Bulgaria. The summer months, especially August, are usually very slow for the destinations in the Northern Hemisphere. And yet exceptions appear! Sofia, Bulgaria has stepped up and has successfully completed a very hot summer with two large international events – the Deaflympics and the annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).
For the first time, the annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) took place in Bulgaria. ACL 2013 was held in Bulgaria’s capital, August 4-9, 2013. As in previous years, the program of the conference included a poster session, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations in addition to the main conference. Yet, unlike the previous conferences ACL 2013 had an immense interest and outstanding participation rate by delegates, reaching numbers in the thousands. Apart from that, the conference had the higher number of submitted papers, posters and tutorials, pointing to the utmost success of this year’s conference underlining a definite growth of the field of computational linguistics.
Choosing Sofia for the destination of the conference proved to be a winning move, not only surprising all delegates with great value-for-money, but with its easy access and great historical and cultural treasures, warm welcome from the locals and delicious food, the 51st annual meeting of ACL 2013 stood out as a complete success. ACL 2013 turned out to be the largest congress to take place in Sofia in 2013 and what was done differently was only one thing – the trust of the Association for Computational Linguistics to the destination and the professional support available locally.
