Human Communication Research Centre
The Institute for Communicating and Collaborative Systems (ICCS)
Division of Informatics
University of Edinburgh

The closing date for applications is 22 February 2002.

Further particulars and application details can be obtained from
http://www.jobs.ed.ac.uk
Or the Personnel Department,
The University of Edinburgh,
9-16 Chambers Street, Edinburgh,
EH1 1HT
Tel: 0131 650 2511
(24 hour answering service) quoting the reference number 311136.

Open Position for a Computational Linguist at the Joint

The European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) has an opening for a one-year position (auxiliary agent), starting approximately in May 2002. The applicant will contribute to Language Technology projects at the JRC-Ispra site near the Lago Maggiore in Northern Italy.

Application forms before: Sunday 3 March 2002.
Further Information available at:
http://www.jrc.it/langtech
Or Contact:
Ralf Steinberger:
ralf.steinberger@jrc.it

Dr. Ralf Steinberger (ralf.steinberger@jrc.it)
European Commission, Joint Research Centre (http://www.jrc.it/langtech/ )
Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen (IPSC)
Cybersecurity and New Technologies for Combating Fraud Unit (CSCF)
T.P. 361
I - 21020 Ispra (VA)
Tel: + 39 - 0332 78 6271
Fax: + 39 - 0332 78 9098

PhD Studentship in Multimedia Information Filtering

The Multimedia Communications Department of the Institut EURECOM (Sophia-Antipolis, France) is offering a PhD Studentship within a European project on Interactive Television. The project will focus on the use of Mpeg7 descriptors for the personalization of informations to the end-user. The research will involve studying techniques for Video Indexing, Information Filtering, Adaptive Processes etc...
Strong background in Mathematics (probabilities and statistics), Computer Science and Networks (Internet) is required.

The Institut EURECOM is a education and research center which has been created by the Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne (EPFL) and Telecom Paris. It is located on the famous "French Riviera" and is devoted to excellence in education and research.
Its activities are organized in Corporate, Mobile and Multimedia Communications. More information is available at:
http://www.eurecom.fr/
http://bmgroup.eurecom.fr/

The studentship will be available from March 2002, for a duration of 3 years. Candidates should send the CV, letter and the name of two references to:
Prof Bernard Merialdo                         email: merialdo@eurecom.fr
Institut EURECOM                              Tel: +33 (0) 4 93 00 26 29
2229 Route des Cretes                         Sec: +33 (0) 4 93 00 26 33
B.P. 193                                  Fax: +33 (0) 4 93 00 26 27
06904 Sophia-Antipolis cedex

Research Staff Positions at NEC USA's C&C Research Laboratories

NEC USA's C&C (Computers & Communications) Research Laboratories has R&D openings at our San Jose, CA location in the scope of:
Internet Content Delivery Systems/Software

These positions offer benefits and opportunity for conducting advanced R&D. The research aims at exploring new business opportunities and supporting NEC internal product development.

We are looking for researchers and engineers who are specialized the following areas:
- Distributed computing
- P2P computing
- Networking
- Web related technologies
- Databases
- Information retrieval
- Content delivery networks
- Streaming media
- Video conferencing
- Electronic commerce applications

Available positions include

- Research Staff Members (a Ph.D. degree is required)
- Research Associates
- Post-doctoral/Visiting Research Scientists
- Interns and co-op students

Please email your resume to resume@ccrl.sj.nec.com (preferred).

Alternatively, you can also mail or fax your resume to:
HR Manager
NEC USA, Inc., C&C Research Laboratories
110 Rio Robles, MS SJ100
San Jose, CA 95134
E-mail: resume@ccrl.sj.nec.com
Fax: (408) 943-3099

III Notices

III.1 Publications

Special Topic Issue of IJUFKBS

International Journal of Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-Based Systems (IJUFKS)

Extended deadline to February 28th, 2002.

