================================================= Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing www.afnlp.org Newsletter No. 3 15 October 2008 TABLE OF CONTENT: 1. Editorial 2. New Appointments 3. IJCNLP Update 4. Meetings 5. Job and Scholarship 6. Upcoming Events ================================================= 1. Editorial AFNLP draws your attention on the recent announcements from ACL-IJCNLP 2009, which also can be found at www.acl-ijcnlp-2009.org. - 2 Oct 2008: ACL-IJCNLP 2009 all-for-turorials - 1 Oct 2008: ACL-IJCNLP 2009 accepted workshops - 30 Sep 2008: ACL-IJCNLP 2009 preliminary call-for-papers To serve the community better, AFNLP has stepped up its outreach efforts. Major progress includes the newsletter programme, the initiative of setting up an AFNLP researcher database. As AFNLP grows its professional associations, it also forms strategic partnership with other scientific communities in Asia, such as Oriental COCOSDA (The Asian Chapter of The International Committee for the Co-ordination and Standardization of Speech Databases and Assessment Techniques) and the International Speech Communication Association - Special Interest Group on Chinese Spoken Language Processing (SIG-CSLP). AFNLP is always interested in improving its activities and the membership services it provides. To help us with this, you are encouraged to give your ideas/comments/suggestions. Your message will be sent us at newsletter@afnlp.org. Haizhou Li, Chair of CLC Singapore 2. New Appointments - 3. IJCNLP Update ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Preliminary Call for Papers Joint Conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing August 2 - 7, 2009, Singapore http://www.acl-ijcnlp-2009.org * * * Full Paper Submission Deadline: February 22, 2009(Sunday) * * * * * * Short Paper Submission Deadline: April 26, 2009(Sunday) * * * For the first time, the flagship conferences of the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL) and the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP) -- the ACL and IJCNLP -- are jointly organized as a single event. The conference will cover a broad spectrum of technical areas related to natural language and computation. ACL-IJCNLP 2009 will include full papers, short papers, oral presentations, poster presentations, demonstrations, tutorials, and pre- and post-conference workshops. The conference invites the submission of papers on original and unpublished research on all aspects of computational linguistics. Important Dates: Feb 22, 2009 Full paper submissions due; Apr 12, 2009 Full paper notification of acceptance; Apr 26, 2009 Short paper submissions due; May 17, 2009 Camera-ready full papers due; May 31, 2009 Short Paper notification of acceptance; Jun 7, 2009 Camera-ready short papers due; Aug 2-7, 2009 ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Topics of interest: Topics include, but are not limited to: * Phonology/Morphology, Tagging and Chunking, Word segmentation * Syntax and Parsing o Grammar induction/development o Corpus-based parsers o Mathematical linguistics, grammatical formalisms * Semantics o Lexical semantics o Ontological semantics o Formal semantics & logic o Word sense disambiguation o Semantic role labeling o Textual entailment & paraphrasing * Discourse, Dialogue and Pragmatics * Language generation * Summarization * Machine translation * Information retrieval * Information Extraction * Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining * Question Answering * Text mining and Natural language processing applications o With vertical domains, such as biomedical, chemical or legal text o On noisy unstructured text, such as emails, blogs, sms * Spoken language processing * Statistical and machine learning methods o Corpus-based language modeling o Knowledge acquisition o Formalisms and Metrics * Language resources and Evaluation o Lexicon and ontology development o Development of Treebank, proposition bank, timebank, etc. o Evaluation metrics, User studies o Science of annotation Submissions: Full Papers: Submissions must describe substantial, original, completed and unpublished work. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation and analysis should be included. Submissions will be judged on correctness, originality, technical strength, significance and relevance to the conference, and interest to the attendees. Each submission will be reviewed by at least three program committee members. Full papers may consist of up to eight (8) pages of content, plus one extra page for references, and will be presented orally or as a poster presentation as determined by the program committee. The decisions as to which papers will be presented orally and which as poster presentations will be based on the nature rather than on the quality of the work. There will be no distinction in the proceedings between full papers presented orally and those presented as poster presentations. The deadline for full papers is February 22, 2009 (GMT + 8). Submission will be electronic using paper submission software that will be available at the conference website. Short papers: ACL-IJCNLP 2009 solicits short papers as well. Short paper submissions must describe original and unpublished work. The short paper deadline is just about three months before the conference to accommodate the following types of papers: - A small, focused contribution - Work in progress - A negative result - An opinion piece - An interesting application nugget Short papers will be presented in one or more oral or poster sessions, and will be given four pages in the proceedings. While short papers will be distinguished from full papers in the proceedings, there will be no distinction in the proceedings between short papers presented orally and those presented as poster presentations. Each short paper submission will be reviewed by at least two program committee members. The deadline for short papers is April 26, 2009(GMT + 8). Submission will be electronic using paper submission software that will be available at the conference website. Format: Full paper submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL-IJCNLP 2009 proceedings without exceeding eight (8) pages of content plus one extra page for references. Short paper submissions should also follow the two-column format of ACL-IJCNLP 2009 proceedings, and should not exceed four (4) pages, including references. We strongly recommend the use of ACL LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word Style files tailored for this year's conference, which will be available on the conference website. All submissions must conform to the official ACL-IJCNLP 2009 style guidelines to be announced in the conference website and they must be electronic in PDF. As the reviewing will be blind, the paper must not include the authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...", must be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...". Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review. Multiple-submission policy: Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must provide this information at submission time. If ACL-IJCNLP 2009 accepts a paper, authors must notify the program chairs by April 19, 2009 (full papers) or June 7, 2009 (short papers), indicating which meeting they choose for presentation of their work. ACL-IJCNLP 2009 cannot accept for publication or presentation work that will be (or has been) published elsewhere. Mentoring Service: ACL is providing a mentoring (coaching) service for authors from regions of the world where English is less emphasized as a language of scientific exchange. Many authors from these regions, although able to read the scientific literature in English, have little or no experience in writing papers in English for conferences such as the ACL meetings. The service will be arranged as follows. A set of potential mentors will be identified by Mentoring Service Chairs Ng, Hwee Tou (NUS, Singapore) and Reeder, Florence (Mitre, USA), who will organize this service for ACL-IJCNLP 2009. If you would like to take advantage of the service, please upload your paper in PDF format by January 14, 2009 for long papers and March 18 2009 for short papers using the paper submission software for mentoring service which will be available at conference website. An appropriate mentor will be assigned to your paper and the mentor will get back to you by February 8 for long papers or April 12 for short papers, at least 2 weeks before the deadline for the submission to the ACL-IJCNLP 2009 program committee. Please note that this service is for the benefit of the authors as described above. It is not a general mentoring service for authors to improve the technical content of their papers. If you have any questions about this service please feel free to send a message to Ng, Hwee Tou (nght@comp.nus.edu.sg) or Reeder, Florence (floreederacl@yahoo.com). 4. Meetings - 5. Job and Scholarship ============================================== 1) National University of Singapore, Singapore Post doctoral research positions available *NB* If you are coming to SIGIR in Singapore, you may request an on-site interview for this position; please contact Min using the below contact information. The Web, IR / NLP Group (WING) at the National University of Singapore (NUS) has three vacancy positions for outstanding postdoctorate fellows (2-3 years) in the fields of Web, Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing. The position is part of a multiyear, multigroup project on media search. The successful applicant will be assigned to do research in one of three open areas: * Presentation slide knowledge mining * Scholarly document text mining * Terminology extraction from semi-structured and web documents The applicant must have a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and should have a set of published works in related web, information retrieval (IR) and/or natural language processing (NLP) conferences. The ideal applicant will also have strong computational modeling and/or algorithmic skills. Knowledge and experience in additional areas such as statistical data analysis, data mining, signal processing, machine learning and pattern recognition, and other topics in artificial intelligence are desirable. Conditions for applicants: * Doctoral thesis less than one year old (Oct 2007) or being defended before end of 2008. * No nationality requirement. Underrepresented minorities are encouraged to apply. Applications should include a cover letter stating your motivation, a curriculum vitae, and at least two referee letters in English. Your references will be contacted if your application passes an initial screening. All applications should be sent to Min-Yen KAN , with the subject line "WING Postdoc Application". Screening of applications will begin immediately and continue until the position is filled. An initial appointment for a one year term is anticipated with the possibility of reappointment. Salary will be commensurate with qualifications and experience. Starting salary for the positions will be around 60,000 SGD per annum. Why Singapore? Why NUS? Why WING? * Extend your scholarly network to Asia, easiest entry point to Asia (centrally located in SE Asia and all locals speak English as a first language) * Work with one of the premier research universities in Asia, in an environment where education and research are well-endowed * Explore our group and see for yourself: Visit us:http://wing.comp.nus.edu.sg/ ============================================== 2) Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 3 PhD Scholarship - School of Computer Engineering (SCE), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore - Starting Jan 2009 - Natural Language Processing for Asian Languages, acoustic modeling and language modeling for multilingual and code-switch speech recognition - 4-Year scholarship covering tuition fees, stipend, and conference travel - Contact: Dr CHNG Eng Siong, Asst Professor, SCE/NTU, Email: ASESChng@ntu.edu.sg 6. Upcoming Events - IALP 2008 (International Conference on Asian Language Processing 2008), November 12-14, 2008, Chiang Mai, Thailand. (http://www.colips.org/conference/ialp2008) - PACLIC 22 (The 22nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation), November 19-21, 2008, Cebu City, Phlippines. - Oriental COCOSDA (The International Committee for the Co-ordination and Standardization of Speech Databases and Assessment Techniques) Workshop, November 25-27 2008, Kyoto, Japan. - The 7th SNLP (International Symposium on Natural Language Processing), December 12-15, 2008, Pattaya, Thailand. - ISCSLP 2008(The 6th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processinig), December 16-19, 2008, Kunming, China. (http://www.iscslp2008.org) - ICCPOL 2009 (The 22nd International Conference on Computer Processing of Oriental Languages), March 26-27, 2009, Hong Kong. http://www4.comp.polyu.edu.hk/~iccpol09/ - ACL-IJCNLP-2009 (Joint Conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP)), August 2-7, 2009, Singapore. (http://www.acl-ijcnlp-2009.org) - eLEX2009 (eLexicography in the 21st century: New challenges, new applications) Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, 22-24 October, 2009. (http://www.uclouvain.be/cecl-elexicography.html) - National Joint Conference on Computational Linguistics of China, 2009, Yantai, China. - The 8th SNLP (International Symposium on Natural Language Processing) and PACLING (the Pacific Association for Computational Linguistics), December 2010, Bangkok, Thailand.