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