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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
1997
Issue 3
Date: 07 Dec 1997
TOPICS: 1. Q: Evaluation of NL dialogue systems?
2. CFP: COLING-ACL 98 -- Call for Workshop and tutorial proposals -- Deadline: 31 Dec 97
3. CFP: Book -- Advances in Scalable Text Summarization Deadline: 30 Dec 97
4. CFP: ETAI -- Electronic Transactions on AI
5. CFP: TAPD'98 -- Tabulation in Parsing and Deduction Deadline: 12 Dec 97
6. CFP: SIGDAT'98 -- Very Large Corpora Deadline: 20 Apr 98
7. CFP: FOIS'98 -- Formal Ontology in Information Systems Deadline: 15 Dec 97
8. CFP: Discourse Relations and Discourse Markers -- Coling/ACL'98 Deadline: 10 Mar 98
9. CFP: INLG'98 -- International Workshop on NL Generation Deadline: 28 Jan 98
10.JOB: ITRI, Brighton -- Research opportunities
11.JOB: ELRA/ELDA
Topic 1: Q: Evaluation of NL dialogue systems?
From: "gas0" <GAS0(at)elvira(dot)ugr(dot)es>
Ramon Lopez-Cozar Delgado
Electronics and Computer Technology Dept.
University of Granada
18071 Granada, Spain
e-mail: gas0(at)elvira(dot)ugr(dot)es
Fax: +34-58-243230
Dear SIGGEN colleagues:
I am a PhD student and a researcher in the Department of
Electronics and Computer Technology at the University of
Granada. I am working on a natural language dialogue system
that aims to answer product orders and questions of clients
in fast-food restaurants. It may be considered a rule-based
expert system whose behaviour is decided from a recorded
dialogue corpus obtained at a real restaurant. The system is
quite developed at the moment, though it needs some improvement
to enhance the level of understanding and naturalness.
I would like to get information about the available evaluation
methods of such a system, as well as information about the
evaluation of natural language dialogue systems in general (used
techniques, bibliography, web sites, etc.).
In order to provide more information, I enclose a short abstract
about the system I am working on.
--- Abstract ----
The system goal is to simulate the restaurant-clerk behaviour. It
must be able to provide information and ask client questions
similarly to how a human clerk does. In addition we
want it to process spontaneous voiced-speech, which at a
linguistic level means to consider phenomena such as unnecessary
word repetition, grammatical order change, anaphora, discordances,
context information, grammatical mistakes, etc. We also expect a
learning ability for the system to allow new information (foods,
drinks, ingredients, etc.) acquisition from client interaction.
The basis for the system development is as follows:
- Unnecessary information in client utterance: Usually,
not all words in a sentence are necessary to obtain its semantic
interpretation, which can be achieved from meaning words only
(keywords). To obtain such interpretation, the system uses
keywords and a keyword lattice analysis. This analysis is carried
out by means of syntactic and semantic rules. From dialogue corpus
we found out that clients usually use a small number of words in
their utterances (communication client-clerk tends to be
telegram-like), therefore a system dictionary can be size-reduced.
- Use of a small number of patterns: Clients tend to communicate
using a small number of patterns to order products, ask questions,
or modify previous product orders. Using these patterns the system
can extract most semantic meanings from clients' utterances. In case
the meaning cannot be obtained, clients are asked to help the system
understanding process or to repeat the utterance input differently.
The system is a compound of several modules: Input Interface, Control
Module, Memory Module, Restaurant-product Knowledge Base, Lexicon, and
Output Interface.
At the moment the system takes about 30.000 C++ code lines. Its inputs
and outputs are natural language text sentences.
Its Input interface is well developed but still needs to define some
syntactic and semantic rules, since now only product orders and
questions are carried out.
We are about to start the Modification Module set up. This module
will be activated when the desire of modification of previous orders
is detected in client input.
