Proceedings of the 18th conference on Computational linguistics - Volume 2

This is the 18th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and, for myself and a few others, the 18th occasion on which I experience a growing sense of excitement at the prospect of meeting old friends, making new ones, and learning about the new discoveries and inventions that my colleagues have made in the last two years.The late Hans Karlgren invented the name "Coling" as an obvious contraction of "computational linguistics", and also in memory of the vagrant hero of a well-known Swedish comic strip who went by that name. The term "computational linguistics" itself was coined only a few years earlier by the late David Hays to refer to a field of endeavor whose creation had been recommended by the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Board (ALPAC) to provide a more solid theoretical foundation for work on machine translation. During the five or so years that intervened, the International Committee on Computational Linguistics stumbled into existence and organised its first conference in New York in 1965.During the 35 years since that first meeting, our field has become broader and deeper, and our students and colleagues can now command good salaries throughout much of the world. For evidence of the vigor of the field, you have only to look around you. The day before the opening of this meeting, a ceremony in Saarbrticken will mark the termination of the 8-year, 89-million dollar Verbmobil project on speech-to-speech translation that involved at one time or another, some 900 people. It will therefore be no surprise that Germany is one of the three countries to whom we owe such a debt of gratitude for the organisation of the meeting.The programme committee decided to make some modest innovations of its own this year, determining for the first time to conduct its business entirely through the Internet. Electronic submission of papers was strongly encouraged, against the advice of several experienced and cautious people who predicted chaos for the conference and a mental breakdown for me. There were, of course, problems. But things went more smoothly than anyone expected and we will know how to do things better next time. No submission was sent for review as hard copy, the handful that arrived on paper being scanned to make the digital version that reviewers then accessed through the world-wide web.323 regular papers, and about 100 project notes and demonstration proposals were received from 22 countries. Each was read by three members of one of the 11 panels of reviewers, totalling 222 people altogether. My gratitude to those dedicated and able people knows no bounds. 110 regular papers, 24 project notes, and 10 demonstration proposals were accepted, or about a third of the submissions. As one who has read many of the papers, I can assure you that the quality of the presentations is likely to be even higher than even this good ratio suggests. So I hope you share some of my excitement at what will be either the last Coling of the old millenium or the first of the new one, but surely one of a series that has only just begun.