HLT 2002 Preliminary Call for Papers

[Priscilla Rasmussen]

 HLT 2002
 Human Language Technology Conference
 March 24-27, 2002
 San Diego, California

 PRELIMINARY CALL FOR PAPERS

 Human language technology (HLT) incorporates a broad spectrum of
 disciplines working towards two closely related goals: to enable
 computers to interact with humans using natural language capabilities,
 and to serve as useful adjuncts to humans in language understanding by
 providing services such as automatic translation, information
 retrieval and information extraction.  The HLT 2001 Conference in
 March 2001 provided a single unified forum for researchers across this
 entire spectrum of disciplines to present very recent high-quality,
 cutting-edge work, to exchange ideas and to explore emerging new
 research directions.  Following the great success of HLT 2001, the
 Conference and Program Chairs invite submissions for HLT 2002 from
 researchers in computer science, linguistics, engineering, psychology,
 etc., who are exploring innovative methods for improving human
 language technology.  Further information will be available at the
 Conference web site, http://hlt2002.org.

 The Conference will span four days, running from Sunday noon through
 mid-day Wednesday.  It will include peer-reviewed research
 presentations, posters, demonstrations, panel sessions and time for
 discussion.  We expect it to include a session of invited "best of"
 papers from conferences of sponsoring organizations focussing in
 particular subdisciplines of HLT.

 HLT 2002 will also include a special focus on Language Processing of
 Biological Data, which includes both Information Extraction of
 Biological Data and Language Modeling of Biological Data, an emerging
 research area involves a linguistic/language processing view of
 biological data from the perspective of bioinformatics.  The purpose
 of this special focus within the HLT2002 context is to bring to the
 attention of a wide audience of HLT researchers the research
 opportunities and recent breakthroughs in these newly emerging areas.
 The special focus will comprise back-to-back tutorial sessions at the
 opening of the conference and a paper session within the larger
 conference setting.

 Because of the conference site, space at the Conference is limited to
 330 participants.  Space will automatically be reserved for authors of
 accepted papers, posters, and demonstrations.

 AREAS OF INTEREST

 HLT submissions outside of the special focus should be in any area of
 advanced HLT research, including but not limited to such areas as:

 Dialogue systems
 HLT Resources, architectures, and evaluation
 Information retrieval
 Information extraction
 Machine translation
 Question answering
 Speech recognition and synthesis
 Text summarization

 IMPORTANT DATES

 January 7        Extended abstract submissions due
 February 11      Notification of acceptance
 March 11         Camera-ready "notebook" papers due
 March 24-27      Conference
 April 22         Final copy of proceedings papers due
 July 29          Proceedings published

 CONFERENCE VENUE

 The HLT Conference will be held at the Catamaran Resort Hotel in San
 Diego, California.  The famous San Diego Zoo is the home of Hua Mei,
 the only baby giant panda to be born in the US.  Sea World is one of
 the area's better known attractions, where you can see the killer
 whale Shamu.  San Diego also houses Balboa Park, the largest urban
 cultural park.  You can stroll through the Gaslamp Quarter or through
 Old Town.  Nearby La Jolla houses the Birch Aquarium, and Carlsbad
 houses Legoland.  Heading south gets you to Tijuana, Mexico.

 CONFERENCE COMMITTEES

 General chair: Mitch Marcus, University of Pennsylvania (USA)
 Co-chair:  David Yarowsky, Johns Hopkins

 Executive Program Committee:

 James Allan, University of Massachusetts (USA)
 Sadaoki Furui, Tokyo Institute of Technology (Japan)
 Ralph Grishman, New York University (USA)
 Donna Harman, NIST (USA)
 Lynette Hirschman, MITRE (USA)
 Eduard Hovy, ISI (USA)
 Dan Jurafsky, University of Colorado (USA)
 Kevin Knight, ISI (USA)
 Joseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS (France)
 John Makhoul, BBN Technologies (USA)
 Nelson Morgan, University of California at Berkeley (USA)
 Mari Ostendorf, University of Washington (USA)
 Hans Uszkoreit, Saarland University and DKFI (Germany)

 Demonstration Co-chairs:
 Clifford Weinstein, MIT Lincoln Laboratory (USA)
 Bob Younger, SPAWAR Systems Center (USA)

 Special Focus Committee:
 Chair: Aravind Joshi, University of Pennsylvania (USA)
 Co-chair:Lynette Hirschman, MITRE (USA)

 SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

 HLT submissions for papers, posters and demonstrations are due on or
 before January 7, 2002.  All submissions will be 3-4 page extended
 abstracts of the proposed presentation, cannot exceed 1500 words
 exclusive of bibliography, and must include enough information for the
 reviewers to judge the applicability and novelty of the work.  It is
 expected that the Conference will include diverse areas within HLT and
 preference will be given to papers that will appeal to multiple
 fields.  There will be separate submissions for papers, posters and
 demonstrations, but work cannot be submitted both as a paper and as a
 poster.  Submissions will be electronic, in PostScript or PDF.
 Complete submission information will be available at
 http://hlt2001.org.  In order to encourage late-breaking research
 results, the submission deadline for HLT 2001 is very close to the
 Conference.  There is insufficient time to produce a bound proceedings
 for the Conference.  Instead, all accepted papers, posters, and
 demonstrations will have their extended abstracts (revised based on
 reviewer comments) published in notebook proceedings that will be
 available at the Conference.  After the Conference, authors will have
 an opportunity to revise their papers for the final bound proceedings.

 SPONSORSHIP

 HLT 2002 is sponsored by several U.S. government agencies, DARPA, NSF
 and ARDA.  We are currently arranging sponsorship of U.S. and
 international  research organizations in the range of human language
 technologies for this and the continuing series of HLT conferences.