Call For Papers

Special Topic Issue on Management of uncertainty and imprecision in multimedia information retrieval systems. In International Journal of Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-Based Systems (IJUFKS)

Aim:
The diffusion of the Internet and the consequent increase in the production and exchange of multimedia information demand the development of effective systems for information access. The main aim of these systems is to provide a fast and effective identification of the information relevant to specific users' needs; this is a complex decision making task, pervaded with vagueness and uncertainty, due to the fact that it requires an interpretation of both the users information needs and the stored information. A promising direction to make effective the information access is to model the uncertainty and vagueness intrinsic in the process of identifying relevant information, and to make the systems adaptive, i.e. able to learn the users concept of relevance.

Topics Of Interest:
We invite submissions of papers on the use of Soft Computing techniques for modelling the uncertainty, vagueness, subjectivity, and learning in information access.

Specific topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:
Information retrieval, Database management, Multimedia indexing and retrieval, Information Filtering, Multilingual information access, Collaborative filtering, Text Categorization,Digital Libraries, Text Mining.

Where the information access process is modelled and/or managed using Soft Computing techniques, like for example : fuzzy logic, probabilistic reasoning, multi-valued logics, chaotic computing, belief networks, machine learning, rough sets, possibility theory, neural networks.

Papers due: February 28th, 2002.
Please send your intention of submission

Submission Process:
Submissions papers can be:
(i) Either, full length papers reporting original work generally of up to 4000 words;
(ii) Or, brief communications of original work or work in progress of up to 1200 words.

Authors should submit the papers electronically to:
gabriella.pasi@itim.mi.cnr.it,
f.crestani@cis.strath.ac.uk
bougha@irit.fr.

A copy of the manuscript must be also sent to boughanem at the address listed below, Including : article's title, the contact author's name, affiliation, address, telephone, FAX numbers, and e-mail address.

For more details refer to the “Guidelines for contributors” included in each issue of the journal and as found on the journal web site:
http://ejournals.wspc.com.sg/journals/ijufks/mkt
Papers submitted to this Special Issue are subject to the usual IJUFKS peer review.

Guest editors:

Mohand Boughanem
IRIT 118, Route de Narbonne
31062 Toulouse, France
Email: bougha@irit.fr

Fabio Crestani
Department of Computer Science
University of Strathclyde
26 Richmond Street
Glasgow G1 1XH, Scotland, UK
Email: f.crestani@cis.strath.ac.uk

Gabriella Pasi
ITIM - CNR
Via Ampere, 56
20131 Milano, Italy
Email: gabriella.pasi@itim.mi.cnr.it

III.2 Meetings

SIGIR2002 - Call for Demonstrations

Demonstrations can offer first-hand experience with Information Retrieval systems, whether advanced operational systems or research prototypes. The demonstration proposal should indicate how the demonstration illustrates new ideas, should provide the technical specifications of the system and should include references to other literature. The hardware, software, and network requirements should be indicated in a separate cover letter. A one-page abstract describing each demonstration accepted will be published in the proceedings. Proposals should be submitted to the Demonstrations Chair. Send either 3 hardcopies or 1 ASCII email copy of at most 500 words. Demonstration proposals should be sent to arrive by February 28, 2002 to: Eija Airio eija.airio@uta.fi.

ICDM '02: The 2002 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining

Sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society
Maebashi TERRSA, Maebashi City, Japan
December 9 - 12, 2002
NOTE: The Conference Date Changed to December 9-12, 2002
Call for Papers
Important Dates
June 5, 2002: Main track paper submissions, Industry track paper submissions
June 30, 2002: Tutorial submissions, submissions Workshop proposals
August 16, 2002 Paper acceptance notices
September 12, 2002: Final camera-readies
December 9-12, 2002: Conference

All paper submissions will be handled electronically. Detailed instructions are provided on the conference home page at
Home Page: http://kis.maebashi-it.ac.jp/icdm02
Mirror Page: http://www.wi-lab.com/icdm02

Eight International Symposium on Social Communication

Centre of applied linguistics
Santiago de Cuba
January 20-24, 2003

Important Dates
Abstract Submission deadline: July 1st, 2002
Notification on paper’s approval by Scientific Committee: by July 30, 2002
Delivery of papers either by e-mail or by mail using 3½-inch diskette: September 15, 2002
Pre-Symposium seminars: January 20th, 2003
8th International Symposium on Social Communication: January 21st through 24th, 2003

