Title ACL 2004 Newsletter No.5 and Final - 10 September 2004 Text ACL 2004 NEWSLETTER NO. 5 and Final (September 6, 2004) This newsletter includes: 1. Remarks of the General Chair 2. Lifetime Achievement Award 3. Best Paper Award 4. Articles from El Pais 5. Information on ACL'05 :: Remarks of the General Chair The organisation of the conference involved an awful lot of advance work by the various chairs, but it paid off magnificently, I thought: the technical programme included some excellent papers, and there was something there for everyone; the organisation went extremely smoothly, with few if any hiccoughs; and -- from what I've been told -- a good time was had by all. Although the conference had the usual strong ACL-stamp (thanks Kathy, Sandee, Priscilla and Mark for your guidance in this), it had a definite European flavour, and I think there is now no doubt that ACL is a truly international organisation. And Barcelona certainly treated us well. The conference centre at Forum of Cultures was among the best we have had and the cultural activities at the site were interesting and entertaining. Some aspects of the conference are probably worth commenting on in more detail: Security is now a major issue everywhere, for understandable reasons, and this has undoubtedly been the most security-aware conference we have had. There was a lot of initial nervousness among the organisers when we learned what this would mean in practice for our conference: would our members object to divulging the personal information they were being asked to give, would the multi-stage registration process prove difficult for us to manage and annoying to our participants, and would we in fact be safe? We were very pleased to find that none of these issues proved problematic. Clearly, the concern for security is one that will become a standard feature in all our conferences, irrespective of where they are held, and it is good to know that we have been able to accomodate this so well. Another aspect to highlight is that of sponsorship. We acquired a record amount of sponsorship this hear: ?95,500 (approximately $116,000) of which some ?63,000 came from the Forum of Cultures --- most probably our largest-ever single contribution. We are enormously grateful for the generosity of all those groups who contributed to our sponsorship fund, including also the Barcelona Cambra de Comer?, Comprendium, Microsoft, Xerox Europe and Daedalus. Gathering sponsorhip is perhaps one of the most difficult behind-the-scenes tasks in the organisation of our conference, and I particularly wish to thank Deborah Dahl and Toni Mart? for doing such an excellent job. A matter of great delight to the organisers has been the number of our colleagues from around the world who chose to attend ACL'04, especially given the unusually large number of other conferences that have been held this year. At the final count we had 682 attendees, which Priscilla and Kathy tell me is yet another record breaker. Thank you all for making ACL'04 such a success, and see you next year in Ann Arbor. Donia Scott General Chair of ACL'04 top :: Lifetime Achievement Award The ACL Lifetime Achievement Award was instituted on the occasion of the 40th anniversary meeting of the Association. The award is for scientific achievement, of both theoretical and applied nature, in the field of Computational Linguistics. The executive committee of the ACL nominates and selects at most one award recipient annually, considering the originality, depth, breadth and impact of the entire body of the nominee?s work in computational linguistics. The recipient is invited to give a speech on the topic of their choice relating to Computational Linguistics at the annual meeting. And the identify of the recipient is kept confidential until the plenary session. Prior recipients of this award are Aravind Joshi and Makato Nagao. And I?m delighted to be able to announce who will join this esteemed company. Karen Sp?rck Jones Karen Sp?rck Jones has worked in automatic language and information processing research since the late 1950s. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, a AAAI Fellow and ECCAI Fellow, and she was President of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1994. She has been a member of the DARPA/NIST Text Retrieval Conferences Programme Committee since 1994, and is involved with several other US evaluation programmes. Her work in the last decade has been on document retrieval including speech applications, database query, user and agent modelling, automatic summarisation, and information and language system evaluation. She has had funded projects on Automatic Summarising, Belief Revision for Information Retrieval, Video Mail Retrieval, and Multimedia Document Retrieval. Karen Sparck Jones' received her PhD from Cambridge in 1964. And her thesis, entitled Synonymy and Semantic Classification, so I?m told, has had an interesting and unusual history. When she completed it in 1964, it was reproduced only in the simple mimeo book form then used by the Cambridge Language Research Unit where she worked. It was finally published in 1986, in an Edinburgh University Press series. And while I was doing my research for this introduction, several of my sources told me that even this late publication managed to be ahead of a great deal of later work that recapitulates aspects of it, usually from ignorance of its existence. There is no doubt that Karen?s thesis was developing statistical and symbolic techniques for the use of what we now call language resources twenty or thirty years ahead of its time. Her present research interests are in the development of the probabilistic model of retrieval, and in automatic summarisation, ranging from foundational work on the form and use of discourse structure to practically-oriented work on shallow processing techniques that combine rule and data driven methods; and in language and information system evaluation. Her publications include numerous papers and eight books. Now, an introduction like this would NOT be complete without a little personal anecdote. As some of you know, Karen and her late husband, Roger Needham, built their own house. Literally. They drove in every nail themselves, with one exception. When the builders were delivering the concrete for the