The sixth HIT-MSRA Summer School on Human Language Technology, supported by Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) and hosted by the MOE-MS Joint Key Lab of NLP and Speech in Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), will be held in Harbin, China, from August 1 to 10, 2011.

This year's session of the HIT-MSRA summer school goes beyond the core areas of applied language technology, featuring various areas of computational research on human-human and/or human-machine communication. In addition to taught courses, the summer school will also feature a number of self-contained research talks and a student workshop.

For this workshop, we now invite original submissions on all aspects of human language technology and computational linguistics. All submissions will be reviewed by a program committee of domestic and international experts, who will make a selection from the submissions based on the novelty, soundness and potential impact of the work. The first author must be a student (at Master’s or PhD level, or at an advanced undergraduate level).

Important Dates:

July 10, 2011 Paper submissions due

July 20, 2011 Notification of acceptance

July 27, 2011 Camera-ready papers due

August, 6, 2011 Student Workshop

Topics of Interest include:

* Computational approaches to discourse and dialogue
* Computational approaches to semantics and pragmatics
* Computational phonology/morphology, tagging and chunking, word segmentation
* Computational psycholinguistics
* Information extraction
* Information retrieval
* Language processing in domains such as bioinformatics, legal, medical, etc.
* Language resources, evaluation methods and metrics, corpus annotation
* Machine translation
* Mathematical linguistics, grammar formalisms
* Mining from textual and spoken language data
* Multilingual language processing
* Multimodal language processing
* Natural Language Generation
* NLP on noisy unstructured text, such as emails, blogs, sms
* Parsing and grammar induction
* Question answering and question generation
* Sentiment analysis and opinion mining
* Spoken language processing
* Statistical and machine learning methods
* Summarization
* Text mining
* Textual entailment and paraphrasing
* Topic and text classification
* Word sense disambiguation

Submission instructions:

All submissions should be in English. They should be electronic, using MS-Word or pdf format. They should be sent to summerschool2011@mtlab.hit.edu.cn by email before the submission deadline. Papers will consist of up to 4 pages of content (including references) in one-column format, including a title, author's name and affiliation, an abstract of maximally 100 words, and up to 5 keywords. The first footnote of the paper should clarify the status of the paper, saying whether the work has been submitted or published before (and if so, where).

Program Committee:

Chair:
Kees van Deemter (Univ. of Aberdeen, UK)
Members:
Lars Ahrenberg (Univ. of Linkoping, Sweden) Hailong Cao (Harbin Inst.of Tech., China)
Daqing He (Univ. of Pittsburgh, USA) Yongzeng Xue (Harbin Inst.of Tech., China)
Muyun Yang (Harbin Inst.of Tech., China) Tiejun Zhao (Harbin Inst.of Tech., China)
Dequan Zheng (Harbin Inst.of Tech., China) Conghui Zhu (Harbin Inst.of Tech., China)