HLT/NAACL 2004

May 2-7, 2004
The Park Plaza Hotel,
one block from the
Boston Common

HLT/NAACL 2004 continues the combination of the Human Language Technology Conferences (HLT) and North American Chapter of the American Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) Annual Meetings begun in 2003. This year's conference will include a special emphasis on bringing together researchers with common interests in computational linguistics, information retrieval, and speech research. Human language technology incorporates a broad spectrum of disciplines working towards enabling computers to interact with humans using natural language, and providing improved services such as automatic translation, speech recognition, information retrieval, text summarization, and information extraction.

HLT/NAACL 2004 will run from Sunday May 2 through Friday May 7. The schedule will include full papers, late-breaking (short) papers, posters and demonstrations. Invited speakers and panelists will discuss the state of today's human language technology. The conference will also host tutorials and workshops, including a workshop organized by and devoted to graduate students.

The conference especially encourages submissions that discuss synergistic combinations of language technologies (e.g., Speech with Information Retrieval, Machine Translation with Speech, Question Answering with Natural Language Processing, etc.). The conference will give special consideration to papers that address the topic of learning from and exploiting knowledge encoded in massive, unstructured collections like the Web.

The conference organization is overseen by a board representing the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), ACM-SIGIR, the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), and HLT funding agencies in North America.

IMPORTANT DATES

TOPICS OF INTEREST

The conference addresses advances in all aspects of human language processing, with special interest in computational linguistics, information retrieval, and speech research together. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Speech processing, including:
  
  • Speech recognition
  • Speech generation
  • Rich transcription: automatic annotation of information structure and sources in speech
• Text summarization
• Question answering
• Information extraction
• Information retrieval
• Computational analysis of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, discourse, style
• Statistical and learning techniques for language processing, including
  
  • Corpus-based language modeling
  • Lexical and knowledge acquisition
• Language generation and text planning
• Parsing
• Discourse analysis
• Multilingual processing, including
  • Machine translation of speech and text
  • Cross-language information retrieval
  • Multi-lingual speech recognition and language identification
• Multimodal representations and processing
• Evaluation, including
  • Glass-box evaluation of HLT systems and system components
  • Black-box evaluation of HLT systems in application settings
• Development of language resources, including
  
  • Lexicons and ontologies
  • Treebanks, proposition banks, and frame banks
• Understanding of human communication, including
  • Natural language interfaces
  • Dialogue structure and dialogue systems
  • Message and narrative understanding systems

DUE DATES

All submissions or camera-ready copy are due by midnight EST on the date specified above.

SUBMISSION INFORMATION

HLT/NAACL 04 submissions for full papers are due on or before November 15, 2003. Submissions for late-breaking (short) papers and posters are due on or before February 4, 2004. For submission information for tutorial proposals, workshop proposals, and demos, please see:

Demos	http://www.hlt-naacl04.org/calldemos.html
Tutorials	http://www.hlt-naacl04.org/calltutorials.html
Workshops	http://www.hlt-naacl04.org/callworkshops.html

Full papers will be evaluated in a blind review process, as with previous NAACL conferences. Short papers will be evaluated in a separate blind reviewing process. Two volumes of proceedings will be produced; one for full papers and another for short papers and demonstration descriptions.

FULL PAPERS

Requirements: Submissions must describe original, completed, unpublished work, and include concrete evaluation results when appropriate. Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must provide this information (see submission format); in the event of multiple acceptances, authors must notify the program chairs as to the meeting they choose to present their work by January 30, 2004, at the latest in order for their work to be included in the proceedings. HLT/NAACL 2004 cannot accept for publication or presentation work that will be (or has been) published elsewhere.

Format: Submissions must be electronic in PDF, should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings (10pt Times-Roman font) and should not exceed eight (8) pages, including references. Authors are strongly encouraged to use the LaTeX style files or MSWord equivalents available on the website -- these formats will ease the transition to the proceedings version.

Reviewing: Reviewing will be blind. No information identifying the authors should be in the paper: this includes not only the authors' names and affiliations, but also self-references that reveal authors' identities; for example, "We have previously shown (Smith 1999)" should be changed to "Smith (1999) has previously shown". Separate identification information is required, and will be part of the web submission process.

Procedure: All interactions will be done via the website and email.

A PDF file of the paper must be uploaded onto the system by the date of the announced deadline. In addition, information about each paper must be entered on the website. This information will include:

Paper title
Authors' names, affiliations, and email addresses
Contact author
A short list of keywords (selected from a predefined list)
Abstract (no more than 500 words)
Whether or not the paper addresses the special topic of learning from large, unstructured corpora
Whether or not the paper is under consideration for other conferences

Authors who for some reason cannot submit a PDF file electronically should contact the program chairs in advance of the due date to work out alternate arrangements.

LATE-BREAKING (SHORT) PAPERS

Submitted Short Papers will be carefully evaluated on the basis of originality, significance, technical soundness, and clarity of exposition. Short Papers may be accepted for presentation in plenary OR poster sessions, as determined by the Program Committee.

The procedure for Short Papers submissions is identical to that of the Full Papers, with the following differences:

1. They may be accepted for oral presentation in plenary OR for presentation in a poster session;
2. The deadlines are later for short papers and posters than for full papers;
3. Short papers are restricted to four (4) pages in length, using the two-column ACL format;
4. Only two reviews per submission are guaranteed.

CONFERENCE VENUE

The conference will be held at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel, which is located in the center of Boston, one block from the Boston Common and Public Garden. There are additional hotels within walking distance, and dorm space may also be available. See the website for more information: www.hlt-naacl04.org.

CONFERENCE COMMITTEES

main contact for category

CONFERENCE WEB SITE

http://www.hlt-naacl04.org