Table
of Contents
1. Editorial
2. View from the Chair
3. EACL Board
4. Prof. Frederick Jelinek, 1932-2010
5. Report on ACL 2010
6. Report on LREC 2010
7. Report on CICLing 2010
8. Report on ESSLLI 2010
9.
Calendar
Welcome to the EACL newsletter for year 2010.
In the time that has passed since the last issue, several events related to our
community have taken place in Europe and in the world. We are reporting on this
below. But first of all, let us start with an important announcement of
interest.
The 13th Conference of the EACL will take place
in 2012 in Avignon, France. The
general chair of EACL 2012 is Walter Daelemans. The program chairs are Mirella
Lapata and Llus Mrquez. The local organisation is headed by Marc El-Bze.
The newsletter starts with a message from the
chair of EACL, Giorgio Satta. A new member, Pierre Lison, has joined the
student board. We report the very sad news of the sudden death of Prof.
Frederick Jelinek. Jan Hajič revives the past in memory of this great man
who has shaped the history of computational linguistics.
To start with our list of events, this year we
have had a very exciting edition of the ACL 2010 conference in Uppsala, Sweden.
The report on the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational
Linguistics is written by Jan Hajič, General Chair of ACL 2010. Nicoletta
Calzolari reports on the seventh international conference on Language Resources
and Evaluation (LREC 2010), which took place in Malta. The 11th International
Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics
(CICLING 2010) was held in Iaşi, Romania. A report is written by Alexander
Gelbukh, General Chair of CICLing 2010. Finally, Valentin Goranko, Chair of the
Programme Committee of ESSLLI 2010, reports on the 22nd European Summer School
in Logic, Language and Information, which took place in Copenhagen, Denmark.
As every year, the student board has carefully
edited a dense calendar of European and international events of interest that will
soon take place. The document is now available via the EACL home page, and we
provide a link at the end of the newsletter. The calendar will be continuously
updated in the months to come.
Sien Moens
Editor
In the year that has just passed since the last
issue of the newsletter, the EACL board has been quite busy with the call for
bid and the selection of the venue for hosting the 13th Conference of the EACL,
which will take place in 2012 in Avignon, France, as already mentioned in the
editorial. Organizing an event of
this size is always an extremely demanding task, and the EACL board is really
grateful to the local organising committee for taking on this main
responsibility. At this time, the
conference general chair and the program chairs have already joined the local
organizers and are working to their best, and I am sure that they all will do a
fantastic job in welcoming us to Avignon in 2012.
Together with the ACL executive committees, the
EACL board has recently worked on the so called conference sudoku problem: in
the past, we have had a somehow odd distribution of computational linguistics
conferences, with years in which only one *ACL conference has been held, and
years in which we have had all three *ACL conferences, together with other CL
related conferences, for a total of five conferences. In order to have a better balance, it has been decided that,
starting with year 2014, the stand alone EACL conference will take place one
year after the edition of the ACL conference which is held in Europe jointly
with the EACL conference. This
solution guarantees that there will always be at least (and at most) two *ACL
conference per year. Accordingly,
the conference calendar for the years following 2014, including CL related
conferences other than *ACL, will be as follows:
2014: ACL (w/NAACL), LREC, COLING, EACL
2015: ACL, NAACL, IJCNLP
2016: ACL (w/EACL), NAACL, LREC, COLING
2017: ACL (w/NAACL), IJCNLP, EACL
2018: ACL, NAACL, LREC, COLING
2019: ACL (w/EACL), NAACL, IJCNLP
One more thing of general interest: the EACL
board is acting to revive its relationship with the regional CL organizations
in Europe. One first initiative
that the board has been working on is an additional issue of the EACL
newsletter that will be entirely devoted to the conference and meetings of
these regional associations.
Toward the end of 2010 we will publish the first such issue, reporting
on regional events that will certainly be of interest to the European community
working on CL.
Finally, the call for bids to host the 51st
Annual Meeting of the ACL, to be held in Europe, the Middle East or Africa in
2013 has been publicized last August.
