The Association for Computational Linguistics was founded in 1962, originally under the name Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics (AMTCL), reflecting how central machine translation was to language technology at the time. The organization adopted its current shorter name, ACL, in 1968.
Its founding sat between two milestones that bracketed the early machine-translation era: the 1954 Georgetown-IBM demonstration that ignited optimism about automatic translation, and the 1966 ALPAC report that would soon puncture it. As MT funding contracted, the society’s scope broadened from translation to the wider study of language by computer.
The ACL describes computational linguistics as “the scientific study of language from a computational perspective,” pursued through either knowledge-based hand-crafted models or data-driven statistical methods - the two traditions that have competed throughout the field’s history. Its members’ work, the society notes, underlies everyday tools from speech recognition and text-to-speech to web search and language instruction.
Today the ACL is the premier international society for what is variously called computational linguistics or natural language processing. It runs the field’s flagship annual meeting and publishes the journal Computational Linguistics, and its open ACL Anthology has become the standard archive for NLP research papers.