ACL-2000: Call For Papers

The Association for Computational Linguistics invites the submission of papers for its 38th Annual Meeting. As was the case with last year's ACL conference, the technical sessions of the conference will be of two kinds. There will be General Sessions as well as a number of special Thematic Sessions organized around themes proposed by members of the computational linguistics community.

For the General Sessions, papers are invited on substantial, original, and unpublished research on all aspects of computational linguistics, including, but not limited to: pragmatics, discourse, semantics, syntax and the lexicon; phonetics, phonology and morphology; interpreting and generating spoken and written language; linguistic, mathematical and psychological models of language; language-oriented information retrieval and information extraction; corpus-based language modeling; multi-lingual processing, machine translation and translation aids; natural language interfaces and dialogue systems; approaches to coordinating the linguistic with other modalities in multi-media systems; message and narrative understanding systems; tools and resources; and evaluation of systems.

Papers submitted to the Thematic Sessions are more narrowly targeted at specific topics. The list of Thematic Sessions is as follows:

• T1: NLP and Open-Domain Question Answering from Text
• T2: Machine Learning and Statistical NLP for Dialogue
• T3: Text Summarization
• T4: Theoretical and Technical Approaches for Asian Language Processing -- Similarities and Differences among Languages

Requirements

Requirements are the same regardless of whether you are submitting a paper to the General Sessions or the Thematic Sessions; a separate Call for Student Workshop papers will provide the information on requirements for the Student Workshop submissions. Papers should describe original work; they should emphasize completed work rather than intended work, and should indicate clearly the state of completion of the reported results. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation results should be included. A paper accepted for presentation at the ACL Meeting cannot be presented or have been presented at any other meeting with publicly available published proceedings. Papers that are being submitted to other conferences must indicate this on the title page. (See Submission Format below.)

Reviewing

The reviewing of the papers submitted to the General Sessions and the Thematic Sessions will be blind. Reviewing of papers submitted to the General Sessions will be managed by an international Conference Program Committee consisting of Area Chairs, each of whom will have the assistance of a team of reviewers. Reviewing of papers for the Thematic Sessions will be managed by the chairs of the Thematic Sessions, with the assistance of teams of reviewers. Final decisions on the technical program (both General Sessions and Thematic Sessions) will be made by the Conference Program Committee. Each submission will be reviewed by at least three reviewers.

Submission Procedure

The format of submissions is the same regardless of whether you are submitting a paper to the General Sessions or the Thematic Sessions. Papers may not exceed 3200 words (exclusive of title page and references). Papers outside the specified length are subject to be rejected without review.

We strongly recommend the use of ACL latex style files or Microsoft Word Style files tailored for this year's conference. These style files include a place for the paper ID code (see below) and word count and allow for a graceful transition to the style required for publication. These will be made available from this page soon. In case you are unable to use these style files directly, a description of the format can be found here (Microsoft Word Document). If you are unable to access this webpage, please send email to acl2k@cis.udel.edu.

The reviewing of papers submitted to the General Session or the Thematic Sessions will be blind. Hence the title page and paper should not include the authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's identity (e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...") should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...".

You must first register your submission. This can be done by filling out an electronic form. The form requires a specification of the title and authors of the paper, as well as a preliminary abstract and list of keywords. Submitting the form will return to you via email a paper ID code which must appear on your submission. Also, please use the paper ID code in all correspondences with the program committee co-chairs. If you have any difficulty using the electronic registration form, please send email to acl2k@cis.udel.edu with all of the title page information (see below) plus the authors' names and affiliations.

As reviewing will be blind, a separate title page and identification page will be required. The title page should include the following information:

• Title:
• Paper ID Code: (generated upon paper registration)
• Topic Area: one or two general topic areas
• Keywords: Up to 5 keywords specifying subject area
• Which Session: T1, T2, T3, T4, or G (you must choose one)
• Word Count, excluding title page and references:
• Under Consideration for other Conferences (specify):
• Abstract: short summary (up to 5 lines)

T1, T2, T3, and T4 correspond to the four Theme Sessions and G corresponds to the General Session. A paper can be submitted to at most one session.

The identification page should contain all of the information in the title page, but in addition must include the authors' names, affiliations, and email addresses. The format for the identification page should be as follows:

• Title:
• Paper ID Code: (generated upon paper registration)
• Authors' names, affiliations, and email addresses
• Topic Area: one or two general topic areas
• Keywords: Up to 5 keywords specifying subject area
• Which Session: T1, T2, T3, T4, or G (you must choose one)
• Word Count, excluding title page and references:
• Under Consideration for other Conferences (specify):
• Abstract: short summary (up to 5 lines)

Submissions must be received by April 7th, 2000. Late submissions (those arriving on or after April 8th) will be rejected without review. The Program Committee is not responsible for postal delays or other mailing problems. Six (6) paper copies (printed on both sides of the page if possible) including the title page should be submitted to the following address:

ACL-2000 Submission
c/o K. Vijay-Shanker
103 Smith Hall
Department of Computer and Information Sciences
University of Delaware
Newark, DE 19716
USA

Two of the six copies must have the identification page attached. In addition, strictly for the purposes of partially-automated routing of papers to area chairs and reviewers, authors should send an electronic version of the paper (without the identification page) to acl-routing@cis.udel.edu. Please include the paper ID code in the subject line of your email. Latex, postscript, pdf, Microsoft word and plain text are all acceptable formats for the electronic version. The electronic version should also be received by April 7, 2000. Please note that as the electronic version will only be used to assist the PC in distributing the papers to appropriate reviewers, this supplementary electronic version in no way replaces the required hardcopy submissions. If you have any difficulty in submitting the electronic version, please send mail to the pc co-chairs at acl2k@cis.udel.edu.

Acknowledgment of receipt of the hardcopy submission will be emailed soon after receipt. Notification of acceptance will be sent to authors (by email) around June 15, 2000. Detailed formatting guidelines for the preparation of the final camera-ready copy will be provided to authors with their acceptance notice. Authors of accepted papers will have to submit a signed copyright release statement along with the final camera-ready papers.

The dates here pertain only to the General Sessions and Thematic sessions.

• Paper registration deadline: March 31, 2000
• Paper submissions deadline: April 7, 2000
• Notification of acceptance: June 15, 2000
• ACL 2000 Conference: October 3--6, 2000

Submission Questions

Authors unable to comply with the above submission procedure should contact the program committee co-chairs sufficiently ahead of the submission deadline so that alternate arrangements can be made. All queries regarding the General Sessions and Thematic sessions of ACL-2000 should be sent to acl2k@cis.udel.edu; this forwards to both PC co-chairs.

Chang-Ning HUANG (PC Co-Chair)	K. VIJAY-SHANKAR (PC Co-Chair)
Microsoft Research, China	Dept. of Computer Science
5F,Beijing Sigma Center	University of Delaware
No.49, Zhichun Road	Newark, DE 19716, USA
Beijing 100080, P.R.C	vijay@cis.udel.edu
cnhuang@microsoft.com	Tel: +1 302 831 1952
Tel: (86-10)6261-7711 -5760	Fax: +1 302 831 8458
Fax: (86-10)8809-7305
Hitoshi IIDA (General Chair)	Aravind K. JOSHI (Honorary Chair)
Speech and Language Information Processing Lab	Department of Computer and Information Sciences
SONY Computer Science Labs, Inc	University of Pennsylvania
Tokyo 141-0022, Japan	Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA
iida@csl.sony.co.jp	joshi@linc.cis.upenn.edu
Tel: +81 3 5448 4380	Tel: +1 215 898 0359
Fax: +81 3 5447 1942	Fax: +1 215 573 9247