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sympo2004sample.tex

Call for Extended Abstracts: 

  Asian Symposium on Natural Language Processing to Overcome Language Barriers


    Organized by:
        The Institute of Electronics, Information
                                    and Communication Engineers (IEICE)
                Technical Group on Natural Language Understanding
                                           and Models of Communication (NLC)
                Technical Group on Thought and Language (TL)

    Supported by:
        Communications Research Laboratory (CRL)

- Description

 The Internet has made it easy to access to a vast amounts of information 
and to connect with people all over the world. However, there are numerous 
barriers to effective information access and efficient communication. One 
of these is language differences. Gaps between different kinds of media, 
such as speech and text, also decrease the efficiency of information access. 
The handicapped and the aged are faced with many more barriers than these. 
 This symposium aims to bring together NLP researchers in Asia and to discuss 
how language barriers can be overcome by applying Natural Language Processing. 
 The symposium will be held immediately following the 1st International 
Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJC-NLP-04). The official 
language will be English. 

- Date and place

  March 25-26, 2004,  Hainan Island, China

  ( Immediately following the 1st International Joint Conference 
    on Natural Language Processing [IJC-NLP-04,  
    http://www.rcl.cityu.edu.hk/ijcnlp04] )

- Topics of interest

Papers are solicited on topics with a focus on NLP aimed at overcoming 
of language barriers. In addition to completed work, work in progress 
and on-going projects are welcomed.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  * Cross-lingual information access and communication
      Machine translation
      Speech translation
      Cross-lingual information retrieval / question answering
      Multilingual automatic summarization
      Language education

  * Cross-media information access
      Text retrieval / question answering by speech
      Multimedia data retrieval

  * Information access and communication for the handicapped and the aged
      Closed-caption generation
      Sign language translation
      Braille transcription

  * Basic technology for making language barrier-free
      Natural language analysis
      Natural language generation

- Special events

    We are planning to have several special events during the symposium
    (see following), which will be open to the symposium participants. 

      Invited academic talks by 
          Prof. Eduard Hovy of ISI, USC,
          Prof. Harold Somers of UMIST and
          Prof. Tiejun Zhao of Harbin Institute of Technology.
      Invited talk on the Asian Broadband Project of Japanese Ministry of
          Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications.
      Panel discussion on e-learning by Asian researchers.

- Submission

  * Initial Submission  (Extended Abstracts)

    Please submit one A4 sheet paper that describes your original and 
    unpublished work. Abstracts that have been or will be submitted in 
    parallel with other conferences or workshops that have proceedings 
    are not eligible for submission. 

    The submission receipt deadline is January 5, 2004. To submit a paper, 
    e-mail to 
      sympo2004@eel.rdc.toshiba.co.jp
    with:
        (1) Submission letter including
            - title
            - key words
            - author names and affiliations 
            - address and phone number of the corresponding author
            - presentation style
                  a. Oral  b. Poster
                  * Please note that this requirement cannot always be met.
      (2) Paper submission in 
               MS Word(.doc), Adobe Acrobat(.pdf), or Postscript(.ps)

    The paper should begin with the title and the names and affiliations of 
    all authors. A Double-column style is strongly recommended for the main 
    body of the paper. The paper can include Tables and Figures. 
    Sample files for MS Word and LaTex are available at 
    http://www.ieice.org/iss/nlc/jpn/symposium2004e.html

    An acknowledgment email will be sent to the corresponding author upon 
    receiving each submission. The authors are advised to contact the PC 
    Chair (either by email to tatsuya.izuha@toshiba.co.jp, or by phone 
    +81-44-549-2239) if they do not receive the acknowledgement by January 8.

  * Notification of acceptance 

    The submitted one-page papers will be reviewed for acceptance at the symposium. 
    Notification of acceptance will be sent via e-mail on January 19, 2004. 

  * Final Submission  (Full Papers)

    Final manuscripts are due by February 23,2004. 
    Please post a hard copy of your final manuscript to the address below. 

        IZUHA Tatsuya, Toshiba Corporation, 
        Corporate Research & Development Center
        1, Komukai Toshiba-cho, Saiwai-ku, Kawasaki 212-8582, Japan 
        E-mail: tatsuya.izuha@toshiba.co.jp
        tel: +81-44-549-2239
        fax: +81-44-520-1308

    The page limit for final papers is eight pages. 
    Instructions on formatting will be announced later. 


- Important Dates

  * Initial submission      January 5, 2004
      (Extended abstracts)
  * Notification            January 19, 2004
  * Final submission        February 23, 2004
      (Full papers)
  * IJC-NLP-04              March 22-24,2004
  * Symposium               March 25-26,2004


- Organizing Committee

  ISAHARA Hitoshi (Co-chair) - Communications Research Laboratory
  NITTA Yoshihiko (Co-chair) - Nihon University
  AKIBA Tomoyoshi  
     - National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology
  INUI Kentaro  - Nara Institute of Science and Technology
  UTSURO Takehito  - Kyoto University
  FUKUMOTO Jun'ichi  - Ritsumeikan University
  NAKANO Mikio  - Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation


- Program Committee

  IZUHA Tatsuya (Chair) -  Toshiba Corporation
  Asanee KAWTRAKUL  -  Kasetsart University
  CHEN Kuang-hua  -  National Taiwan University 
  FUJII Atsushi  -  University of Tsukuba
  IKEDA Takashi  -  Gifu University
  KIKUI Genichiro  -  ATR Spoken Language Translation Research Labs.
  KISHIDA Kazuaki  -  Surugadai University
  KITAMURA Mihoko  -  Oki Electric Industry
  MATSUBARA Shigeki - Nagoya University
  MURATA Masaki - Communications Research Laboratory
  NAKAIWA Hiromi  -  ATR Spoken Language Translation Research Labs.
  OKUMURA Manabu  - Tokyo Institute of Technology
  SANO Hiroshi  -  Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
  SASAOKA Hisayuki  -  Asahikawa National College of Technology
  SUZUKI Masami  -  ATR Media Information Science Labs.
  TAKAHASHI Naoto 
     - National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology
  UCHIMOTO Kiyotaka - Communications Research Laboratory
  Virach SORNLERTLAMVANICH 
      - CRL Thai Computational Linguistics Laboratory 
  WANG Haifeng  - Toshiba (China) Corporation, R&D Center 
  ZHOU Ming  -  Microsoft Research Asia 


- Contact Information

    IZUHA Tatsuya, Toshiba Corporation 
    Corporate Research & Development Center
    E-mail: tatsuya.izuha@toshiba.co.jp
    tel: +81-44-549-2239
    fax: +81-44-520-1308