(EMNLP/VLC-99) JOINT SIGDAT CONFERENCE ON EMPIRICAL
METHODS IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING AND VERY LARGE CORPORA
Sponsored by SIGDAT (ACL's Special Interest Group for Linguistic Data
and Corpus-based Approaches to NLP)
June 21-22, 1999
University of Maryland
In conjunction with
ACL'99: the 37th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational
Linguistics
This SIGDAT-sponsored joint conference will continue to provide a
forum for new research in corpus-based and/or empirical methods in
NLP. In addition to providing a general forum, the theme for this
year is
"Corpus-based and/or Empirical Methods in NLP for Speech, MT, IR, and
other Applied Systems"
A large number of systems in automatic speech recognition(ASR) and
synthesis, machine translation(MT), information retrieval(IR), optical
character recognition(OCR) and handwriting recognition have become
commercially available in the last decade. Many of these systems use
NLP technologies as an important component. Corpus-based and empirical
methods in NLP have been a major trend in recent years. How useful are
these techniques when applied to real systems, especially when
compared to rule-based methods? Are there any new techniques to be
developed in EMNLP and from VLC in order to improve the
state-of-the-art of ASR, MT, IR, OCR, and other applied systems? Are
there new ways to combine corpus-based and empirical methods with
rule-based systems?
This two-day conference aims to bring together academic researchers
and industrial practitioners to discuss the above issues, through
technical paper sessions, invited talks, and panel discussions. The
goal of the conference is to raise an awareness of what kind of new
EMNLP techniques need to be developed in order to bring about the next
breakthrough in speech recognition and synthesis, machine translation,
information retrieval and other applied systems.
SCOPE
The conference solicits paper submissions in (and not limited to) the
following areas:
1) Original work in one of the following technologies and its relevance to speech, MT, or IR:
(a) word sense disambiguation
(b) word and term segmentation and extraction
(c) alignment
(d) bilingual lexicon extraction
(e) POS tagging
(f) statistical parsing
(g) others (please specify)
2) Proposals of new EMNLP technologies for speech, MT, IR, OCR, or other applied systems (please specify)
3) Comparetive evaluation of the performance of EMNLP technologies in one of the areas in (1) and that of its
rule-based or knowledge-based counterpart in a speech, MT, IR, OCR or other applied systems
SUBMISSIONS REQUIREMENTS
Submissions should be limited to original, evaluated work. All papers should include background
survey and/or reference to previous work. The authors should provide explicit explanation when there
is no evaluation in their work. We encourage paper submissions related to the conference theme.
In particular, we encourage the authors to include in their papers, proposals and discussions of the relevance of their
work to the theme . However, there will be a special session in the conference to include corpus-based and/or empirical
work in all areas of natural language processing.
IMPORTANT DATES
March 31 Submission of full-length paper
April 30 Acceptance notice
May 20 Camera-ready paper due
June 21-22 Conference date
Program Chair
Pascale Fung
Human Language Technology Center
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
University of Science and Tehnology (HKUST)
Clear Water Bay, Kowloon
Hong Kong
Tel: (+852) 2358 8537
Fax: (+852) 2358 1485
Email: pascale@ee.ust.hk
Program Co-Chair
Joe Zhou
LEXIS-NEXIS, a Division of Reed Elsevier
9555 Springboro Pike
Dayton, OH 45342
USA
Email: joez@lexis-nexis.com