Workshop Chair (Nicoletta Calzolari)
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              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.