While I continue to work in computational linguistics, broadly construed, I am feeling less and less motivated to actually attend the core ACL events I’ll denote as *CL (the international ACL and EMNLP meetings, and the regional meetings: EACL in Europe, NAACL in North America, IJCNLP in East Asia, and so on).
This is not a “why I left…” post, nor do I have much constructive criticism, but it is helpful to contrast with the kinds of conferences I attend when wearing my formal linguist hat. As a formal linguist, I overwhelmingly attend conferences in the “ACELA corridor” portion of the Mid-Atlantic and New England well-served by trains, and pay registration fees of $100 or even less. In contrast, I cannot even remember the last time any *CL meeting was in this (rich, populous, and well-educated) region of the country, and I expect to spend my entire travel budget for the year on attending even a domestic *CL thanks to skyrocketing registration fees and hotel prices. (It doesn’t help that these conferences tend to go on for a long time so you need a lot of nights in the hotel.) I don’t know how much the ACL can do about costs, but the *CL conference locations tend towards the random or exotic rather than dense areas with a lot of research output.
There are two other big issues with *CL that make me less likely to attend them. First, other than the handful of senior faculty who are in ACL leadership, and the same invited talks (it’s the same few people over and over…) there are hardly any faculty at *CL conferences anymore. I don’t see many of my mid-career peers, and I don’t see senior people either. Something needs to be done to encourage these people to attend. Secondly, the program of *CL conferences, even in the main sessions, are overwhelmingly inclined towards what are essentially system demonstrations using known technologies, rather than new ideas, critiques, unsolved problems, or system comparisons. To put it another way, I guess I’m glad BERT or GPT-4o worked for your problem, but that kind of talk or poster doesn’t exactly make for scintillating scientific debate.
I continue to work in these areas but I suspect I am going to opt in for online presentation (or just go straight to the journals) more in the future; and perhaps send students in my stead.