Groups and institutions who are interested should notify their intention
to submit a proposal by February 15, 2011, and send in a draft proposal by
March 15, 2011. I very much hope
you will consider putting in a bid to host the event. Please contact Ken Church, the Coordinating Committee chair
for this conference, if you have any questions about it.
Giorgio Satta
Chair
The
current EACL board is composed as follows:
Giorgio Satta (University of Padua,
Italy)
Sien Moens (Katholieke Universiteit
Leuven, Belgium)
Mike Rosner (University of Malta,
Malta)
Joakim Nivre (Uppsala University and
Vxj University, Sweden)
Eric Gaussier (Joseph Fourier University, Grenoble,
France)
Toni Mart (Universitat de Barcelona, Spain)
Kiril
Simov (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria)
Josef van Genabith (Dublin City
University, Ireland)
Anette
Frank (University of Heidelberg,
Germany)
Alex
Lascarides (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Gertjan
van Noord (University of Groningen, The Netherlands)
Felisa Verdejo (Ciudad Universitaria
Madrid, Spain)
Student board:
Pierre
Lison (German Research Centre for
Artificial Intelligence, Saarbrcken, Germany)
Mattias
Nilsson (Uppsala University, Sweden)
Marta
Recasens Potau (University of Barcelona, Spain)
Below, a
new EACL officer introduces himself with a short bio.
Pierre Lison is a researcher at the German
Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence in Saarbrcken, Germany. He holds a
M.Sc. in Computer Science & Engineering from the University of Louvain
(Belgium) and a M.Sc. in Computational Linguistics from the University of
Saarland (Germany). He is currently involved in several international projects
in cognitive robotics and human-robot interaction. Since 2009, he is also
pursuing a Ph.D. on adaptive dialogue management, under the direction of
Geert-Jan M. Kruijff.
Joakim Nivre
Secretary
Prof. Frederick Jelinek,
1932-2010
Prof. Frederick Jelinek, dr.h.c., Julian
Sinclair Smith Professor at the Whiting School of Engineering at the Johns
Hopkins University and the director of JHU's Center for Language Speech and
Processing, died unexpectedly at his workplace on Sept. 14, 2010. Prof. Jelinek
is survived by his wife Milena Jelinek, professor at Columbia University, son
and daughter William and Hannah, three grandchildren and his sister Susan
Abramowitz.
Prof. Frederick (Bedrich in Czech) Jelinek
was born Nov. 18, 1932 in the former Czechoslovakia; his father Vilem was a
dentist in a small city of Kladno, near Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia
(now the Czech Republic). The family was half Jewish; his mother was born to
Czech parents in Switzerland. Thus, during the Nazi occupation of
Czechoslovakia, at the time of Protektorat Boehmen und Maehren, 1939-1945)
they experienced very difficult times, as many Jews did at the time. In 1941,
they even had to leave their home city and move to Prague. His father, who had
planned emigration in the early days of German rule but - tragically - decided
to stay, was eventually deported to Theresin, a Jewish ghetto north of Prague.
He died there because of a typhus epidemic in the last days of the World War
II.
Bedrich Jelinek then entered a Czech high
school. He actually had trouble getting through, due to three missing years of
formal education that was stripped from him, as from many others, by various
anti-Jew Nazi decrees. After 1948, when the Communists came to power following
the well-known February coup in Czechoslovakia, his mother sagaciously
decided to leave the country. One of the reasons was also that the
revolutionary organization of Communist Youth would not allow her son to even
take the high school graduation exam.
Thanks to her Swiss origins, they were easily allowed into the United
States and they settled in New York. Frederick Jelinek then started evening
engineering courses at the City College of New York, despite being interested
more in becoming a lawyer. However, as he also recalled in his acceptance
speech of the honorary doctorate at the Charles University in Prague in 2001,
he thought that his foreign accent would make him a less successful lawyer and
that also it took much longer to get the degree (and consequently to earn money
for living) than in engineering. Today, we can only imagine how a good lawyer
he would have been, if he were equally successful at the bar as he has been in
his forced engineering career.
