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2005
Issue 1
SIGGEN Newsletter
www.siggen.org
Date: 05 June 2005
TOPICS:
1. INF: Recent SIGGEN updates; board election, state of SIGGEN
2. CfB: Call for Bids for INLG'06
3. CfP: EWNLG'05 in Aberdeen [Early Registration by June 17]
4. CfP: Symposium on Dialog Modeling and Generation [July 7]
5. CfP: Using Corpora for Natural Language Generation [July 14]
6. TUT: Statistical Machine Translation and Generation [Aug. 11]
7. JOB: Postdoctoral Position in Adaptive Spoken Language, NY
8. JOB: Research Fellow/PostDoc, Aberdeen
9. Stu: Funded Studentship, Aberdeen
10. ANN: Surge 2.3 now available
| SIGGEN Board Members: | |
| Tilman Becker | Tilman.Becker(at)dfki(dot)de |
| Charles Callaway | ccallawa(at)inf(dot)ed(dot)ac(dot)uk |
| Irene Langkilde-Geary | irenelg(at)cs(dot)byu(dot)edu |
| David McDonald | dmcdonald(at)bbn(dot)com |
| David Reitter | dreitter(at)inf(dot)ed(dot)ac(dot)uk |
TOPIC 1: Recent SIGGEN updates; board election, state of SIGGEN
Dear SIGGEN members,
Tilman Becker, the last remaining member from the previous SIGGEN board, has been joined by the 4 new board members from this winter's election: Charles Callaway, Irene Langkilde-Geary, David McDonald, and student representative Dave Reitter.
As mentioned before, the website has been moved to www.siggen.org, (change your bookmarks!) hosted at DFKI, and has been updated, most significantly in regards to the membership on the Who's who page. This page, which now lists 145 members, has been revamped to ensure that all links are valid. If you, or someone you know, would like to be added to this list, please don't hesitate to email us. The mailing list has been similarly checked to ensure valid email addresses, and now contains 209 members. This means that those who do not receive copies of this newsletter are not currently on the email list, not considered to be members, and thus cannot vote in future elections. (A copy of the current SIGGEN constitution is located at: http://www.siggen.org/discussion/constitution/constitution_v2.html)
Your board members will be attending a wide array of conferences this summer, so if you see us, please don't hesitate to talk to us, or of course send us email. We will quickly respond to any suggestions or comments you may have.
-- The SIGGEN Board
TOPIC 2: SIGGEN: Call for Bids to Host INLG-2006
http://www.siggen.org/event/bidinlg06.html
SIGGEN (Special Interest Group in Generation of the Association for Computational Linguistics) invites proposals to host the International Natural Language Generation (INLG) Conference in 2006. INLG conferences are usually held in the summer, and sometimes co-located with other NLP events, such as ACL. INLG attendance is usually on the order of 80 people (that is, more than 50 and less than 120).
As INLG-2004 was in the ACL European region, we especially welcome and will prefer proposals for holding INLG-2006 in the ACL Americas or Asia/Pacific regions.
Draft proposals should be emailed to ccallawa(at)inf(dot)ed(dot)ac(dot)uk by 30 Sept 2005.
These proposals should outline:
* conference location and practicalities (venue, accomodation, meals). Note that INLG's have traditionally been held in places which are secluded but easily accessible (within a few hours drive of a major international airport), such as Brighton, UK (2004); mid-State New York (2002); Mitzpe Ramon, Israel (2000); Niagara-on-the-Lake, Canada (1998); Hertsmonceux Castle, UK (1996); and Kennebunkport, USA (1994).
* approximate conference date. Will it be possible for INLG attendees to combine attendance at INLG with attendance at other conferences of interest to the NLG community (for example, INLG-02 immediately preceded ACL-02, INLG-98 immediately preceded ACL-98, and INLG-92 immediately followed ANLP-92).
* rough budget and expected sponsorship. Approximately how much will participants need to pay to attend, including accomodation and meals as well as conference registration? Note that attendance cost for previous INLG's has generally been US$500 or less.
* local arrangements. Who will be in charge of organising the conference, and how will finances be handled (eg, can participants pay by credit card)?
Draft proposals will be considered by a committee that includes some SIGGEN board members and previous INLG chairs. This committee may contact proposers and request additional information.
For more information, see:
* http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/inlg04/ for information about INLG-2004.
* http://inlg02.cs.columbia.edu/ for information about INLG-2002.
* http://www.dfki.de/~wahlster/bids/ for draft bids for ACL-01 (a bit different from INLG draft bids, but useful as examples).
TOPIC 3: EWNLG'05 in Aberdeen [Early Registration by June 17]
Call for Participation
8-10 August 2005 Aberdeen, Scotland (following IJCAI-2005 in Edinburgh) http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~gwilcock/ENLG-05/
Natural language generation (NLG) is a subfield of natural language processing that focuses on the generation of written texts in natural languages from some underlying non-linguistic representation of information, generally from databases or knowledge sources. Accomplishing this goal may be envisioned for a number of different purposes, including standardized and/or multi-lingual reports, summaries, machine translation, dialogue applications, and embedding in multi-media and hypertext environments. Consequently, the automated production of language is associated with a large number of highly diverse tasks whose appropriate orchestration in high quality poses a variety of theoretical and practical problems. Relevant issues include content selection, text organization, production of referring expressions, aggregation, lexicalization, and surface realization, as well as coordination with other media.
