| Chair | Graham Neubig | Carnegie Mellon University | 2024-2025 |
| Secretary | Jessy Li | University of Texas at Austin | 2024-2025 |
| Treasurer | Steven Bethard | University of Arizona | 2025-2026 |
| Past Chair | Luciana Benotti | Universidad Nacional de Córdoba | 2024-2025 |
| Board Member | Greg Durrett | University of Texas at Austin | 2024-2025 |
| Board Member | Helena Gómez-Adorno | National Autonomous University of Mexico | 2025-2026 |
| Board Member | Hanna Hajishirzi | University of Washington | 2024-2025 |
| Board Member | Nanyun (Violet) Peng | University of California, Los Angeles | 2025-2026 |
| Board Member | Dilek Hakkani-Tur | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign | 2024-2025 |
Graham Neubig is an associate professor at the Language Technologies Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on natural language processing, with a particular interest in fundamentals, applications, and understanding of large language models for tasks such as question answering, code generation, and multilingual applications. His final goal is that every person in the world should be able to communicate with each-other, and with computers in their own language. He also contributes to making NLP research more accessible through open publishing of research papers, advanced NLP course materials and video lectures, and open-source software. He has previously been the Chief Technical Officer of ARR, and served on the NAACL board for 4 years. He was one of the initiators of several workshops, including the Workshop on Neural Machine Translation.
My major goals as NAACL chair are two-fold:
I believe my past experience as the initiator of several workshops, member of the NAACL board, role in handling the logistics of ARR, and participant in several grassroots NLP initiatives run by language communities (such as Masakhane and AmericasNLP), have left me well prepared to take on these tasks.
Jessy Li is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her PhD in 2017 from the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research looks into models for discourse processing, natural language generation, and methods to better understand social discourse. She has received the NSF CAREER award for her work on discourse and text simplification. Jessy has been a Senior Area Chair for numerous *CL conferences, a Senior Action Editor for ACL Rolling Review, and an Associate Editor for the Dialogue & Discourse journal. She was honored as an Outstanding Area Chair (EMNLP 2020) and an Outstanding Senior Program Committee Member (AAAI 2020). She was a Program Co-Chair for SIGDIAL 2022, and has served on the SIGDIAL board from 2019–2021 and from 2023–2025. She has also been a co-organizer for the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse (CODI) since its inauguration in 2020, and co-organized the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Programming co-located with ACL 2021.
It is the NAACL secretary’s responsibility to communicate within the NAACL executive committee and to the community broadly, e.g., to organize meetings, ballots, and to maintain and update media outlets. As we brace for the changing era we are in now, we have also witnessed an uptick of the frequency of major policy changes at ACL over recent years. Thus it is critical to have more timely and transparent communication than ever before. I will commit to:
As part of the NAACL board, I will additionally work on the following:
Steven Bethard is an associate professor at the College of Information Science at the University of Arizona whose research focuses on modeling the language of time and timelines, normalizing text to medical and geospatial ontologies, and information extraction models for clinical applications. He has been engaged in the NAACL community for many years: he was a program chair for NAACL 2024, was publication chair for NAACL 2021 and ACL 2020, was on the board of SIGLEX from 2016-2024, was an organizer of the SemEval workshop from 2016-2018, has been an organizer of the Clinical NLP Workshop since 2016, is an area chair for ACL Rolling Review, and is a standing reviewer for TACL.
As NAACL treasurer, I would work closely with ACL treasurer David Yarowsky and ACL business manager Jenn Rachford (the latter of whom I worked closely with during the organization of NAACL 2024) to ensure that NAACL can continue to support the efforts beyond the main NAACL conference that it has in the past: the North American Computational Linguistics Open Competition (NACLO) for engaging high school students, the Regional Americas Fund (RAF) for strengthening computational linguistics broadly across the Americas, and the Frederick Jelinek Memorial Summer Workshop on Speech and Language Technology (JSALT) for encouraging hands-on collaboration on challenging NLP problems.
My future goal as NAACL treasurer would be to examine our current income and expenditures to allow us to expand our support of initiatives like NACLO, RAF, and JSALT, to expand our support for travel and/or registration to our flagship conference from underrepresented regions, and to make our financial spending profile appropriately reflect the recent transition from “North America” to “Nations of the Americas” by encouraging support of events in previously underfunded regions of the Americas.
