Compilation of Reports to the ACL Executive ------------------------------------------- (partial set received before 28/9/2000) PRESIDENT AND SECRETARY-TREASURER'S REPORT ========================================== These reports incorporate information from all other reports and are in final preparation. EUROPEAN CHAPTER (Donia Scott) ============================== REPORT on EACL activities ------------------------- EDUCATION AND TRAINING Following a decision by the EACL board in early 1991, the organisation is increasing its support for training in computational linguistics within Europe. Over the last year, this activity has been focussed on following events: 1. European Masters in Speech and Language: This is a pan-European course on NLP and Speech Sciences in which any European university can participate, provided that they can demonstrate that they cover some of the contents of the Euromasters. Students can attend courses in any participating university. There are currently 14 participating universities. Because of the different Higher Education systems within Europe, the course is implemented through certification. Students who have completed the required number of courses on the EM-L\&S syllabus, a project (preferably in industry) and attended a 1-week Easter school, are elegible for certification. This certification is endorsed jointly by EACL and ESCA (European Speech Communication Association). The EACL has a the right to appoint one member to the Board of the EM-L\&S. The term of office of our representative is 4 years. Currently serving is Walter Daelemans. 2. ESSLLI Summer Schools: For the second year running, the EACL has provided direct support to the prestigeous ESSLLI summer school, by sponsoring an introductory course in Computational Linguistics. Sponsorship takes the form of covering the lecturer or lecturers' travel expenses and accommodation. In return, student attendees who are ACL members receive a reduced registration. This year, we sponsored a course on HPSG by Anne Copstake and Rob Malouf. The cost to EACL was 700 Euros. 3. Revised constitution The organisation's constitution is currently being revised to reflect the changes that have come about from the internationalisation of ACL. The draft of the new constitution will be circulated to members for comments in December. EACL Finances ------------- SWISS CURRENT ACCOUNT 1999 (Swiss Francs) ----------------------------------------- 1 CHF = 0.62EUR 1 USD = 1.55CHF (average) DATE BALANCE (CHF) (EUR) 1/1/1999 20403.79 12716.93 INCOME (CHF) (EUR) dues 4029.08 2511.18 publications 1137.90 709.21 mail 593.95 370.19 funds 166.65 103.87 late fee 111.45 69.46 interest 41.05 25.58 total income 6080.08 3789.49 EXPENSES eacl99 float -6450.00 -4020.05 committee meet -962.00 -599.58 sponsorship -768.60 -479.04 bank charges -343.45 -214.06 total expenses -8524.05 -5312.72 31/12/1999 17959.82 11193.69 FRENCH ACCOUNT 1999 (French Francs) ----------------------------------- 1 FF = 0.152449017 EUR BALANCE (FF) (EUR) 1/1/1999 58,987.01 8,992.51 INCOME (FF) (EUR) dues 3224.00 491.50 publications 2090.62 318.71 interest 1937.32 295.34 funds 100.00 15.24 total income 7351.94 1120.80 EXPENSES 0.00 31/12/1999 66,338.95 10,113.31 STATEMENT OF ASSETS SWISS ACCOUNT 1999 (SWISS FRANCS) ----------------------------------------------------- 1 CHF = 0.623263 EUR Current Investment Int. Total Total CHF (EUR) 31/12/1995 40,886 121,325 2,129 164,340 102,427 31/12/1996 39,637 142,933 747 183,317 114,255 31/12/1997 46,153 142,527 747 189,427 118,063 31/12/1998 20,404 181,321 201,725 125,728 31/12/1999 17,960 180,917 198,877 123,952 Michael Rosner, 5th May 2000 NORTH AMERICAN CHAPTER (Diane Litman) ===================================== Report from NAACL Diane Litman, Chair The NAACL Executive Committee met on May 1, 2000, at the NAACL conference in Seattle, WA. The agenda discussed included: * NAACL-00 Conference Report * NAACL-01 Conference Planning * Reports from NAACL officers and setup committee * Formulation of Chapter Policies * Constitutional Issues * Discussion of Goals The minutes of this meeting can be found on the NAACL webpage at http://www.naacl.org/minutes.htm. The NAACL-00 conference was very successful. The NAACL-2000 Program Chair's Report provides details, and can be found at http://www.aclweb.org/archive/naacl2000.html. The NAACL-01 conference planning is well underway. This spring we ran a site selection process, by mailing a Call for Bids to all members and also directly contacting a small number of sites. Our efforts resulted in one bid from CMU. After some negotiation, the meeting was accepted for June 2-7, 2001, with Lori Levin and Alon Lavie as the General and Local Arrangement Chairs, respectively, and with EMNLP as a co-located event. To avoid potential submission conflicts with ACL 2001 (to be held a month later), we have made our deadlines earlier than needed. The NAACL exec also selected Kevin Knight as Program Chair, and selected the student workshop chairs. We modified Ed Hovy's ACL conference planning document for NAACL, and have been actively using this to attempt to keep people on schedule. This summer, Diane Litman and Priscilla Rasmussen conducted a site visit with Lori Levin and Alon Lavie. The current conference status (e.g., sub chairs, the calls, etc.) can be found at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ref/naacl2001.html. The job duties for the NAACL officers were created based on modifying the ACL job duties. The officers have been executing their duties as discussed in this report. Our chapter web page can be found at http://www.naacl.org We have spent much of the year formulating policies for the NAACL organization, the NAACL conference, and how to manage financial and other interactions with ACL. We have contacted the NAACL nominating committee about running the next NAACL elections. This process, as well as some startup issues, have exposed some problems with the current constitution. A set of amendments will be voted on by the membership. We are currently working on other goals of our organization, e.g. how to attract wider participation of researchers in areas that are outside the traditional foci of ACL meetings. For example, we have again used the term "Language Technologies" for the NAACL conference to further outreach. ACL-2000 GENERAL CHAIR (Hitoshi Iida) ======================================= I set up the ACL-2000 Executive Committee through discussions with ACL Executive Committee. Some chairs had been assigned to each role; the Honorary Chair, Aravind Joshi; the Program Co-Chairs, K. Vijayashanker and Chang-Ning Huang; and the Local Organizing Chair, Dekai Wu. Workshop Chair: Nicoletta Calzolari Tutorial Co-Chairs: John Carroll and Hemant Darbari Demonstration Chair: Norbert Reithinger Publicity Co-Chairs: Steven Krauwer and Keh-Yih Su Student Research Workshop Co-Chairs: Sergey Pakhomov and Olivia Kwong Student Research Workshop Faculty Advisor: Philip Resnik I arranged the whole time schedule till the ACL-2000 and through discussions with co-/chairs of PC, Workshop, Tutorial and Demos we decided their important dates. Sponsorship: I discussed with the Local Chair on Asian sponsorship. I made much effort to get sponsorship from Japanese companies. But this effort failed because they judged there was no merit for themselves more than Logos. They usually organize a special committee so called ``organizing committee'' whose main job is to collect money and whose members come from each company before starting the organizing process for the excecutive committee. I wrote down the difference between the present Japanese sponsorship system and the west one. Welcome reception: I invited President Nagao of Kyoto University to the ACL-2000. We have his keynote lecture at the welcome reception in addition to Prof. Joshi$B!G(Bs keynote lecture. I arranged the program for the reception with the Local Chair. Thematic session on Asian languages: I helped the Program Committee to organize one thematic session for Asian languages merged with the proposal of Indian Language Processing. ACL-2000 HONORARY CHAIR (Aravind Joshi) ======================================= Being the honorary chair I did as little as possible and my colleagues did not ask me to do too much either. One specific thing I have done is the organization of a Special Session on Computational Linguistics in South and South East Asia. The following excerpt from the letter of invitation describes the purpose of this session. "As you know ACL 2000, the first international ACL conference (http://www.cs.ust.hk/acl2000/index.html), will be held in Hongkong, October 3-6 2000. As a part of this conference the program committee for ACL 2000 has asked me to organize a special session: Computational Linguistics in South and South East Asia). The main purpose of this session is give an opportunity for researchers in these regions for presenting an overview of Computational Linguistics (CL) activities in their regions, including, of course, their own activities. The reason for this special session is to promote CL activities in these regions as well as to recognize the current activities in these regions, which although quite considerable, do not have the visibility they should have." I would like to propose that ACL encourages such efforts, the choice of the countries depending on the region where the international meeting will take place. Such efforts will strengthen the internationalization efforts of ACL. Panel members of the Special Session at ACL 2000 (arranged alphabetically): Profesoor Allan Borra College of Computer Studies DLSU Professional Schools, Inc. De La Salle University Philppines 0922 Dr. Bobby Nazief Computer Science Center University of Indonesia Professor Phan Huy Khanh Chef de Faculte' d'Informatique Universite' de DaNang 17, Le Duan, Da Nang VietNam Professor Rajeev Sangal, Director Language Technologies Research Centre, Indian Institute of Information Technology Gachibowli, Hyderabad 500 019, INDIA Dr.Virach Sornlertlamvanich Director of Information Research and Development Division (iTech) National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC) Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment Bangkok 10400, Thailand. Professor. Zaharin Yusoff Universiti Sains Malaysia 11800 Penang Malaysia ACL-2000 PC CO-CHAIRS (K Vijayashanker and Chang-Ning Huang) =========================================================== ACL-2000 PC Co-Chair report A. The Program -------------- For this year's ACL, 267 submissions were received. Of these 201 were submitted to the general session and 65 to the theme sessions. A total of 70 papers were accepted, 53 from the main session and 17 from the thematic sessions. Thus the acceptance rate for the entire conference was 26.2 percent with the rate being 26.4 and 26.2 percent for the general and thematic sessions. In addition to the two keynote speakers (at the welcome reception), we have three invited talks during the conference. A1. Thematic Sessions --------------------- We liked some of the reasons behind special thematic sessions introduced at last year's conference. We discussed the thematic sessions with last year's PC co-chairs particularly about the problems they encountered in implementing the themes. One problem they had was with the number of submissions for some of the themes. Therefore, we decided to ask that the theme proposers offer reasons why they would expect that the proposed theme area would be viable and likely to generate a good number of submissions. We accepted four of the six theme proposals we received. We thought these would generate sufficient interest and met some of the reasons underlying the thematic sessions. We believe that the number of submissions did mostly meet our expectations. The following gives the numbers of submissions and acceptances in each theme. Theme Submissions #ACC % of papers accepted Question-Answering 6 2 33% ML in Dialogue 8 2 25% Summarization 13 4 30.8% Proc. of Asian Languages 38 9 23.7% Total 65 17 26.2% A2. Breakdown by Research Areas (General Session Only) ------------------------------------------------------ It was hard to decide how to breakdown the numbers by areas. Finally, to simplify our task, we decided to break it down according to the area chairs. Area Submissions #accepted %accepted Syntax, Grammars 15 4 26.7% and morphology Machine Translation 22 5 22.7% and Multilinguality Machine Learning and 31 11 35.5% Statistical Methods (Syntax) Speech, Systems, and 20 3 15.0% Evaluation Discourse, Dialogue, 35 10 28.6% and Generation Lexicon and Semantics 21 5 23.8% Corpus-based and Statistical 36 8 22.2% NLP (not syntactic) Parsing Algorithms and Models 23 8 34.8% Total 201 53 26.4% A2. Geographical Breakdown -------------------------- We are pleased to report that the time of internationalization efforts of ACL, we received papers from around the world. The numbers below reflect the host countries of the contact authors. Continent Countries Conference Count Submission Acceptance % Submissions Acceptance % Americas USA 68 32.3 total 73 32.9 Australasia Japan 44 22.7 China/HK 26 26.9 Korea 14 35.7 total 97 23.7 Europe Germany 25 28.0 UK 19 21.1 France 15 13.3 Spain 7 42.9 total 95 22.1 The substantial increase in number of submissions from Asia can be attributed partly to the location of the conference, and the inclusion of a theme focussing on NLP techniques especially for Asian Languages. However, it must be noted that nearly all papers from Australasia were from China, Japan, and Korea. We were surprised by the low number of submissions from some Australasian countries such as Australia, Singapore, Taiwan. B. The Process -------------- Reviewing was blind. The program committee comprised of eight area chairs who were assisted by a team of reviewers. The thematic session submissions were reviewed by individual theme chairs and their team of reviewers. All reviews and theme chair recommendations were available for the program committee deliberations. For each theme paper, an area chair was responsible for leading the discussion at the program committee meeting. We used hard copy for paper distribution and email for reviewing. Despite realizing that mailing incurs considerable expenses. We chose not to go for electronic submission because (1) we did not have sufficient support for this, and more importantly (2) we expected an increased number of papers that might use fonts which often create problems, and during this stage of the process, we don't have sufficient time to deal with so many submissions. In contrast for the submission of the final version of the selected papers, we felt we would have more time to deal with any problems with electronic versions (for the CDROM version of the proceedings). This was indeed the case. We encountered such problems while printing/examining the pdf files of accepted papers. We were able to handle these problems as the time pressure was not as intense at this stage and furthermore the number of papers was only around a quarter of the original number of submissions. Prior to the submission, all authors had to pre-register their papers using a web-based form. Greg Silber developed a software package for us that included this. Upon submission of information, each submitter was immediately informed of a paper-id which was confirmed in a subsequent email. In addition, various files (html, text and spreadsheets) recording different pieces of the entered information (either collectively for all submissions or individually for each submission) were produced. These were especially useful for us during the entire process. We used a program developed by David Yarowsky that produced a ranking of area chairs/reviewers for papers. This information was useful for us in making our decisions of assignment of papers to reviewers. C. Reviewing ------------ We believe that overall the area chairs, theme chairs and the reviewers were conceintcous and did a very good job. The chairs made sure that at least three reviews were received for each paper and on a few occasions requested the reviewers to provide additional comments/elaborate. The reviewers were also requested to keep in mind the high number of submissions from non-native-English-speaking authors and to be constructive in their remarks regarding language use. D. Proceedings -------------- We asked the authors of accepted papers to send us a hard-copy of the paper for the printed proceedings and a pdf file for the CDROM proceedings. The hard-copies were put together in order and assigned page numbers and the prefatory pages created. These were shipped to Hong Kong for final production. Despite very good support from Samuel Harp at Hong Kong, we wondered whether it might have been simpler to have continued using OmniPress given their knowledge and experience in producing the ACL proceedings. The time difference and distance were the main problems with the arrangement used this year. As mentioned above, there were a substantial number of pdf files where there were problems with inclusion of fonts. Also there were quite a few cases where all the pages wouldn't print etc. However, with cooperation from the authors, these were sorted in time. All of remaining items in the production of the CDROM version were handled by David Yarowsky. We are very thankful to David Yarowsky for managing this task and for doing a wonderful job. E. Other Items -------------- While we were not unsatisfied with the number of submissions to the theme sessions, we were a little concerned with the unevenness of the reviewing of the theme papers. It would be nice to have a clear demarcation of the responsibilities with the new conference committee organization. Likewise a repository of files used and instructions on actions to be taken by the various chairs would be useful. ACL-2000 TUTORIALS (John Carroll & Hemant Darbari) ================================================== John Carroll & Hemant Darbari ACL 2000 Tutorials Co-Chairs We scheduled the ACL 2000 tutorials, as is customary, to take place over the course of a morning and afternoon just before the start of the main conference. The formal opening of the conference this year is October 2nd in the late afternoon/early evening, so to avoid any tutorials overlapping the opening, we set up the sessions for the afternoon of October 1st and the morning of October 2nd. We anticipated having two tutorials running in parallel in each session, making a total of four. Reimbursement for presenters was set at the same level as last year (US$500 per session plus $25 per registrant in the range 21-50 plus $15 per registrant in excess of 50). The call for tutorial proposals was sent out to email distribution lists in late March. We received six proposals, of which we selected four as being relevant to the ACL membership, of good quality, coming from respected researchers in the CL community, and representing a good spread of topics. The accepted tutorials are: Morphology for Asian Languages Kenneth Church (chair); speakers from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan Unification-based Processing Underway to Dot Com Dan Flickinger & Stephan Oepen Statistical Machine Translation Kevin Knight Multilingual Information Access Douglas W. Oard The Multilingual Information Access proposal was initiated by Kam-Fai Wong, chair of IRAL-2000 (the 5th International Workshop on Information Retrieval with Asian Languages) to be held in Hong Kong immediately before ACL, with the intention that this tutorial should be shared between the ACL and IRAL events. We welcomed this suggestion; ACL is organizing the tutorial, but IRAL participants may register for it with IRAL on the same terms as ACL participants. Proceeds after speaker reimbursement and expenses are to be shared between the two organizations in proportion to the respective numbers of registrations. The tutorials are to take place at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Brief tutorial descriptions are online at the ACL 2000 web site, were incorporated into the conference registration brochure, and are published in the conference proceedings companion volume and CDROM. The scale of fees for tutorial registration remains unchanged from 1999, at US$130 full, $85 student, or $165/$95 for late registration. Each tutorial participant will receive a printed copy of the materials, containing at least the overhead transparencies used. ACL-2000 Demonstrations (Norbert Reithinger) ============================================ ACL 2000 Demonstrations Chairman Report Norbert Reithinger DFKI GmbH Saarbruecken, Germany bert@dfki.de One intention for this year's ACL demos was to have interesting demos that are especially linked to the thematic sessions of the main conference. In the initial Call for Demos, which was posted on various mailing lists and the ACL 2000 conference site at the beginning of May 2000, we called especially for submissions in the 4 areas. The session chairs of all 4 sessions agreed to take over the review process for these demos. We got 26 submissions, and accepted 18, one of which was later withdrawn. Sorted according to the submitter's country, we get the following table Sub. Accepted Asia: 11 7 PR China: 5 4 Japan: 2 1 Korea: 4 2 America: 5 4 Canada: 1 1 USA: 4 3 Europe: 10 6 Czech Rep: 3 2 Germany: 3 3 Denmark: 1 1 Portugal: 1 0 Spain: 1 1 (later withdrawn) Switzerl.: 1 0 Eight of the accepted demos are related to the thematic session T4 "Theoretical and technical approaches for Asian language processing". Two of these eight were also submitted to T2 "Machine learning and statistical NLP for dialog" and one of these eight to T3 "Text summarization". The rest was in the category "General". If future ACLs will also have thematic sessions, I propose that the thematic session