Venue:	Sapporo Convention Center, Sapporo, JAPAN
Dates:	Tutorials and Pre-conference Workshops: July 7, 2003
	Main Conference: July 8-10, 2003
	Post-conference Workshops: July 11-12, 2003
Paper submission due:	February 26, 2003

This news letter includes:

1) Call for Exhibits and Sponsorship

2) List of Accepted Workshops

3) Call for Interactive Poster/Demo Sessions

4) Information on Other Conferences or Workshops Being Held Nearby

1) Call for Exhibits and Sponsorship

ACL03 will provide industrial sponsors with exhibition booths with full Internet access at the conference site. Not only companies but also research institutes and universities are encouraged to have exhibits. For details, see Exhibits and Sponsorship.

We are happy to announce that the following companies, research institutes and universities have agreed to give us their support and will have exhibits at ACL03.

[Companies]
Fuji Xerox Co., Ltd.
Fujitsu Limited
Hitachi, Ltd.
IBM Japan
Justsystem Corporation
Microsoft Co., Ltd.
NEC Corporation
NTT Corporation
Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd.
Toshiba Corporation


[Research Institutes and Universities]
ATR Spoken Language Translation Research Laboratories
Chukyo University
Communications Research Laboratory
Hiroshima City University
Hokkaido University
Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
Keio University
Kyoto University
Nara Institute of Science and Technology
National Institute for Japanese Language, Communications Research Laboratory, Tokyo Institute of Technology
National Institute of Informatics
The University of Tokushima
The University of Tokyo (three groups)
Tokyo Institute of Technology (three groups)
Tottori University



2) List of Accepted Workshops

The workshop committee has announced the following 12 proposals have been accepted, two as associated conferences and ten as ACL workshops. The CFPs of these associated conferences and workshops will be made available in January from our Web site.

2)-1 Associated Conferences

AC1 EMNLP2003: The Eighth Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yuji Matsumoto (Nara Institute of Science and Technology)

AC2 6th International Workshop on Information Retrieval with Asian Languages (IRAL2003)
Jun Adachi (National Institute of Informatics)


2)-2 ACL Workshops

WS1 Multilingual Summarization and Question Answering --- Machine Learning and Beyond
Abraham Ittycheriah (IBM), Tsuneaki Kato (Univ. of Tokyo), Chin-Yew Lin (USC/ISI), Yutaka Sasaki (NTT)


WS2 Natural Language Processing in Biomedicine
Sofia Ananiadou (Univ. of Salford), Udo Hahn (Univ. of Freiburg), Jerry Hobbs (USC/ISI), James Pustejovsky (Brandeis Univ.), Jun-ichi Tsujii (The Univ. of Tokyo)


WS3 The Lexicon and Figurative Language
Alan Wallington (University of Birmingham)


WS4 Multilingual and Mixed-language Named Entity Recognition: Combining Statistical and Symbolic Models
Mari Broman Olsen (Microsoft Corporation)


WS5 The Second International Workshop on Automatic Paraphrasing: Paraphrase Acquisition and Applications
Kentaro Inui (Chair, NAIST), Regina Barzilay (Cornell University), Mark Dras (Macquarie University), Satoshi Sato (Kyoto University), Kazuhide Yamamoto (Nagaoka Univ. of Tech./ATR)


WS6 Second Sighan Workshop on Chinese Language Processing
Qing Ma (Communications Research Lab), Fei Xia (IBM)


WS7 Multiword Expressions: Analysis, Acquisition and Treatment
Anna Korhonen (Univ. of Cambridge), Francis Bond (NTT), Diana McCarthy (Univ. of Sussex), Aline Villavicencio (Univ. of Cambridge)


WS8 Linguistic Annotation: Getting the Model Right
Nancy Ide (Bassar College), Key-Sun Choi (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), Laurent Romary (LORIA/INRIA)


WS9 Workshop on Patent Corpus Processing
Atsushi Fujii (Univ. of Tsukuba), Makoto Iwayama (Tokyo Institute of Technology)


WS10 Towards a Resources Information Infrastructure
Steven Krauwer (ELSNET), Nicoletta Calzolari (ILC-CNR), Antonio Zampolli (Universita di Pisa & ILC-CNR)



3) Call for Interactive Poster/Demo Sessions

ACL-03 features special sessions for interactive posters and demonstrations. Poster/Demo presentations present original and significant work in progress, on-going research projects with novel ideas/applications, or late-breaking results that are best communicated in an interactive format.

