Thursday 20th July, 9:30-10:30, Bayside Auditorium A

Some of the themes that the panel will discuss are as follows:

• Diversity and Universality: Are Asian languages special?
• Some critical linguistic differences in Asia and implications for NLP.
• Can the availability of detailed linguistic information (for example,
  morphology) help in ameliorating the scarcity of large annotated corpora?

Panelists:

• Jun'ichi Tsujii, Professor, University of Tokyo, Japan and
  Professor of Text Mining, University of Manchester and Director of National Center for Text Mining (NaCTeM), UK
• Benjamin Tsou, Chair Professor of Linguistics and Asian Languages, Director, Language Information Sciences Research Centre, City University of Hong Kong.
• Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India

Moderator:

• Aravind Joshi, Henry Salvatori Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Short Biographies of the panelists and the moderator:

Jun'ichi Tsujii

Jun'ichi Tsujii has worked in Natural Language Processing since 1976. Starting with Machine Translation, he has widened his research to grammar formalisms for practical NLP application, Efficient Parsing for HPSG/LTAG, Information Extraction and Intelligent Question Answering. He leads a successful research team on NLP at the University of Tokyo, Japan. In 2005, He was appointed Professor of Text Mining at School of Informatics, University of Manchester as well as Director of National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM).

Benjamin Tsou

Benjamin Tsou began work on Chinese syntax and MT at MIT in the 1960's. After more work on textual summarization and speech-to-text processing, he has more recently worked on entropy, and Sentiment Analysis. Since 1995, he has cultivated the large scale [200 million character annotated] synchronous (monitor) corpus for Chinese, LIVAC, which dynamically monitors characteristic linguistic and cultural variations among 6 major Chinese speech communities. He is Chair Professor of Linguistics and Asian Languages, and Director of the Language Information Sciences Research Centre of the City University of Hong Kong.

Pushpak Bhattacharaya

Pushpak Bhattacharyya is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and
also Professor-in-Charge of the Language Processing Laboratory at IIT Bombay,
India. He was a visiting research fellow at MIT (1990), visiting Professor at Stanford University (2004), and Joseph Fourier University Grenoble (2005). His research focus is on Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Machine Translation and Information Extraction and plays a leading in a national project on CLIR and MT.

Moderator: Aravind Joshi

Aravind Joshi is the Henry Salvatori Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a Past President of ACL and a Member of ICCL. He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, USA. His research interests are in the areas of formal, computational, and processing models of syntax, semantics, and discourse. Currently he is involved in a large discourse annotation project.