All mail or inquiries should be addressed to:
Dr. Eloina Miyares Bermudez
Secretaria Ejecutiva Comite Organizador
VIII Simposio Internacional Comunicacion Social
Centro de Linguistica Aplicada
Apartado Postal 4067, Vista Alegre
Santiago de Cuba 4, Cuba 90400
Telephone: (53-226) 642760
E-mail: leonel@lingapli.ciges.inf.cu

Semantic Web Workshop at the 2002 World Wide Web Conference

Hawaii, May 7, 2002
Call for Participation

Important dates
Submission of papers: March 1st
Notification of acceptance: April 1st
Submission of camera-ready copy: April 15th

For additional information about the workshop, visit
http://semanticweb2002.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de
For additional information about WWW-2002, visit
http://www2002.org

Workshop on Distributed Computing Architectures for Digital Libraries

Call for Papers
http://www.cs.odu.edu/~jbollen/icpp2002/
To be held in conjunction with the
31st International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP 2002)
Vancouver, Canada August 18-21, 2002
http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/icpp2002/

Important Dates:
April 20, 2002: Paper Submission
May 15, 2002: Notification of acceptance
June 1, 2002: Camera-ready copies due

SIGIR 2002 - Call for Posters

Call for POSTER Submissions
Submission deadline of February 28, 2002
http://www.sigir2002.org

SIGIR is the major international forum for the presentation of new research results and the demonstration of new systems and techniques in the broad field of information retrieval (IR). The Conference and Poster Chair invite all those working in areas related to IR to submit original research posters at this time. (Proposals for tutorials, workshops, and demonstrations of systems are also encouraged with the same deadline and same topics, but submissions are handled differently. See the Conference Web page for details.)

SIGIR 2002 welcomes contributions related to any aspect of IR, but the major Areas of Interest are listed below:

     * Formal Models, Language Models, Search Strategies,
       Fusion/Combination
     * Machine Learning for IR, Text Data Mining, Clustering, Text
       Categorization
     * Cross-lingual Retrieval, Multilingual Retrieval, Machine
       Translation for IR
     * Topic Detection and Tracking, Content-Based Filtering,
       Collaborative Filtering, Agents
     * Web IR, Citation and Link Analysis, XML and
       Metadata, Digital Libraries
     * Video and Image Access, Audio and Speech Retrieval,
       Music Retrieval
     * Text Representation and Indexing, Information
      Extraction, Lexical Acquisition, Natural Language
       Processing for IR
     * Performance, Compression, Scalability, Architectures,
       Distributed Search, Mobile Applications
     * Interfaces, Visualization, Interactive IR, User Models,
       User Studies
     * Summarization, Question Answering
     * Evaluation, Building Test Collections, Experimental
       Design and Metrics

Poster presentations offer researchers an opportunity to present late-breaking results, significant work in progress, or research that is best communicated in an interactive or graphical format. Two-page abstracts of posters will appear in the conference proceedings. A poster proposal is an extended abstract (of 2 pages in SIGIR format) that emphasizes the research problem and the methods being used. Authors are encouraged to conceal their identity for the reviewing process where it is practical to do so. Poster proposals must be submitted by February 28, 2002. They must be submitted electronically, via the submission web page at http://sigir.shef.ac.uk.

We can accept poster proposals in either PDF or Postscript. It is the responsibility of authors to ensure that their poster proposals use no unusual format features and are printable on a standard Postscript printer. Hardcopy or electronic copy in other formats will only be accepted in exceptional circumstances. To arrange hardcopy or alternative format submission, please email the Poster Chair (allan@cs.umass.edu). All authors, even those who choose to submit hardcopy, must complete the details on the submission web page. LaTeX and Word templates for SIGIR submissions are available from
http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html.

