Extension of Deadline of EMNLP/VLC-99

[Liu Xiaohu]

Dear authors,

Since some people have asked for an extension of deadline, we have
decided to grant it to everyone, in order to be fair. Please note
that the deadline for EMNLP/VLC-99 submission has been changed
to Monday April 5th, 1999. All papers , in hardcoyp, should reach the
Hong Kong address on or before that date. No further deadline extension
will be granted.

Please note that the style files can be downloaded from the
ACL99 web site (http://www.mri.mq.edu.au/conf/acl99).
No paper ID is required, please leave it blank in your submissions.

Thank you

=================================================
          Final Call For Papers

(http://www.ee.ust.hk/~pascale/emnlpwvlc99.html)

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

            Sponsored by
SIGDAT(http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~yarowsky/sigdat.html)
(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
                                (http://mri.mq.edu.au/conf/acl99/)

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
(http://www.mri.mq.au/conf/acl99/style/aclsub.sty)
(plus bibstyle(http://www.mri.mq.au/conf/acl99/style/acl.bst) and
trivial
example(http://www.mri.mq.au/conf/acl99/style/acl99sample-sub.tex)) or
Word
 style (http://www.mri.mq.au/conf/acl99/style/aclsub.doc) 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 (http://www.ee.ust.hk/~pascale/)
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)