COLING/ACL 2006 Call For Papers 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics AND 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics 17th-21st July 2006 Sydney, Australia http://www.coling2006.org/ http://www.acl2006.org/ *** Submission deadline: FEBRUARY 28, 2006 *** General Conference Chair: Nicoletta Calzolari (ILC-CNR, Pisa) Program Co-Chairs: Claire Cardie (Cornell University) Pierre Isabelle (National Research Council of Canada) Local Organization Co-Chairs: Robert Dale (Macquarie University, Sydney) Cecile Paris (CSIRO, Sydney) Following up on the higly successful events at Stanford (1984) and Montreal (1998), the International Committee on Computational Linguistics and the Association for Computational Linguistics will be hosting their third joint conference in Sydney, July 17th-21st, 2006. Papers are invited on substantial, original, and unpublished research on all aspects of computational linguistics, including, but not limited to: pragmatics, semantics, syntax, grammars and the lexicon; phonetics, phonology and morphology; lexical semantics and ontologies; word segmentation, tagging and chunking; parsing, generation and summarization; language modeling, spoken language recognition and understanding; linguistic, psychological and mathematical models of language; information retrieval, question answering, information extraction and text mining; machine learning for natural language; corpus-based modeling of language, discourse and dialogue; multi-lingual processing, machine translation and translation aids; multi-modal and natural language interfaces and dialogue systems; applications, tools and language resources such as annotated corpora; and system evaluation. We are particularly interested in bridging the gap to other related communities, and so we especially welcome papers on speech technology and information retrieval. Also, for this first joint COLING/ACL conference to be held in Asia we especially encourage papers that address issues specific to the processing of Asian languages. Requirements Papers should describe original work; they should emphasize completed work rather than intended work, and should indicate clearly the state of completion of the reported results. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation results should be included. Submissions will be judged on correctness, originality, technical strength, significance and relevance to the conference, and interest to the attendees. Submissions presented at the joint COLING/ACL conference should mostly contain new material that has not been, and will not be, presented at any other meeting with publicly available proceedings. Papers that are being submitted in parallel to other conferences or workshops must indicate this on the title page, as must papers that contain significant overlap with previously published work. Reviewing Reviewing will be managed by an international Conference Program Committee consisting of Area Chairs and associated Program Committee Members. The names of the Area Chairs will be communicated within the next few weeks. The reviewing process will be blind and each submission will be reviewed by at least three program committee members. Categories of Papers Papers can be submitted to one of two categories: the REGULAR PAPER category or the POSTER category. Authors must designate one of these categories at submission time. Although both categories of submmission will be the same maximum length, regular papers will be presented a single time to a potentially large audience during one of the parallel paper sessions at the conference, and poster presentations will be repeated several times before small groups of people (using paper posters or demos) at one of the conference poster sessions. Regular papers are most appropriate for presenting substantial research results, while posters are more appropriate for presenting an ongoing research effort. Regular papers and poster papers will appear in separate volumes of the proceedings. Submission Information Submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings and should not exceed eight (8) pages, including references. We strongly recommend the use of the LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word document template that will be made available on the conference Web site. A description of the required format will be made available to those who are unable to make direct use of these style files. We reserve the right to reject submissions that do not conform to these styles, including font size restrictions. 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. Submission will be electronic. The only accepted format for submitted papers is Adobe PDF. The papers must be submitted no later than February 28, 2006. Papers submitted after that time will not be reviewed. For details of the submission procedure, please consult the submission webpage reachable via the conference website at www.coling2006.org. Questions regarding the submission procedure should be directed to the Program Co-Chairs (cardie@cs.cornell.edu, isabellep@nrc.ca). Deadlines Paper submission deadline: February 28, 2006 Notification of acceptance: April 28, 2006 Camera ready papers due: May 19, 2006 COLING/ACL 2006 Conference: July 17-21, 2006 Mentoring Service ACL is providing a mentoring (coaching) service for authors from regions of the world where English is not the language of scientific exchange. Many authors from these regions, although able to read the scientific literature in English, have little or no experience in writing papers in English for conferences such as the COLING and ACL meetings. The service will be arranged as follows. A set of potential mentors will be identified by Richard Power, who has agreed to organize this service for COLING/ACL 2006. Richard Power Information Technology Research Institute University of Brighton Watts Building Lewes Road Brighton BN24GJ UK +44 1273 642904 +44 1273 642908 (fax) Email: Richard.Power@itri.brighton.ac.uk To take advantage of this service, send the paper electronically to the above email address, using pdf, ps or doc format. Alternatively, hard copy can be sent to the postal address. The paper should arrive before January 28, 2006. An appropriate mentor will be assigned to your paper and the mentor will get back to you by February 21, 2006, at least seven days before the deadline for the submission to COLING/ACL 2006. Please note that this service is for the benefit of the authors as described above. It is not a general mentoring service for authors to improve their papers. If you have any questions about this service please feel free to send a message to Richard Power. Conference Venue Situated on a breathtaking harbour, Sydney is one of the world's most attractive, exciting and vibrant cities, with stunning attractions, great climate and friendly people that ensure it continues to exceed visitor expectations. Recreation, exploration, adventure and relaxation await in a multicultural city bursting with unique attractions, fine dining, world class accommodation, non-stop shopping, heart racing adventure and a diverse range of entertainment. Coling/ACL 2006 will take place at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre, Australia's largest and premier venue for conferences, exhibitions and special events. The centre is superbly located on the waterfront in Sydney's most popular visitor precinct, Darling Harbour, adjacent to the city's central business district. The centre offers superb views over Darling Harbour and the city skyline as well as world class facilities.