During its 59th annual meeting, the Association for Computational Linguistics awarded its 2021 Distinguished Service Award to Professor Lillian Lee.
Lillian Lee is a professor of computer science and of information science at Cornell University. She received her undergraduate degree at Cornell in math and computer science and her Ph.D. in computer science at Harvard in 1997.
Professor Lee is an accomplished and award-winner researcher in natural language processing, working in the areas of sentiment analysis, semantics, and the intersection of NLP and social sciences, among many other topics. She is an ACM Fellow, an ACL Fellow, and a AAAI Fellow.
She has been awarded the Distinguished service award for continuous sustained and extended service to the Transactions of the ACL (TACL), which has become one of the most influential publication venues in the field. Lillian became Editor in Chief of TACL in 2013 and remained in that role until 2019. Her colleagues state that during that time, her tireless work was key to all aspects of TACL's functioning. She played a crucial role both in routine day-to-day tasks, as well as a leadership and strategic planning role in defining TACL policies and setting it up for continued future growth, transforming the journal from its initial stages to a well-organized operation.