Mexico from June 6th to June 11th, 2021. The Organizing Committee is monitoring the ongoing global pandemic and will update the conference plans (e.g. moving to a virtual or hybrid format) as needed closer to the conference dates.

Important Dates

• Author Response Period: January 20 – 25, 2021
• Notification of acceptance: March 10, 2021
• Camera ready papers due: April 11, 2021
• Final notification for papers requiring ethics re-review: April 30, 2021
• Publication date: May 24, 2021
• Conference date: June 6–11, 2021

For more information of NAACL-HLT 2021: https://2021.naacl.org/

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

The Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2021) is being organized and will be held in Bangkok, Thailand, from August 1st to 6th, 2021. However, the format of the ACL-IJCNLP 2021 conference will depend on the situation of pandemic.

Important Dates

• Anonymity period begins: January 1, 2021
• Abstract deadline (long & short papers): January 25, 2021
• Submission deadline (long & short papers): February 1, 2021
• Author response period: March 25-31, 2021
• Notification of acceptance: May 5, 2021
• Camera-ready due: June 1, 2021
• Tutorials: August 1, 2021
• Main Conference: August 2–4, 2021
• Workshops: August 5–6, 2021

For more information of the ACL-IICNLP 2021 conference: https://2021.aclweb.org/

EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 will take place from the 7th to the 11th of November 2021, hopefully in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, but possibly online depending on the development of the covid situation.

For more information of the EMNLP 2021 conference: https://2021.emnlp.org/

ACL 2022

ACL 2022 will be held in Dublin, Ireland, May 22-28, 2022.

ACL 2023

ACL invites proposals to host the annual ACL conference in the Americas in July or August 2023. At this time, we seek preliminary draft proposals from prospective bidders in relevant regions. Promising bidders will be asked to provide additional information for the final selection.

ACL 2023 will be organized in collaboration with NAACL. The ACL 2023 Coordinating Committee will select the General Chair and the Program Committee Co-Chairs for the conference. Draft proposals should identify Local Arrangements Chair(s), who will work with the General Chair and the Coordinating Committee to develop a detailed plan and budget.

Important dates:

• December, 2020: Call for bids
• February 26, 2021: Notify intention to submit proposal
• April 23, 2021: Draft proposals due
• Through June 1, 2021: Feedback to bidders
• June 25, 2021: Final bids due
• August, 2021: Bid selected and site announced during ACL 2021

For any queries please contact Tim Baldwin (tb@ldwin.net: ACL2023 Coordinating Committee Chair), or Priscilla Rasmussen (acl.rasmussen@gmail.com).

Please send notifications of intent and draft proposals to: Tim Baldwin (tb@ldwin.net)

Read more: https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/call-bids-host-acl-2023

2020 Reports from ACL Officers

Q1 reports: http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q1_Reports

Q3 reports: http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2020Q3_Reports

ACL Resolutions

The list of ACL resolutions: https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Resolutions

Sincerely,

Shiqi Zhao, ACL secretary