ACL European Chapter Report 2002

Donia Scott, Chair
John Carroll, Secretary


1. Constitution

The ACL executive ratified the new EACL constitution at their meeting in

Toulouse, July 2002.


2. EACL Chair-elect

The new constitution introduces a new EACL post: Chair-elect. The EACL
Nominating Committee proposed Claire Gardent. The EACL Secretary emailed
out a call to members for any further nominations; none were received.
Claire Gardent was therefore elected unopposed, as Chair-elect 2002. She
will become Chair in January 2003, for an initial term of 2 years.


3. EACL'03

Three bids to hold EACL'03 were received, from Budapest, Heidelberg and
Trento. The EACL Board at its meeting in Toulouse, July 2002,
shortlisted Budapest and Trento, and asked for further specific details
in revised bids. When these were received, the Board discussed them and
chose Budapest. Major considerations were: encouragement of East-West
links in Europe, and the fact that Trento is hosting a major CL event
this year (ESSLLI'02). Claire Gardent (as Chair-elect) will be in
overall charge of conference arrangments, assisted by Philippe Blache
(Board member responsible for conferences), both reporting to the rest
of the Board. The local arrangements chair is Ferenc Kiefer.

The conference will take place 12-17 April 2003, at the Hotel Agro
situated in the Buda hills. The Board is seeking to widen participation,
and there will be dedicated tracks for project notes and demos; the
Board is also encouraging national CL groups in Europe to organise
events in conjunction with the conference. It is hoped that there will
also be official participation from EU projects.

Conference chairs have been appointed and have held one meeting, at LREC
in Las Palmas. The list of chairs is:

Programme Co-Chairs: Ann Copestake (UK), Jan Hajic (Czeck Republic)
Demos and Poster Chair: Alberto Lavelli (Italy)
Tutorial Chair: Dan Cristea (Romania)
Publication Chair: Patrick Paroubek (France)
Workshop Chair: Steven Krauwer (The Netherlands)
Student Workshop Chair: EACL Student Board (M. Gabsdil, J.Hockenmaier, J. Herring)

Planning for the conference is going well, and the first call for papers

will be sent out soon. The conference website is
http://www.conferences.hu/EACL03/.


4. Newsletter

There has been much positive feedback about the first EACL newsletter.
The second EACL newsletter was sent out to members 18 January 2002, and
the third is in preparation and will be sent out to members in early
July.


5. Sponsorships

In 2002, EACL will sponsor the ESSLLI foundational course on Shallow
Text Processing to be given by Chris Brew, with a contribution of 750
euro. In return for sponsorship, members of EACL will be eligible for a
reduced registration fee.

EACL will also sponsor the computational lexicography training workshop
LEXICOM, to be held at the University of Brighton, July 2002. The
contribution will be 750 euro, to be administered by LEXICOM to support
the participation of a student from Eastern Europe.


6. European Masters in Language and Speech

EACL (jointly with ISCA) continues to endorse EMasters awards to
successful students. Walter Daelemans, the EMasters board member
appointed by EACL reports that the initiative seems to be thriving. The
summer school in Leuven this summer (8-12 July) will attract 50 students
and 10 staff. The summer school structure in Brno, which included
student presentations, will be kept in future schools. The 14 partners
in the EMasters have now graduated 24 students, with 52 students
onging. The Universities of Muenster and Muenchen have expressed an
interest in becoming partners in the EMasters. The EMasters website
(http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/Euromasters/) is informative and
well-designed. There are plans to try to solve the problem of lack of
financial support by having departments pay for their own costs and in
addition apply for an Erasmus intensive programme as a group. Finally,
Gerrit Bloothooft has announced that he will retire as coordinator of
the EMasters; a new coordinator will probably be appointed by the
EMasters board at the next meeting in Leuven on July 13.


7. New EACL Website

The EACL Student Board have devised an attractive and informative new
website, which went online in May 2002, at http://www.eacl.org. The
site contains links to EACL news, the main ACL site, conferences, CL
research and educational resources, and archival material. The EACL
Board congratulate the students on a very professional job.


8. New officers

The biennial cycle for electing new EACL officers is coming around
again, and the EACL Nominating Committee will shortly be preparing
the slate for the term 2003-5.