(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.

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!