During its 58th annual meeting, the Association for Computational Linguistics awarded its 2020 Distinguished Service Award to Prof. Graeme Hirst.
Prof. Hirst is Professor and Associate Chair, Graduate Studies, in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.
He received his undergraduate degree in Information Science and Pure Mathematics from Monash University in 1973, his Master's degree in Computational Linguistics from Australian National University in 1979 and his PhD in Computer Science from Brown University in 1983. He joined the University of Toronto CS department in 1984. He has also held visiting and adjunct positions at the University of Rochester, the University of Waterloo, the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Mannheim.
Prof. Hirst has served the ACL community in many ways over the years, but the main reason that he is exceptionally deserving as the 2020 awardee is that he was ACL's treasurer for 10 years from 2008 until 2017.
The treasurer, working with our business manager Priscilla Rasmussen, manages ACL's finances, including the financing of our conferences. An ACL conference involves financial commitments in the high six figures, so this is a big responsibility. ACL's finances today are rock solid in large part thanks to Prof. Hirst's financial stewardship, and they are helping ACL weather what could have been a financially disastrous 2020.
Prof. Hirst has served ACL in other ways as well. In 1985, he took on the role of book review editor of the Computational Linguistics journal, which he continued until 2014. He was also elected a member of the Executive Board of NAACL in 2001, serving as Chair in 2004 and 2005 and Past Chair from 2006 to 2009.
More recently, Prof. Hirst has been instrumental in launching ACL's Professional Conduct Committee and is coleading it with Emily Bender. This is critical for making ACL a welcoming environment and ensuring equality and respect for everybody.
Hinrich Schütze, ACL President