Professional Activities and Organizations

Professional affiliations:

·       Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), member since 1987.

·       Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA), member since 1991.

·       Association for Digital Government in North America (DGSNA), member since 2006.

·       American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), member since 1984.

·       International Pragmatics Association (IPrA), member 1986–2001.

·       Cognitive Science Society (CogSci), member 1987–2003.

·       International Systemic Functional Linguistics Association (ISFLA), member 1987–1994.

·       Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), member 1991–1993.

Service in professional organizations:

·       President (2008–2010) and President-Elect (2006–08), Digital Government Society of North America (DGSNA)

·       President (2001–03), President-Elect (1999–01), and Treasurer (2003–), International Association of Machine Translation (IAMT); member of Council (1996–99).

·       Past President (2002), President (2001), Vice President (2000), Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL); member of Executive Committee, 1994–1997.

·       President (1996–2000), Vice President (1994–96), and Wise Counselor (2002–05), Association of Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA).

·       Member of Executive Committee (2000), North American Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics (NAACL). One of three people tasked with establishing this chapter for the ACL. 

·       Chair of committee (2005–06) tasked with creating the constitutions to form the North American Digital Government Society and International Digital Electronic Government Society (IDEGS). 

·       Chair of committee (2002–03) tasked with establishing HLT-NAACL joint conference series, and first coverall conference chair.  Appointed by joint agreement of US funding agencies (DARPA, NSF, ARDA) and ACL. 

·       Member of Executive Committee, SIGMEDIA, 1992–93.

Relationships with small companies:

·       WiseWindow, 2007–.  Measures relevant consumer insights about corporation products.  Technical Advisor.

·       Boorah, 2006–.  Local search company that extracts sentiment from user reviews.  Technical Advisor.

·       Applied Semantics (acquired by Google in 2003), 2001–2003.  Web and local search company.  On Board of Advisors.

·       MaximOne, 2001–2003.  Semantics-based text search and summarization.  Technical Advisor.

·       TransClick, 2000–2004.  Machine translation and translator support.  Technical Advisor.

·       Infosqueeze, 2000–2005.  Text summarization.  Co-founder.

·       Inkpot, 1999–2002.  Personalized production of documents.  Co-founder.

Journal and book series editorial boards:

·       Book series editorial board:  Natural Language Processing (click here), John Benjamins Publishers, 1999–.

·       Journal editorial board:  Journal of Information Technology & Politics (JITP), 2006–.

·       Journal editorial board:  Language Resources and Evaluation (LRE), 2005–.

·       Journal editorial board:  Machine Translation, (click here) 1999–.

·       Journal editorial board:  ACM Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing (TALIP), 2003–2007. 

·       Journal editorial board:  Journal of the Society of Natural Language Processing of Japan, 1997–99.

·       Journal editorial board:  Computational Linguistics (click here), 1991–93.

·       Journal editorial board (Technical Area on the Semantics of Web Information):  Electronic Transactions of Artificial Intelligence (ETAI), 2000–01. 

·       Co-editor, Special Issue on Digital Government. International Journal of E-Government Research (click here).  2005.

·       Co-editor, Special Issue on Text Summarization. Computational Linguistics. 2002. 

·       Co-editor. Special Issue on Multi-lingual Information Management.  Computers and the Humanities 35(4), November 2001.

·       Guest co-editor, special issue of Machine Translation. October 1998.

Standing committees:

·       International Review Board:  Continuous Access To Cultural Heritage program (CATCH). Dutch Science Foundation (NWO), 2004–. 

·       Advisory Committee:  NIST Text Analysis Conference (TAC) for Advancement and Evaluation of NLP (including DUC and RTE). 2007–08.

·       International Review Board: Interactieve Multimodale Informatie Extractie (IMIX). Dutch Science Foundation (NWO), 2005. 

·       International Review Board:  Multi-lingual Intelligence Science and Technology program (W-MIST). University of Posts and Telecommunication.  Beijing, China, 2004–. 