The workshop continues a biennial series of workshops on natural language generation that has been running since 1987. Previous European workshops have been held at Royaumont, Edinburgh, Judenstein, Pisa, Leiden, Duisburg, Toulouse (2001) and Budapest (2003). The series provides a regular forum for presentation of research in this area, both for NLG specialists and for researchers who may not think of themselves as part of the NLG community.
The 2005 workshop will span the interest areas of natural language generation and Artificial Intelligence, with a special focus on research that integrates NLG with AI, including vision, robotics, intelligent agents, and knowledge discovery. We also encourage papers that investigate the use of state-of-the-art generation technology in real world applications to handle both spoken and text output, and apply language generation techniques to interactive AI systems like communicating robots, to allow the user to enter into short conversations with the system in search for information. There will be demonstrations of working NLG systems, and special sessions for posters describing real-world applications and advanced language technology systems.
Papers will be presented on formal, corpus-based, implementational and analytical work on conventional NLG topics (realisation, microplanning, etc), and especially papers with a focus on the following themes:
* Embodied agents and robot communication (special track)
* NLG for real-world applications
* Use of ontologies in NLG
* Statistical methods for NLG
* Information organization for planning and NLG
* Robust methods and techniques for NLG
* Evaluation of NLG systems
Invited Speaker:
Kevin Knight (Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California) will give an invited talk on Tree Transducers for Machine Translation and Generation
TOPIC 4: Symposium on Dialogue Modelling and Generation
Call for Participation
July 7, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
http://lubitsch.lili.uni-bielefeld.de/DMG/
This symposium is intended to tackle issues in the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue and dialogue generation. It aims at bringing together the dialogue modelling and language generation/production communities and will provide an opportunity for researchers from a variety of disciplines, including linguistics, computer science and psycholinguistics, to exchange ideas.
We invited talks elaborating on important theoretical notions in dialogue modelling -such as constraints (Asher & Lascarides, 2003, and many other recent papers), the role of domain knowledge (e.g., Ludwig, 2003, and, again, many more) and the influence of social relations between interlocutors on dialogue behaviour (going back to the seminal work by Brown and Levinson, 1978)- and asked presenters to shed light on these or other theoretically fruitful notions in dialogue modelling by:
* relating them to issues in language generation/production or
* drawing out similarities and differences between applications of such notions in discourse generation versus interpretation or
* describing computational/implemented models, in particular, for generation/production or
* comparing psycholinguistic with linguistic or engineering approaches to dialogue modelling.
The symposium will thus be a natural complement to ones that deal with natural language interpretation or structural properties of discourse.
TOPIC 5: Using Corpora for Natural Language Generation
Call for Participation
July 14, Birmingham, England (preceding Corpus Linguistics 2005) http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/ucnlg/
We aim to bring together researchers who use corpora for NLG research either in the traditional, manual way, or automatically, involving machine learning and statistical methods. The goal of the workshop is to present and discuss current research, to compare manual and automatic corpus exploitation, to evaluate achievements, and to identify challenges for the future.
Registration is open at the Corpus Linguistics 2005 website. Please note that Using Corpora for NLG is a full-day workshop, and that you do not need to register for the main conference. Simply select the appropriate options in the registration form. The workshop registration fee is 70 Pounds.
Papers will be presented on all aspects of using corpora for natural language generation, including, but not limited to:
* (Partial) automation of traditional corpus analysis for NLG
* Issues in annotating corpora for NLG
* Statistical approaches to deep and/or surface generation
* Machine learning methods for deep and/or surface generation
* Role of corpora in the evaluation of NLG systems
* Reuse of resources developed for NLU (e.g. treebanks) in NLG
* Domain-specific vs. general purpose corpora for NLG
We would like to emphasise that where we say `NLG' we mean to include the language generation components of machine translation and dialogue systems.
Invited Speaker:
Irene Langkilde-Geary (Brigham Young University, Provo, USA) will give an invited talk with the provisional title: Constraint programming as a Whiteboard Architecture for Probabilistic NLG.
Panel on Exploiting Corpora for NLG:
We will hold a panel discussion on the topics of the workshop. The panel members are:
Chris Brew, Linguistics, Ohio State University, USA
Irene Langkilde-Geary, Brigham Young University, USA
Ehud Reiter, Computing Science, University of Aberdeen, UK
Donia Scott, CRC, Open University, UK
Bonnie Webber, Informatics, University of Edinburgh, UK
TOPIC 6: Tutorial: Statistical Machine Translation and Generation
August 11, Aberdeen, Scotland (Immediately following EWNLG'05)
http://www.csd.abdn.ac.uk/~cmellish/knight.html
Kevin Knight, USC/Information Sciences Institute, USA
The statistical approach to machine translation provides a set of techniques for (1) automatically learning translation knowledge from bilingual data, and (2) applying that knowledge to translate previously-unseen sentences. When it was first introduced, statistical MT was far too slow and inaccurate to be useful -- it was an interesting lab experiment. In 2005, we see statistical MT significantly outperforming other methods in many language pairs and domains, at speeds permitting commercial applications like foreign news broadcast translation. What made this possible? This tutorial will cover the basic theory and the major technical advances of the past few years. Of course, there is a long way to go! The tutorial will also cover known limitations of current MT models and describe current research trends. We will also discuss problems in natural language generation, where the input is typically more abstract than foreign text, and describe how statistical MT research is currently exploiting linguistic categories.