Luciana Benotti is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science in the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, in Argentina. Her research interests cover many aspects of situated dialogue, including the study of misunderstandings, clarification requests and grounding. She has a PhD in Computer Science from INRIA, Nancy Grand Est, France. She received an IBM SUR award for her work on robust conversational interfaces, and a Google RISE award for her outreach efforts in developing AI-based technology for education. She has been an invited scholar at the University of Trento (2019), Stanford University (2018), Roskilde University (2014), University of Lorraine (2013), Universidad de Costa Rica (2012), and University of Southern California (2010). She regularly serves under different roles in the ACL community. She has been a volunteer during conferences, a reviewer since 2010, an area chair for dialogue and interactive systems several times, and a member of the executive board of SIGDIAL and SIGSEM. She is currently an elected officer at the NAACL executive board for 2021 and 2022. She is also serving as ARR action editor, ACL 2022 tutorial chair and NAACL 2022 D&I advisor.
If I am elected as chair of the board, I will keep working actively towards maintaining the high quality of the *CL conferences, while focusing on supporting diversity and inclusion. As a Latinamerican researcher, I know first hand the serious problems that overlooking these issues provoke. I will coordinate NAACL exec board responsibilities in collaboration with the ACL. I will continue enabling the initiatives I proposed as an officer, which have made good progress in this short time thanks to the work of the current NAACL exec board and the ACL community.
Care about ethics: I will support the continued inclusion of an ethical impact statement for all papers submitted to *CL conferences. Such statements should not only consider privacy, gender and race, but also take economy, power and climate into account. I will work towards improving the ethical reviewing through consensus in the community, serving as one of the Members at Large of the newly-formed ACL Ethics Committee.
Encourage reproducibility: I will continue to explore incentives to encourage the release of implementation code, data, metadata, and trained models required to reproduce the results of all papers submitted to NAACL. These measures would not only improve transparency, but they would help researchers with low computing budgets implement their ideas and help reduce carbon footprint. I will support the publication of reproducibility studies, in particular when applied to languages other than English.
Lower barriers: I will continue to strengthen diversity and inclusion initiatives at NAACL from different perspectives. In particular, I will work towards increasing the amount of fee waivers and strive to get travel grants for those who face financial barriers. Moreover, during the pandemic the organization of virtual conferences has successfully increased participation of underrepresented communities, and I will investigate and measure the impact of hybrid alternatives in the future.
Build community: I will support initiatives that broaden and strengthen NAACL´s community. Many successful community building activities are already rolling (e.g., Birds of a feather, ACL mentoring, WiNLP, RAF, Masakane, Queer and LatinX in AI, among others). The next step is to improve communication lines and coordinate joint efforts so that they benefit from each other.
Greg Durrett is an associate professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. He obtained his PhD in 2016 from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was advised by Dan Klein. Recently, his work has been recognized by a 2023 Sloan Research Fellowship and a 2022 NSF CAREER award. Greg and his collaborators have been publishing in the ACL community actively since 2011 in areas including textual reasoning, summarization, factuality of generation, question answering, and program synthesis (along with syntactic parsing and coreference resolution during his PhD). He served as Publication Chair for EMNLP 2021 and Faculty Advisor to the NAACL Student Research Workshop in 2019. Beyond that, he has organized 4 workshops for *CL conferences: Deep Learning for Low-resource NLP at EMNLP 2019, NLP for Programming at ACL 2021, and the Workshop on Natural Language Reasoning and Structured Explanations at ACL 2023 and ACL 2024. He has been a senior area chair for summarization and an area chair or reviewer in areas spanning interpretability, semantics, syntax, information extraction, and more.
NAACL has undergone a period of rapid change and growth. The boom period of the early deep learning area, with exponentially-growing paper submissions and conference attendance, has tapered off. We now face the challenges of a new and distinct boom period, that of large language models. While NAACL and the rest of *CL are poised to be leaders in this new era, careful management will be needed to ensure this is successful.
One of the principal new challenges is that the NLP community is losing its status as intellectual leader behind recent advances. For instance, OpenAI’s developments are largely external to the community, and core NLP areas like interpretability are being rebranded and coopted by others. By streamlining the current publication process, NAACL can attract a wider range of submissions and disseminate research to an even wider audience than it currently does.
I propose to support the following initiatives within NAACL, with the eventual aim of propagating such changes to the *CL conferences at large:
Remove the arXiv anonymity period. The results of the recent survey by ACL support a case for taking action here. I agree with the arguments put forth by Michael Saxon (https://saxon.me/blog/the-acl-anonymity-embargo-period-is-exclusionary-actually-an-early-career-researchers-perspective.html). The anonymity period was adopted as a compromise solution that no longer makes the right tradeoffs given changes in the publishing landscape. While I am strongly in favor of a fair review process and preserving double-blind review as an institution, the negative impacts of the specific anonymity policy, particularly on early-career researchers who would benefit from discussing their work, outweigh its benefit.