chairs ask paper submitters also to submit demos. A problem in the preparation of the demos is the technical infrastructure the demoers assume, e.g. Internet connections, or beamers and screens. In the call we stated that we cannot guarantee anything but power. However, nowadays many systems process data off the Internet and need connectivity. Also, the expectations of the demoers wrt. the local presentation infrastructure are high. This creates problems for the demo organizer and the local organization, if the venue is not at an institution where this infrastructure is already present. Costs for Internet connectivity was within a reasonable range for this ACL. However, it was too expensive to rent beamers. The local organizers were very helpful and inventive to provide at least 17" monitors for notebook presentations. ACL-2000 PUBLICATIONS (David Yarowsky) ====================================== Comprehensive Proceedings on CDROM: ---------------------------------- ACL published the its proceedings electronically for the first this year, in the form of a comprehensive CDROM containing: * the complete proceedings of the main conference, including all papers in PDF format, panel summaries, demonstration notes and invited speaker and tutorial abstracts. * the complete proceedings of all 8 associated workshops, including the concurrent Student Research Workshop. * a complete archive of the ACL-2000 web pages and all workshop web pages as they existed on September 25, including local arrangements information, calls for papers and other announcements, instructions to authors and other information that will form a useful permanent record of the conference and its associated activities * a unified author index to the 392 papers in the 9 separate volumes, supporting rapid paper location in the collected proceedings (and an interesting summary of author productivity). Thanks to the careful and dedicated involvement of all of the main session and workshop chairs, 100% of the papers in every volume were successfully included in PDF format and accurately indexed. Silviu Cucerzan of Johns Hopkins University and Michaela Fok of HKUST deserve special acknowledgement for their extensive contributions to the design of the CDROM, and Samuel Harp and Zhao Jun of iSilk provided invaluable logistical support to its production. Development of Proceedings and CDROM Preparation Software: --------------------------------------------------------- In support of the proceedings production effort, I created a software toolkit that generates all of the tables of contents and indexes needed for both the hard copy proceedings and the CDROM from a single simple text file including paper title, author names and paper length. In the future this should save significant labor for all workshop and main session chairs preparing proceedings. It should improve accuracy by allowing a single compilation and proofreading of the basic data list to be propagated reliably to at least 5 different tables/indexes in both latex and html format. It should also improve consistency by automatically generating all workshop and main conference proceedings to the same common standard. Any year-to-year updates to the design, paper size or page formatting can be made once to the software templates, tested on the previous year's data files and then incorporated consistently in all proceedings for that conference. Overall the software should simplify and speed the proceedings creation process, allowing program chairs with no experience to create standardized printed and on-line volumes without style sheets, special training or frustrating layout hacking. Also, as a trial on the SIGDAT EMNLP/VLC-2000 proceedings, an interface was developed by Radu Florian to allow authors to submit their papers automatically in PDF and PS format and both enter and proofread the paper titles and author lists. We hope that this will save program chairs data entry and further automate the proceedings and CDROM creation process. In the future I am interested in developing full text and bibliographic search capabilities as a value-added component of the CDROM or other electronic proceedings. The New Position of Publications Chair -------------------------------------- This year the ACL Exec created the new position of Publications Chair both to coordinate the production of the 6 workshop proceedings and companion volume to the conference proceedings, and to design and create the new CDROM proceedings. Because a professional printer in Hong Kong was used this year, significant time was also spent working with the printers and chairs on issues such as cover design and production details. In the future, I would encourage that the publications chair's role be to (a) work closely with the main session and workshop chairs to establish and implement common design standards for the proceedings covers and internal page layouts, including helping to create standardized latex/MSword templates for authors, (b) coordinate the proceedings preparation process with the chairs and printer, ensuring that all parties have the information they need and ensuring that all proceedings are delivered to the printers on time and in the correct format, (c) coordinate and/or prepare any companion volumes to the main proceedings, (d) coordinate and create a CDROM compilation of all associated proceedings, conference web page archives and other appropriate content, and (e) investigate and coordinate any new proposals for electronic proceedings publication, including subscription-based on-line publication and support of indexing/abstracting by search engines and technical paper repositories. Future Concerns and Issues for Discussion ----------------------------------------- It is important to consider the possibility that electronic publication of main conference and workshop proceedings will cannibalize sales of hard-copy proceedings if all conference participants have complete copies of all workshop proceedings on a CDROM. It will be interesting to contrast such post-workshop sales with previous years to better estimate future printing needs. Should workshops be given the choice to opt-out of inclusion in any future electronic publications, especially if some may seek to republish as books? The pros and cons of offering discounted registrants (e.g. students) only CDROM versions of its proceedings should be discussed. The ACL should also consider whether it wants to control or encourage electronic distribution of its electronic proceedings. Is the economic impact to ACL of hard-copy and electronic sales of its proceedings so substantial that it wants to aggressively protect its copyright? Or is it equally or more important to encourage maximal dissemination of our community's scholarship? - David Yarowsky Johns Hopkins University yarowsky@cs.jhu.edu ACL-2000 PUBLICITY (Keh-Yih Su and Steven Krauwer) ================================================== I itemize the activities that we have done (with Steven) for publicity affair as follows for your reference. 1. Proposed the action-plan for the publicity affair in April . Unfortunately, most of those action items cannot be executed according to the schedule due to lacking of necessary information. 2. Discussed with Priscilla about whether it is worth to have the poster and put the advertisement on some popular magazines. The conclusion was that it would be more effective to use email-lists. 3. Discussed with Dr. Iida about what we should do at both AACL-2000 and Coling-2000. 4. Announced ACL-2000 news in ROCLING newsletter (the newsletter of the Society of Computational Linguistics in Taiwan). 5. Wrote the draft version (by Steven) of "Call for Participation". However, this copy was not finalized and put in the usage as the reason stated in the attached emails. Keh-Yih STUDENT RESEARCH WORKSHOP (Olivia Kwong and Sergey Pakhmov) =========================================================== ACL-2000 Student Research Workshop 1. Program Committee The co-chairs of the ACL-2000 Student Research Workshop, Olivia Kwong (University of Cambridge) and Sergey Pakhomov (University of Minnesota) were nominated by last year's co-chairs, Melanie Baljko and Anna Korhonen, and approved by the ACL Executive Committee. Philip Resnik was appointed by the ACL Executive Committee as Faculty Advisor. The program committee was initially formed from volunteers at the ACL'99 conference. The ACL Executive Committee approved of it but also asked the co-chairs to invite additional members from Asia and some for statistical NLP. The final program committee thus consisted of 15 student members and 27 non-student members. Of the 42 reviewers, 15 were from North America, 14 from Europe, and 13 from Asia. 2. Submission Thirty-six papers were submitted to the Student Research Workshop. The submission length was increased to 2,500 words, considering the very different arrangements this year regarding the workshop format and the publication of the proceedings. Each paper was assigned one student reviewer and two non-student reviewers. Reviews were mostly done on-line. We accepted 10 of the papers and reserved 4 on the waiting list, and it turned out that none of the accepted papers withdrew. Some statistics for the submissions and acceptance are shown below (Tables 1-3). 3. Presentation Format The papers would be presented in half-hour slots (and in parallel sessions) allocated from the main conference. To mark the difference of this year's workshop from conventional ACL student sessions (apart from NSF funding application and a separate volume of proceedings), for each accepted paper we have invited two senior researchers to act as panelists to give detailed feedback to the student author(s). Each slot would thus start with author presentation (18mins), followed by panelists feedback/discussion (7mins) and general Q&A (5mins). 4. Panelists We have recruited 2 panelists for each presentation. The panelists are listed below: Kevin Knight; Jean Pierre Chanod; Diane Litman; Eric Brill; Nicoletta Calzolari; John Carroll; Robert Dale; Owen Rambow; Adam Kilgariff. 5. Problems Both co-chairs found the experience from organizing the workshop invaluable and rewarding. We would like to thank ACL for offering us this opportunity. Although the work had not been as smooth as expected at times, we learned a lot from it. 5.1. Format and Scheduling In particular we were immersed in uncertainty most of the time, right from the beginning when there was much confusion on the change from conventional ACL student sessions to a student research workshop, regarding its format and scheduling. Discussion about the publication of the proceedings was stirred up again right before the hard copies were due, and we were never given any conclusion. 