Also, the Learning Module needs to be started. This module will be
activated when "possible" unknown foods, ingredients, drinks, etc.
are detected in client input. These new products will be learnt, so
they could be recognized the next time they appear in client
sentences.
The Natural Language Generator needs improvement to enhance the
expression power, though at the moment, the system can build
both syntactically and semantically right sentences, in a very
natural fashion, by using pronouns and context information available
at the moment of the natural language generation.
The system uses a graphic interface that now is useful but simple. In
future we would like to improve it by including product-pictures and
graphics of the "artificial" restaurant-clerk face, in order to
improve a friendly communication.
We think the integration of the system in a voice-controlled
response system represents its best application. To
do so, it would need a speech-to-text interface that
provides a text-word sequence from client voice. A text-to-speech
interface should transform the system output into synthesized voice.
Theoretically the whole system could be part of an
automatic front-end dialogue system for clients in restaurants,
or for those at home who use telephone for ordering.
--- End of Abstract ---
I do not know if this short abstract would be enough for you to
get an idea of the system, so in case you need any further
information, or in case you have any comment or remark, please
let me know.
I look forward to hearing from you soon. Thanks again.
Sincerely,
Ramon Lopez-Cozar Delgado
Electronics and Computer Technology Dept.
University of Granada
18071 Granada
Spain.
Topic 2: CFP: COLING-ACL 98 -- Call for Workshop and tutorial proposals
From: pete(at)sharp(dot)co(dot)uk (Pete Whitelock)
The Programme Commitee would like to receive proposals for tutorials
and workshops to be held in conjunction with the Joint COLING-ACL
Conference.
TUTORIALS
Tutorials will be held on Sunday 9th August, the day preceeding the
conference proper. Tutorials may address any topic of current or
possible future relevance to the field. The duration of each tutorial
should be approximately 3 hours. Those interested in presenting a
tutorial should send a 300-500 word proposal to Pete Whitelock,
pete(at)sharp(dot)co(dot)uk, describing the relevance of the subject matter to
the conference participants, an outline of the tutorial's content, and
a short statement of the proposer's relevant experience.
WORKSHOPS
Workshops will be held on Saturday 15th and Sunday 16th of August,
immediately following the conference proper. Workshops will normally
be one day in length, but may extend to a second day if
required. Those interested in organising a workshop should send a
brief proposal to Pete Whitelock, pete(at)sharp(dot)co(dot)uk, describing the
topic of the workshop and its relevance to Coling, the approximate
number of participants expected and the likely duration of the
workshop, and a short statement of the proposer's relevant experience.
It is hoped that it will be possible to accomodate all proposals for
tutorials and workshops, but the room space available will place an
upper limit on the number. Since proposals will be accepted primarily
on a first-come first-served basis, proposers are encouraged to submit
as early as possible. Early submission is particularly important if
workshop presentations are to be refereed. In any event, no proposals
will be accepted after the final deadline of Dec 31st.
Topic 3: CFP: Book -- Advances in Scalable Text Summarization
From: Inderjeet Mani <mani(at)azrael(dot)mitre(dot)org>
With the explosion in the quantity of on-line information in recent
years, demand for text summarization technology appears to be
growing. Commercial companies are starting to offer text summarization
capabilities, often bundled with information retrieval tools. Further,
there is considerable interest in mining information from large
databases, many of which have text content. These recent developments
offer opportunities as well as substantial challenges for research in
text summarization. In general, such developments have created a
practical need for summarization systems which scale up when applied
to large volumes of unrestricted text.
In response to this challenge, a number of new approaches have
emerged. Traditionally, shallower techniques have been leveraged to
achieve the desired levels of scalability and domain-independence, but
recent advances in robust information extraction as well as approaches
integrating statistical and symbolic techniques have opened up
possibilities for more powerful yet scalable summarization techniques.