This tutorial is free of charge. It is hosted by the Natural Language Generation group at the University of Aberdeen. We are grateful for the support of EPSRC grant EP/C523156/1 which has made this tutorial possible.
If you are interested in attending this tutorial, please send an email to ccameron(at)csd(dot)abdn(dot)ac(dot)uk so that you can be allocated a place and informed of any further developments. For more information, contact Chris Mellish (cmellish(at)csd(dot)abdn(dot)ac(dot)uk).
TOPIC 7: Postdoctoral Position in Adaptive Spoken Language
StonyBrook, NY
The Psychology, Linguistics, and Computer Science Departments at Stony Brook University are collaborating on an innovative project, funded by the National Science Foundation: "Adaptive Spoken Dialog with Human and Computer Partners." We seek a postdoctoral associate to collaborate with us. The successful applicant will have a Ph.D. in Psychology, Linguistics, or Computer Science, or a relevant interdisciplinary field.
Preferred Qualifications: Experience in one or more of the following: experiment design, statistics, linguistic phonetics, computational linguistics, speech processing, psycholinguistics techniques such as eyetracking.
Depending on the candidate's background and qualifications, duties will include:
1) Contributing to empirical (laboratory and corpus-based) studies of language use (both comprehension and production). This involves working with human subjects, designing experiments, collecting data, and conducting detailed analyses of text and spoken corpora
2) Contributing to our efforts to model human language behavior and test computational models using data.
3) Generating independent sub-projects relevant to project's research questions.
4) Supervising graduate and undergraduate student researchers in day-to-day activities across one or more projects conducted within the PI's laboratories
5) Assisting with management of laboratory resources, such as ordering equipment, software installation, etc.
6) Writing up results for publication
7) Traveling to conferences and workshops as appropriate
8) Developing expertise in relevant techniques and procedures that span Psychology, Linguistics, and Computer Science
This is a full time position. The Research Foundation of SUNY is a private educational corporation. Employment is subject to the Research Foundation policies and procedures, sponsor guidelines, and availability of funding. Projected start date: January 1, 2006 (flexible)
Application Procedure: Applications will be accepted until the position is filled. More details about the project can be found at http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~adaptation/. Applications for the may be submitted on-line at http://naples.cc.sunysb.edu/Admin/CampusJob.nsf via the "Postdoctoral positions" link, or else submit a cover letter and resume to:
Prof. Susan E. Brennan
Department of Psychology
Stony Brook University
Stony Brook, New York 11794-2500
Fax: 631-632-7876
Stony Brook University, flagship campus of the S.U.N.Y. system, is a world-class, student-centered research university located 60 miles from New York City.
TOPIC 8: Research Fellow/PostDoc: Towards a Unified Algorithm for the generation of referring expressions
University of Aberdeen, Scotland
Applications due: July 15, 2005
Contact: Dr Kees van Deemter
kvdeemte(at)csd(dot)abdn(dot)ac(dot)uk
Background:
Natural Language Generation programs generate text from an underlying Knowledge Base. It can be difficult to find a mapping from the information in the Knowledge Base to the words in a sentence. Difficulties arise, for example, when the Knowledge Base uses `names' (i.e., databases keys) that a hearer/reader does not understand. This can happen, for instance, if the Knowledge Base contains an artificial name like `#Jones083', because `Jones' alone is not uniquely distinguishing; it is also true if the Knowledge Base deals with entities for which no names at all are in common usage (e.g., a specific tree or a chair). In all such cases, the program has to "invent" a description that enables the reader to identify the referent. In the case of Mr. Jones, for example, the program could give his name and address; in the case of a tree, some longer description may be necessary (e.g., `the green oak on the corner of ... and ...'. The technical term for this set of problems is Generation of Referring Expressions (GRE). GRE is a key aspect of almost any Natural Language Generation system.
Aims:
Existing GRE algorithms tend to focus on one particular class of referring expressions, for example conjunctions of atomic or relational properties (e.g., `the black dog', `the book on the table'). Our research is aimed at designing and implementing a new algorithm for the generation of referring expressions that generates appropriate descriptions in a far greater variety of situations than any of its predecessors. The algorithm will be more complete than its predecessors because it is able to construct a greater variety of descriptions (involving negations, disjunctions, relations, vagueness, etc.). The descriptions generated should also be more appropriate (i.e., more natural in the eyes of a human hearer/reader), because the algorithm will be based on empirical studies involving corpora and controlled experiments. Among other things, these empirical studies will address the question under what circumstances the descriptions should be logically under- or overspecific; they will also allow us to prune the search space (i.e., the space of all descriptions) which would otherwise threaten to make the problem intractible. The project combines (psycho)linguistic, computational and logical challenges and should be of interest to people whose intellectual home is in either of these areas.
