*********** Ijcnlp-04 Newsletter No.4 (18th of Dec. 2003)***************

The 1st International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing
organized by the Asia Federation of NLP associations (AFNLP)

Website:
http://www.rcl.cityu.edu.hk/ijcnlp04
http://www.colips.org/conference/ijcnlp04/ (mirror site in Singapore)
http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/ijcnlp04 (mirror site at USC)
http://www.cipsc.org.cn/IJCNLP-04/

*************************************************************
[Date]
Main Conference: March 22-24, 2004
Workshops/symposium: March 25-26, 2004

[Venue]
Resort Golden Palm http://www.resortgp.com.cn/
Sanya, Hainan island, China
***Land's End - Hainan is so remote on the sea that ancient people,
while believing that earth is square, really thought it is where
the land ends***
http://www.regenttour.com/chinaplanner/hainan/

[Sponsoring Organizations]

Association for Natural Language Processing of Japan (ANLP), Tokyo
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Philadelphia
Association for Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language
Processing (ACLCLP), Taipei
Korea NLP society, Seoul
Chinese Infortation Processing Society of China (CIPSC), Beijing
(more to be added)

************************************************************************
This issue contains

[1] Report from PC on Paper Submission of Main Conference
[2] Call for Papers: IJCNLP-04 Interactive Poster/Demo Sessions
[3] Paper Submission for Workshops and Satellite Symposium

************************************************************************
[1] Report from PC on Paper Submission of Main Conference

The Program Committee has received 210 paper submissions from all over
the world, which far exceeds our expectation. Thank you very much for
your interest in IJCNLP-04.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
[2] Call for Papers: IJCNLP-04 Interactive Poster/Demo Sessions

You may have a very cool demo but don't have time to package a full
size of paper for main conference, or you get a late breaking report
but has not yet finished solid evaluation, or you prefer to present
your works in an interactive style, this session will provide you an
exciting channel to show your cool demos and ideas and get valuable
feedbacks at the same time.
The special session for interactive posters and demonstrations
provided in IJCNLP-04 will welcome poster/demo presentations with
novel ideas and profound applications, or the works that are best
presented and discussed in an interactive style. This session will
provide a forum of academic and technical exchanges. Presentations
from both the academic and industries are welcomed. The topics of
interest will cover the same area of the main conference
(http://www-tsujii.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ijc-nlp04/submission.html).
The authors should submit an original paper (no more than 4 pages in
IJCNLP format) that describes the problem of the research and the
novel methods. Presentations with demos should include an outline of
the system design and enough details to allow the evaluation of
technical solidness and usefulness. The equipments required for the
demonstration must be provided. The Interactive Poster/Demo papers
will be included in a separated proceeding that is in parallel to the
main conference proceedings.
Each submission will be blind reviewed by three reviewers. Reviewing
will be managed by an international program committee.

Presentation Style of the Interactive Poster/Demo Sessions
The Interactive Poster/Demo Sessions will run in the afternoons of
March 22 and March 23. Each presentation will receive a booth with a
1.8m x 0.6m desk and a 1.8m x 2.1m panel. Network connection and
electricity outlets will be supplied to each booth.

Submission Information
Submissions should follow the format of IJCNLP proceedings and
should not exceed four (4) pages, including references. Since the
reviewing will be blind, the paper should not include the authors'
names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the
author's identity should be avoided.

Submission Procedure
All papers must be submitted electronically via email to the
following address. Either a PDF or PS file must be sent as an attached
file. Please use the first author's surname to name the file. The
Subject field should be "IJCNLP-04 Poster/Demo submission". Please
include the name, affiliation and email address of the contact person
in the body of your email.

