Association for Computational Linguistics
In plain wordsThe scientific society at the center of research on language technology, from translation software to chatbots. It runs the field's leading conferences and a free online archive of their papers.
The main learned society of natural language processingnatural language processing, n.: The field that teaches computers to handle human language — to read, interpret, translate, summarize and produce text and speech. It is one of the oldest and largest areas of artificial intelligence. and computational linguistics. Its flagship yearly conference shares the society's abbreviation, ACL; one of its special-interest groups runs EMNLP, others run workshops, and its regional chapters hold NAACL (the Americas), EACL (Europe) and AACL (Asia-Pacific). Its journals are Computational Linguistics and Transactions of the ACL, and its Findings volumes publish sound papers not accepted to a main conference. Its ACL Anthology, a free archive of papers from its own and related venues going back decades, is a basic research resource, and since 2021 ACL Rolling Review has centralized peer review across its conferences. Papers such as BLEUBLEU, abbr.: An automatic score for machine translation that checks how many short runs of words in the computer's translation also appear in human reference translations. (2002) and BERTBERT, prop. n.: An influential 2018 Google language model that learned to understand text by filling in hidden words. It made search engines and many language tools much better at grasping meaning in context. (2019, at NAACL) appeared at its venues; since about 2020 language modelslarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code. have dominated its program.
We submitted to ACL Rolling Review and committed the paper to EMNLP.
Origin
Founded in 1962 as the Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics, reflecting the field's roots in Cold War machine translationmachine translation, n.: Software that renders writing or speech in one language into another language, as online translation services and phone translation apps do. research; it adopted its present name in 1968. Its journal, begun in 1974 as the American Journal of Computational Linguistics, became Computational Linguistics in 1984.
Related
- natural language processingnatural language processing, n.: The field that teaches computers to handle human language — to read, interpret, translate, summarize and produce text and speech. It is one of the oldest and largest areas of artificial intelligence.
- machine translationmachine translation, n.: Software that renders writing or speech in one language into another language, as online translation services and phone translation apps do.
- BLEUBLEU, abbr.: An automatic score for machine translation that checks how many short runs of words in the computer's translation also appear in human reference translations.
- BERTBERT, prop. n.: An influential 2018 Google language model that learned to understand text by filling in hidden words. It made search engines and many language tools much better at grasping meaning in context.
- ALPAC reportALPAC report, prop. n.: A 1966 US government report that concluded machine translation was slower, worse and costlier than human translators. It ended most American funding for the field for many years.
- large language modellarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code.
Mentioned in
Emily M. BenderEmily M. Bender, prop. n.: An American linguist who argues that language models only mimic the form of language without understanding it, and who co-coined the phrase 'stochastic parrots'., COLMCOLM, prop. n.: An academic conference, founded in 2024, devoted entirely to research on language models, the technology behind AI chatbots., EMNLPEMNLP, prop. n.: A leading yearly conference on getting computers to handle human language, founded in the 1990s for data-driven methods and now dominated by work on large language models., Frederick JelinekFrederick Jelinek, prop. n.: A Czech-born American engineer who led IBM's speech-recognition research and made statistics learned from data, rather than hand-written grammar rules, the basis of language technology., OpenReviewOpenReview, prop. n.: A website where conference papers are submitted and peer reviewed; for some conferences, anyone can read the reviews and the authors' replies.