We are pleased to announce that the NATO Advanced Study Institute (ASI) on "Language Engineering for Lesser-studied Languages" will be held on the campus of Bilkent University in Turkey, July 3rd through July 14th, 2000. The ASI program will comprise courses on all aspects of language engineering, participant workshops and discussion panels. Currently, the following courses are planned:

_ Introduction to languages and language engineering,

_ Text processing ecology,

_ Computational tools and resources,

_ Computational morphology and finite state methods,

_ Statistical methods and corpus linguistics,

_ Lexical acquisition,

_ Grammar and grammar writing,

_ Machine translation,

_ Information extraction,

_ Information retrieval.

Participant workshops will provide a forum for participants to present their work on language engineering and receive feedback from colleagues. Discussion panels will enable participants to discuss specific issues with experts in the field.

The ASI will admit a limited number of qualified participants from NATO countries (1) Partner countries (2), and Mediterranean dialogue countries (3). Depending on the specific circumstances, funding for room and board expenses of such participants will be available. Participants from commercial/industrial institutions and from other countries may attend provided they cover their registration, travel and living expenses.

Since there are a limited number of participant slots, admission to the ASI will be strictly on a competitive basis taking into account the participant's background, their potential contribution and the benefit they may draw from the meeting.

Detailed information about the course schedule, lecturers and the application procedure will be announced shortly. This information will also be available on the World Wide Web at http://www.nlp.bilkent.edu.tr/ASI/index.html and on mirror sites to be announced.

We acknowledge the additional support provided by Bilkent University, Computing Research Lab, NMSU, and EACL- European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

(1) NATO countries: Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom, and USA.

(2) Partner Countries eligible for support: Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrghyzistan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Romania, Russia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Tadjikistan, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (*), Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan. ((*) Turkey recognizes the Republic of Macedonia with its constitutional name.)

(3) Mediterranean Dialogue Countries eligible for support: Egypt, Israel.