After two years at the City College, he has
received a stipend from the Committee for Free Europe. As a part of the deal,
he had to promise them to help rebuild Czechoslovakia once free again.
Frederick Jelinek then started regular classes at MIT, where he met Claude
Shannon and embarked on the study on theory of information, happy that the goal
of this branch of science is not to build physical systems. As we know now,
it was the beginnings of the information theory being applied to other branches
of science. However, it was not yet applied to linguistics, even though we can
trace some connections there, too: Frederick Jelinek, after graduation in 1956
and started his doctorate in the same field, was often talking to Roman
Jakobson, a Russian linguist with close ties to Czechoslovakia, who worked at
both Harvard and MIT. Jakobson also arranged for a stipend for Frederick
Jelinek's wife, Milena, to study at Noam Chomsky's department once she was
allowed out of Czechoslovakia in 1961 as a measure of friendship of the
Czechoslovak government to John F. Kennedy after he was elected U.S. president.
After he got his Ph.D. from MIT, Frederick Jelinek joined Cornell University as
a professor. He already wanted to start pursuing the connection between
linguistics and information theory there, but the professor who was supposed to
work on this topic with him there pulled out of the field.
The turning point came in 1972, ten years after
he joined Cornell: as part of his unpaid 3 months as a professor, he accepted a
position at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights in New York.
IBM was then starting to look into the speech recognition problem, and after
the sudden departure of the group manager, they offered the position to him.
Frederick Jelinek then stayed at this temporary position for two years, after
which he had to leave Cornell completely but he kept his IBM position. He was
the head of the Speech group for the next 19 years, the years that changed the
field of computational linguistics the most in its entire history.
The IBM speech group, first located in Yorktown
and then in Hawthorne, New York, consisted of almost no linguists: rather, the
researchers had been educated either in engineering, information theory, or in
physics. They were thus skeptical to the linguistic experts who were devising
speech recognition systems at that time. As Frederick Jelinek recalls, the key
to their success was probably their naive approach to this problem. They
threw all the then-current methods out and started from scratch, applying
information theory, statistical methods and machine learning to the speech
recognition problem and later to machine translation. After almost twenty years
since then, we now know the results of this naive approach - they have not
been surpassed yet. Moreover, all commercial large vocabulary speech
recognizers now on the market use these methods with only relatively minor
modifications.
In 1993 Frederick Jelinek joined Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore, Maryland, and became the director of the Center for
Language and Speech processing at the Whiting School of Engineering. While at
Johns Hopkins University, he was awarded many NSF, DARPA and other grants.
Among them, there was a series of grants that stands out: the grants for the
organization of the now famous (and often emulated) JHU Summer Workshop
(officially, the Workshop on Language Engineering for Students and
Professionals Integrating Research and Education). It is an 8-week
labor-intensive event, where carefully peer-selected projects are being worked
on by two to four teams of professors, researchers, graduate and undergraduate
students. It is hard to find a well-known researcher in the field of speech
recognition or computational linguistics who has not been there at least once
during her or his career.
After 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin
Wall and the political changes in Czechoslovakia (also known as the Velvet
Revolution), he started paying off his promise to his MIT stipend Committee: he
started to visit Czechoslovakia (then Czech Republic) often, and invited first
Czechs to his IBM team to work on both speech recognition and machine
translation. The author was the first one to do so, soon followed by several
others, who are now working at IBM or the academia both in the Czech Republic
and in the U.S. He also taught in Prague, both at the Charles University and at
the Technical University. He arranged for a gift to the Technical University in
Prague, and then helped to get his managers to agree to keep part of the Watson
speech recognition and development team in Prague, where they reside until
today. He also collaborated with Charles University later, inviting professors,
postdocs, and students in various capacities to his new place of work after he
had joined the Johns Hopkins University in 1993. In 2001, he spent his
sabbatical year in the Czech Republic, working and lecturing at the Institute
of Formal and Applied Linguistics, which is part of the Computer Science School
of Charles University in Prague. At that time, he also received his honorary
doctorate from Charles University. He was then coming often to visit
conferences, for example the Text, Speech and Dialog (TSD) conference
organized jointly by the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen and the Masaryk
University in Brno, of which he was the honorary chairman of the organizing
committee. He continued teaching intensive courses in speech recognition at
Charles University and elsewhere, and he was also sending his students to spend
some time in Prague under the NSF PIRE project he headed. Recently, he also
started intensive collaboration with the Technical University in Brno, also in
the Czech Republic.
