Unless otherwise stated, all submissions are due by 11:59 PM EST on the specified day.

Dates

Topics

Full papers

Short papers

Demos

Submission guidelines

Conference Chair, Program Committee Chairs, and Senior PC members

ACL-08: HLT combines the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) with the Human Language Technology Conference (HLT) of the North American Chapter of the ACL. The conference covers a broad spectrum of disciplines working towards enabling intelligent systems to interact with humans using natural language, and towards enhancing human-human communication through services such as speech recognition, automatic translation, information retrieval, text summarization, and information extraction. ACL-08: HLT will feature full papers, short papers, posters, demonstrations, and a student research workshop, as well as pre- and post-conference tutorials and workshops. The conference is organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics, in cooperation with The North American Chapter of the ACL.

The conference invites the submission of papers on substantial, original, and unpublished research in disciplines that could impact human language processing systems.

Important Dates:

Jan 10, 2008 Full paper submissions due

Feb 28, 2008 Full paper notification of acceptance

Mar 14, 2008 Short paper submissions due

Apr 14, 2008 Short Paper notification of acceptance

Apr 21, 2008 Camera-ready full/short papers due

Jun 15-20, 2008 ACL 08: HLT Conference

Topics of Interest:

Topics include, but are not limited to:

* Intelligent systems for natural language interaction, including intervention

o Dialogue systems for collaboration, tutoring and behavioral

o Embodied conversational agents, virtual humans and human-robot conversation

o Language-enhanced platforms for interactive narrative and digital entertainment

* Information retrieval

o Speech/MT-oriented information retrieval

o NLP-oriented information retrieval

o General information retrieval

* Information retrieval/NLP applications

o Text Data Mining, Information Extraction, Filtering, Recommendation

o Question Answering

o Topic/text classification and clustering

o Sentiment/attribution/genre analysis

* Language Generation

* Summarization

* Machine Translation and Multilingual processing, including

o Cross-language information retrieval

o Machine translation of speech and text

o Multi-lingual speech recognition and language identification

* Multimodal representations and processing, including speech and gesture

* Speech processing

o Speech recognition

o Speech generation and synthesis

o Rich transcription (automatic annotation of information structure and sources in speech)

* Phonology/Morphology, POS tagging, word segmentation

* Syntax and Parsing

o Grammar induction/development

o Corpus-based parsers and evaluation

o Mathematical Linguistics, Formal Grammar, and algorithms

* Semantics

o lexical semantics

o formal semantics & logic

o textual entailment & paraphrasing

o word sense disambiguation

* Discourse and Pragmatics

* Statistical and machine learning techniques for language processing, including

o Corpus-based language modeling

o Lexical and knowledge acquisition

o Formalisms and Metrics

* Development of language resources, including

o Lexicons and ontologies

o Treebanks, proposition banks, and frame banks

* Evaluation

o Glass-box evaluation of systems and system components

o Black-box evaluation of systems in application settings

o User studies

Submission information:

Full papers:
Short papers:
Demos:

Full papers:

Submissions must describe original, completed, unpublished work. Each submission will be judged chiefly on the strength of the argument it provides in support of its contribution, through e.g., experimental evaluation, theoretical analysis, or critical engagement with HLT. Each submission will be reviewed by at least three program committee members.

Full papers may consist of up to eight (8) pages of content, with 1 extra page for references, and may be presented either as a poster or an oral presentation. Some research is best suited to a traditional oral presentation, whereas other research would benefit from the more interactive presentation a poster allows. As an experiment this year, long paper presenters can express a preference to deliver their paper as a poster or an oral presentation. The program and area chairs will attempt to fulfill as many of these preferences as possible, organizational factors permitting. ACL 08: HLT will additionally aim to give poster presentations higher status than usual (by scheduling, physical arrangement, combination with refreshments). The proceedings will not distinguish long papers by presentation format.

The deadline for full papers is 11:59 PM EST on January 10, 2008. Submission will be electronic using the paper submission software available at https://www.softconf.com/acl08/papers.

Short papers:

In keeping with the HLT tradition, ACL 08: HLT solicits short papers, in order to bring fresh research and new ideas to the conference. Short paper submissions must describe original and unpublished work. Papers qualifying as short papers can be of one of three types:

1. late-breaking results
2. smaller-scale work than a long paper, e.g., a new idea or a system without a full evaluation
3. opinion or position papers

It is in general possible to resubmit a submission which was recently rejected as a long ACL-08:HLT paper. The resubmission must be shortened to fit the short paper guidelines and should respond to reviewer comments if appropriate. The reviewing of a resubmission will be influenced by whether the reviewers of the long version recommended to resubmit.

