• Participants list

(1) International Conference Members:
1. ICCPOL: Prof. Lee, Jong-Hyeok
2. IRAL: Prof. Ishikawa, Tetsuya (represented by Prof. Tsujii, Jun'ichi)
3. NLPRS: Prof. Choi, Key-Sun (represented by Prof. Lee, Jong-Hyeok)
4. PACLIC: Prof. Tsou, Benjamin
5. PACLING. Prof. Ishizaki, Shun (represented by Prof. Tanaka, Kumiko).

There are total 5 members in this category, and 5 official voters present.

(2) Regional Association Members:
1. China Chinese Information Society, China: Not nominated yet
2. NLP Assoc. of India (NLPAI): Prof. Sangal, Rajeev.
3. Indonesian Language Technology - Research Community (ILT-RC), Indonesia:
Dr. Riza, Hammam (Absent and no assigned representative).
4. Association of Natural Language Processing, Japan: Dr. Tanaka, Hideki.
5. SIG-KLC (Special Interest Group of Korean Language Computing) of KISS (Korea Information Science Society):
Prof. Kweon, Hyuk-Chul (represented by Prof. Lee, Jong-Hyeok).
6. Singapore Chinese and Oriental Languages Information Processing Society:
Prof. Lua, Kim Teng (represented by Dr. Su, Jian).
7. The Association for Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing, Taiwan: Prof. Chang,
Jyung-Sheng.

There are total 7 members in this category, and 5 official voters present.

(3) Regional Representative and Expert Members:
1. Prof. Dale, Robert(Australia).
2. (China) -- Formal candidate not nominated yet. Dr. Zhou, Ming will present as an in-formal observer
3. Prof. Tsujii, Jun'ichi (Japan).
4. Prof. Yusoff, Zaharin (Malaysia): Absent and no assigned representative.
5. Dr. Su, Keh-Yih (Taiwan)
6. Dr. Sornlertlamvanich, Virach (Thailand).

There are total 6 members in this category, and 4 official voters present.
To sum up, there are 18 (= 5+7+6) members for the first CCC of AFNLP, and 14 (= 5+5+4) official voters present.
Since we have over half official voters (14 > 9) attend this meeting, according to our Chapter, all those conclusions
made in this meeting are regarded as "Official Conclu-sion".

• Agenda

(1) Introducing attendants ( 5 minutes )


(2) Activity Report ( 25 minutes : maximum three minutes each )
A : ICCPOL, IRAL, PACLIC, PACLING.
B&C : Australia region, China region, Hong Kong region, India region, Indonesia region, Japan region, Korea region,
Malaysia region, Singapore regin, Taiwan region, Thailand region.

(3) Resolving Issues Session ( 55 minutes )
1. Decide if we should associate our name (i.e., AFNLP) to ACL-2003:from Prof.Tsujii: " i.e. the AFNLP will help to
organize ACL at Sapporo as a junior partner and the name of the AFNLP will be mentioned in a certain way (like
the conference is organized by ACL in association with AFNLP, .... ). Since I already asked the ACL exec, it is
impossible to claim that ACL-AFNLP jointly organize the ACL conference at Sappporo"
2. Strategies for promoting AFNLP flagship conference?
3. How to position AFNLP flagship conference?
4. Decide the name, the season for hosting the future AFNLP flagship conference.
5. Decide the years for holding the first and second AFNLP flagship conferences.
6. How to promote the first and second AFNLP flagship conferences?

(4) AFNLP Steering Committee Report ( 5 minutes )

• Official conclusions made

(1) Associate our name ( i.e., AFNLP ) to ACL-2003 : YES ( no objection vote )

(2) Official Name of future AFNLP flagship conference : NLP SUMMIT is chosen ( 8 votes to 3 votes in the final round of voting which makes choice between "NLP SUMMIT" and NLPRS" )


(3) Tentatively decide that the first AFNLP flagship conference will be held during 2002 winter. Prof. Tsujii and Dr. Keh-yih Su have been asked to negotiate with relevant peoples and then decide the organizer location and date later.

