ACL founded as the AMTCL in 1962

Why a society

Machine translation — the attempt to get computers to translate between human languages — and computational linguistics, the use of computational methods to describe and process language, sit between linguistics, engineering and computing. Machine translation has to turn a text in one natural language into a text in another; computational linguistics ranges more widely, using programs to analyse words, sentences and grammar. The methods overlap, because both have to write language down in a form a computer can handle.

Work of this kind is usually done by small, scattered groups: a few people in a university department, a few more in a company or a translation service, each with its own notation, its own test material and its own vocabulary. A field in that state has difficulty comparing results, or agreeing on what counts as a good result. The usual remedy is a professional society — a body that runs meetings, publishes, and gives scattered researchers a shared place to argue.

The founding meeting

On 13 June 1962, nine researchers met and established the Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics (AMTCL). They were Victor Yngve, David Hayes, Harry Josselson, Ida Rhodes, Paul Garvin, Winfred Lehman, Richard See, Anthony Oettinger and Sydney Lamb.^[1] The purpose published for the new organisation was to "encourage high standards by sponsoring meetings, publication and other exchange of information".^[1]

Officers and early membership

Victor Yngve, of the University of Chicago, was the association's first program chair and its first president. David Hayes was vice-president and Harry Josselson secretary-treasurer.^[2] The posts are the minimum a society of this kind needs: someone to arrange what is presented, someone to speak for the body, and someone to keep the records and the money. In its first year or two the association had about 100 members.^[2]

Its first annual meeting was held on 25–26 August 1963, at the Denver Hilton.^[1] An annual meeting is the point at which a society becomes visible: it is where work done in scattered places is presented in one room, and where the people who read each other's papers finally meet.

The name change of 1968

In 1968 the association changed its name to the Association for Computational Linguistics. The goals and the organisation were not changed with it; the society kept its aims and its structure and took a new name.^[1] The wording moved the emphasis. Machine translation, which had been named first, dropped out of the title, and computational linguistics stood alone as the subject the association was named after — the wider term for computational work on language rather than the specific task that had brought the founders together.

What an association carries

A society of about a hundred members that meets once a year and publishes is small, but small is how research fields usually begin. What such a body provides is continuity rather than size: a standing place to present work, an outlet for publication, and shared expectations about how results are reported and compared. Those things are easy to take for granted once they exist and hard to assemble without an organisation behind them. The meeting of 13 June 1962, the first annual meeting in Denver, the first officers and the roughly one hundred early members are the ordinary machinery of a research field — the part that outlasts individual projects and keeps a subject going under its own name.