[Corpora-List] Rochester, NY: NAACL HLT 2007 Conference - Call for Doctoral Consortium

[Jackson Liscombe]

Doctoral Consortium at NAACL HLT 2007
http://www.cs.rochester.edu/meetings/hlt-naacl07/dc/

April 22, 2007
Rochester, NY

Application Deadline: Jan 18, 2007


1. Call for Participation

Following the success of last year, the Doctoral Consortium at
NAACL HLT 2007 will provide an opportunity for a group of senior
Ph.D. students to discuss and explore their research and career
objectives with a panel of established researchers in the fields of
natural language processing, speech technology, and information
retrieval.  The event is also an opportunity for students to develop
the skills necessary to effectively communicate one's research in
preparation for future job talks.

The Doctoral Consortium will be held as a workshop on April 22, 2007,
immediately before the start of the main conference.  Students will
present their work and get feedback from a panel of experienced
researchers.  The event will also include a panel presentation on
professional development topics relevant to students pursuing research
careers in academia or industry.

Students will participate in a poster session held during the main
conference and will have a short paper discussing their research
published in the companion volume of the proceedings.  Each student's
professional biography, research abstract, and photograph will also be
included in a face book to be distributed to all attendees of the
main NAACL HLT 2007 conference.

The consortium has the following objectives: (1) to provide feedback
on participants' research and on the presentation of their work to
others; (2) to develop a supportive community of scholars; (3) to
support a new generation of researchers with information and advice on
academic, research, industrial, and non-traditional career paths; and
(4) to contribute to the NAACL HLT conference goals through
interaction with other researchers and participation in conference
events.

There is a possibility that students who participate in the Doctoral
Consortium may be able to receive an allowance for basic conference
registration, travel, and hotel.  The Doctoral Consortium organizers
are currently applying for funding for such travel support.  Updates
will be available on the Doctoral Consortium website:
http://www.cs.rochester.edu/meetings/hlt-naacl07/dc/

NAACL HLT 2007 continues the combination of the Human Language
Technology Conferences (HLT) and North American Chapter of the
Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) Annual Meetings
begun in 2003. Human language technology incorporates a broad spectrum
of disciplines working to enable natural language human-computer
interaction, and providing services such as speech recognition,
automatic translation, information retrieval, text summarization, and
information extraction. For further information on the main
conference, please see
http://www.cs.rochester.edu/meetings/hlt-naacl07/


2. Eligibility for Participation

The event is designed for senior Ph.D. students who are in the last
few years of their doctoral program (who have already settled on a
research direction and who have likely already submitted a thesis
proposal).  Students who are conducting research on all aspects of
human language processing are invited to apply.  Topics include (but
are not limited to):

  + Computational analysis of language
    - Phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, dialogue,
      discourse, and style

  + Speech processing, including:
    - Speech recognition and speech generation
    - Rich transcription: automatic annotation of information structure
      and sources in speech

  + Information retrieval, text classification, and information
    filtering/recommendation
    - Text data mining, information extraction, text summarization, and
      question answering

  + Multimodal representations and processing

  + Statistical and learning techniques for language, including
    - Corpus-based language modeling
    - Lexical and knowledge acquisition

  + Development of language resources, including
    - Lexicons and ontologies
    - Treebanks, proposition banks, and frame banks

  + Language generation and text planning

  + Multilingual processing, including
    - Machine translation of speech and text
    - Cross-language information retrieval
    - Multi-lingual speech recognition and language identification

  + Intelligent systems for natural language interaction, including
    - Conversational systems for collaboration, tutoring and behavioral
      intervention
    - Embodied conversational agents, virtual humans and human-robot
      conversation
    - Language-enhanced platforms for interactive narrative and digital
      entertainment

  + Evaluation, including
    - Glass-box evaluation of HLT systems and system components
    - Black-box evaluation of HLT systems in application settings


As part of the application process, students will submit a short paper
summarizing their research goals, completed work, and future
directions.  This paper should be the basis for the student's
presentation at the Doctoral Consortium event, which should follow the
format of an abbreviated job talk.  Thus, the paper should give an
overview of the student's research and highlight his or her
contributions; the paper may include citations to previous
publications that describe more specific aspects of the student's
research.

