Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics - Volume 1
On behalf of the program committee for ACL-2003, consisting of 12 area chairs and two program committee co-chairs, we are pleased to present you with this volume. It contains the papers accepted for presentation in the main conference program of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics held in Sapporo, Japan on July 7-12, 2003.The 41st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics consists of the main program, a student workshop, interactive poster/demo sessions, ten pre- and post-conference workshops, and four tutorials. Associated conferences for ACL-2003 include The Eighth Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP2003) and the Sixth International Workshop on Information Retrieval with Asian Languages (IRAL2003). These workshops and associated conferences have published separate proceedings that are available at the conference or from the ACL office (http://www.aclweb.org/).This year, 360 papers were submitted for the main program of the meeting, from which 71 were accepted for presentation and inclusion in the conference proceedings. An acceptance rate of 19.72% makes ACL-2003 one of the most selective international conferences of the year. Among the accepted papers, 32 come from North America and Canada, 22 from Asia and the Pacific Rim area, and 17 from Europe. As a whole, the accepted papers provide a unique overview of cutting-edge research in the field of Computational Linguistics conducted at present.