Second Call For Papers

             (EMNLP/VLC-99) JOINT SIGDAT CONFERENCE ON
       EMPIRICAL METHODS IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING AND
                        VERY LARGE CORPORA

     Sponsored by SIGDAT (ACL's Special Interest Group for Linguistic
Data and Corpus-based Approaches to NLP)

                          June 21-22, 1999
                       University of Maryland

                           In conjunction with
                     ACL'99: the 37th Annual Meeting of the
                     Association for Computational Linguistics

This SIGDAT-sponsored joint conference will continue to provide a forum
for new research in corpus-based and/or empirical methods in NLP.  In 
additionto providing a general forum, the theme for this year is 
"Corpus-based and/or Empirical Methods in NLP for Speech, MT, IR, and
other Applied Systems" 

A large number of systems in automatic speech recognition(ASR) and
synthesis, machine translation(MT), information retrieval(IR),  optical 
character recognition(OCR) and handwriting recognition have become 
commercially available in the last decade.  Many of these systems use 
NLP technologies as an important component. Corpus-based and
empirical methods in NLP  have been a major trend in recent years. How
useful are these techniques when applied to real systems, especially when 
compared to rule-based methods?  Are there any new techniques to be 
developed in EMNLP and from VLC in order to improve the state-of-the-art 
of ASR, MT, IR, OCR, and other applied systems?  Are there new ways to 
combine corpus-based and empirical methods with rule-based systems? 

This two-day conference aims to bring together academic researchers and
industrial practitioners to discuss the above issues, through technical 
paper sessions, invited talks, and panel discussions. The goal of the 
conference is to raise an awareness of what kind of new EMNLP techniques 
need to be developed in order to bring about the next breakthrough in 
speech recognition and synthesis, machine translation, information
retrieval and other applied systems.  

Scope 

The conference solicits paper submissions in (and not limited to) the
following areas: 

1) Original work in one of the following technologies and its relevance
to speech, MT, or IR: 
      (a) word sense disambiguation 
      (b) word and term segmentation and extraction 
      (c) alignment 
      (d) bilingual lexicon extraction 
      (e) POS tagging 
      (f) statistical parsing 
      (g) dialog models 
      (h) others (please specify) 

2) Proposals of new EMNLP technologies for speech, MT, IR, OCR, or other
applied systems (please specify). 

3) Comparetive evaluation of the performance of EMNLP technologies in 
one of the areas in (1) and that of its rule-based or  knowledge-based 
counterpart in a speech, MT, IR, OCR or other applied system. 
  
Submission Requirements 

Submissions should be limited to original, evaluated work. All papers
should include background survey and/or reference to previous work.  The 
authors should provide explicit explanation when there is no evaluation in 
their work. We encourage paper submissions related to the conference theme. 
In particular, we encourage the authors to include in their papers, 
proposals and discussions of the relevance of their work to the
theme. However,  there will be a special session in the conference to
include corpus-based and/or empirical work in all areas of natural language
processing. 

Submission Format 

Only hard-copy submissions will be accepted. Reviewing of papers will
not be blind. The submission format and word limit are the same as those 
for ACL this year. We strongly recommend the use of ACL-standard LaTeX 
(plus bibstyle and trivial example) or Word style files for the 
preparation of submissions. Six opies of full-length paper (not to exceed
3200 words exclusive of references) should be received at the following
address before or on March 31, 1999. 

EMNLP/VLC-99 Program Committee 
c/o Pascale Fung 
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering 
University of Science and Tehnology (HKUST) 
Clear Water Bay, Kowloon 
Hong Kong 

Important Dates 

March  31             Submission of full-length paper 
April    30             Acceptance notice 
May      20            Camera-ready paper due 
June      21-22       Conference date 

Program Chair

Pascale Fung 
Human Language Technology Center 
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering 
University of Science and Tehnology (HKUST) 
Clear Water Bay, Kowloon 
Hong Kong 
Tel:  (+852)  2358 8537 
Fax: (+852)  2358 1485 
Email: pascale@ee.ust.hk 
  
Program Co-Chair 
Joe Zhou 
LEXIS-NEXIS, a Division of Reed Elsevier 
9555 Springboro Pike 
Dayton, OH 45342 
USA 
Email: joez@lexis-nexis.com

Program Committee (partial list) 

Jiang-Shin Chang (Behavior Design Corp.) 
Ken Church (AT&T Labs--Research) 
Ido Dagan (Bar-Ilan University) 
Marti Hearst (UC-Berkeley) 
Huang, Changning (Tsinghua University) 
Pierre Isabelle (Xerox Research Europe) 
Lillian Lee (Cornell University) 
David Lewis (AT&T Research) 
Dan Melamed (West Law Research) 
Masaaki Nagata (NTT) 
Steve Richardson (Microsoft Research) 
Richard Sproat (AT&T Labs--Research) 
Andreas Stolcke (SRI) 
Ralph Weischedel (BBN) 
Dekai Wu (Hong Kong University of Science & Technology) 
David Yarowsky (Johns Hopkins University)