LREC 2002 Workshop on Linguistic Knowledge Acquisition And Representation: Bootstrapping Annotated Language Data

Las Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain
2nd June 2002

Important Dates
Deadline for workshop abstract submission: 15th of February 2002
Notification of acceptance: 15th of March 2002
Final version of paper for workshop proceedings: 15th of April 2002
Workshop: 2nd June 2002 (afternoon session)

Contact Person
Simonetta Montemagni
Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale (ILC) - CNR
Area della Ricerca di Pisa
Via Moruzzi 1, 56124 Pisa, ITALY
E-mail: simo@ilc.pi.cnr.it

2002 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2002)

Preliminary Call for Papers

We are interested in papers from academia, government, and industry on all areas of traditional interest to the SIGDAT community and aligned fields, including but not limited to:

- Information extraction
- Information retrieval
- Language and dialog modeling
- Lexical acquisition
- Machine translation
- Multilingual technologies
- Question answering
- Statistical parsing
- Summarization
- Tagging
- Term and named entity extraction
- Word sense disambiguation
- Word, term, and text segmentation

Important Dates:
Submission deadline: April 4, 2002=20
Acceptance notification: May 8, 2002=20
Camera-ready copy due: June 6, 2002=20
Conference: July 6-7, 2002=20

More info will be coming soon; see also last year EMNLP's website at
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/llee/emnlp.html

Conference URL
http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/~hajic/emnlp02

Acquiring, Structuring and Evaluating Terminologies (TermAcq 2002)

28th May 2002
Workshop held in conjunction with the LREC 2002 conference
Las Palmas, Canary Islands – Spain
2nd Call For Papers (deadline extended to the 21st of Feb., 2002)

Important dates
Deadline for workshop abstract submission: 15th of February 2002
Notification of acceptance: 8th of March 2002
Final version of paper for workshop proceedings: 5th of April 2002
Workshop: 28th May 2002
http://www.lrec-conf.org

Workshop on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages ACL-2002

University of Pennsylvania
Thursday 11 July 2002
Final Call For Papers

Important dates:
February 24, 2002: Deadline for submissions
April 7, 2002: Notification of acceptance
May 1, 2002: Final version due
July 11, 2002: Workshop date

Home Page and Further Details:
http://www.cs.um.edu.mt/~mros/WSL

NAFIPS-FLINT 2002

June 27-29, 2002
New Orleans, LA

NAFIPS (North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society)
BISCFLINT (Berkeley Initiative in Soft Computing's special interest group on Fuzzy Logic and the InterneT)

The Special Interest Group on Fuzzy Logic and the Internet (FLINT) will hold its annual workshop as part of NAFIPS 2002. The FLINT workshop and NAFIPS 2002 were combined to allow people to conveniently attend both (and save money). The registration for NAFIPS 2002 covers all sessions and events. Special Track: Fuzzy Sets and the Internet.

Conference And Conference Site:

The conference will be held at the Tulane University campus in the Tulane University Centre in enchanting and historic New Orleans, Louisiana. New Orleans is world renowned for its fine food and music. Housing has been made available at very reasonable costs on campus in the Aron Residences. A number of other hotels are available via about a 15-minute ride on the national landmark St. Charles streetcar. The conference banquet will be held at a site to be decided.

To be placed on the mailing list for future notices, please send name and email address to the:
Publications Chair, Jianhua Chen
Jianhua@bit.csc.lsu.edu

19th International Conference on Computational Linguistics COLING-2002

August 24 - September 1, 2002
Howard International House,
Taipei, Taiwan
Call for Papers

Organized by:
Academia Sinica, ACLCLP and Tsing Hua University
Under the Auspices of:
The International Committee on Computational Linguistics

Important Dates:
Deadline for Workshop Proposals: 15 January 2002
Deadline for paper submission: 15 February 2002
Notification of Workshops: 15 February 2002
Notification to authors: 1 May 2002
Final camera-ready copy and pre-registration: 15 June 2002
Tutorials: 24 - 25 August 2002 (Academia Sinica)
Conference: 26 August - 30 August 2002 Howard International House)
Post-Conference Workshops: 31 August, 1 September 2002 (Academia Sinica)
URL: http://www.coling2002.sinica.edu.tw/

Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing for Ontology Engineering

Workshop held in conjunction with the ECAI 2002 conference
Lyon (France), July 22-23 2002
All for Papers

Important Dates:
Deadline for paper submissions: March 15th 2002
Notification of acceptance: April 26th 2002
Deadline for motivation abstracts: May 24th 2002
Camera-ready papers: May 24th 2002
Workshop ECAI2002: July 22nd-23rd 2002
http://www.inria.fr/acacia/OLT2002

