The ACL Lifetime Achievement Award was instituted in 2002 and has been given every year since. The award is conferred to recognize the work of a researcher who has made sustained and impactful contributions to the field of computational linguistics and natural language processing.
The ACL Lifetime Award Committee will nominate and select at most one award recipient annually, considering the originality, depth, breadth and impact of the entire body of the nominees' work in computational linguistics and natural language processing. Candidates were discussed with the following factors in mind: background, research area, specific contributions to NLP, past recognition, service to community. After deliberating over a period of a few months, the committee chooses Dr. Ron Kaplan as the ACL Lifetime Achievement Award Winner of 2019.
Dr. Ron Kaplan’s career is a notable mixture of scientific achievement, service to ACL in senior capacities and influential direction of research in research organizations. His scientific contributions include models of grammar for ATNs, and the General Syntactic Processor, and the development of active-chart parsing (with Martin Kay), the theory of Lexical Function Grammar (with Joan Bresnan), the Grammar Writer’s workbench and the Core Language Engine, and the development of the mathematical, linguistic, and computational foundations of finite-state methods in application to phonological and morphological systems of grammar, as well as their role in phonological and morphological systems developed by Chomsky and Halle, and Koskenniemi respectively. He has served as president of the ACL, and is an inaugural ACL fellow. He also has supervised research activities at several laboratories including Amazon (where he is Vice President and chief scientist in Search), Nuance Communications, Powerset (a division of Microsoft), and at the Palo Alto Research Center.
He received his bachelor's degree (1968) in Mathematics and Language Behavior from the University of California, Berkeley and his Master's (1970) and Ph.D(1975) in Social Psychology from Harvard University. Currently he is an adjunct professor at Stanford University. He recently received honorary degree from Copenhagen University and University of York.
On behalf of ACL, I want to take this opportunity to express my deepest gratitude to you for your enormous contributions to the ACL! We are very proud of your widely recognized accomplishments in promoting ACL and NLP communities over the years. Please join me to congratulate Ron Kaplan for this supreme award of ACL!
Ming Zhou, ACL President