HLT/EMNLP 2005 Call for Papers

Human Language Technology Conference
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

October 6-8, 2005
Vancouver, B.C., Canada

HLT/EMNLP 2005 continues the conference series jointly sponsored by the Human Language Technology Advisory Board (HLT) and the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). This year's conference is co-sponsored by SIGDAT, the ACL's special interest group on linguistic data and corpus-based approaches to NLP, which has traditionally sponsored the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) Conferences. The joint conference provides a unified forum for researchers across a spectrum of disciplines to present recent, high-quality, cutting-edge work, to exchange ideas, and to explore emerging new research directions. The conference especially encourages submissions that discuss synergistic combinations of language technologies (e.g., Speech with Information Retrieval, Machine Translation with Speech, Question Answering with Natural Language Processing, etc.). Particular consideration will be given to papers addressing novel learning tasks and evaluation metrics in speech, natural language processing and information retrieval, including e.g.:

• learning tasks insufficiently addressed in the past, e.g. collaborative learning, learning in the presence of background knowledge, or finding anomalies in data;
• limits of standard evaluation methods on new tasks;
• novel performance measures incorporating user preferences, competence, or relevance to a given problem;
• learning and optimization algorithms addressing the above, e.g. novel statistical methods or cognitively inspired solutions.

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

• Speech processing, including:
  • Speech recognition
  • Speech generation
  • Speech summarization
  • Rich transcription: annotation of speech signals with metalinguistic information, such as speaker identity, attitude, emotion, etc.
  • Speech-based human-computer interfaces
• Text summarization
• Question answering
• Paraphrasing
• Computational analysis of phonology, morphology, prosody, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, discourse, style
• Statistical techniques for language processing, including:
  • Corpus-based language modeling
  • Lexical and knowledge acquisition
• Language generation and text planning
• Sentence parsing and discourse analysis
• Multilingual processing, including:
  • Machine translation of speech and text
  • Cross-language information retrieval
  • Multi-lingual speech recognition and language identification
• Evaluation, including:
  • Glass-box evaluation of HLT systems and system components
  • Back-box evaluation of HLT systems in application settings
• Development of language resources, including:
  • Lexicons and ontologies
  • Treebanks, proposition banks, and frame banks
• Understanding of human communication, including:
  • Natural language interfaces
  • Dialogue structure and dialogue systems
  • Message and narrative understanding systems
• Information extraction from multiple media
• Information retrieval, including:
  • Formal models, clustering and classification
  • Web mining for IR
  • Natural language processing for IR
  • Spoken IR
  • Metadata annotation and XML IR

Important Dates

Submissions

Requirements

Submissions must describe original, completed, unpublished work, and include concrete evaluation results when appropriate. Papers being submitted to other meetings must provide this information (see submission format). In the event of multiple acceptances, authors are requested to immediately notify the HLT/EMNLP program chair and to choose which meeting to present and publish the work at as soon as possible. We cannot accept for publication or presentation work that will be (or has been) published elsewhere.

Format

Papers must be submitted electronically in Postscript (PS) or Portable Document Format (PDF). They should follow the ACL formatting guidelines and should not exceed eight (8) pages in two-column format, including references and illustrations. Papers exceeding the maximum length may be rejected without review. Authors are encouraged to use the style files provided on the HLT/EMNLP 2005 website. We strongly prefer submissions in PS format. Any author who submits in PDF must assume the responsibility for ensuring that fonts are treated properly so that the paper will print (not just view) anywhere. (This may involve reading the manual.) DOC/RTF formats cannot be accepted.

Reviewing

Reviewing will be blind. No information identifying the authors should be in the paper: this includes not only the authors' names and affiliations, but also self-references that reveal authors' identities; for example, "We have previously shown (Smith 1999)" should be changed to "Smith (1999) has previously shown". Names and affiliations should be listed on a separate identification page.

Procedure

Papers must be submitted electronically by 11:59 p.m. PDT (GMT -7) on June 3, 2005, through the conference website. In addition, information about each paper must be provided, including:

• Paper title
• Authors' names, affiliations, and contact information
• Contact author
• A short list of keywords (selected from a predefined list)
• Abstract (no more than 300 words)
• A statement whether the paper has been or will be submitted to other conferences

Authors who cannot submit a file electronically should contact the program chairs before the due date to arrange alternative forms of submission.

After notifications of acceptance have been issued, authors will have the opportunity to revise their submissions in accordance with reviewers' comments. The due date for the final submission of camera-ready papers is August 17, 2005.