Resnik Elected to NAACL Executive Board

Philip Resnik, a professor of linguistics with an appointment in UMIACS, was recently elected to the North American Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) Executive Board.

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and its chapters are the premier scientific/professional organizations for people who work on computational approaches to human language. Its constituency includes people doing scientific research on, for example, computational modeling of how people learn and process language.

It also includes a vibrant community of technologists, including many of the people who have been developing attention-getting natural language processing (NLP) technology in recent years, such as Apple Siri, IBM Watson, Google Translate, Amazon Echo, etc.

Resnik, who specializes in computational approaches to social science and is an expert in NLP, was elected to a two-year term on the executive board (2017-2018).

He says his duties will include standard organizational duties, such as helping to determine the time and location for the organization’s annual conference, but as a board member, he would also like to accomplish three goals which he laid out in his candidacy statement.

“The first is the organization’s public profile: I want to see NAACL become the go-to resource whenever people outside the community are seeking a well-informed and relevant viewpoint—for example about language technology and its implications for society, as part of the broader conversation about artificial intelligence,” Resnik says. “The second is the relationship between academic research and the world of industry, especially startups, since these days there's so much fluidity between the two. And the third is creating and strengthening bridges to other communities, particularly those concerned with mental health and health care more generally.”

He adds he is excited to join the board and begin tackling those goals.

“I've gotten an enormous amount of benefit from NAACL as a member of the organization, and I'm enthusiastically looking forward to contributing as a member of the board,” Resnik says.