The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is a scientific and professional organization for people working on natural language processing.

The publication of the annual meeting's Proceedings of the ACL began in 1979 and gradually matured into its modern form.

By the 21st century, it was able to maintain authors at a high rate who coalesced in a more stable arrangement around individual research topics.

[14] The ACL organizes several of the top conferences and workshops in the field of computational linguistics and natural language processing.

[15] ACL has a large number of Special Interest Groups (SIGs), focusing on specific areas of natural language processing.