General Info:
http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/projects/tuna/TUNA-index.html
TOPIC 9: Funded Studentship: Managing Ambiguity in Generated Text
University of Aberdeen, Scotland
Applications due: July 15, 2005
| Contact: | Dr Kees van Deemter |
| kvdeemte(at)csd(dot)abdn(dot)ac(dot)uk |
General Info for prospective students at Aberdeen:
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/sras/postgraduate/apply5
TOPIC 10: Surge 2.3 now available for download
| Contact: | Charles Callaway |
| ccallawa(at)inf(dot)ed(dot)ac(dot)uk |
Surge 2.3, the latest version of the SURGE English grammar, has been packaged for download at the following location. Improvements have been made for written and spoken dialogue, XML and LATEX formatting, punctuation, and additional coverage rules derived from the Penn TreeBank. For use with FUF5.3.
http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/ccallawa/index-c.html
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1999
Issue 2 (lost)
Issue 1 (lost)
1998
Issue 1
Date: 25 Mar 1998
TOPICS:
1. A: INLG Registration & Program [Act by May 1st 1998]
2. CFP: TAG+ Workshop [Philadelphia - Deadline Apr 15th 1998]
3. A: CSLU Spring Short Courses [Portland, OR - May 5 - May 18]
4. JOB: ITRI Brighton PhD Studentship [Apply by Apr 30, 1998]
5. CFP: COLING/ACL98 Discourse Relations Workshop [Deadline Apr 6]
6. CFP: Special issue NRHM Adaptivity and User Modeling [Deadline Jun 1]
7. CFP: Computational Treatment of Portuguese - Brazil [Deadline May 4]
8. A: KPML Mailing List
9. P: Diana McKinnie [Generating reports from dictated X-ray reports]
TOPIC 1:
A: INLG Registration & Program [Act by May 1st 1998]
From: Graeme Hirst <gh(at)cs(dot)toronto(dot)edu>
9th International Workshop on
NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION
5-7 August 1998
Prince of Wales Hotel
Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada
REGISTRATION INFORMATION
Preliminary details of the program and registration information and forms are now available for the 9th biennial Workshop on Natural Language Generation.
This message gives basic information on participation. For full information, please visit the INLG-98 Website:
http://logos.uwaterloo.ca/~inlg98
PROGRAM AND SCHEDULE:
The workshop will begin with an opening reception on the evening of Tuesday 4 August, and end with lunch on Friday 7 August.
The program includes approximately 30 papers, demonstrations, and a panel session to be presented over 2 1/2 days. (The complete list of accepted papers is on the conference Web site.)
In addition, the social program includes an outing to Niagara Falls with dinner at the top of the Skylon Tower.
LOCATION AND TRANSPORTATION:
The workshop will be held at the Prince of Wales Hotel, in the scenic town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, which is easily accessible from Toronto International Airport. See our Web page on transportation for details of transfers to Niagara-on-the-Lake from Toronto International Airport, on Buffalo Airport as an alternative, and for directions to Niagara-on-the-Lake by car, bus, and train.
REGISTRATION AND ACCOMMODATION:
A discount accommodation-and-meal package has been negotiated with the Prince of Wales Hotel for the workshop. To get the discount, you must book your accommodation on the conference registration form, which is available from our Web site.
Registration paid by credit card will be accepted by e-mail and fax.
NOTE!!! Space at the workshop is limited. We will allocate space in the order that registrations are received, except that a space will be held for one author of each submitted paper (whether accepted or not) until **1 May 1998**. If the workshop is oversubscribed before the final June deadline, we will endeavour to find additional space, but cannot promise to succeed nor that any space found will be as cheap as the reserved space. Workshop registration and hotel reservations must be received by **1 June 1998**. Any unassigned hotel rooms will be released after this date. Late registrants will be accommodated only if space is available, and will have to pay the hotel's full rack rates.
FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE:
We anticipate having funds to subsidize attendance at the workshop by graduate students and unfunded researchers. Details should be known by mid-April.
TOURISM:
See the INLG Web pages for links to information on tourism in the Niagara region, Toronto, and Montreal.
TRANSPORTATION TO MONTREAL FOR COLING:
The workshop is to be held in the week immediately prior to the joint conference of COLING and ACL, in Montreal, Canada (10-14 August 1998). After the workshop, a bus will take participants who wish to attend COLING / ACL directly to the Toronto train station for an express train to Montreal.
WORKSHOP SPONSOR AND ORGANIZERS:
The workshop is sponsored by the Association for Computational Linguistics and ACL SIGGEN (Special Interest Group on Natural Language Generation).
The workshop is organized by Chrysanne DiMarco of the University of Waterloo, with the assistance of Graeme Hirst of the University of Toronto. The Program Chair is Eduard Hovy of USC/ISI.
General enquiries concerning registration and accommodation:
Jean Webster, University of Waterloo
jrwebster(at)icr(dot)uwaterloo(dot)ca
phone +1 519-888-4567 extension 5076.
General workshop questions:
Chrysanne DiMarco, University of Waterloo
cdimarco(at)logos(dot)uwaterloo(dot)ca
phone +1 519 888 4443
For more information, program, and registration forms, visit the
INLG-98 Website:
http://logos.uwaterloo.ca/~inlg98
TOPIC 2:
CFP: TAG+ Workshop [Philadelphia - Deadline Apr 15th 1998]
From: Jennifer MacDougall <jmacdoug(at)central(dot)cis(dot)upenn(dot)edu>
August 1 to August 3, 1998
TAG TUTORIALS -- PRELIMINARY ANNOUNCEMENT
July 28 to July 31, 1998
Philadelphia, PA, USA
URL: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~ircs/mol/tag98.html
The fourth workshop on tree-adjoining grammars and related frameworks (hence the + after TAG) will be held at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania in August 1998, from August 1 to August 3. Previous workshops were held at Dagstuhl (1990), UPenn (1992), and Univ. Paris 7 (1994).
