It is a great pleasure to edit the EACL newsletter for the first time. I would like to start by expressing many thanks to the previous editor, Gertjan van Noord, for all his work over the past two years. He contributes to this issue, in his new capacity as Chair of EACL. Other contributions in this edition include a report on ACL 2004 from Toni Badia, who chaired the local organising committee; a report on the Israeli Seminar on Computational Linguistics (ISCOL-2004) by Ido Dagan; a word about EACL sponsorship from our new EACL secretary Anette Frank and the treasurer Mike Rosner; and an announcement about EACL 2006. Last but definitely not least, this newsletter includes a calendar of upcoming events in computational linguistics. Thanks to Leonoor van der Beek for all her efforts in keeping this calendar up to date.
I would be grateful to receive any contributions for future editions of the newsletter on any matters of interest to EACL members. Please email them to newsletter@eacl.org. And I look forward to seeing you during this summer's conference season, especially at Ann Arbor in June.
The EACL board has undergone quite a few changes. We are very thankful for the time and effort that our leaving board members have spent on EACL. John Carroll has been the EACL secretary for many years and did a wonderful job. Claire Gardent has been the chair over the last two years and, among other things, was responsible for the Budapest EACL event, one of the most successful EACL meetings in history. Finally, we will miss Hans Uszkoreit's creative contributions and advice. Claire, John, and Hans: many thanks!
We have three new board members, whom I would like to welcome. Anette Frank (from Saarbrücken) will take over from John as our new secretary. Alex Lascarides (Edinburgh) is our new chair-elect. So she will be the EACL chair in 2007 and 2008. Paola Merlo (Geneva) is our third new member. Yes. The feminine influence in EACL is quite obvious. Five out of eight board members, half of the nominating committee and another majority in the EACL student board!
ACL-04 took place in Barcelona July 21-26, 2004, organised by a committee of researchers from the five universities in the Barcelona area which have active research groups on Computational Linguistics (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Universitat de Barcelona, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and Universitat Ramon Llull).
The main conference included 18 sessions covering most of the areas in the field, ranging from multimodal and situated language processing to evaluation of machine translation. In addition there were three "Demonstration and interactive poster" sessions and the Student Research Workshop. On the last two days of ACL-04 11 workshops were organised and successfully attended. At the final count we had 682 registered attendees, taking into account both the main conference and the workshops.
The Lifetime Achievement Award was bestowed upon Karen Spark Jones who has worked on automatic language and information processing research since the late 1950s. Over the last decade her work has been on document retrieval including speech applications, database query, user and agent modelling, automatic summarisation, and information and language system evaluation.
ACL-04 took place in the Barcelona International Convention Centre within the premises of the 2004 Forum of Cultures. The Forum organised a daily programme of cultural events and entertainment options, which proved to be of great interest to ACL-04 participants.
Finally, a word on sponsorship. We reached a record amount of sponsorship contributions this year: 95,500 euros (approximately $116,000), of which ca. 63,000 euros came from the 2004 Forum of Cultures -- probably our largest-ever single contributor. We are enormously grateful for the generosity of all companies and institutions that contributed, as sponsors, to the success of ACL-04, including the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Navigation, Comprendium, Microsoft, Xerox Europe, and Daedalus.
The annual meeting of the Israeli Seminar on Computational Linguistics was held on December 27, 2004 at Bar Ilan University. This year we were honoring Prof. Yaacov Choueka upon his retirement. The seminar has been most successful, demonstrating the progress and expansion of the field in Israel. More than 70 participants attended the event, including faculty and students from all universities as well as many people from industrial companies in the NLP, IR and text processing areas.
The program included (see above URL for full program):
After more than 20 years, the EACL meeting will once more take place in Italy. The very first EACL meeting was organised in Pisa back in 1983. In 2006, Trento will host the 11th EACL meeting (for those of you who have difficulty counting the EACL meetings, please read the preface to the EACL 2003 Budapest proceedings by Ann Copestake and Jan Hajic).
The Programme Co-chairs will be Diana McCarthy (Sussex, UK) and Shuly Wintner (Haifa, Israel). The local organisation of the conference will be carried out by IRST (to be more precise: the Cognitive and Communication Technology (TCC) Division of ITC-IRST, Centro per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica). Alberto Lavelli and Bernardo Magnini will co-chair the local organising committee. The conference will take place from April 3 to April 7. The tutorials and workshops will be held on April 3-4, and the main programme is scheduled for April 5-7.
Trento is a nicely located historical city. It is very close to the Dolomites mountains and to famous cities such as Verona, Venice, and Milan. The Trento region is said to combine the positive aspects of both the northern (germanic) and southern (mediterranean) life styles.
The conference facilities are all located in the centre, and they're very attractive for EACL. Bars, restaurants and hotels are all relatively close. The city is not very big, with only 100,000 inhabitants. You can travel to Trento through the international airports in Verona, Milano or Munich. Trento is on the intercity connection between Munich and Verona.
