================================================================================ ================================================================================ COLING/ACL 2006 NEWSLETTER NO. 1 This is the official newsletter of COLING/ACL 2006 For complete details, visit the conference web site at: www.acl2006.org www.coling2006.org ================================================================================ ================================================================================ ================================================================================ :: Important Dates ================================================================================ Workshop proposal submission deadline: December 9, 2005 (Fri) Tutorial proposal submission deadline: January 5, 2006 (Mon) Main conference paper submission deadline: February 28, 2006 (Tue) Student research workshop paper submission deadline: February 28, 2006 (Tue) Tutorials: July 16, 2006 (Sun) Main conference: July 17-21, 2006 (Mon-Fri) Workshops: July 22-23, 2006 (Sat-Sun) ================================================================================ :: Table of Contents ================================================================================ 1. Conference Venue 2. Organising Committee 3. Main Conference Call for Papers 4. Mentoring Service 5. Call for Proposals for Workshops 6. Call for Proposals for Tutorials 7. Call for Papers for Student Workshop ================================================================================ :: 1. Conference Venue ================================================================================ Situated on a breathtaking harbour, Sydney is one of the world's most attractive, exciting and vibrant cities, with stunning attractions, great climate and friendly people that ensure it continues to exceed visitor expectations. Recreation, exploration, adventure and relaxation await in a multicultural city bursting with unique attractions, fine dining, world class accommodation, non-stop shopping, heart racing adventure and a diverse range of entertainment. COLING/ACL 2006 will take place at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre, Australia's largest and premier venue for conferences, exhibitions and special events. The centre is superbly located on the waterfront in Sydney's most popular visitor precinct, Darling Harbour, adjacent to the city's central business district. The centre offers superb views over Darling Harbour and the city skyline as well as world class facilities. ================================================================================ :: 2. Organising Committee ================================================================================ General Chair: Nicoletta Calzolari Program Chairs: Claire Cardie and Pierre Isabelle Student Workshop Chair: Rebecca Hwa Workshop Chair: Suzanne Stevenson Tutorial Chair: Claire Gardent Demo Chair: James Curran Exhibits Chair: Menno van Zaanen Sponsorship (International): Steven Krauwer Sponsorship (Australia): Dominique Estival Publicity: Timothy Baldwin Publications: Olivia Kwong Mentoring: Richard Power Student Volunteers: Priscilla Rasmussen Website: Andrew Lampert Local Arrangements: Robert Dale and Cecile Paris Registrations and Delegate Information: Judy Potter ================================================================================ :: 3. Main Conference Call for Papers ================================================================================ Program Co-Chairs: Claire Cardie (Cornell University) Pierre Isabelle (National Research Council of Canada) Important Dates: Paper submission deadline: February 28, 2006 Notification of acceptance: April 28, 2006 Camera ready papers due: May 26, 2006 Following up on the higly successful events at Stanford (1984) and Montreal (1998), the International Committee on Computational Linguistics and the Association for Computational Linguistics will be hosting their third joint conference in Sydney, July 17th-21st, 2006. Papers are invited on substantial, original, and unpublished research on all aspects of computational linguistics, including, but not limited to: pragmatics, semantics, syntax, grammars and the lexicon; phonetics, phonology and morphology; lexical semantics and ontologies; word segmentation, tagging and chunking; parsing, generation and summarization; language modeling, spoken language recognition and understanding; linguistic, psychological and mathematical models of language; information retrieval, question answering, information extraction and text mining; machine learning for natural language; corpus-based modeling of language, discourse and dialogue; multi-lingual processing, machine translation and translation aids; multi-modal and natural language interfaces and dialogue systems; applications, tools and language resources such as annotated corpora; and system evaluation. We are particularly interested in bridging the gap to other related communities, and so we especially welcome papers on speech technology and information retrieval. Also, for this first joint COLING/ACL conference to be held in Asia we especially encourage papers that address issues specific to the processing of Asian languages. Papers can be submitted to one of two categories: the REGULAR PAPER category or the POSTER category. Authors must designate one of these categories at submission time. Although both categories of submmission will be the same maximum length, regular papers will be presented a single time to a potentially large audience during one of the parallel paper sessions at the conference, and poster presentations will be repeated several times before small groups of people (using paper posters or demos) at one of the conference poster sessions. Regular papers are most appropriate for presenting substantial research results, while posters are more appropriate for presenting an ongoing research effort. Regular papers and poster papers will appear in separate volumes of the proceedings. For further information regarding requirements, reviewing, formatting and submission details, see the conference web site: http://www.acl2006.org/program/papers ================================================================================ :: 4. Mentoring Service ================================================================================ ACL is providing a mentoring (coaching) service for authors from regions of the world where English is not the language of scientific exchange. Many authors from these regions, although able to read the scientific literature in English, have little or no experience in writing papers in English for conferences such as the COLING and ACL meetings. The service will be arranged as follows. A set of potential mentors will be identified by Richard Power, who has agreed to organize this service for COLING/ACL 2006. Dr Richard Power Faculty of Mathematics and Computing The Open University Walton Hall Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK Tel: +44 (0) 1908 654863 Fax: +44 (0) 1908 653744 Email: r.power@open.ac.uk # NOTE: THESE CONTACT DETAILS SUPERSEDE THOSE CONTAINED IN THE FIRST CFP To take advantage of this service, send the paper electronically to the above email address, using pdf, ps or doc format. Alternatively, hard copy can be sent to the postal address. The paper should arrive before January 28, 2006. An appropriate mentor will be assigned to your paper and the mentor will get back to you by February 21, 2006, at least seven days before the deadline for the submission to COLING/ACL 2006. Please note that this service is for the benefit of the authors as described above. It is not a general mentoring service for authors to improve their papers. If you have any questions about this service please feel free to send a message to Richard Power. ================================================================================ :: 5. Call for Proposals for Workshops ================================================================================ Workshops Program Committee: Suzanne Stevenson (Chair), University of Toronto Ann Copestake, University of Cambridge Pascale Fung, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology Jamie Henderson, University of Edinburgh Ingrid Zukerman, Monash University Important Dates: Submission deadline for workshop proposals: December 9, 2005 Notification of acceptance of workshop proposals: January 16, 2006 The Program Committee of the 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and the 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics invites proposals for workshops to be held in conjunction with the joint COLING/ACL conference in Sydney, Australia. We solicit proposals on any topic of interest to the COLING and ACL community. We especially welcome interdisciplinary proposals that encourage deeper connections to fields both traditionally and more recently allied with computational linguistics (such as linguistics, speech processing, psychology, information retrieval, machine learning, bioinformatics, etc.). For further information on submission details, see the conference web site: http://www.acl2006.org/program/workshops ================================================================================ :: 6. Call for Proposals for Tutorials ================================================================================ Tutorials Chair: Claire Gardent (CNRS/Nancy) Important Dates: Submission deadline for tutorial proposals: January 5, 2006 Notification of acceptance: January 20, 2006 Tutorial descriptions due: April 10, 2006 Tutorial course material due: June 6, 2006 Tutorial proposals are invited for the Tutorial Program of COLING/ACL'06. Proposals for tutorials on all topics of computational linguistics and its applications are sought. Especially encouraged are cross-disciplinary tutorials that educate the community about recent technical advancements in semantic processing, machine learning, statistics, or data mining technology that are of interest to computational linguistics, or introduce relevant algorithms and theory that may be "old hat" to specialists in these areas but are still unfamiliar to part of the natural language processing community. For further information on submission details, see the conference web site: http://www.acl2006.org/program/tutorials ================================================================================ :: 7. Call for Papers for Student Workshop ================================================================================ Student Research Workshop Co-Chairs: Marine Carpuat (Hong Kong University of Science & Technology) Kevin Duh (University of Washington) Important Dates: Paper submissions deadline: February 28, 2006 Notification of acceptance: April 28, 2006 Camera ready papers due: May 19, 2006 The Student Research Workshop is an established tradition at ACL conferences. The workshop provides a venue for student researchers investigating topics in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing to present their work and receive feedback. Participants will have the opportunity to receive feedback both from the general audience and from selected panelists -- experienced researchers who prepare in-depth comments and questions in advance of the presentation. We invite all student researchers to submit their work to the workshop. As the main goal of the workshop is to provide feedback, the emphasis is on work in progress. The research being presented can come from any topic areas within computational linguistics including, but not limited to: * pragmatics, discourse, semantics, syntax and the lexicon * phonetics, phonology and morphology * linguistic, mathematical and psychological models of language * information retrieval, information extraction, question answering * summarization and paraphrasing * speech recognition, speech synthesis * corpus-based language modeling * multi-lingual processing, machine translation, translation aids * spoken and written natural language interfaces, dialogue systems * multi-modal language processing, multimedia systems * message and narrative understanding systems For further information regarding requirements, reviewing, formatting and submission details, see the conference web site: http://www.acl2006.org/program/student-workshops ================================================================================