Papers on all aspects of TAG (linguistic, mathematical, computational, and applicational), as well as papers relating TAGs to other frameworks, are invited. As in the past there will be some invited talks on other grammar formalisms which have interesting relationships to TAGs (for example, Categorial Grammars and HPSG).
GUIDELINES FOR ABSTRACTS:
Abstracts should be at most two pages (exclusive of references), and should be submitted in ASCII format, as a .ps file, or as SELF-CONTAINED latex file to jmacdoug (at) central (dot) cis (dot) upenn (dot) edu. (If email is not available, please send the abstract to the address given below.) Please indicate on the abstract if you would prefer to give a short presentation (10 minutes) or a long one (30 minutes). The abstract should contain your name, address, and email address. Proceedings including extended versions (4 pages) of accepted abstracts will be available at the workshop.
| Deadline for submission for abstracts: | April 15 |
| Notification of acceptance: | May 15 |
| Deadline for submission of camera-ready | |
| extended abstract: | July 6 |
| Workshop Dates: | August 1 to August 3 |
If you do not want to submit an abstract, but would like to attend, we would appreciate it if you could inform us by email by July 6 (unless you have already done so). If you would like to present a demo, please let us know as soon as possible, including information about required hard and software.
PROGRAM COMMITTEE:
Anne Abeille (Universit'e Paris 7)
Tilman Becker (DFKI)
Christy Doran (University of Pennsylvania)
Robert Frank (Johns Hopkins University)
Klaus Netter (DFKI)
Richard Oehrle (University of Arizona)
Owen Rambow (CoGenTex, Inc.)
Giorgio Satta (Universita di Padova)
Yuka Tateisi (University of Tokyo)
K. Vijayshanker (University of Delaware)
David Weir (University of Sussex)
CONTACT ADDRESS:
Jennifer MacDougall
553 Moore Building
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6389
USA
Telephone: (215) 898-3191
FAX: (215) 898-0587
Email: jmacdoug (at) central (dot) cis (dot) upenn (dot) edu
TUTORIAL:
Prior to the workshop there will be a tutorial (including labs and demos) from July 28 to July 31 1998. Details about the tutorial will be sent out soon. We are trying to get some partial support for some of the students attending the tutorials. If you may be interested in attending this tutorial, please contact Jennifer MacDougall at the address above (preferably by email) and we will send you more information.
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
Anne Abeille (Paris 7)
Tilman Becker (DFKI)
Owen Rambow (CoGenTex, Inc.)
Giorgio Satta (Universita di Padova)
K. Vijayshanker (University of Delaware)
TOPIC 3:
A: CSLU Spring Short Courses [Portland, OR - May 5 - May 18]
From: "Terri Durham" <durham(at)cse(dot)ogi(dot)edu>
Institute in Portland, Oregon will be giving two spring short courses in May to coincide with the ICASSP '98 Conference in Seattle Washington.
Please visit our web page for a full description of each course and to fill out your registration form. http://www.cse.ogi.edu/CSLU/shortcourse2/
If you have any questions please don't hesitate to give me a call.
Thank You,
Terri Durham
CSLU Center Administrator
PO Box 91000 Portland, OR. 97291
20000 NW Walker Rd., Beaverton, OR. 97006
Phone: 503-690-1630 // Fax: 503-690-1306
May 5-8th Text-to-Speech Synthesis
Instructors:
Paul Taylor
Center for Speech Technology Research, University of Edinburgh
Alan Black
Center for Speech Technology Research, University of Edinburgh
Michael Macon
Center for Spoken Language Understanding, Oregon Graduate Institute
May 18-22 Building Spoken Dialogue Systems
Instructors:
Stephen Sutton
Center for Spoken Language Understanding, Oregon Graduate Institute
Teaching Assistants:
Andrew Cronk
Center for Spoken Language Understanding, Oregon Graduate Institute
Ed Kaiser
Center for Spoken Language Understanding, Oregon Graduate Institute
TOPIC 4: JOB: ITRI Brighton PhD Studentship [Apply by Apr 30, 1998]
From: postgrad-admissions(at)itri(dot)brighton(dot)ac(dot)uk
University of Brighton
PhD Studentship for October 1998Application deadline: 30 April 1998
The Information Technology Research Institute (ITRI) invites applications for a three-year EPSRC studentship award to commence in October 1998. The studentship will be awarded in one (or more) of the following topics in Computational Linguistics:
DOCUMENT GENERATION (including TEXT GENERATION): architectures; corpus analysis; diagrammatic reasoning; discourse; evaluation; hybrid generation; implementation; layout; multilinguality; multimodality; representation languages; pragmatics; tools
LEXICONS: corpus analysis; evaluation; lexical statistics; lexicalized grammars; lexicography; lexicon induction from text; multilinguality; representation; tools; tuning; word sense disambiguation
NATURAL LANGUAGE INTERFACES: dialogue; interface design
Applicants should have a good honours degree or equivalent in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics or Linguistics.
