ACL Publicity Director Barbara Plank and Deputy Sarvnaz Karimi

Dear ACL members,

I am happy to announce the ACL Publicity Director and Deputy Director:

- Director: Barbara Plank (IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
- Deputy Director: Sarvnaz Karimi (CSIRO, Australia)

Congratulations to Barbara and Sarvnaz, whose term starts from the date of announcement. Thank you to the other candidates for running, and to the working group for searching for the Publicity Director and Deputy Director.

Ming Zhou, ACL President

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What is computational linguistics?

Computational linguistics is the scientific study of language from a computational perspective. Computational linguists are interested in providing computational models of various kinds of linguistic phenomena. These models may be "knowledge-based" ("hand-crafted") or "data-driven" ("statistical" or "empirical"). Work in computational linguistics is in some cases motivated from a scientific perspective in that one is trying to provide a computational explanation for a particular linguistic or psycholinguistic phenomenon; and in other cases the motivation may be more purely technological in that one wants to provide a working component of a speech or natural language system. Indeed, the work of computational linguists is incorporated into many working systems today, including speech recognition systems, text-to-speech synthesizers, automated voice response systems, web search engines, text editors, language instruction materials, to name just a few.

Popular computational linguistics textbooks include: