In 1998, the ACL Executive decided to create a chapter of the Association
specifically to serve the interests of North American members. This
chapter will parallel the European ACL chapter, and possibly be followed
by a chapter representing Asia as well.
The Executive formed a committee consisting of Sandra Carberry (University
of Delaware), Eduard Hovy (Information Sciences Institute of the University
of Southern California) and Marilyn Walker (AT&T Laboratories) to establish
the new chapter.
This committee presented a draft constitution for the new chapter to the
Executive at the recent ACL conference in June 1998. The Executive agreed
to a plan leading up to the formation of the new chapter by January 2000,
involving the following steps:
1. September 1999: draft constitution of the new chapter made public to
ACL membership via ACL website
2. September 1999: electronic discussion forum created for comments
3. October 1999: call for nominations for chapter officials
4. November 1999: electronic voting for chapter officials
5. December 1999: announcement of elected officials
6. January 2000: first electronic meeting of new chapter officials
7. April 2000: meeting of new chapter membership at NAACL/ANLP conference
The chapter creation committee will moderate the open discussion and will
act as Nominating and Electoral Committee for the election. This committee
will dissolve at the end of December, 1999.
We invite you to peruse the new chapter constitution from the ACL website,
at
http://www.aclweb.org/naacl/
We invite you to subscribe to the discussion list by sending an email
message to hovy@isi.edu, consisting simply of the line
"subscribe naacl-setup"
in the subject line.
We invite you to post comments and suggestions for the activities of the
new chapter to
naacl-setup@isi.edu
We invite you to nominate officers for the new chapter by electronically
sending the following information to Sandra Carberry (carberry@eecis.udel.edu):
- the name and affiliation of the nominee,
- the position nominated for,
- a short statement of some of the nominee's achievements and/or
qualifications in the context of computational linguistics,
- a short statement by the nominee expressing the willingness to stand
for election.
Nominees must be members of ACL in good standing at the time of nomination.
The chapter creation committee,
Sandra Carberry, Eduard Hovy, Marilyn Walker