EPSRC studentships are restricted to UK or EU residents. Residents of the UK are eligible for fees and a maintenance allowance; other EU residents are only eligible for fees (and so would need to be able to support themselves during their studies).
The EPSRC baseline rate of maintenance allowance is currently approx 5,295 pounds sterling per annum. For further general information on EPSRC studentships, please consult http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/in-depth/indpfram.htm.
Further information on the Institute's research programme can be found on the ITRI home page (http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk) and information about students and how to apply on our research students page (http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/students).
If we already have your application on file for consideration this year, you do not need to apply again.
Deadline for applications: 30 April 1998
For additional advice and information, please contact:
Ms. Vivienne Wicks, Research Administrator
Information Technology Research Institute
University of Brighton
Lewes Rd.
Brighton
BN2 4GJ, UK
Email: postgrad-admissions (at) itri (dot) brighton (dot) ac (dot) uk
Tel: +44 1273 642900
Fax: +44 1273 642908
TOPIC 5:
CFP: COLING/ACL98 Discourse Relations Workshop [Deadline Apr 6]
From: <stede(at)cs(dot)tu-berlin(dot)de>
(See also: http://flp.cs.tu-berlin.de/~marker/aclcolingws.html)
The notion of discourse relation has received many different interpretations, some of which are hardly compatible with one another. Nonetheless, there is a consensus among researchers that intersegment relations hold between adjacent portions of a text and that these relations may be signalled by linguistic means, including so-called cue phrases, aspect and mood shifts, theme inversions, and other markers.
The workshop intends to bring together researchers working on discourse relations and discourse markers in different linguistic traditions and different NLP applications. The particular focus of the workshop is the issue of discourse relations from the viewpoint of linguistic realization. Specifically, contributions should address one or more of the following questions:
o What are sound methodologies for comparing similar discourse markers (contrastive studies, distribution analyses, etc.)?
o What are sound methodologies for relating discourse relations with potential realizations?
o Are there discourse relations that are always lexically signalled? Are there any that are never lexically signalled?
o What non-lexical (i.e., syntactic or prosodic) means are used to signal a relation?
o In production, how does one decide whether to signal a relation at all?
o In production, how does one motivate a choice among candidate signals for a given relation?
o In production, how does the choice of signal interact with other decisions (in particular, those of linearizing some tree or graph structure)?
o In analysis, is it possible to reliably infer discourse relations from surface cues?
o In analysis, how can one disambiguate polysemous signals such as "and", "since" (temporal or causal) etc.?
o What are useful lexical representations of discourse markers, for both analysis and production?
o What are useful representations of discourse relations (and the entities they relate), such that they facilitate the realization decision? What features would one like to have handy in a representation so that choices can be made easily?
o Are there significant differences between realizations in spoken and written language?
o How do individual languages differ in terms of any of the above issues?
Organizing committee
The workshop is organized by
Manfred Stede (TU Berlin)
Leo Wanner (University of Stuttgart)
Eduard Hovy (ISI/USC, Marina del Rey)
Requirements for submission
Papers are invited that address any of the topics listed above. Maximum length is 8 pages including figures and references. Please use A4 or US letter format and set margins so that the text lies within a rectangle of 6.5 x 9 inches (16.5 x 23 cm). Use classical fonts such as Times Roman or Computer Modern, 11 to 12 points for text, 14 to 16 points for headings and title. LaTeX users are encouraged to use the style file provided by ACL: http://coling-acl98.iro.umontreal.ca/colaclsub.sty Papers can be submitted either electronically in PostScript format, or as hardcopies.
Submissions from North America should be sent to:
Eduard Hovy
Information Sciences Institute
4676 Admiralty Way Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695
U.S.A.
hovy (at) isi (dot) edu
Submissions from elsewhere should be sent to either of the following:
| Manfred Stede | Leo Wanner |
| TU Berlin | Computer Science Department |
| KIT Project Group | Intelligent Systems Group |
| Sekr. FR 6-10 | University of Stuttgart |
| Franklinstr. 28/29 | Breitwiesenstr. 20-22 |
| D-10587 Berlin | D-70565 Stuttgart |
| Germany | Germany |
| stede(at)cs(dot)tu-berlin(dot)de | wannerlo(at)informatik(dot)uni-stuttgart(dot)de |
Timetable
Deadline for electronic submissions: April 6, 1998
Deadline for hardcopy submissions: April 9 (arrival date)
Notification of acceptance: May 25, 1998
Final manuscripts due: June 15, 1998
Program committee
| Sandra Carberry (U Delaware) | |
| Barbara DiEugenio (U Pittsburgh) | |
| Eduard Hovy (USC/ISI) | |
| Alistair Knott (U Edinburgh) | |
| Alex Lascarides (U Edinburgh) | |
| Owen Rambow (Cogentex Inc.) | |
| Ted Sanders (U Utrecht) | |
| Donia Scott (U Brighton) | |
| Wilbert Spooren (U Tilburg) | |
| Manfred Stede (TU Berlin) | |
| Keith Vander Linden (Calvin College) | |
| Marilyn Walker (ATT Labs) | |
| Leo Wanner (U Stuttgart) |
TOPIC 6:
CFP: Special issue NRHM Adaptivity and User Modeling [Deadline Jun 1]
From: Maria Milosavljevic <mariam(at)alba.nsw.cmis.CSIRO.AU>
The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia
1998 call for submissions on the themes of 'adaptivity and user modeling in hypertext/hypermedia systems', and 'hypermedia for museums and cultural heritage’.
