2015Q1 Reports: Secretary

1. Thanks to the outgoing members of the ACL exec

I would like to thank the outgoing members of the ACL executive committee, Jian Su (Institute for Infocom Research, Singapore), Haifeng Wang (Baidu, China), and Stephen Clark (Cambridge University, UK), for their service to the ACL community and wish them further success.

2. ACL Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

The winner of the ACL 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award was Robert Mercer of Renaissance Technologies.

The video of Robert's acceptance speech can be found here:

http://techtalks.tv/talks/closing-session/60532/

The 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award will be announced in July in Beijing. For a list of past winners, visit:

http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Lifetime_Achievement_Award_Recipients

3. ACL fellows

http://www.aclweb.org/website/node/442

I am happy to announce that the fellow selection committee has selected six more ACL fellows for 2014.

Walter Daelemans (University of Antwerp)- For significant contributions to the theory, methodology, and applications of machine learning of language.

Kevin Knight (Information Science Institute; University of Southern California, USA) - For significant contributions to statistical machine translation, automata for natural language processing, and decipherment of historical manuscripts.

Daniel Marcu (Information Science Institute; University of Southern California) - For significant contributions to discourse parsing, summarization, and machine translation and to kickstarting the statistical machine translation industry.

Raymond Mooney (University of Texas, Austin) - For significant contributions to machine learning for semantic parsing, language generation, and multimodal integration.

Martha Palmer (University of Colorado at Boulder) - For significant contributions to computational semantics and the development of semantic corpora.

Junichi Tsujii (Microsoft Research Asia, National Institute of Informatics, University of Tokyo, University of Manchester) - For significant contributions to MT, parsing by unification-based grammar and text mining for biology.

Nominations for 2015 can be made through this page by early Fall.

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

4. ACL elections

We are pleased to announce that Joakim Nivre (Uppsala University) has been elected as the vp-elect of the ACL and that Yejin Choi (University of Washington) has been chosen as a member of the ACL executive committee in charge of conferences. In addition, Lluís Màrquez (Qatar Computing Research Institute) is now an ACL exec member ex officio as chair of EACL.

The next elections will take place in the Fall. Openings for 2016 include vp-elect, secretary, and information officer.

5. New Editor for TACL

TACL (Transactions of the ACL) has a new editor, Lillian Lee, from Cornell University. The other editor continues to be Michael Collins (Columbia University).

6. ACL-IJCNLP 2015 will be in Beijing, China from July 26 to July 31.

http://www.aclweb.org/website/node/441

Long papers are due on February 27

http://acl2015.org/

General chair: Yuji Matsumoto, Nara Institute of Science and Technology Program chairs: Chengqing Zong, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Michael Strube, Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies

7. NAACL HLT 2015 will be in Denver, Colorado

The conference takes place from May 31 to June 6.

http://naacl.org/naacl-hlt-2015/

General chair: Rada Mihalcea. Program chairs: Joyce Chai and Anoop Sarkar.

8. EMNLP 2015 will be in Lisbon, Portugal

EMNLP 2015 will take place September 17-21, 2015 in Lisbon, Portugal. Lluís Màrquez will serve as general chair, with Jian Su and Chris Callison-Burch as program chairs. Local arrangements will be coordinated by a team led by André Martins and João Graça.

The URL is:

https://emnlp2015-website.herokuapp.com/

9. ACL 2016 will be in Berlin, Germany

The conference will take place on the campus of Humboldt University. Local chairs: Valia Kordoni, HU Berlin and Markus Egg, HU Berlin. The dates are 7-12 August 2016.

10. NAACL 2016 will be in San Diego

The dates are June 12-17, 2016.

11. ACL 2017 call for bids

http://www.aclweb.org/website/node/438

ACL invites proposals to host the 55th Annual Meeting of the ACL, to be held in the Americas in June, July, or August 2017.

At this time, we seek preliminary draft proposals from prospective bidders in the Americas. Promising bidders will be asked to provide additional information for the final selection.

IMPORTANT DEADLINE: January 15, 2015 - Notify intention to submit proposal

12. ACL 2018 call for bids

Contact Joakim Nivre and see his report on this site.

13. New Special Interest Group

A new SIG (Special Interest Group) has been created, SIGSLAV, on Slavic NLP.

http://sigslav.cs.helsinki.fi

All SIGs are listed here:

http://www.aclweb.org/website/sigs

14. Upcoming events

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

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

15. New Book Review Editor for the Computational Linguistics journal:

Hwee Tou Ng from the National University of Singapore was appointed book review editor for Computational Linguistics. The position has a term of five years.

16. The International Linguistics Olympiad will be in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria:

http://iol13.linguistics-bg.com/

17. AFNLP/ACL cross-representation

Haifeng Wang has been selected by AFNLP to be the AFNLP representative to ACL.

Pushpak Bhattacharyya has been selected by ACL to be the ACL representative to AFNLP.

18. 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 me at secretary@aclweb.org if you are interested in volunteering.

19. ACL membership renewal

Please renew your membership on www.aclweb.org before April 1.

Dragomir Radev Secretary, ACL