| Chair | Anna Rumshisky | University of Massachusetts Lowell | 2026-2027 |
| Secretary | Jessy Li | University of Texas at Austin | 2026-2027 |
| Treasurer | Steven Bethard | University of Arizona | 2025-2026 |
| Past Chair | Graham Neubig | Carnegie Mellon University | 2024-2025 |
| Board Member | Muhao Chen | University of California, Davis | 2026-2027 |
| Board Member | Helena Gómez-Adorno | National Autonomous University of Mexico | 2025-2026 |
| Board Member | Francisco (Paco) Guzmán | Handshake AI | 2026-2027 |
| Board Member | Ana Marasović | University of Utah | 2026-2027 |
| Board Member | Nanyun (Violet) Peng | University of California, Los Angeles | 2025-2026 |
Anna Rumshisky is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she leads the Text Machine Lab for NLP. Her research centers on large language models, with a focus on efficient large-model training, model analysis, and interpretability. Over the past five years, she has also held a joint role in industry as an Amazon Academic with the Amazon AGIF (Artificial General Intelligence Foundations) organization, working on foundational model development at scale. She has served as Program Chair for NAACL 2021 and as an elected member of the NAACL Executive Board (2022–2023), and has held senior area chair roles across major conferences including ACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICLR, and ICML. She has organized numerous workshops and tutorials, including the Clinical NLP and Insights from Negative Results in NLP series, and founded the annual New England NLP Meeting series. Drawing on her experience bridging academic and industry research environments, she brings a broad view of how to sustain and evolve the NLP community as it grows in scale and scope.
I am honored to run for Chair of the NAACL Executive Committee. Having served as NAACL 2021 Program Chair and as an elected board member (2022-2023), I have witnessed firsthand both the remarkable growth of our community and the challenges that come with scaling while preserving what makes NAACL special. My dual perspective, gained from spending half my time in academia at UMass Lowell and half in industry, has given me insight into how we can strengthen our community across different research environments.
If elected as Chair, I would focus on the following three areas:
Sustaining Community at Scale. As our field experiences explosive growth with the rise of large language models, NAACL must evolve its structures while maintaining the collaborative spirit that has defined our community. I will work to ensure that increased submission volumes do not come at the cost of review quality or meaningful participation. This includes exploring innovative approaches to peer review within the ARR system, drawing on successful practices from large ML conferences such as NeurIPS and ICLR. Examples include AI-assisted review quality tracking to support area chairs, calibration periods for AC and reviewer discussions to improve consistency, and Best Reviewer awards and registration perks for top reviewers and area chairs to sustain engagement and reward high-quality work.
Strengthening Academia-Industry Partnerships. The boundary between academic and industry NLP research has become increasingly fluid. As model scaling (and the science of model scaling) becomes more and more dominant as the way to improve abilities of AI models, frontier research is shifting to industry labs that can afford the experiments needed to make advances in training models at scale. At the same time, the cost of experiments at scale is influencing how research priorities are set in frontier labs. This setup discourages the exploration of unproven directions since it’s very costly. Consequently, much industry research follows a very narrow trajectory, potentially risking convergence to a local optimum. The role of academic research has always been exactly this kind of exploration. But at the same time, a lot of academic work becomes “proof of concept” until scaled. Understanding this interplay and ensuring that it is understood and encouraged by both sides is crucial. Having worked in both environments for the past five years, I’ve seen how crucial and how challenging it is to maintain productive collaboration between these communities. I will advocate for initiatives that facilitate knowledge transfer and collaboration and work to develop programs that help academic researchers navigate industry partnerships while maintaining open science principles.
Expanding Regional Engagement Across the Americas. NAACL’s evolution to represent the Nations of the Americas is more than a name change - it’s a commitment to genuinely serve researchers across both continents. My experience founding the New England NLP Meeting series has shown me the value of regional community building. I will work to support and expand similar initiatives throughout the Americas, ensuring that researchers in underserved regions have pathways to participate fully in NAACL. This includes advocating for conference locations beyond major US cities and expanding mentorship and financial support programs for researchers from underrepresented institutions.
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, generation, and pragmatics & alignment. Jessy has been a (Senior) Area Chair for numerous *CL conferences, a (Senior) Action Editor for ACL Rolling Review, an Action Editor for the TACL journal and the Computational Linguistics Journal, and an Associate Editor for the Dialogue & Discourse journal (2021–2025). She was honored as an Outstanding Area Chair (EMNLP 2020, 2023) and an Outstanding Senior Program Committee Member (AAAI 2020). She was a Program 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. Jessy is the current NAACL Secretary, and will be a Program Chair for EMNLP 2026.
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.
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.