NRHM (previously Hypermedia, one of the original journals on the subject) is a refereed annual review journal covering research on practical and theoretical developments in hypermedia, interactive multimedia and related technologies. The new editorial team has introduced themed issues, each issue (normally 10-12 papers) will review and explore one or two topical themes from a variety of perspectives. The main theme of the 1997 issue was the evaluation of hypermedia and multimedia systems.
The themes for the 1998 issue of the New Review will be:
- hypermedia for museums and cultural heritage Theme editors Douglas Tudhope and Daniel Cunliffe
- adaptivity and user modeling in hypertext/hypermedia systems: Guest editors Peter Brusilovsky and Maria Milosavljevic (also see Adaptive Hypertext and Hypermedia Home Page http://www.education.uts.edu.au/projects/ah/index.html)
Papers should be submitted to the appropriate theme editors no later than June 1st 1998. For Instructions to Authors, see http://www.comp.glam.ac.uk/~NRHM/ or contact the Editor.
Submissions are welcomed on all aspects of the two themes, including but not restricted to:
Adaptive hypermedia
| user modeling in adaptive hypermedia | |
| adaptive educational hypermedia systems | |
| adaptive information systems | |
| adaptive museum hypermedia | |
| adaptive navigation support | |
| natural language techniques for dynamic hypertext generation | |
| adaptive WWW navigation aids | |
| adaptive visualization of hypertext structure | |
| empirical studies of adaptive hypermedia | |
| content adaptation in hypertext and hypermedia | |
| personalized information spaces | |
| adaptivity and adaptability in a hypermedia context | |
| adaptive information retrieval |
Guest editors
Peter Brusilovsky - plb (at) cs (dot) cmu (dot) edu
School of Computer Science,
Carnegie Mellon University,
Pittsburgh, PA 15213,
USA.
Maria Milosavljevic - mariam (at) mpce (dot) mq (dot) edu (dot) au
MRI Language Technology Group,
Macquarie University,
Sydney, NSW 2109,
Australia.
Hypermedia for Museums and Cultural heritage
| hypermedia link services | |
| networked access | |
| time-varying interactive presentations | |
| image, audio and video databases | |
| navigation design | |
| intelligent hypermedia and agents | |
| web-based museum hypermedia | |
| spatial and temporal models | |
| evaluation and studies of use | |
| metadata and intellectual access | |
| thesauri and semantic representations | |
| copyright /IPR for digital multimedia standards |
Editor
Douglas Tudhope - dstudhope (at) glamorgan (dot) ac (dot) uk
Department of Computer Studies
University of Glamorgan
Pontypridd, Mid-Glamorgan CF37 1DL
Wales, UK
fax +1443-482715
tel +1443-482271
Associate Editor (US) Andrew Dillon - adillon (at) ucs (dot) indiana (dot) edu
Associate Editor (UK) Daniel Cunliffe - djcunlif (at) glamorgan (dot) ac (dot) uk
For subscription information, contact
Taylor Graham Publishing, 500 Chesham House,
150 Regent Street, London W1R 5FA, UK.
TOPIC 7:
CFP: Computational Treatment of Portuguese - Brazil [Deadline May 4]
From: lucia (at) dc(dot) ufscar(dot) br (Lucia Rino)
III PROPOR
WORKSHOP ON THE COMPUTATIONAL TREATMENT OF THE
WRITTEN AND SPOKEN PORTUGUESE LANGUAGE
November 3-4, 1998
PUCRS Campus
Porto Alegre - RS
BRAZIL
Sponsored by the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC)
Organized by the Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS)
CALL FOR PAPERS
Along with the XIV SBIA'98 (Artificial Inteligence Brazilian Symposium), to be held in Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil, in the PUCRS Campus between 04 and 06 of November, 1998, there will be carried out the III PROPOR - III WORKSHOP ON THE COMPUTATIONAL TREATMENT OF THE WRITTEN AND SPOKEN PORTUGUESE LANGUAGE - on the 3rd and 4th of November, 1998.
The former two PROPOR workshops occurred in Portugal and in Brazil, respectively in Feb/1993 and Oct/1996. The third one intends to bring together researchers working on Computational Linguistics, specially those whose work is in any sense related to the processing of the Portuguese language. The main goals of the workshop are to provide the means for the researchers to exchange information and to explore and discuss the availability of resources to solve problems related to Natural Language, having Portuguese as the central language. Contributions should address one or more of the following topics:
- The automatic interpretation of the Portuguese language
- The automatic generation of the Portuguese language
Verbal discourse processing: problems and resources of the Portuguese language
Differences and similarities between the treatment of spoken and written Portuguese
The above topics naturally include a broader discussion on Natural Language Processing as such, and other issues in the Computational Linguistics spectrum. Researchers are invited to submit articles or demoes, in order to integrate, and exchange, experiences with the participants during the event.
Workshop organization
The workshop will consist of technical pannels, conference and discussion sessions. Participants are also invited to present demoes and systems resulting from project and development of software.
Requirements for submission
Papers and software are invited that address any of the topics listed above, preference given to conclusive work. Work reporting ongoing MsC or PhD research can be submitted to the Workshop of Unconcluded Dissertations and Theses, which is held along with SBIA'98. In this case, submission requirements can be found in the following address:
http://www.inf.pucrs.br/~flavio/sbia98/sbia98.html.
