ACL 1999 Newsletter

ACL Newsletter, 1999

Enclosed you will find the 1999 ACL Membership/Order form which was also sent via email to those with good email addresses on file. We look forward to an active year with strong participation from our membership. We would like to welcome Dr. Phil Cohen as the incoming ACL President, Dr. Wolfgang Wahlster as the ACL Vice President, and Dr. Dekai Wu as an ACL executive committee member for 1999 - 2001. And we give our deepest thanks to Eva Hajicova for serving as President in 1998, and to Paul Jacobs who served on the ACL executive committee for the past three years. We also welcome all new members who have decided to join the Association.

In response to the many requests for MULTI-YEAR memberships, we will now offer, beginning in 1999, both three-year and five-year membership options to Regular and Joint members. This is in addition to the single-year option that was always available. Please be sure to mark the option you desire; otherwise, one-year membership is presumed.

1998 turned out to be a very busy conference year for the ACL. In addition to the quite large and highly successful Coling-ACL'98, held at the Universite de Montreal in Montreal, Canada, with its 8 co-located workshops, other conferences and workshops were:

New Methods in Language Processing and Computational NL Learning Joint Conference, held at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, 11-17 January, 1998
Third Conference on Empirical Methods in NL Processing, held in Granada, Spain, 2 June 1998
International Workshop on Finite State Methods in NL Processing, held at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, 30 June-1 July 1998
Ninth International Workshop on NL Generation, held at Niagra-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada, 5-7 August 1998.

For 1999, we want to invite you to attend and participate in the upcoming 1999 meetings:

EACL-99 8-12 June 1999 at the University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway; Koenraad de Smedt is Local Arrangements Chair
ACL-99 20-26 June 1999 at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA; Bonnie Dorr is Local Arrangements Chair

Please check the web pages (from our main page: http://aclweb.org/) for detailed information on these two meetings.

In addition, the ACL is co-sponsoring computational linguistics courses at the 1999 Linguistic Institute of The Linguistic Society of America, June 21st - July 30, 1999 at The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. See their web page: http://www.beckman.uiuc.edu/groups/cs/linginst/ for details.

Over the last year a great deal of change has taken place in the ACL organization. The ACL Office has moved to more permanent headquarters after having spent four years at Rutgers University in New Jersey through their generous donation of precious office space. The new ACL Office address, telephone and fax are:

Assoc. for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
75 Paterson Street, Suite 9
New Brunswick, NJ 08901 USA

+1-732-342-9100 phone
+1-732-342-9339 fax

The Computer Science Department at Columbia University will continue to serve as the host of the ACL computer account. The ACL webmaster, Drago Radev, has the following accounts set up with aliases to allow simpler communications with the ACL officers:


acl@aclweb.org		       To the main ACL Office (Priscilla Rasmussen)
president@aclweb.org	       To the ACL President (currently Phil Cohen)
vice-president@aclweb.org      To the ACL Vice-President (currently Wolfgang
							  Wahlster)
secretary-treasurer@aclweb.org To the ACL Secretary-Treasurer (currently 
							Kathleen McCoy)
webmaster@aclweb.org	       To the ACL Webmaster (Drago Radev)
comments@aclweb.org	       To the ACL Secretary-Treasurer who will 
				  forward email to the appropriate source

Drago is also working on setting up an auto-moderated newsgroup for members of ACL to use for general discussions and news items of interest to our community such as job postings, updates of sig contact information, new related-area publication announcements, etc... You will be given the option to subscribe or not to this group.

ACL internationalization is still at the forefront of much discussion within ACL. Last summer the ACL executive committee asked Sandra Carberry, Ed Hovy, and Lynn Walker to put into motion the formation of a North American Chapter of the ACL. If you have comments and/or advice for this committee and/or want to be more involved in this chapter formation, please send email to na-comments@aclweb.org. We are hoping to have the "kick-off" meeting for this chapter in the Spring of 2000.

In addition, the executive committee asked Dekai Wu to begin exploring the formation of an Asian/Pacific Rim Chapter. More on this as progress is made, but look for ACL2000 to be held in Asia in the fall of 2000. Please send any comments/suggestions with respect to this chapter to comments@aclweb.org.

We are seeking ways to better serve our membership and very much appreciate any comments or suggestions that you might have for doing this. We are looking forward to a very good year for ACL.

				Kathleen F. McCoy, Secretary-Treasurer
                                University of Delaware
				February, 1999