Newsletter 2022

Membership

The ACL membership continues to grow rapidly in 2022. We expect to close 2022 with over XXXX 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:

• Rada Mihalcea (ACL VP-elect (2019), VP (2020), President (2021), Past President (2022))
• Anna Korhonen (ACL member at-large, 2020-2022)
• Shuly Wintner (EACL Chair, 2021-2022)
• Keh-Yih Su (AACL Chair, 2021-2022)

I would like to thank all of you for your great contributions as the exec members and wish you luck in your future endeavors!

New Exec Members

We have four new members joining the exec as of January 1, 2023. These are:

• Chengqing Zong (ACL VP-elect)
• Vera Demberg (ACL member at-large)
• Roberto Basili (EACL Chair)
• Jian Su (AACL Chair)

Welcome to the new exec members!

David Yarowsky, who has finished his first term of ACL treasurer (2018-2022), is elected as the treasurer for a second term (2023-2027).

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

The next elections will take place in the Fall of 2023.

ACL Policies

In 2022, ACL has approved three new policies:

• ACL Conference Awards Policy
  • It lays out a standard protocol for awards at ACL conferences.
• ACL Efficient NLP Policy
  • It aims to promote ways that the ACL community can reduce the computational costs of NLP.
• ACL COVID Policy
  • It will be revisited annually by the ACL exec so as to be responsive to changing pandemic conditions.

New SIGs

Two SIGs were created in 2022:

• SIGARAB: SIG on Arabic Natural Language Processing
  • http://www.sigarab.org/
  • president Nizar Habash, secretary Wassim El-Hajj
• SIGTURK: SIG on Turkic Languages
  • https://sigturk.github.io/
  • president Duygu Ataman, secretary Sardana Ivanova

ACL Rolling Review

ACL has established an ARR board that will oversee the activities of ARR. The founding members of the ARR Board:

• Julia Hockenmaier, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
• Yusuke Miyao, The University of Tokyo, Japan
• Smaranda Muresan, Columbia University, USA
• Thamar Solorio, University of Houston, USA

Several new EICs have started their service in 2022. The current ARR EICs are:

• Lilja Øvrelid, University of Oslo
• Mausam, IIT Delhi
• Sebastian Riedel, Facebook AI and University College London
• Thamar Solorio, Bloomberg LP and University of Houston
• Viviane Moreira, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

ACL Lifetime Achievement Award

The winner of the ACL 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award (LTA) was Martha Evens, for being a path blazer in a multitude of ways.

https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/martha-evens-receives-2022-acl-lifetime-achievement-award

The 2023 Lifetime Achievement Award will be announced during the ACL 2023 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 2022 winner of the Distinguished Service Award is Dragomir Radev, for his longstanding and sustained service to the ACL in a variety of leadership and service roles.

https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/dragomir-radev-receives-2022-acl-distinguished-service-award

The 2023 Distinguished Service Award will be announced during the ACL 2023 conference.

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

Test-of-Time Paper Award

The 2022 winners of the 1997 Test-of-Time Paper Award are:

• Kevin Knight, Jonathan Graehl. Machine Transliteration. Proceedings of ACL 1997.
• Michael Collins. Three Generative, Lexicalised Models for Statistical Parsing. Proceedings of ACL 1997.

The 2022 winners of the 2012 Test-of-Time Paper Award are:

• Mausam, Michael Schmitz, Stephen Soderland, Robert Bart, Oren Etzioni. Open Language Learning for Information Extraction. Proceedings of EMNLP-CoNLL 2012.
• Margaret Mitchell, Jesse Dodge, Amit Goyal, Kota Yamaguchi, Karl Stratos, Xufeng Han, Alyssa Mensch, Alex Berg, Tamara Berg, Hal Daumé III. Midge: Generating Image Descriptions From Computer Vision Detections. Proceedings of EACL 2012.

ACL Fellows

The ACL Nominating Committee has selected the following new fellows for 2022:

• Hinrich Schütze
  • University of Munich (LMU)
  • For significant contributions to statistical and neural language representation models below, beyond and above the word level.

• Marti Hearst
  • University of California Berkeley
  • For significant contributions to semantics, discourse structure and text data mining.

• Claire Gardent
  • Lorraine Research Laboratory in Computer Science and its Applications (LORIA), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
  • For significant contributions to linguistically informed computational models for natural language generation, and the curation of NLG benchmarking and evaluation resources.

• James F Allen
  • University of Rochester
  • For significant contributions to natural language dialogue research, planning and plan recognition.

• Owen Rambow
  • Stony Brook University
  • For significant contributions to syntax, Tree Adjoining Grammars, dependency processing, natural language generation, and Arabic language processing.

• Yejin Choi
  • University of Washington and Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
  • For significant contributions to research in natural language generation, language and vision, and commonsense reasoning.

• Maosong Sun
  • Tsinghua University
  • For significant contributions to Chinese NLP, and sustained service to the growth of computational linguistics in China.

• Tomek Strzalkowski
  • Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
  • For significant contributions to computational sociolinguistics, metaphor extraction, interactive question answering, and natural language information retrieval.

Coming Conferences

• ACL 2023
  • The 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL'23) will take place in Toronto, Canada from July 9th to July 14th, 2023.
• EACL 2023
  • The 17th EACL conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023.
• EMNLP 2023
  • TBD

2022 Reports from ACL Officers

Q1 reports: http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2022Q1_Reports

Q3 reports: http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2022Q3_Reports

ACL Resolutions

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

Sincerely,

Shiqi Zhao, ACL secretary