# Apologies for cross-postings
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COLING/ACL 2006 NEWSLETTER NO. 6
September 4, 2006
This is the sixth and final official newsletter of COLING/ACL 2006
The 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
and
The 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Sydney, Australia
July 17-21, 2006
For complete details, visit the conference web site at:
www.acl2006.org
www.coling2006.org
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:: Table of Contents
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1. Comments from the General Chair
2. Conference Sponsors
3. Awards
4. Lifetime Achievement Award
5. Student Volunteers
6. Conference Photos
7. ACL 2007 and COLING 2008
8. Conference Organisers
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:: 1. Comments from the General Chair
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COLING/ACL 2006 is the joint conference of the International Committee on
Computational Linguistics and the Association for Computational
Linguistics. The conference was held in Sydney, Australia, from 17-21 July
2006, with tutorials on July 16, workshops on July 22-23, and co-located
events on July 15-16 and July 22-23.
In this joint conference we tried to maintain the spirit of both COLING and
ACL, but the combination had its own personality, in a mixture that was more
than the simple sum of the two. Part of its character was due to the location,
for the first time -- for both conferences -- in Australia. For this reason we
decided to have a member of AFNLP (the Asian Federation of Natural Language
Processing) on the Advisory Board and to give particular attention and
visibility to the Asia-Pacific context, communities and languages. We
sincerely thank both the AFNLP-Nagao Fund for providing financial support for
those presenting Asian NLP research, and ALTA (the Australasian Language
Technology Association) for their local support.
It is my task here -- but I should say my pleasure -- to express gratitude to
all those without whom this conference would not have existed, and I think I
can do that on behalf of all participants.
My biggest thanks go to all the Chairs, for their invaluable effort and
dedication which made this Conference possible. First of all the two Program
Chairs: Claire Cardie and Pierre Isabelle, who did a tremendous job, managing
so many submissions and taking care of both regular papers and posters, and
the two Local Arrangements Chairs: Robert Dale and Cecile Paris, who succeeded
in keeping so many details under control, in such a smooth way as if
everything were natural and effortless for them.
And all the others, for their precious, competent and hard work
I warmly thank the Advisory Board -- composed of four ICCL, four ACL, and one
AFNLP members -- to whom we resorted for suggestions on important and
sometimes delicate issues: Sandra Carberry, Eva Hajicova, Aravind Joshi,
Martin Kay, Kathleen McCoy, Martha Palmer, Priscilla Rasmussen, Benjamin
T'sou, Jun'ichi Tsujii.
I express my gratitude to all the sponsors for their great support to the
conference.
I thank all the organizers of the so numerous surrounding workshops,
tutorials, and other co-located events -- conferences, workshops, summer
school -- adding value to the main conference, creating altogether probably
the biggest ever happening in Computational Linguistics.
My thanks to the area chairs, the reviewers, the invited speakers, the authors
of the various presentations, in particular the students who enter with
enthusiasm in such an exciting field, all the participants who in many cases
made a long trip to be present at COLING/ACL 2006, and all those who
contributed in many ways to a success of the conference.
And I finally thank both ICCL and ACL for having decided to join forces again
in such a great enterprise. COLING/ACL 2006 was, I'm sure, an exciting,
stimulating and inspiring event for all those who attended.
Nicoletta Calzolari
COLING/ACL 2006 General Chair
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:: 2. Conference Sponsors
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We wish to thank our sponsors for their generous support:
- HCSNet (Platinum)
- Macquarie University (Gold)
- CSIRO (Gold)
- Microsoft Research (Gold, including Wireless)
- Appen (Silver, Student Volunteers)
- Google (Silver, including Cocktail Reception)
- XRCE (Bronze)
- ELRA (Student Support Fund)
- DSTO (Glass)
- Australian Computer Society (Supporter)
- NSF (student support for the Student Research Workshop)
We also gratefully acknowledge the following organisations for their
contributions to COLING/ACL 2006:
- Microsoft Research Asia (ACL Best Paper Award)
- AFNLP (Best Asian Language Paper Award and 10 AFNLP-Nagao Conference
participation awards)
- NSF (Student support for the Student Research Workshop)
COLING/ACL 2006 was also supported by ALTA (Australasian Language Technology
Association).
