Proceedings of the 2009 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Volume 2 - Volume 2

Welcome to the 2009 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! The conference is organized under the auspices of SIGDAT, the ACL Special Interest Group for linguistic data and corpus-based approaches to natural language processing. It is co-located this year with ACLIJCNLP 2009 in Singapore. EMNLP received 475 submissions, a new record. We were able to accept 163 papers in total (an acceptance rate of 34%). Of these, 96 (20%) were accepted for oral presentation, and 67 (14%) for poster presentation. The papers were selected by a program committee of 15 area chairs, from Asia, Europe, and North America, assisted by a panel of 389 reviewers. This year EMNLP again held an author response period. Authors were able to read and respond to the reviews of their paper before the program committee made a final decision. They were asked to correct factual errors in the reviews and answer questions raised in the reviewer comments.The intention was to help produce more accurate reviews. In some cases, reviewers changed their scores in view of the authors response and the area chairs read all responses carefully prior to making recommendations for acceptance.