Proceedings of the 1st North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics conference

On behalf of the Program Committee for NAACL 2000, I am pleased to present you with the papers accepted for presentation at the First Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, held in Seattle, Washington, April 29-May 4, 2000.NAACL received a gratifyingly large number of papers from around the world. Submissions were received from 28 countries. Reviewing was blind to all reviewers and area chairs. It was also highly selective. Out of 166 submissions, 43 were selected for presentation at NAACL 2000.Selecting the papers was not an easy task. In total, over 110 reviewers, representing 20 different countries, reported to a senior program committee consisting of eight area chairs. The senior program committee spent an intensive day at a meeting in Virginia reaching the final decisions. The area chairs and reviewers cannot be thanked enough for the conscientious and painstaking jobs they performed. All those who contributed are named on the following page, but I would particularly like to express my thanks here to the area chairs: Michael Collins (AT&T Labs - Research), Nancy Green (University of North Carolina at Greensboro), Graeme Hirst (University of Toronto), Kevin Knight (USC/Information Sciences Institute), Dekang Lin (University of Manitoba), Diane Litman (AT&T Labs - Research), Philip Resnik (University of Maryland), and Andreas Stolcke (SRI International).In its first year, it was advantageous to co-locate NAACL with ANLP, an established conference. To coordinate the two conferences, submissions focusing on end-applications were invited to ANLP 2000, while submissions focusing on methodology were invited to NAACL 2000. Future NAACL conferences will encourage both types of submissions.