Asian Symposium on Natural Language Processing to Overcome Language Barriers

Website: http://www.ieice.org/iss/nlc/jpn/sympo2004/

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)

Date March 25-26, 2004
Venue Hainan Island, China
Contact Person IZUHA Tatsuya, Toshiba Corporation (tatsuya.izuha@toshiba.co.jp)

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.

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

Submission

The submission deadline of extended abstracts will be December, 2. Submission details will be available from
http://www.ieice.org/iss/nlc/jpn/symposium2004e.html

Publication

This Symposium will prepare a printed version of the proceedings. We also plan to publish selected papers as a special issue of IEICE Transactions.

Important Dates

Submission of Extended Abstracts: January 5, 2004 (Extended)
Notification of Acceptance: January 19, 2004 (Extended)
Camera Ready Papers: February 23, 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