5.2. Walker Fund The administration of the Walker Fund also brought up a lot of misunderstanding, and the delayed outcomes from other funding resources left us (and the student applicants) difficult to plan ahead. The delay in the Walker Fund administration was primarily caused by the fact that our tasks and responsibilities ragarding the Fund were not clearly delineated. We believe that for the future the following steps need to be taken to make administering the Walker fund go smoother: a. The role of the student co-chairs in the administration of travel funds should be better defined, to minimize confusion as to who should apply the selection criteria, who should make the decision, and so on. b. Selection criteria ought to be revised and clearly stated to avoid possible further disputes. c. This year, one of the main selection criteria was the applicant's admittance to the main conference, not the student workshop. Since other grants (other than Walker) such as the NSF grant and the European grant applied for this year are applied specifically for the student session/workshop, they should be distributed differently from the Walker Fund. In particular, the highest priority should be given to the students whose work has been accepted to the student event, not the main event. d. Other grants (other than Walker) should be advertized and applied for separately from the Walker Grant or the application for funding should be made more general to include all possible grants. The eligibility should be determined and made very clear in advance. Despite all these problems, we have come through with the event settled as it is now. Table 1: Papers by country Country Submitted Accepted USA 11 (30.56%) 3 UK 5 (13.89%) 2 Japan 5 (13.89%) 1 France 4 (11.11%) 0 Germany 2 (5.56%) 1 Spain 2 (5.56%) 0 Bulgaria 1 (2.78%) 0 Czech Republic 1 (2.78%) 0 Malaysia 1 (2.78%) 0 Netherlands 1 (2.78%) 1 Sweden 1 (2.78%) 1 Switzerland 1 (2.78%) 0 Turkey 1 (2.78%) 1 Table 2: Papers by geographical area Area Submitted Accepted Acceptance rate North America 11 3 27.27% Europe 19 6 26.32% Asia 6 1 16.67% Table 3: Papers by topics Topic Submitted Accepted 1. Syntax and Parsing 6 (16.67%) 0 2. Knowledge acquisition/extraction 1 (2.78%) 0 3. Generation 7 (19.44%) 3 4. Statistical language processing 4 (11.11%) 2 5. Natural language systems 2 (5.56%) 0 6. Discourse and pragmatics 2 (5.56%) 2 7. Grammar 3 (8.33%) 0 8. Semantics 2 (5.56%) 0 9. Corpus analysis 2 (5.56%) 2 10. Machine translation 1 (2.78%) 0 11. Speech 0 (0.00%) 0 12. Other 6 (16.67%) 1 Olivia Kwong and Sergey Pakhomov ACL-2000 Student Research Workshop Co-Chairs Workshop Chair (Nicoletta Calzolari) ==================================== Report from the Workshop Chair Nicoletta Calzolari Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale del CNR, Pisa, Italy glottolo@ilc.pi.cnr.it I set up a small Workshop Programme Committee, composed by: Nicoletta Calzolari (chair), Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale del CNR, Pisa, Italy Roy J. Byrd, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, U.S.A. Lauri Carlson, Department of Linguistics, University of Helsinki, Finland Sadao Kurohashi, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Japan Each one reviewed all workshop proposals, with comments sent to proposers. We received 10 proposals: one was rejected, one became a tutorial (more suitable as such), two have been asked to be merged and the proposers accepted. We ended up with 7 Workshops (2 of 2-days, 3 of 1-day (one became later half-day), 2 of half-day). Various organisational info asked to the workshop organisers was sent to the persons in charge in HK, and to Priscilla and Kathy. Everyone was very helpful in many occasions for many organisational details. Some problems arose in communication with local organisers, mainly because there have been different people in charge one after the other, with obvious difficulties, even though each one individually always trying to be really very helpful. Proceedings: problems due to late deadline for the Workshop proceedings wrt main conference, and quite many other details, have been solved with the help of everyone. David Yarowsky in particular did a great job for the Workshops Proceedings. I was expecting that ACL have some sort of "general guidelines", in particular for local organisation, workshop proceedings, etc. This would have been very useful, because most of the problems we had to face are the usual ones of every conference/workshop organisation (while sometimes it was not clear from whom to find the needed info). The availability of a few general rules would have saved a lot of time to everyone. COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS JOURNAL (Julia Hirschberg) ==================================================== Report for Computational Linguistics (September 2000) Julia Hirschberg, Editor Forty seven manuscripts were submitted to CL in 1999. Mean time from receipt of manuscript to first decision was 140 days, down from 184 in 1998. At this time, 52 papers have been submitted to the journal in 2000. Only two of these submissions are in our new and experimental short paper category, suggesting that this category may not be as useful an innovation as we had expected.* Twenty three of the rest are submissions to the special issue on Anaphora and Ellipsis resolution (guest editors Ruslan Mitkov, Shalom Lappin and Bran Boguraev). One special issue was published in 1999: Finite State Methods in NLP, edited by Lauri Karttunen and Kemal Oflazer, in the March 2000 issue (CL 26-1). Type of first decision made for 1999 submissions is shown below, and compared with previous years' reports at the time of the annual meeting in the next calendar year (since the annual meeting is later this year, more decisions have been made for 1999 papers): Disposition of Manuscripts as of NAACL Meeting, September, 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 Submitted 47 48 69 57 Accepted 14 9 21 9 Rejected 7 7 15 15 Resubmission 21 4 27 26 No decision yet 3 28 5 6 Withdrawn 2 1 1 The distribution of 2000 submissions by country (by first author's location) was as follows: Area Country Total ASIA Japan 3 Korea 3 New Zealand 2 Singapor 1 Total 9 EUROPE France 5 Germany 1 Greece 2 Italy 1 Netherlands 2 Russia 2 Spain 1 Switzerland 1 Turkey 1 UK 8 Total 24 NORTH AMERICA USA 12 Canada 1 Total 13 SOUTH AMERICA Brazil 1 * Note that time to decision for our first short paper was 53 days; the second has just been submitted. BOOK REVIEWS (Graeme Hirst) =========================== Computational Linguistics Book Review Editor's report Graeme Hirst September 2000 TIMELINESS OF PUBLICATION We are continuing to get most reviews published in a timely manner -- that is, within 12 months of receipt of the book. This allows six months for the reviewer (many take less) and five months for journal production. MATERIAL REVIEWED I am continuing to be fairly strict in deciding if a book is to be reviewed, but try to include all books that are in "core" computational linguistics, as well as a variety of books from adjacent and overlapping disciplines that are likely to be useful in CL. We do not review technical reports, doctoral theses, conference proceedings, or workshop proceedings, except if revised for publication as a book by a recognized publisher. PRODUCTION MATTERS I am indebted to Nadia Talent for long hours of reading out loud with me to check the galleys. ACL-2001 (Patrick Saint-Dizier) ============================== Preparation of ACL2001 - Toulouse Exec. comm. report nb. 1 September 27, 2000 by Patrick Saint-Dizier, stdizier@irit.fr ---------------------------------------------- Here is the current state of preparation of the ACL2001 from the point of view of `local arrangements'. Preparation has been devided into tasks, with someone responsible for each task. All costs are given all taxes included (VAT, = 19.6%). Basically, initial fares remain approximately those planned a year ago, but a major change is the rate of the $ which will make the conference slightly cheaper for our US and Canadian colleagues. 1. ROOMS: --------- Although I don't have any official response, the rooms we asked for have been allocated. I reserved slightly more than needed, but since I don't know exactly how many parallel sessions there will be, and how many special sessions (e.g. business meetings, students sessions,...) I prefered to ask for more. What is now reserved: - an auditorium with 700 to 800 seats, 4 audito. with 400 seats, - 10 rooms for workshops with 60 seats, - 6 rooms with 60 seats for tutorials. The main hall (1000 m2) is reaserved for software, publishers, registration and advertising. 3 points near the auditoriums will be devoted to coffee breaks. - we should have 2 rooms for e-mail equiped with 30 PCs + 2 rooms for demos with 1 PC inside, during the conference period. If you think this is too much, please do let me know asap. Video equipment is under discussion and preparation. Since there is a big 'trade-union' pressure we have to go slowly and to be patient and diplomatic. Staff is being `reserved' also. We think about having paid students to manage video projectors, computers, etc. This is going to be cheaper, with a better service. The regular staff is indeed charged at 256F/hour. Costs (still to be negociated): 90 000 F for rooms, tables,.., and cleaning + 30 000 F maximum for video and assistance. + insurance to be taken. This is basically what I had anticipated in the proposal (where fares are without taxes). 2. SPONSORS: ------------ So far, 3 requests have been made to the CNRS (continuing studies, engineering and humanities dept.). We expect about 20 000 F from the 3 together. 2 of us are in the different commitees. Obtained: 10 000 F from ATALA. In Progress, or just started: EEC DG13, Elsnet, Compulog. By December: Our 3 universities, IRIT, Midi Pyrenees region, Ministry of foreign affairs, etc.. Private: we want to wait till december also, since the sponsorship will be made on the 2001 budgets. 2 companies have already shown interest. We plan to issue a call for participation/demos for industrial partners. Fares have not yet been fixed. Suggestions from the exec. committee are welcome. 3. ACCOUNTING: -------------- Done by the CNRS, with NO management fees. One person there and one at IRIT will be in charge of the whole accounting (+ me to check everything). I will also hire a part-time post-doc `student' (2 days/week) to help me, from mid-November. Most of the accounting framework and procedures are now settled. So far, no money on the account. Inscription fees will be managed by ourselves (reception and validation) + the CNRS (purely accounting aspects). Funds in foreign currencies will be subject to a management/exchange fee of 1.6 %. Credit cards are, of course, the best solution. Same for funds from sponsors. Present expenses: 5000F for a the student who made the WEB page, about 500F of small expenses (1US$ = 7.60 F). Taken from my grant. I'd like to establish a first, as real as possible, budget before December. 