Venue:	Sapporo Convention Center, Sapporo, JAPAN
Dates:	Tutorials and Pre-conference Workshops: July 7, 2003
	Main Conference: July 8-10, 2003
	Post-conference Workshops: July 11-12, 2003

This news letter includes:

1) Early Registration (by June 14)

2) About SARS

3) Accommodation at Sapporo

4) Tentative Program

5) List of Accepted Papers

6) Announcements from Several Workshops

7) Information on Other Conferences or Workshops Being Held Nearby

1) Early Registration (by June 14)

The ACL-2003 Conference registration is now available online.

We look forward to seeing you in Sapporo! The conference promises to be an exciting and informative gathering and Sapporo will offer a wide variety of wonderful experiences.

Note that the deadline of early registration (June 14) is fast approaching.


2) About SARS

The risk of SARS is a clear concern for everyone attending the conference. However, Japan HAS NOT been affected by SARS, and the governments and authorities in Japan and in the affected countries are very vigilant not to spread SARS. Reports from the World Health Organization indicate that SARS is under control and the number of new cases decreases steadily. We do not expect a dramatic change in this situation and do not anticipate that this will affect the conference. We will make relevant announcements on the issue on our Web site.

We are looking forward to seeing you at Sapporo.


3) Accommodation at Sapporo

July is the best season to be in Sapporo, pleasant, not too hot and virtually no rain. However, this means that it attracts many holiday makers from all over Japan and the world, and you will find hotel booking difficult. We recommend you to visit our Web site to book your hotel. We also prepare nice, clean and cheap accommodations for students. Contact us immediately (also see our Web site).


4) Tentative Program

For details, see the Web site.

July 7:	Tutorials, IRAL (AC2)
July 8-10:	Main Conference, Exhibition
July 9-10:	Interactive Poster/Demo Sessions
July 9:	Banquet
July 10:	Student Workshop
July 11-12:	EMNLP (AC1), WS6
July 11:	WS1, WS2, WS3, WS5, WS8
July 12:	WS4, WS7, WS9

[Note]

AC1	The Eighth Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP2003)
AC2	The Sixth International Workshop on Information Retrieval with Asian Languages (IRAL2003)
WS1	Multilingual Summarization and Question Answering
WS2	Natural Language Processing in Biomedicine
WS3	The Lexicon and Figurative Language
WS4	Multilingual and Mixed-language Named Entity Recognition
WS5	The Second International Workshop on Paraphrasing
WS6	Second SIGHAN Workshop on Chinese Language Processing
WS7	Multiword Expressions: Analysis, Acquisition and Treatment
WS8	Linguistic Annotation: Getting the Model Right
WS9	Workshop on Patent Corpus Processing

Note that WS10 Towards a Resources Information Infrastructure has been canceled.


5) List of Accepted Papers

The Program committee of the main coference selected 71 papers from 360 submitted papers and the PC of the student sessions compiled an interesting program of 12 papers. The interactive demo and poster session, which is a new attempt in this ACL conference, has 27 papers to be presented. 11 wokrshops including EMNLP and IRAL accepted more than 130 research papers. You can see the titles and authors of these accepted papers in our Web site.


6) Announcements from Several Workshops

WS4 Multilingual and Mixed-Language Named Entity Recognition

Funding: Three participants have received $500 student travel grants. Funding for additional students may be available, sponsored by the Microsoft Research Group. For more information, please contact Mari Olsen as soon as possible.

Invited Speaker: David Yarowsky, "Bootstrapping Multilingual Named-Entity Recognizers". Full program and information available at http://research.microsoft.com/conferences/mulner-acl03/.


WS5 Second International Workshop on Paraphrasing: Paraphrase Acquisition and Applications

The complete workshop program is now on our Web site.


7) Information on Other Conferences or Workshops Being Held Nearby

(a) 4th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGdial2003)

July 5 and 6, 2003, Sapporo Industries Cultivation Center


(b) Workshop on Language Understanding and Agent for Real World Interaction

July 13, 2003, Hokkaido University


(c) PAPILLON-2003 Workshop on Multilingual Lexical Databases

July 3-5, 2003, Hokkaido University


(d) Joint ACL-SIGSEM and ISO TC-37/SC-4 Workshop

July 6, Sapporo