IMPORTANT DEADLINES
Technical papers and software descriptions: May 04, 1998 (mailing date)
Notification of acceptance: July 01, 1998 (by email)
=46inal manuscripts due: August 15, 1998 (mailing date)
No electronic submission will be accepted.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR SUBMISSION
Manuscripts must be written either in Portuguese or in English. Please use A4 letter format, doubleline spacing, classical fonts such as Times Roman or Computer Modern, 12 points for text, 14 to 16 points for headings and title. Maximum length is 15 pages including figures and references. Small caps or figures must be avoided, since the manuscripts may be reduced for the proceedings. The content of the first page must include the title of the article, the author(s) fullname(s), institution of origin, address, and a summary of the work. Faxed or emailed work will not be accepted for revision. Software descriptions must contain title, goals and a short characterization, besides the names of the authors, their institution of origin and address, and the specification of software/hardware needs for demoes.
=46our hardcopy copies of both, technical papers or software descriptions, must be accompanied by a letter of submission containing the title of the work, authors, and the name of the contact person. Submissions should be sent to:
Organizing committee
| Vera L=FAcia Strube de Lima (PUCRS) | |
| Flavio Moreira de Oliveira (PUCRS) | |
| Rosa Maria Viccari (UFRGS) |
Program committee
| Ariadne M. B. R. Carvalho (IC-UNICAMP) | |
| Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza (DI-PUCRJ) | |
| Elisabete Ranchhod (FL-UL) | |
| Isabel Trancoso (INESC) | |
| Jacques Robin (DI-UFPe) | |
| Jos=E9 Gabriel Pereira Lopes (FCT-UNL) | |
| Laura S. Garcia (CEFET-PR) | |
| L=FAcia Machado Rino (DC-UFSCar) | |
| Mike Dillinger (IL-UFMG) | |
| Raul S. Wazlawick (DI-UFSC) | |
| Rosa Maria Viccari (II-UFRGS) | |
| Vera L=FAcia Strube de Lima(II-PUCRS) |
TOPIC 8:
A: KPML Mailing List
From: Elke Teich <elke(at)dude(dot)uni-sb(dot)de>
KPML (Komet-Penman MultiLingual) is a grammar development environment for Systemic Functional Grammars and a sentence generator for English, German, Dutch and a few other languages. The system was developed at the Institute for Integrated Publication and Information Systems (IPSI) of the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD), Darmstadt, Germany (http://www.darmstadt.gmd.de/IPSI/index.html) and is now being further developed at the Center for Language and Communication research at the University of Stirling, UK (http://www.stir.ac.uk/english/communication).
KPML is based on the Penman system for generation of English sentences originally developed at the Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California.
Added functionalities include
- multilinguality
- facilities for versioning and back-up for large-scale grammar resources
- graphic-based grammar writing tools
- graphic-based grammar exploration tools
- tools for preparing teaching materials
- specialized example and test suite management tools.
KPML has been used in a number of projects and is currently one of the most popular platforms for developing grammars for generation. Users of the system currently develop generation grammars for languages as diverse as English, German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Finnish, Greek, Czech, Russian and Bulgarian. More information about KPML can be found at http://www.stir.ac.uk/english/communication/Computational-tools/ including the requirements for installing the system, downloading the system, documentation etc.
You might also want to have a look at a sample generated document where the text parts are generated with KPML:
http://www.darmstadt.gmd.de/publish/komet/kometpave-pics-96.html
Other relevant pages:
KPML basic:
http://www.stir.ac.uk/english/communication/Computational-tools/kpml.html
KPML documentation (online):
http://www.darmstadt.gmd.de/publish/komet/kpml-1-doc/kpml.html
KPML documentation (downloadable hardcopy):
file://ftp.darmstadt.gmd.de/pub/komet/KPML-1.0/
The Grammar Exploration Tool:
http://www.stir.ac.uk/english/communication/Computational-tools/Grexplorer/grexplorer.html
The generation grammar bank:
http://www.stir.ac.uk/english/communication/Computational-tools/generation-bank.html
This mailing list offers users of KPML the opportunity of exchanging information, seeking and giving advice in issues of linguistic specification and computational implementation, announcing and making available add-on functionalities and new resources etc. The list is managed by the department of English Linguistics, Institute of Applied Linguistics, Translation and Interpreting of the University of the Saarland, Saarbruecken, Germany (http://www.uni-sb.de/~sl16eset/elke.html).
Subscribe NOW and keep in touch!
To subscribe send e-mail to
elke(at)dude(dot)uni-sb(dot)de
by putting 'subscribe MY-E-MAIL-ADDRESS' in the subject field.
TOPIC 9:
P: Diana McKinnie [Generating reports from dictated X-ray reports]
From: Diana McKinnie <LDDMCKIN(at)ihc(dot)com>
I am a PhD student in the Medical Informatics program at the University of Utah. My project deals with generating natural language reports from parsed, dictated X-ray reports. I find the field of natural language generation fascinating and frustrating. I look forward to talking to others with the same fascinations and frustrations.
My e-mail address at the University is: d.mckinnie(at)m(dot)cc(dot)utah(dot)edu.
Thanks- Diana McKinnie
eof