The short papers accepted for presentation at the Doctoral Consortium
cannot be presented or have been presented at any other meeting with
publicly available proceedings.  Papers that are being submitted to
other conferences must indicate this immediately after the title
material on the first page.

Students who are submitting papers on specific portions of their work
to the main conference are also invited to apply to the Doctoral
Consortium.  In this case, the short paper for the Doctoral Consortium
must give an overview of the student's dissertation research, and the
paper for the main conference should focus on a specific piece of this
work.


3. Application Procedure

Applications should contain the following four elements:

(1) A cover letter (under 2-pages) describing the student's progress
in his or her degree program, expected date of graduation, plans after
graduation, and what he or she hopes to gain from the Doctoral
Consortium.  The letter should contain the student's name, department,
school, contact information, name of advisor, advisor's e-mail
address, and a short statement affirming that the student meets the
eligibility requirements specified in Section 2 of this Call for
Participation.

(2) The student's Curriculum Vitae (including a list of publications).

(3) A short paper written by the student summarizing his or her
research goals, completed work, and future directions.  This paper
should be the basis for the student's presentation at the Doctoral
Consortium event, and it should give an overview of the student's
research and highlight his or her major contributions.

(4) A letter of recommendation from the student's advisor.  The
student's advisor should produce a PDF file of the recommendation
letter and e-mail it to naacl-hlt-2007-dc at cs.columbia.edu by
Jan 18, 2007.

The student should send email to naacl-hlt-2007-dc at cs.columbia.edu by
Jan 18, 2007, with three attachments in PDF format: the cover letter,
the Curriculum Vitae, and the short paper.

The short paper should follow the format of "short papers" submitted
to the main NAACL HLT 2007 conference.  It should follow the
two-column format of NAACL/ACL proceedings and should not exceed four
(4) pages, including references.  We strongly recommend the use of ACL
LaTeX or Microsoft Word style files tailored for this year's
conference.  They will be available through the Doctoral Consortium
homepage (listed below).  A description of the format will also be
available in case you are unable to use the style files directly.
Papers must conform to the official NAACL HLT 2007 style guidelines,
and we reserve the right to reject submissions that do not conform to
these styles including font size restrictions.  Submissions should be
in PDF format and must include all fonts, so that the paper will print
(not just view) anywhere.

Further details on the submission procedure and formatting
instructions may be found at the Doctoral Consortium homepage:
http://www.cs.rochester.edu/meetings/hlt-naacl07/dc/

If students are accepted to the Doctoral Consortium, they will also be
asked to submit a short professional biography, research abstract, and
photograph to be included in the face book to be distributed to all
participants at the NAACL HLT 2007 conference.  Detailed formatting
guidelines for the preparation of the final camera-ready copy will be
provided to authors with their acceptance notice.


4. Important Dates

All application materials must be received by 11:59pm (23:59) PST
(Pacific Standard Time) on Jan 18, 2007.  Late submissions will be
automatically disqualified.  Acknowledgment will be e-mailed soon
after receipt.

Application deadline: Jan 18, 2007
Notification of acceptance: Feb 22, 2007
Camera-ready papers due: Mar 5, 2007
Doctoral Consortium Event: April 22, 2007
NAACL HLT 2007 Conference: April 22-27, 2007


5. Contact Information

If you need to contact the co-chairs of the Doctoral Consortium,
please use: naacl-hlt-2007-dc at cs.columbia.edu

An e-mail sent to this address will be forwarded to the co-chairs.

Doctoral Consortium Co-chairs:
Jackson Liscombe (Columbia University)
Phil Michalak (University of Rochester)

Faculty Advisor:
Julia Hirschberg (Columbia University)