The Important Dates
Paper submission deadline: January 15, 2003
Notification of acceptance: Feb. 15, 2004
Camera ready papers due: Feb 28, 2004
Please submit papers to: mingzhou@microsoft.com

Program Committee for Interactive Poster/Demo sessions
Chair: Ming Zhou, Microsoft Research Asia
PC members:
Masaaki Nagata, NTT
Takenobu Tokunaga, Tokyo Institute of Technology
Genichiro Kikui, ATR
Sadao Kurohashi, The University of Tokyo
Donghong Ji, Kent Ridge Digital Labs
Jian-Yun Nie, Univ. of Montreal
Dekang Lin, Univ. of Alberta
Hsin-Hsi Chen, National Taiwan University
Lee-Feng Chien, Academia Sinica
Kam-Fai Wong, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Gary Geunbae Lee, POSTECH
Jong-Hyeok Lee, POSTECH
Maosong Sun, Tsinghua University
Jun Zhao, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Tiejun Zhao, Harbin Institute of Technology
Qun Liu, China Academy of Science
Haifeng Wang, Toshiba R&D Centre
Kui-Lam Kwok, City University of New York
Dan Moldovan, University of Texas at Dallas
Chin-Yew Lin, ISI/USC
Tilman Becker, DFKI
Rens Bod, University of Amsterdam
Harry Bunt, Tilburg University
Christian Boitet, Universite Joseph Fourier
Michael Zock, LIMSI

------------------------------------------------------------------------
[3] Paper Submission for Workshops and Satellite Symposium

We will have the following five workshops and one satellite symposium
on March 25 and/or 26, following the main conference. Some WSs and
Symposium extended their submission deadline. Please see following
and our web site for the details of these events.

***
[W1] Asian Language Resources

We have estabished a proper URL for the Workshop of Asian Language
Resources at http://www.crl-asia.org/tcl/alr-04

Extension of paper submission deadline:
Paper submission deadline: January 3, 2004 (extended)
Notification of acceptance: January 15, 2004 (extended)
Camera ready papers due: January 24, 2004
Workshop date: March 25, 2004 (Thursday)

(Organiziers)
Chair:
Virach Sornlertlamvanich
(Thai Computational Linguistics Laboratory, CRL, Bangkok)
Co-chairs:
Chu-Ren Huang (Academia Sinica, Taipei)
Takenobu Tokunaga (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo)

***
[W2] Multilingual Summarization and Question Answering - Towards
Systematizing and Automatic Evaluation

Paper submission deadline: January 19, 2004
Notification of acceptance: February 12, 2004
Camera ready papers due: February 26, 2004
Workshop date: March 25, 2004 (Thursday)

(Organizers)
Chin-Yew Lin (USC/ISI, Los Angeles)
Hang Li (Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing)

(Sponsor)
Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing

***
[W3] Beyond shallow analyses - Formalisms and statistical modeling for
deep analyses

Paper submission deadline: January 31, 2004
Workshop date: March 21, 2004 (Sunday)

(Organizers)
R. Kaplan (Parc, Palo Alto)
M. Johnson (Brown University, Rhode Island)
A. Joshi (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia)
D. McAllester (Toyota Technological Institute, Chicago)
Y. Miyao (University of Tokyo, Tokyo)
S. Oepen (University of Oslo, Oslo and Stanford Univ., Palo Alto)
S. Riezler (Parc, Palo Alto)
J. Tsujii (University of Tokyo, Tokyo)
H. Uszkoreit (DFKI and Saarbrueken University, Saarbrueken)

***
[W4] Named Entity Recognition for Natural Language Processing
Applications

(Organizer)
Benjamin Tsou (City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)

Workshop website:
http://personal.cityu.edu.hk/~rlolivia/W4_NE.htm

Paper submission deadline: 19 December 2003 *** Extended ***
Workshop date: March 26, 2004 (Friday)

Program Committee:

Roberto Basili (University of Rome Tor Vergata, Rome)
Ralph Grishman (New York University, New York)
Kevin Humphreys (Microsoft, Redmond)
Hideki Isozaki (NTT Communication Science Labs, Kyoto)
Gary Geunbae Lee (POSTECH, Pohang)
Masaaki Nagata (NTT Cyber Space Laboratories, Kanagawa)
Hwee Tou Ng (National University of Singapore, Singapore)
Thierry Poibeau (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales,
Paris)
Manabu Sassano (Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd., Kawasaki)
Satoshi Sekine (New York University, New York)
Rou Song (Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing)
Kiyotaka Uchimoto (Communications Research Laboratory, Kyoto)
Takehito Utsuro (Kyoto University, Kyoto)
Jingbo Zhu (Northeastern University, Shenyang)