We in Prague talked to him, regretfully only
very briefly, just before his return from the TSD conference back to Baltimore
this past September. No one knew at the moment that there are only three more
days left for him in this world. No one could imagine that we (or anybody else)
will never see him or talk to him again. I am afraid that I cannot fully
imagine it even today.
October 29,
2010
Jan Hajic
Institute
of Formal and Applied Linguistics
School of
Computer Science
Faculty of
Mathematics and Physics
Charles
University in Prague
Czech
Republic
The 48th Annual
Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (a.k.a. the ACL
2010 Conference) took place in Uppsala, Sweden, July 11-16, 2010, organized by
a team of local organizers lead by Joakim Nivre. It had the usual schedule -
tutorials on Sunday, July 11, the main conference from Monday to Wednesday, and
post-conference workshops on Thursday and Friday, July 15 and 16. To everyones
surprise, the number of participants was pretty high at 955 (as computed by
Priscilla Rasmussen, the ACL Office Manager, who oversaw the whole conference
as usual), given that 2010 is a very conference-rich year (with 5 major
Computational Linguistics conferences, the maximum there can ever be). This
figure trails only the one at Prague 2007, for a pure ACL event. Another
thing common with the 2007 event was the weather - a bit on the hot side mainly
in the first half of the week, which is quite unusual for Sweden (but probably
a blessing for the many pubs in Uppsala serving nicely cold beer... and for the
participants from the warmer places of the Earth, too).
The main conference, the programme of which has
been selected by Sandra Carberry and Steven Clark, has been a big success. The
programme chairs broadened the scope of the conference substantially. The
resulting programme has then been universally praised. The issue of the printed
paper length (long and short) has been separated from the mode of presentation
(with three possibilities - long talks, short talks and posters). The main
conference also included the student research workshop, truly organized by
graduate students (Seniz Demir, Jan Raab and Nils Reiter, with the help of the
faculty advisor, Tomek Strzalkowski) and the usual demos (Sandra Kuebler) and
exhibits.
There were five tutorials, selected by Lluis
Marquez and Haifeng Wang, with a total of 350 participants. The most successful
tutorial was given by Hal Daume III From Structured Prediction to Inverse
Reinforcement Learning (with almost 100 participants). Other tutorials covered
linguistic annotation, semantic parsing, tree-based translation and discourse.
The selection of workshops and their scheduling
has not been an easy task for Pushpak Bhattacharyia and David Weir either:
there were, in the end, 14 post-conference workshops - three of them two-day
events with 100+ participants (CoNLL-2010, WMT'10/MetricsMATR and
SemEval-2010), one one-and-a-half-day event (LAW IV), and ten one-day
workshops, covering all emerging and quickly developing subareas of
Computational Linguistics, from BioNLP through new theoretical and
application areas to dialogue systems.
Mentoring for students with difficulties in the
English language has been offered as usual (an effort lead by Bjorn Gamback and
Diana McCarthy).
The publication team (Jing-Shin Chang and
Philipp Koehn) has used new features in the START conference system, which
helped to produce most of the proceedings automatically. However, this was also
the first year when proceedings were not printed on paper at all. Moreover, the
usual CDs have been replaced by credit-card sized USB sticks (with the nice ACL
2010 logo on them). (If you have been there or do have one of those, keep them
as a valuable historical artefact: there are plans to make the proceedings
available only online next year, making these proceedings on CDs and USB sticks
obsolete. The ACL 2010 one can thus easily prove to be the only
ACL-Proceeding-on-a-USB-stick ever made!)