With the renewed interest in text summarization, another challenge is
to develop rigorous criteria to help evaluate different methodologies,
in order to better advise investors and the interested public on
technology choices. This state-of-the-art collection will bring
together research aimed at advancing the scientific frontiers of text
summarization to meet these new practical challenges and
opportunities. **The principal aim of this book is to collect some
of the key results to date and to identify promising research issues
for the benefit of students, corporate researchers, and research
program managers interested in learning more about this field.**
Submissions are invited on original research in all aspects of text
summarization, including, but not limited to:
TECHNIQUES
* Statistical, linguistic, and knowledge-based techniques in intelligent summarization
* Text summary generation
* Capturing cohesion and coherence relations in text
* Exploiting advances in information extraction in summarization
* Exploiting domain knowledge in scalable text summarization
* Combining scalability with abstraction in summarization
* Tailoring summaries to particular users, tasks, and contexts
NEW PROBLEMS
* Multilingual summarization
* Multimodal summarization
* Multi-document/multi-source summarization
FUNDAMENTAL ISSUES in THEORY AND PRACTICE
* Classification of summarization systems
* Theoretical foundations, including cognitive models
* Evaluation methods and metrics
* Summarization in operational contexts: requirements, architectures, lessons learned
Criteria for selection will include clarity, originality, relevance,
and significance of results. The papers will be reviewed by a
committee of experts. In addition, authors will be asked to relate the
content of their papers to other related papers in the book. In
addition to new contributions, the book will also include reprints of
classic papers in the field.
Submission Information
DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION: December 30, 1997
PAPERS REVIEWED BY: March 15, 1997
DRAFT TO PUBLISHERS: July 15, 1997
Interested authors should submit to the address below three copies of
a previously unpublished paper no more than 20 pages long,
single-spaced, addressing a specific text summarization issue or
reporting novel methods and results. Authors should indicate whether
the paper is being submitted elsewhere. Please include your name and
address on the first page.
For more information, please contact:
Dr. Inderjeet Mani
The MITRE Corporation, W640
11493 Sunset Hills Road
Reston, Virginia 22090, USA
Internet: imani(at)mitre(dot)org
Phone: (703) 883-6149
Fax: (703) 883-1379
Topic 4: CFP: ETAI -- Electronic Transactions on AI
From: Elisabeth Andre <Elisabeth.Andre(at)dfki(dot)de>
AREA: Intelligent User Interfaces
SCOPE:
The ETAI is organized into several specialized areas. The area of Intelligent User Interfaces focuses on design principles, methodologies and tools that make man-machine communication easier and more effective. For ETAI, papers are invited from the whole spectrum of Intelligent User Interfaces research. Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to:
- knowledge-based tools and environments for user interface design and development
- adaptive and customizable user interfaces
- user modeling
- intelligent interface agents and agent-based interaction
- knowledge-based presentation of information
- intelligent interfaces to the internet, for tasks such as design, presentation, access and navigation
- natural-language and multimodal interfaces
- intelligent front-ends to multimedia, hypermedia and virtual environments
- architectures for intelligent user interfaces
- evaluation and analysis of intelligent user interfaces applications, such as tutoring and advisory systems, computer-supported collaborative work, computer-aided design, decision-support systems, information kiosks
CONTRIBUTIONS:
The ETAI welcomes contributions for the first issues of the area:
Intelligent User Interfaces. Beside high-quality papers, we seek
conference and workshop reports, book reviews and links to software
that is available and can be run over the net. Submission guidelines
can be found under http://www.ida.liu.se/ext/etai/submission.html
For more details contact the area editor (address see below).
AREA EDITOR: Elisabeth Andre, DFKI, Germany
AREA EDITORIAL COMMITTEE (as of September 1997):
Niels Ole Bernsen, Odense University, Denmark
Peter Brusilovsky, CMU, USA
Lynda Hardmann, CWI, NL
James Lester, North Carolina State University, USA
Joe Marks, MERL, USA
Chris Mellish, University of Edinburgh, UK
Ehud Reiter, University of Aberdeen, UK
Constantine Stephanidis, FORTH, Greece
Oliviero Stock, IRST, Italy
Annika Waern, SICS, Sweden
WHAT IS THE ETAI?