***
[W5] International Workshop on Machine Translation and Multilingual
Information Retrieval (MTMIR 2004)

http://a1-www.is.tokushima-u.ac.jp/member/ren/Conferences/IJCNLP2004/MTMIR0=
4
=2Ehtm

Workshop date: March 26, 2004 (Friday)

The workshop is organized in cooperation with

Asia-Pacific Association of Machine Translation
Chinese Information Processing Society of China
Asian Information-Science-Life
Chinese Academy of Science and Engineering in Japan

[TOPICS]

The large tide of economic globalization provides to the MT and MIR with
great opportunities as well as severe challenges. Since the first word was
uttered, people have searched ways to communicate their ideas, thoughts, an=
d
opinions to others. Today, businesses are expanding their borders, becoming
more global, as they seek out new markets and customer bases. With the pace
of information transfer via fast PCs and networks, this goal becomes quite =
a
challenge.

Asia is becoming the hot area in the world in various sciences, such as
politics, economics, and culture. The first international Optical
Communication Network Plan with translation function has been published
between Japan and China. The multilingual composite service program for 200=
8
Beijing Olympic game is being developed. It is learned by most countries in
Asia that we should realize multilingual translation and remove the languag=
e
obstacle that impacts information flow among different countries in Asia.

In Asia, MT and MIR have become increasingly important in recent years due
to rapid advancements in the field of knowledge engineering, natural
language processing, Multi-lingual Multi-function Multi-media intelligent
systems, and artificial intelligence. This workshop serves as an
international forum for academic and industrial researchers to discuss the
application of new computer technologies to MT and MIR. The main objective
of this workshop is to bring researchers together to exchange idea and
experience related to the fields. It will provide an international forum fo=
r
an overview of the most recent trends in the active research fields and a
common starting-point to tackle the most acute problems of MT and MIR.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Multi-lingual Multi-function Multi-media intelligent systems
Machine Translation System
Mutli-Lingual Information Retrieval

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submission deadline: January 17, 2004
Notification of acceptance: February 12, 2004
Camera ready papers due: February 26, 2004
Workshop date: March 25, 2004 (Thursday)

SUBMISSION DETAILS

Selected papers from the accepted for presentation in the MTMIR will be
published in the international journal of Asian Information-Science-Life.
All correspondence will be directed to the first named author unless
indicated otherwise.

All papers must be submitted electronically to

mohafi@is.tokushima-u.ac.jp

Please name your paper file in the following manner: YourLastName2MTMIR. In
example, if your name if REN, the name of your files should look like the
following: Ren2MTMIR.pdf.

The publication policy and the format guidelines are same as IJCNLP-2004,
for details please refer the Web site http://www.rcl.cityu.edu.hk/ijcnlp04=
/

ORGANIZERS

HONORARY CHAIRS:
Jun'ichi TSUJII (University of Tokyo)
Zhendong DONG (Chinese Information Processing Society of China)

Organizing Committee CHAIR:
Fuji REN (The University of Tokushima)

Organizing Committee:

