News

Remembering Dragomir Radev

With a heavy heart, the ACL exec announces the premature passing of one of our own, Dragomir Radev, ACL Fellow 2018, ACM Fellow 2015, AAAS Fellow 2020, and AAAI Fellow 2020. Drago was the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of Computer Science at Yale University. He joined Yale in 2017 after spending 16 years at the University of Michigan as a professor in computer science. He surged into the NLP field with seminal research on multi-document text summarization, the topic of his PhD dissertation in 1999.

ACL Fellows 2022

We are delighted to announce that the ACL Nominating Committee has selected eight ACL fellows for 2022: Hinrich Schütze, Marti Hearst, Claire Gardent, James F. Allen, Owen Rambow, Yejin Choi, Maosong Sun, Tomek Strzalkowski

New TACL co-Editors-in-Chief

Roi Reichart and Asli Celikyilmaz have been selected to be co-Editors-in-Chief (co-EiCs) of TACL, which will bring the number of co-EiCs to three (along with Ani Nenkova) when Brian Roark finishes his term at the end of 2022. Congratulations to Roi and Asli!

The temporary expansion to three co-EiCs will last until the end of Ani Nenkova's term in 2024, when TACL will revert to its standard 2 co-EiCs. The expansion is in support of initiatives that require effort beyond the regular operation of the journal.

Announcement of the 2022 ACL Test-of-Time Paper Award

The ACL Test-of-Time Paper Award recognizes up to four papers for their long-lasting impact on the field of Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics: two papers from 25 years earlier, and two papers from 10 years earlier.

The 2022 winners of the 1997 Test-of-Time Paper Award are:

Kevin Knight, Jonathan Graehl.
Machine Transliteration.
Proceedings of ACL 1997.

Michael Collins.
Three Generative, Lexicalised Models for Statistical Parsing.
Proceedings of ACL 1997.

The 2022 winners of the 2012 Test-of-Time Paper Award are:

Mausam, Michael Schmitz, Stephen Soderland, Robert Bart, Oren Etzioni.
Open Language Learning for Information Extraction.
Proceedings of EMNLP-CoNLL 2012.

Margaret Mitchell, Jesse Dodge, Amit Goyal, Kota Yamaguchi, Karl Stratos, Xufeng Han, Alyssa Mensch, Alex Berg, Tamara Berg, Hal Daumé III
Midge: Generating Image Descriptions From Computer Vision Detections.
Proceedings of EACL 2012.

Dragomir Radev Receives the 2022 ACL Distinguished Service Award


We are delighted to award the 2022 ACL Distinguished Service Award to Professor Dragomir (Drago) Radev, professor at Yale University and longtime member of the ACL, for his longstanding and sustained service to the ACL in a variety of leadership and service roles. Professor Radev received his PhD in 1999 from Columbia University and his areas of research in NLP include graph-based analysis, text summarization, and social science applications. Radev is a Fellow of the ACL, the ACM, AAAI, and the AAAS.

Martha Evens Receives the 2022 ACL Lifetime Achievement Award


We are delighted to award the 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award to Martha Evens, Professor Emeritus at Illinois Institute of Technology in Computer Science and a long-time member of ACL, for being a path blazer in a multitude of ways. First as an outstanding professor and mentor in Computer Science, with over 300 publications and over 100 PhD students, and for her pioneering research contributions in lexical databases and intelligent tutoring systems for medical students. Professor Evens received a BS in Mathematics from Bryn Mawr, summa cum laude, in 1955, an MS in Mathematics from Radcliffe in 1957, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Northwestern in 1975.

ACL COVID policy

It is the policy of ACL conferences that attendees wear high-quality, well-fitting masks while attending indoor functions at ACL events, removing their masks only the minimal amount necessary to eat and drink. This policy is in force even if local regulations are less strict, but may be superseded by stricter local regulations. Furthermore, the ACL strongly encourages attendees to be cautious with masking in indoor space outside the conference venue (e.g. on public transit or while eating away from the venue) to avoid bringing COVID to the venue.

Vale Lauri Karttunen

It is with great sadness that I share the news of Lauri Karttunen's untimely passing. A
recipient of the ACL Lifetime Achievement Award (2007) and a founding ACL Fellow, Lauri
was a famously understated but extremely influential figure in computational linguistics.
He made foundational contributions to diverse areas including discourse referents,
presupposition plugs/holes/filters, implicative verbs, finite state methods, computational
morphophonology, and natural language inference.

ACL Statement on the Ukraine situation

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) condemns in the strongest possible
terms the actions of the Russian Federation government in invading the sovereign state of
Ukraine and engaging in war against the Ukrainian people. We stand together with Ukrainian
NLP colleagues, the Ukrainian people, Russian NLP colleagues and Russian people who
condemn the actions of the Russian Federation government, and all those around the world
who have been impacted by the invasion.

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