Newsletter 2021

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Membership

The ACL membership continues to grow rapidly in 2021. We expect to close 2021 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:

Hinrich Schütze (ACL VP-elect (2018), VP (2019), President (2020), Past President (2021))
Nitin Madnani (ACL Member at-large, 2019-2021)
Colin Cherry (NAACL Chair, 2020-2021)

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, 2022. These are:

Emily M. Bender (ACL VP-elect)
Mohit Bansal (ACL member at-large)
Luciana Benotti (NAACL Chair)

Welcome to Emily, Mohit, and Luciana!

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

The next elections will take place in the Fall of 2022.

New Exec-plus Positions and Directors

The ACL Exec approved the second term of Nitin Madnani as ACL Information Director, from 2022 to 2024.

The ACL Exec approved Donia Scott as PCC Chair (replacing Emily M. Bender) starting 1/1/2022 for a term of five years.

The full list of Exec-plus members can also be found here: http://www.aclweb.org/portal/about

ACL Ethics Committee

ACL has established an Ethics Committee. The members of the committee are as follows:

Chairs:
- Karën Fort, Min Yen Kan, Yulia Tsvetkov
Members:
- Luciana Benotti, Mark Dredze, Pascale Fung, Dirk Hovy, Jin-Dong Kim, Malvina Nissim

The term of the co-chairs is five years, through the end of 2026, while the term of the members is three years, through the end of 2024.

The ACL Ethics Committee is formed to provide a continuous and consistent platform for dealing with potential ethical concerns raised within ACL events and the ACL community. The focus of this committee is to provide guidance and address considerations of what constitutes ethical research.

ACL Lifetime Achievement Award

The winner of the ACL 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award (LTA) was Junichi Tsujii.

https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/junichi-tsujii-receives-2021-acl-lifetime-achievement-award

The 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award will be announced during the ACL 2022 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 2021 winner of the Distinguished Service Award is Lillian Lee, for continuous sustained and extended service to the Transactions of the ACL (TACL).

https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/lillian-lee-receives-2021-acl-distinguished-service-award

The 2022 Distinguished Service Award will be announced during the ACL 2022 conference.

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

ACL Test-of-Time Awards

The ACL Test-of-Time Paper Award recognizes up to four papers for their long-lasting impact on the field of Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics: two papers from 25 years earlier, and two papers from 10 years earlier.

The 2021 winners of the 1996 Test-of-Time Paper Award are:

Adam Berger, Stephen Della Pietra, Vicent Della Pietra. A Maximum Entropy Approach to Natural Language Processing. Computational Linguistics, Volume 22, Number 1, March 1996.
Jean Carletta. Assessing Agreement on Classification Tasks: The Kappa Statistic. Computational Linguistics, Volume 22, Number 2, June 1996.

The 2021 winners of the 2011 Test-of-Time Paper Award are:

Maite Taboada, Julian Brooke, Milan Tofiloski, Kimberly Voll, Manfred Stede. Lexicon-Based Methods for Sentiment Analysis. Computational Linguistics, Volume 37, Issue 2, June 2011.
Myle Ott, Yejin Choi, Claire Cardie, Jeff Hancock. Finding Deceptive Opinion Spam by Any Stretch of the Imagination. Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies.

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

ACL Fellows

We are delighted to announce that the ACL Nominating Committee has selected eight ACL fellows for 2021:

Joakim Nivre
- Uppsala University
- For significant contributions to algorithms, models and data resources for dependency parsing, pushing the field to the forefront of multilingual syntactic analysis.

Qun Liu
- Huawei
- For significant contributions to machine translation and Chinese natural language processing.

Luke Zettlemoyer
- University of Washington
- For significant contributions to grounded semantics, semantic parsing, and representation learning for natural language processing.

Anette Frank
- Heidelberg University
- For integrative work in linguistically informed, technically well-founded semantics- and discourse-oriented natural language processing.

Joyce Chai
- University of Michigan
- For significant contributions to grounded natural language processing and the interaction between language processing and robotics.

Eneko Agirre
- University of the Basque Country
- For significant contributions to word sense disambiguation, semantic textual similarity, unsupervised machine translation, Basque resources and services to the ACL.

Chengqing Zong
- Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences
- For significant contributions to machine translation and sentiment analysis and sustained service to the growth of natural language processing in China.

Amanda Stent
- Colby College
- For significant contributions to computational models of multimodal and spoken dialogue, natural language generation and summarization.

Congratulations to the new fellows!

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

The list of current ACL fellows can be found here: https://aclweb.org/aclwiki/ACL_Fellows

ACL 2022

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2022) is being organized and will be held in Dublin, Ireland, from May 22nd to 27th, 2022. It is planned to be a hybrid meeting, with as many as possible in Dublin.

Important Dates

Deadline for submission to ACL Rolling Review: 15th November 2021
Commitment deadline for ACL 2022: 15th January 2022
Notification of acceptance: 23rd February 2022
Deadline to withdraw papers: 26th February 2022
Camera-ready due: 15th March 2022

For more information of the ACL 2022 conference: https://2022.aclweb.org/

NAACL-HLT 2022

The 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT2022) will be held in Seattle, Washington from July 10 through July 15, 2022.

Important Dates

Anonymity period begins: 1 month before submission
Latest submission to ARR (main conference + industry): January 15, 2022
Submission deadline for system demonstrations: February 11, 2022
Commitment deadline for NAACL 2022: March 2, 2022
Notification of acceptance: April 7, 2022
Withdrawal deadline: April 11, 2022
Camera-ready version due: May 3, 2022
Conference date: July 10–15, 2022

More information about NAACL-HLT 2022 can be found here: https://2022.naacl.org/

AACL-IJCNLP 2022

The 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (AACL-IJCNLP 2022) will be held in Taipei from November 21-24, 2022.

EMNLP 2022

EMNLP 2022 will be held December 7-11 in Abu Dhabi, the capital city of the United Arab Emirates. It will be a hybrid conference and we plan to continue improving the hybrid experience.

ACL 2023

The venue of the ACL 2023 conference will be decided and announced in early 2022.

ACL 2024

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) hereby invites proposals to host the annual ACL conference in the Asia-Pacific Region in July or August 2024. At this time, we seek preliminary draft proposals from prospective bidders in relevant regions. Promising bidders will be asked to provide additional information for the final selection.

ACL 2024 will be organized in collaboration with AACL. The ACL 2024 Coordinating Committee, made up of representatives of the ACL and representatives from the AFNLP, will select the General Chair and the Program Committee Co-Chairs for the conference. Draft proposals should identify Local Arrangements Chair(s), who will work with the General Chair and the Coordinating Committee to develop a detailed conference plan and budget.

Important dates:

September, 2021: Call for bids
November 30, 2021: Notify intention to submit proposal
January 21, 2022: Draft proposals due
Through March 1, 2022: Feedback to bidders
March 31, 2022: Final bids due
May, 2022: Bid selected and site announced during ACL 2022

For any queries please contact Iryna Gurevych (gurevych@ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de): ACL2024 Coordinating Committee Chair, or Priscilla Rasmussen (acl.rasmussen@gmail.com).

Please send notifications of intent and draft proposals to:

Iryna Gurevych, gurevych@ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de
Priscilla Rasmussen, acl.rasmussen@gmail.com
David Yarowsky, yarowsky@gmail.com

2021 Reports from ACL Officers

Q1 reports: http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2021Q1_Reports

Q3 reports: http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2021Q3_Reports

ACL Resolutions

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

Sincerely,

Shiqi Zhao, ACL secretary