Special Track on Applied Natural Language Processing

Novel human-computer interfaces, for instance talking heads, can benefit from language understanding and generation techniques with big impact on user satisfaction. Dialoguebased intelligent tutoring systems require advanced dialogue processing, language understanding and generation components in order to assess students' natural language inputs and provide appropriate feedback. Moreover, language can facilitate human-computer interaction for the handicapped (no typing needed) and elderly leading to an ever increasing user base for computer systems. Some of the many areas emphasized by the ANLP track to include for contributions include multilingual processing, learning environments, multimodal communication, bioNLP, spam filtering, language acquisition (first and second), textual assessment, language varieties, materials development, generic classification, educational applications, information retrieval, speech processing, machine learning, knowledge representations, English for specific purposes, textual assessment indices, coreference resolution, word sense disambiguation, dialogue management and systems, language generation, language models, ontologies, and reasoning. For 2012, there were 15 submissions, out of which 10 were accepted as long papers and 3 as poster presentations.