For further details, see:
http://www.acl2006.org/sponsorship
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:: 3. Awards
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The program and area chairs selected the following paper for the COLING-ACL
2006 Best Paper Award:
"Semantic Taxonomy Induction from Heterogenous Evidence", by Rion Snow,
Daniel Jurafsky, and Andrew Ng
In addition, a number of reviewers were recognized (via a bottle of
scrumptious Australian wine!) as going beyond the call of duty in their
reviews:
Antal van den Bosch
James Curran
Mark Dras
Kevin Duh
George Foster
Evgeniy Gabrilovitch
Oren Kurland
Mulind Mahajan
Dragos Munteanu
Satoshi Nakamura
Laurent Prevot
Katharina Probst
Tanya Schultz
Suzanne Stevenson
Christoph Tillmann
Marilyn Walker
Stephen Wan
Finally, as part of the conference's Asian Language focus, four papers were
identified by the program and area chairs as contenders for the Best Asian
Language Paper Award. These papers were presented in a special parallel
session:
"Tree-to-String Alignment Template for Statistical Machine Translation", by
Yang Liu, Qun Liu, Shouxun Lin
"Incorporating speech recognition confidence into discriminative named
entity recognition of speech data", by Katsuhito Sudoh, Hajime Tsukada,
Hideki Isozaki
"Exploiting Syntactic Patterns as Clues in Zero-Anaphora Resolution", by Ryu
Iida, Kentaro Inui, Yuji Matsumoto
"Self-Organizing n-gram Model for Automatic Word Spacing", Seong-Bae Park,
Yoon-Shik Tae, Se-Young Park
Among these, the paper by Iida, Inui, and Matsumoto was chosen as the winner
of the Best Asian Language Paper Award.
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:: 4. Lifetime Achievement Award
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The ACL Lifetime Achievement Award was instituted on the occasion of the 40th
anniversary meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 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.
One of the highlights of COLING/ACL 2006 was the presentation of the 2006 ACL
Lifetime Achievement Award to:
Eva Hajicova
The following is an excerpt from the introduction made by Jun'ichi Tsujii
(president of the ACL) at the COLING/ACL 2006 award ceremony.
I first met Eva, 26 years ago, at Coling in Tokyo, 1980.
I had just started my career as researcher then, while she was already an
established researcher, a member of ICCL (International Committee of
Computational Linguistics) and the representative, the banner carrier of the
legendary Prague school of linguistics. Prague is the birth place of modern
scientific linguistics, formal theory of discourse, and dependency
representation.
She started her career 40 years ago, and has successfully represented the
Prague school together with Professor Petr Sgall. Throughout her career, she
has been successful in leading the Prague school of linguistics and making it
the Prague School of Computational Linguistics, one of the most influential
centers of Computational Linguistics, always a front-runner of new ideas, in
particular, in semantics and pragmatics.
She not only inherited the strong tradition of the Prague school in
linguistics, but also, under the communist regime, despite the harsh
restrictions on communication with the outside world, spread the Prague way of
thinking on language to researchers outside, and has extended it in accordance
with development of the fields.
One of her recent accomplishments, the Prague dependency treebank, is a good
example of the combination of deep theoretical thinking nourished in the tradition
of the Prague school, with the modern methodology of our days.
It consists of surface and deep annotations,analytical and tectogrammatical
levels, for Czech, English, and Arabic. This effort has been extremely
influential in that it represents one of the major annotation efforts in
dependency syntax.
Furthermore, it was conceived from the beginning as a multi-layer annotation
that goes beyond morphology and surface syntax. The Prague Dependency
Treebank is used for linguistic research, and as the basis for machine
learning experiments in computational linguistics.
She is certainly one of the people who have defined and formed the field of
computational linguistics, and has developed it to the scientific field as we
know it now. She has successfully injected the unique perspective of the
Prague school, European tradition of linguistics, into our field,
Computational linguistics and Natural Language Processing.
Without her, with the long period of the dark age in the region, we would have
lost one of the greatest traditions in European linguistics which has enriched
enormously our fields.