Talking about publications - the Conference
Handbook (work of the publicity team, Beata Megyesi and Koenraad de Smedt) and
the conference website (handled by the local support team from Akademikonferens)
should be mentioned, since it provided all the necessary information in a
concise and informative manner, and has kept a common graphical design
throughout, a nice touch.
Sponsors, as usual, have made the life of all
the participants cheaper. This year, thanks to a worldwide team of sponsorship
chairs, the list of sponsors is quite impressive (especially locally), despite
the financially challenging times. Riksbanken Jubileumsfond, Vetenskapsradet,
Uppsala Universitet, the Swedish GSLT, textkernel, CELI, esTeam, Google, Voice
Provider, Uppsala Kommun (City of Uppsala), Yahoo!Labs, Xerox RCE, and Acapela
Group all helped to keep the fees low and banquet cost reasonable.
SDL/LanguageWeaver had sponsored the conference bags, and the Swedish SICS had
sponsored local students. The NSF (USA) and ACL funds made it possible to award
travel grants (an effort coordinated by Marketa Lopatkova) for student
participants.
The ACLs Lifetime Achievement Award went to
William A. (Bill) Woods, former President of ACL (1974), the father of
Augmented Transition Networks in the 1970s and an acclaimed industrial
researcher in the area of NLP and speech. Bill was present and gave a very nice
talk in a dedicated time slot at the main conference.
There were three Best Paper awards. The Best
long paper award went to Matthew Gerber and Joyce Chai for Beyond NomBank: A
Study of Implicit Arguments for Nominal Predicates; the Best short paper award went to Michael
Lamar, Yariv Maron, Mark Johnson and Elie Bienenstock for SVD and Clustering
for Unsupervised POS Tagging. The Best student paper Award, sponsored by IBM, was given to David
Elson, Nicholas Dames and Kathleen McKeown for their paper titled Extracting
Social Networks from Literary Fiction.
All in all, the Uppsala ACL 2010 conference has
been a very successful one, and it will be hard to beat by subsequent ACL
events.
Jan Hajič
General Chair of ACL 2010
The 7th edition
of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference was held in Valletta
(Malta) on May 17-23, 2010. Organized by ELRA since 1998 with an
increasing success, the LREC conference has become the major event on Language
Resources and Evaluation for Human Language Technologies. The Maltese edition
of LREC, which received the High Patronage of the President of Malta and the
support from the President of the European Council, had Mike Rosner as local
organiser and brought together 1246 registered participants from 61 countries
in the remarkable Mediterranean Conference Centre. LREC thus continues to be
– as many say – the conference where you have to be and where you
meet everyone.
This time again, the submission figures have improved
compared to the previous edition (LREC 2008): 930 submissions to the Main
conference were received and reviewed, out of which 646 papers were accepted.
One third of the accepted papers were presented during the oral sessions. The
poster sessions, held in parallel with Orals in the impressive Sacra
Infermeria, were as usual a remarkable feature of the Conference. Furthermore,
LREC welcomed two keynote speeches and one invited talk given respectively by
Ralf Steinberger (European Commission,
Joint Research Centre, Italy), Jaime Carbonell (Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon
University, USA) and Ray Fabri (Institute
of Linguistics, University of Malta). LREC has been again the event where
we gathered a broad representation of the current trends of the field, with its
many features and for many languages.
As in the previous editions, the 2 days
preceding and following the conference were dedicated to tutorials and
workshops: in Malta, 9 tutorials and 22 workshops have been organised. Research
communities are now holding their workshop at LREC on a regular basis and some
workshops have become very successful over the years; we can think of the Sign
Languages event that has gathered over 100 participants at LREC 2010.
