The ACL Distinguished Service award recognizes one individual each year for extraordinary service to the computational linguistics community. Areas of service include, but are not limited to: association service, service as an editor, conference organization, representation of ACL in other organizations, or influential service as a government agency contract monitor or program director, that results in positive effects on the field of computational linguistics.
2019 is the first year that the Distinguished Service Award (DSA) will be awarded. The criteria and nomination procedure for the award: Extraordinary service to ACL and its activities; Extended service over many years; Responsible, ethical representation of ACL. Nominations are made by the membership by a predefined date. The DSA committee reviewed the received nominations against the criteria of this award and made deliberating discussion for a few months, before making the final decision.
Here comes the result. I am delighted to announce:
The 2019 winner of the Distinguished Service Award is Min-Yen Kan, for his dedicated and sustained work on the ACL Anthology.
Prof. Kan served as ACL Anthology Editor from 2008-2018. The ACL Anthology is a key asset for the computational linguistics research community, regularly indexing and storing the outputs of our research and making them freely available to the rest of the world. Min-Yen’s 10 year long stewardship of the anthology saw it upgraded completely, the introduction of DOI support, building and sustenance of relationships with events beyond the ACL, support for data sharing and video links for talks — all while at the same time dealing with the day-to-day process of managing publication intake and indexing for the hundreds of events and the thousands of publications. While recent interest in our field has prompted many broad and deep discussions, introspection, and on occasion consternation among ACL members, very rarely has there been worry about the Anthology’s ability to cope. This stands as testament to the quality of Min-Yen’s leadership over many years.
Beyond his service as the editor for the Anthology, Prof. Kan served as a reviewer, editor or chair for a number of conferences and journals. Specific highlights are his work as an associate editor for Information Retrieval, his role, together with Regina Barzilay, as one of the program chairs for the annual meeting of the ACL in 2017, and his work as a reviewer for the Transactions of the ACL. Another task Prof. Kan took on in addition to maintaining the Anthology was contributing directly to the organization of the ACL by serving as an executive board member. He was the first ACL information officer, in office from 2012 to 2015, and oversaw the development of the ACL's web presence. He helped make sure that the ACL could run its affairs and communicate with its membership. He is also the PC co-chair of NLPCC2019 together with Jie Tang.
The fact that Prof. Kan has filled the demanding role as the Anthology editor for 10 years, in conjunction with a number of other, important services to the community, is an outstanding service, which should be rewarded and brought to the attention of the ACL community.
Prof. Kan received his B.S(1996)., M.S.(1998), and Ph.D. (2002) from Columbia University. He currently is an associate professor of National University of Singapore (NUS), and deputy director (for research) of the Institute for Application of Learning Science and Education Technology and Assistant Dean of Undergraduate Office of NUS.
I want all of you join me in thanking Prof. Kan for his outstanding service to ACL and congratulating him as the first recipient of DSA award issued by ACL!
Ming Zhou, ACL President