Continue to use OpenReview, but rethink ARR. The paper submission process should be simplified and receiving reviews should be tied to an accept or reject decision. We can follow a model of conferences like ICWSM and USENIX Security, which have multiple intakes for a single conference, giving multiple deadlines throughout the year while streamlining the experience for authors.
Continue to expand diversity initiatives. Widening NLP, DEI chairs for conferences, the Student Research Workshop, and more have had major positive impacts on our community. To improve access to our conference further, I strongly support the creation of an “ACLv” (fully virtual) conference, proposed by Barbara Plank and others, to expand access.
Continue the trend of NAACL’s increased engagement with Latin America. I strongly support continuing to host conferences in underserved regions. I am eager to hear input and discuss how to properly nurture such initiatives and grow the *CL presence there further.
Helena Gómez-Adorno is a Researcher at the Research Institute of Applied Mathematics and Systems (IIMAS) at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She has been actively involved in the NLP community, serving as co-program chair for NAACL 2024. Helena has previously participated as a Reviewer, Area Chair, and Senior Area Chair for NAACL conferences since 2019. Additionally, she has served on the organizing committee of other NLP conferences and in the Mexican NLP Summer School in 2020, 2021, and 2024. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the National Polytechnic Institute (México) in 2018, where she introduced graph-based text representations for various natural language processing tasks. Her Ph.D. thesis was awarded the “Presea Lázaro Cárdenas 2019” for outstanding academic performance as an Engineering and Physical-Mathematical Sciences doctoral student. Her expertise led her to publications on topics related to text classification for authorship analysis, fake news detection, biomedical named entity recognition, and emotion classification, among others. Helena is also an “Honorary Visiting Researcher” at the Polytechnic School of the National University of Asunción (in Paraguay).
I am excited to submit my candidacy for the NAACL board. As a researcher from Latin America, affiliated with two Latin American universities, I can bring a unique perspective to the board, particularly in highlighting the challenges faced by researchers in the Global South. The disparities in access to resources, funding for conference attendance, and institutional publishing requirements shape a very different reality for many of us. This experience drives my commitment to fostering a more inclusive and diverse NAACL, one that addresses issues relevant to the broader American continent, both North and South.
The recent change to The Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics reflects a significant shift toward inclusivity, acknowledging that NLP challenges and advancements span the entire continent. This name change aligns perfectly with my initiative to increase participation from underrepresented regions, particularly in Latin America. It motivates my efforts to integrate the broader Americas by establishing stronger connections with NLP communities throughout the continent.
If elected to the NAACL board, I would work to:
Increase Latin American community participation by establishing funds for regional workshops organized in collaboration with North American institutions to stimulate collaborations and disseminate NAACL in LATAM. Implement mentorship programs for LATAM students and provide resources such as paper writing workshops.
Promote the participation of underrepresented communities in NAACL on two fronts: 1) Strengthen workshops and initiatives like WiNLP, student workshops, LatinX, and Queer, among others, by connecting with regional initiatives like BRAIC, SIMBig, Iberamia, CLEI, etc. and 2) Encourage the inclusion of broader research areas on the Main Conference through special calls that involve the collaboration from institutions of both the Global South and North, this will facilitate that the underprivileged researcher has ties to stronger institutions that can cover registration fees and not only rely on diversity and inclusion grants. I will also advocate for continuing with a diverse selection of keynote speakers at NAACL conferences, as it has already been in the lasts NAACL editions.
Streamline the organization of NAACL conferences, inspired by my experience as NAACL 2024 (Mexico City) co-program chair. I would focus on integrating event programming with registration processes and creating clear guidelines and toolkits to assist future organizing committees.
Integrate the Latin American industry into NAACL. We can implement many strategies, but first, I would establish an advisory board composed of leaders from major Latin American NLP and technology companies to provide insights into regional needs for shaping conference themes, shared tasks, and other NAACL initiatives relevant to the industry. This integration will contribute to generating resources that will allow financing the participation of LATAM researchers in NAACL.
Hanna Hajishirzi is a Torode Family Associate Professor at the University of Washington and a Senior Director of NLP at AI2. Her research spans different areas in NLP and AI, more recently on the science of language models and language models for science. Honors include an NSF CAREER, Sloan Fellowship, Allen Distinguished Investigator Award, Intel rising star award, UIUC alumni award. She has received a best paper and several honorable mention paper awards and has served as an area chair and senior area chair at NLP and Machine Learning conferences, including NAACL, EMNLP, ACL, AAAI, and NeurIPS.
As a board member, I am excited to work on these issues within the NLP community:
Modernize the reviewing and archiving process. The imposition of anonymity deadlines by NLP conferences has resulted in authors refraining from submitting some of their most influential papers to these forums. Conversely, a majority of machine learning and AI conferences permit the archiving of papers and facilitate open discussions subsequent to paper submissions. I hope to contribute to the modernization of the review process by advocating for the elimination of anonymity deadlines, thereby ensuring that NAACL remains the focal point of NLP-related research, including rapidly advancing research areas.
