This philatelic collector sheet is uniquely created to commemorate the ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Conference in Singapore ! You can find totally 10 pieces of personalised stamps here. The ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Conference logo is printed on the right side of a real and usable Singapore postage stamp, which has the design of an Orchid flower. The Orchid flower, specifically Vanda Miss Joaquim (卓锦万黛兰) , was identified as the National Flower of Singapore, on 15th April 1981. This flower can bloom throughout the year, and signifies Singapore’s continuous efforts towards making better progress and excellence. This special edition of philatelic collector sheet marks the significant achievement made by all contributors at ACL-IJCNLP 2009 in the research and development of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing; and anticipates this spirit to strive on!

Whether you are a philatelic collector or not, this is a very special edition of stamps that you cannot miss ! If you are interested to purchase this limited edition of ACL-IJCNLP 2009 philatelic collector sheet, please approach Ms Wang Xi at the Registration desk during the conference period. Each set will cost SGD30.00 (or USD20.00). Whilst stock lasts !

T-Shirt

Besides the limited edition philatelic collector sheet above, you would also be able to find limited edition of custom-made ACL-IJCNLP 2009 T-Shirts on sale during the conference. The t-shirts come in two different colors (yellow with red/blue with red), and different sizes. The design and sizes are shown as follows:

You would see models (i.e. conference officers/volunteers/helpers) wearing them during the conference. If you feel like owning a piece of this limited edition t-shirt, you can also approach Ms Wang Xi at the Registration desk during the conference period to purchase. Each t-shirt will cost SGD15.00 (or USD10.00), and similarly whilst stock lasts ! Don’t forget to check them out !! >_<

As a final note – if in case you require any assistance during the conference, please do not hesitate to approach any of the models (i.e. conference helpers/volunteers wearing this conference t-shirt). We have a team of experienced and enthusiastic volunteers, who are looking forward to welcoming and serving you at ACL-IJCNLP 2009 at Suntec, Singapore. Besides wearing the conference t-shirt, they should also be wearing a special badge to ease you to identify and locate them. Fyi, the conference officers, volunteers and helpers could assist in the area of registration, first aid, technical assistance, logistics, general information, conference ushering, and publicity.  Half of them are  actually student volunteers from Singapore.  If you’d like to know more about life in Singapore, you could also try to chat with them, even if you do not require their assistance!

There is now a user account for all conference attendees to contribute to the blog.  Please click the log-in link on the right hand menu, using “acl-ijcnlp” as the user;”sun***” (replace the asterisks with the venue of the conference, lowercase, six letters) as the password.

Once logged in, you can post your comments (via “posts”) on the upper left.   Please make sure to sign you own post and provide a link to your website if you wish.  Posts will be reviewed on a (sub-) daily basis to ensure timely information gets posted.  Commercial posts, advertisements, job openings related to ACL-IJCNLP are more than welcomed, but may be edited for content and delivery.

(Also see Mary Ellen Foster’s comments on this post below).

There have been very recent changes to how Wireless@SG registration works.  As reported in the conference handbook and earlier on the website, international phone numbers used to be accepted for registration — this is no longer the case.

Registration confirmation and password are sent via SMS; local Singapore mobile phone numbers are required at the moment. We advise you to purchase a prepaid SIM card upon arrival to Singapore. The prepaid SIM cards for all 3 mobile operators are sold in a number of shops including convenience stores like 7-Eleven. Passport is required to purchase a SIM card.  See the earlier post about hand phones for more information on obtaining a SIM card.

The English word Singapore is derived from a Malay word Singapura  or literally Lion City, which was given in the 13th century by a prince from Palembang when he was shipwrecked on the island and saw a creature that he believed was a lion. Following the Chinese translation principle that “Names should follow their bearers, while things should follow Chinese”, the Malay word Singapura is transliterated into 新加坡 (Xin1 Jia1 Po1 in Hanyu Pinyin), which carries forward the original pronunciation, as the country’s official Chinese name, as opposed to the literal translation  狮城. While studying transliteration, let me give you a preview of the ACL-IJCNLP 2009 conference bag – a special design to feature the name of the country in 4 official languages of Singapore, namely English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil.

ACL-IJCNLP '09 Conference Bag

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This post is contributed by Haizhou Li, who is the Local Organizing Chair of ACL-IJCNLP ‘09. He is currently a Principal Scientist and Nokia Professor in Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), Singapore. He is also the Department Head of Human Language Technology in I2R and Programme Manager of Social Robotics in A*STAR. His research interests include automatic speech recognition, machine translation, and robotics.

I hope you’ll enjoy their posts. More such posts will be coming your way in subsequent weeks (we have several exciting topics currently being explored by other potential guest bloggers). Oh, and do support the guest bloggers by showering their posts with some love (i.e. posting comments). d:

P.S. d: (: ): s: — in case you’re wondering what they are, these are the reverse smileys. They are kind of my personal touch left behind from the era of using MSN Messenger (now I’m almost exclusively using GTalk). I didn’t like the emoticons produced by MSN Messenger, so I decided to “twist” my emoticons to avoid automatic conversion to those silly images. Since then, it becomes a habit that is stuck til now.

So first of all, the readers might wonder what exactly is ACL-IJCNLP? Having lived in Singapore myself, I have seen my fair share of acronyms, but even for me, ACL-IJCNLP is rather long (and I often have a slip of tongue when saying it quickly… try it!). Well, it is a joint conference between two organizations. One is the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and the other is the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). Both of these organizations, as their name implies, consist of researchers who are involved in natural language processing (NLP) and computational linguistics research. Both NLP and computational linguistics overlap significantly. Computational linguistics is described more towards using statistical and rule-based model to solve natural language problems, while NLP is a more general term revolving around research concerning interactions between natural language and computers. Such research span a great breadth from typographical correction (hey, who have not benefited from MS Word or iPhone auto-correction) to automatic word sense disambiguation (determining whether an ambiguous word/phrase means one thing or another) to semantic analysis (who does the word ‘he’ in that sentence refer to?).

In fact, NLP has become more pervasive in recent years. iPhone is now able to correct typo based on probabilistic model depending on the key you pressed on the on-screen keyboard. Google utilizes research in computational linguistics to statistically classify crawled news articles based on keywords analysis. A more exhaustive yet accessible list of things that natural language processing tries to accomplish can be found in wikipedia (here and here).

But we digressed. Back to the conference, ACL-IJCNLP is actually short for “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”. Yes, it is a mouthful, and we almost never use the full name of the conference in day-to-day conversation, ACL-IJCNLP suffices. In this conference, researchers who are active in both fields will present cutting-edge papers on their own research. The fields are so diverse that you would expect seeing publications from many different subfields. The list of accepted papers can be viewed here.

Now the purpose of this blog is two-fold. For conference participants, we will be posting announcements (most of them will arrive to your e-mail too) and tid-bits about Singapore and what you could do when you are here. For general public, we hope to increase interests in NLP and computational linguistics and also interests around the conference itself. Throughout the next three months, we will also have guest bloggers to write article concerning aspects of the research in the field and on the conference. In addition to posting articles myself, I will also be tweaking the blog design and plugins meanwhile (yes I know it is still the all too typical default design right now; worry not, it will change soon ).

The easiest way to follow this blog is to subscribe to the RSS feed with your favourite RSS readers (mine is Google Reader).

We hope to see you around come August, meanwhile we hope you will enjoy reading this blog. Comments on how we can improve will be greatly appreciated. Cheers!