• Activity reports

(1) ICCPOL, IRAL, PACLIC, PACLING
ICCPOL (Prof. Lee, Jong-Hyeok)
Conferences hosted by CLCS (Chinese Language Computer Society)
- ICCPOL'03 (Int'l Conf. on Computer Processing on Oriental languages)
n July 10-12, 2003
n Shengyang, China
n Organizing Chair: Prof. Tianshun Yao (Northeastern U. of China)
- ICCLC'04 (Int'l Conf. on Chinese Language Computing)
n July 9-11, 2004
n Arcata, California, USA
n Organizing Chair: Prof. Kai Chu (Humboldt State University, Arcata, California, USA)

IRAL (oral present given by Prof. Tsujii)
Prof. Tetsuya Ishikawa added later: "IRAL will now asking to the ACL'2003 a local chair that IRAL will hold WS at
theACL'2003."

PACLIC (Prof. Tsou, Benjamin)

PACLIC (Pacific Conference on Language, Information and Computation) - A Report for AFNLP
1. PACLIC came about as a result of merger of several conferences with principal or-ganizers from Japan and Korea (Logico-Semantics Societies), and then with the addition of Taiwan. Hong Kong and then Singapore were added after the merger.
2. PACLIC's interest has traditionally focused on the more formal aspects of language structure and linguistic research,with strong but not exclusive emphasis on Asian lan-guages. The renamed conference, PACLIC, has extended itsinterests to cover NLP and Computational Linguistics.
3. Its annual conference is rotated among Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singa-pore, and Thailand may be added as a host. The 17th conference will be hosted by Singapore's Chinese and Oriental Languages Information Processing Societies.
4. Recent Keynote Speakers for PACLIC:
2000 - Japan : Masayoshi. Shibatani (No. 14)
2001 - Hong Kong : Charles Fillmore (No. 15)
2002 - Korea : Erhard Hinrichs &Lee Kiyong (No. 16)
5. Typical attendance: about 40-50, with a significant number of regulars.
6. Publication of regular conference proceedings - about 3 dozen papers.

PACLING (Prof. Ishizaki, Shun)

(2) PACLING Activity Report for AFNLP-CCC 2002
A :PACLING(Pacific Association for Computational Linguistics) is a unique forum for scientific and technological exchange on the natural language processing research, starting at the Japan-Australia joint symposium held in 1987 in Melbourne, Australia. In 2001, Kitakyushu meeting was hold as the 7th one in Japan, following the Waterloo Meeting in Canada in 1999.
The next meeting will be in 2003 or 2004 in Canada. The topics of the meeting will be discussed later at the steering board and will be focused on some specific ones instead of general ones.
The current president of PACLING is Prof. Nick Cercone at University of Waterloo, Canada.
B&C: Australia region, China region, Hong Kong region, India region, Indo-nesia region, Japan region, Korea region, Malaysia region, Singapore region, Tai-wan region, Thailand region

Australia Region (Prof. Dale, Robert)
The Australasian Natural Language Processing Workshop
This workshop series takes place every two years, often in association with another na-tional event. In 2002, the workshop is attached to the Australian AI conference taking place in Canberra in December 2002. The workshop is typically a one day event that attracts 20-30 people.
Our plan is to continue the two year cycle; the date and venue for the 2004 workshop has yet to be determined.

China Region (Dr. Zhou, Ming)

Hong Kong Region (Prof. Tsou, Benjamin)

AFNLP - Regional Report : Hong Kong
Much of the research and development efforts on NLP in Hong Kong are based at publi-cally funded universities and degree granting institutions. Of the 9 institutions, there are several which have a higher concentration than others:

1. Chinese University of Hong Kong - Staff in the Faculty of Engineering's depts. of Electronic Engineering, and System Engineering & Engineering Management, are involved in speech processing and text mining.

2. City University of Hong Kong - It has staff in the departments of Electronic Engi-neering; Chinese, Translation and Linguistics; English; Information Systems; Computer Science and at its Language Information Sciences Research Centre. Their efforts have included work on Chinese and bilingual corpus development, discourse analysis and web-based developments, as well as modeling processes and speech processing.