Kenji Araki (Hokkaido University)
Zhaoxiong Chen (RCCLIE, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Jason S. Chang (National Tsing Hua University)
Key-Sun CHOI (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)
Lei Duan (Sony USA Research)
Heyan Huang (Research Center of Computer & Language Information Engineering=
,
CAS)
Mohamed Fattah (The University of Tokushima)
Zhiwei Feng (Institute of Applied Linguistics, Ministry of Education)
Yoshihiko Hayashi (NTT Cyberspace Laboratories)
Chu-Ren Huang (Academia Sinica)
Hitoshi Iida (Tokyo University of Technology)
Qun Liu (Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Science)
Ruzhan Lu (Shanghai Jiao Tong University)
Kim-Teng Lua (National University of Singapore)
Robert LUK (Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
Hiromi Nakaiwa (ATR)
Jian-Yun Nie (Universite de Montreal)
Keh-Yih Su (Behavior Design Corp.)
EHARA Terumasa (Tokyo University of Science)
Benjamin K. TSOU (City University of Hong Kong)
Xiaolong Wang (Harbin Institute of Technology)
Dekai Wu (HKUST)
Fei Xia (IBM T. J. Watson Research Center)
Shiwen Yu (Peking University)
Jun ZHAO (Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Automation)
Yixin Zhong (Beijing University of Posts & Telecommunications)
Qiang Zhou (Tsinghua University)
Qiru Zhou (Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies)
Chengqing ZONG (Chinese Academy of Sciences)

For any further questions or inquiries please contact:
Professor Fuji Ren
Dept. of Information Science and Intelligent Systems
Faculty of Engineering, Tokushima University
2-1 Minamijosanjima,Tokushima 770-8506, Japan
Tel: +81-88-656-9684 Fax: +81-88-656-6575
Email: ren@is.tokushima-u.ac.jp

***Satellite Symposium***

[SS1] Asian Symposium on Natural Language Processing to Overcome
Language Barriers
http://www.ieice.org/iss/nlc/jpn/symposium2004e.html
Submission of Extended Abstracts: January 5, 2004 (Extended)

We are planning to have several special events during the symposium
(see following), which will be open to the symposium participants.

Invited academic talks by
Prof. Eduard Hovy of ISI, USC,
Prof. Harold Somers of UMIST and
Prof. Tiejun Zhao of Harbin Institute of Technology.
Invited talk on the Asian Broadband Project of Japanese Ministry of
Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications.
Panel discussion on e-learning by Asian researchers.

Call for Extended Abstracts

The deadline for paper submissions has been extended
to January 5, 2004 from December 2, 2003.

Asian Symposium on Natural Language Processing
to Overcome Language Barriers
( http://www.ieice.org/iss/nlc/jpn/symposium2004e.html )

Organized by:
The Institute of Electronics, Information
and Communication Engineers (IEICE)
Technical Group on Natural Language Understanding
and Models of Communication (NLC=
)
Technical Group on Thought and Language (TL)

Supported by:
Communications Research Laboratory (CRL)

- Description

The Internet has made it easy to access to a vast amounts of information
and to connect with people all over the world. However, there are numerous
barriers to effective information access and efficient communication. One
of these is language differences. Gaps between different kinds of media,
such as speech and text, also decrease the efficiency of information access.
The handicapped and the aged are faced with many more barriers than these.
This symposium aims to bring together NLP researchers in Asia and to
discuss how language barriers can be overcome by applying Natural Language
Processing.
The symposium will be held immediately following the 1st International
Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJC-NLP-04). The official
language will be English.

- Date and place

March 25-26, 2004, Hainan Island, China

( Immediately following the 1st International Joint Conference
on Natural Language Processing [IJC-NLP-04,
http://www.rcl.cityu.edu.hk/ijcnlp04] )

- Topics of interest

Papers are solicited on topics with a focus on NLP aimed at overcoming
of language barriers. In addition to completed work, work in progress
and on-going projects are welcomed.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Cross-lingual information access and communication
Machine translation
Speech translation
Cross-lingual information retrieval / question answering
Multilingual automatic summarization
Language education

* Cross-media information access
Text retrieval / question answering by speech
Multimedia data retrieval

* Information access and communication for the handicapped and the aged
Closed-caption generation
Sign language translation
Braille transcription

* Basic technology for making language barrier-free
Natural language analysis
Natural language generation

- Special events

We are planning to have several special events during the symposium
(see following), which will be open to the symposium participants.

Invited academic talks by
Prof. Eduard Hovy of ISI, USC,
Prof. Harold Somers of UMIST and
Prof. Tiejun Zhao of Harbin Institute of Technology.
Invited talk on the Asian Broadband Project of Japanese Ministry of
Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications.
Panel discussion on e-learning by Asian researchers.

