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) Report on Early Registration

2) Registration: Online Registration (by June 30)

3) Reception Party and Registration Desk

4) Program

5) Invited Speakers

6) Useful Information for Your Stay in Japan

1) Report on Early Registration

522 people registered for ACL'03 at our early registration site, among which 485 people will attend the main conference and 37 of which are WS-only registrants. These numbers are higher than we expected. Thank you for your interest in ACL03.


2) Registration: Online Registration (by June 30)

Please be aware that the registration site will be closed at midnight, June 30 (Eastern Time). While you can register on site, your name will not be listed on the participant list. We recommend that you register now, which is less expensive than on-site registration.

The ACL-2003 Conference registration form is available online.

Online registration deadline (late registration):

By midnight, June 30, 2003 (Eastern Time)

3) Reception Party and Registration Desk

The registration desk will be open at the Sapporo Convention Center from 9:00, July 7, where you can pick up your conference kit.

The reception party, free for all participants of ACL03, where you can enjoy a bit of Japanese culture and delicious food, will start from 18:00, July 7, also at the Sapporo Convention Center.

Since the registration desk will be very crowded on the first day of the conference (July 8), we recommend that you pick up your conference kit on July 7 and then relax.


4) Program

Detailed programs for the Main Conference, Student Workshop, Interactive Posters/Demos, Associated Conferences, and Workshops are now shown on the Website.


5) Invited Speakers

We have invited the following speakers:

Main Conference

Cynthia Fisher: From Structure to Meaning: Simple Sentence-Structure Cues Guide Sentence Comprehension by Young Children

Ariel Rubinstein: Economics about Language

Donia Scott: Layout in NLP: The Case for Document Structure

LTA Winner: The name of the 2nd LTA winner will not be disclosed till the award ceremony. The winner give a talk.


Associated Conference (AC1): EMNLP

Knight, Kevin: Deeper Representations for Machine Translation: Ready or Not?


WS1: Multilingual Summarization and Question Answering

Dan Roth

Noriko Kando


WS2: Natural Language Processing in Biomedicine

Carol Friedman: Opportunities and Challenges for NLP in Biomedicine


WS4: Multilingual and Mixed-language Named Entity Recognition

David Yarowsky: Bootstrapping Multilingual Named-Entity Recognizers


WS5: The Second International Workshop on Paraphrasing

Graeme Hirst: Paraphrasing Paraphrased


6) Useful Information for Your Stay in Japan

(a) ATMs in Japan

ACL'03 attendees should be aware that most Japanese ATMs are not connected to US and European banking networks, so it may be wise not to rely solely on ATMs for obtaining cash in Japan. Visa and Mastercard are usually accepted at major restaurants and hotels, but you may wish to use travellers checks, cash advances on credit cards or other means to obtain cash while visiting Japan.


(b) Tips

In Japan, there is no need to give tips anywhere including hotels, restaurants and taxis where people usually give tips in other countries.


(c) Sapporo City Information Desk

The desk is located on the 1st floor of the JR Sapporo Station Complex and is open from 9:00 to 17:30, July 6. If you have problems (getting lost at the airport, around town, etc.), please call 011-209-5030. The desk staff will be there to help you.

The desk is open from 8:30 to 17:30 between July 7 and 10 at the Sapporo Convention Center. Please visit for further local information.


*This is the last issue of the ACL03 newsletter. Thank you for your interest and we are looking forward to seeing you in Sapporo.