Call for Papers for NAACL HLT 2009


May 31 - June 5, 2009, Boulder, Colorado


Deadline for full paper submission - Monday, December 1, 2008, 11:59pm, PST
Deadline for short paper submission - Monday, February 9, 2009


NAACL HLT 2009 combines the Annual Meeting of the North American Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) with the Human Language Technology Conference (HLT) of NAACL. The conference covers a broad spectrum of disciplines working towards enabling intelligent systems to interact with humans using natural language, and towards enhancing human-human communication through services such as speech recognition, automatic translation, information retrieval, text summarization, and information extraction. NAACL HLT 2009 will feature full papers, short papers, demonstrations, and a doctoral consortium, as well as pre- and post-conference tutorials and workshops.


The conference invites the submission of papers on substantial, original, and unpublished research in disciplines that could impact human language processing systems. Long papers describe complete work; short papers can describe a small, focused contribution, a work in progress, a negative result, an opinion piece or an interesting application note. A separate review form for short papers will be introduced this year.


NAACL HLT 2009 aims to hold two special sessions, Large Scale Language Processing and Speech Indexing and Retrieval. Topics include, but are not limited to, the following areas, and are understood to be applied to speech and/or text: - Large scale language processing - Speech indexing and retrieval - Information retrieval (including monolingual and CLIR)

  • Information extraction
  • Speech-centered applications (e.g., human-computer, human-robot interaction, education and learning systems, assistive technologies, digital entertainment)
  • Machine translation
  • Summarization
  • Question answering
  • Topic classification and information filtering
  • Non-topical classification (e.g., sentiment/attribution/genre analysis)
  • Topic clustering
  • Text and speech mining
  • Statistical and machine learning techniques for language processing
  • Spoken term detection and spoken document indexing
  • Language generation
  • Speech synthesis
  • Speech understanding
  • Speech analysis and recognition
  • Multilingual processing
  • Phonology
  • Morphology (including word segmentation)
  • Part of speech tagging
  • Syntax and parsing (e.g., grammar induction, formal grammar, algorithms)
  • Word sense disambiguation
  • Lexical semantics
  • Formal semantics and logic
  • Textual entailment and paraphrasing
  • Discourse and pragmatics
  • Dialog systems
  • Knowledge acquisition and representation
  • Evaluation (e.g., intrinsic, extrinsic, user studies)
  • Development of language resources (e.g., lexicons, ontologies, annotated corpora)
  • Rich transcription (automatic annotation of information structure and sources in speech)
  • Multimodal representations and processing, including speech and gesture

Important Dates:

  • Dec 1, 2008 Full paper submissions due
  • Jan 19, 2009 Full paper notification of acceptance
  • Feb 9, 2009 Short paper submissions due
  • Mar 27, 2009 Short Paper notification of acceptance
  • Mar 31, 2009 Camera-ready full papers due
  • Apr 6, 2009 Camera-ready short papers due
  • May 31 -June 5, 2009 NAACL HLT 2009 Conference

Submission information:

Submission will be electronic and should be submitted using the following websites:


Full papers: Submissions must describe original, completed, unpublished work. Each submission will be judged chiefly on the strength of the argument it provides in support of its contribution, through e.g., experimental evaluation, theoretical analysis, or critical engagement with HLT. Each submission will be reviewed by at least three program committee members.


Full papers may be presented either as a poster or an oral presentation. Some research is best suited to a traditional oral presentation, whereas other research would benefit from the more interactive presentation a poster allows. Paper presenters can express a preference to deliver their paper as a poster or an oral presentation; the program and area chairs will attempt to fulfill as many of these preferences as possible, organizational factors permitting. The proceedings will not distinguish long papers by presentation format.


Short papers: In keeping with the HLT tradition, NAACL HLT 2009 solicits short papers as well as long papers. Short papers are intended to be different from long papers in character, and not compressed versions of long papers. Papers qualifying as short papers can be of one of five types:

  • a small, focused contribution
  • a work in progress
  • a negative result
  • an opinion piece
  • an interesting application note

Short papers may be presented either as a poster or an oral presentation, and will be given four pages in the proceedings, including references. Short papers will be distinguished from full papers in the proceedings. Each short paper submission will be reviewed by at least two program committee members. A separate review form for short papers will be used, which will shortly be available at the conference website. A sample short paper review form can be found here.


Format:

Full paper submissions should follow the two-column format of NAACL HLT 2009 proceedings, and be at most eight (8) pages in length. To encourage thorough citation of related work, the references section does not count against the 8 page limit: up to one additional page is allowed for the references section of a submitted paper. Short paper submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings, and should not exceed four (4) pages, including references. As reviewing will be blind, the paper should not include the authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...", should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...". Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review. All submissions must be electronic in PDF. Please see the conference website for detailed typesetting specifications. Authors are strongly encouraged to use the LaTeX or Microsoft Word style files available at http://clear.colorado.edu/NAACLHLT2009/stylefiles.html.


Multiple-submission policy: Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must provide this information at the time of the NAACL HLT 2009 submission deadline, or at the time of the later submission if this was not anticipated at the time of the NAACL HLT 2009 deadline. Short papers for which extended versions are submitted or published elsewhere before the NAACL HLT 2009 final manuscripts are due are considered duplicate submissions. If NAACL HLT 2009 accepts a paper, authors must notify the program chairs by January 25, 2009 (full papers) or April 2, 2009 (short papers), indicating which meeting they choose for presentation of their work. NAACL HLT 2009 cannot accept for publication or presentation work that will be (or has been) published elsewhere.


General Conference Chair:

Mari Ostendorf, University of Washington


Program Co-Chairs:

Michael Collins, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Shri Narayanan, University of Southern California

Douglas W. Oard, University of Maryland

Lucy Vanderwende, Microsoft Research


Area Chairs:

Michiel Bacchiani, Google

Regina Barzilay, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Ken Church, Microsoft Research

Charles Clarke, University of Waterloo

Eric Fosler-Lussier, Ohio State University

Sharon Goldwater, University of Edinburgh

Julia Hirschberg, Columbia University

Jimmy Huang, York University

Mark Johnson, Brown University

Philipp Koehn, University of Edinburgh

Roland Kuhn, National Research Council of Canada, IIT

Gina Levow, University of Chicago

Dekang Lin, Google

Ryan McDonald, Google

Prem Natarajan, BBN Technologies

Patrick Pantel, Yahoo! Labs

Kristina Toutanova, Microsoft Research

Geoff Zweig, Microsoft Research


Local Arrangements:

James Martin, University of Colorado at Boulder

Martha Palmer, University of Colorado at Boulder