Final Call For Papers

[Liu Xiaohu]

Final 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. Paper ID is not
required. Please leave it blank. 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

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)
Mehryar Mohri (AT&T Labs--Research)
Masaaki Nagata (NTT)
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)