ACL08: HLT Held in Columbus, Ohio

BY ERIC FOSLER-LUSSIER

This June, the Human Language Technology (HLT) conference was held jointly with the Association for Computational Linguistics Annual Meeting in Columbus, Ohio; The Ohio State University served as the sponsor. HLT in recent years has been co-located with the North American ACL (NAACL) meetings, but with ACL's location in North America this year, the ACL conference took on some aspects of the HLT program, such as short papers and more extensive poster sessions not traditionally found in the ACL program.

ACL:HLT featured a day of tutorial sessions on June 15th, including tutorials on Computational Advertising, Dialog Systems, Semi-Supervised Learning, Online Learning, Speech Technology, and Interactive Visualization. The main conference program was three days, covering a wide range of topics from information extraction, syntax, and parsing to machine translation and speech processing; the annual Student Research Workshop ran in parallel with the poster session. This was followed by two days of workshops based on special interests (e.g., Dialogue and Discourse (SIGDIAL), Computational Morphology and Phonology (SIGMORPHON), Biomedical NLP (BioNLP), Teaching Computational Linguistics (TeachCL)). The entire program can be found at the conference website (www.acl2008.org), and the proceedings for both the main conference and the workshops are available at the ACL Anthology.

Among the highlights of the conference were invited talks by Marc Swerts of Tilburg University and Susan Dumais of Microsoft Research. Marc's research looks to improve understanding of how non-verbal communication is used by speakers to help get their messages across to listeners. His invited talk, entitled "Facial expressions in human-human and human-machine interactions," explored how facial expressions are used for "highlighting important pieces of information, for signaling how confident speakers are about what they try to convey, and for marking emotionally sensitive information." The audience was treated to a number of excellent examples, such as comparing tennis pro Justine Henin's facial expressions during a news conference after a tournament win with her expression during the announcement of her retirement. Marc's talk concluded with a discussion of how facial expression can help make human-machine interaction more natural.

Susan Dumais, in her talk "Supporting Searchers in Searching," spoke of the need for advances in search interfaces -- in essence, going beyond the "type words into a search box" model. Susan demonstrated algorithms that her group and others have been working on to reorder searches based on the context of the user and the queries that have been asked previously. For example, the query "ACL" brought up "Austin City Limits" in the search engine without context, but by knowing that the user had executed queries in the topic of computational linguistics previously, "Association for Computational Linguistics" may be reranked higher in a contextual search. Susan also spoke about the need for looking at metadata content (e.g., time or document genre) and new interfaces for facilitating dialogue between search engines and searchers.

Two other plenary sessions were quite notable. Yorick Wilkes was presented the ACL Lifetime Achievement Award, and gave a engaging personal retrospective of the growth of computational linguistics over his lifetime. ACL President Bonnie Dorr, in the finest Presidential Address tradition, had the audience in stitches with a series of videos of her preparing for her address, "interviewing" past ACL presidents and other notable researchers by taking their comments out of context, and rapping a song about computational linguistics as a way to reach younger audiences. All of the plenary talks, including the best paper awards, were videoed and will eventually be available from the ACL Video Archive.

The conference attendees enjoyed an opening reception at the Ohio Statehouse (seat of the Ohio Legislature), as well as an evening banquet at the Columbus Zoo followed by a nighttime stroll to look at the animals. (The running joke of the conference was that local organizers kept having people say to them, "Columbus, hey, it's not as bad as I thought.") General Chair Kathy McKeown, Program Chairs Johanna Moore, Simone Teufel, James Allan, and Sadaoki Furui, and Local Arrangements Chair Chris Brew, along with a host of volunteers, provided an excellent experience for all.

Next year's NAACL-HLT 2009 will be held at the University of Colorado, Boulder from May 31-June 5, with Mari Ostendorf as general chair, Michael Collins, Lucy Vanderwende, Doug Oard, and Shri Narayanan as program committee chairs, and James Martin and Martha Palmer as Local Arrangement Co-Chairs. This event is co-sponsored by the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and everyone is strongly encouraged to submit to this HLT event.

For those who are in or are looking to travel to Asia, in 2009, ACL will be jointly held with the International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2009) in Singapore, with Keh-Yih Su as conference chair, Jian Su and Janyce Weibe as program chairs, and Haizhou Li as Local Organizing Chair.