3. Hong Kong Polytechnic University - Staff in the depts. of Computer Science, and Chinese & Bilingual Studies work on Chinese input interface and text processing.

4. Hong Kong University of Sciences & Technology - Staff in the Faculty of Engineer-ing's depts. of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science work on bilingual text and speech processing.

The remaining 5 institutions all have individual staff members interested in NLP and re-lated activities.

There are also a number of Chinese relevant ISP/ICD operations in Hong Kong. The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong has about 200 members, some of whom are interested in NLP. There is talk of the formation of an NLP focused association. The HKSAR also has a Department of Information & Technology Services which is charged with policy formulation and policy implementation, and there is also a Government funded Applied Science Technology Research Institute (ASTRI) Co Ltd which has some inter-ests in speech processing. Hong Kong has been the recent venue for several international conferences such as ACL, IRAL workshop, PACLIC etc.

India Region (Prof. Sangal, Rajeev)

(3) NLP Activities in India

A Brief Status Report
Period: Dec. 2001 to Aug. 2002

Rajeev Sangal
IIIT Hyderabad

[At AFNLP-CCC meeting on 27 August 2002, at COLING-2002, Taipei.]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Summary
o Large activity in India but uncoordinated
o Approx. 10 centres, 100 researchers
o NLP Assoc. of India has been announced
- Hopefully, will help in coordination
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Conferences and Workshops Held
Period: Dec. 2001 to Aug. 2002
- 2-week Training Workshop on Corpus based NLP, at Anna University MIT Campus, 17-29 Dec. 2001.
(By Prof Aravind Joshi and his team.)
- 1st Global Wordnet Conference, at CIIL Mysore, 21-25 Jan. 2002. (Large conf.)
- 3-week Training Workshop on Lexical Resources for Machine Translation, IIIT Hy-derabad, 17 June - 6 July, 2002
- 1-week Evaluation Workshop on WASP
Workbench for Word Sense Disambiguation
IIIT Hyderabad, 8-13 July, 2002
(With University of Brighton, UK)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Minor Conferences and Workshops Held
- Support Tools for Machine Aided Trans. at IIT Kanpur, Mar. 2002 (Small conf.)
- Symposium on Machine Translation, at Kendriya Hindi Sansathan, Agra, 13-14 Apr. 2002 (Small meeting)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NLP Association of India (NLPAI)
o NLP Association of India being formed
- Decision taken and announced at CIIL, Mysore (at meeting at Global Wordnet conf.)
o To be run by institutions and eminent individuals
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NLPAI Core Institutional Members
Linguistics institutions:
- CIIL Mysore
- Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha Tirupati
- Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan Delhi
- University of Hyderabad
- CIEFL Hyderabad
- Nat. Centre for Promotion of Urdu Lang. Delhi
- Kendriya Hindi Sansthan Agra
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(contd.) ... Core Institutional Members
Computer Science institutions:
- IIIT Hyderabad
- NCST Mumbai
- Anna University, KBC Centre, Chennai
- IIT Kanpur
- ISI Kolkatta
- C-DAC Pune
- IIT Bombay
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Planned Activities of NLPAI
o Organize a yearly conference
- NLPAI likely to adopt ICON
(Int. Conf. on NLP, 18-21 Dec. 2002)
o Bring out a periodic newsletter
o Organize evaluation/contest of systems
o Form SIGs in NLP
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Conclusion
o Linguistic institutions getting into computational linguistics
o Community also getting organized (NLP Assoc. of India)
o Increased Govt. funding likely
Indonesia Region
Japan Region (Dr. Tanaka, Hideki)

Activity report
The Association for Natural Language Processing
http://www.pluto.ai.kyutech.ac.jp/NLP
Hideki Tanaka