Tenth International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS 2002)

October 30 - November 1, Irvine, California
2^nd Call for Papers

Important Dates:
Paper Submission Deadline: May 31, 2002
Acceptance Notification: July 15, 2002
Final Version Due: August 20, 2002
Conference: October 30 - November 1, 2002
http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/fedconf/coopis/2002

International Conference on Ontology's, Databases, and Applications of Semantics for Large Scale Information Systems (ODBASE)

October 29 - November 1,
Irvine, California
2^nd Call for Papers

Important Dates
Paper Submission Deadline: May 31, 2002
Acceptance Notification: July 15, 2002
Final Version Due: August 20, 2002
Conference: October 30 - November 1, 2002
http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/fedconf/odbase/2002

LIDA 2002

It is our pleasure to inform you that preparations for LIDA 2002 Course and Conference are well under way and that we are able to send you a tentative program.
We are very much pleased with the fact that some of our lecturers are top professionals such as Christine Borgman, Tefko Saracevic, Nick Belkin, Peter Ingwersen, Pertti Vakkari, Kalervo Jaervelin, David Bawden, Lynn Robinson, Carol Kuhlthau, etc. We believe that some of them are known to you as well.

All information about LIDA 2002 can be found on the following address:
www.ffzg.hr/infoz/lida

If you are interested in taking part in LIDA 2002 Course and Conference, please feel free to contact us.

Sanjica Faletar
Research assistant
Department of Library and Information Science
Faculty of Education
University of J. J. Strossmayer, Osijek
Croatia

LREC 2002 - Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation

                   Last call for papers
           Deadline extension : March 6th, 2002

Using Semantics for Information Retrieval and Filtering

            State of the Art and Future Research

             Las Palmas, Canary Islands - Spain
                      2nd of June 2002

               Held in conjunction with the

Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation

                       (LREC 2002)

The goal of this full day workshop is to bring together researchers
in the domain of information retrieval, and in particular, researchers
concerned by the utility of enhancing queries with semantic information
gleaned from languages resources and processes.

Workshop scope and aims
-----------------------

Several experiments have been carried out in the last 15 years
investigating the use of various resources and techniques (e.g.,
thesauri, synonyms, word sense disambiguation, etc.) to help refine or
enhance queries. However, the conclusions drawn on the basis of these
experiments vary widely. Results of some studies have led to the
conclusion that semantic information serves no purpose and even
degrades results, while others have concluded that the use of semantic
information drawn from external resources significantly increases the
performance of retrieval software. At this point, several question
arise:

- Why do these conclusions vary so widely?
- Is the divergence a result of differences in methodology?
- Is the divergence a result of a difference in resources? What
    are the most suitable resources? Do results using manually
    constructed resources differ in significant ways from results
    using automatically extracted information?
- What is the contribution of specialized resources?
- Are present frameworks for evaluation (e.g., TREC) appropriate
    for evaluation of results?.

These questions are fundamental not only to research in document retrieval,
but also for information searching, question answering, filtering, etc.
Their importance is even more acute for multilingual applications, where,
for instance, the question of whether to disambiguate before translating
is fundamental.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers in the domain
of document retrieval, and in particular, researchers on both sides of the
question of the utility of enhancing queries with semantic information
gleaned from languages resources and processes.

The workshop will provide a forum for presentation of the different points
of view, followed by a roundtable in which the participants will assess the
state of the art, consider the results of past and on-going work and the
possible reasons for the considerable differences in their conclusions.
Ultimately, they will attempt to identify future directions for research.

In view of the relevance of Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) to information
retrieval, a part of the workshop will be dedicated to a panel on Senseval
and WSD evaluation (http://www.itri.bton.ac.uk/events/senseval/).
The purpose of the panel is to open the discussion on the objectives and
principles of Senseval-3, the next evaluation exercise for WSD systems.

The panel will summarize the methodology and results of Senseval-2 and
consider the current state of WSD. Panelists will speak about the following
topics: Is the Senseval-2 method of evaluation adequate? Are we building
the right kind of lexical resources for real sense disambiguation systems?
Should we (and is it possible to) start an application-specific evaluation
track?

