The Association for Computational Linguistics invites the submission of papers for its forty-first Annual Meeting to be held in Sapporo, Japan. Papers are invited on substantial, original, and unpublished research on all aspects of computational linguistics, including, but not limited to:

Requirements

Papers should describe original work; they should emphasize completed work rather than intended work, and should indicate clearly the state of completion of the reported results. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation results should be included.

Submissions will be judged on correctness, originality, technical strength, significance and relevance to the conference, and interest to the attendees.

A paper accepted for presentation at the ACL Meeting cannot be presented or have been presented at any other meeting with publicly available published proceedings. Papers that are being submitted to other conferences or workshops must indicate this on the title page, as must papers that contain significant overlap with previously published work. Click here for more details.

Reviewing

The reviewing of the papers will be blind. Reviewing will be managed by an international Conference Program Committee consisting of Area Chairs, each of whom will have the assistance of a set of Program Committee members. Final decisions on the technical program will be made by the Conference Program Committee. Each submission will be reviewed by at least three reviewers.

Submission Information

Submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings and should not exceed eight (8) pages, including references. We strongly recommend the use of ACL LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word Style files tailored for this year's conference.

Several files are supplied below that describe the formatting for ACL'03 submissions. Note that full paper submissions are restricted to 8 pages, while short paper submissions are restricted to 3 pages.

PDF file illustrating the format	acl03.pdf
Postscript file illustrating the format	acl03.ps
Sample latex file	acl03.tex
Style file for latex	acl03.sty
Bibliography formatting file for latex	acl.bst
MSWord dot file	acl03.dot

A description of the format is available in acl03.ps in case you are unable to use these style files directly.

Note also that as reviewing will be blind, the paper should not include the authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...", should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...". Papers that do not conform to the requirements above are subject to be rejected without review.

Submission Procedure

All papers must be submitted electronically at the same web address. The papers must be submitted no later than 11 p.m. Central Time February 26, 2003 (Midnight Eastern time Feb. 26 2003; 5 a.m. GMT on Feb 27, 2003). Papers submitted after that time will not be reviewed: (Note that we no longer require early registration for papers.)

Please consult the submission page for detailed description of the submission procedures.

Questions regarding the submission process should be directed to acl03-submissions@cs.uiuc.edu.

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline:	February 26, 2003, 11 p.m. Central Time
Notification of Acceptance:	April 26, 2003
Camera ready papers due:	May 20, 2003
ACL-03 Conference:	July 7-12, 2003

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 ACL meetings. They may also have some trouble with the style of the presentation of the material that is expected for ACL.

The service will be arranged as follows. A set of potential mentors will be identified by Martha Palmer who has agreed to organize this service for ACL'03. An author who would like to take advantage of this service must send a draft of his/her paper to:

Martha S. Palmer
256 Moore
Department of Computer and Information Science
University of Pennsylvania
200 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA
U.S.A.

The author must send ONE copy of the paper (HARD COPY by regular mail or by FAX) by no later than January 9, 2003. The author should try to make the draft as complete as possible in order to get the best advice. An appropriate mentor will be assigned to your paper and the mentor will get back to the author at least two weeks before the deadline for the submission to ACL'03 program committee.

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 Martha Palmer.