This year, new features have been introduced to
LREC:
The LRE-Map, a new mechanism intended to
monitor the use and creation of language resources by collecting information on
both existing and newly-created resources during the submission process. Nearly
2000 language resource forms have been filled in. Apart from providing a
portrait of the resources behind the community, of their uses and usability,
the LRE Map intends to be a measuring instrument for monitoring the field of
language resources. The feature has been so successful that it has been
implemented also at COLING 2010 and EMNLP 2010, while other major conferences
are in the pipeline, in addition to the LRE Journal.
The EC Village, an initiative supported by the European
Commission to encourage EC-sponsored
projects to gain visibility by showing their objectives,
progress and activities, either through demos, or through brochures or posters
for projects still at the early stages. 15 projects took part in this Village.
The Special sessions, a new experiment of oral sessions
on hot topics, with less papers to leave room for more exchange and
discussions between the authors, chairpersons and audience.
Finally, the Antonio Zampolli Prize, created in
2004 in memory of Professor Zampolli to acknowledge outstanding contributions
to the advancement of Language Resources and Evaluation within Human Language
Technologies, has been awarded to Mark Liberman (University of Pennsylvania,
USA) who gave the talk The Future of Computational Linguistics: or, What
Would Antonio Zampolli Do?
Nicoletta
Calzolari, Conference Chair, ILC-CNR, Pisa, Italy
Khalid
Choukri, ELRA, Paris, France
Hlne Mazo, ELDA, Paris,
France
Stelios
Piperidis, ELRA President and ILSP, Athens, Greece
Over the last decade CICLing has grown into a
major and influencing international conference[1].
CICLing 2010 was the first CICLing
event held in Europe, in the beautiful city of Iaşi, Romania. It received
a record high number of submissions: 271 papers by 565 authors from 47
countries; the previous record was 232 submissions to the 2008 event held in
Haifa, Israel—also very near to Europe, which suggests that Europe is a
very good opportunity for an international conference. As all CICLing events
since 2002, it was officially endorsed by the ACL.
Of the 271 submissions received, 61 (23%
acceptance rate) were accepted for oral presentation and publication in a
volume of the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science series, which recently re-appeared
on the ISI Science Citation Index Expanded. Additionally, three journals
published papers presented as posters; in particular, 18 selected papers were
published in the newly founded International
Journal of Computational Linguistics and Applications (IJCLA). In total, 117 papers were
presented at the conference—which made up an impressive major event open
for both established experts and young researchers or students.
With the 2010 event, CICLing paid tribute of
admiration to Romania, the nation that gave the world probably the greatest
number of wonderful computational linguists per capita—many of whom have
been CICLing Program Committee members, keynote speakers, or authors:
D. Cristea, R. Girju, D. Inkpen, D. Marcu, R. Mihalcea
(one of the greatest friends of CICLing!), V. Năstase,
C. Orăsan, M. Paşca, V. Rus, to name just a few of
CICLingers (a nice term coined by Corina Forăscu to refer to so friendly
CICLing team). At the opening ceremony, Dan Cristea publicly questioned the
thesis about great contribution of Romanians to CL and asked me for hard
data—which I with great pleasure presented, using statistics of the
CICLing PC, past keynote speakers and past authors.
CICLing is an unusual conference in a number of
aspects. At CICLing, each keynote speaker contributes a full paper (not just an
abstract) to the proceedings, which greatly adds value both to the book and to
the keynote talk itself: the attendees can take better advantage of the talk by
reading the written paper afterwards. What is more, in addition to the formal
talk each keynote speaker organizes a separate special event: something really different,
unusual, interactive, involving, funny, relaxing—in short, something that
is not normally done at a serious conference. The format and contents of such
an event, of course, vary greatly with every speaker. In 2010, we were honoured
by excellent keynote talks and special events by James Pustejovsky and Shuly
Wintner, who was the winner of the ballot for a future keynote speaker among
the attendees of CICLing 2008.
CICLing devotes half of its time to
socializing: this is what conferences are for, in contrast to books and
journals. Each event features three full-day tours to the best places the
country can offer, preferably unique of its kind in the world. This gives not
only an excellent tourist opportunity but also a lot of time to make friends
and discuss things with famous people who you hardly have an opportunity to
even greet in the crowd at a large normal conference. In Romania, we visited
natural attractions, saw very interesting ancient Orthodox painted monasteries
and felt the atmosphere of legend and mystery in medieval fortresses and
castles (Draculas castle at midnight!).
