The VEXTAL Conference will be held at the Venice International University - University Ca' Foscari - Venice(It), 22 - 24 November, 1999. It is directed to research people working in the area of computational linguistics, mathematical and quantitative linguistics, corpus linguistics and language engineering. It is the follow-up of FRACTAL held in Besançon (France), last year.

The official languages of the conference are Italian, French and English.

For those who haven't made it to pay the conference registration fee yet, there will be a specially organized two hours service available at the Department building in San Polo, Ca' Soranzo (see the map): it is a big "campo" not far from Rialto Bridge , and the building is on the right with a Chinese sign on the entrance door.Don't miss it, because there will be a Welcome Party for those who intend to meet and make acquaintances, from 15.00 to 18.00 p.m.

We prepared a map of Venice with all the Hotels' locations and the most important places in Venice. Notice that we shall have our evening Baroque Concert at the Auditorium Santa Margherita on Monday 22nd. The ticket for the concert will cost no more than Lit 15.000, i.e. less than $10 or 8 €. You can walk to the concert hall and have dinner while you walk: this is a very common Venitian tradition which is called 'going for "bacari"' the name for bars in the Venitian dialect. In "bacari" you can have a glass of wine and very typical Venitian appetizers for a cheap price everywhere. To reach the Island of San Servolo you should take a boat from the docks in front of the Londra Hotel very close to San Mark's Square. Look at the timetable under Campus at VIU website. However the most convenient morning boat to reach the island leaves at 8.35 a.m. for the first two days and at 9.00 a.m. the third day.

We are currently engaged in organizing the Gala Dinner or Banquet. As to the Banquet please let me have your preliminary assent to participation - you will pay when you officially register for the conference at your arrival - Lit.75.000 per person, i.e. $45, 40 €. Here is the Menu only in Italian, though, seen that there are no well-established foreign food correspondances!

THEMES

Papers are invited for twenty minute talks, questions included, in all areas of NLP, including (but not limited to) :
lexicon morphology syntax semantics
pragmatics discourse parsing text generation
abstraction/summarization dialogue machine translation
quantitative, logical, symbolical and statistical approaches

VEXTAL also welcomes submissions from fields for which NLP plays an important role, which are more application oriented:
cognitive aspects
terminology, knowledge acquisition
information extraction
documentary retrieval
corpus linguistics
grammar and style-checkers and NLP tools
computer assisted language learning
mathematical & quantitative linguistics

VEXTAL invites submissions focusing on NLP applications already implemented, tested and evaluated. Demos are strongly encouraged, in addition to a standard paper.
All accepted papers will be published in the Conference Proceedings.

The Conference is organized with the contribution of :