ACL IN 1977 
Paul G. Chapin 
National Science Foundation 
1800 G St. NW 
Washington, D.C. 20550 
As I leaf through my own "ACL (Historical)" 
file (which, I am frightened to observe, goes back 
to the Fourth Annual Meeting, in 1966), and focus 
in particular on 1977, when I was President, it 
strikes me that pretty much everything significant 
that happened in the Association that year was the 
work of other people. Don Walker was completing 
the mammoth task of transferring all of the ACL's 
records from the East Coast to the West, paying 
off our indebtedness to the Center for Applied 
Linguistics, and in general getting the Associa- 
tion onto the firm financial and organizational 
footing which it has enjoyed to this day. Dave 
Hays was seeing to it that the microfiche journal 
kept on coming, and George Heldorn Joined him as 
Associate Editor that year to begin the move 
toward hard copy publication. That was the year 
when we hitched up our organizational pants and 
moved our Annual Meeting back to the Spring, after 
some years when it had been in the Fall. Jonathan 
Allen and his Program Committee coped admirably 
with the challenge of putting on an Annual Meeting 
program less than six months after the last one. 
The culinary staff at the Foundry Restaurant in 
Georgetown provided a banquet that I still remem- 
ber as delicious. 
AFIPS weighed in in a less constructive 
fashion with their demand that we enroll a member- 
ship of 1500 by a certain time (1982, I think) to 
retain our status as full-fledged members, which 
would require tripling our membership (maybe we'll 
make it yet--who knows?). They were also respon- 
sible for one of the non-events of the decade, the 
abortive founding of abacus, which was to be the 
Scientific American of computing. We pledged 
$5,000 to the start-up costs on that, payable on 
request, but they never got far enough to make the 
request. 
What of the field? The program for the 1977 
Annual Meeting shows names which are mostly still 
familiar to all of us, speaking on topics which 
would not be out of place at the 1982 Annual 
Meeting. I take this as a sign not of stagnation, 
but of persevering people working on problems of 
enormous complexity. 
One event of 1977 may end up having more 
impact on our field than anything the ACL did that 
year. That was the year that the Sloan Foundation 
made the first grants in its Particular Program 
in Cognitive Science. It will be a long time 
before we know all of the results of the ferment 
that Program created, but it is already abundantly 
clear that one result has been a massive increase 
in the interested attention of theoretical 
linguists to computational linguistics. This is 
going to be beneficial to both fields, but 
especially so, I think to computational linguis- 
tics, by keeping our attention fixed on problems 
far larger than making the program work. 
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