As usually, the poster session was
combined with a welcome party, which replaced a banquet (we usually do not
spend time and money on a separate banquet) and lasted three hours—enough
time to see all 56 posters! For the first time, the poster session was preceded
by the oral poster session featuring a short 2-minute oral presentation of
each poster; the attendees judged that this was a very good idea. Most of the
poster papers were made available for downloading before the conference. A
poster presentation has certain advantages over an oral presentation, and one
of them is that most of the poster papers are openly accessible from the
CICLing website.
Also for the first time, the entire event was
live broadcasted over Internet. At least Ted Pedersen reported that he watched
the entire conference from Duluth, USA—and hopefully we had many more
virtual attendees. While usually only keynote talks and special events used to
be recorded, in 2010 the local organizers recorded the entire conference; the
recording shall be permanently available for downloading from the CICLing website.
CICLing traditionally gives out several awards.
The best paper award is judged by the award committee. It is always too hard to
select the very best papers. In 2010, both first place best paper award and
best presentation award (assigned by a ballot among all attendees) went to
G. Tsatsaronis, I. Varlamis, and K. Nrvg for the paper An
experimental study on unsupervised graph-based word sense disambiguation; second place best paper award, to
P. Annesi and R. Basili, Cross-lingual alignment of FrameNet
annotations through hidden Markov models; third place, to L. Macken and
W. Daelemans, A chunk-driven bootstrapping approach to extracting
translation patterns;
and a special best student paper award went to J. De Belder and M.-F. Moens for
the paper Integer linear programming for Dutch sentence compression. The authors of the best papers
were given a longer time slot for presentation. Finally, best poster award
(also assigned by a ballot among all attendees) went to M. Guerrero Nieto, M.
J. Garca Rodrguez, A. Urrutia Zambrana, M. . Bernab Poveda and W. Siabato
for the poster Incorporating TimeML into a GIS.
As part of the celebration of Romania, the
first PROMISE workshop (Processing Romanian in Multilingual, Interoperational
and Scalable Environments) was held in conjunction with CICLing. It generously shared with
CICLing a keynote talk presented by Dan Cristea and featured talks by Diana
Inkpen, Daniel Marcu, Rada Mihalcea, and Constantin Orăsan, presented via
videoconference, as well as eleven talks presented locally.
Incidentally (or is it?), during the conference
in another hall of the same building a solemn ceremony was held of conferring
the title of Honorary Professor of the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of
Iaşi, our hosting university, upon another big friend of CICLing and of
Romania, Nancy Ide. Right after the ceremony, the fresh Honorary Professor
addressed warm words to the attendees of the conference. She also presented a
talk at the PROMISE event.
The conference was blessed with a perfect, very
responsible and professional local organizing committee led by Corina
Forăscu, who devoted a huge amount of her time and effort to the
conference: the conference would not have been possible without her great
enthusiasm, professionalism and hard work throughout many days and many nights.
I would like to greatly thank Lenuţa Alboaie, Sabin Buraga and all student
volunteers involved in the conference. We also had excellent support from the
A. I. Cuza University of Iaşi, especially from Dan Cristea, and Romanian
Academy, especially from Dan Tufiş.
Weve said farewell to CICLing 2010 and to
hospitable Iaşi, and we welcome all CICLingers, past and future, to Tokyo,
Japan, for the 12th CICLing event, CICLing 2011, to be held on February
20–26. As usually, it is officially endorsed by the ACL and the
proceedings shall appear in the ISI-indexed Springer LNCS series. We are eager
to listen to the keynote talks and special events by Chris Manning, Diana McCarthy, Jun'ichi
Tsujii, and Hans
Uszkoreit. With CICLing 2011 we shall introduce a new verifiability
policy, please see the website. And of course we shall have three full-day
trips to the most fascinating places in Japan. If you read this too close to
the deadline (or after it), let us know and we shall do our best to consider
all late submissions.
