The 1st International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing
(IJCNLP-04)

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The 1st IJCNLP is organized by the Asia Federation of Natural Language
Processing (AFNLP: http://www.afnlp.org/) to celebrate the inauguration of
the Federation on the beautiful Hainan Island
(http://www.regenttour.com/chinaplanner/hainan/), China, on March 22-24, 2004.

Local Host: Chinese Information Processing Society of China

Sponsoring Organizations:
Chinese Information Processing Society of China (TBC)
Association for Natural Language Processing (TBC)
Association for Computational Linguistics (TBC)
(to be added)
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This announcement includes:

(1) Call for Papers, Submission details
(1-1) Requirements
(1-2) Submission Information
(1-3) Submission Procedure
(1-4) Important Dates
(2) Call for Proposals of Thematic Sessions
(3) Call for Proposals of Satellite Events
(4) Call for Papers [Interactive Posters with Demo]
(5) Miscellaneous Announcements
(6) Organization

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(1) [Call for Papers and Submission details]

**Paper submission deadline: November 15, 2003 **

The 1st International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing
(IJCNLP-04) invites the submission of papers to its inaugural meeting to be
held in Sanya, Hainan Island, China. Papers are invited on substantial,
original, and unpublished research on all aspects of natural language
processing, including, but not limited to:

* machine translation and multilingual processing
* question answering, information extraction and information retrieval
* natural language applications, tools and resources, system
evaluation
* natural language processing for web, knowledge-management systems,
text mining
* word segmentation, shallow parsing, tagging and chunking
* parsing, generation and summarization
* language modeling, statistical methods in natural language
processing
* machine learning for natural language
* software architectures for natural language processing
* syntax, semantics, grammars, morphology and phonology
* discourse and dialogue, natural language interfaces, speech
* lexical semantics and ontologies for NLP
* linguistic, psychological and mathematical models of language
* computational psycholinguistics

(1-1) [Requirements]

Papers should describe original work. Submissions will be judged on
correctness, originality, technical strength, significance and relevance to
the conference, and interest to the attendees.

A paper accepted for presentation at the IJCNLP-04 cannot be presented or
have been presented at any other meeting with publicly available published
proceedings. Papers that are being submitted to other conferences or
workshops must indicate this on the title page, as must papers that contain
significant overlap with previously published work.

(1-2)[Submission Information]

Submissions should follow a two-column format and should not exceed eight
(8) pages, including references. We strongly recommend the use of IJCNLP-04
LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word Style files tailored for IJCNLP-04. The
files and a description of the format are available in the submission site

Submission Site http://www-tsujii.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ijc-nlp04/submission.html

Note that full paper submissions are restricted to 8 pages.

Note also that as reviewing will be blind, the paper should not include the
authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal
the author's identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Kim, 1991) ...", should
be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith previously showed (Kim,
1991) ...". Papers that do not conform to the requirements above are
subject to be rejected without review.

(1-3) [Submission Procedure]

All papers must be submitted electronically according to the instructions
in the submission site. The papers must be submitted no later than 12 p.m.
Japan Standard Time November 15, 2003. Papers submitted after that time
will not be reviewed (Note that we no longer require early registration for
papers.)

Please consult the submission site in which instructions for electronic
submission are provided. Questions regarding the submission process should
be directed to

ijc-nlp04-submission@is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp.

(1-4) [Important Dates]

Paper submission deadline: November 15, 2003
Notification of acceptance: December 23, 2003
Camera ready papers due: January 24, 2004
Main conference: March 22-24, 2004 (Monday-Wednesday)

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(2)[Call for Proposals for Thematic Sessions]

A Thematic Session provides a good occasion to focus peoples with the same
special interest, so that they can meet each other at a specific time-space
to discuss and exchange ideas. Due to the successful history of Thematic
Session in ACL, the IJCNLP-04 would like to offer the opportunity again to
let you organize your own Thematic Session within the main conference. You
are encouraged to submit the proposal for Thematic Session, and to take
this chance to promote a special area/topic/approach and to find out who
are interested in that.

