The ACL was founded in 1962 as the Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics (AMTCL). The initial membership was about 100. In 1965, the AMTCL took over the journal
Mechanical Translation and Computational Linguistics. This journal was succeeded by many other journals: the
American Journal of Computational Linguistics (1974–1978, 1980–1983), and then
Computational Linguistics (1984–present). Since 1988, the journal has been published for the ACL by
MIT Press. The annual meeting was first held in 1963 in conjunction with the
Association for Computing Machinery National Conference. The annual meeting was, for a long time, relatively informal and did not publish anything longer than abstracts. By 1968, the society took on its current name, the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). The publication of the annual meeting's
Proceedings of the ACL began in 1979 and gradually matured into its modern form. In 1991, the group published a prototype for a text generator based on the
universal grammar theory of
Noam Chomsky. The system, nicknamed
Parrot, relied on a finite set of syntactic transformations and a hand-curated lexicon. Despite some initial success, including experimentation with morpheme syntactics, funding halted after the research team encountered intractable difficulties with
inflection and abstract locutions. ==Annual Meeting of the ACL==