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