A Society in Transition

I was President in 1968, the year during which the Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics became the Association for Computational Linguistics. Names always create controversy, and the founding name, selected in 1962, was chosen in competition with others, not the least of which was the one that subsequently replaced it. In fact, a change of name to the Association for Computational Linguistics was actually approved in 1963, at what has been described as an "unofficial meeting." However, that action was subsequently ruled out of order, since it did not result from a constitutional amendment. Five years later, proper procedure having been followed, the change was made officially.