·       Member of US Expert Board:  ISO TC37 SC4 (ISO committee developing standards for language resource management), 2003–.

·       Member of Workshop Program Committee:  ARDA’s Northeastern Region Research Center (NRRC), 2001–2002.

·       Member:  DARPA Written Language Coordinating Committee (1992–94).

·       Member:  IFIP Committee on Natural Language (1990–94). 

Ad hoc study panels:

·       Session chair (invited), special joint meeting of funders and national research community representatives called Workshop on Future of Semantic Text Annotation Research. College Park, MD. April 2005. 

·       Chair of joint NSF-EU researcher meeting to plan collaboration program between US and EU in Digital Government / eGovernment research.  Delft, The Netherlands. November 2004.

·       Participant and session chair in NSF meeting to outline Digital Government collaboration program between US and Organization of American States (OAS).  Washington, DC. November 2004.

·       Participant and member of editorial reporting team, Workshop on Exploring International Collaborations for Research on eGovernment and Digital Government.  Commissioned by the EU and National Science Foundation, at dg.o 2004 conference, Seattle, WA. May 2004.

·       Member, Expert Meeting on the Building of an International Research Institute on e-Science Studies (IRISS).  Convened by the Royal Dutch Academy of Science (KNAW). Amsterdam, The Netherlands. May 2003.

·       Member and session leader, Workshop on Developing a Basic Research Program on e-Rulemaking, for Digital Government.  Commissioned by National Science Foundation. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. January 2003.

·       Member and session leader, Workshop on Developing a Basic Research Program on Policy and Governance, for Digital Government.  Commissioned by National Science Foundation.  Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. May 2002.

·       Session co-leader, Workshop on Responding to the Unexpected.  Commissioned by National Science Foundation.  New York, NY. February 2002. 

·       Co-editor of report on Multilingual Information Management (MLIM), commissioned by the National Science Foundation (Washington, DC). Co-chair of information collection workshops held in Granada, Spain (May 1998) and Montreal, Canada (August 1998). To view the report, click here.

·       Member of working group on Multilingual Information Retrieval, study panel for NSF and DARPA. Meetings held at Columbia University, New York, and ETH, Zürich, in November 1997 and March 1998. Report published in 1998.

·       Member of NSF Workshop on R&D Opportunities in Federal Information Services, section on Information Integration. Study published in 1997.

·       Member of AAAI-NSF Workshop on National Information Infrastructure. Workshop held at AAAI-94, Seattle, WA, August 1994.

·       Contributor to Survey of the State of the Art in Human Language Technology. Responsible for overview section on Natural Language Generation. Report commissioned jointly by the National Science Foundation (Washington, DC) and the European Commission's LRE directorate (Brussels, Belgium) in January 1994. Published in 1996; click here.

·       Member of stugy group on Natural Language Research in the U.S., chaired by Prof. Victor Zue, MIT. Study commissioned by ISAT and presented in August 1991.

·       Member of study group on Multimedia Communication Research in the U.S., chaired by Dr. William Swartout, USC Information Sciences Institute. Study commissioned by ISAT and presented in August 1990.

Selected conference and large event organizing committees:

·       Convenor and liaison to DGSNA Board.  Ninth Conference on Digital Government (dg.o 2008).  Montreal, Canada, May 2008.

·       Program Committee Honorary Chair, IEEE International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Engineering (IEEE NLP-KE).  Beijing, China. 2007.

·       Member of Senior Program Committee (co-responsible for Natural Language track), AAAI conference, July 2007.

·       Member of Advisory Committee, 5th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON 2007). IIIT Hyderabad, India. January 2007.

·       Member of Scientific Committee, Fifth Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006).  Genoa, Italy. May 2006.

·       Member of Advisory Board, International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON-05). Hyderabad, India. December 2005.

·       Member of Program Committee, Joint Conference of Human Language Technologies and Empirical Methods in NLP (HLT-EMNLP 2005). Vancouver, Canada. October 2005.