The NAACL election in the fall of 2001 produced the following results.
All Chapter Board members are elected for 2 year terms. There will be an election for two Chapter Board members this fall. Any North American member of ACL can run for these positions – if you would like to nominate yourself or someone else, please contact the head of the nominating committee, Lori Levin (lsl@cs.cmu.edu). For all other positions, the next elections will be in the fall of 2003.
Since ACL is in North America this year (July 8-10 in Philadelphia), there is no separate meeting of NAACL. NAACL is co-hosting ACL.
As announced in our previous newsletter, we have started planning for NAACL03 and have decided to merge the conference with HLT, the conference on Human Language Technology. This is an experiment, and we are now committed only for 2003, after which time we will assess the success of the merged conference. The goal of the merger is to combine the best of the two conferences, specifically, the high standard of full paper reviews for NAACL and the broader range of topics of HLT. We feel that NLP researchers and the broader HLT community will both benefit from increased exposure and exchange of ideas. Furthermore, we feel that the division into an “applied” conference and a main conference (presumably more theoretical in outlook) is somewhat artificial, as applications have always been featured in the main conference as well, and as the line between application and more fundamental research is not always that clear in our discipline.
To plan the conference, an Advisory Board has been formed, whose members include three representatives from NAACL (Graeme Hirst, its chair; Lynette Hirschman; Dragomir Radev), three representatives from US funding agencies (Karen Kukich, NSF; John Prange, ARDA; Charles Wayne, DARPA), a representative from the IR community (Donna Harman, NIST), a representative from the speech community (Salim Roukos, IBM), and a co-chair of HLT2002 (David Yarowsky, JHU). The Advisory Board proceeds by consensus, and the NAACL members of the Advisory Board will refer all important decisions for ratification by the entire NAACL Chapter Board. The Advisory Board has decided to name Eduard Hovy as General Chair, and Marti Hearst and Mari Ostendorf have agreed to serve as PC co-chairs. They will appoint area chairs. Needless to say, acceptance of submissions will be, as always, entirely based on merit; the members of the Advisory Board will have no direct influence on the selection of papers to be presented at the conference. It is the intention of the NAACL Chapter Board that the merged conference will include all the research areas of previous NAACL, ACL, and HLT conferences; further details will be elaborated by the PC.
The conference will take place May 31 - June 4, 2003, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Dekang Lin has kindly agreed to serve as Local Arrangements Chair.
We are excited about HLT/NAACL-2003 and we think it will provide a good opportunity for us to present our work to a larger audience. We encourage NAACL members to share suggestions about the merged conference with the NAACL Chapter Board (naacl-comments@aclweb.org).
Following some suggestions from members, the Chapter Board has decided to cooperate with Johns Hopkins’s CSLP Summer School on Human Language Technology to fund 5-10 undergraduate and graduate students to attend the 10 day course that takes place before the workshop. The course covers NLP and speech, with much hands-on work. As this year the 10-day course overlaps with ACL, the scholarship includes ACL attendance fee(the students will miss three days of course work, mainly related to speech and IR). This experiment will be repeated two more times, at which time we will evaluate the experience. We are also considering expanding our support to include cooperation with other relevant North American summer schools.
More information on the course: http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/ws2002/calendar/preliminary.shtml, and on the scholarships: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/cardie/naacl/summer-school/summer-school-home.html
These are the conferences as scheduled for 2002 and 2003. The deadlines for main session paper submissions are being coordinated among the three 2003 conferences; details will be published as we get closer.
ACL (NAACL) Philadelphia, July 7-12
EACL Budapest, Hungary, April 12-17 or April 23-27
NAACL-HLT Edmonton, Canada, May 31- June 4
ACL Sapporo, Japan, July 7-12