The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the international scientific and professional society for people working on problems involving natural language and computation.
An annual meeting is held each summer in locations where significant computational linguistics research is carried out.
It was founded in 1962, originally named the Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics (AMTCL).
It became the ACL in 1968.
The ACL has a European (EACL) and a North American (NAACL) chapter.
The ACL journal, Computational Linguistics, is the primary forum for research on computational linguistics and natural language processing.
Since 1988, the journal has been published for the ACL by MIT Press.
History
The ACL was founded in 1962 as the Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics (AMTCL).
The initial membership was about 100.
In 1965 the AMTCL took over the journal Mechanical Translation and Computational Linguistics.
This journal was succeeded by many other journals: American Journal of Computational Linguistics (1974—1978, 1980—1983), and then Computational Linguistics (1984—present).
The annual meeting was first held in 1963 in conjunction with the Association for Computing Machinery National Conference.
The annual meeting was, for much time, relatively informal and did not publish anything lengthier than abstracts.
By 1968, the society took on its current name, the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).
The publishing of the annual meeting's Proceedings of the ACL began in 1979, and gradually matured into its modern form.
Many of the meetings were held in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America, and a few with the American Society for Information Science and Cognitive Science Society.
The United States government sponsored much research from 1989 to 1994, leading to a maturing of the ACL, characterised by an increase in author retention rates and an increase in research in some key topics, such as speech recognition.
By the 21st century, the society was able to maintain authors at a high rate who coalesced in a more stable arrangement around individual research topics.
In 2020, the annual meeting of the ACL for the first time received more submissions from China than from the United States, reflecting the increasing geographical diversity of the society.
Special Interest Groups
ACL has a large number of Special Interest Groups (SIGs), focusing on specific areas of natural language processing.
Some current SIGs within ACL are:
Presidents
Each year the ACL elects a distinguished computational linguist who becomes vice-president of the organization in the next calendar year and president one year later.
Recent ACL presidents are:
References
External links
ACL Anthology
ACL Wiki
EACL
NAACL