The Thematic Session Proposals will be evaluated by the IJCNLP-04 program
chairs, and those accepted ones will be announced in the Call for Papers
announcement. Submitting papers to Thematic Sessions is the same as that
for ordinary sessions of the main conference (In the submission page, we
will have a check-box to let the author select the general session or a
particular thematic session). The organizer of each Thematic Session needs
to organize his/her own sub-committee for reviewing their assigned papers
and to make recommendation. However, the IJCNLP-04 program committee
reserves the right to make the final adjustment to keep the same quality
standard across various general sessions and thematic sessions. How many
time-slots (usually 3 to 4 papers per slot) would be assigned to a specific
Thematic Session (or if it will be requested to merge with another session)
will depend on the final number of submissions accepted.

Please submit your proposals for Thematic Session to

Dr. Keh Yeh Su (kysu@bdc.com.tw)

before September 20, 2003.

The proposal should indicate what kind of group would be interested in the
proposed theme, and it should also predict the number of possible
submissions. The list of your sub-committee-members that you would like to
invite should also be provided with their affiliations. The notification of
acceptance of Thematic Sessions is October 1, and you are requested to give
a short description for Call-for-Paper on your Thematic Sessions before
October 15. The paper submission deadline will be November 15 (which is the
same as the general session).

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(3)[Call for Papers: Interactive Posters and Demos]

IJCNLP-04 features special sessions for interactive posters and
demonstrations. Poster/Demo presentations present original and significant
work in progress, on-going research projects with novel ideas/applications,
or late-breaking results that are best communicated in an interactive format.
Submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings and
should not exceed four (4) pages, including references. The detailed
submission procedure, together with the style files, is provided in the
submission site.

Important Dates
Paper submission deadline: January 9, 2004
Notification of acceptance: January 30, 2004
Camera ready papers due: February 13, 2004

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(4)[CALL for Proposals for Satellite Events]

We would like to receive proposals of satellite conferences, workshops,
tutorials, meetings of SIGs, etc. that are to be collocated with IJCNLP-04.
The program committee and the local organizers will provide required
facilities. If you are willing to take initiatives in organizing satellite
events, please submit a brief description of the satellite events to

Prof. Choi, Key-Sun (kschoi@cs.kaist.ac.kr)

The submission should reach no later than September 20, 2003.

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(5) Miscellaneous Announcements

(5-1) The proceedings of IJCNLP will be archived in the ACL anthology site
as well as the archive site of the AFNLP.
(5-2) Three associations, ACL, A-NLP, and CIPSC express their intentions to
support IJCNLP-04 financially. We welcome other associations to offer their
supports.

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(6) Organization of IJCNLP-04

Honorary Chair
Nagao, Makoto (Kyoto University, Kyoto)

Conference Co-chairs
Ni, Guangnan (Chinese Academy of Engineering, Beijing)
Tsou, Benjamin K. (City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)

Program Committee Co-chairs
Su, Keh-Yih (Behavior Design Corporation, Taipei)
Tsujii, Jun-ichi (University of Tokyo, Tokyo)
Chair for Satellite Events
Choi, Key-Sun (KAIST, Daejeon)
Chair for Interactive Posters and Demos
Zhou, Ming (Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing)

Local Organizing Committee Co-chairs
Cao, Youqi (Chinese Information Processing Society of China, Beijing)
(VC) Sun, Maosong (Tsinghua University, Beijing)
(External Liaison Person)

Publicity Chair
Isahara, Hitoshi (CRL, Kyoto)
Publication Chair
Jong Hyeok LEE (Postech, Pohang)
(VC) Kurohashi, Sadao (University of Tokyo, Tokyo)
Kwong, Olivia (City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)

Financial Chair
Wong, Kam Fai (Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)
(VC)Lai, Tom (City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)