General introduction
- Foundation: 1 Jan. 1994
- Membership: regular 706, student 121
Area:
- CL, linguistics and NLP
Main activities
- Publication of journal (4 times / year, no page limitation)
- Annual meeting (March)
Activities:
Apr. 2001-Mar.2002
The 8th annual meeting
- 18-20, Mar. 2002 at Keihan'na plaza (Kyoto)
- 3 tutorials, panel discussion, 2 invited talks and one satellite WS
- 128 oral presentations and 44 posters
- Attendance: 411 (main conference)
Journal publication
- 4 journals (vol.8 No.3 - vol.9 No.1)
Finance
- Sound
Plans:
Apr. 2002-Mar.2003
Annual meeting
- 17-21 Mar. 2003, Yokohama National University
Issues
- English journal
- Preparations for the coming 10th anniversary in 2004
- Collaboration with AFNLP

Supplemented later by Dr. Tanaka, Hideki:
Brief history
- foundation date: 1 Jan. 1994
Regularity of meetings
- annual meeting
Programs of (say 3) latest meetings and/or proceedings and/or other scholarly publi-cations Last annual meeting
(Mar. 2002) covered 128 oral presentations and 44 poster presentations. There were 3 tutorials, 2 invited talks, and one workshop in the meeting. # our programs are in Japanese We published 4 issues of "journal of natural language processing" in 2001.
Some attendance/memebrship statistics
- regular members: 706
- student members: 121
- Attendance of the last annual meeting: 411
Purpose and objectives of the organization
Promotion of the research in NLP, CL and lingulistics. The main events are the journal publication (4 issues / year) and annual meeting. [6] the nature of any offi-cial/government sponsorship No sponsorship (Based on membership fee)

Korea Region (Prof. Lee, Jong-Hyeok)

Conferences hosted by SIG-KLC (Korean Language Computing)
- The 5th China-Korea Joint Symposium on Oriental Language Processing and Pattern Recognition
n Not decided
n Tsingtao, China
Organizing Chair: Prof. Ruwei Dai (Chinese Academy of Science)

Malaysia Region

Singapore Region (Dr. Su, Jian)

1) COLIPS would like to host AFNLP-CCC in the future and coordinate AFNLP-CCC's promotion in Singapore;

2) COLIPS will host the following events in the coming years. ICCC can become AFNLP-CCC's satellite event to align with AFNLP-CCC schedule.
1. International Conference on Issues of Chinese Standardization in the Information Era (Nov 27-29) 2002 Chairperson: Dr Lua Kim-Teng luakt@comp.nus.edu.sg
2. The 2nd Kent Ridge International Roundtable Conference on Chinese Lin-guisitcs (Nov 27-29) 2002 Chairperson: Dr Lua Kim-Teng luakt@comp.nus.edu.sg
3. PACLIC17 3-5 June, 2003 (Tuesday-Friday) Chairperson: Dr Lua Kim-Teng luakt@comp.nus.edu.sg
4. Oriental COCOSDA 2-3 June, 2003 (Monday-Tuesday) Chairperson: Dr Lua Kim-Teng luakt@comp.nus.edu.sg
5. COLIPS Linguistic and Language Information Processing Seminars (quarterly) Chairperson: Dr Li Haizhou hzli@ieee.org
6. International Conference on Chinese Computing (ICCC), 2005, Chairperson: Dr Lua Kim-Teng luakt@comp.nus.edu.sg

Taiwan Region (Prof. Chang, Jyung-Sheng)

The Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language
Processing Society was founded in 1989 to promote the research and development of computational linguistics and natural language processing in Taiwan. As of April 2002, CLCLP has 215 members, including 85 life-time members,
33 regular members, 85 student members and 12 institutional members.

CLCLP hosts the annual ROCLING conferences since 1989. ROCLING is perhaps the longest running conference of its kind in Asia . The attendances of recent ROCLING conference has risen to around 200 people. CLCLP's special interest groups SIGIR and SIGSPEECH also holds seasonal workshops regularly.
Since 1992, CLCLP has been publishing a semi-annual journal by the same name.

In recognition of CLCLP's contribution to computation linguistics study, the ICCL has chosen CLCLP to host COLING 2002 in Taiwan. As the president of CLCLP, I welcome you all to Taiwan and wish everybody an enjoyable stay here.

