The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is a scientific and professional organization for people working on

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to proc ...

. 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 Computational linguistics is an Interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, comput ...

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: '' 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 MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (United States). It was established in 1962. History The MIT Press traces its origins back to 1926 when MIT publ ...

. The annual meeting was first held in 1963 in conjunction with the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

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 The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a learned society for the field of linguistics. Founded in New York City in 1924, the LSA works to promote the scientific study of language. The society publishes three scholarly journals: ''Language'', ...

, and a few with the American Society for Information Science and

Cognitive Science Society The Cognitive Science Society is a professional society for the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science. It brings together researchers from many fields who hold the common goal of understanding the nature of the human mind. The society pro ...

. The

United States government The federal government of the United States (U.S. federal government or U.S. government) is the national government of the United States, a federal republic located primarily in North America, composed of 50 states, a city within a fede ...

sponsored much research from 1989 to 1994, leading to a maturing of the ACL, characterized by an increase in author retention rates and an increase in research in some key topics, such as

speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the ma ...

. 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 The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., federal district, five ma ...

, reflecting the increasing geographical diversity of the society.

Conference Locations

* ACL 2022,

Dublin Dublin (; , or ) is the capital and largest city of Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of the Wicklow Mountains range. At the 2016 ...

Ireland Ireland ( ; ga, Éire ; Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, in Northwestern Europe, north-western Europe. It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel (Grea ...

or online * ACL 2021,

Bangkok Bangkok, officially known in Thai as Krung Thep Maha Nakhon and colloquially as Krung Thep, is the capital and most populous city of Thailand. The city occupies in the Chao Phraya River delta in central Thailand and has an estimated populatio ...

Thailand Thailand ( ), historically known as Siam () and officially the Kingdom of Thailand, is a country in Southeast Asia, located at the centre of the Indochinese Peninsula, spanning , with a population of almost 70 million. The country is b ...

or online * ACL 2020, originally

Seattle, Washington Seattle ( ) is a port, seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the county seat, seat of King County, Washington, King County, Washington (state), Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in bo ...

(moved online due to COVID-19) * ACL 2019,

Florence Florence ( ; it, Firenze ) is a city in Central Italy and the capital city of the Tuscany region. It is the most populated city in Tuscany, with 383,083 inhabitants in 2016, and over 1,520,000 in its metropolitan area.Bilancio demografico ...

Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical ...

* ACL 2018,

Melbourne Melbourne ( ; Boonwurrung/ Woiwurrung: ''Narrm'' or ''Naarm'') is the capital and most populous city of the Australian state of Victoria, and the second-most populous city in both Australia and Oceania. Its name generally refers to a me ...

, Australia * ACL 2017,

Vancouver Vancouver ( ) is a major city in western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the city, up from 631,486 in 2016. Th ...

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tota ...

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 Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre o ...

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:

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

{{Authority control Computational linguistics International professional associations Organizations established in 1962 Computer science-related professional associations