Important dates
---------------

- Paper submission deadline: March, 6th 2002
- Notification of acceptance/rejection: March 27th, 2002
- Camera ready papers due: April 8th, 2002
- Workshop: June 2nd, 2002

Topics
------

Papers are requested that deal with one or more of the following topics
(this is not an exhaustive list), and which make use of semantics applied
to automatic information management:

- Query enrichment
- Semantic disambiguation
- Thematic clustering
- Performance comparison according to the resources or techniques
    used
- Automatic construction of resources from corpora
- Comparisons of manually and automatically created resources
- Methodology and resources for evaluation
- Interlingual document retrieval
- Structure and quality control of resources
- Comparison of general resources and specialized resources
- Use of document structure (XML, RDF, etc.)

Submission Details
------------------

Papers should not exceed 7 pages.

Submission must be sent by ELECTRONIC mail to loupy@sinequa.com. Please
write "LREC2002 workshop paper
submission" in the subject line.

Accepted formats: Postscript (strongly preferred), PDF or RTF. No
information about author(s) should appear in the submission paper.

Please send the following information in a separate file: the title
to be printed in the programme of the Workshop; names and affiliations
of the authors; the full address of the first author (or a contact person),
including phone, fax, email, URL.

Formatting guidelines are provided at http://www.langnat.com/usirf. The
format described here may be modified for the final version.

Contact Person
--------------

Claude de Loupy
   Sinequa
51-59 rue Ledru-Rollin
94200 Ivry-sur-Seine, France
Tel: +33 1 49 87 06 00 / Fax: +33 1 49 87 06 01
email: loupy@sinequa.com

IV Projects

Medical Informatics Fellowship Training at Oregon Health & Science University.

OHSU offers a two to three year research training fellowship program in medical informatics. Candidates must be US citizens or permanent residents, and possess a doctoral degree (M.D., Ph.D, or other doctoral degree). Support for the program comes mainly from the National Library of Medicine but also from the Department of Veterans Affairs and other sources. The overall goal of the program is to give fellows the research training and experience that will prepare them to enter the academic community and undertake programs of independent medical informatics research, or to take leadership positions in the growing number of hospital and/or commercial efforts in medical informatics. Fellows are expected to select a faculty mentor who will help them outline a curriculum and a program of research; the fellow then will focus on and complete a significant research project, and present their research results orally and in writing.

There are many opportunities for classroom learning in the program. Fellows are encouraged to take courses in the curriculum of the Master of Science in Medical Informatics, as consistent with their research and career goals, but they may choose whether or not to be formally degree-seeking candidates. Besides the MS degree, fellows have the option to pursue a Master of Public Health with a specialization in health informatics.
Accepted fellows who choose to pursue the MS degree in medical informatics are automatically admitted to that program; separate application is required for the MPH program. Fellowship applicants who wish to be considered for admission to the informatics MS degree program even if not accepted for fellowship support should indicate this in their application.

Courses taught by OHSU faculty cover introductory and advanced medical informatics topics, as well as computer science, research methods, quantitative methods & statistics, introduction to clinical medicine and management topics. The division also provides a weekly seminar, with a combination of inside and outside speakers. Fellows may also take part in a seminar series for fellows in the Division of General Internal Medicine and advanced coursework in computer science and other relevant topics taught at nearby universities.

The OHSU medical informatics fellowship program formally began in 1992 and is directed by Kent A. Spackman, M.D., Ph.D. The master's degree program is directed by William Hersh, M.D. More than fifty Portland-area faculty are affiliated with the program and are potential mentors to fellows. Active research areas include bioinformatics, information retrieval, computer-based patient records, clinical terminology, clinician information needs, and health care information technology management.

For more information about the fellowship program, including an application form, visit our Web site at:
http://www.ohsu.edu/bicc-informatics/fellowship/
Preferential consideration will be given to applications received by
February 1, 2002.

Kent Spackman, M.D., Ph.D.
Director
Email: spackman@ohsu.edu

Call for Bids to Host Human Language Technology 2003: 3^rd Meeting of the NAACL

Call for Bids to Host Human Language Technology 2003
3rd Meeting of the NAACL

The Human Language Technology -North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics Advisory Board hereby invite proposals to host Human Language Technology 2003: 3rd Meeting of the NAACL.

