================================================= Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing www.afnlp.org Newsletter No. 2 15 July 2008 TABLE OF CONTENT: 1. Message from the Editor 2. New Appointments 3. IJCNLP Update 4. Meetings 5. Job and Scholarship 6. Upcoming Events ================================================= 1. Message from the Editor ¨C Haizhou Li This is the 2nd issue of AFNLP Newsletter. I hope that you find the information is useful. The AFNLP newsletter programme received overwhelming response. We have taken the following actions in response to the feedbacks. - The Newletter is now made available at AFNLP official website; - To announce the following information, please send to Dr Minghui DONG, Communications and Liaison Committee (CLC), at mhdong@i2r.a-star.edu.sg. a) Book, Database, Software Releases b) Journal, Workshop, and Conference announcements c) Job and scholarship openings d) Activities from AFNLP member organizations - The Newsletter is now disseminated to all IJCNLP participants and the affiliates of AFNLP member organizations. To unsubscribe from this maillist, please reply to newsletter@afnlp.org with email subject "Unsubscribing AFNLP Newsletter"; 2. New Appointments - Prof. Mark Steedman was appointed as the ACL Liaison Member to AFNLP to join the AFNLP Executive Committee (2008) - Prof. Kam-Fai Wong was appointed as the AFNLP Liaison Member to ACL to join the ACL Board (2008) 3. IJCNLP Update (ACL-IJCNLP 2009) - Organization Committee was appointed in July 2008 1) General Conference Chair Su, Keh-Yih (Behavior Design Corp., Taiwan) 2) Program Chairs Su, Jian (Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore) Wiebe, Janyce (University of Pittsburgh, USA) 3) Local Organizing Chair Li, Haizhou (Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore) 4) Demo Chairs Lee, Gary Geunbae (POSTECH, Korea) Schulte im Walde, Sabine (University of Stuttgart, Germany) 5) Exhibits Chairs Baldwin, Timothy (University of Melbourne, Australia) Koehn, Philipp (University of Edinburgh, UK) 6) Mentoring Service Chairs Ng, Hwee Tou (National University of Singapore, Singapore) Reeder, Florence (Mitre, USA; freedermitre.org) 7) Publication Chairs Barzilay, Regina (MIT, USA) Chang, Jing-Shin (National Chi Nan University, Taiwan) 8) Publicity Chairs Kan, Min-Yen (National University of Singapore, Singapore) Way, Andy (Dublin City University, Ireland) 9) Sponsorship Chairs Isahara, Hitoshi (NICT, Japan) Lua, Kim-Teng (COLIPS, Singapore) 10) Student Chairs Dimalen, Davis (Academica Sinica, Taiwan) Finkel, Jenny Rose (Standford University, USA) Thomson, Blaise (Cambridge University, UK) 11) Student Workshop Faculty Advisors Ngai, Grace (Polytechnic University, Hong Kong) Roark, Brian (Oregon Health & Science University, USA) 12) Tutorial Chairs McCarthy, Diana (University of Sussex, UK) Zong, Chengqing (Chinese Academy of Sciences, China) 13) Workshop Chairs Lin, Jimmy (University of Maryland, USA) Matsumoto, Yuji (NAIST, Japan) 14) Webmaster Dong, Minghui (Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore) 15) Registration Priscilla Rasmussen (ACL) - Venue Suntec Convention Centre, Singapore - Date 2 August 2009: Tutorials 3-5 August 2009: ACL-IJCNLP 2009 6-7 August 2009: Workshops & EMNLP 2009 4 Meetings - 5. Job and Scholarship 1) National University of Singapore, Singapore (I) ================================================== Post doctoral research positions available *NB* If you are coming to SIGIR in Singapore, you may request an on-site interview for this position; please contact Min using the below contact information. The Web, IR / NLP Group (WING) at the National University of Singapore (NUS) has three vacancy positions for outstanding postdoctorate fellows (2-3 years) in the fields of Web, Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing. The position is part of a multiyear, multigroup project on media search. The successful applicant will be assigned to do research in one of three open areas: * Presentation slide knowledge mining * Scholarly document text mining * Terminology extraction from semi-structured and web documents The applicant must have a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and should have a set of published works in related web, information retrieval (IR) and/or natural language processing (NLP) conferences. The ideal applicant will also have strong computational modeling and/or algorithmic skills. Knowledge and experience in additional areas such as statistical data analysis, data mining, signal processing, machine learning and pattern recognition, and other topics in artificial intelligence are desirable. Conditions for applicants: * Doctoral thesis less than one year old (Oct 2007) or being defended before end of 2008. * No nationality requirement. Underrepresented minorities are encouraged to apply. Applications should include a cover letter stating your motivation, a curriculum vitae, and at least two referee letters in English. Your references will be contacted if your application passes an initial screening. All applications should be sent to Min-Yen KAN , with the subject line "WING Postdoc Application". Screening of applications will begin immediately and continue until the position is filled. An initial appointment for a one year term is anticipated with the possibility of reappointment. Salary will be commensurate with qualifications and experience. Starting salary for the positions will be around 60,000 SGD per annum. Why