Association for Computational Linguistics

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: the American Journal of Computational Linguistics (1974–1978, 1980–1983), and then Computational Linguistics (1984–present).{{cite web |last1=Jones |first1=Karen Sparck |title=Some Notes on ACL History |url=https://www.aclweb.org/archive/misc/History.html |publisher=ACL |access-date=10 February 2021 |date=1994}} Since 1988, the journal has been published for the ACL by MIT Press.{{Cite web |title=List of Issues {{!}} Computational Linguistics {{!}} MIT Press Journals |url=http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/coli |access-date=2017-10-21 |website=mitpressjournals.org |language=en}}{{Cite web |title=Computational Linguistics |url=http://cljournal.org/ |access-date=2017-10-21 |website=cljournal.org}}

The annual meeting was first held in 1963 in conjunction with the Association for Computing Machinery National Conference.{{cite journal |last1=Walker |first1=Donald E. |title=Reflections on 20 Years of the ACL: An Introduction |journal=20th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics |date=1982 |pages=89–91 |url=https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P82-1017/ |publisher=Association for Computational Linguistics|doi=10.3115/981251.981273 |s2cid=6224861 |doi-access=free }} The annual meeting was, for a long time, relatively informal and did not publish anything longer than abstracts. By 1968, the society took on its current name, the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). The publication 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 the Cognitive Science Society.

The United States government sponsored much research from 1989 to 1994, characterized by an increase in author retention rates and an increase in research in some key topics, such as speech recognition, in ACL. By the 21st century, it was able to maintain authors at a high rate who coalesced in a more stable arrangement around individual research topics.{{cite journal |last1=Anderson |first1=Ashton |last2=Jurafsky |first2=Dan |last3=McFarland |first3=Daniel A. |title=Towards a Computational History of the ACL: 1980-2008 |journal=Proceedings of the ACL-2012 Special Workshop on Rediscovering 50 Years of Discoveries |date=2012 |pages=13–21 |url=https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W12-3202 |publisher=Association for Computational Linguistics}}

Every year, the ACL holds the Annual Meeting of the ACL.{{cite web |title=Annual Meetings of the Association for Computational Linguistics {{!}} ACL Member Portal |url=https://www.aclweb.org/portal/acl |website=ACL HomeAssociation for Computational Linguistics |access-date=22 December 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221222133326/https://www.aclweb.org/portal/acl |archive-date=22 December 2022 |language=en |url-status=live}} The location lies in Europe in years zero modulo three, North America in years one modulo three, and Asia–Australia in years two modulo three. In 2020, the Annual Meeting received for the first time more submissions from China than the United States.{{cite web |last1=Chai |first1=Joyce |last2=Schluter |first2=Natalie |last3=Tetreault |first3=Joel |title=ACL2020: General Conference Statistics |url=https://acl2020.org/blog/general-conference-statistics/ |website=ACL2020 |date=4 June 2020 |publisher=Association for Computational Linguistics |access-date=10 February 2021}}

The ACL organizes several of the top conferences and workshops in the field of computational linguistics and natural language processing. These include:

• Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), the flagship conference of the organization
• Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
• International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP), held jointly one of the other conferences on a rotating basis
• Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)
• Lexical and Computational Semantics and Semantic Evaluation (SemEval)
• Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM)
• Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (WMT)

Besides conferences, the ACL also sponsors the journals Computational Linguistics and Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL). Papers and other presentations at ACL and ACL-affiliated venues are archived online in the open-access ACL Anthology.{{cite web |title=ACL Anthology |url=https://aclanthology.org/ |publisher=Association for Computational Linguistics}}

ACL has a large number of Special Interest Groups (SIGs), focusing on specific areas of natural language processing. Some current SIGs within ACL are:{{Cite web|url=https://www.aclweb.org/portal/sigs|title=Special Interest Groups {{!}} ACL Member Portal|website=aclweb.org|access-date=2017-10-21}}

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:{{Cite web|url=https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Officers|title=ACL Officers – Admin Wiki|website=aclweb.org|language=en|access-date=2017-10-21}}

• Sociedad Española para el Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural (SEPLN, Spanish Association for Natural Language Processing)

{{reflist}}

• {{official website|https://www.aclweb.org/}}
• [http://www.aclweb.org/anthology ACL Anthology]
• [http://aclweb.org/aclwiki ACL Wiki]
• [http://www.eacl.org EACL]
• [http://www.naacl.org NAACL]
• [https://aaclweb.org/index.html AACL]

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Category:Computational linguistics

Category:International professional associations

Category:Scientific organizations established in 1962

Category:Computer science-related professional associations