Presidential Address

ACL-2000, Hong Kong5 October 2000

Wolfgang Wahlster

1. The International Conference Rotation Scheme

3. ACL‘s Ultimate Killer App for NLP

4. Selection Criteria for an ACL President

5. PR Campaign for ACL Membership Growth

Agenda Items not covered at the ACL Business Meeting

American ZoneEuropean-African

ZoneAsian-Pacific

Zone

Rotation Scheme for International ACL Conferences

ACLACLACL

American ZoneEuropean-African

ZoneAsian-Pacific

Zone

Montreal1998 Madrid

1997Maryland1999

Saarbrücken2000

COLING Conferences ACL Conferences EACL Conferences

Hong Kong2000

Rotation Scheme for CL Conferences

Toulouse2001

Milwaukee2002 ?

Edmonton2002 ?

Taipei2002

Two Alternatives for a Conference Rotation SchemeBasic Idea: every part of the world is assigned to a particular region

that ACL will visit every third year

American Zone

European-AfricanZone

Asian-PacificZone

The vertical approach (eg. IJCAI Conferences)

Arctic Zone

Antarctic Zone

CentralZone

The horizontal approach (a “cool“ idea)

A New Three-Year Rotation Scheme:The horizontal partitioning approach

Creating two new Chapters: The Arctic Chapter of the ACL: AACL (Double ACL) The Antarctic Chapter of the ACL: AAACL (Triple ACL)

Arctic Region 2003 CL for the Snow iMac

CentralRegion

Antarctic Region 2002 CL for LINUX

2001

CL forWindows

1. The International Conference Rotation Scheme

3. ACL‘s Ultimate Killer App for NLP

4. Selection Criteria for an ACL President

5. PR Campaign for ACL Membership Growth

Agenda Items not covered at the ACL Business Meeting

Y2K: The Killer App for NLP (see Marcus 1997)

Y2K Y TO K B2B B TO B(Business-to-Business)

$200 billion spent worldwide to address the Y2K problem

45 international conferences dealing with the Y2K problem

BUT: The Y2K problem is still open.

WHY? 2 [tu:] is a homophone with{to, too, two} as a homophonic set

Y2K Y TWO K B2B B TWO B

Y2K: The Killer App for NLP

Two Y2K problems (syntactic ambiguity)

Two parse trees:

Y 2 K11 Y 2 K22

11 Numerical Y2K problem: arises from early space-saving method

2000

Y 2000 ‘Y‘ to ‘K‘

22 Non-Numerical Y2K problem: arises from a major spelling reform

The Seriousness of the Non-NumericalY2K Bug

The numerical Y2K bug hype was greatly overblown

But: The non-numerical Y2K bug can cause serious economic and social harm

Extensive use of date expressions (MUC, Verbmobil)

IT that supports global capital flow

payrolls

small business inventories

is highly vulnerable.

Embedded IT systems in: aviation

health care

telecommunications

are unable to deliver services in a normal manner.

• Synchronous tree adjoining grammars

• Combinatory categorial grammar with typed feature unification

• HPSG grammar compiled to a lexicalized tree adjoining grammar

• CFG approximation of a probabilistic LFG parser

• Bidirectional cascade of chunk parsers

Various Approaches to the Non-NumericalY2K Problem

ACL‘s FST Solution for the Non-Numerical Y2K Problem

y:k

y:

S1

Simple

Very Efficient: O(n)

Java Applet

Finite-State Transducer

Single State

Two Transitions

Monday, 3 May 04

Mondak, 3 Mak 2004

Monday, 3 May 04

An example of the combined Y2K Problem

Status of ACL's Y2K Date Change Project

We have now implemented all changes to all programs and all data to reflect the new date standards:

Mondak, Tuesdak, Wednesdak, Thursdak, Fridak, Saturdak, Sundak,

Microsoft has announced a solution for the the non-numerical Y2k problem. However a Microsoft spokesman said that it will relesead not before 2004.

Thus, ACL has a key competitive advantage using its FST solution and bringing it to market right now.

Januark, Februark, March, April, Mak, June, Julk, August, September, October, November, December

ACL's non-numerical Y2K Date Change Project

We have gone through

every line of codein every program in every system.

We have analyzed

all databases, all knowledge bases all data files all backups all historic archives.

and modified all data with ACL's non-numerical Y2K technology to reflect the change.

We are proud to report that we have completed the date change mission.

The Calendar for the New Millenium

Y2K: Back to the Origins

DAGLow German, Middle English Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian

TAGTAG DAYDAYGerman English

MONDAY MONDAKDAKDAKY2K version

1. The International Conference Rotation Scheme

3. ACL‘s Ultimate Killer App for NLP

4. Selection Criteria for an ACL President

5. PR Campaign for ACL Membership Growth

Agenda Items not covered at the ACL Business Meeting

How to become (male) ACL President?What have these guys in common?

Vice President

Past President 1997 Past President President

Vice President - elect

What have these guys in common ?

Vice PresidentPast President1997

Past President President

Language Learning

Semantics

Discourse

Multimodality

Corpus-basedMethods

Parsing

Discourse

Multimodality

User Modelling

Multimodality

Vice President - elect

Mitch Marcus

PhilCohen

WolfgangWahlster

Ed Hovy

JohnNerbonne

Induction of Decision Trees using Machine Learning Approaches

What have these guys in common?Using a visual ID3 approach

Vice PresidentPast President1997

Past President President

hair today,gone tomorrow

Baldness ismainly causedby stress

Vice President - elect

Induced Rule: ACL-President(x) => Bald(x)

Vice PresidentPast President1997

Past President President

Honorary Chair

Vice President - elect

1. The International Conference Rotation Scheme

3. ACL‘s Ultimate Killer App for NLP

4. Selection Criteria for an ACL President

5. PR Campaign for ACL Membership Growth

Agenda Items not covered at the ACL Business Meeting

A TV Ad Campaign for ACL Membership Growth

Language Technology Increases Employee Job Satisfaction!

TV ad campaign is less efficient than an ACL song that makes it onto the top international music

charts

What type of song? What music style?

Folk music (too old-fashioned)

Jazz (too sophisticated)

Post-Punk (too loud)

Techno (no underlying message)

Rap/Hip-Hop (Street poetry)

The Optimal PR Compaign for ACL

The ACL Rap 1. Part

CKY, TFS, and FUG CFG, ATN and LFG HMM, HTK and TTSASR, DSP and SLS DRT, MLP and RTN,TDL, MRS and ANN  EDR, NLP, and HCIHLT, LRE and IUI

Verse

Acronyms, are for the machine,

When they know what we mean,

It‘s just sensational,

That's why there's ACL,

So come and take our word for it,

All those acronyms will be sentenced to life.

Chorus

The ACL Rap 2. Part

BNC, DCI and DRS XLE, RST and TMS   QLF, VIT and DCGFSA, CLR and CUG CLE, FUF and CCGILL, SMT and TAG ALE, MGU and XMLBDI, CSP and XOL

Acronyms, are for the machine,

When they know what we mean,

It‘s just sensational,

That's why there's ACL,

So come and take our word for it,

All those acronyms will be sentenced to life.

Verse Chorus

ACL Rap

Original Composition: “The Fantastic Four“

Lyrics and Idea: Wolfgang Wahlster, Anthony Jameson

Vocals: Alexander Kowalski

ACL Karaoke Edition: Renato “Psycho“ Orsini

Arrangement: AK-art

Production: AK-art for ACL Production

Digitally mastered at the AK-art studios

The ACL Rap