I remember her lectures on multi-layered representation including discourse
structures, and their Machine Translation research at Kyoto University in
Japan, some 20 years ago.
Her talks struck me by their strong intellectual, theoretical orientations,
since MT research in Japan at the time was taken mostly as engineering
endeavor, very much concerned with engineering issues such as efficiency,
management of huge lexicon etc.
Eva's leadership quality has contributed to not only the Prague school but to
the international movement of our field. She was Chair of European ACL and ACL
as well as permanent member of International Committee of Computational
Linguistics.
From the entire computational linguistics community, congratulations Eva on a
lifetime of achievement!
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:: 5. Student Volunteers
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We gratefully acknowledge the tireless efforts of all the student volunteers
in keeping the COLING/ACL 2006 wheels oiled throughout, including early in the
morning preparing for the day ahead.
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:: 6. Conference Photos
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We have set up a Flickr group for sharing COLING/ACL 2006 photos, which anyone
who has a Flickr account can join and post photos/discussion to.
The URL to head to for the group is:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/coling-acl2006/
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:: 7. ACL 2007 and COLING 2008
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We are pleased to announce that ACL 2007 will be held in Prague, Czech
Republic, over the period June 24-29, 2007. For further details, visit the
website at:
COLING 2008 will be held in Manchester, UK, dates TBA.
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:: 8. Conference Organisers
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The following individuals were involved in the organisation of COLING/ACL
2006:
General Chair:
Nicoletta Calzolari
Program Committee Co-chairs:
Claire Cardie
Pierre Isabelle
Tutorials Chair:
Claire Gardent
Workshops Chair:
Suzanne Stevenson
Workshops Program Committee:
Ann Copestake
Pascale Fung
Jamie Henderson
Ingrid Zukerman
Interactive Presentations Chair
James Curran
Publications Chair:
Olivia Kwong
Sponsorship Chairs:
Steven Krauwer
Dominique Estival
Exhibits Chair:
Menno van Zaanen
Mentoring Chair:
Richard Power
Publicity Chair:
Timothy Baldwin
Student Workshop Chairs:
Rebecca Hwa
Marine Carpuat
Kevin Duh
Local Organisation Chairs:
Cecile Paris
Robert Dale
Local Organising Advisory Committee:
John Debenham
Jon Patrick
Raymond Wong
Student Volunteers Coordinator:
Priscilla Rasmussen
Conference Webmasters:
Andrew Lampert
Brett Powley
Conference Secretariat:
Judy Potter and the Well Done Events team
Graphic Design:
Kathie Mason
Advisory Committee:
Sandra Carberry
Eva Hajicova
Aravind Joshi
Martin Kay
Kathleen McCoy
Martha Palmer
Priscilla Rasmussen
Benjamin T'sou
Jun'ichi Tsujii
Program Committee Area Chairs:
Johan Bos
Jason Chang
David Chiang
Eva Hajicova
Chu-Ren Huang
Martin Kay
Emiel Krahmer
Roland Kuhn
Lillian Lee
Yuji Matsumoto
Dan Moldovan
Mark-Jan Nederhof
Hwee Tou Ng
John Prager
Anoop Sarkar
Donia Scott
Simone Teufel
Benjamin Tsou
ChengXiang Zhai
Ming Zhou
International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL):
Igor Boguslavsky
Christian Boitet
Nicoletta Calzolari
Eva Hajicova
Kolbjorn Heggstad
Chu-Ren Huang
Pierre Isabelle
Aravind K. Joshi
Martin Kay
Winfried Lenders
Makoto Nagao
Sergei Nirenburg
Helmut Schnelle
Donia Scott
Petr Sgall
Hozumi Tanaka
Jun'ichi Tsujii
Hans Uszkoreit
Hiroshi Wada
Yorick Wilks
ACL Executive Committee:
Jun'ichi Tsujii
Mark Steedman
Bonnie Dorr
Kathleen McCoy
Dragomir Radev
Martha Palmer
Sandra Carberry
Walter Daelemans
Keh-Yih Su
Claire Cardie
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Contact details for the various COLING/ACL organisers can be found at:
http://www.acl2006.org/contact
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