Newsletter 2018

Membership

I am pleased to announce that we have been experiencing a rapid growth and now have over 4000 members by the end of 2018! After January 1st, you can renew your membership through the ACL portal: http://www.aclweb.org/portal/ or you can renew when you register for an ACL affiliated conference.

Asia-Pacific Chapter of ACL (AACL)

To promote the growth of the Asia-Pacific NLP community, the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL) was officially launched on July 18, 2018. The founding officers of the AACL Executive Board are:

• Chair (2018-2020): Haifeng Wang, Baidu, China
• Chair-elect (2018-2020): Keh-Yih Su, Institute of Information Science, Taiwan
• Secretary (2018-2020): Yang Liu, Tsinghua University, China
• Treasurer (2018-2020): Seung-won Hwang, Yonsei University, Korea
• At-large (2018-2020): Yusuke Miyao, National Institute of Informatics, Japan
• At-large (2018-2020): Jian Su, Institute of Infocomm Research, Singapore
• At-large (2018-2020): Mark Dras, Macquarie University, Australia

AACL aims to serve the needs of ACL members from 57 countries/territories in Asia-Pacific. AACL will organize conferences, encourage and facilitate ACL membership by people and institutions in the Asia-Pacific region, and will provide a source of information on regional activities for the ACL Executive Committee. AACL will strive to collaborate with AFNLP and other relevant local scientific and professional societies to the mutual benefit of all. For more information, please visit the AACL website: http://aaclweb.org/.

We are looking forward to a successful and harmonious AACL!

Outgoing Exec Members

The following people are leaving the exec:

• Joakim Nivre (ACL VP-elect (2015), VP (2016), President (2017), Past President (2018))
• Graeme Hirst (ACL Treasurer (2008-2012, 2013-2017), Past Treasurer (2018))
• Jing-Shin Chang (ACL Information Officer (2016-2018))
• Walter Daelemans (EACL Chair (2017-2018))

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 three new members joining the exec as of January 1, 2019. These are:

• Rada Mihalcea (VP-elect, replacing Joakim Nivre)
• Nitin Madnani (Information Director, replacing Jing-Shin Chang)
• Sharon Goldwater (EACL Chair, replacing Walter Daelemans)

Welcome to Rada, Nitin, Sharon!

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

The next elections will take place in the Fall.

ACL Anthology Director

Matt Post, from Johns Hopkins University, was selected as the new ACL Anthology Director. Matt’s term starts on January 1, 2019. Thank you to the ACL Anthology Advisory Board, headed by Dragomir Radev, for their hard work on this process.

We would like to express our sincere thanks to Min-Yen Kan, who was the ACL Anthology Director for the past 10 years!

ACL Lifetime Achievement Award

The winner of the ACL 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award (LTA) was Professor Mark Steedman of the University of Edinburgh.

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

The 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award will be announced during ACL 2019 in Florence.

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

ACL Distinguished Service Award

In 2018, We set up an ACL Distinguished Service Award. The ACL Distinguished Service Award recognizes one individual each year for extraordinary service to the computational linguistics community. Areas of service include, but are not limited to: association service, service as an editor, conference organization, representation of ACL in other organizations, or influential service as a government agency contract monitor or program director, that results in positive effects on the field of computational linguistics.

The nominator should compile the nomination package and submit the complete package by February 1 of the nomination year to secretary@aclweb.org. For more information about the Distinguished Service Award, please visit: https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Distinguished_Service_Award

ACL Fellows

The ACL Nominating Committee has selected the following new fellows for 2018:

• 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.

Congratulations to these established ACL members!

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

The CL and TACL Journals

Paola Merlo finished her tenure as editor of the CL journal in 2018. Thanks Paola for the great contribution as the CL editor in the past five years! We welcome the new editor, Hwee Tou Ng, from the National University of Singapore and the new book review editor, Iryna Gurevych from Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. Cristina Grisot will continue as the editorial assistant and Mike White as squib editor. A longer assessment of these last five years of the journal and editorial opinions from the outgoing editor can be found in the Last Words farewell from the editor, in the June issue of the journal: https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/coli_e_00320

TACL is pleased to announce that the journal is transitioning the publication process of accepted papers to be handled by MIT Press; website here: https://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/tacl Co-editor-in-chief Kristina Toutanova's term ended June 30, 2018, and Brian Roark's term as co-editor-in-chief officially began July 1, 2018. All hail Kristina for her incredible service!

