The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the primary international organization in the field of natural language processing. The ACL's annual conference is the major international conference in this field. This project is to subsidize travel, conference, and housing expenses of students selected to participate in the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Student Research Workshop, which is part of the ACL conference on June 15-20, 2008 in Columbus, Ohio. The workshop consists of two tracks: full paper presentations and poster presentations. All selected work has only student authors. The full paper sessions are composed of paper presentations followed by a discussion panel led by respected researchers in the field. The workshop is organized and run by students. The workshop provides a valuable opportunity for the next generation of natural language processing researchers to enter the computational linguistics community. It allows the best students in the field to take their first important step toward becoming professional computational linguists by receiving critical feedback on their work from external experts, and by making contacts with other students and senior researchers in their field. The students who are involved in running and selecting papers for the workshop also gain valuable opportunities for professional growth and interaction with the researchers on the organizing committee of the main conference. The workshop contributes to the maintenance and development of a skilled and diverse computational linguistics and natural language processing workforce, helping to produce a pool of researchers with the scientific and engineering knowledge for natural language processing.