Promote open research. With all advances in language modeling, the NLP and scientific community needs access to open models, open data, and open evaluation settings to understand and advance the science of language models. I hope to advocate for open, well-document, and reproducible research papers from the community. Consequently, this bridges the academic and industry research gap.
Advocate for interdisciplinary research. Recently, language models have demonstrated notable efficacy in practical applications. However, there exists potential for substantial enhancement through interdisciplinary research, thereby extending the scientific foundations of language models into diverse domains such as medicine and to scientific discovery. I hope to promote and facilitate interdisciplinary research efforts that integrate various facets of AI and NLP into tangible real-world applications.
AI literacy for public, k-12 students, and undergraduates: It is an exciting time for the NLP field. I am enthusiastic about disseminating knowledge to both the general public and younger generations, elucidating the capabilities and limitations inherent to language models and the broader NLP field.
Nanyun (Violet) Peng is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at The University of California, Los Angeles. She received her Ph.D. from the Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on controllable and creative language generation, multilingual and multimodal models, and the development of automatic evaluation metrics, with a commitment to advancing robust and trustworthy natural language processing (NLP). She has received an Outstanding Paper Award at NAACL 2022, three Outstanding Paper Awards at EMNLP 2024, and Oral Paper selections at NeurIPS 2022 and ICML 2023, as well as several Best Paper Awards at workshops affiliated with premier AI and NLP conferences. She was also featured in the IJCAI 2022 Early Career Spotlight. Her research has been supported by prestigious funding sources, including the NSF CAREER Award, DARPA, IARPA, NIH grants, and multiple industrial research awards.
NAACL has seen remarkable growth as the NLP community expands in both size and scope, intersecting with domains like healthcare, law, and education. This interdisciplinary surge highlights the importance of fostering collaborations and ensuring that NAACL remains a space where cutting-edge research and diverse perspectives thrive. If elected to the board, I aim to address key challenges and opportunities to strengthen our community and its impact by focusing on the following areas:
Improving Peer Review Systems: The scalability and quality of peer review have become pressing issues in our growing field. Building on my experience with chairing ICLR 2025 and initiated reciprocal review, I will work with all NAACL board members to explore ways to introduce a similar system where authors actively participate as reviewers, and senior authors are incentivize to review. This approach fosters accountability, ensures a greater pool of informed reviewers, and reduce the overall review load for each participating reviewers (in ICLR 2025, we were able to reduce the maximum review load to 3 papers). Combined with mentorship programs and transparent review processes, this can significantly improve the quality and fairness of feedback.
Enhancing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) & Empowering Young Researchers: Supporting underrepresented groups and young researchers is critical to sustaining our community’s growth. I will advocate for initiatives such as targeted travel grants, year-long mentorship programs with 1-1 mentor-mentee arrangement to empower early-career researchers. By lowering barriers to participation, particularly for those in low-resourced regions, we can ensure that NAACL reflects the full diversity of voices and perspectives in NLP.
Bridging Industry and Academia: As interdisciplinary research becomes increasingly vital, NAACL must serve as a hub for collaboration between academia and industry. I propose creating industrial track for papers and workshops, and formalized panel sessions and networking platforms to facilitate knowledge exchange and communications. By fostering stronger connections, we can ensure that NAACL remains a leader in driving both academic and industrial research of NLP.
With these initiatives, I am committed to ensuring that NAACL continues to thrive as a dynamic, inclusive, and forward-thinking community.
Dilek Hakkani-Tür is a Professor of Computer Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, focusing on enabling natural dialogues with machines. Prior to that, she was a researcher at Amazon, Google, Microsoft, International Computer Science Institute and AT&T Labs-Research. She received her PhD degree from Bilkent University in 2000. Her research interests include conversational AI, natural language and speech processing, spoken dialogue systems, and machine learning for language processing. She has over 80 patents that were granted and co-authored more than 300 papers in natural language and speech processing. She received several best paper awards for publications she co-authored on conversational systems, including her earlier work on active learning for dialogue systems, from IEEE Signal Processing Society, ISCA and EURASIP. She served as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, member of the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee, area editor for speech and language processing for Elsevier’s Digital Signal Processing Journal and IEEE Signal Processing Letters, member of the ISCA Advisory Council, the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, an IEEE Distinguished Industry Speaker, program co-chair of NAACL 2021 and president of the SIGdial. She is a fellow of the IEEE and ISCA.
The past few years have been interesting for language processing in general, with a lot of advancements in the field. If elected, the areas I’d like to focus on include: