The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) mourns the passing of Remko Jan Hendrik Scha (15 September 1945 – 9 November 2015), who made important contributions to the study of semantics, and discourse analysis through his work on Dynamic Discourse Model (with Livia Polanyi).
Susan Armstrong
20.6.1952 - 1.9.2015
It is with great sadness that we report the recent death of Susan Armstrong, who worked as Professor of translation technology at the University of Geneva until her retirement in 2014. She served as secretary to the European Chapter of the ACL from 1993-2000, remaining on the Chapter’s nominating committee until 2004. She had a fundamental role in the founding and successful development of SIGDAT.
The ACL sadly received the message about the unexpected passing away of Professor Fred Jelinek, on Tuesday night. Fred was one of the pioneers and founders of modern research in speech recognition and statistical machine translation and made enormous contributions to our field. In recognition of his contributions he received the ACL Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009. His death is a great loss for all those who knew him, and for the ACL community.
Here is a link to Fred's life and work in his own words: clsp.jhu.edu
The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) mourns the passing of Jane J. Robinson, former president of the ACL.
1938-2015
The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) mourns the July 1, 2015 death of Paul Chapin, former ACL president (1977). The language sciences lost a truly valued defender and friend on July 1, 2015, with the death of Paul Gipson Chapin from Acute Myeloid Leukemia, in Tucson, Arizona.
1960-2015
The Association for Computational Linguistics mourns the passing of Adam Kilgarriff. a remarkable computational linguist and long term ACL member.
Former ACL president Jun'ichi Tsujii has been named a recipient of the Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon by the Government of Japan. These medals are given to distinguished scientists, artists, and athletes.
Kathleen R. McKeown is the Women of Vision Award winner in the *Innovation* category. McKeown has made seminal contributions to the natural language processing (NLP) area, also called Computational Linguistics (CL), within the general areas of artificial intelligence, information extraction, and human machine interaction. More specifically, McKeown has made pioneering contributions to natural language generation; this field of research focuses on enabling computers to effectively utilize natural language.