Mission

Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing is to coordinate the activities and events in the Asia-Pacific region.

Historical Background

The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing associations is to promote information dissemination and research co-operation among researchers in the region and co-ordinate initiatives of the region with those of the other regions in Natural Language Processing and the related fields.

The official members of the AFNLP are either professional associations or research institutions/universities in countries or territories of the region, which represent researchers in the countries/territories or which take on the responsibility of representing them. We also welcome other organizations, such as organizers of conferences in the region, international professional bodies, professional associations of research fields related with NLP etc., to join us as liaison members.

The AFNLP establishes subcommittees that deal with specific issues such as linguistic resource sharing, etc. It also issues newsletters with topics such as
(1) Survey of research activities in countries/territories in the region
(2) News on conferences, information from international bodies
(3) Job announcements
(4) Announcements of funding for co-operative projects across borders.

The research fields that the member organizations of the AFNLP cover are natural language processing related areas,?including, but not limited to:
(1) Computational treatment of various aspects of linguistics such as pragmatics, discourse, semantics, syntax, morphology, lexicon, etc.
(2) Theories for natural language processing such as cognitive models of language understanding, translation theory, machine learning, statistical language models, communication models, neural models of language processing, etc.
(3) Human Language Technologies such as spoken and written language analysis and generation, machine translation, speech translation, information retrieval and extraction, natural language interface and dialogue systems, text mining, etc.
(4) Applications related with NLP such as multi-modal interaction, knowledge integration and sharing, tools for internet, XML and their extensions, ontology building, etc.
(5) Resources and evaluation methods for NLP systems.

Existing Asian Initiatives

– Conference Series in Asia

1. NLPRS: Natural Language Processing Pacific Rim Symposium
2. IRAL: International Workshop on Information Retrieval with Asian Languages
3. PACLING: Pacific Association for Computational Linguistics
4. PACLIC: Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation
5. PRICAI: Pacific Rim International Conference on AI
6. ICCPOL: International Conference on Computer Processing of Oriental Languages
7. ROCLING: Research on Computational Linguistics Conference