The proposal submission process is incremental. First, draft proposals are sought from prospective bidders. Based on the evaluation of the draft proposals, promising bidders will be subsequently asked to provide additional information as needed.

Bids must specify a Local Arrangements Chair, who will be responsible for the usual activities, such as arranging meeting rooms, equipment, refreshments, housing, on-site registration, participant e-mail access, security for equipment, the reception, the banquet, and working with the General Chair, the HLT-NAACL Advisory Board and NAACL to develop the budget and registration materials.

Bids for Local Arrangements Chair can include suggestions for General Chair, which must be someone other than the Local Arrangements Chair but could be at the same institution. However, the HLT-NAACL Advisory Board will be responsible for selecting the General Chair.

The General Chair will be responsible for overseeing operations of the conference, including working with the HLT-NAACL Advisory Board and the Local Arrangements Chair to develop the budget and registration materials; working with the Program and Local Arrangements Chairs to develop the schedule and program; working with the HTL-NAACL Advisory Board to appoint supporting chairs to obtain outside funding, publicize the conference, and organize workshops, tutorials, student events, and demonstrations (none of these supporting nominations need to be included in the proposal); and coordinating the activities of the various chairs and their committees.

The HLT-NAACL Advisory Board will be responsible for selecting the Program Committee Co-Chairs, who will oversee the processes of soliciting, receiving, and reviewing submissions; selecting the papers to be presented at the conference; notifying authors of acceptance or rejection; and developing the conference program.

Draft proposals are due on Wednesday, March 20, 2002. They will be evaluated by the HLT-NAACL Advisory Board during HLT-2002 March 24-27. Promising bidders will be contacted shortly afterwards and will be asked to provide further information due to the Advisory Board on Monday, April 22. The final bid will be chosen by the HLT-NAACL Advisory Board by Monday May 6, 2002.

The 1st and 2nd meetings of NAACL were highly successful, with approximately 500 attendees at NAACL-01. By merging with the HLT conference, we hope to attract new attendees from areas such as the speech and information retrieval communities. The conference might, therefore, draw over 600 people, depending on the venue.

The HLT/NAACL Advisory Board is a new group still being organized and we apologize for the tight time frame. We thank proposers in advance for their efforts.

Draft proposals should include information on:
* Location (accessibility; conference venue, e.g., hotel or   university; accommodations, e.g., hotels, motels, student dorms). Note that bids must be for locations in North America.
* Local CL Community
* Proposed Dates
* Meeting Space (space for plenary sessions, tutorials, workshops, posters, exhibits, demos and small meetings)
* A/V Equipment
* Food/Entertainment/Banquet/Receptions
* Local Arrangements Team (chair/co-chair, committee, volunteer labour, registration handling)
* General Chair (optional)
* Sponsorships
* Budget Estimates
* Opportunities for Co-location with Other Meetings (if any)

Proposals will be evaluated in relation to a number of site selection criteria (unordered):

* Experience of local arrangement team.
* Local CL community support.
* Any local government and industry support
* Accessibility and attractiveness of proposed site.
* Appropriateness of proposed dates.
* Adequacy of conference and exhibit facilities for the anticipated number of registrants.
* Adequacy of residence accommodations and food services in a range of price categories and close to the conference facilities.
* Adequacy of budget projections and expected surplus.
* Geographical balance with regard to the previous conferences in Pittsburgh and Seattle, USA, but still limited to North America.

The HLT-NAACL Advisory Board seeks proposals for holding the meeting during the first half of 2003.The HLT-NAACL Advisory Board will look especially favourably on proposals for the spring.

Please send draft proposals electronically to Lynette Hirschman, the NAACL Executive Board member responsible for the Call for Bids:
Lynette Hirschman
MITRE MS K320
202 Burlington Rd.
Bedford, MA 01730
781-271-7789; fax: 781-271-2780
lynette@mitre.org

Important Dates:
March 20, 2002     Draft proposals due
March 27, 2002     HLT-NAACL Advisory Board evaluates proposals and contacts promising bidders
April 22, 2002 Promiising bidders provide any requested information
May 6, 2002 Bid selected