The ETAI represents a novel approach to electronic publishing. We do
not simply inherit the patterns from the older technology, but instead
we have rethought the structure of scientific communication in order
to make the best possible use of international computer networks as
well as electronic document and database technologies.
Articles submitted to the ETAI are reviewed in a 2-phase process.
After submission, an article is open to public online discussion in
the area's News Journal. After the discussion period of three months,
and after the authors have had a chance to revise it, the article is
reviewed for acceptance by the ETAI, using confidential peer review
and journal level quality criteria. This second phase is expected to
be rather short because of the preceding discussion and possible
revision. During the entire reviewing process, the article is already
published in a "First Publication Archive", which compares to
publication as a departmental tech report.
Compared to mailgroups, the News Journals offer a more persistent and
reputable forum of discussion. Discussion contributions are preserved
in such a way that they are accessible and referencable for the
future. In other words, they also are to be considered as "published".
One additional type of contributions in News Journals is for links to
software that is available and can be run over the net. This is
particularly valuable for software which can be run directly from a
web page.
The creation of bibliographies, finally, is a traditional activity in
research, but it is impractical in paper-based media since by their
very nature, bibliographies ought to be updated as new articles
arrive. The on-line maintenance of specialized bibliographies within
each of its topic areas is a natural function in the ETAI.
For more details see: http://www.ida.liu.se/ext/etai/
ADDRESS FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:
Elisabeth Andre
DFKI GmbH
Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3
D-66123 Saarbruecken
Germany
Phone: +49 681 302 5267
Fax: +49 681 302 5341
email: andre(at)dfki(dot)de
Topic 5: CFP: TAPD'98 -- Tabulation in Parsing and Deduction
From: Eric Villemonte de la Clergerie <Eric.Clergerie(at)inria(dot)fr>
MOTIVATIONS
Tabulation techniques are becoming a common way to deal with highly
redundant computations occurring, for instance, in Natural Language
Processing, Logic Programming, Deductive Databases, or Abstract
Interpretation, and related to phenomena such as ambiguity,
non-determinism or domain ordering.
Different approaches, including for example Chart Parsing, Magic-Set
rewriting, Memoization, and Dynamic Programming, have been proposed
whose key idea is to keep traces of computations to achieve
computation sharing and loop detection. In addition, tabulation also
offers more flexibility to investigate new parsing or proof strategies
and to represent ambiguity by shared structures (Shared Proof or Parse
Forest).
The first objective of this workshop is to compare and discuss these
different approaches. The second objective is to present tabulation
and tabular systems to potential users in different application
areas. One major area of application is Natural Language Processing,
where tabulation has been known for a long time (CKY, Earley, chart
parsing). However, sophisticated tabulation techniques are required
for the more and more complex grammatical formalisms now used in NLP
(unification, constraints, structural complexity). Contributions in
other areas, such as picture parsing, genome analysis, or complete
deduction techniques, are also encouraged.
TOPICS (not exclusive)
-- Tabulation Techniques:
Chart Parsing, Tabling, Memoization, Dynamic Programming, Magic Set, Generic Fix-Point Algorithms
-- Applications:
Parsing, Generation, Logic Programming, Deductive Databases,Abstract Interpretation, Deduction in Knowledge Bases, Theorem Proving
-- Static Analysis:
Improving tabular evaluation
-- Parsing or resolution strategies.
-- Efficiency issues:
Dealing with large tables (structure sharing, term indexing), Execution models, Exploiting the domain ordering (subsumption).
-- Shared structures (parse or proof forest):
Formal analysis, representation and processing.
WORKSHOP FORMAT: The workshop will be a 2-day event that provides a
forum for individual presentations of the accepted contributions as
well as group discussions.
