2013Q1 Reports: Secretary
A number of exciting events happened in 2012 and just as many are about to occur in the near future. Read ahead for the latest ACL news.
1. ACL Lifetime Achievement Award Winner
The winner of the ACL 2012 LTA was Charles Fillmore, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_J._Fillmore
Chuck's acceptance gave acceptance speech can be seen here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KTrHQjkGmz0
2. ACL fellows
http://www.aclweb.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=101&Itemid=30
The first group of ACL fellows was announced in 2011.
http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Fellows
I am happy to announce that the fellow selection committee has selected five more ACL fellows for 2012.
Richard Sproat (Google). For significant contributions to computational morphology, text normalization, text-to-speech synthesis, Chinese language processing, and computational approaches to writing systems.
Dan Roth (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign). For significant contributions to machine learning and inference in natural language processing.
Hwee Tou Ng (National University of Singapore). For significant contributions to coreference resolution and semantic processing, and for the development of semantic corpora.
Bonnie Webber (University of Edinburgh). For significant contributions to discourse structure and discourse-based interpretation.
Mark Steedman (University of Edinburgh). For the development of Combinatory Categorial Grammar, and for significant contributions to grammar induction and parsing.
Nominations for 2013 can be made through this page:
http://www.aclweb.org/portal/nominations
3. ACL elections
I would like to say goodbye to the outgoing exec members for their hard work and dedication to ACL. Please join me in thanking Paola Merlo (University of Geneva) and Kevin Knight (ISI) for their outstanding service to ACL during their terms.
Ken Church (IBM Research) finished his term as ACL president. He will remain on the exec in the role of past-president during 2013. Haifeng Wang (Baidu) will be the new ACL president.
The new exec members are:
Chris Manning (Stanford University), the new vice-president-elect.
Graeme Hirst (University of Toronto), reelected as treasurer.
Min-Yen Kan (National University of Singapore), elected to the exec. Min will also serve as the ACL's inaugural Information Officer.
Congratulations to Chris, Graeme, and Min. We are all looking forward to working with them in the years to come.
4. Transactions of the ACL is a new journal run by the ACL
http://www.aclweb.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=103&Itemid=30
Dekang Lin (Google) and Michael Collins (Columbia University) are the two co-editors of the new journal, Transactions of the ACL (http://www.transacl.org).
Ido Dagan, the chair of the journal's steering committee, wrote:
TACL targets papers of quite similar scope to our current (long) conference papers. Papers published at TACL will also receive a presentation slot at the annual ACL conference. TACL is thus intended to become an additional submission venue for presentation at the conference, coupled with fast turnaround journal-style reviewing and a journal publication. In the future, additional conferences may join as presentation venues for TACL papers. While coupling with a conference presentation is a major feature of TACL, authors may choose to avoid such presentation.
The following information applies to papers submitted through TACL only. Check the web site for the conferences themselves for their own submission dates.
The NAACL 2013 acceptance deadline is February 28th, 2013. Any paper
- accepted* to TACL by February 28th, 2013, will be eligible for
presentation at the NAACL 2013 conference.
The ACL 2013 acceptance deadline is March 31st, 2013. Any paper
- accepted* to TACL by March 31st, 2013, will be eligible for
presentation at the ACL 2013 conference.
5. Paola Merlo will be the new CL journal editor, starting in mid-2013
After a transitional period during which she will be working with the current editor, Robert Dale, Paola Merlo will take over as the new editor of Computational Linguistics.
Paola is the Chair of the Linguistics Department at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. She has a PhD in Computational Linguistics from the University of Maryland.
6. ACL 2013 will be in Sofia, Bulgaria
For the first time, the annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) takes place in Bulgaria. ACL 2013 will be held in Sofia, Bulgaria's capital, August 4-9, 2013.
Hinrich Schuetze (University of Munich) is the general chair. Massimo Poesio (University of Essex and University of Trento) and Pascale Fung (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) are the program chairs while Svetla Koeva (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) is the local chair.
An unofficial Facebook page with many photos from Sofia can be found here:
http://www.facebook.com/Sofia.City.Bulgaria?ref=stream
7. ACL 2014 will be in Baltimore, Maryland, June 22-27, 2014
The general chair is Daniel Marcu (ISI). The program co-chairs are Kristina Toutanova (Microsoft Research) and Hua Wu (Baidu Research). Local arrangements will be the job of David Yarowsky (JHU).
8. ACL-IJCNLP 2015 call for bids
We are now accepting bids for ACL-IJCNLP 2015. The deadline to express interest is January 31, 2013. Details and contact information can be found here:
https://www.aclweb.org/node/238
9. New SIG on Language Technologies for the Socio-Economic Sciences and the Humanities
A new Special Interest Group was created in 2012. For details, please visit:
http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2012Q3_Reports:_SIGHUM
10. The 2013 LSA Summer Institute will be in Ann Arbor, Michigan
11. Lifetime achievement award
The 2013 LTA will be announced in August in Sofia. For a list of past winners, visit:
http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Lifetime_Achievement_Award_Recipients
12. Outgoing Webmaster
I would also like to thank our Webmaster, Ali Hakim, for his outstanding work. Ali will be stepping down at the end of 2012 after six years.
Nominations and self-nominations for ACL Webmaster are now being accepted. Please contact me for details.