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The conference invites the submission of papers on substantial, original, and unpublished research in disciplines that could impact human language processing systems.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

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Topics of Interest:

Topics include, but are not limited to:

* Intelligent systems for natural language interaction, including
o Dialogue systems for collaboration, tutoring and behavioral intervention
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

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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.

Accepted full papers will be given eight pages in the proceedings, 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 January 10, 2008. Submission will be electronic using the paper submission software available at https://www.softconf.com/acl08/papers.

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Short papers: In keeping with the HLT tradition, ACL 08: HLT solicits short papers as well as long papers. The short paper deadline is just three months before the conference to allow authors to bring fresh research and new ideas to the conference. Papers qualifying as short papers can be of one of three types:

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

Short papers will be presented in one or more poster sessions, and will be given four pages in the proceedings. Short papers will be distinguished from full papers in the proceedings. Each short paper submission will be reviewed by at least two program committee members. The deadline for short papers is March 14, 2008. Submission will be electronic using the paper submission software available at https://www.softconf.com/acl08/papers.

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Format:

Full paper submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL 08: HLT proceedings without exceeding eight (8) pages, including 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 on the conference website.

Demonstration, doctoral consortium, 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. If ACL08: 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. ACL08: 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.

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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)

Senior Program Members:

Jason Baldridge (University of Texas at Austin)
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 (McQuarie University, Australia)
Pascale Fung (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong)
Daniel Gildea (University of Rochester, USA)
Daniel Hardt (University of Copenhagen, 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)
Sabine Schulte im Walde (Stuttgart University, Germany)
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, (The Ohio State University)