Muhao Chen is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, UC Davis, where he leads the Language Understanding and Knowledge Acquisition (LUKA) Group. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science at UCLA, and B.S. in Computer Science from Fudan University. His research focuses on robust and accountable ML, particularly on accountability and security issues of large language models and agentic AI. He is a co-founder and the secretary of ACL Special Interest Group in NLP Security (SIGSEC). His work has been recognized with EMNLP Outstanding Paper Awards (2023, 2024), an ACM SIGBio Best Student Paper Award (2021), faculty research awards from Amazon (2022, 2023) and Cisco, and funding support from multiple NSF, DARPA, IARPA, and industry grants.
As NAACL expands to serve the entire Americas and as our field increasingly shapes society, I will focus on the following priorities.
Supporting early career development. I will support students and early-stage researchers in academia and industry through structured mentoring sessions at conferences and online sessions. I will help build online social groups and channels that provide shared resources and peer support for career growth.
Bridging academic and industry research. I will enable stronger two way exchange through practitioner panels, deployment focused tutorials, and shared tasks grounded in real constraints. I will encourage the contribution of datasets, evaluation artifacts, and safety findings with clear openness and governance. I will support collaboration models that respect publication needs while enabling practical impact.
Broadening participation across the Americas. I will increase participation from Central and South America through NAACL and *ACL conferences hosted in these regions, regional workshops, and satellite and hybrid language inclusive activities that reflect the Nations of the Americas Chapter mission and build lasting local communities.
Responsible research and utility of AI. I will advocate practices that make our research safe, reproducible, and useful. This includes open evaluation protocols, transparent reporting of risks and limitations, and community resources for safety testing. I will promote benchmarks and tutorials that connect fundamental research to real world utility while upholding ethical and societal safeguards.
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.
I’m Francisco (Paco) Guzmán, Head of AI Research at Handshake. I lead research on data quality and evaluation; creating data and systems that expand the knowledge and reliability of frontier AI through expert data. Previously at Meta, I led efforts like NLLB-200 (expanding translation to 200 languages and billions of speakers) and SeamlessM4T (recognized by TIME as one of 2023’s best inventions), pushing multilingual and open-science work that expanded language technology access worldwide. I also led post-training teams for Llama 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3; advancing open-weights models that empower researchers globally.
I created the AI Learning Alliance (AILA) with Georgia Tech, partnering with HBCUs, HSIs to democratize AI education; co-created the TICO-19 initiative to make COVID-19 information accessible in 35+ languages; organized the first WMT shared task on African languages; and have served as Co-Research Director at AMTA (2020-2022), Ethics Co-Chair at EMNLP 2023, and Area Chair at conferences including NeurIPS, ACL, and EMNLP. I’m deeply committed to mentorship and to building research ecosystems in industry and academia that scale inclusion and provide opportunities for everyone.
NAACL is where rigor, openness, and inclusivity converge. I’m running for the Board to strengthen those pillars by investing in three areas:
Compute access fund: Access to compute has become the major inequalizer in research. Smaller universities across the Americas, particularly in Latin America, cannot compete when frontier research requires resources only industry can afford. I will establish a NAACL Compute Fund in partnership with cloud providers (e.g., AWS, Google Cloud, Azure), making grants available to researchers at institutions without significant compute budgets. This fund will lower the entrance bar so more researchers in the Americas can conduct cutting-edge research and remain competitive in the AI era. Success will be measured by: number of institutions served, papers published using the grants, and geographic distribution across the hemisphere.
Evaluation standards and reproducibility: With training data contamination threatening benchmark validity, establish lightweight, NAACL-endorsed rubrics for dataset quality, reproducibility, and contamination checks. This raises the floor for fairness and transparency in our review and benchmark culture, protecting research integrity while making good science easier to verify.
Mentorship and regional collaboration: Scale mentorship programs connecting students with experienced researchers from academia and industry. Establish a NAACL Research Apprenticeship Program that provides grants for paid internships at leading labs across the Americas; targeting not only NLP students but also researchers from other disciplines (Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Social Sciences) to foster interdisciplinary AI research addressing real-world problems across language barriers. Support regional workshops and shared tasks that strengthen our continental identity; ensuring researchers have platforms to showcase work on problems unique to the Americas.
NAACL’s strength lies in its people and its standards. My goal is to help the organization set both higher and fairer; so good science is easier to do and verify across the Americas. I commit to substantial time for board work and championing transparency in our publication guidelines.
Ana Marasović is an Assistant Professor in the Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah. Her research interests broadly fall into NLP, human-centered AI, and interpretability. Previously, she was a Young Investigator at the Allen Institute for AI with a courtesy appointment at the University of Washington, and completed her PhD at Heidelberg University. She is a co-recipient of the Best Paper Award at ACL 2023, the Best Paper Honorable Mention at ACL 2020, and the Best Paper Award at SoCal 2022 NLP Symposium. Her work was selected as a CoLM 2025 Spotlight. She is also the University of Utah One-U Responsible AI Initiative Faculty Fellow and UC Berkeley EECS 2020 Rising Star.
If elected to the NAACL board, I would work to:
Simplify research submission and presentation processes:
Re-engage the broader LLM research community with NAACL:
Improve the reviewing process:
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.