4. ADVERTISING: --------------- So far, only electronic. We wait for the scientific committees to be nominated to start a larger advertising campaign. We have some difficulties getting e-mails of participants from previous meetings, incl. Coling00. But this should be resolved. The WEB site is operational, forms for inscriptions and the database are ready to work. I intend to revise the main page to make it more readable. Also, as soon as new information is available, the site will be updated. I will be also obliged by law to make a parallel site in French. All our advertising will also have to be bilingual. a waste of time... 5. ACCOMODATION: ---------------- Cheap rooms at student residences downtown have been reserved: 150 rooms during the workshop-tutorial period, and 200 rooms during the main conf. Fare: 95 F/night breakfast: 20F lunches: a maximum of 500 lunches can be served daily at the univ. cafeteria, fixed fare: 40F. For breaks this is OK, but fares have not yet been fixed, this depends on what we ask for, obvioulsy. For hotels: the company who accepted to make reservations at no cost has vanished. We'll seek for another one quickly. An alternative is to have lists of hotels with negociated fares managed by ourselves on our WEB site. Banquet: we're looking for something for about 250 persons. Looks difficult downtown. Outside the city, in a small castle, this should be much easier, but we'll have transportation expenses. We plan to have a dinner not exceeding 200F. Party: not yet done, too early. 6. OTHER TASKS: --------------- these tasks are less urgent, or smaller. They will start as soon as required: - Printings: we already have a formal agreement for the printing of the proceedings. 600 copies for 80 000F. Same for workshop and tutorial printings. - social events: under preparation, not so urgent. - transportation facilities: to be fixed in the next 2 months, essentially with Air France. I already have a formal agreement, but with no details. The period is certainly not optimal to get low discounts since this is the touristic season. - management of expos and demos: early next year. NAACL-2001 (Lori Levin) ======================= General Chair: Lori Levin, Carnegie Mellon University NAACL 2001 will be held on June 2-7 at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. We have been consistently behind schedule, but otherwise on track to produce a pleasant and high quality conference. Because of several constraints on the dates of the conference, and CMU's requirement to have the conference on campus, the conference will be held only one month before ACL/EACL. The following should help to assure reasonable attendance (around 400 people). --Collocation with EMNLP --Something a little different: A special full day of industry exhibits, which should at least it will make money even if it doesn't attract many people. --Early deadlines for paper submission, well in advance of ACL/EACL. Following are reports from the sub-chairs: LOCAL ARRANGEMENTS ------------------ Alon Lavie, Carnegie Mellon University Local arrangements for the conference are well under way and are progressing nicely. Main actions already taken include: - We have a draft budget for the conference, that has as of yet not been finalized. Suggested registration fees for the main conference are $250 (regular members) and $100 (students). - We have made arrangements with Lorrie Safar from CMU Conference Services to coordinate dealings with the various internal and external organizations for the conference. - We have reserved and secured the space for the conference at the CMU University Center for the duration of the conference (including workshops and tutorials) - We have confirmed and reserved the banquet location - The Carnegie Museum of Natural History - for the night of June 6, 2001. A contract has yet to be signed. - We have made arrangements with the Holiday Inn University Center to be the main conference hotel. The Holiday Inn will reserve a block of 125 rooms for the conference, at a preferred rate. - We have made arrangements with CMU housing to have a block of 150 comfortable single dorm rooms (with shared bath) reserved for the conference. Dorm rooms will cost about $40 per night. - We have made tentative arrangements for the special Exhibits Session to be held on the second day of the main conference. - We have started to explore catering options for all events (reception, banquet and coffee breaks) PROGRAM ------- Kevin Knight, ISI 7/25. draft CFP to naacl exec, including proposed senior program committee (SPC). 8/09. SPC list approved by naacl exec. 8/14. started assembling SPC. 8/14. sent initial CFP to priscilla for distribution. 8/15. initial CFP sent out. 8/26. final SPC settled: Eric Brill (Microsoft Research) Ann Copestake (Cambridge University and CSLI) Marti Hearst (UC Berkeley) Aravind Joshi (University of Pennsylvania) Andrew Kehler (UC San Diego) Elliott Macklovitch (University of Montreal) Fernando Pereira (WhizBang! Labs) Owen Rambow (AT&T Research) Elizabeth Shriberg (SRI) Ralph Weischedel (BBN) 8/31. requested reviewer suggestions from SPC. 9/13. sent updated CFP (w/ SPC names) to priscilla for distribution. 9/19. received final reviewer suggestions ("program committee"). 9/22. sorted potential reviewers, handled duplicates, distributed backups among SPC. 9/23. asked each SPC member to recruit approximately 10 reviewers from their list, preferably within a week, certainly by 10/15. 9/23-10/1. now working with Yaser Al-Onaizan on the web form for "intention to submit", which will operate from October 1st to November 6th. The stub is at http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/naacl01/notification-of-submission.html (already linked to from the main conference page). STUDENT RESEARCH WORKSHOP ------------------------- Advisor: Deborah Dahl, UNISYS Co-Chairs: Lisa Michaud, University of Delaware Krzysztof Czuba, Carnegie Mellon University * We decided to continue the successful format of last year's presentations in Seattle, arranging the papers in a full-day workshop and pairing a longer presentation time with prepared comments from an invited "panel" of two accomplished researchers for each paper. We are planning for 10 student presentations. * To give our students extra exposure to people who will not be able to make it to the workshop, we are also planning a poster session which will probably take place during the opening reception of the conference. * Our current status is that we have built a website at: http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~aclstu/naacl01-student/ ...and we have distributed a preliminary Call for Papers (emailed by Priscilla on August 15th), using the same deadlines as the main session (included below). We are currently finalizing our list of prospective paper reviewers for validation by the executive committee, and we are nearly done preparing our grant proposal in order to provide travel, registration, and lodging scholarships to our participants. Our deadline schedule: Deadline for electronic notification of intent to submit: November 6, 2000 Submission deadline: November 9, 2000 Acceptance notification: January 24, 2001 Camera-ready papers due by: February 27, 2001 WORKSHOPS --------- Lillian Lee, Cornell University 8/25/00: call for proposals sent to Priscilla Rasmussen 8/28/00: CFWP circulated by Priscilla (not sure what lists, I just know I got a copy); ref@cs.cmu.edu posted it to the NAACL '01 web pg. 9/8/00: CFWP sent to the corpora mailing list. 10/24/00: Sub. deadline 11/13/00: acceptances out 1/5/01: wksp descriptions due to me 3/9/01: wksp materials for repro due to me TUTORIALS --------- Dekang Lin, University of Alberta The call for tutorials went out last week. Deadline is December 20, 2000. DEMOS ----- Ronnie Smith, East Carolina University --Plan to issue CFP by mid-Oct. --Talked to David Traum, demo chair for ACl '99 and got some advice from him. EXHIBITS -------- Lynn Carlson, Department of Defense 1. Lynn Carlson and Kurt Godden have been coordinating on a solicitation letter to be sent out to a wide-range of commercial vendors. This draft letter will be finalized this week and sent out shortly. Kurt and his team (Arendse Bernth, Jeff Allen) have compiled a large mailing list. 2. Lynn suggested to Lori that information on both sponsorship and exhibits be placed on the Language Technologies 2001 Web site, for maximum exposure. Lynn agreed to provide this information to Bob Frederking. 3. The following is the general plan for the exhibits, which has been coordinated with Alon Lavie and Lori Levin: --Exhibitors will pay a flat fee of $750.00 for the full day exhibits session on June 6. --The fee will include attendance at the conference for one person. --The fee will be waived for Gold and Silver level sponsors. --Exhibitors will be asked to state a preference between a) having a booth, b) doing a 15-20 minute presentation, or c) both. Final decisions will be made after assessment of the level of interest. We will have an application and deadline for potential exhibitors (to be determined). --Exhibitors will be considered on a first-come, first-serve basis. SPONSORSHIPS ------------ Kurt Godden, Sporgit Technologies --Assembled a sponsorship committee. --Assembled a mailing list of approximately 100 potential sponsors. --Solicitation letter will be sent out next week. PUBLICITY --------- Ralf Brown, Carnegie Mellon University --Checked for conference calendars to make sure NAACL 2001 was listed. Added it where necessary. --Brochures and posters to be distributed in Hong Kong and elsewhere. --Still need to look into advertising in magazines and journals. WEB SITE -------- Bob Frederking, Carnegie Mellon University http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ref/naacl2001.html September hits: (from log in /afs/cs/data/www/url_200009.tab) Sep 21 03:30 355 /~ref/naacl2001.html Sep 26 03:40 516 /~ref/naacl2001.html It appears we've gotten an average of 32 hits per day in the last five days, whereas we had on average 17 hits per day the first 21 days of September. The total number of hits before Sept. 21 was about 1200. Does anyone know of a correlation between web site hits and submissions or attendance? OUTREACH -------- We decided to do some outreach to research communities that do not send many submissions to ACL conferences including speech recognition, machine learning, and information retrieval. The program chair, Kevin Knight, has taken steps in this direction: (1) The call for papers mentions that submissions will be accepted in those areas, and (2) Those areas are represented on the senior program committee. We are arranging the following extras -------------------------------------- --On line registration courtesy of Dragomir Radev, ACL --CDRom proceedings --Ethernet connections and wireless internet connections (if you register your card in