HLT/NAACL 2004 Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics http://www.hlt-naacl04.org CALL FOR PAPERS May 2-7, 2004 Boston, Mass USA www.hlt-naacl04.org HLT/NAACL 2004 continues the combination of the Human Language Technology Conferences (HLT) and North American Chapter of the American Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) Annual Meetings begun in 2003. This year's conference will include a special emphasis on bringing together researchers with common interests in computational linguistics, information retrieval, and speech research. Human language technology incorporates a broad spectrum of disciplines working towards enabling computers to interact with humans using natural language, and providing improved services such as automatic translation, speech recognition, information retrieval, text summarization, and information extraction. HLT/NAACL 2004 will run from Sunday May 2 through Friday May 7. The schedule will include full papers, late-breaking (short) papers, posters and demonstrations. Invited speakers and panelists will discuss the state of today's human language technology. The conference will also host tutorials and workshops, including a workshop organized by and devoted to graduate students. The conference especially encourages submissions that discuss synergistic combinations of language technologies (e.g., Speech with Information Retrieval, Machine Translation with Speech, Question Answering with Natural Language Processing, etc.). The conference will give special consideration to papers that address the topic of learning from and exploiting knowledge encoded in massive, unstructured collections like the Web. 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 Nov 1, 2003 Due: proposals for workshops and tutorials Nov 15, 2003 Due: full papers Notification: acceptance/rejection of workshops Dec 14, 2003 Due: proposals for demos Dec 15, 2003 Notification: acceptance/rejection of tutorials proposals Jan 23, 2004 Notification: acceptance/rejection of full papers Feb 1, 2004 Notification: acceptance/rejection of demos Feb 4, 2004 Due: late-breaking short papers, posters Mar 8, 2004 Notification: acceptance/rejection of short papers, posters Mar 17, 2004 Due: camera-ready full papers, short papers, posters May 2-7, 2004 Conference TOPICS OF INTEREST The conference addresses advances in all aspects of human language processing, with special interest in computational linguistics, information retrieval, and speech research together. Topics of interest include but are not limited to: * Speech processing, including: Speech recognition Speech generation Rich transcription: automatic annotation of information structure and sources in speech * Text summarization * Question answering * Information extraction * Information retrieval * Computational analysis of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, discourse, style * Statistical and learning techniques for language processing, including Corpus-based language modeling Lexical and knowledge acquisition * Language generation and text planning * Parsing * Discourse analysis * Multilingual processing, including Machine translation of speech and text Cross-language information retrieval Multi-lingual speech recognition and language identification * Multimodal representations and processing * Evaluation, including Glass-box evaluation of HLT systems and system components Black-box evaluation of HLT systems in application settings * Development of language resources, including Lexicons and ontologies Treebanks, proposition banks, and frame banks * Understanding of human communication, including Natural language interfaces Dialogue structure and dialogue systems Message and narrative understanding systems DUE DATES All submissions or camera-ready copy are due by midnight EST on the date specified above. SUBMISSION INFORMATION HLT/NAACL 04 submissions for full papers are due on or before November 15, 2003. Submissions for late-breaking (short) papers and posters are due on or before February 4, 2004. For submission information for tutorial proposals, workshop proposals, and demos, please see: Demos http://www.hlt-naacl04.org/calldemos.html Tutorials http://www.hlt-naacl04.org/calltutorials.html Workshops http://www.hlt-naacl04.org/callworkshops.html Full papers will be evaluated in a blind review process, as with previous NAACL conferences. Short papers will be evaluated in a separate blind reviewing process. Two volumes of proceedings will be produced; one for full papers and another for short papers and demonstration descriptions. FULL PAPERS Requirements: Submissions must describe original, completed, unpublished work, and include concrete evaluation results when appropriate. Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must provide this information (see submission format); in the event of multiple acceptances, authors must notify the program chairs as to the meeting they choose to present their work by January 30, 2004, at the latest in order for their work to be included in the proceedings. HLT/NAACL 2004 cannot accept for publication or presentation work that will be (or has been) published elsewhere. Format: Submissions must be electronic in PDF, should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings (10pt Times-Roman font) and should not exceed eight (8) pages, including references. Authors are strongly encouraged to use the LaTeX style files or MSWord equivalents available on the website -- these formats will ease the transition to the proceedings version. Reviewing: Reviewing will be blind. No information identifying the authors should be in the paper: this includes not only the authors' names and affiliations, but also self-references that reveal authors' identities; for example, "We have previously shown (Smith 1999)" should be changed to "Smith (1999) has previously shown". Separate identification information is required, and will be part of the web submission process. Procedure: All interactions will be done via the website and email. A PDF file of the paper must be uploaded onto the system by the date of the announced deadline. In addition, information about each paper must be entered on the website. This information will include: Paper title Authors' names, affiliations, and email addresses Contact author A short list of keywords (selected from a predefined list) Abstract (no more than 500 words) Whether or not the paper addresses the special topic of learning from large, unstructured corpora Whether or not the paper is under consideration for other conferences Authors who for some reason cannot submit a PDF file electronically should contact the program chairs *in advance of the due date* to work out alternate arrangements. LATE-BREAKING (SHORT) PAPERS Submitted Short Papers will be carefully evaluated on the basis of originality, significance, technical soundness, and clarity of exposition. Short Papers may be accepted for presentation in plenary OR poster sessions, as determined by the Program Committee. The procedure for Short Papers submissions is identical to that of the Full Papers, with the following differences: (1) They may be accepted for oral presentation in plenary OR for presentation in a poster session; (2) The deadlines are later for short papers and posters than for full papers; (3) Short papers are restricted to four (4) pages in length, using the two-column ACL format; (4) Only two reviews per submission are guaranteed. CONFERENCE VENUE The conference will be held at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel, which is located in the center of Boston, one block from the Boston Common and Public Garden. There are additional hotels within walking distance, and dorm space may also be available. See the website for more information: www.hlt-naacl04.org CONFERENCE COMMITTEES General Chair: Julia Hirschberg, Columbia University (julia@cs.columbia.edu) Local Arrangements Chair: Christy Doran, MITRE (cdoran@mitre.org) Program Committee Chairs: Susan Dumais, Microsoft Research (sdumais@microsoft.com) Daniel Marcu, ISI/USC (marcu@isi.edu) Salim Roukos, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center (roukos@us.ibm.com) Area Chairs for Full Papers and Short Papers: Srinivas Bangalore, AT&T Labs Charlie Clarke, University of Waterloo Sadaoki Furui, Tokyo Institute of Technology Jim Glass, MIT Joshua Goodman, Microsoft Research Warren Greiff, MITRE Ralph Grishman, NYU Sanda Harabagiu, University of Texas, Dallas Don Hindle, Primus Knowledge Systems Candy Kamm, FxPal Inderjeet Mani, Georgetown University Andrew McCallum, University of Massachusetts Kathy McKeown, Columbia University Bob Moore, Microsoft Research Hermann Ney, RWTH Aachen Doug Oard, University of Maryland Kishore Papineni, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center John Prager, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center Brian Roark, AT&T Labs Roni Rosenfeld, CMU Demonstration Chairs: David Palmer, Virage (dpalmer@virage.com) * Joe Polifroni, MIT (joe@csail.mit.edu) Deb Roy, MIT Media Lab (dkroy@media.mit.edu) Publications Chairs: Katrin Kirchoff, University of Washington (katrin@ee.washington.edu) Gina-Anne Levow, University of Chicago (levow@cs.uchicago.edu) * Miles Osborne, Edinburgh University (miles@inf.ed.ac.uk) Publicity Chairs: Peter Anick, Overture (peter.anick@overture.com) Peter Heeman, OGI (heeman@cse.ogi.edu) * Shri Narayanan, USC (shri@sipi.usc.edu) Sponsorships and Exhibits Chairs: Doug Jones, MIT Lincoln Labs (daj@ll.mit.edu) * Roberto Pieraccini, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center (rob1p@us.ibm.com) Student Workshop Faculty Advisors: Lisa Ballesteros, Mount Holyoke College (lballest@mtholyoke.edu) Eric Fosler-Lussier, OSU (fosler@cis.ohio-state.edu) * Amanda Stent, Stony Brook University (stent@cs.sunysb.edu) Student Workshop Chairs: TBD Tutorials Chairs: Alex Acero, Microsoft (alexac@microsoft.com) Jamie Callan, CMU (callan@cmu.edu) * Andy Kehler, UCSD (kehler@ling.ucsd.edu) Webmaster: Pablo Duboue, Columbia University (pablo@cs.columbia.edu) Workshops Chairs: Bhuvana Ramabhadran, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center (bhuvana@us.ibm.com) Alan Smeaton, Dublin City University (asmeaton@computing.dcu.ie) * Richard Sproat, University of Illinois (rws@uiuc.edu) *Indicates main contact person for an area. Conference Oversight Committee: Donna Harman, NIST Lynette Hirschman, MITRE Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto Eduard Hovy, ISI/USC Karen Kukich, NSF Sanjeev Khudanpur, Johns Hopkins John Prange, ARDA Dragomir Radev, University of Michigan Charles Wayne, DARPA CONFERENCE WEB SITE: http://www.hlt-naacl04.org