ACL 60-60
The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) recently announced the "60-60" initiative as part of its 60th-anniversary celebration. The main goal of this initiative is to promote diversity and inclusivity in computational linguistics by facilitating multilingual scientific communication. The intent is to eliminate language barriers that may hinder scientific access or innovation.
The initiative has several key objectives, including facilitating scientific communication in various forms, such as text, speech, sign language, and across 60 languages. Machine translation technologies will be used to translate scientific content, such as paper titles and abstracts, from the ACL Anthology into 60 languages. Additionally, human reference translations will be generated for a subset of these materials. The quality of machine translations into 20 selected languages will also be evaluated.
Frequent terms and expressions used in computational linguistics over the years will be curated, with context sentences machine translated into the 60 selected languages. The initiative will also provide sign language interpretations for specific workshops. By ACL 2023, the initiative aims to have the entire ACL Anthology translated into 60 languages, a standardized scientific and computational linguistics terminology list with contextual examples in 60 languages, live cross-lingual closed captioning and dubbing, and translated talks and videos from the computational linguistics community.
The initiative is a collaborative effort involving various academic institutions, technology companies, and startups worldwide. Its ultimate goal is to democratize computational linguistics by making it more accessible to scientists across the globe, regardless of the language they speak.