?
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) 2024
Originally named the Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics (AMTCL), the Association for Computational Linguistics was founded in 1962 and renamed the ACL in 1968. The ACL is run by some 20 volunteers overseeing the administration of the Association (organising elections, deciding on new actions, adapting to the fast changing trends of our fields), the publication of two journals (Computational Linguistics and the Transaction of the ACL) and the organisation of the ACL, EACL, NAACL and AACL conferences. The ACL executive board is regularly renewed based on elections from the membership. To ensure continuity, some of the volunteers (e.g., secretary, treasurer and anthology editor) serve longer term mandates and a professional Business Manager gives much needed support to the daily management of the Association. While ACL runs multiple conferences and workshops each year, the ACL conference is the flagship conference of the Association and like the field in general, it has seen drastic changes over the years both in terms of approaches (from symbolic to statistical to neural) and in terms of popularity (from a few academics to a large population of several thousands academics and industrials with widespread geographical coverage). It is a testimony to the strength of the Association that the ACL meeting has been held annually since 1962. Also remarkable is that, thanks to Steven Bird’s initiative, the proceedings are available online in the ACL anthology since ACL 1979 (which hosted a whopping 23 papers!). In this note, I would like to welcome all participants to ACL 2024, the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (held in Bangkok, Thailand, August 11-16, 2024), and to express my gratitude to another large set of volunteers who made ACL 2024 possible. First and foremost, I would like to thank the three Program Chairs, Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins and Vivek Srikumar who oversaw the reviewing process, selected the keynote speakers and created the conference program. 2024 was the first year where all *CL conferences moved entirely to the ACL Rolling Review model. This meant a novel process working in tight interaction with the ARR team while handling a huge number of submissions. Thanks to Lun-Wei, Andre and Vivek, to the ARR Editors in Chief (Mausam, Viviane Moreira, Vincent Ng, Lilja Øvrelid, Thamar Solorio, Jun Suzuki), to the Senior Area Chairs, Area Chairs, reviewers, and to the Best Paper Committee, who worked together to select the ACL 2024 program. The workshop and the tutorial program was created by the Workshop (Eunsol Choi, Xipeng Qiu) and the Tutorial (Luis Chiruzzo, Hung-yi Lee, Leonardo Ribeiro) Chairs, who collaborated with EACL, NAACL and EMNLP 2024 to select 32 workshops and 6 tutorials that cover both technical and societal areas of Natural Language Processing. The program also includes demonstrations selected by the Demonstration Chairs (Yixin Cao, Yang Feng, Deyi Xiong), as well as the traditional Student Research Workshop, which was put together by the SRW Chairs (Eve Fleisig, Xiyan Fu), with the guidance and support of the faculty advisors (Ekapol Chuangsuwanich, Yuval Pinter). Thank you all! Preparing the proceedings is another large, time consuming task. Thanks to the Publication Chairs (Miruna Clinciu, Zhiyu Zoey Chen, Chen Liang, Bing Liu) for coordinating the preparation of all proceedings, including the main conference proceedings, findings, demonstration, SRW and workshop proceedings. The Website Chairs (Yun-Nung Chen, Vipas Sutantayawalee) created the website and were quick in responding to our queries for updates; thank you Vipas and Yun-Nun. Thanks also to the Publicity and Social Media Chairs (Yuki Arase, Dimitra Gkatzia, Jing Jiang) who communicated and publicized the conference through various social media channels, enhancing the visibility and reach of the conference. Thanks also to the Handbook Chairs (Loic Barrault, Pierre Colombo) for creating the conference handbook that will guide you through the conference program. Making ACL accessible to a wider community was the task of the Diversity and Inclusion Chairs (Aparna Garimella, Lin Gui, Jing Li, Steven Wilson). Thank you all for helping in fostering a diverse and inclusive environment. Thanks to the Ethics Chairs (Aurélie Névéol, Alice Oh), who checked papers flagged with ethics issues. They had to process many more papers than expected but handled the overflow brilliantly. The Technical Open Review Chairs (Thiago Castro-Ferreira, Taro Watanabe) helped out with Open Review related requests and the Virtual Infrastructure Chairs (Gaël Guibon, Gözde Gül, Rachada Kongkrachantra), made various enhancements to the virtual platform to ensure an engaging conference experience. Thank you! The conference is also a successful recipient for thousands of emails. Many thanks go to the Internal Communication Chairs (Claudia Borg, Yannick Parmentier, Valentina Pyatkin), for their efficient and much needed processing of the multiple emails sent to ACL 2024. The registration fees would be considerably higher without our sponsors generous contributions. Sincere thanks to them and to Chris Callison-Burch, the ACL sponsorship Director who, together with the Sponsorship Chairs (Lluis Marquez, Kobbrit Viriyayudhakorn) succeeded in securing the sponsorships that are crucial in helping keep registration fees down. Sol Rosenberg and his team provide the Underline virtual platform - thank for their support in collaborating with us to meet our needs and accommodate ACL feature requests. The local team (Thepchai Supnithi, Prachya Bookwan, Thanaruk Theeramunkong) did a wonderful job locating the venue, providing help with local and visa information, booking hotels for the participants and organizing a social program. During the conference, student volunteers help make the conference run smoothly. Many thanks to them and to the Student Volunteer Chairs (Hao Fei, Margot Mieskes, Liangming Pan) who reviewed applications, selected the student volunteers, and assigned them their tasks. Much of the know-how for the various chair positions is based on insights gleaned from earlier events. Thanks to previous ACL conference Chairs for sharing their experience, and to the ACL Exec for their support. Special thanks go to Jennifer Rachford, ACL Business Manager, whose remarkable ability to juggle multiple conferences and interact with overloaded scientists make the impossible possible. Her knowledge of the ACL conferences and of their multiple aspects is essential for the success of our conferences. Finally, let me thank you all, authors, reviewers, presenters, workshop organizers and participants of the conference. Thank you for choosing to be part of ACL 2024, I wish you a very enjoyable conference! ACL 2024 General Chair Claire Gardent CNRS, France
