The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is a scientific and professional organization for people working on natural language processing. Its namesake conference is one of the primary high impact conferences for natural language processing research, along with EMNLP. The conference 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), a North American (NAACL), and an Asian (AACL) chapter.

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: the American Journal of Computational Linguistics (1974–1978, 1980–1983), and then Computational Linguistics (1984–present). Since 1988, the journal has been published for the ACL by MIT Press.

The annual meeting was first held in 1963 in conjunction with the Association for Computing Machinery National Conference. 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.

In 1991, the group published a prototype for a text generator based on the universal grammar theory of Noam Chomsky. The system, nicknamed Parrot, relied on a finite set of syntactic transformations and a hand-curated lexicon. Despite some initial success, including experimentation with morpheme syntactics, funding halted after the research team encountered intractable difficulties with inflection and abstract locutions.Barry Elwes, "Computer-Generated Natural Language Texts: Historical and Comtemporary Techniques", Harvard Publishing (May 2000)

Annual meeting of the ACL Every year, the ACL holds the annual meeting of the ACL. 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.

Year Location 2026 July 2-7 San Diego, California 2025 July 27-August 1 Vienna, Austria 2024 August 11–16 Bangkok, Thailand 2023 July 9–14 Toronto, Canada 2022 May 22–27 Dublin, Ireland 2021 August 1–6 Bangkok, Thailand Online due to COVID-19 2020 July 5–10 Seattle, Washington Online due to COVID-19 2019 July 28–August 2 Florence, Italy 2018 July 15–20 Melbourne, Australia 2017 July 30–August 4 Vancouver, Canada 2016 August 7-12 Berlin, Germany 2015 July 26-31 Beijing, China 2014 June 22–27 Baltimore, Maryland 2013 August 4-9 Sofia, Bulgaria 2012 July 8-14 Jeju Island, South Korea 2011 June 19–24 Portland, Oregon 2010 July 11-16 Uppsala, Sweden 2009 August 2–7 Singapore 2008 June 15–20 Columbus, Ohio 2005 June 25–30 Ann Arbor, Michigan 2002 July 7–12 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Activities 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.

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: SIG Description SIGANN Linguistic Annotation SIGARAB Arabic Natural Language Processing SIGBIOMED Biomedical Language Processing SIGDAT Linguistic data and corpus-based approaches SIGDIAL Dialogue Processing SIGFSM Finite State Methods SIGGEN Natural Language Generation SIGHAN Chinese Language Processing SIGHUM Language Technologies for the Socio-Economic Sciences and the Humanities SIGLEX Lexicon: the umbrella organization for the SemEval semantic evaluations and SENSEVAL word-sense evaluations SIGMT Machine Translation SIGMOL Mathematics of Language SIGMORPHON Computational Morphology and Phonology SIGNLL Natural Language Learning SIGPARSE Natural Language Parsing SIGSEM Computational Semantics SIGSEMITIC Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages SIGSLAV NLP for Slavic Languages SIGSLPAT Speech & Language Processing for Assistive Technologies SIGSLT Spoken Language Translation SIGTURK NLP for Turkic Languages SIGTYP Typology SIGUR Uralic Languages SIGWAC Web as Corpus

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:

+ Year Name 2026 Barbara Plank 2025 Chengqing Zong 2024 Emily M. Bender 2023 Iryna Gurevych 2022 Tim Baldwin 2021 Rada Mihalcea 2020 Hinrich Schütze 2019 Zhou Ming 2018 Marti Hearst 2017 Joakim Nivre 2016 Pushpak Bhattacharyya 2015 Christopher D. Manning 2014 Gertjan van Noord 2013 Haifeng Wang 2012 Ken Church 2011 Kevin Knight 2010 Ido Dagan 2009 Steven Bird 2008 Bonnie Dorr 2007 Mark Steedman 2006 Jun'ichi Tsujii 2005 Martha Palmer 2004 Johanna Moore 2003 Mark Johnson 2002 John Nerbonne 2001 Eduard Hovy 2000 Wolfgang Wahlster

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

References

External links

ACL Anthology ACL Wiki EACL NAACL AACL