Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 Young Investigators Workshop on Computational Approaches to Languages of the Americas, Los Angeles, CA, USA, June 6, 2010

Welcome to the First Young Investigators Workshop on Computational Approaches to Languages of the Americas. This workshop will be held on June 6, 2010 in Los Angeles, immediately following the 11th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, NAACL-HLT 2010. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers from all of the Americas developing human language technologies that are interested in establishing international collaborations. We believe a more interactive community within the Americas can contribute to the advancement of the field, not only with respect to the improvement of performance on specific areas of NLP but more important, with respect to motivating the growth of its community by providing a conducive collaboration infrastructure that facilitates the active involvement of researchers in the field. We are very excited about the response to the call for papers. We received a total of 21 submissions from 8 countries. The final program brings together researchers from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Uruguay and the USA. The contributions in the proceedings are of three types: research papers, project overviews and opinion papers. The research papers include recent advances in topics from opinion mining, to textual entailment, to adaptation of NLP approaches to software engineering. The survey papers present an overview of larger research projects by a single university or research group. These overviews present interesting efforts in dialogue systems, text simplification, language generation, and corpus based approaches to verb subcategorization and relation extraction. The proceedings also include two opinion papers that describe the research situation of the NLP communities in Costa Rica and Brazil. All contributions describe how international collaborations can push research forward by either listing the resources and/or experience sought or what specific resources and experience can be contributed. In sum, these proceedings provide a broad coverage of research on computational linguistics south of the Rio Bravo addressing three different languages: Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and English.