2024Q1 Reports: Secretary

Membership

We expect to close 2023 with over 7000 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:

• Tim Baldwin (ACL VP-elect (2020), VP (2021), President (2022), Past President (2023))
• Yusuke Miyao (ACL member at-large, conference officer, 2021-2023)
• Luciana Benotti (NAACL Chair, 2022-2023)
• Hwee Tou Ng (CL EiC, 2018-2024)

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 three new members joining the exec as of January 1, 2024. These are:

• Barbara Plank (ACL VP-elect)
• Yuki Arase (ACL member at-large)
• Graham Neubig (NAACL Chair)
• Wei Lu (CL EiC)

Welcome to the new exec members!

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

The next elections will take place in the Fall of 2024.

ACL Policies

In 2023, ACL has approved the following new policies:

• ACL Name Change Policy
  • ACL recognizes the right of individuals to use the name of their choosing for their publications, including those in the past. We offer multiple options for individuals who have changed their name.
• Policy on Memorial Services

In addition, the Exec approved the amendment to the Lifetime Achievement Award to accept nominations from the ACL members, and the amendment to ACL Conference Conflict-of-interest policy.

New SIGs

The following new SIGs were created in 2023:

• SIGSUMM (SIG on summarization)
  • https://www.sigsumm.org/
  • Liaison representative: Yue Dong
• SIGSEC (SIG on NLP Security)
  • https://sig.llmsecurity.net
  • President: Leon Derczynski, Secretary: Muhao Chen
• SIGWrit (SIG on Writing Systems and Written Language)
  • president: Richard Sproat, Secretary-Treasurer: Kyle Gorman

ACL Lifetime Achievement Award

The winner of the ACL 2023 Lifetime Achievement Award (LTA) was Martha Palmer, for tremendous contributions to NLP, multilingual resources, and supervised ML in lexical-semantic processing.

https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/martha-palmer-receives-2023-acl-lifetime-achievement-award

The 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award will be announced during the ACL 2024 conference.

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

Dragomir Radev Distinguished Service Award

In recognition of the outstanding contributions of Dragomir Radev to the ACL and the whole NLP community, the ACL Executive Committee has decided to rename the Distinguished Service Award to Dragomir Radev Distinguished Service Award.

The 2023 winner of the Dragomir Radev Distinguished Service Award is Joakim Nivre, who has served in many different capacities in the ACL leadership and exemplifies the dedication over his over two decades of contribution to computational linguistics.

https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/joakim-nivre-receives-2023-acl-dragomir-radev-distinguished-service-award

The 2024 Dragomir Radev Distinguished Service Award will be announced during the ACL 2024 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 winners of the 1998 Test-of-Time Paper Award are:

• Irene Langkilde, Kevin Knight. Generation that Exploits Corpus-Based Statistical Knowledge. Proceedings of ACL 1998.
• Hinrich Schütze. Automatic Word Sense Discrimination. Computational Linguistics, 24(1). 1998.

The winners of the 2013 Test-of-Time Paper Award are:

• Ryan McDonald, Joakim Nivre, Yvonne Quirmbach-Brundage, Yoav Goldberg, Dipanjan Das, Kuzman Ganchev, Keith Hall, Slav Petrov, Hao Zhang, Oscar Täckström, Claudia Bedini, Núria Bertomeu Castelló, Jungmee Lee. Universal Dependency Annotation for Multilingual Parsing. Proceedings of ACL 2013.
• Richard Socher, Alex Perelygin, Jean Wu, Jason Chuang, Christopher D. Manning, Andrew Ng, Christopher Potts. Recursive Deep Models for Semantic Compositionality Over a Sentiment Treebank. Proceedings of EMNLP 2013.

ACL Fellows

The ACL Nominating Committee has selected the following new fellows for 2023:

• Mona Diab
  • Carnegie Mellon University
  • For contributions to Arabic language NLP, to lexical semantics, and for democratizing NLP to wider and less privileged communities.

• Barbara di Eugenio
  • University of Illinois at Chicago
  • For outstanding contributions to natural language generation; intelligent tutoring systems; discourse; intercoder agreement; and applying multimodal interactive systems to health.

• Anna Korhonen
  • University of Cambridge
  • For significant contributions to lexical acquisition, multilingual and low resource NLP, socially beneficial language applications, and services to the ACL community

• Roberto Navigli
  • Sapienza University of Rome
  • For significant contributions to multilingual lexical-semantic resources and a unifying vision for multilingual lexical and sentence-level semantics.

• Ming Zhou
  • Langboat Ltd.
  • For significant contributions to machine translation, language learning, text generation as well as the growth of NLP community in China and Asia

Coming Conferences

• EACL 2024
  • https://2024.eacl.org/
  • The 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2024) will take place in Malta, March 17-22, 2024.

• NAACL 2024
  • https://2024.naacl.org/
  • 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2024) will take place in Mexico City, Mexico from June 16th to 21st, 2024.

• ACL 2024
  • https://2024.aclweb.org/
  • The 62st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024.

• EMNLP 2024
  • The 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2024) will take place in Miami, USA, from November 12 to 16, 2024.

2023 Reports from ACL Officers

Q1 reports: http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2023Q1_Reports

Q3 reports: http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2023Q3_Reports

ACL Resolutions

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

Sincerely,

Shiqi Zhao, ACL secretary