PITTSBURGH: Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute (LTI) in the School of Computer Science will host "Language Technologies 2001," a meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), June 2-7 on the university campus. More than 400 experts from academia and industry are expected to attend the event, which will include tutorials, workshops, exhibits and demonstrations of the latest in research and products related to language technologies. Another meeting on empirical methods in natural language processing will also take place in the same location. Complete details can be found on the Web at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~naacl2001.

"The conference brings together the world's foremost university researchers with companies starting to use this technology in their products, and with students who may be interested in pursuing studies in any one of the language technologies," says conference chair Lori Levin, a senior research scientist in the LTI. "These are the people providing voice interaction with machines, machine translation, speech recognition and data mining."

"This conference is significant because language technologies'processing language and at least partially understanding it'give us the ability to obtain knowledge from text or speech data, translate it to another language and retrieve information," adds Jaime Carbonell, computer science professor and director of the LTI.

Invited conference speakers include:

• Tom Mitchell, Carnegie Mellon professor of artificial intelligence and learning, and director of the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery in the School of Computer Science. Mitchell is also vice president and chief scientist of WhizBang! Labs. (Provo Utah), a startup firm that uses machine learning to automatically extract information from all over the Web. He will speak on "Machine Learning and Extracting Information from the Web."
• Aravind Joshi, the Henry Salvatori professor of computer and cognitive science and co-director of the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Joshi will speak on "Language Modeling of Biological Data."
• Jon Kleinberg, assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University, works with algorithms that exploit the combinatorial structure of networks. He is studying geometric and combinatorial methods for computational problems in molecular biology. Kleinberg will speak on "Structure and Content in World Wide Web Search."

Carnegie Mellon's Language Technologies Institute is the largest and most diverse organization of its kind in the world, studying all aspects of language technology, including speech recognition, synthesis of text to speech, natural language parsing and generation, machine translation, computer-assisted language instruction, corpus based linguistic analysis, information retrieval, including translingual retrieval, summarization, and text mining for trend detection. The institute also looks at theoretical issues underlying the structure of language that permit computational treatment. It was established in 1986 as the Center for Machine Translation, and became the LTI in 1996 when an educational component was added.

More information on the LTI is available on the Web at http://www.lti.cs.cmu.edu/.

The Association for Computational Linguistics holds annual meetings in the United States, Europe and the Pacific Rim.