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

This news letter includes:

1) Submission Deadlines and Submission Sites

1-1) Main Conference

1-2) Student Research Workshop

1-3) Interactive Poster/Demo Sessions

2) Tutorials

3) Reduced Registration Fee and Visa Documents

3-1) Reduced Registration Fee

3-2) Visa Documents

4) ACL-2003 Student Research Workshop Program Committee

5) Call for Exhibits and Sponsorship

1) Submission Deadlines and Submission Sites

The submission deadlines of the main conference, student workshop and interactive Poster/Demo sessions are approaching and their submission sites are now open.

Note that the associated conferences (EMNLP and IRAL) and the workshops have their own submission deadlines and sites. Please see our web site for the details.


1-1) Main Conference

* Submission deadline: February 26, 2003
(Note that we NO LONGER require early registration of papers.)

[Submission site]
The electronic submission site of the ACL-2003 main conference (http://acl03-submissions.cs.uiuc.edu) is now open. Please consult it for details on the submission format and procedures.


1-2) Student Research Workshop

* Submission deadline: February 26, 2003
(Note that we NO LONGER require early registration of papers.)

[Submission site]
Electronic submissions are strongly preferred. Specific instructions and web forms for electronic submissions will be available soon on http://tangra.si.umich.edu/clair/acl03-student/.
(Note that the instructions for items to be submitted were modified.)


1-3) Interactive Poster/Demo Sessions

* Submission deadline: May 1, 2003

[Submission site]
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. For further detail, please consult the following site: http://cl.aist-nara.ac.jp/staff/matsu/poster.html.


2) Tutorials

There will be four tutorials, to be given by leading experts in language and speech processing. The titles and presenters are:

Finite State Language Processing

Gertjan van Noord (University of Groningen, The Netherlands)

Optimization, Maxent Models, and Conditional Estimation without Magic

Dan Klein and Chris Manning (Stanford University, U.S.A.)

Knowledge Discovery from Text

Dan Moldovan (University of Texas at Dallas, U.S.A.)
Roxana Girju (Baylor University, U.S.A.)

Spoken Language Processing: Separating Science Fact from Science Fiction

Roger Moore (20/20 Speech Ltd, U.K.)

The tutorials will take place on July 7.


3) Reduced Registration Fee and Visa Documents

3-1) Reduced Registration Fee

We are pleased to announce that we are planning to offer a special reduced registration fee for participants from developing countries and those with hard currency problems. We hope this will enable a greater number of researchers to participate in ACL-2003. While the actual reduced fee will be announced soon in the next Newsletter and our web site, the conditions for the reduced fee will be the same as those for the reduced ACL membership fees (See Membership in the ACL web site http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~acl/home.html) A special arrangement of accommodations for these participants is also being considered, which will be announced in the next newsletter and our web site.


3-2) Visa Documents

Participants may need to acquire a visa to attend ACL03.

Those with nationality of European countries (with some exceptions) and North American countries do not need a visa. However, please check with your local Japanese embassy or consulate if you are not sure.

In most countries, to acquire a visa is not complicated and does not take long. However, it may take longer in some countries and if you need help obtaining a visa, please see http://www.ec-inc.co.jp/ACL2003/visa.html and send an e-mail to the Secretariat with necessary information.

The period between the dates of acceptance notification and the actual dates of conference/WSs is shorter than in an ordinary International ACL conference. If you are afraid that you have not enough time in obtaining a visa or official approval of traveling abroad, please contact the Secretariat. If you submitted a paper to the main conference, the WSs, the interactive demo sessions or the student workshop, please also include the Paper ID and the title of your paper in your e-mail.


4) ACL-2003 Student Research Workshop Program Committee

The committee of the student workshop announced a tentative list of the members of the Program Committee. A few more people will be added to the list.

[Students]
Slaven Bilac, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
Hoojung Chung, Korea University, Korea (TBC)
Mona Diab, University of Maryland, College Park, U.S.A.
Ji Donghong, Institute of Infocomm Reseach, Singapore
Ariadna Font Llitjos, Carnegie Mellon University, U.S.A.
Hisanori Furumaki, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
Krasimira Ivanova, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria
Martin Jansche, The Ohio State University, U.S.A.
Nobuhiro Kaji, The University of Tokyo, Japan
Hannah Kermes, University of Stuttgart, Germany
Sang-Bum Kim, Korea University, Korea (TBC)
Yoji Kiyota, The University of Tokyo, Japan
Taku Kudo, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
Koji Murakami, Hokkaido University, Japan
Hong I Ng, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Constantin Orasan, University of Wolverhampton, U.K.
Noah Smith, Johns Hopkins University, U.S.A.
Kristina Striegnitz, Saarland University, Germany
Mary D. Taffet, Syracuse University, U.S.A.
Mineki Takechi, FUJITSU Ltd. / Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
Vivian Tsang, University of Toronto, Canada
Tylman Ule, Universit Tingen, Germany

[Non-students]
Regina Barzilay, Cornell University, U.S.A.
Thorsten Brants, Google, U.S.A.
Baobao Chang, Peking University, China
Huang Chu-Ren, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
Herve Dejean, XRCE, France
Pascale Fung, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China
Jianfeng Gao, Microsoft Research Asia, China
Iryna Gurevych, European Media Laboratory, Germany
Daisuke Kawahara, The University of Tokyo, Japan
Alistair Knott, University of Otago, New Zealand
Anna Korhonen, University of Cambridge, U.K.
Jong-Hyeok Lee, Pohang University of Science and Technology, Korea (TBC)
Lothar Lemnitzer, Tuebingen University, Germany
Deryle Lonsdale, Brigham Young University Department of Linguistics, U.S.A.
Edson T. Miyamoto, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
Diego Molla-Aliod, Macquarie University, Australia
Petya Osenova, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and The Sofia University, Bulgaria
Gerald Penn, University of Toronto, Canada
Bill Raymond, The Ohio State University, U.S.A.
Kiyoaki Shirai, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
Virach Sornlertlamvanich, NECTEC, Thailand
Oliver Streiter, European Academie, Italy
Naohoshi Tamura, Yokohama National University Japan
Dan Tufis, Romanian Academy of Sciences, Romania
Hui Wang, Peking University, China
Janyce Wiebe, University of Pittsburgh, U.S.A.
Maria Wolters, Rhetorical Systems, Scotland


5) Call for Exhibits and Sponsorship

We are happy to announce that 8 companies, 4 research institutes and 13 universities have approved the Exhibits and Sponsorship programs and will show their products or introduce their services of interest to the NLP community.

The deadline of application for the Exhibits and Sponsorship is approaching. Application Deadline for both: April 1, 2003

For details, see Industrial Exhibition and Sponsorship at http://www.ec-inc.co.jp/ACL2003/ .