Report from the Asian Liaison Officer
Junichi TSUJII

(1)	The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing Association was 
formally established. The first preparatory meeting of AFNLP was held in 
October during ACL Hong Kong. We had a follow-up meeting in January, when 
the federation was formally established.

(2)	The home page of AFNLP was prepared by Korean colleagues at KAIST: 
http://www.asianlp.org/index.html

(3)	Unlike ACL, AFNLP is a federation of national associations of NLP of 
individual countries and other international bodies. We would like to see 
the Federation help Asia-wide initiatives to flourish. It is the belief 
shared by the members of AFNLP that such a bottom-up approach will be more 
effective than establishing the Asian Chapter of ACL. AFNLP established a 
committee for resource sharing, the chair of which is Prof.H.Tanaka (Japan) 
who will co-ordinate the resource sharing activities together with two 
co-sub-chairs, Prof.Huang (Taiwan) and Prof.Tokunaga (Japan).

(4)    Japan made a bid for ACL2003. The candidate location is Sapporo, 
which is the capital of the northern island of Hokkaido. You can see the bid at

      http://acyo8.media.eng.hokudai.ac.jp/araki/secret/sec1.html
      (id:guest, password: acl2003)

      The printed version of the bid was sent out to Toulouse by Prof,Araki 
(the proposed chair of the local organizing committee)

(5)	While there are no official links with ACL, there will be several 
international conferences by Asian researchers in Asia this year, like 
Pacling, NLPRS, etc. It is my impression that strong co-operative spirits 
are now emerging among Asian researchers.