EACL NEWSLETTER

Issue 4

October 2003

1. Editorial
2. Views of the Chair
3. Sponsorships 2003
4. Report on EACL 2003 Budapest
5. Announcement of ACL 2004 Barcelona
6. National CL/NLP Conferences: CLIN
7. Announcement of LangTech 2003 Paris
8. Introduction of the new student board
9. Announcement of new Knowledge Center for Processing Hebrew
10. Conference Report: RANLP
11. Announcement of EAMT 2004 Malta
12. Conference Calender

Editorial

The previous half year has been a busy period, as far as CL conferences go. Personally, I attended the EACL meeting in Budapest and the IWPT workshop in Nancy. Both were successful: it seems that computational linguistics in Europe is doing well. We have a report on the Budapest event below. I also had the opportunity to attend the ACL meeting in Sapporo (for me, Sapporo brings back memories of the time when I watched, as a kid, the Dutch speed skater Ard Schenk win three gold medals at the Olympics). This meeting was a great success too. Very well organized, a large number of participants, and a number of very good papers (reflected by the fact that two papers were elected for the best paper award).

For these reasons, I'm really looking forward to the next conference season, which will bring three large events to Europe: Coling in Geneva, ACL in Barcelona, and LREC in Lisbon.

I hope to meet many of you there!

Gertjan van Noord
Editor

Views of the Chair

As the EACL conference is now triennial, the next EACL conference will take place in 2006 (Watch out for the call for bids which will be issued shortly!). This gives us more time to concentrate on other EACL issues. In particular, John Nerbonne has been working towards the goal of making the EACL a legal European entity (by making it a foundation) -- this should give the EACL increased visibility, and allow for a tighter link with in particular, the European Union.

As you know, 2003 has also brought a renewal of the board and of the student board. You will find more information about the new student board in this issue. We are looking forward to working together for the EACL. We are of course open to any suggestion you might have on how to improve the workings and achievements of the association.

Claire Gardent
Chair of the EACL

Sponsorships 2003

Lexicom 2003 was a training workshop in lexical computing and lexicography, held at the University of Brighton in July, and tutored by Sue Atkins, Adam Kilgarriff and Michael Rundell. Topics included building text corpora, using software for analysing corpus data, and designing and using dictionary databases and computational lexicons. EACL sponsored a bursary for a student from Eastern Europe who would otherwise not have been able to attend. The bursary was awarded to Nina Tudjman Vukovic, a doctoral student from Zagreb University, Croatia.

The EUROLAN 2003 Summer School took place July 28-August 8 in Bucharest, Romania, with the title "The Semantic Web and Language Technology: its Potential and Practicalities". The summer school consisted of two weeks of intensive study of Semantic Web technology and its application to natural language processing, with seminars and hands-on lab sessions. EACL sponsorship was used to waive the tuition fees for three Eastern European students.

The 15th European Summer School in Logic Language and Information (ESSLLI 2003) was held 18-29 August in Vienna, Austria. Foundational, introductory and advanced courses together with workshops covered a wide variety of topics in the areas of language and computation, language and logic, and logic and computation. In the language and computation area, EACL sponsored the foundational course on Probabilistic Models of NLP given by Detlef Prescher and Khalil Sima'an. The sponsorship took the form of a contribution of 750 euro towards the presenters' expenses.

John Carroll
Secretary of the EACL

Report on EACL 2003 Budapest

Although strongly international, with 40 countries represented, the conference retained a distinctive European flavour: 78% of the participants were from Europe (29 countries), 12% from America, 7% from Australasia and 3% from Africa.

As is now usual in ACL related conferences, the event consisted of a main conference, a student research workshop, demos, (12) workshops and (4) tutorials. For the first time however, the EACL conference included a research notes session with the aim of opening up the conference to a wider range of presenters. Thus whilst for the main conference, the acceptance rate was 26.5%, research notes had an acceptance rate of 60%. Demos had a 80% acceptance rate, whereas the student research workshop adopted a selective 33% acceptance rate.

The Budapest local organisers did a superb job of catering to the participants needs and making us feel welcome. Thank you to all and in particular to Ference Kiefer, Tamas Varadi and Gusztav Hencsey!

The next EACL conference will take place in 2006. If you intend to host EACL'06, watch out! The call for bids will be issued shortly.

Claire Gardent

Announcement of ACL 2004 Barcelona

ACL'04 will be hosted by a committee composed of computational linguists from several institutions in Barcelona, chaired by Prof Toni Badia of University Pompeu Fabra. The technical chairs are:

Conference Chair	Donia Scott
Programme Chairs	Walter Daelemans Marilyn Walker
Tutorial Chair	Inderjeet Mani
Workshop Chair	Srinivas Bangalore
Programme Chairs	Philippe Blache Horacio Rodriques
Publication Chairs	Owen Rambow Sergi Balari Sadao Kurohashi
Publicity Chairs	Felisa Verdejo
Exhibition Chair	Toni Marti

The search for sponsorship chair(s) is still on; volunteers or nominations are welcome!

