Jane Robinson expressed the appreciation of the ACL to SRI International, Sperry-Univac, and Stan­ford University for their support of the Association and of this meeting; to Norm Sondheimer for his most energetic presidential activities; to Ray Perrault and his Program Committee for an excellent program; to Jerry Kaplan and his helpers for the fine local arrange­ments; to George Heidorn, Michael McCord, the AJCL Editorial Board, and the referees for the high quality of the Journal; to Jim and Renee Moore and Candy Sidner for mobilizing the successful member­ship drive; to Paul Chapin for getting the Monograph Series organized; to Martha Evens, Paul Orgren, and their helpers at the NCC and OAC for representing us there; to the Executive Committee members for their involvement; to the Nominating Committee for select­ing a respectable slate of officers for 1982; and to Don and Betty Walker for maintaining a Secretariat that shores up this enterprise.

The report was accepted with enthusiasm and the meeting was adjourned.

Donald E. Walker Secretary-Treasurer

The ACL will sponsor two sessions at the 1982 National Computer Conference (NCC), to be held June 7-10, 1982, in the Astrohall and Astroarena in Houston, Texas. The NCC is sponsored by AFIPS and four of its constituent societies: the Association for Computing Machinery, the Data Processing Man­agement Association, the IEEE Computer Society, and the Society for Computer Simulation.

At this year's NCC, more than 600 firms will dis­play the latest advances in computer hardware, soft­ware, and services. They will occupy some 325,00 net square feet of exhibit space, up 95,000 net square feet from NCC '81. In addition, a technical program will focus on "Advancing Professionalism." Its aim is to emphasize the fact that even as systems become in­creasingly ubiquitous through office automation and home computing, there are methods for building them to be usable, reliable, and efficient.

The two ACL-sponsored sessions are scheduled for Wednesday, June 9, and will address the topics of machine-readable dictionaries and natural language help systems. Short descriptions of each follow.

Call for Papers - Applied Natural Language Processing Conference

Processing and Generating Text Using Machine-Readable Dictionaries. Machine readable dictionaries are already being used as a basis for simple text-handling tasks like spelling correction, hyphenation, and automatic generation of simple business letters. More complex dictionaries are being designed for nat­ural language processing systems capable of under­standing and generating sophisticated texts. This ses­sion describes current applications in office automa­tion, research in lexical semantics, and our visions of the dictionary of the future.

The session was organized by Martha Evens, Illi­nois Institute of Technology, and will be chaired by her. It will consist of:

Computational Lexicology - A Research Program Robert Amsler, SRI International Use of Webster's Seventh Collegiate Dictionary to Construct a Master Hyphenation List

The Future of the Dictionary and the Dictionary of the Future Martin Kay, Xerox PARC Relations Extracted from Machine-Readable Dictionaries for Building a Text Generator Raoul N. Smith, GTE Laboratories

Natural Language Help Systems. Intelligent help facilities can contribute significantly to the usability of sophisticated interactive systems. To handle the wide variety of queries that will'be posed to such a system, a flexible interface is necessary. Since English pro­vides such flexibility and is already familiar to users, it is attractive as an interface language. This session will explore issues in both the design of flexible help sys­tems and the use of English for communicating with such systems.

The session was organized by Elaine Rich, Universi­ty of Texas at Austin, and will be chaired by Robert Fenchel, Xerox Corporation. It will consist of :

Uniform Help Facilities for a Cooperative User Interface Philip Hayes, Carnegie-Mellon University

Natural Language Help in the Consul System Bill Mark, Information Sciences Institute

Programs as Data for Their Help Systems Elaine Rich, University of Texas at Austin

For further information contact: Martha Evens

Computer Science Department Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago, Illinois 60616 (312) 567-5150

A Conference on Applied Natural Language Proc­essing will be held February 1-3, 1983, in Santa Moni­ca, California, sponsored by the Association for Com­putational Linguistics and the Naval Research Labora­tory. This special conference will focus on the use of computational linguistic techniques in solving real world problems, and will be limited to 300 partici­pants. Original papers on the use of computational linguistic techniques are being solicited in the areas of:

• data, information and knowledge management

• training and education

• language translation technology

• speech recognition and synthesis technology

The papers should discuss applications, evaluations, limitations, and general tools and techniques. Papers describing end-users' experience with these technolo­gies are especially welcome.

Six copies of an extended summary of five to eight pages, double spaced, should be sent by August 15, 1982 to:

System Development Corporation 2500 Colorado Avenue

Santa Monica, California 90406 It is important that the summary identify distinctive aspects of the work and clearly indicate to what extent the work is complete and has been implemented.

Summaries will be reviewed by the Conference Committee. Notification of acceptance of papers will be sent by September 15, 1982. For inclusion in the Conference Proceedings, final versions of papers must be received by November 15, 1982. Authors of ac­cepted papers will be expected to sign a copyright release form. Limited travel funds for authors will be available.

Facilities for product and system demonstrations will be available, including videotape equipment. Short papers describing planned demonstrations and types of equipment required should be submitted by November 15, 1982. Additionally, tutorials and panel sessions are planned.

The Conference Committee consists of: Iris Kame-ny, System Development Corporation (General Chair), Beatrice Oshika, System Development Corporation (Program Chair), Don Walker, SRI International (Secretary-Treasurer), Christine Montgomery, Operat­ing System Division, Logicon, Ray Perrault, University of Toronto, Jane Robinson, SRI International, and Norm Sondheimer, Sperry Univac.