2016Q3 Reports: AFNLP Representative
AFNLP has been working very closely with other sister associations in this quarter. Many of the events will be described in this issue, including:
- Collaboration with the Association Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing (ACLCLP), Taiwan, to organize the 2017 conference
- Support China Computer Federation (CCF) and Chinese Language Computer Society (CLCS) to organize the 4th Natural Language Processing & Chinese Computing and 24th International Conference on Computer Processing of Oriental Languages (NLPCC-ICCPOL-2016), Kunming, China, December 2-6 2016.
- Collaborate with COLING2016 to organize the 12th Workshop on Asian Language Resources, December 12, 2016, Osaka, Japan.
AFNLP keeps a close working relationship with ACL. Since our inception, AFNLP has a representative sitting in the ACL Executive Committee and ACL has one in ours. Respectively, they are Haifang Wang and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. They take up the strategic role of linking between both societies. Furthermore, AFNLP has been influential to ACL management with our members, Pushpak Bhattacharyya (AFNLP Member-At-Large, 2015-2017), Haifang Wang (AFNLP Liasion Member, 2013-14, 2015-2016) and Jun’ichi Tsujii (AFNLP President 2007-2008), serve(d) as ACL Presidents, 2016, 2013, and 2006, respectively.
AFNLP Election
Chengqing Zong, our General Secretary, has recently announced the start of the process of nomination and election of AFNLP members-at-large (MALs) and Office Bearers. I urge members to participate actively. Following is the schedule:
July 1, 2016 | Nomination for members-at-large (MALs) and Vice-President (VP), committees chairs starts |
July 31, 2016 | Nomination due for members-at-large (MALs) |
August 8, 2016 | MAL voting starts |
September 4, 2016 | MAL voting due |
September 7, 2016 | Announcement of the MAL election results |
September 21, 2016 | Nomination due for VP, committee chairs |
September 26, 2016 | Start voting for Office Bearers |
October 25, 2016 | Voting due for Office Bearers |
October 28, 2016 | Announcement of the new Office Bearers |
January 1, 2017 | New office starts |
Members can refer to http://www.afnlp.org/main/guidelinesmal.htm for the policies of the nomination and election of MALs. All individual members of AFNLP are eligible to nominate and to be nominated. An individual member should be an active AFNLP member for at least 4 years to qualify for MAL candidacy. The nomination submission should include nominee’s name, job title, affiliation, email contact, a biography up to 500 words, an election statement up to 500 words, and two nominators. All nominations should be submitted to AFNLP General Secretary, Chengqing Zong (cqzong@nlpr.ia.ac.cn), before July 31, 2016 (Sunday).
Asian Linguistic Resources Committee (ALRC)
Koiti Hasiti (Chair, ALRC, AFNLP) Kam-Fai Wong (President, AFNLP), Nicoletta Calzorari, ELRA, Italy, and Key-Sun Choi, ISO/TC 37/SC4 (language resource management standards), KAIST, Korea are organizing the 12th Workshop of Asian Language Resources, COLOG2016, Osaka, Japan, December 2016. The Workshop focuses on language resources for Asian region, which has more than 2,200 spoken languages. There are now increasing efforts to build multi-lingual, multi-modal language resources, with varying levels of annotations, through manual, semi-automatic and automatic approaches, as the use of ICT spreads across the region. Also, the number of applications based on these language resources has been rapidly growing. The workshops on ALR is a series aiming to forge a better coordination and collaboration among researchers on these languages, and the NLP community, in general to develop common frameworks and processes for this purpose.
Publicity and Communications
We will initiate an update exercise for the expert list in this coming quarter. The target is to get the name, expertise and associated contact information of 20 experts from each country/region. The list will be shared with international NLP associations and conferences for them to select more Asian experts in their activities.
Based on input from members of the executive committee, AFNLP has compiled a list of 2016 NLP-related conferences, which will be held in or related to Asia, see below:
Conference | Submission Date | Notification Date | Conference Date | Location |
SIGIR 2016 | Jan 21, 2016 | Mar 31, 2016 | Jul 17-21, 2016 | Pisa, Italy |
ACL 2016 | Mar 18, 2016 | May 14, 2016 | Aug 7-12, 2016 | Berlin, Germany |
EMNLP 2016 | Jun 3, 2016 | Jul 29, 2016 | Sep 1-5, 2016 | Austin, TX, USA |
ICHAI2016 | Apr 30, 2016 | Jun 24, 2016 | Oct 4-7, 2016 | Singapore |
PACLIC2016 | Jun 30, 2016 | Jul 31 2016 | Oct 28-30, 2016 | Seoul, Korea |
IALP 2016 | Jul 20, 2016 | Aug 20, 2016 | Nov 21-23, 2016 | Tainan, Taiwan |
NLPCC2016 | Jul 22, 2016 | Sep 17, 2016 | Dec 2-6, 2016 | Kunming, China |
COLING 2016 | Jul 15, 2016 | Sep 19, 2016 | Dec 11-16, 2016 | Osaka, Japan |
WALR2016 | Sep 25, 2016 | Oct 16, 2016 | Dec 12 | Osaka, Japan |
MT Summit XVI | TBD | TBD | Sep 18-22, 2017 | Nagoya, Japan |
IJCNLP2017 | Jun 20, 2017 | Aug 20, 2017 | Nov 20-24, 2017 | Taipei, Taiwan |
Scholarship and Awards
AFNLP has committed three best paper awards to the following conferences:
a. ACL-2016 Student Research Workshop, August 7-12, 2016
b. IALP-2016, Tainan, Taiwan, November 21-23, 2016
c. COLING-2016, Osaka, Japan, December 11-16, 2016
IJCNLP 2017
Please refer to the report of IJCNLP-2017: http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2016Q3_Reports:_IJCNLP_2017.