We have just returned from Boston, where Amruta and I attended a full week of conference activities. On Sunday May 2 there were tutorials, NAACL on May 3-5, and then CoNLL May 6-7.
NAACL is the annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. This event drew about 500 particpants, which is about the average size for this conference in recent years. Amruta and I participated in the system demonstration section of this event, and I'll have more to say about that in future notes. NAACL-2004 info http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~pablo/hlt-naacl04/ CoNLL is the Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, and it had about 60 participants this year. Amruta and I both gave talks, and again I'll have more to say about that later. CoNLL 2004 info http://cnts.uia.ac.be/conll2004/ Next year (2005) NAACL and probably CoNLL will take place in Ann Arbor, Michgan in late June, and will be combined with the international meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. This is very nice for us as Ann Arbor is close to Detroit, which is a very easy trip from Duluth. Boston was quite nice. The conference hotel was right by Boston Common and the Public Garden, which are large green spaces (parks) right in the middle of Boston. On several days we bought our lunch at take out places and then when with small groups of people to have a picnic. In addition, we had time to make short visits to Harvard and MIT, as well as Beacon Hill (a historic colonial neighborhood that has been nicely restored) and misc other historic sites. In general though, the week in Boston was mostly spent on conference activities. For this conference, authors submited their papers for reviewing in November 2003, and decisions were made sometime in February. Each paper is reviewed by about 3 experts, and they score and select from the submitted papers. At NAACL, about 70% of the submitted papers were rejected, so the quality of the work is generally quite high. The selected papers are then scheduled during the three days of the conference for presentation, where the authors present a 25 minute summary of the paper. These presentations form the "meat" of the conference, but in fact there is quite a lot else going on. There are invited talks by prominent folks that last for about an hour, and attempt to provide a broader picture on the field. This year there were two invited talks - one about the Web and one about automatic Essay Evaluation (more on both later). Then there are demonstration sessions like the one that Amruta and I participated in, and there are also tutorials (half day classes) the day before the conference, and then, perhaps most crucially, is the chance to meet with people informally throughout the day and into the night. After the three days of NAACL there was two days of workshops, which are smaller more specialized gatherings. CoNLL took place during those two days, and featured two very excellent invited speakers, Chris Manning of Stanford, and Martha Palmer of Penn. As you can tell, quite a bit happened last week. :) I'm going to try and summarize some of it over the next few days, so you can get a sense of what goes on at such a conference. This will also help me (force me) to organize the huge volume of notes that I took! More soon, Ted -- Ted Pedersen http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Make a clean sweep of pop-up ads. Yahoo! Companion Toolbar. Now with Pop-Up Blocker. Get it for free! http://us.click.yahoo.com/L5YrjA/eSIIAA/yQLSAA/x3XolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nlpatumd/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