SUBMISSION PROCEDURE: Authors are invited to submit before December
12, 1997 a 4-page position paper or abstract concerning a theoretical
contribution or a system to be presented. Due to tight time
constraints, submissions will be handled exclusively electronically
(LaTeX, PostScript, dvi or ascii format). Submissions should include
the title, authors' names, affiliations, addresses, and e-mail.
Submissions must be sent to Eric.Clergerie(at)inria(dot)fr
The collection of selected papers will be available at the
workshop. After the workshop, authors are invited to submit a full
paper for publication in a special issue of the Journal of Logic
Programming oriented towards Natural Language Processing. The authors
should note that this second submission will be treated according to
the standards of the Journal of Logic Programming.
SCHEDULE:
| Submission of contributions: | 12 December 1997 |
| Notification of acceptance: | 26 January 1998 |
| Final versions due: | 20 February 1998 |
PROGRAM COMMITTEE:
| Bernard Lang (chairman) | -- INRIA, France |
| Francois Bry | -- University of Munich, Germany |
| Eric de la Clergerie | -- INRIA, France |
| Marc Dymetman | -- Xerox, France |
| Mark Johnson | -- Brown University, USA |
| Baudouin Le Charlier | -- University of Namur, Belgium |
| Mark Jan Nederhof | -- University of Groningen, NL |
| David Rosenblueth | -- University of Mexico, Mexico |
| Manuel Vilares | -- University of La Coruna, Spain |
| David S. Warren | -- University of New York at Stony Brook, USA |
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
| Francois Barthelemy | -- CNAM, Paris, France |
| Eric de la Clergerie | -- INRIA, Rocquencourt, France |
| Bernard Lang | -- INRIA, Rocquencourt, France |
| Manuel Vilares | -- University of La Coruna, Spain |
LOCAL ORGANIZATION:
| Claudie Thenault | --INRIA, Relations Exterieures, France |
ORGANIZATION: Up-to-date information will be available at
For request, please contact:
| Eric de la Clergerie | |
| INRIA Rocquencourt | Tel: +33 1 39 63 54 10 |
| Domaine de Voluceau - BP 105 | Fax: +33 1 39 63 53 30 |
| 78153 Le Chesnay Cedex | E-mail: Eric.Clergerie(at)inria(dot)fr |
Topic 6: CFP: SIGDAT'98 -- Very Large Corpora
From: Eugene Charniak <ec(at)cs(dot)brown(dot)edu>
WHEN: August 15-16, 1998 (immediately following ACL/COLING-98)
WHERE: University of Montreal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION:
As in past years, the workshop will offer a general forum for new research in
corpus-based and statistical natural language processing. Areas of interest
include (but are not limited to):
- robust parsing, phrase structure analysis
- part of speech tagging
- term and name identification
- word sense disambiguation
- morphological analysis
- anaphora resolution
- event categorization
- discourse structure identification
- alignment of parallel texts and bilingual terminology
- language modelling
- lexicography
- machine translation
- spelling and grammar correction
PROGRAM CHAIR:
| Eugene Charniak | Brown University |
SPONSOR: SIGDAT (ACL's special interest group for linguistic data and corpus-based approaches to NLP)
FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION:
Only hard-copy submissions will be accepted. Authors should submit
six (6) copies of their full-length paper (3500-8000 words) to Eugene
Charniak at the Johns Hopkins University address below. Authors
should consult the primary call for papers in February for updated
specifications.