advance) SIGs - GENERAL REPORT (Eduard Hovy) =================================== ACL Status Report SIGs -- General Eduard Hovy The ACL SIGs continue to be healthy and active. All but one of them held or cosponsored conferences or workshops during 1999-2000. The policy governing `shadow accounts' in which the funds generated by and allocated to each SIG is still under discussion. SIGDAT Joint ACL-SIGDAT Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Very Large Corpora Hong Kong, 7-8 October, 2000 SIGDIAL 1st SIGDIAL Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue Hong Kong, 7-8 October, 2000 SIGGEN International NL Generation Conference Mitzpe Ramon, Israel, 12-16 June 2000 This year the (regular biennial) workshop was replaced by a conference. SIGLEX Workshop on Word Senses and Multi-Linguality Hong Kong, 7 October 2000 SIGMOL MOL6 -- 6th Meeting on Mathematics of Language Orlando, Florida, 23-25 July 1999 SIGNLL Fourth Computational Natural Language Learning Workshop Lisbon, Portugal, 14 September 2000 (held in conjunction with ICGI-2000) SIGPARSE IWPT -- 6th International Workshop on Parsing Technologies Trento, Italy, 23-25 February 2000 SIGPHON Fifth Meeting of the ACL SIG in Computational Phonology Luxembourg, 6 August 2000 (held in conjunction with COLING) SIGDAT (Ken Church, David Yarowsky) =================================== SIGDAT - 2000 Annual Report SIGDAT is ACL's special interest group for linguistic data and corpus-based approaches to NLP. In 2000, SIGDAT organized the 2-day Joint SIGDAT Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Very Large Corpora (EMNLP/VLC-2000). The meeting was held immediately following ACL-2000 at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology on October 7 and 8. Hinrich Schuetze served as conference chair and Keh-Yih Su served as conference co-chair. 26 papers were accepted for presentation out of approximately 80 submissions, consistent with the typical 25-32% acceptance rate of SIGDAT conferences and workshops. EMNLP/VLC-2000 invited speakers were John B. Lowe (VP of Language Engineering, Ask Jeeves Inc.), speaking on the topic of "What's in store for question answering? Prognostications based on corpus analysis of several hundred million questions" and Soumen Chakrabarti of the Indian Institute of Technology. A panel session was held on the topic of "NLP for the Web: Critical Technology or Luxury?" Generous EMNLP/VLC-2000 corporate sponsorship was provided by Ask Jeeves Inc, Behavior Design Corporation, GroupFire Inc, Intel China Research Center and LEXIS NEXIS. EMNLP/VLC-99 is a temporary merger of SIGDAT's two thriving meeting series, the Conference on Empirical Methods in NLP and the Workshop on Very Large Corpora, now in their 8th and 5th year respectively. - David Yarowsky Secretary-Treasurer SIGDIAL (Laila Dybkjær) ======================== REPORT ON SIGDIAL ACTIVITIES SIGdial is the ACL Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue which was formed in November 1997. This report covers the period from August 1999 to September 2000. The first SIGdial elections were held in the summer of 1999. As a result of the elections and subsequent nominations, SIGdial is now being run by the following team: President: Laila Dybkjær; Vice President: David Traum; Secretary: Barbara di Eugenio; Science Advisory Committee: Akira Shimazu, Jennifer Chu-Carroll, Morena Danieli, Diane Litman, Michael Strube, and Jan van Kuppevelt; Information Officer: Pamela Jordan; AAAI Liaison: Diane Litman; ACL Student Liaison: Lisa Harper; CHI Liaison: David Novick; ESCA/ISCA Liaison: Roberto Pieraccini; ICSLP/ISCA Liaison: Julia Hirschberg; Bibliography Committee: Florence Reeder, Guido Boella, Carol Van Ess Dykema, David Traum, Marilyn Walker, and Rebecca Walther. During the past year several workshops with strong relations to the SIGdial field of interest have been endorsed by SIGdial: August 2, 1999: IJCAI Workshop on Knowledge and Reasoning in Practical Dialogue Systems (Stockholm, Sweden). November 5-7, 1999: AAAI Fall Symposium on Psychological Models of Communication in Collaborative Systems (North Falmouth, Massachusetts, USA). March 20-22, 2000: AAAI Spring Symposium, My Dinner with R2D2: Natural Dialogues with Practical Robotic Devices (Stanford, California). May 4, 2000: Workshop on Conversational Systems, NAACL/ANLP (Seattle, Washington, USA). May 29, 2000: From spoken dialogue to full natural interactive dialogue: Theory, empirical analysis and evaluation, LREC 2000 (Athens, Greece). June 15-17, 2000: Götalog 2000: 4th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (Göteborg University, Sweden). July 3-5, 2000: Third Workshop on Human-Computer Conversation (Bellagio, Italy). October 7-8, 2000: ACL2000: 1st SigDial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue with theme session on Principles For Dialogue System Evaluation (Hong Kong). November 3-5, 2000: AAAI Fall Symposium, Building Dialogue Systems for Tutorial Applications (North Falmouth, MA, USA). The first SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue is now reality and will be held as a two day post-conference workshop in conjunction with ACL 2000 in Hong Kong. 18 papers have been selected for presentation at the workshop which will include sessions on annotation and corpus work, prosody and dialogue, discourse, cooperation, dialogue management, dialogue systems and tools, and evaluation. The organisers of the workshop are Laila Dybkjær, Koiti Hasida, and David Traum backed by a strong group of colleagues on the program committee. The web site and mailing list which had so far been hosted and maintained by SIGdial at IET, USA, had to be moved in spring 2000. The mailing list is now hosted by Loria, Nancy, in France and maintained by Laurent Romary. When the web site had to be moved it also had to be given a new url. In order to avoid changing urls in the future the domain name sigdial.org was bought. For the moment www.sigdial.org is hosted by NISLab in Denmark. The calendar and events pages are maintained by Pamela Jordan, University of Pittsburgh, USA, whereas all other web pages are maintained by Laila Dybkjær and staff at NISLab. A new membership database has been implemented very recently to provide more functionality and to allow for more information about the individual member. For the moment SIGdial has +200 members. A flyer on SIGdial has been produced and will be distributed for the first time at ACL 2000 and at the first SIGdial workshop. The aims of the flyer are to make SIGdial more visible, attract more members, and encourage more activity in the area. SIGGEN (Ehud Reiter) ==================== Report on SIGGEN 99-00 After an open discussion, a document describing SIGGEN's participation in future NLG events was produced. There are three categories of events * INLG (International NLG) Conferences: SIGGEN will solict bids and ask that they meet certain criteria (such as open attendance and formal publication). However, it will leave the choice between bids to a committee of previous INLG PCs, and will not be involved in INLG finances. * SIGGEN NLG workshops: SIGGEN will offer support in name to NLG workshops that meet certain criteria * Other events: may be listed on the SIGGEN Web site at the discretion of the SIGGEN webmaster There were two SIGGEN-supported events in 2000: The First International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG-00) in Israel (the bids for this were done under the old rules, as they pre-date the new policy); and Impacts in Language Generation: NLG Between Technology and Applications, in Germany. SIGGEN is now formally soliciting bids for INLG-02, under the new policy. SIGGEN also organised a contest and a vote for a logo. This was won by Ted Caldwell (from CoGenTex, Inc). The new logo is on the SIGGEN website and can be used by SIGGEN approved conferences and workshops. The SIGGEN web site continued to expand, and now includes detailed sections on NLG resources (books, conferences, systems and software, people, papers). The SIGGEN mailing list is now moderated, to ensure that only appropriate messages are sent to it. The mailing list now has 232 subscribers; these subscribers constitute the official SIGGEN membership for purposes of electing officers and other voting matters. The future of SIGGEN was discussed at the INLG-00 business meeting. It was decided that instead of having one election for the complete board every 4-6 years, it was better to have an election every two years for the student member plus two (out of four) of the other members. This election will be organised after INLG-02 has been arranged. SIGLEX (Adam Kilgarriff, Martha Palmer) ======================================= SIGLEX Report to ACL Executive 22 Sept 2000 There has been the following activity since the last ACL. 1) 'Standardizing Lexical Resources' workshop at Maryland ACL '99. This well-attended workshop carried forward the debate on how lexical resources might be standardized, respective roles of EU projects (particularly EAGLES) and US initiatives, and how agreement on suitable sense inventories --as required for NLP in general, and SENSEVAL in particular-- might be achieved. Chair: Martha Palmer; Invited speakers: Nicoletta Calzolari, Chuck Fillmore, Patrick Hanks and Piek Vossen; Panel organisers: Christiane Fellbaum and Philip Resnik. 2) NLE Special Issue on Semantic Tagging The special issue of the Natural Language Engineering Journal based on the SIGLEX97 workshop held in conjunction with ANLP'97 in Washington DC was published as NLE 5(2) 1999. It was edited by Martha Palmer and Marc Light, and was published by Cambridge University Press. 3) CHum Special Issue on SENSEVAL The SIGLEX-sponsored SENSEVAL (Word Sense Disambiguation Evaluation) exercise in 1998 generated a high level of interest, and the journal Computers and the Humanities proposed a Special Issue. In the event, it was a Special Double Issue (34 1--2), edited by Adam Kilgarriff and Martha Palmer. It was published in June 2000 by Kluwer. 4) SENSEVAL-2 In the course of the year SENSEVAL-2 has been planned for 2001. Again it will be primarily a SIGLEX event, though also under the aegis of EURALEX (European Assn for Lexicography). A call for interest was posted in spring, and it currently looks hopeful that there will be tasks for * French * English * Italian * Japanese * Spanish * Danish * German * Estonian * Swedish * Korean * Chinese (Last time there were tasks for just 3 languages.) There are likely to be over 30 participating systems, with most teams participating for English. Co-ordinators are Adam Kilgarriff and Phil Edmonds (of Sharp Labs Europe). In consultation with Patrick St-Dizier, we have recently set the SENSEVAL-2 workshop for July 6-7 in Toulouse, running as a regular ACL-2001 workshop. We are aware this is somewhat forward of us, as we did not go through the workshops chair. We hope we are forgiven, as it proved hard to set a date, and SENSEVAL involves large quantities of planning and data preparation so it was necessary to clarify the schedule a full year ahead. 