================================================= Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing www.afnlp.org Newsletter No. 1 15 April 2008 ================================================= 1. Message from AFNLP Chair of CLC - Dr Haizhou Li It is with great pleasure that I announce the AFNLP newsletter programme. AFNLP was founded in 2003 with the mission to promote the research and development of the computational analysis and the automatic processing of all languages of importance to the Asian region. Since its establishment, AFNLP has seen tremendous growth of the NLP research community in Asia. To better serve the community, AFNLP has started a newsletter programme in 2008, which aims at facilitating the information sharing within the community, and reaching out to the people for the next phase of membership growth. To start with, the AFNLP executive committee is serving as the editorial board. This newsletter programme will include email dissemination of announcements from AFNLP and its members, updates of information at AFNLP website, and maintenance of a mailing list of the AFNLP affiliates. You will receive newsletters and announcements from the AFNLP Communications and Liaison Committee (CLC). I hope that you will like the programme and will actively contribute to it. 2. New Appointments - Prof Virach Sornlertlamvanich (Thailand) is appointed as Asian Language Resources Committee co-Chair (2008-2009) to replace Prof. Huang Chu-ren (2003-2007). - Dr Chengqing Zong (China) and Prof Rajeev Sangal (India) are appointed as AFNLP Executive Committee members (2008-2009). 3. Announcement of mailing list - AFNLP now maintains a mailing list of NLP researchers in Asia Pacific Region. Announcements and newsletters will be sent through this mailing list, managed by the AFNLP Webmaster. - AFNLP members and affiliates may submit your activity announcements, call-for-papers and requests for AFNLP support to Dr Minghui DONG, the AFNLP Webmaster, at mhdong@i2r.a-star.edu.sg for further actions. - If you have any feedbacks about AFNLP newsletter, please send to the editorial board at newsletter@afnlp.org. 4 Meetings (1) AFNLP Executive Committee Meeting The 1st AFNLP Executive Committee meeting 2008 was held in Hyderabad, India during IJCNLP-08 on January 9, 2008, attended by - AFNLP President: Jun'ichi Tsujii - AFNLP Secretary General: Keh-Yih Su - AFNLP Honorary Treasurer: Kai-Fai Wong - AFNLP-CCC Chair: Yuji Matsumoto - AFNLP-CLC Chair: Haizhou Li - AFNLP-NCAC Chair: Benjamin Tsou - IJCNLP-08 Local Organizing Co-chair: Rajeev Sangal The meeting was adjourned with the following resolutions: - The treasurer will set up an AFNLP financial account in Hong Kong. - The AFNLP-CCC chair will organize a post-conference feedback meeting after each IJCNLP conference. - AFNLP will reach out to other academic communities. The current list with liaison persons includes: COLING (Jun'ichi Tsujii), LREC (Benjamin Tsou), SIGIR (Kai-Fai Wong), Oriental COCOSDA (Haizhou Li), AMMT (Jun'ichi Tsujii), Web related (Key-Sun Choi), China (Benjamin Tsou). - The AFNLP Executive Committee approved the proposal to exchange the liaison member with ACL, and Dr Keh-Yih Su will contact ACL secretary for further arrangement. - The Duties AFNLP Officers will be documented in further detail and published at AFNLP official website. - The Responsibilities of Committee Chairs and Time-Tables will documented in further detail and published at AFNLP official website. - The AFNLP Executive Committee approved the proposal to maintain a "Database of Asia NLP Related Researchers". A committee will be set up to oversee the database management. The database will be published at AFNLP official website. - The AFNLP Executive Committee approved the proposal to kick-off its newsletter programme in 2008. - Schedule and milestones of those actions planned above will be monitored by the secretary general. (2) AFNLP Board Meeting The AFNLP board meeting was held in Hyderabad, India during IJCNLP-08 on January 9, 2008, attended by - Jun'ichi Tsujii - Keh-Yih Su - Kai-Fai Wong - Yuji Matsumoto - Haizhou Li - Benjamin Tsou - Jong-Hyeok Lee - Rajeev Sangal - Virach Sornlertlamvanich - Raji Bagga - Chengqing Zong with the following agenda - Prof Jun'ichi Tsujii gave the president report. - Dr Keh-Yih Su gave the secretary report. - Prof Kai-Fai Wong gave the treasurer report. - Prof Yuji Matsumoto gave the report of Conference Coordinating Committee. - Dr Li Haizhou