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A simplified workflow for processing metadata corrections should make it easier for authors to submit corrections and for Anthology staff and volunteers to process them expeditiously.

NAACL 2024 main conference papers are now available

EACL 2024 conference videos are now available

The proceedings of LREC 2024 and its colocated workshops are now available

The ACL Anthology website now has a dedicated section for blog posts and announcements as well as an RSS feed for papers. 🎉

The ACL Anthology is a treasure. It is the repository of our community’s scientific contributions extending back over fifty years; its engine is nicely designed custom in-house software that still works well after almost two decades; and it has enabled research projects examining topics like author networks and topic shift over time. That all of this labor has been donated by its members further distinguishes the Anthology: it is not a found treasure, but one that has been crafted and shaped over countless hours, as if by a hundred Berninis, holding keyboards instead of chisels.

The title can be read in two ways. Either I should comment on the past twenty years of ACL (which coincide with the period between ACL 1982 held at Penn and ACL 2002 also held at Penn) or twenty more years from ACL 2002. As you will see many of my comments will be relevant to both these interpretations.

How did I get into computational linguistics (CL)? I did not really get into it. It sort of happened to me, much like Voltaire realizing one day that he was indeed writing prose. This is simply due to the fact that I started doing what is now called CL (or natural language processing) well before there was such a recognized field or a professional society with that name. As a matter of fact for the first couple of years of ACL (until about early 64) I did not officially belong to ACL. This was not because I disliked something about ACL or the people connected with it. Far from it. I knew the people very well and respected them. In retrospect, I am sure part of my reason for not rushing into it was the initial name of the current ACL. More importantly, I guess I was not sure myself that what I was doing was the same as the proclaimed goals of the organization at the start. I was also not sure that what I was doing at that time was either part of linguistics or part of computer science, or combination of the two, and perhaps, therefore, not needing any special name. Of course, once I joined ACL I threw myself into it in every possible way. However, I believe my initial experience described above may reflect in some way in my remarks below.

As an organisation, the ACL has clearly evolved over the forty years since its foundation. (Whether, or how, it has evolved in its area of intellectual interest over the same period is a tricky and interesting question.) The ACL’s organisational development in the period up to Don Walker’s death in 1993 was, however, rather different from its evolution since. This was partly because the ACL’s community was not very large in its first two decades, partly because there were only three Secretary-Treasurers in the whole period from 1963 to 1993. Don Walker’s term of office, from 1976-1993, was a particularly important period in the development of the ACL, and both for these reasons and because Don had been in post for so long, the two years 1993-1994 – 1993 when Don was ill and died, and 1994 when I was President – were a rough transition time.