5) 'Word Senses and Multilinguality' workshop, ACL 2000, Hong Kong This workshop, organised by Nancy Ide, Phil Resnik, Chuck Fillmore and David Yarowsky, addresses particularly a challenging question that has arisen in several recent SIGLEX events: can sense inventories be idenfified by operationalising the intuition that a word only has interestingly distinct senses where the distinct senses have different translations in other languages. Several good papers have been received and we look forward to a tightly-focussed workshop. 6) Adoption of a constitution SIGLEX has until now been without a formal constitution. One has now been proposed and will be voted on at the ACL workshop in Hong Kong. The constitution is closely modelled on those of other ACL SIGs. Proposals for officers include: Nominating committee: Nicoletta Calzolari (University of Pisa), Marc Light (MITRE Corporation), Martha Palmer (University of Pennsylvania), and Philip Resnik (University of Maryland) President: Adam Kilgarriff, ITRI, University of Brighton Secretary: Christiane Fellbaum, Princeton University Information Officers: Grame Hirst, University of Toronto Martha Evens, Northwestern University Boyan Onyshkevych, Department of Defense Charles Fillmore, University of California, Berkeley --------------- Adam Kilgarriff Martha Palmer --------------- SIGMEDIA (Elizabeth Andre) ========================== ANNUAL REPORT SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP ON MULTIMEDIA LANGUAGE PROCESSING (SIGMEDIA) September 18th 2000 CHAIR: Elisabeth Andre (DFKI GmbH, Germany, andre@dfki.de) MAILING ADDRESSES: sigmedia@dfki.de, sigmedia-request@dfki.de (administrative matters) URL: http://www.dfki.de/sigmedia/ During the last period, SIGMEDIA members have been involved in the organization of the following workshops: - INLG 2000 Workshop: Coherence in Generated Multimedia (Co-Chairs: John Lee, Kees van Deemter, Date: 12 June 2000, Venue: Mitzpe Ramon, Israel) - AAAI 1999 Fall Symposium on Modal and Temporal Logics Based Planning for Open Networked Multimedia Systems (Chair: Fawzi Daoud, Venue: Date: Nov. 5-7 2000. North Falmouth, MA, USA) - AAAI 2000 Fall Symposium on Socially Intelligent Agents - The Human in the Loop Chair: Kerstin Dautenham, Date: 3-5 November 2000, Venue: Sea Crest Resort, North Falmouth, MA, USA - i3 Workshop on Interactive Learning Environments for Children (Chair: Constantine Stephanidis, Date: 3 March 2000, Venue: Athens, Greece) Furthermore, we strenghtened our links to the European I3 Network (Intelligent Information Interfaces) and established links to the International Scientific Forum “Towards an Information Society for All” (ISF). Due to these links, a slight increase in membership could be observed. SIGMOL (Larry Moss) =================== REPORT ON MOL FOR THE UPCOMING ACL MEETING ACL's SIG on Mathematics of Language (SIGMOL) is a group consisting primarily of computer scientists and linguists interested in theoretical work in "mathematical linguistics" in a broad sense, including much of classical formal language theory, as well as aspects of contemporary grammar formalisms, computational linguistics, statistical linguistics, and semantics. SIGMOL is a loose organization which exists primarily to hold a bi-annual conference. It has no membership dues, and there are few activities between the meetings. Its members typically have other organizational ties, and the association with the ACL is especially welcome. The president from 1999-2001 is Larry Moss, and the vice-president is Dick Oehrle. Following the 2001 meeting, Dick will become president and a new vice-president will be elected. The two previous presidents were Aravind Joshi and David Johnson. The MOL meetings are workshop-style events usually lasting two or three days. Proceedings are issued at the same time as the meeting. In addition, the past two meetings have produced journal issues, the last one being a forthcoming double issue of _Grammars_. The next meeting will be held in Helsinki, Finland just before the 2001 European Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information. It will be held jointly with the Formal Grammars conference that usually is part of ESSLLI. For the first time, SIGMOL is reaching out to the educated public by presenting a symposium at the 2001 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The symposium is on Mathematical Statistics in Linguistics and Natural Language Processing. SIGMOL obtained funding from the US National Science Foundation to bring five prominent researchers to the AAAS meeting. The point again is to make an important area pertaining to mathematics of language known to a much wider audience. It also may widen the circle of people who participate in MOL meetings, since statistical work has not as yet been well represented at MOL meetings. SIGMOL would like to cordially invite other ACL members to the symposium on Friday, February 16, in San Francisco. Overall, SIGMOL is in a healthy state and should continue to grow, in North America and in perhaps even more in Europe. It has a much smaller membership than other academic organizations and is accordingly much less ambitious. At the same time, we feel that it has a purpose. And we hope that it continues to live up to that purpose. Larry Moss SIGNLL (Walter Daelemans) ========================= ACL SIGNLL - President's Report 1999 In 1999 SIGNLL has an estimated 210 members and our web pages are relatively frequently browsed (40 hits per week). Joining SIGNLL is possible via the SIGNLL home page located at URL http://www.aclweb.org/signll/. The membership of SIGNLL is still diverse both in nationality and in research area indicated (psychology, linguistics, machine learning, computational linguistics, grammar induction, and other more peripheral areas). Updating of the web-pages (where links can be found to relevant assocations, networks, research cooperations, research departments, groups, institutes, individuals, mailing lists, archives, journals, bulletins, conference reports, online papers, online courses and slides, bibliographies, software, corpora, companies, meta-information sources etc.) remains one of the main services of the SIG (done by SIGNLLs information officer dr. Antal van den Bosch). Information relevant to the NLL community is regularly distributed through an email list derived from the membership records. The provision of resources to the NLL research community remains a major goal. The main event in 1999 was the third CoNLL (SIGNLL Conference on Natural Language Learning), organized in co-location with the EACL in Bergen, Norway. Meanwhile also the fourth CoNLL has been organized in Lisbon, Portugal, co-located with ICGI (the Grammar Inference conference), and LLL (Learning Language in Logic). The number of contributions for these CoNLL meetings was 14 and 37, respectively, indicating a growing acquaintance of the research community with CoNLL. An election for president and secretary was held in 1999. Elected president of SIGNLL for 2000-2001 is Walter Daelemans (University of Antwerp) and secretary for that period is Claire Cardie (Cornell University). Our new international Advisory Committee consist of Thorsten Brants, Michael Brent, James Cussens, Raymond Mooney, John Nerbonne, Miles Osborne, David Powers, and Ronan Reilly. Our SIGDAT Liaison Representative remains David Yarowsky, and our Information Officer Antal van den Bosch. We think SIGNLL is still unique in its multiple focus (computational models of language learning both for language engineering and for testing psycholinguistic and linguistic theories; formal and empirical aspects of learning of both artificial and natural languages). We think we have successfully strived for complementarity with related SIGDAT events such as EMNLP and WVLC, and have contributed to interdisciplinary communication by our conference co-location policy. Immediate plans for the future are the organization of a successful fifth CoNLL in 2001 with a "shared task" to focus attention of researchers, and setting up a "living bibliography" on our website involving members of the research community. Walter Daelemans Antwerp, 18 September 2000 SIGPARSE (Harry Bunt) ===================== 1999-2000 report from SIGPARSE ----------------------------- Over the period July 1999 - July 2000, the activities of SIGPARSE have, as usual, focussed on matters concerning the biennial `International Workshop on Parsing Technologies' (IWPT) series. In addition, SIGPARSE has given its sponsorship to the workshop on Chinese Language Processing that takes place in conjunction with ACL-2000 in Hong Kong. The Sixth International Workshop on Parsing Technologies (IWPT 2000) took place at the Institute for Research in Science and Technology (IRST) in Trento, Italy. The organisation was in the hands of Harry Bunt as general chair, John Carroll as program chair and Alberto Lavelli as local arrangements chair. The workshop had approximately the same number of participants as the previous IWPT (between 60 and 70), and enjoyed a satisfactory number of submitted papers from which a high-quality selection of 23 papers was made that were presented at the workshop, supplemented with 17 posters. Invited talks were given by Martin Kay, Eric Brill and Giorgio Satta. The proceedings, containing the 23 accepted papers, summary versions of the invited talks, and abstracts of the posters were available at the workshop. The local arrangements were organised in an excellent fashion, and so the workshop may be considered quite successful. Preparations have in the mean time started for the Seventh International Workshop on Parsing Technologies, to be held in China in late 2001 or in Spring 2002. Giorgio Satta has agreed to be program chair and Fuliang Weng to be local arrangements chair. Also, a book has been put together publishing an edited selection of papers, presented at the Fifth International Workshop on Parsing Technologies (IWPT'97) which was held in Cambridge, Mass., September 17-21, 1997. This book is a sequel to the two volumes based on workshops in the IWPT series that were published earlier: "Current Issues in Parsing Technology" (Masaru Tomita, ed.; Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston/Dordrecht 1991), based on IWPT'89, and "Recent Advances in Parsing Technology" (Harry Bunt and Masaru Tomita, eds.; Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston/Dordrecht 1996), based on IWPT'93. The new volume, entitled "Advances in Probabilistic and Other Parsing Technologies" and edited by Harry Bunt and Anton Nijholt, is again published by Kluwer Academic Publishers (series Text, Speech and Language Technology) and is forthcoming in October 2000. During the period reported