FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS FinTAL - 5th International Conference on Natural Language Processing Turku, Finland 23-25 August 2006 http://www.it.utu.fi/fintal The FinTAL conference will be held in Turku, Finland in August 23-25, 2006. The conference is hosted jointly by the Turku Centre for Computer Science (TUCS) and the Department of Information Technology, University of Turku. FinTAL is the fifth in the series of the TAL conferences, following FracTAL (Besançon, France, 1997), VexTAL (Venice, Italy, 1999), PorTAL (Faro, Algarve, Portugal, 2002), and EsTAL (Alicante, Spain, 2004). The main purpose of the TAL conference series is to bring together scientists representing linguistics, computer science and related fields, sharing a common interest in the advancement of computational linguistics and natural language processing. SCOPE OF THE CONFERENCE Papers are invited on recent, substantial, original and unpublished research on all aspects of computational linguistics and natural language processing theory, methods and applications, including, but not limited to: * Pragmatics, Discourse, Semantics, Syntax, and the Lexicon * Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology * Speech Recognition * Speech Synthesis * Natural Language Generation * Ontologies, Semantic Networks, and Lexical Resources * Corpus Linguistics * Linguistic, Mathematical, and Psychological Models of Language * Anaphora Resolution * Word Sense Disambiguation * Corpus-based Language Modeling * Machine Translation and Translation Aids * Text and Speech Interfaces * Dialogue systems * Language Learning and Therapy * Simulation and Visualization * Knowledge Acquisition and Representation * Information Extraction * Information Retrieval * Question Answering * Text Summarization * Text and Speech Classification * Systems Evaluation PAPER SUBMISSION We welcome submissions both from academia and the industry on any topic that is of interest to the NLP community, particularly encouraging research emphasizing multidisciplinary aspects of NLP and the interplay between linguistics, computer science and application domains such as biomedicine, communication systems, public services, and educational technology. Submitted papers should describe original work, emphasizing completed or well advanced, rather than intended, research. The state of completion of the reported work must be clearly indicated. Where appropriate, results should be rigorously evaluated; the assessment of statistical significance for quantitative results is encouraged. Submissions should contain original material that has not been previously presented to the scientific community. A parallel submission to other publication fora as well as a significant overlap in contents with previously published work should be clearly indicated to the program committee. All submissions will be reviewed by at least three program committee members. The submissions will be judged on originality, relevance, technical quality, and presentation. Papers can be submitted in two categories: full papers and short papers, where full papers are appropriate for describing substantial research with well-evaluated results and short papers will typically describe ongoing research and preliminary results. All accepted papers in both categories will be published in the conference proceedings. At the conference, full papers will be presented as a talk and short papers will be presented as a poster. PROCEEDINGS The conference proceedings will be published by Springer Publishers as a volume in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series (LNAI), a subseries of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). KEYNOTE SPEAKERS * Fred Karlsson (University of Helsinki, Finland) * Igor Mel'cuk (University of Montreal, Canada) PROGRAM COMMITTEE Chair: * Tapio Salakoski, University of Turku, Finland Members: * Olli Aaltonen, University of Turku, Finland * Walid El Abed, Nestlé Corp., Switzerland * Jorge Baptista, University of Faro, Portugal * Patricio Martínez Barco, University of Alicante, Spain * Krzysztof Bogacki, University of Warsaw, Poland * Caroline Brun, Xerox Corp., France * Sylviane Cardey, University of Franche-Comté, France * Nigel Collier, National Institute of Informatics, Japan * Walter Daelemans, University of Antwerp, Belgium * Rodolfo Delmonte, University of Venice, Italy * Pasi Fränti, University of Joensuu, Finland * Peter Greenfield, University of Franche-Comté, France * Jari Kangas, Nokia Research Center, Finland * Kimmo Koskenniemi, University of Helsinki, Finland * Kyoko Kuroda, Shimane College, Japan * Hsiang-I Lin, National University, Taiwan * Nuno Mamede, University of Lisbon, Portugal * Rada Mihalcea, University of North Texas, USA * Leonel Ruiz Miyares, University of Santiago de Cuba, Cuba * Adeline Nazarenko, University Paris-Nord, France * Elisabeth Ranchhod, University of Lisbon, Portugal * Karl-Michael Schneider, University of Passau, Germany * Rolf Schwitter, Macquarie University, Australia * John Tait, University of Sunderland, United Kingdom * José Luis Vicedo, University of Alicante, Spain * Simo Vihjanen, Lingsoft Ltd., Finland * Roman Yangarber, University of Helsinki, Finland ORGANIZING COMMITTEE * Filip Ginter, University of Turku, Finland * Sampo Pyysalo, University of Turku, Finland IMPORTANT DATES * Paper submission due: 27 March 2006 * Notification of acceptance: 9 May 2006 * Camera-ready paper due: 2 June 2006 * Conference: 23-25 August 2006 LOCATION The conference will be held at the premises of the Turku Centre for Computer Science (TUCS). Turku, the oldest city in Finland, lies in the southwest corner of Finland, surrounded by the Turku archipelago comprising of thousands of islands and small rocky islets. Turku and its surroundings offer a wealth of sightseeing opportunities. You can admire the archipelago from a cruise ship, visit some of the museums and the historical castle, or have a dinner in one of the famous boat restaurants on the Aura river, the heart of the city. Nearby Turku are, for example, the historical towns of Naantali and Rauma, the latter being a part of the UNESCO world heritage.