For more information, please consult the conference website at http://www.acl2004.org

Donia Scott

National CL/NLP Conferences: CLIN

In order to minimize organisational overhead, each annual meeting only lasts a single day. The meeting consists of a keynote lecture from a leading CL researcher. The remainder of the meeting consists of a large number of parallel 20-minute presentations. The aim of the meeting is to have both senior and junior researchers and Ph.D. students in the programme. The number of presentations has increased from about 25 in the first few years to about 50 last year in Groningen. The language of the meeting is English (with some Dutch exceptions).

After each CLIN meeting, the participants are invited to submit a full paper version of their presentation. After a careful review procedure, a subset of these papers is collected in a volume. This volume is ready by the time of the next meeting, and is included in the conference package of that meeting. Recent volumes are published by Rodopi in their series "Language and Computers".

This years' meeting will be organised at the University of Antwerp (Belgium) by the CNTS Language Technology Group (Walter Daelemans, Bart Decadt, Guy De Pauw and Véronique Hoste). The keynote speaker will be Thorsten Brants (Google Inc.).

The series of CLIN meetings is organised very informally by a working group consisting of Walter Daelemans, Anton Nijholt and Gertjan van Noord. The CLIN website is at http://www.let.rug.nl/~vannoord/Clin/

Gertjan van Noord

Announcement of LangTech 2003 Paris

The first edition of this European forum for speech and language technology, LangTech 2002 Berlin Germany, was attended by some 330 participants from over 30 countries, with presentations by representatives of over 70 companies from 20 nations. Nearly two-thirds of LangTech attendees came from industry or commercial concerns.

This years' meeting, organised in Paris, features two invited keynote speakers: Paul Ricci (ScanSoft) and Sanda Harabagiu (Language Computer Corporation and Texas University).

[information extracted from web-site, Gertjan van Noord]

New Student Board

Irina Chugur graduated in linguistics at the Complutense University of Madrid in 1999. She was involved in the building of the Spanish WordNet. Her main research interests are in Lexical Semantics, Computational Lexicology. She is currently at UNED Madrid, finishing her PhD thesis on enriching lexical resources with lexical semantic relations. Irina will be responsible for the web calendar.

Sebastian Pado is a PhD student at Saarland University, Saarbruecken, Germany. He received a MSc in Cognitive Science and Natural Language from Edinburgh University and he is involved with the SALSA project which aims at producing a large, semantically annotated corpus of German. He is interested in (Shallow) Semantics and in how to leverage models of meaning. Sebastian will assist the EACL webmaster in general web management.

Leonoor van der Beek is a student at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Her PhD project is part of the Pionier Project 'Algorithms for Linguistic Processing' which focuses on developing methods for efficient parsing and disambiguation and applying these techniques to a broad coverage grammar for Dutch. Her main interest is in formal syntax and grammar development. Leonoor will be responsible for the educational webpages.

Leonoor van der Beek

Announcement of new Knowledge Center for Processing Hebrew

Alon Itai, Shuly Wintner

RANLP

Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2003) Borovets, Bulgaria, 7-12 September 2003

RANLP is widely known for its outstanding keynote speakers and tutorial lecturers. The 2003 list featured Branimir Boguraev, Shalom Lappin, Inderjeet Mani, Stephen Pulman, Hans Uszkoreit, Yorick Wilks, Dan Cristea, Hamish Cunningham, Ido Dagan, John Prager and Piek Vossen. RANLP-03 was highly selective for full papers (with an acceptance rate of only 28%), and their publication in book form is being discussed with a well-known publisher. The conference proceedings contains short papers and posters as well. Some 160 participants attended RANLP-03. An international workshop "Information extraction for Slavonic and other Central and Eastern European languages" was organised in conjunction with RANLP-03 (http://lml.bas.bg/IESL2003/).

In addition to the high quality scientific programme, both academics and students from four continents enjoyed a versatile social programme with many making new friends. The attractive mountain scenery of Borovets, the numerous restaurants, pubs and discotheques of the resort, the delicious food and drinks, the climate as well as the absence of daily "high-tech stress" made the stay of all conference participants even more enjoyable.

Galia Angelova, Ruslan Mitkov

Announcement of EAMT 2004 Malta

Special themes for this workshop will be machine translation and other issues relating to Semitic languages, and translation issues arising from the accessions of newly associated states of the EU. Papers will be accepted on any aspect of machine translation and computer based translation tools (e.g translation memories, etc.)

Local arrangements organiser is Mike Rosner (mike.rosner@um.edu.mt) from whom further details can be obtained. Full details and registration will appear later on the EAMT website (www.eamt.org)

Mike Rosner

Conference Calendar

2003

2004