foundation, they needed help, so the whole Computer Lab came to help. The job was to hold the wheelbarrow while the cement was poured in and then wheel it from the truck over to the place where it was needed. As you can imagine it was immensely heavy and hard to control. Well, as it turned out, Karen was the only person who could do it. She is a truly powerful woman! An now, I?ll turn over the floor to our third Lifetime Achievement Award winner. Karen Sparck Jones. top :: Best Paper Award The best paper prize was awarded to Diana McCarthy, Rob Koeling, Julie Weeds, & John Carroll for their paper "Finding Predominant Word Senses in Untagged Text". In this paper they develop a method for selecting the predominant sense of a word from a corpus without sense annotations, using unsupervised thesaurus extraction techniques. The paper was rated highly by the reviewers and PC on quality and innovativeness, and was selected also because it combines two important topics in our field: unsupervised learning and robust semantic analysis. top :: Articles from El Pais 21st July - La Ling??stica Computacional 25th July - Las tecnolog?as de la lengua pueden facilitar el acceso a la numerosa informaci?n de Internet 2nd September - La Universidad espa?ola, vivero de empresas de las tecnolog?as de la lengua top :: Information on ACL'05 ACL 05 will be held jointly with NAACL in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The conference site will be the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The dates are set to be June 25 to June 30, 2005. We will be following the standard schedule: the tutorials will be on the first day, the main conference will follow during the next three days, finally, the workshops will be on the last two days. The general conference chair is Kevin Knight. Local arrangements chair is Dragomir Radev. The local committee includes Steve Abney, Joyce Chai, San Duanmu, Kurt Godden, Acrisio Pires, Martha Pollack, Rich Thomason (associate chair), and Keith van der Linden. Kemal Oflazer and Hwee Tou Ng will be program committee co-chairs. The local chair will be supported by the Conference Management Services at the University represented by William Vlisides and his team. Ann Arbor is located in southeastern Michigan, less than an hour from Detroit. It's small but cosmopolitan, with many restaurants, museums, galleries, and cultural opportunities. Most activities are reachable by foot or taxi or AATA buses. The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, is one of the largest, most diverse, and most prestigious centers of learning in the United States. The University has three campuses in Ann Arbor with over 37,000 students. Michigan's Central Campus includes the 80-acre Medical Center, the Law School with its picturesque ``quad,'' Hill Auditorium, the Rackham Graduate School building, the ``Diag'' where students hang out, as well as many other historic buildings. Nearby is the Arboretum, with its flower gardens, fields, and forests, through which the Huron River runs. The Arboretum is a favorite spot for jogging, walking, picnicking, and just relaxing. The University's North Campus is home to the schools of Engineering, Music, and Architecture and Design. To the south is the Athletic Campus, which includes stadiums and arenas for University of Michigan varsity teams. The shopping area immediately to the northwest of Central Campus has many new and used book stores, including the original Borders, as well as shops and restaurants. The Main Street area, a few more blocks from Central Campus, is a great place to dine, shop, and stroll. Attendees can eat dinner at any of a large number of excellent restaurants, sample fresh beer at one of Ann Arbor's three brewpubs, or listen to live music at The Bird of Paradise jazz club or The Ark. The Kerrytown area of Ann Arbor is several blocks further to the north. The Farmer's market takes place every Wednesday and Saturday; indoor Kerrytown shops are open every day of the week and include everything from fish markets to flower sellers to designer clothing stores. Just around the corner you'll find Zingerman's, Ann Arbor's famous New York-style deli, one of the most popular eateries in the city. The corporate side of Ann Arbor is flourishing. Industrial parks and new corporate complexes house such companies as Domino's Pizza and Borders Group, Inc., all of whom have made their headquarters here. Additional major companies such as Pfizer have research facilities in the city. Ann Arbor is home to numerous museums, parks, galleries, and shops, including the Hands-On Museum, University of Michigan Exhibit Museum and Planetarium, Matthaei Botanical Gardens as well as several outdoor pools. An Ann Arbor events listings and restaurant guide can be found at http://www.arborweb.com. Other relevant URLs are http://www.annarbor.org and http://aa.mlive.com. Ann Arbor is easy to reach by air, rail, or highway. An Amtrak station is located less than two miles from the University of Michigan, and Detroit Metropolitan Airport is a brief 30-minute drive. Detroit Metro is a hub airport for Northwest/KLM, and direct flights link Detroit to a large number of cities around the world, including London, Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Osaka, and many other cities. The Ann Arbor area has an unusually large number of hotels for a town of its size. There are two hotels within walking distance of Central Campus: The Bell Tower Inn, http://www.belltowerhotel.com/ and the Campus Inn, http://www.campusinn.com/home.html. We have reserved rooms in both of these hotels as well as two other hotels which are not within walking distance. Transportation from and to these other two hotels will be provided on a schedule to be announced later. Additional hotels are also available: http://www.annarbor.org/accommodations/hotels.asp Students will be able to stay in campus dormitories which are within walking distance from campus. There are a large number of parking garages in the Central Campus area, and temporary parking stickers are available for a fee. See http://www.parking.umich.edu The organizers of ACL 2005 are looking forward to seeing all of you in Ann Arbor. Send mail to radev@umich.edu should you have questions about the conference. Dragomir Radev (local arrangements chair)