Thailand Region (Dr. Sornlertlamvanich, Virach)

NLP Related Activities in Thailand

1. Symposium on Natural Language Processing (SNLP)

SNLP is held biannually by NLP researchers in Thailand since 1993. The whole series of the conference were hosted jointly with NECTEC: 1993 (Chulalongkorn University), 1995 (Kasetsart University), 1997 (Asian Institute of Technology), 2000 (King Mong-kut's University of Technology, Thonburi) and 2002 (Sirindhorn International Institute of Technology).

The Fifth Symposium on Natural Language Processing (SNLP) which is a series of only one NLP related symposium in Thailand had been held jointly with the Fifth Meeting of Oriental-COCOSDA as SNLP-Oriental COCOSDA 2002 during May 9-11 in Hua-Hin, Thailand. About 100 participants from both NLP and speech processing research fields attended the conference. Most of them were from Asian countries.

There were five invited talks by four speakers: Prof. Emeritus H. Fujisaki of University of Tokyo on Information Retrieval and Modeling of Tonal Features of Speech, Prof. Fangxin Chen of IBM China Research Laboratory on Speech Synthesis for Tonal Lan-guages, Prof. Takenobu Tokunaga of Tokyo Institute of Technology on Natural Lan-guage Understanding and Action Control, and Prof. David Yarowsky of Johns Hopkins University on Cross-Language Projection of Linguistic Knowledge.

There were 57 oral presentations including 28 regular papers, 17 short papers, 8 COCOSDA papers and 4 student papers. Among them, 23 were from Thailand, 14 from Japan, 5 from China, 3 from Korea and India, 2 from Taiwan and one from Malaysia, Indonesia and Guam. All the 4 student papers which were from Thailand. General pres-entations were made in parallel for NLP and speech processing using two rooms.

The outline of the program is as follows: 11 papers in 3 sessions for information retrieval and information extraction, 7 papers in 2 sessions for pattern recognition, 3 papers for morphology, 6 papers in 2 sessions for NLP applications, 2 papers for syntax, 4 papers for language resources, etc., 13 papers in 4 sessions for speech processing, 8 papers in 2 sessions for O-COCOSDA, and 4 papers in 2 sessions for students.

2. Survey on Research and Development of Machine Translation in Asian Countries
This is a two-days workshop held in Phuket, Thailand during May 13-14, 2002. We have got financial support from Asia-Pacific Telecommunity (APT) for inviting all participants whose countries are members of the APT.

There were 50 participants from oversea (24) and Thai local organizations (26). The par-ticipants were invited from 2 groups (39 from R&D, and 11 from policy and planning personnel) The representatives from 11 countries (India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam) 1 region (Hong Kong) were invited to present the research status of NLP/MT including the ser-vices that are available to public.

The purpose of this workshop was 1) to update technology status of MT in Asia, 2) to exchange research and development experience in the field, 3) to establish collaboration for developing a cross language web navigation system in Asia, 4) to establish activities for technology transfer from experienced countries to the inexperienced countries, and 5) to develop human resources in the field.

We had Dr. Hitoshi Iida as our keynote speaker for "AAMT Activities and General Trends of MT". There are 17 papers presented in 4 topics: MT technology, MT research status, digitalization status, and problems in language processing. The meeting raised 4 topics of discussion concerning the collaboration in Asia, language processing related standardization, financial support and the possibility of joining among the existing working bodies.

As a conclusion, followings are the possible grouping of the activity status based on the focus of the activity:
1. Basic components:-
Standardization (Character code and locale)
Lao PDR, Myanmar, Philippines, Vietnam

2. Working on Regional MT:-
Philippines and India (official lang. - dialects)
Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei (share resources for Malay-English MT development)

3. Experience on English and mother language MT
Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Korea,
Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand.

The expecting collaboration in the near future to focus on making standardization among Asian languages, sharing language resources, and exchanging information for research and implementation are:
1. Establish Asian chapters for Intra-Asian Collaboration.
2. Construct Help-desk operation for standardization.
3. Establish a Working group or Liaison Secretariat for Language resources.
4. Establish a Working group or Liaison Secretariat for MT.

(c)2001,Asia Federation of Natural Language Processing,