The program for the April meeting is now being finalized and shows every sign of being an excellent follow-up to our highly successful first annual meeting last year in Dublin. The invitations will be issued in mid-March. So if you have not already confirmed, do so before the deadline date of March 4th.

Speakers and topics

• Jan Roukens (DG/XIII-E) will open the General Assembly meeting with a brief overview of European Union's position on standards in localization and documentation and support for language engineering within the Commission's upcoming 4th Framework program (1994- 1998).
• Gary Jaekel (Manager, Ericsson Language Services), a user of the Logos MT system, will speak on the organizational and commercial implications of implementing an MT system.
• Kurshid Ahmad (University of Surrey) will talk about a subject of great interest to LISA members--automatic extraction of terminology from existing documentation.
• José de Hoyos (Localization Manager, Novell Inc.) will review his localization operation, with a glimpse of some of Novell's internal tools under development.
• Maghi King (Director, ISSCO), the doyen of MT evaluation and group leader of the CEC's EAGLES project focusing on the very same subject, will tackle this thorny topic--a matter of particular relevance to LISA members.
• Tsujii Jun-ichi (UMIST) will talk about the viability of statistical (tools and aids) vs. traditional MT with a view of current Japanese machine translation development and commercial exploitation.

Panel Discussions

Several panel sessions devoted to translation tool technology are currently being assembled. These will include both vendors and users of current commercial systems. There will be time for substantial Q&A and open discussions, so get those questions ready.

Exhibitors

TRADOS Translator's Workbench, Logos, SITE-Eurolang, IBM TM/2 and LMT, Systran and the STAR-TRANSIT are among the companies which have confirmed that they will exhibit their products in Heidelberg. Lotus Germany will also demonstrate the power of their work group program--Notes.

This issue contains a series of articles submitted by MT, CAT and localization experts who explain various aspects of language processing systems. This can be used as a guide to some of the technical issues that will undoubtedly arise during the panel discussions and product exhibition.

General Assembly

LISA's first General Assembly session will cover:

• LISA Executive Committee nominations
• 1994 membership and operational matters

SIGs

Meetings for the various SIGs will be held concurrent with product demos.

Attendance is Heidelberg is strictly limited and places are filling up rapidly, so reserve your place soon.