gave the report of Communications and Liaison Committee - Prof Benjamin Tsou gave the report of Nominations and Constitutional Affairs Committee - Prof Raji Bagga gave the report of IJCNLP 2008. - Dr Haizhou Li reported the progress of the organization of ACL/IJCNLP 2009. - Prof. Kam-Fai Wong reported the AIRS conferences. - Prof Jong-Hyeok Lee reported the ICCPOL conferences. - Prof. Benjamin Tsou rerpoted the PACLIC conferences. - Rajeev Sangal gave report on behalf of NLP Assoc. of India (NLPAI) - Jong-Hyeok Lee gave report on behalf of SIG-HLT (Special Interest Group of Human Language Technology) of KISS (Korea Information Science Society) - Dr Haizhou Li gave report on behalf of Chinese and Oriental Languages Information Processing Society, Singapore. - Chengqing Zong gave report on behalf of Chinese Information Processing Society, China. - Prof Benjamin Tsou gave report on behalf of Hong Hong. - Virach Sornlertlamvanich gave report on behalf of Thailand. Reports in the board meeting can be found at AFNLP website http://www.afnlp.org/documents/meetings/Board_Meeting_IJCNLP08.htm 4. Past Events: - ADD Workshop 1: Introduction to NLP, August 21¨CSeptember 1, 2006, Bangkok, Thailand - AIRS 2006 (The Third Asia Information Retrieval Symposium), Oct. 16-18, 2006, Singapore. - PACLIC 20 (The 20th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation), November 1-3, 2006, Wuhan, China. - PACLIC 21 (The 21st Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation), November 1-3, 2007, Seoul, Korea. - ALTW 2006 (The Australasian Language Technology Workshop 2006), Nov 30- Dec 1, 2006, Sydney, Australia. (http://www.alta.asn.au/events/altw2006/) - ICCPOL 2006 (The 21st International Conference on Computer Processing of Oriental Languages), December 17-19, 2006, Singapore. (http://www.colips.org/conference/iscslp2006) - ISCSLP 2006 (The 5th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing), December 13-16, 2006, Singapore. (http://www.colips.org/conference/iccpol2006) - ADD Workshop 2: Advanced NLP (Special Topic on Morpho-Syntactic Analysis), March 6-14, 2007, Bangkok, Thailand. - PACLING 2007 (the Pacific Association for Computational Linguistics), Sep 19-21, 2007, Melbourne, Australia. - The 19th Annual Conference on Human and Cognitive Language Technology, Oct. 12-13, 2007, Korea. - ICCC 2007 (International Conference on Chinese Computing 2007), October 13-15, 2007, Wuhan, China. (http://www.iccc2007.net) - ALTW 2007 (The Australasian Language Technology Workshop 2006), Dec 10-11, 2007, Melbourne, Australia. (http://www.alta.asn.au/events/altw2007/) - National Joint Conference on Computational Linguistics of China, 2007, Dalian, China. - Annual Meeting of Young Scientists on NLP, 2007, Suzhou, China. - Annual Workshop on Evaluation of Machine Translation, 2007, Harerbin, China. - ADD Workshop 3: Advanced NLP (Special Topic on Image, Speech and Text Processing), February 25-Mar 3, 2008, Thailand. 5. Upcoming Events - Summer school on Natural Language Processing and Text Mining, June 24-29, 2008, Kharagpur, India.(http://cse.iitkgp.ac.in/nlpschool/) - CLSW 2008 (Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop 2008), July 14-17, 2008, Singapore. (http://www.chineselex.org) - PACLIC 22 (The 22nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation), November 19-21, 2008, Cebu City, Phlippines. - IALP 2008 (International Conference on Asian Language Processing 2008), Nov. 12-14, 2008, Chiang Mai, Thailand. (http://www.colips.org/conference/ialp2008) - ICCPOL 2008 (The 22nd International Conference on Computer Processing of Oriental Languages), December 2008, Hong Kong. - The 7th SNLP (International Symposium on Natural Language Processing), December 12-15, 2008, Pattaya, Thailand. - National Student Conference on Computational Linguistics, 2008, Taiyuan, China. - Annual Meeting of Young Scientists on NLP, 2008, Beijing, China. - Annual Workshop on Evaluation of Machine Translation, 2008, Taiyuan, China. - IEEE International Conference on NLP and Knowledge Engineering (IEEE NLP-KE) 2008, China. - ACL-IJCNLP-2009 (Joint Conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP)), August 2-7, 2009, Singapore. (http://www.acl-ijcnlp-2009.org) - National Joint Conference on Computational Linguistics of China, 2009, Yantai, China. - The 8th SNLP (International Symposium on Natural Language Processing) and PACLING (the Pacific Association for Computational Linguistics), December 2010, Bangkok, Thailand.