HLT-NAACL 2003 
                  Human Language Technology 2003 
                      3rd conference of the 
   North American Association for Computational Linguistics

                  http://www.hlt-naacl03.org

                     May 27-June 1, 2003 
                    Westin Edmonton Hotel
                       Edmonton, Canada


ANNOUNCEMENT

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, 
and to serve as useful adjuncts to humans in tasks involving 
language by providing services such as automatic translation, 
automated speech recognition, information retrieval, text 
summarization, and information extraction.  

HLT-NAACL 2003 will run from Tuesday May 27 through Sunday 
June 1, 2003.  Its sessions will include technical presentations 
of peer-reviewed (full) papers, late-breaking (short) papers, 
posters, and system demonstrations.  Invited speakers and 
panelists will discuss the state of today's human language 
technology.  Tutorials will be presented on various aspects 
of Human Language Technology (including Information Retrieval, 
Speech Processing, and Natural Language Processing).  The 
conference will host workshops on various topics, including 
a workshop organized by and devoted to graduate students.

HLT-NAACL 2003 combines the conference series of HLT and NAACL 
(North American Chapter of the Association for Computational 
Linguistics).  As an experiment in encouraging synergy and 
reducing "conference overload", the organizers of HLT and the 
NAACL Executive agreed to a combined conference in 2003.  The 
conference provides a unified forum for researchers to present 
recent, high-quality, cutting-edge work, to exchange ideas, 
and to explore emerging new research directions.

As described in the calls for submissions of papers and 
demonstrations at http://www.htl-naacl03.org, the conference 
especially encourages reports of work on synergistic combinations 
of language technologies (e.g., Speech Processing with 
Information Retrieval, Machine Translation with Speech, Question 
Answering with Natural Language Processing, etc.).  Papers that 
announce or accompany new resources or available software are 
also especially encouraged.  In addition, the conference will 
give special consideration to papers that address a special 
topic: New approaches to and uses of unsupervised and lightly 
supervised learning techniques.  

The conference organization is overseen by a board representing 
the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational 
Linguistics (NAACL), ACM SIGIR, the International Speech 
Communication Association (ISCA), and HLT funding agencies in 
North America.  


IMPORTANT DATES

 Dec 16, 2002  Due: full papers; proposals for tutorials and workshops
 Feb 24, 2003  Notification of acceptance of full papers, tutorials, 
                    and workshops 
 Mar 7         Due: late-breaking short papers, posters, demos, and 
                    workshop papers
 Apr 4         Due: camera-ready full papers 
 Apr 4         Notification of acceptance of late-breaking submissions
 Apr 17        Due: camera-ready late-breaking submissions
 May 27-Jun 1  Conference:  
     Tue May 27           Tutorials 
     Wed-Fri May 28-30    Conference proper   
     Sat-Sun May 31-Jun 1 Workshops  



CONFERENCE VENUE

The conference will be held in Edmonton, Canada, at the Westin Edmonton 
hotel (www.thewestinedmonton.com, tel. (780) 426-3636). Accommodation 
will also be provided at dormitories of the University of Alberta and 
at other nearby hotels.    

Edmonton is home to more than 10,000 acres of parkland and the world's 
largest indoor mall.  In the heart of downtown, the Westin Edmonton is 
one of the city's premier hotels, located near the arts district, 
theaters, and shopping.  Special low room rates (approx $US 75) have 
been negotiated.  

The conference will take place in late Spring, during which Edmonton 
usually enjoys good weather.  For information about the city, visit 
http://www.gov.edmonton.ab.ca/.  A visual tour of the city appears at 
http://www.vredmonton.com/.   



CONFERENCE COMMITTEES

General chair: Eduard Hovy (USC / Information Sciences Institute)
Program co-chairs:  Marti Hearst (UC Berkeley), 
                    Mari Ostendorf (U Washington)
Local Arrangements chair: Dekang Lin (U of Alberta) 

Program Committee: To be announced 
Demonstration Co-chairs: Bob Frederking (CMU); Bob Younger (SPAWAR) 
Workshop Co-chairs: TBD
Tutorial Co-chairs: TBD
Website: http://www.hlt-naacl03.org 

Conference Oversight Committee: Donna Harman (NIST), Lynette Hirschman 
(MITRE), Graeme Hirst (U Toronto; chair), Karen Kukich (NSF), John Prange 
(ARDA), Dragomir Radev (U Michigan), Salim Roukos (IBM), Charles Wayne 
(DARPA), David Yarowsky (Johns Hopkins U)