Singapore? Why NUS? Why WING? * Extend your scholarly network to Asia, easiest entry point to Asia (centrally located in SE Asia and all locals speak English as a first language) * Work with one of the premier research universities in Asia, in an environment where education and research are well-endowed * Explore our group and see for yourself: Visit us:http://wing.comp.nus.edu.sg/ 2) National University of Singapore, Singapore (II) ================================================== - Postdoc researcher at Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore I am looking for one postdoc researcher to work in the area of machine translation for resource-poor languages. This position is available immediately for a one year period, with possible extension for another one or two years. The candidate will join at the rank of Research Fellow, at a starting monthly salary of around S$5,000, depending on qualifications and experience. The candidate should have a PhD in computer science or a related discipline, with prior research experience and publications in statistical machine translation. Strong programming skills and good command of English (both spoken and written) are required. Expertise in machine learning is valuable. Interested candidates please apply with cover letter, CV, list of publications, names and email addresses of 3 referees. Please email the application material to: Prof. Hwee Tou Ng (Email: nght AT comp DOT nus DOT edu DOT sg). Application is open until the position is filled. Dr. Hwee Tou Ng Associate Professor Department of Computer Science School of Computing National University of Singapore Home Page: http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~nght 3) Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore ============================================= (A) 3 Researcher positions - Information Extraction & Text Mining Group, Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), Singapore, http://www.i2r.a-star.edu.sg/, http://www1.i2r.a- star.edu.sg/~sujian - We are looking for established researchers and fresh postgraduates to join the team to advance the technologies in information extraction, question answering and other natural language processing or text mining areas - Requirements: . PhD in Computer Science / Computer Engineering or related disciplines, with at least 4 year experience in the relevant areas; . Proficient in Java / C / C++ / C# programming; . Excellent academic record; - Contact: Dr SU Jian, Group Leader, Institute for Infocomm Research, Email: sujian@i2r.a-star.edu.sg. (B) 3 Researcher positions - Department of Human Language Technology, Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), Singapore, http://hlt.i2r.a-star.edu.sg - Our passionate research team has won international awards and competitions, set international standards, successfully commercialized technologies through spinoffs, licensing. - We are looking for dynamic researchers to join the team to develop breakthrough technologies in the following areas: . Spoken Document Retrieval . Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition . Speech Translation . Human-robot Interaction . Speech Synthesis - Requirements: . PhD in Computer Science / Electronics & Electrical Engineering / Computer Engineering or related disciplines . Strong in Mathematics and analytical thinking . Proficient in C/C++ programming . Excellent academic record (fresh PhD graduates are welcome to apply) - Contact: Dr LI Haizhou, Department Head, Institute for Infocomm Research, Email: hli@i2r.a-star.edu.sg 4) Nanyang Technological University, Singapore ============================================== 3 PhD Scholarship - School of Computer Engineering (SCE), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore - Starting Jan 2009 - Natural Language Processing for Asian Languages, acoustic modeling and language modeling for multilingual and code-switch speech recognition - 4-Year scholarship covering tuition fees, stipend, and conference travel - Contact: Dr CHNG Eng Siong, Asst Professor, SCE/NTU, Email: ASESChng@ntu.edu.sg 6. Upcoming Events - CLSW 2008 (Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop 2008), July 14-17, 2008, Singapore. (http://www.chineselex.org) - PACLIC 22 (The 22nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation), November 19-21, 2008, Cebu City, Phlippines. - IALP 2008 (International Conference on Asian Language Processing 2008), Nov. 12-14, 2008, Chiang Mai, Thailand. (http://www.colips.org/conference/ialp2008) - Oriental COCOSDA (The International Committee for the Co-ordination and Standardization of Speech Databases and Assessment Techniques) Workshop, Nov. 25-27 2008, Kyoto, Japan. - ICCPOL 2008 (The 22nd International Conference on Computer Processing of Oriental Languages), December 2008, Hong Kong. - The 7th SNLP (International Symposium on Natural Language Processing), December 12-15, 2008, Pattaya, Thailand. - ISCSLP 2008(The 6th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processinig), December 16-19, 2008, Kunming, China. (http://www.iscslp2008.org) - ACL-IJCNLP-2009 (Joint Conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP)), August 2-7, 2009, Singapore. (http://www.acl-ijcnlp-2009.org) - National Joint Conference on Computational Linguistics of China, 2009, Yantai, China. - The 8th SNLP (International Symposium on Natural Language Processing) and PACLING (the Pacific Association for Computational Linguistics), December 2010, Bangkok, Thailand.