SCHEDULE:
| Submission Deadline: | April 20, 1998 |
| Notification Date: | June 1, 1998 |
| Camera ready copy due: | June 22, 1998 |
CONTACT:
Eugene Charniak
e-mail ec(at)cs(dot)brown(dot)edu
Address: Before February 1, 1998 and After June 1, 1998
Department of Computer Science
Brown University
Providence RI 02912-1910
Address: From February 1, 1998 until June 1, 1998
Department of Computer Science
Johns Hopkins University
NEB 224, 3400 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21218-2694
Topic 7: CFP: FOIS'98 -- Formal Ontology in Information Systems
From: Alessandro Artale <artale(at)irst(dot)itc(dot)it>
Research on ontology is becoming increasingly widespread in the computer
science community. Its importance has been recognized in fields as diverse
as qualitative modelling of physical systems, natural language processing,
knowledge engineering, information integration, database design, geographic
information science, and intelligent information access. Various workshops
addressing the engineering aspects of ontology have been held in the past
few years. However, ontology - by its very nature - ought to be a unifying
discipline. Insights in this field have potential impacts on the whole area
of information systems. In order to provide a solid general foundation for
this work, it is therefore important to focus on the common scientific
principles and open problems arising from current tools, methodologies, and
applications of ontology. The purpose of this conference is to take a first
step in this direction.
As the heterogeneity of the program committee indicates, the conference will have a strongly interdisciplinary character. Expected participants include computer science practitioners as well as linguists, logicians, and philosophers. Although the primary focus of the conference is on theoretical issues, methodological proposals as well as papers addressing concrete applications from a well-founded theoretical perspective are welcome.
TOPICS
Examples of problem areas that may be addressed at the conference include:
THEORETICAL ISSUES
* Foundations:
parthood, constitution, identity, integrity, dependence, causality
* Kinds of entity:
particulars vs. universals, continuants vs. occurrents,
abstracta vs. concreta, attributes, relations, qualities,
quantities, tropes or moments, states, situations, environments
* Matter, space, time, motion, change
* Natural kinds, organisms, artifacts
* The ontology of social reality:
legal and administrative entities, artistic expressions
* The ontology of information and information processing:
representations, signs, software products, virtual reality, cyberspace
* Top-level ontological taxonomies:
new proposals or critical analyses of existing ones
* Cognitive foundations of ontological distinctions
* Kinds of ontology:
top-level ontologies, domain ontologies, task ontologies,application ontologies
* Ontological commitment
APPLICATION AREAS
* Knowledge organization, integration and standardization
* Intelligent information access
* Information systems design
* Knowledge engineering
* Conceptual modelling
* Qualitative modelling
* Lexical semantics
* Terminology integration
* Product knowledge integration
* Geographic information systems
* Legal information systems
TOOLS AND METHODOLOGIES
* Ontological and linguistic instruments for conceptual analysis
* Methodologies for ontology development, maintenance, and integration
SUBMISSION OF PAPERS
Papers will be selected on the basis of a rigorous review of full paper
contributions. Authors should submit 5 copies to the Conference Chair by
December 19, 1997. Papers received after the deadline or not conforming to
the submission format will be rejected without review.
Submitted papers must be unpublished and substantially different from papers
under review. Papers that have been or will be presented at small
workshops/symposia whose proceedings are available only to attendees may be
submitted.
Each submission should include a title page containing the title, author(s),
affiliation(s), submitting author's mailing address, telephone number, fax
number and e-mail address, as well as an abstract and keywords indicating
the topic areas listed above that best describe the
contribution. Submissions must be at most 16 pages, excluding the title page
and the bibliography, with a maximum of 38 lines per page and an average of
75 characters per line (corresponding to the LaTeX article-style, 12pt)
using LaTeX or Microsoft Word. Papers should be sent in 5 copies. Fax or
electronic submissions will not be accepted.
Those proposing to submit papers must complete the form at the WWW address
<http://mnemosyne.itc.it:1024/fois98/> by Monday December 15, 1997. If
intending authors do not have WWW access, then an e-mail message must be
sent to <fois98(at)irst(dot)itc(dot)it> by the same date, giving details of any
proposed submission in the following format:
Title: <Title of paper>
Author: <Last name, initials>
Author: <Insert as many more author lines as necessary>
...
CorrespondingAuthor: <name of corresponding author>
CorrespondingEmail: <email of corresponding author>
CorrespondingAddress: <address of corresponding author>
Keywords: <insert list of keywords, preferably chosen from above list>
Abstract: <insert short abstract, max 200 words>
EndAbstract:
Should intending authors not have e-mail access, the information above
should be sent by letter to arrive to the Conference Chair by Monday
December 15, 1997.