The European Summer Schools in Logic, Language and
Information (ESSLLI) have been organized every year since 1989 by the
Association for Logic, Language and Information (FoLLI) in different sites
around Europe. The ESSLLI series has established itself as one of the major
annual international academic events in Europe, where dozens of worldwide
leading academics present courses, organize workshops, and exchange ideas on a
wide variety of established and new topics in the areas of Logic, Language, and
Computation to several hundreds of highly motivated master and doctoral
students and young researchers not only from Europe, but also from all other
continents. One of the most distinct and valuable feature of the ESSLLI schools
is their highly interdisciplinary nature, making them a unique meeting point of
logicians, linguists, computer scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians.
The 22nd
European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI 2010)
took place in Copenhagen, Denmark, during August 9-20, 2010. During these two
weeks over 450 participants were offered a rich academic program of their
choice from 47 foundational, introductory and advanced courses and 5 workshops
covering a wide variety of topics at the interface of the three main interdisciplinary
areas of ESSLLI: Language and Computation, Language and Logic, and Logic and
Computation. ESSLLI 2010 was hosted by the Faculty of Humanities of the
University of Copenhagen, and organized by a devoted and efficient committee,
chaired by Vincent Hendricks, Professor of Formal Philosophy at the University
of Copenhagen. The course and workshop programme was selected and composed by
the ESSLLI 2010 programme committee, chaired by Valentin Goranko (Technical
University of Denmark) from about 120 high-quality proposals for courses and
workshops, offered by nearly two hundred distinguished academics.
The operating budget of ESSLLI 2010 was based
mainly on the participants registration fees, with additional funding from
several academic institutions, local and international organizations and
business. Traditionally, all teaching and organizing work at the summer school
was done on a voluntary basis. Lecturers and workshop organizers were not paid
for their contribution, but were only reimbursed for part of their travel and
accommodation cost. This financial policy made it possible to keep the
participation at the school affordable for graduate students. Nevertheless,
teaching a course at ESSLLI has always been a widely acknowledged testimony of
a lecturers high academic standing and recognition, and ESSLLI 2010 enjoyed a
traditionally high and well-appreciated academic standard. Besides the regular courses,
traditional highlights of ESSLLI 2010 were the 4 evening lectures offered to
all participants by distinguished academics: Dov Gabbay (Kings College London,
University of Luxembourg, and Bar Ilan University, Israel), Shalom Lappin
(Kings College London), Neil Jones (University of Copenhagen) and Johan van
Benthem (University of Amsterdam and Stanford University).
Another traditional feature of ESSLLI 2010 was
the daily student session, organized by a student programme committee, chaired
by Marija Slavkovik (University of Luxembourg). This session enabled master and
doctoral students to present their work to a keen and competent audience of
fellow students and senior researchers.
The ESSLLI summer schools include an attractive
social programme, too. Besides the traditional ESSLLI party, food and drinks
receptions, and soccer match between students and lecturers teams, ESSLLI 2010
also offered a boat tour of the canals of Copenhagen.
In conclusion, ESSLLI 2010 was a very
successful and memorable academic and cultural event, and since its closing day
many of the participants began looking forward to the next edition of the
ESSLLI series: ESSLLI 2011 in
Ljubljana, Slovenia, during August 1-12, 2011. Chair of the Program Committee
of ESSLLI 2011 is Makoto Kanazawa (National Institute of Informatics, Japan),
and Chair of the Organizing Committee is Darja Fišer (The University of
Ljubljana, Slovenia).
Valentin Goranko
Chair of the Programme Committee of ESSLLI 2010
The
calendar can be found here.
[1] As can be observed, for example, by its h-index = 23 and
almost four thousand citations according to Harzings Publish or Perish
program—which is slightly higher than the figures for RANLP, TSD or NLDB,
while still significantly lower than ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, COLING or EACL.