Retrospective and Future Views

Abstract

I was honored to receive the Association for Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award in 2025. I especially want to thank the people who nominated me for the award as I know nominations require time and effort. This paper is a rough transcript of the speech I gave accepting the award at the conference in Vienna, Austria. In the talk, I look back at my research at early stages of my career and then look at the arc that research takes and how it relates to work that I still carry out today. I look at the trajectories of four areas of my research: language generation, text summarization, social media analysis and multimodal analysis of artwork. In the talk, I featured videos of my current students speaking about their research and where they think the field is heading. I dedicate the talk and this paper to the amazing students I have had the honor to work with over the years.