Interactive Poster/Demo sessions provide a forum of academic and technical exchanges and are completely separated from the Industrial Exhibition that takes place also on the conference site.

The topics of interest cover the same area of the main conference. See the http://www.ec-inc.co.jp/ACL2003/callforpapers.html.

Full paper submission information

The authors should submit an original paper (of no more than 4 pages in ACL format) that describes and emphasizes the problem of the research and the novelty of the methods or theories being used. Presentations with demos should outline the design of their systems and provide sufficient details to allow the evaluation of their validity, quality and usefulness. They should also describe the equipments required for the demonstration.

Interactive Poster/Demo presentations will be given a booth for showing posters and giving a demo on a laptop computer or via a projector. The Poster/Demo papers are allocated 4 pages which will be included in the companion volume of the conference proceedings.

All the Poster/Demo submissions will be reviewed by an international program committee.


Submission Information

Submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings and should not exceed four (4) pages, including references. We strongly recommend the use of ACL LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word Style files tailored for this year's conference. A description of the format will also be available in case you are unable to use these style files directly. As reviewing will be blind, the paper should not include the authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's identity should be avoided. The papers with a demo that requires a special consideration should describe the requirements just before the introductory session of the paper.


Submission Procedure

All papers must be submitted electronically at the web address. The papers must be submitted no later than 12 noon Central Time (8PM GMT) on May 1st, 2003. Papers submitted after that time will not be reviewed.


Important Dates

Paper submission deadline:	May 1, 2003
Notification of acceptance:	May 20, 2003
Camera ready copy due:	June 3, 2003

Program Committee for Interactive Poster/Demo sessions

Chair:
Yuji Matsumoto, NAIST (Japan)

PC members (more will be added):
Tilman Becker, DFKI (Germany)
Rens Bod, University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands)
Christian Boitet, Universite Joseph Fourier (France)
Harry Bunt, Tilburg University (the Netherlands)
Sharon Caraballo, Georgetown University (U.S.A.)
John Caroll, University of Sussex (U.K.)
Hsin-Hsi Chen, National Taiwan University (Taiwan)
Lee-Feng Chien, Academia Sinica (Taiwan)
Hai Leong Chieu, DSO National Laboratories (Singapore)
Pascale Fung, University of Science and Technology (Hong Kong)
Graeme Hirst, University of Tronto (Canada)
Kentaro Inui, NAIST (Japan)
Genichiro Kikui, ATR (Japan)
Sadao Kurohashi, The University of Tokyo (Japan)
Kui-Lam Kwok, City University of New York (U.S.A.)
Maria Lapata, School of Informatics (U.K.)
Gary Geunbae Lee, POSTECH (Korea)
Jong-Hyeok Lee, POSTECH (Korea)
Hang Li, Microsoft (China)
Dan Melamed, New York University (U.S.A.)
Dan Moldovan, University of Texas at Dallas (U.S.A.)
Manny Rayner, RIACS (U.S.A.)
Satoshi Sekine, Bew York University (U.S.A.)
Bangalore Srinivas, AT&T (U.S.A.)
Key-Yih Su, BDC Corp (Taiwan)
Thomas Fang Zheng, Tsinghua University (China)
Michael Zock, LIMSI (France)



4) Information on Other Conferences or Workshops Being Held Nearby

We would be happy to help those wishing to arrange events in conjunction with ACL03. For information on available venues and local facilities for gatherings and meetings, please contact:
Kenji Araki (Hokkaido University, Japan)

Following is a list of collocated events so far informed to us.

(a) 4th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue

Sapporo, July 5 and 6, 2003
http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/sigdial2003/

General chair:
Akira Kurematsu (University of Electro-Communications)


(b) Workshop on Language Understanding and Agent for Real World Interaction

Hokkaido University, July 13, 2003
http://nakajima.myftp.org/lang/index.htm

Organizing co-chairs:
Hozumi Tanaka (Tokyo Institute of Technology)
Sadaoki Furui (Tokyo Institute of Technology)
Masayuki Nakajima (Tokyo Institute of Technology)