Fifth Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing Washington Marriott Hotel Washington, DC March 31 - April 3, 1997 sponsored by the Association for Computational Linguistics The conference is intended to bring together researchers, system implementers, and managers from around the world to exchange information on the application of natural language processing to real-world problems. Through technical presentations, case studies, tutorials, and demonstrations, it will examine how specific approaches, techniques, and resources have proven valuable for particular applications in text and speech processing. AREAS OF INTEREST Original contributions are solicited in all areas of applied natural language processing, including but not limited to: text and message processing; spoken language understanding; machine translation; information retrieval; computer-aided language learning; grammar and style checking; instructional systems; help systems; text and spoken language generation; database retrieval systems; multilanguage systems and multimedia systems. Contributions may address applications, novel characteristics of implemented systems, tools and methods for system development (for example, for corpus analysis, knowledge acquisition, and system customization and maintenance), resources (such as corpora and lexicons), implementation techniques, and evaluation methods. Papers that critically evaluate an approach or language processing strategy are especially welcome. PROGRAM COMMITTEE Sessions will be organized and contributions will be reviewed by the program committee: Ralph Grishman (chair), New York University Chinatsu Aone, SRA Corp. Rusty Bobrow, BBN Martha Evens, Illinois Institute of Technology Lynette Hirschman, MITRE Corp. Eduard Hovy, Univ of Southern California/Information Sciences Institute Yuji Matsumoto, Nara Institute of Science and Technology Boyan Onyshkevych, U. S. Dept. of Defense Tomek Strzalkowski, General Electric Corporate Res. and Dev. Henry Thompson, Univ. of Edinburgh Hans Uszkoreit, DFKI Saarbruecken Marc Vilain, MITRE Corp. and by other reviewers selected by the program committee. REQUIREMENTS FOR SUBMISSION A paper accepted for presentation at this meeting cannot be presented or have been presented at any other meeting with publically available proceedings. Papers that are being submitted to other conferences must indicate this on the submission (on the identification page). Papers may be submitted to both the ANLP 97 and ACL 97 conferences, so long as this is indicated on the submission, and a paper accepted for ANLP 97 is subsequently withdrawn from ACL 97 (the submission deadline for ACL 97 is shortly before the notification date for ANLP 97). TYPES OF PRESENTATIONS * Full technical papers (a maximum of 8 proceedings pages) * Briefer technical notes (a maximum of 4 proceedings pages) focussing on a single technical or implementation issue * System presentations with demos: demo sessions will be organized as part of the conference, consisting of presentations of novel system features followed by system demos. Full support for demos will be provided. Submissions for demo sessions should include a technical paper or note describing the system, emphasizing its novel characteristics and relating it to other work described in the literature. System descriptions will normally be the length of a technical note (4 pages maximum) but technical papers (8 pages maximum) will be considered if warranted by the novel technical material. Each paper must be accompanied by a set of printed graphics or, if possible, a video of the system to be presented, in order to judge its value as a demo presentation. These submissions will be reviewed on the same schedule as technical papers. * Videos (maximum 15 minutes) that display interesting research on NLP applications to real-world problems. Promotional videos are acceptable so long as their main focus is on giving a clear and realistic idea of how natural language processing is being used, rather than on advertising a company or product. Videos will be reviewed on the same schedule as technical papers. Accepted videos will be organized into an ongoing video presentation. Authors should submit one copy of their videotape, accompanied by a submission letter granting permission to copy the tape to a standard format, along with two copies of a one to two page abstract that includes the title, the name, address, and email of the authors, the tape format of the submitted tape (VHS (preferred), NTSC, PAL, or SECAM), and the duration. Tape submissions should be sent to the same address as hard-copy papers (see below). * Student posters describing ongoing student research work (a maximum of 3 proceedings pages). SUBMISSION FORMAT The submission should consist of an identification page plus the actual paper. Because reviewing will be blind, the actual paper should not contain the authors' names or addresses. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the authors' identity (e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991)...") should be avoided. Instead use references like "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...". The identification page should include the title, the paper type (paper, note, demo paper, student), the name, full address and affiliation, and email address of each author, the indication "student: yes" if an author is an ACL student member, and a brief abstract, in the following format: title: A Really Universal Semantic Representation type: paper author: Ralph Grishman address: Computer Science Department New York University 715 Broadway, Room 703 New York, NY 10003 email: grishman@cs.nyu.edu author: Know One Atoll address: Computer Science Department New York University 715 Broadway, Room 701 New York, NY 10003 email: atoll@cs.nyu.edu student: yes abstract: This paper describes a new universal semantic representation, based on the recently decoded conversations of humpback whales. Using interviews with several species, we present evidence of its efficacy as an interlingua for inter-species machine translation, and its advantages over previous, anthropocentric representations. The paper should be prepared in the format of an ACL proceedings paper (two column, single spaced, but with no author information) and must conform to the length requirements for the type of submission. Please do not submit double-spaced papers. Electronic Submissions Electronic submissions should consist of the material of the identification page, as a simple ASCII file, followed by a single self-contained LaTeX file for the paper itself. This should be sent as a single mail message to anlp97@cs.nyu.edu, with the subject line "submission", on or before November 7, 1996. Electronic submissions must use the ACL proceedings style (aclap.sty) which can be obtained by ftp (as described below). A model paper, model.tex, is also available from the ftp site. Hard Copy Submissions Five copies of the paper and one copy of the identification page should be sent to ANLP 97 Computer Science Department New York University 715 Broadway, 7th Floor New York, NY 10003 In the case of hard-copy submissions, an email message with the information on the identification page and the subject line "hard copy submission" should be sent to anlp97@cs.nyu.edu. Hard copy submissions must be received by November 7, 1996; late papers will be returned unopened. DEMOS In addition to the demo sessions, there will be booths for the presentation of demos throughout the conference. All demo presenters will be asked to provide brief system descriptions; these will be included in a demo proceedings volume, which will complement the volume of technical papers. Sites interested in presenting a demo at the conference should send a note by email to anlp97@cs.nyu.edu by December 6, 1996 with the subject line "demo", giving a brief description of the demo, and indicating whether there will be a requirement for any equipment beyond that which will be provided by the demonstrator. VENUE The meeting will be held at the Washington Marriott Hotel, in downtown Washington, D.C. from March 31 (Monday) through April 3, 1997. Tutorials are scheduled for Monday, with technical sessions on Tuesday through Thursday. Early April is usually one of the nicest times in Washington, with the cherry blossoms just starting to come out. We have planned the location, in combination with a wide-ranging technical program, to encourage participation from government and industry. Local arrangements are being handled by John White of PRC, white_john@po.gis.prc.com. SCHEDULE Nov. 7, 1996 Submissions due Jan. 22, 1997 Notification of acceptance / rejection Feb. 12, 1997 Final papers due March 31-Apr. 3, 1997 Conference TUTORIALS The conference will include a set of tutorials on the first day, March 31. Proposals for tutorials should be sent to the program chair. FEEDBACK We're looking to develop a broad conference program with multiple "tracks" to meet the needs of a wide range of attendees. Send queries and comments to the program chair, Ralph Grishman, New York University, grishman@cs.nyu.edu. FTP and WWW SITE We have placed the ACL style file (aclap.sty) and a model LaTeX paper (model.tex) at the New York University FTP site. To obtain the style file, $ ftp cs.nyu.edu Name: anonymous Password: grishman@cs.nyu.edu [not echoed] ftp> cd pub/nlp/anlp97 ftp> get aclap.sty ftp> quit $ These files can also be accessed through the WWW page we have set up for the conference, http://cs.nyu.edu/cs/projects/proteus/anlp97