[Corpora-List] ACL 2010 newsletter no. 6

Sun Sep 12 15:55:21 UTC 2010

 Apologies if you have received multiple copies of this announcement
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              ACL 2010 NEWSLETTER NO. 6
                 (September 7, 2010)
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:: Table of Contents
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1. ACL 2010 in Uppsala, Sweden
2. Organizing Committee
3. Pictures
4. ACL in Swedish Media
5. Sponsorship

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:: 1. ACL 2010 in Uppsala, Sweden
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The 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational
Linguistics was held in Uppsala, Sweden, July 11-16, 2010. The
conference was organized by the Department of Linguistics and
Philology at Uppsala University.

The conference was the second largest in ACL's history ever. 955
people attended the six-day event, including the main conference with
up to six parallel sessions and over 600 presentations, and the
student research workshop, six tutorials, thirteen workshops and the
CoNLL conference.

The scope of the program was broadened substantially. The issue of the
"printed" paper length (long and short) has been separated from the
mode of presentation with three possibilities - long talks, short
talks and posters. The resulting program was a great success and has
been universally praised.

The ACL's Lifetime Achievement Award went to William A. (Bill) Woods,
former President of ACL (1974), the "father" of Augmented Transition
Networks in the 1970s and an acclaimed industrial researcher in the
area of NLP and speech. Bill was present and gave a very nice talk in
a dedicated time slot at the main conference.

There were three Best Paper awards. The Best long paper award went to
Matthew Gerber and Joyce Chai for "Beyond NomBank: A Study of Implicit
Arguments for Nominal Predicates"; the Best short paper award went to
Michael Lamar, Yariv Maron, Mark Johnson and Elie Bienenstock for "SVD
and Clustering for Unsupervised POS Tagging". The Best student paper
Award, sponsored by IBM, was given to David Elson, Nicholas Dames and
Kathleen McKeown for their paper titled "Extracting Social Networks
from Literary Fiction".

The organizing committee would like to thank all authors, reviewers
and participants for making the conference a successful event!

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:: 2. Organizing Committee
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General Chair: Jan Hajic
Program Chairs: Sandra Carberry and Stephen Clark
Local Arrangements Chair: Joakim Nivre
Workshop Chairs: Pushpak Bhattacharyia and David Weir
Tutorial Chairs: Lluis Marquez and Haifeng Wang
System Demonstrations Chair: Sandra Kubler
Student Research Workshop Chairs: Seniz Demir, Jan Raab, Nils Reiter,
and faculty advisors Marketa Lopatkova and Tomek Strzalkowski
Publication Chairs: Jing-Shin Chang and Philipp Koehn
Mentoring Service: Bjorn Gamback and Diana McCarthy
Sponsorship Chairs: Stephen Pulman (Europe), Frederique Segond
(Europe), Srinivas Bangalore (Americas), Christy Doran (Americas),
Hercules Dalianis (local), and Mats Wiren (local)
Publicity Chairs: Koenraad de Smedt and Beata Megyesi
Exhibition Chair: Jorg Tiedemann
Local Arrangement Committee: Joakim Nivre (chair), Beata Megyesi (vice
chair), Rolf Carlson, Mats Dahllof, Marco Kuhlmann, Mattias Nilsson,
Markus Saers, Anna Sagvall Hein, Per Starback, Jorg Tiedemann, Oscar
Tackstrom and Reut Tsarfaty
Local Organizing Secretariat: Ulla Conti, Academic Conferences

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:: 3. Pictures
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Pictures from the conference can be found athttp://acl2010.org/. The
photos were taken by Rolf Carlson and Fredrik Olsson.

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:: 4. ACL in Swedish Media
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The local publicity chair reports that the conference has been
successfully recognized by the Swedish press. Daily newspapers, the
Swedish radio and the national Swedish television have all shown
interest in the conference.

The national news sent an almost 3 minutes long report on language
technology. Kevin Knight, Fernando Pereira and Franz Josef Och were
interviewed by the news "Rapport", which was sent in June 17 in the
Swedish National Television on channel 1
(SVT1):http://svtplay.se/v/2079668/rapport/datorn_ska_hjalpa_oss_spraka.

The Swedish Radio sent two interviews and published two articles
during the conference week. Mikko Kurimo was interviewed about his
work on a mobile device that performs personalised speech-to-speech
translation. The article with the interview is available at
http://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=406&artikel=3859170
and was broadcast on July 19.

Benjamin Snyder talked about lost language decipherment, a work that
he presented a paper on called "A Statistical Model for Lost Language
Decipherment", co-authored with Regina Barzilay and Kevin Knight. You
can find the article and the interview on
http://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=406&artikel=3854774.
The story was sent in July 15 at 06.32, 07.36 and 08.36 in the channel
called P1.

The local newspaper Upsala Nya Tidning has published an article about
the challenge paper "The Human Language Project: Building a Universal
Corpus of the World's Languages" by Steven Abney and Steven Bird. The
article "Now the world's languages are going to be surveyed" was based
on an interview with Steven Bird, see
http://www.unt.se/uppsala/varldens-sprak-ska-kartlaggas-997587.aspx.

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:: 5. Sponsorship
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ACL 2010 very gratefully acknowledges the following commitments in
sponsorship:

Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation) -
Platinum Sponsor
Vetenskapsradet (Swedish Research Council) - Platinum Sponsor
Uppsala University - Platinum Sponsor
GSLT (Swedish National Graduate School of Language Technology) - Gold
Sponsor
Textkernel - Gold Sponsor
CELI - Language&  Information Technology - Silver Sponsor
City of Uppsala - Silver Sponsor
Esteam - Silver Sponsor
Google - Silver Sponsor
Voice Provider - Silver Sponsor
Yahoo! Labs - Silver Sponsor
Acapela Group - Bronze Sponsor
XEROX - Bronze Sponsor
NSF (National Science Foundation) - SRW Sponsor
IBM Research - Sponsor of Best Paper Student Award
Language Weaver - Conference Bag Sponsor
SICS (Swedish Institute of Computer Science) - Local Student
Fellowship Sponsor

We thank Beata B. Megyesi, Head of Dept. of Linguistics and Philology
at Uppsala University, for being editor of these newsletters.

Koenraad De Smedt, distributor

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