- Submission

* Initial Submission (Extended Abstracts)

Please submit one A4 sheet paper that describes your original and
unpublished work. Abstracts that have been or will be submitted in
parallel with other conferences or workshops that have proceedings
are not eligible for submission.

The submission receipt deadline is January 5, 2004. To submit a paper,
e-mail to
sympo2004@eel.rdc.toshiba.co.jp
with:
(1) Submission letter including
- title
- key words
- author names and affiliations
- address and phone number of the corresponding author
- presentation style
a. Oral b. Poster
* Please note that this requirement cannot always be met.
(2) Paper submission in
MS Word(.doc), Adobe Acrobat(.pdf), or Postscript(.ps)

The paper should begin with the title and the names and affiliations of
all authors. A Double-column style is strongly recommended for the main
body of the paper. The paper can include Tables and Figures.
Sample files for MS Word and LaTex are available at
http://www.ieice.org/iss/nlc/jpn/symposium2004e.html

An acknowledgment email will be sent to the corresponding author upon
receiving each submission. The authors are advised to contact the PC
Chair (either by email to tatsuya.izuha@toshiba.co.jp, or by phone
+81-44-549-2239) if they do not receive the acknowledgement by January
8.

* Notification of acceptance

The submitted one-page papers will be reviewed for acceptance
at the symposium.
Notification of acceptance will be sent via e-mail on January 19, 2004.

* Final Submission (Full Papers)

Final manuscripts are due by February 23,2004.
Please post a hard copy of your final manuscript to the address below.

IZUHA Tatsuya, Toshiba Corporation,
Corporate Research & Development Center
1, Komukai Toshiba-cho, Saiwai-ku, Kawasaki 212-8582, Japan
E-mail: tatsuya.izuha@toshiba.co.jp
tel: +81-44-549-2239
fax: +81-44-520-1308

The page limit for final papers is eight pages.
Instructions on formatting will be announced later.

- Important Dates

* Initial submission January 5, 2004
(Extended abstracts)
* Notification January 19, 2004
* Final submission February 23, 2004
(Full papers)
* IJC-NLP-04 March 22-24,2004
* Symposium March 25-26,2004

- Organizing Committee

ISAHARA Hitoshi (Co-chair) - Communications Research Laboratory
NITTA Yoshihiko (Co-chair) - Nihon University
AKIBA Tomoyoshi
- National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology
INUI Kentaro - Nara Institute of Science and Technology
UTSURO Takehito - Kyoto University
FUKUMOTO Jun'ichi - Ritsumeikan University
NAKANO Mikio - Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation

- Program Committee

IZUHA Tatsuya (Chair) - Toshiba Corporation
Asanee KAWTRAKUL - Kasetsart University
CHEN Kuang-hua - National Taiwan University
FUJII Atsushi - University of Tsukuba
IKEDA Takashi - Gifu University
KIKUI Genichiro - ATR Spoken Language Translation Research Labs.
KISHIDA Kazuaki - Surugadai University
KITAMURA Mihoko - Oki Electric Industry
MATSUBARA Shigeki - Nagoya University
MURATA Masaki - Communications Research Laboratory
NAKAIWA Hiromi - ATR Spoken Language Translation Research Labs.
OKUMURA Manabu - Tokyo Institute of Technology
SANO Hiroshi - Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
SASAOKA Hisayuki - Asahikawa National College of Technology
SUZUKI Masami - ATR Media Information Science Labs.
TAKAHASHI Naoto
- National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology
UCHIMOTO Kiyotaka - Communications Research Laboratory
Virach SORNLERTLAMVANICH
- CRL Thai Computational Linguistics Laboratory
WANG Haifeng - Toshiba (China) Corporation, R&D Center
ZHOU Ming - Microsoft Research Asia

- Contact Information

IZUHA Tatsuya, Toshiba Corporation
Corporate Research & Development Center
E-mail: tatsuya.izuha@toshiba.co.jp
tel: +81-44-549-2239
fax: +81-44-520-1308