Call for Participation

Following the success of last year, the Doctoral Consortium at NAACL-HLT 2007 will provide an opportunity for a group of senior Ph.D. students to discuss and explore their research and career objectives with a panel of established researchers in the fields of natural language processing, speech technology, and information retrieval. The event is also an opportunity for students to develop the skills necessary to effectively communicate one's research in preparation for future job talks.

The Doctoral Consortium will be held as a workshop on April 22, 2007, immediately before the start of the main conference. Students will present their work and get feedback from a panel of experienced researchers. The event will also include a panel presentation on professional development topics relevant to students pursuing research careers in academia or industry.

Students will participate in a poster session held during the main conference and will have a short paper discussing their research published in the companion volume of the proceedings. Each student's professional biography, research abstract, and photograph will also be included in a face book to be distributed to all attendees of the main NAACL-HLT 2007 conference.

The consortium has the following objectives:

1. to provide feedback on participants' research and on the presentation of their work to others
2. to develop a supportive community of scholars
3. to support a new generation of researchers with information and advice on academic, research, industrial, and non-traditional career paths; and (4) to contribute to the NAACL-HLT conference goals through interaction with other researchers and participation in conference events

There is a possibility that students who participate in the Doctoral Consortium may be able to receive an allowance for basic conference registration, travel, and hotel. The Doctoral Consortium organizers are currently applying for funding for such travel support. Updates will be available on the Doctoral Consortium Website.

NAACL-HLT 2007 continues the combination of the Human Language Technology Conferences (HLT) and North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) Annual Meetings begun in 2003. Human language technology incorporates a broad spectrum of disciplines working to enable natural language human-computer interaction, and providing services such as speech recognition, automatic translation, information retrieval, text summarization, and information extraction. For further information on the main conference, please see the Conference Homepage

Eligibility for Participation

The event is designed for senior Ph.D. students who are in the last few years of their doctoral program (who have already settled on a research direction and who have likely already submitted a thesis proposal). Students who are conducting research on all aspects of human language processing are invited to apply. Topics include (but are not limited to):

• Computational analysis of language
  • Phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, dialogue, discourse, and style
• Speech processing, including:
  • Speech recognition and speech generation
  • Rich transcription: automatic annotation of information structure and sources in speech
• Information retrieval, text classification, and information filtering/recommendation
  • Text data mining, information extraction, text summarization, and question answering
• Multimodal representations and processing
• Statistical and learning techniques for language, including
  • Corpus-based language modeling
  • Lexical and knowledge acquisition
• Development of language resources, including
  • Lexicons and ontologies
  • Treebanks, proposition banks, and frame banks
• Language generation and text planning
• Multilingual processing, including
  • Machine translation of speech and text
  • Cross-language information retrieval
  • Multi-lingual speech recognition and language identification
• Intelligent systems for natural language interaction, including
  • Conversational systems for collaboration, tutoring and behavioral intervention
  • Embodied conversational agents, virtual humans and human-robot conversation
  • Language-enhanced platforms for interactive narrative and digital entertainment
• Evaluation, including
  • Glass-box evaluation of HLT systems and system components
  • Black-box evaluation of HLT systems in application settings

As part of the application process, students will submit a short paper summarizing their research goals, completed work, and future directions. This paper should be the basis for the student's presentation at the Doctoral Consortium event, which should follow the format of an abbreviated job talk. Thus, the paper should give an overview of the student's research and highlight his or her contributions; the paper may include citations to previous publications that describe more specific aspects of the student's research.

The short papers accepted for presentation at the Doctoral Consortium cannot be presented or have been presented at any other meeting with publicly available proceedings. Papers that are being submitted to other conferences must indicate this immediately after the title material on the first page.

Students who are submitting papers on specific portions of their work to the main conference are also invited to apply to the Doctoral Consortium. In this case, the short paper for the Doctoral Consortium must give an overview of the student's dissertation research, and the paper for the main conference should focus on a specific piece of this work.

Application Procedure

Applications should contain the following four elements:

1. A cover letter (under 2-pages) describing the student's progress in his or her degree program, expected date of graduation, plans after graduation, and what he or she hopes to gain from the Doctoral Consortium. The letter should contain the student's name, department, school, contact information, name of advisor, advisor's e-mail address, and a short statement affirming that the student meets the eligibility requirements specified in Section 2 of this Call for Participation.

2. The student's Curriculum Vitae (including a list of publications).

3. A short paper written by the student summarizing his or her research goals, completed work, and future directions. This paper should be the basis for the student's presentation at the Doctoral Consortium event, and it should give an overview of the student's research and highlight his or her major contributions.

4. A letter of recommendation from the student's advisor. The student's advisor should produce a PDF file of the recommendation letter and e-mail it to by Jan 18, 2007.

The student should send email to by Jan 18, 2007, with three attachments in PDF format: the cover letter, the Curriculum Vitae, and the short paper.

The short paper should follow the format of "short papers" submitted to the main NAACL-HLT 2007 conference. It should follow the two-column format of NAACL/ACL proceedings and should not exceed four (4) pages, including references. We strongly recommend the use of ACL LaTeX or Microsoft Word style files tailored for this year's conference. They will be available through the Doctoral Consortium homepage (listed below). A description of the format will also be available in case you are unable to use the style files directly. Papers must conform to the official NAACL-HLT 2007 style guidelines, and we reserve the right to reject submissions that do not conform to these styles including font size restrictions. Submissions should be in PDF format and must include all fonts, so that the paper will print (not just view) anywhere.

Further details on the submission procedure and formatting instructions may be found at the Doctoral Consortium submissions webpage.

If students are accepted to the Doctoral Consortium, they will also be asked to submit a short professional biography, research abstract, and photograph to be included in the face book to be distributed to all participants at the NAACL-HLT 2007 conference. Detailed formatting guidelines for the preparation of the final camera-ready copy will be provided to authors with their acceptance notice.

Important Dates

All application materials must be received by 11:59pm (23:59) PST (Pacific Standard Time) on Jan 18, 2007. Late submissions will be automatically disqualified. Acknowledgment will be e-mailed soon after receipt.

Application deadline: Jan 18, 2007
Notification of acceptance: Feb 22, 2007
Camera-ready papers due: Mar 5, 2007
Doctoral Consortium Event: April 22, 2007
NAACL-HLT 2007 Conference: April 22-27, 2007

Contact Information

If you need to contact the co-chairs of the Doctoral Consortium, please use: .

An e-mail sent to this address will be forwarded to the co-chairs.

Doctoral Consortium Co-chairs:

Faculty Advisor: