HLT 2002 Human Language Technology Conference March 24-27, 2002 San Diego, California PRELIMINARY CALL FOR PAPERS Human language technology (HLT) incorporates a broad spectrum of disciplines working towards two closely related goals: to enable computers to interact with humans using natural language capabilities, and to serve as useful adjuncts to humans in language understanding by providing services such as automatic translation, information retrieval and information extraction. The HLT 2001 Conference in March 2001 provided a single unified forum for researchers across this entire spectrum of disciplines to present very recent high-quality, cutting-edge work, to exchange ideas and to explore emerging new research directions. Following the great success of HLT 2001, the Conference and Program Chairs invite submissions for HLT 2002 from researchers in computer science, linguistics, engineering, psychology, etc., who are exploring innovative methods for improving human language technology. Further information will be available at the Conference web site, http://hlt2002.org. The Conference will span four days, running from Sunday noon through mid-day Wednesday. It will include peer-reviewed research presentations, posters, demonstrations, panel sessions and time for discussion. We expect it to include a session of invited "best of" papers from conferences of sponsoring organizations focussing in particular subdisciplines of HLT. HLT 2002 will also include a special focus on Language Processing of Biological Data, which includes both Information Extraction of Biological Data and Language Modeling of Biological Data, an emerging research area involves a linguistic/language processing view of biological data from the perspective of bioinformatics. The purpose of this special focus within the HLT2002 context is to bring to the attention of a wide audience of HLT researchers the research opportunities and recent breakthroughs in these newly emerging areas. The special focus will comprise back-to-back tutorial sessions at the opening of the conference and a paper session within the larger conference setting. Because of the conference site, space at the Conference is limited to 330 participants. Space will automatically be reserved for authors of accepted papers, posters, and demonstrations. AREAS OF INTEREST HLT submissions outside of the special focus should be in any area of advanced HLT research, including but not limited to such areas as: Dialogue systems HLT Resources, architectures, and evaluation Information retrieval Information extraction Machine translation Question answering Speech recognition and synthesis Text summarization IMPORTANT DATES January 7 Extended abstract submissions due February 11 Notification of acceptance March 11 Camera-ready "notebook" papers due March 24-27 Conference April 22 Final copy of proceedings papers due July 29 Proceedings published CONFERENCE VENUE The HLT Conference will be held at the Catamaran Resort Hotel in San Diego, California. The famous San Diego Zoo is the home of Hua Mei, the only baby giant panda to be born in the US. Sea World is one of the area's better known attractions, where you can see the killer whale Shamu. San Diego also houses Balboa Park, the largest urban cultural park. You can stroll through the Gaslamp Quarter or through Old Town. Nearby La Jolla houses the Birch Aquarium, and Carlsbad houses Legoland. Heading south gets you to Tijuana, Mexico. CONFERENCE COMMITTEES General chair: Mitch Marcus, University of Pennsylvania (USA) Co-chair: David Yarowsky, Johns Hopkins Executive Program Committee: James Allan, University of Massachusetts (USA) Sadaoki Furui, Tokyo Institute of Technology (Japan) Ralph Grishman, New York University (USA) Donna Harman, NIST (USA) Lynette Hirschman, MITRE (USA) Eduard Hovy, ISI (USA) Dan Jurafsky, University of Colorado (USA) Kevin Knight, ISI (USA) Joseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS (France) John Makhoul, BBN Technologies (USA) Nelson Morgan, University of California at Berkeley (USA) Mari Ostendorf, University of Washington (USA) Hans Uszkoreit, Saarland University and DKFI (Germany) Demonstration Co-chairs: Clifford Weinstein, MIT Lincoln Laboratory (USA) Bob Younger, SPAWAR Systems Center (USA) Special Focus Committee: Chair: Aravind Joshi, University of Pennsylvania (USA) Co-chair:Lynette Hirschman, MITRE (USA) SUBMISSION GUIDELINES HLT submissions for papers, posters and demonstrations are due on or before January 7, 2002. All submissions will be 3-4 page extended abstracts of the proposed presentation, cannot exceed 1500 words exclusive of bibliography, and must include enough information for the reviewers to judge the applicability and novelty of the work. It is expected that the Conference will include diverse areas within HLT and preference will be given to papers that will appeal to multiple fields. There will be separate submissions for papers, posters and demonstrations, but work cannot be submitted both as a paper and as a poster. Submissions will be electronic, in PostScript or PDF. Complete submission information will be available at http://hlt2001.org. In order to encourage late-breaking research results, the submission deadline for HLT 2001 is very close to the Conference. There is insufficient time to produce a bound proceedings for the Conference. Instead, all accepted papers, posters, and demonstrations will have their extended abstracts (revised based on reviewer comments) published in notebook proceedings that will be available at the Conference. After the Conference, authors will have an opportunity to revise their papers for the final bound proceedings. SPONSORSHIP HLT 2002 is sponsored by several U.S. government agencies, DARPA, NSF and ARDA. We are currently arranging sponsorship of U.S. and international research organizations in the range of human language technologies for this and the continuing series of HLT conferences.