here, Harry Bunt (Tilburg University) has continued as SIGPARSE officer. Alon Lavie at CMU has been most helpful in continuing to maintain the active SIGPARSE email list (`sigparse-project@cs.cmu.edu'). A SIGPARSE website is maintained at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Twente in Enschede, the Netherlands. This site can be found at `http://parlevink.cs.utwente.nl/sigparse/'. Harry Bunt, September 2000. SIGPHON (Alain Thériault) =========================== Alain Thériault Liaison Officer SIGPHON Executive Committee ACL Special Interest Group in Phonology (SIGPHON) 1999-2000 Activity Report SIGPHON held its fifth workshop this year, under the auspices of COLING 2000. Attendance was slightly up, with 21 registrants and 28 hardcopy proceedings sold. The workshop title was "Finite-State Phonology," a theme that succesfully brought together different descriptive traditions (rewrite rules, DP, OT) and fostered discussion of cutting-edge computational and formal issues. The program included six papers, a discussion of relevant papers from the main conference, and a panel titled "How to Design a Great Workbench Tool for Working Phonologists?" SIGPHON continues to serve the community by maintaining a mailing list and online bibliographies at its web site, www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/sigphon/. Membership currently stands at 176, with 36 members declaring computational phonology as their "primary" interest. SIGSEM (Patrick Blackburn) ========================== ----------------------------------------------------------------- Annual Report on SIGSEM, 26 October 2000 Patrick Blackburn and Harry Bunt ----------------------------------------------------------------- The past year has been dominated by two activities. First, sponsoring workshops. Second, getting the SIGSEM website up and running, and holding a membership drive. ICoS-2, the Second Workshop on Inference in Computational Semantics was held at Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany, on July 29--30, 2000. The invited speakers were: James Allen: Towards Practical Dialogue Systems. Christof Monz: Computational Semantics in Information Retrieval Bonnie Webber: Computing Anaphora There were thirteen invited talks, and six system demonstrations. In addition, there was a fruitful discussion of the role of SIGSEM and the future of the ICoS workshop. ICoS is a small event, but a lively one that attracts some bright young researchers. There was a general feeling that it was important to retain the genuine workshop atmosphere it has, and to increase the emphasis on implementations. The proceedings of ICoS-2 will be appearing as a special issue of the Journal of Language and Computation. Plans are now underway for ICoS-3. If all goes according to plan, this will be held as a satellite workshop of IJCAR in June 2001 in Siena, Italy. IJCAR, the International Joint Conference on Automated Reasoning, is a one-off event made up of the three main automated reasoning conferences (CADE, FTP, and TABLEAUX). Holding ICoS-3 as a satellite workshop should encourage further links between the automated reasoning and NLP communities. As well as invited and contributed talks, we are planning to offer a tutorial on automated reasoning for computational linguists, and a tutorial on computational semantics for members of the automated reasoning community. SIGSEM is also a sponsor of IWCS-4, the Fourth International Workshop on Computational Semantics, which will be held in Tilburg, the Netherlands, from January 10--12, 2001. A preliminary version of the SIGSEM webpage has been made public (and there is now a link to it from the ACL homepage): see www.sigsem.org It is now possible to sign up as a SIGSEM member online, and the list of members is maintained publicly. Response to the site has exceeded expectations. It was anticipated that membership would plateau at about 90. In fact, in the first two weeks since the site was made public we have signed up 110 members. We will be continuing our membership drive in the coming weeks. It now seems plausible that we will attract over 150 members by the end of the year. As encouraging as the numbers is the quality of the membership we are attracting. Once the membership drive is over, it is hoped to further develop the website. Among other things, we hope to develop serious coverage of projects in computational semantics, educational tools and courses in computational semantics, and inference tools. ACL INTERNET SITE (Dragomir Radev) ================================== The ACL Internet site (http://www.aclweb.org) June 11, 1999 - September 20, 2000 Report by Dragomir R. Radev (radev@umich.edu) INTRODUCTION o The ACL Web site is getting more and more popular. From June 11, 1990 to September 20, 2000, the top-level page has been accessed 153,494 times. That is an average of 331 hits (accesses) per day (or an increase of 22.1% over last year). NEW ACTIVITIES o Democratization of ACL elections - two votes conducted: (1) Constitution changes - old name (Association for Computational Linguistics) stays (316 votes) (2) New officers - Member of the Exec, Vice-President in Waiting, and Secretary (274 votes as of 09/20/2000). o A page for NAACL has been created (Claire Cardie): http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/People/cardie/naacl o An electronic membership and ordering form has been created: http://www.aclweb.org/reg/reg.cgi o The server will now automatically restart (Greg Silber) o A secure server has been set up for sensitive transactions (Greg Silber) https://www.aclweb.org o ACL conference registration pages (Greg Silber): https://www.aclweb.org/aclreg00/aclreg00.html o Some SIGs have registered their own domains: SIGSEM and SIGSEM. Others are using redirects from the main ACL page: SIGGEN, SIGNLL. All SIGs have functioning Web pages. o An ACL archives section has been added (Richard Sproat, separate report): http://www.aclweb.org/archive/ o A new version of the Software registry has been released (Thierry DeClerck): http://registry.dfki.de/ CONTINUING FEATURES o The ACL NLP/CL Universe, the catalog of Web-based NLP/CL resources, has grown at a steady rate. Since last year there has been an 15.3% increase in the number of pointers, bringing their total from 1913 to 2206. There are now 322 personal pages, 524 pointers to various resources (corpora, software, etc.), 323 academic or industrial labs, departments, and institutes, etc. o The mailing list acl-news is used to announce new additions to the NLP/CL Universe. Currently, the list includes 566 subscribers (a 30.1% increase from last year). The list is posted automatically to the only NLP-related newsgroup on Usenet - comp.ai.nat-lang. Since ACL 1999, the newsletter has been published nine times. o The unofficial Natural Language Processing FAQ (list of Frequently Asked Questions and Answers) is still available through the ACL page. Volunteers are sought to contribute to the list. A new version of the FAQ was released in September of 1999. ANNOUNCEMENTS o ACL members should make an attempt to announce all events, resources, or personal and lab pages to the aclweb.org site using the on-line URL submission mechanism. Please feel free to send me mail with suggestions or comments (radev@umich.edu) ACL ARCHIVES (Richard Sproat) ============================= 2000 Report on the ACL Archives Late in 1999, at the request of various officers of the ACL, I agreed to become the archivist for the ACL. The feeling was that there were various and sundry documents relating to the ACL organization and procedures which were worth preserving, but which had not been collected into one place, and were therefore hard to find. My first job was therefore to collect such material. Some of this was provided to me directly, and the rest I collected from one ACL officer's archived e-mail correspondence related to the Association. The next task was to set up the website, which I did in December of 1999. The archives may now be accessed at http://www.aclweb.org/archive/. The purpose of the Archives is to store any material relating to the ACL deemed worthy of preservation. This includes, but is not limited to, offical documents (e.g. constitutions, foundation documents), officer reports, guidelines (e.g. program committee guidelines, local organizer's guidelines) and lists of past and present officers of the ACL. The current top-level page contains the following entries: - ACL Official Documents (3 items) - ACL Society Guidelines and Reports (16 items) - Current and Past Officers of the ACL (4 lists) - Some Notes on ACL History (1 report) - ACL Exec Private Area (4 items) Note that the Private Area is password protected. The Archives will only remain useful if people contribute archival material to keep it up to date. Such material can be submitted to me directly at archivist@aclweb.org. Richard Sproat ACL Archivist archivist@aclweb.org NLP Software Registry (Thierry Declerck) ======================================== Actual status of the ACL Natural Software Registry -------------------------------------------------- The fourth edition of the ACL Natural Language Registry (NLSR) has been released this year (see http://registry.dfki.de/) This version offers among others a new functionality: a database has been developed which allows menu-guided standard queries for all the specifications of the products as they are listed in the Registry. So the visitor will have two types of access to the information stored in the NLSR: browsing through the structured list of products or by asking for specific information. Another novelty concerns the classification of the products, which in the former editions of the NLSR was no longer representing with accuracy the state of the art of the Human Language Technology (HLT). Our taxonomy is largely based on the book "State of the Art in Language Technology" (ed. by G.B. Varile and A. Zampolli, Linguistica Computazionale, volume XII - XIII). The classification can be enriched by the products submitted and/or by comments done by the visitors. For the time being around 130 products are listed, all of those having been checked on their actuality. Ongoing activities ------------------ - We are preparing a "call for submission" to be delivered by the ACL mailing list and other relevant lists (like COLIBRI). - We are checking the ACL catalog of Web-based NLP/CL resources and looking for redundancies or inconsistencies with the listing in the Registry. - We are looking for a closer cooperation and interlinking with initiatives concerned with the listing and organisation of NLP/CL resources (like TELRI, Elsnet, LDC, ELRA, national initiatives, the CLASS support project of the EC). - We will look for extending and improving the classification work done so far (taking into account more recent "Surveys" of the State of the Art in the HLT domain.) Contact: registry@dfki.de -------