Baidu’s Haifeng Wang Will Chair New ACL Asia-Pacific Chapter

At the 56th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in Melbourne, Australia this week President Marti Hearst announced the establishment of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL). Baidu Senior Vice President and Head of AI Group Haifeng Wang was named AACL Founding Chair.

Founded in 1962, the ACL is one of the world’s largest conferences on Natural Language Processing (NLP), attracting many international experts and researchers. The ACL received 1,419 paper submissions in 2017 and 1,621 in 2018. The ACL established a European Chapter in 1982 and a North American Chapter in 1999.

In recent years the number of ACL Asia-Pacific submissions and members has increased, and the AACL was founded to reflect this and promote local development of Computational Linguistics. The AACL will hold a regional gathering in 2020, and every two years after that.

Besides his roles at Baidu, Wang also chairs the Department of Language Information Engineering at Peking University and is a Harbin Institute of Technology Visiting Professor. Wang has over 4000 citations as a researcher, and is the only Chinese national to have served as ACL President (2013). Wang believes that the ultimate goal of AI is to enable machines to think like humans. Because language is the carrier of knowledge for humans, NLP can play a huge role in teaching machines, and in the development of AI.

Author: Alex Chen | Editor: Michael Sarazen

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