We hope to welcome many of you in Trento!
| March 31-April 1, 2005, Bonn, Germany | Applications of GermaNet II |
| March 9-11, 2005, Magdeburg, Germany | From Data and Information Analysis to Knowledge Engineering |
| March 24-26, 2005, Compiegne, France | UNTELE 2005 Use of New Technologies in Foreign Language Teaching |
| April 4-5, 2005, Rouen, France | Terminology and Artificial Intelligence TIA'05 |
| April 7-8, 2005, Barcelona, Spain | Formal and Computational Approaches to Discourse Particles |
| April 7-9, 2005, Lodz, Poland | PALC 2005 Practical Applications in Language and Computers |
| April 8, 2005, Lodz, Poland | Workshop on E-education |
| April 9, 2005, Lodz, Poland | Cognitive Corpus Linguistics Workshop |
| April 11-13, 2005, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK | SMBM 2005 Symposium on Semantic Mining in Biomedicine |
| April 19-21, 2005, Essex, UK | 2nd ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on the Linguistic Dimensions of Prepositions and their Use in Computational Linguistics Formalisms and Applications |
| April 28-30, 2005, Bordeaux, France | LACL2005 Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics |
| May 15, 2005, Paris, France | ATALA workshop on Methods and tools for the evaluation of syntactic parsers |
| May 19-20, 2005, Geneva, Switzerland | GL2005 3rd International Workshop on Generative Approaches to the Lexicon |
| May 20-25, 2005, Joensuu, Finland | NODALIDA 15th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics |
| May 30-31, 2005, Budapest, Hungary | EAMT 2005 10th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation |
| June 6-10, 2005, Fontainebleau, France | Traitement Automatiques des Langues Naturelles 2005 |
| June 9-11, 2005, Nancy, France | DIALOR'05/SEMDIAL |
| June 15-17, 2005, Alicante, Spain | NLDB05 Tenth International Conference of Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems |
| July 6, 2005, Amsterdam, the Netherlands | Symposium on Dialogue Modelling and Generation |
| July 6-7, 2005, Bremen, Germany | 2nd International Workshop on Constrained-Based Grammar |
| July 15-17, 2005, Birmingham, UK | Corpus Linguistics 2005 |
| July 18-20, 2005, Bergen, Norway | LFG05 |
| July 25-28, 2005, Split, Croatia | Workshop on Computational Linguistics Computational Modeling of Lexical Acquisition |
| July 30-August 5, 2005, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK | IJCAI-05 19th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence |
| July 30, 2005, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK | 4th Workshop on Knowledge and Reasoning for Answering Questions |
| August 7-11, 2005, Bonn, Germany | ICML 2005 22nd International Conference on Machine Learning |
| August 5-7, 2005, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK | FG-MOL 2005 10th conference on Formal Grammar and 9th Meeting on Mathematics of Language |
| August 8-19, 2005, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK | ESSLLI 2005 |
| August 8-10, 2005, Aberdeen, UK | 10th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation |
| August 15-20, 2005, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK | Formal Semantics and Cross-Linguistic Data ESSLLI workshop |
| August 16-20, 2005, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK | Foundations of Natural-Language Grammar ESSLLI workshop |
| August 22-24, 2005, Lisbon, Portugal | HPSG 2005 |
| August 24-27, 2005, Cracow, Poland | EUROCALL 2005 Conference for the European Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning |
| September 1-2, 2005, Helsinki, Finland | FSMNLP 2005 Workshop on Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing |
| September 14-16, 2005, Granada, Spain | SEPLN2005 21th Conference of the Spanish Society for Natural Language Processing |
| September 19, 2005, Santiago de Compostela, Spain | Contrastive and Learner Corpus Workshop |
| September, 21-23, 2005, Borovets, Bulgaria | RANLP-2005 Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing |
| October 3-7, 2005, Porto, Portugal | ECML/PKDD05 16th European Conference on Machine Learning/9th European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases |
| October 31-November 4, 2005, Agia Napa, Cyprus | CoopIS 2005 Cooperative Information Systems |
| October 31-November 4, 2005, Agia Napa, Cyprus | ODBASE 4th International Conference on Ontologies, Databases, and Applications of Semantics |
| March 9-11, 2005, Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India | Symposium on Linguistics, Quantification & Computation | |
| March 31-April 2, 2005, Tucson, Arizona, USA | 18th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing | |
| May 3-5, 2005, Mclean, VA, USA | International Conference on Intelligence Analysis | |
| May 6-8, 2005, Clearwater Beach, FL, USA | FLAIRS 2005 Special track on Natural Language based Knowledge Representations | |
| May 24-25, 2005 | NLUCS 2005 Workshop on Natural Language Understanding and Cognitive Science | |
| May 26-27, 2005, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada | Workshop on the Analysis of Informal and Formal Information Exchange During Negotiations | |
| June 23-25, 2005, Moscow, Russia | Meaning-Text Theory (MTT-2005) | |
| June 25-30, 2005, Ann Harbor, Michigan, USA | ACL-05 | |
| June 29-30, 2005, Ann Harbor, Michigan, USA | CoNLL-2005 Ninth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning | |
| June 27-30, 2005, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA | Intelligent Linguistic Technologies | |
| July 9-10, 2005, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA | AAAI-05 WORKSHOP on Question Answering in Restricted Domains | |
| July 9-10, 2005, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA | SLU 2005 Wrokshop on Spoken Language Understanding | |
| July 21-22, 2005, Palo Alto, CA, USA | CEAS Second Conference on Email and Anti-Spam | |
| August 28 2005, Seoul, Korea | WDA2005 Third International Workshop on Web Document Analysis | |
| August 29-September1 2005, Seoul, Korea | ICDAR2005 8th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition | |
| September 14-16, 2005, Melbourne, Australia | NaTeMed2005 Special Session on Natural Language Processing and Text Mining in Medicine at KES 2005 | |
| October 6-8, 2005, Vancouver, B.C., Canada | HLT/EMNLP 2005 | |
| October 9-10, 2005, Vancouver, BC, Canada | DUC 2005 Document Understanding Conference | |
| October 11-13, 2005, Jeju Island, Korea | JCNLP05 Second International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing | |
| November 27-December 1, 2005, Cancun, Mexico | ASRU2005 Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop | |
| December 20-22, 2005, Pune, India | 2nd Indian International Conference on Artificial Intelligence |