Second Call For Papers

[Liu Xiaohu]

Second Call For Papers

             (EMNLP/VLC-99) JOINT SIGDAT CONFERENCE ON
              EMPIRICAL METHODS IN NATURAL LANGUAGE
                                  PROCESSING AND
                              VERY LARGE CORPORA

                    Sponsored by SIGDAT (ACL's Special Interest Group
for
                        Linguistic Data and Corpus-based Approaches to NLP)

                                    June 21-22, 1999
                                 University of Maryland

                                        In conjunction with
                                  ACL'99: the 37th Annual Meeting of the
                                   Association for Computational
Linguistics

This SIGDAT-sponsored joint conference will continue to provide a forum
for new
research in corpus-based and/or empirical methods in NLP.  In addition
to
providing a general forum, the theme for this year is

"Corpus-based and/or Empirical Methods in NLP for Speech, MT, IR, and
other
Applied Systems"

A large number of systems in automatic speech recognition(ASR) and
synthesis,
machine translation(MT), information retrieval(IR),  optical character
recognition(OCR) and handwriting recognition have become commercially
available in
the last decade.  Many of these systems use NLP technologies as an
important
component.  Corpus-based and empirical methods in NLP  have been a major
trend in
recent years. How useful are these techniques when applied to real
systems,
especially when compared to rule-based methods?  Are there any new
techniques to
be developed in EMNLP and from VLC in order to improve the
state-of-the-art of
ASR, MT, IR, OCR, and other applied systems? Are there new ways to
combine corpus-based and empirical methods with rule-based systems?

This two-day conference aims to bring together academic researchers and
industrial
practitioners to discuss the above issues, through technical paper
sessions,
invited talks, and panel discussions. The goal of the conference is to
raise an
awareness of what kind of new EMNLP techniques need to be developed in
order to
bring about the next breakthrough in speech recognition and synthesis,
machine
translation, information retrieval and other applied systems.


Scope

The conference solicits paper submissions in (and not limited to) the
following areas:

1) Original work in one of the following technologies and its relevance
to speech, MT, or IR:
      (a) word sense disambiguation
      (b) word and term segmentation and extraction
      (c) alignment
      (d) bilingual lexicon extraction
      (e) POS tagging
      (f) statistical parsing
      (g) dialog models
      (h) others (please specify)

2) Proposals of new EMNLP technologies for speech, MT, IR, OCR, or other
applied systems (please specify).

3) Comparetive evaluation of the performance of EMNLP technologies in
one of the areas in (1) and that of its rule-based or  knowledge-based
counterpart in a speech, MT, IR, OCR or other applied system.



Submission Requirements

Submissions should be limited to original, evaluated work. All papers
should include background survey and/or reference to previous work.  The
authors should provide explicit explanation when there is no evaluation
in their work. We encourage paper submissions related to the conference
theme. In particular, we encourage the authors to include in their
papers, proposals and discussions of the relevance of their work to the
theme. However,  there will be a special session in the conference to
include corpus-based and/or empirical work in all areas of natural
language processing.



Submission Format

Only hard-copy submissions will be accepted. Reviewing of papers will
not be blind. The submission format and word limit are the same as those
for ACL this year. We strongly recommend the use of ACL-standard LaTeX
(plus bibstyle and trivial example) or Word style files for the
preparation of submissions. Six opies of full-length paper (not to
exceed 3200 words exclusive of references) should be received at the
following address before or on March 31, 1999.

EMNLP/VLC-99 Program Committee
c/o Pascale Fung
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
University of Science and Tehnology (HKUST)
Clear Water Bay, Kowloon
Hong Kong


Important Dates

March  31             Submission of full-length paper
April    30             Acceptance notice
May      20            Camera-ready paper due
June      21-22       Conference date



Program Chair

Pascale Fung
Human Language Technology Center
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
University of Science and Tehnology (HKUST)
Clear Water Bay, Kowloon
Hong Kong
Tel:  (+852)  2358 8537
Fax: (+852)  2358 1485
Email: pascale at ee.ust.hk

Program Co-Chair
Joe Zhou
LEXIS-NEXIS, a Division of Reed Elsevier
9555 Springboro Pike
Dayton, OH 45342
USA
Email: joez at lexis-nexis.com

Program Committee (partial list)

Jiang-Shin Chang (Behavior Design Corp.)
Ken Church (AT&T Labs--Research)
Ido Dagan (Bar-Ilan University)
Marti Hearst (UC-Berkeley)
Huang, Changning (Tsinghua University)
Pierre Isabelle (Xerox Research Europe)
Lillian Lee (Cornell University)
David Lewis (AT&T Research)
Dan Melamed (West Group)
Masaaki Nagata (NTT)
Steve Richardson (Microsoft Research)
Richard Sproat (AT&T Labs--Research)
Andreas Stolcke (SRI)
Ralph Weischedel (BBN)
Dekai Wu (Hong Kong University of Science & Technology)
David Yarowsky (Johns Hopkins University)