NAACL-HLT 2019

https://naacl2019.org/

NAACL-HLT 2019 will be held at the Hyatt Regency in Minneapolis from June 2nd through 7th, 2019.

Organizing Committee:

• General Chair:
  • Jill Burstein, Educational Testing Service, USA
• Program Co-Chairs:
  • Christy Doran, Interactions LLC, USA
  • Ted Pedersen, University of Minnesota Duluth, USA
  • Thamar Solorio, University of Houston, USA
• Local Organization:
  • Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL

Important Dates:

• December 3, 2018: Abstract & keywords due (long, short, & industry track)
• December 10, 2018: Final paper submissions due (long, short, & industry track)
• February 11, 2019: Demo papers due (incl. video)
• February 15, 2019: Student research workshop papers due
• February 22, 2019: Notification of acceptance (long, short, & industry track)
• March 2, 2019: Notification of acceptance (student research workshop)
• March 18, 2019: Notification of acceptance (demos)
• April 1, 2019: Camera-ready papers due (long, short, industry track, demos & student research workshop)
• June 2, 2019: Tutorials
• June 3 – 5, 2019: Main conference
• June 6 – 7, 2019: Workshops

ACL 2019

http://www.acl2019.org/EN/index.xhtml

The 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) will take place in Florence (Italy) at the 'Fortezza da Basso' from July 28th to August 2nd, 2019.

Committees:

• General Chair
  • Lluís Màrquez - Amazon
• Program Co-Chairs
  • Anna Korhonen - University of Cambridge
  • David Traum - University of South California
• Local Organisation Co-Chairs
  • Alessandro Lenci - University of Pisa
  • Bernardo Magnini - Bruno Kessler Foundation
  • Simonetta Montemagni - CNR-ILC, Pisa

Important Dates:

• October 31, 2018: Deadline for nominating reviewers, area chairs, and invited speakers
• November 6, 2018: Submission deadline for workshop proposals
• November 29, 2018: Notification of acceptance for workshops
• January 20, 2019: Submission deadline for tutorial proposals
• February 1, 2019: Notification of acceptance for tutorials
• March 4, 2019: Submission deadline (long & short papers)
• May 13, 2019: Notification of acceptance
• June 3, 2019: Camera-ready due
• July 28, 2019: Tutorials
• July 29-31, 2019: Conference
• August 1-2, 2019: Workshops and Co-located conferences

EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019

https://www.emnlp-ijcnlp2019.org/

EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 will be held at the Asia World Expo in Hong Kong from November 3rd through November 7th, 2019.

Organizing Committee:

• General Chair
  • Kentaro Inui, Tohuku University, Japan
• Program Co-Chairs
  • Jing Jiang, Singapore Management University, Singapore
  • Vincent Ng, University of Texas at Dallas, USA
  • Xiaojun Wan, Peking University, China
• Local Organizing Committee
  • Kam-Fai Wong, Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
  • Samuel Tam, Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
  • TBA

Important Dates:

• May 21, 2019: Submissions due (long & short)
• July 9, 2019: Author response period starts
• July 15, 2019: Author responses due
• August 12, 2019: Notification of acceptance
• August 30, 2019: Camera-ready papers due
• November 3–4, 2019: Workshops & tutorials
• November 5–7, 2019: Main conference

ACL 2020

The 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) will take place in Seattle (USA) from July 6 to 11, 2020.

Organizing Committee:

• General Chair:
  • Dan Jurafsky, Stanford University, USA
• Program Co-Chairs:
  • TBA
• Local Organization:
  • Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL
  • Luke Zettlemoyer, University of Washington
  • Jianfeng Gao, Microsoft Research

ACL 2021 Call for Bids

The Association for Computational Linguistics invites proposals to host the conference in the Asia-Pacific region in June, July or August 2021. 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. The selected location for ACL 2021 will be announced at the ACL 2019 conference in Florence. For any queries please contact Hinrich Schuetze, the Coordinating Committee chair. Please send notifications and draft proposals to: Hinrich Schuetze (hinrichacl@cis.lmu.de)

https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/call-bids-acl-2021

2018 Reports from ACL Officers

Q1 reports: http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2018Q1_Reports

Q3 reports: http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2018Q3_Reports

Q4 reports: https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2018Q4_Reports

ACL Resolutions

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

Highlights include a process for the ACL Exec to add new leadership roles from the membership (passed on December 23, 2018) and details about the Professional Conduct Committee and enforcement of the ACL Anti-Harassment policy (passed on February 16, 2018 and December 12, 2018).

Sincerely,

Shiqi Zhao, ACL Secretary