Short papers will be presented orally or in poster sessions, and will be given four pages in the proceedings. Authors should indicate their preference; the reviewers will determine which format is more appropriate based on the submission. Each new short paper submission will be reviewed by at least two program committee members (previous reviews may be taken into account for resubmissions). The deadline for short papers is 11:59 PM EDT on March 14, 2008. Submission will be electronic using the paper submission software available at https://www.softconf.com/acl08/shortPapers.

Format:

Full paper submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL-08: HLT proceedings without exceeding eight (8) pages of content, with 1 extra page for references. Short paper submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings, and should not exceed four (4) pages, including references. 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 (Smith, 1991) ...", should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...". Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review. All submissions must be electronic in PDF. Please see the conference website for detailed typesetting specifications. Authors are strongly encouraged to use the LaTeX or Microsoft Word style files available at http://ling.osu.edu/acl08/stylefiles.html.

Demonstration, student sessions, tutorial, and workshop proposals:

Multiple-submission policy: Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must provide this information at submission time. Papers may not be submitted to ACL-08: HLT if they are currently or will be submitted to other meetings or publications and that other meeting or publication prohibits multiple submission. If ACL-08: HLT accepts a paper, authors must notify the program chairs by March 7, 2008 (full papers) or April 21, 2008 (short papers), indicating which meeting they choose for presentation of their work. ACL-08: HLT cannot accept for publication or presentation work that will be (or has been) published elsewhere. For the short paper submissions to ACL08: HLT, a paper will be considered identical to a long paper (for example, an eight-page paper submitted to ACL) if it does not differ in at least two content pages from the long paper.

General Conference Chair:

Kathleen McKeown (Columbia University)

Program Co-Chairs:

Johanna D. Moore (University of Edinburgh)

Simone Teufel (Cambridge University)

James Allan(University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

Sadaoki Furui (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan)

Workshop:

Ming Zhou (Microsoft Research China)

Tutorials:

Ani Nenkova (Univ of Pennsylvania, USA)

Marilyn Walker (Univ of Sheffield, UK)

Eugene Agichtein (Emory University, USA)

Demos:

Jimmy Lin (University of Maryland)

Student Co-Chairs:

Faculty rep: Jan Wiebe (University of Pittsburgh)

Student NL: Wolfgang Maier (U of Tubingen, Germany)

Student Speech: Ebru Arisoy (Bogazici University, Turkey)

Student IR: Keisuke Inoue (Syracuse University, USA)

Area Chairs:

Jason Baldridge (University of Texas at Austin, USA)

Regina Barzilay (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)

Pushpak Bhattacharayya (Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay)

David Carmel (IBM Research, Israel)

David Chiang (USC/Information Sciences Institute, USA)

Steve Clark (Oxford University, UK)

Hal Daume (University of Utah, USA)

Dina Demner-Fushman (National Library of Medicine, USA)

Li Deng (Microsoft Research, USA)

Mark Dras (Macquarie University, Australia)

Pascale Fung (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong)

Daniel Gildea (University of Rochester, USA)

John Hansen (University of Texas at Dallas, USA)

Daniel Hardt (Copenhagen Business School, Denmark)

Masato Ishizaki (University of Tokyo, Japan)

Michael Johnston (AT&T Labs Reserach, USA)

Min-Yen Kan (National University of Singapore,Singapore)

Noriko Kando (National Institute of Informatics, Japan)

Emiel Krahmer (Tilburg University, Netherlands)

Elizabeth Liddy (Syracuse University, USA)

Chin-Yew Lin (Microsoft Research Asia, China)

Andrew McCallum (University of Massachusetts, USA)

Katja Markert (University of Leeds, UK)

Lluis Marquez (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain)

Raymond Mooney (University of Texas at Austin, USA)

Rashmi Prasad (University of Pennsylvania, USA)

Helmut Schmid (University of Stuttgart, Germany)

Sabine Schulte im Walde (Stuttgart University, Germany)

Rohini Srihari (University of Buffalo, USA)

Manfred Stede (Potsdam University, Germany)

Keiichi Tokuda (Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan)

Taro Watanabe (NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Japan)

Janyce Wiebe (University of Pittsburgh, USA)

David Weir (Sussex University, UK)

Local Arrangements:

Chris Brew

Donna Byron

Eric Fosler-Lussier

Detmar Meurers

Michael White

DJ Hovermale (Webmaster)