President's Report
John Nerbonne

Just a little over forty years ago, on June 13, 1962, Victor Yngve,
David Hayes, Harry Josselson, Ida Rhodes, Paul Garvin, Winfred Lehman,
Richard See, Anthony Oettinger and Sydney Lamb met to establish the
Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics
(AMTCL), which held its first Annual Meeting the following year.
These pioneers wished to "encourage high standards by sponsoring
meetings, publication and other exchange of information." The
Association changed its name, but not its goals or organization, in
1968 to the Association for Computational Linguistics.

The year July, 2001 through June, 2002 is thus the fortieth
anniversary year of the ACL, and two activities were initiated to
celebrate this appropriately.

• The ACL Anthology is a collection of all the publications associated
  with ACL and COLING in the forty years of their work, including all
  the ACL conference and workshop proceedings, back issues of
  journals, COLING proceedings. Steven Bird proposed and then
  organized this enormous undertaking, which will make the results of
  computational linguistics research much more generally available.
  There is a special section in the journal and publications section
  of this report (below) on this project.
  
• The ACL Lifetime Achievement Award was suggested to me and Phil
  Cohen by Erhard Hinrichs. The executive committee resolved to
  present this award at most annually in recognition of scientific and
  technical achievement. The recipient will be invited to speak on a
  topic of his choice at the Annual Meeting. While the primary
  motivation for establishing this award is to recognize the same
  "high standards" our founders sought to encourage, we also hope that
  the award will publicize our work in larger circles.
  

Naturally, several ongoing projects continued to occupy the
association throughout this period.

• The relation of the international organization to its regional
  chapters has begun crystallizing even while it continues to occupy
  us. Regional chapters host regional meetings and co-host
  (international) ACL meetings held in their regions, and they share
  in the financial risks and benefits of all those conferences. This
  financial structure is now in place. In addition to hosting
  meetings, chapters will also take (regional) education into their
  portfolios, including the support of summer schools and the like.
  In this vein the EACL has supported European Summer School in Logic,
  Language and Information (ESSLLI) and NAACL cooperates with
  the Johns Hopkins summer school.
  
• Asian researchers have introduced a new umbrella federation
  of organizations in response to ACL's internationalization push.
  This differs from the sort of chapter structure now in place in
  Europe and North America, but Asian researchers do wish to host
  international conferences regularly and to participate in the
  international organization.
  
• We continue to investigate greater financial autonomy for special
  interest groups.
  
• The executive committee has begun investigating a fee structure
  that would accommodate people that wished to attend only a single
  satellite workshop at one of the annual meetings or chapter
  meetings.
  
• The conference handbook, initiated by Ed Hovy, is being extended and
  maintained by the Association's secretary, Sandee Carberry, and it
  is already streamlining many issues of planning, responsibility and
  organization.
  
• The North American chapter has embarked on a course of collaboration
  with the Human Language Conferences, originally sponsored by DARPA
  in the 1980's. The report of the chapter chair, Diane Litman,
  contains further details.
  
• We established mutual reductions membership rates for members of
  ISCA who wish to join ACL (and vice versa) in an experiment to try
  to involve more speech researchers in ACL.
  

Finally, I note issues of importance which were not foci of attention
in 2001-2002.

• Publicity and public awareness of Computational Linguistics.
  Although recognized as valuable, public relations efforts inevitably
  need to showcase individuals and their specific accomplishments.
  ACL support for proposals has foundered in the past on the
  reluctance of the executive committee to be involved with these
  decisions, including the reluctance to delegate them to others.
  This is clearly suboptimal, since it ends up leaving the ACL with
  no systematic influence on publicity about the field.
  
• Industrial involvement. While the current conference guidelines
  always foresee an applications track, designed to supersede the old
  "Applied Natural Language Processing", industrial involvement seems
  disproportionately low in the organization, meaning in particular
  membership, participation at meetings, active support in the
  organization.
  

The organization continues to be healthy in its membership numbers and
its balance sheet, and for this we should be grateful to Treasurer
Kathy McCoy, and Office Manager Priscilla Rasmussen, who are now
complemented essentially by Association Secretary Sandee Carberry.

John Nerbonne, Groningen
ACL President, 2002