Abstract

I am honored that the North American Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics (NAACL) has given me the opportunity, as General Conference Chair, to continue the NAACL HLT tradition of covering topics from all areas of Human Language Technology, which makes it possible for researchers to discuss algorithms and applications that cut across the fields of natural language processing (NLP), speech processing, and information retrieval (IR).
I have been very fortunate to work with a terrific group of Technical Program Co-Chairs: Michael Collins (NLP), Shri Narayanan (speech), Douglas W. Oard (IR), and Lucy Vanderwende (NLP). This year the technical program emphasizes the breadth and interdisciplinary nature of human language processing research. The plenary talks will stretch our thinking about how language is used by considering the application of language to vision in one case, and language as it relates to food in another. There are two special sessions with themes that cut across multiple sub-areas of HLT: Large Scale Language Processing and Speech Information Retrieval. We also recognize the increasing importance of industry in our field with a lunchtime panel discussion on the Next Big Applications in Industry, with thanks to Bill Dolan for organizing and moderating the discussion. Finally, we have a breadth of excellent technical papers in lecture and poster sessions, thanks to the efforts of our Senior Program Committee members, the many reviewers on the Program Committee who helped us keep to our schedule, and the Paper Awards Committee. Together they have done a great job in putting together an …

Date

2009

Authors

Mari Ostendorf, Michael Collins, Shrikanth Narayanan, Douglas W Oard, Lucy Vanderwende

Conference

Proceedings of Human Language Technologies: The 2009 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics