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.