The proceedings will be published in the IOS-Press (Amsterdam) bookseries
'Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications' and will be
available at the conference. Final camera-ready copies of the accepted
papers will be due by March 9, 1998. Authors will be responsible for
preparing the final camera-ready in conformity with the formatting
requirements laid down by the publisher (see instructions at the FOIS'98 web
page http://mnemosyne.itc.it:1024/fois98/submissions.html). Final papers
will be allowed at most fourteen (14) pages in the conference proceedings
style (corresponding to approximately 20 article-style LaTex pages).
SCHEDULE
| Monday, December | 15, 1997 Electronic abstracts due |
| Friday, December | 19, 1997 Papers due |
| Friday, February | 6, 1998 Results sent to authors |
| Monday, March | 9, 1998 Final papers due |
| Saturday-Monday, June | 6-8, 1998 FOIS'98 |
CONFERENCE COMMITTEE
| CONFERENCE CHAIR | ORGANIZATION CHAIR |
| Nicola Guarino | Alessandro Artale |
| National Research Council | ITC-IRST |
| LADSEB-CNR | Povo, I-38050 Trento, Italy |
| Corso Stati Uniti, 4 | e-mail: artale(at)irst(dot)itc(dot)it |
| I-35127 Padova, Italy | |
| e-mail: guarino(at)ladseb(dot)pd(dot)cnr(dot)it |
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
| Alessandro Artale - Enrico Franconi | (ITC-IRST, Trento, Italy) |
| Nicola Guarino - Claudio Masolo | (LADSEB-CNR, Padova, Italy) |
| Luca Pazzi - Sonia Bergamaschi | (Univ. of Modena, Italy) |
| Geri Steve - Aldo Gangemi | (ITBM-CNR, Roma, Italy) |
| Cristiano Castelfranchi - Rino Falcone | (IP-CNR, Roma, Italy) |
Topic 8: CFP: Discourse Relations and Discourse Markers -- Coling/ACL'98
From: Eduard Hovy <hovy(at)ISI(dot)EDU>
The notion of discourse relation has received many 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:
* What are sound methodologies for comparing similar discourse markers
(contrastive studies, distribution analyses, etc.)?
* What are sound methodologies for relating discourse relations with
potential realizations?
* Are there discourse relations that are *always* lexically signalled?
Are there any that are *never* lexically signalled?
* What non-lexical (i.e., syntactic or prosodic) means are used to signal a relation?
* In production, how does one decide whether to signal a relation at all?
* In production, how does one motivate a choice among candidate signals for a given relation?
* In production, how does the choice of signal interact with other decisions (in particular, those of linearizing some tree or graph structure)?
* In analysis, is it possible to reliably infer discourse relations from surface cues?
* In analysis, how can one disambiguate polysemous signals such as "and", "since" (temporal or causal) etc.?
* What are useful lexical representations of discourse markers, for both analysis and production?
* 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?
* Are there significant differences between realizations in spoken and written language?
* How do individual languages differ in terms of any of the above issues?
Organizing committee
The workshop is organized by
Manfred Stede (Technical University, Berlin)
Leo Wanner (University of Stuttgart)
Eduard Hovy (ISI/USC, Marina del Rey)
This call for papers as well as future information on the workshop can
be found at http://www.cs.tu-berlin.de/~marker/aclcolingws.html
Timetable
Deadline for electronic submissions: March 10, 1998
Deadline for hardcopy submissions: March 13 (arrival date)
Notification of acceptance: May 1, 1998
Final manuscripts due: June 12, 1998
Topic 9: CFP: INLG'98 -- International Workshop on NL Generation
From: Graeme Hirst <gh(at)cs(dot)toronto(dot)edu>
(For more information, visit http://logos.uwaterloo.ca/~inlg98 )
The 9th biennial Workshop on Natural Language Generation will be held
in the scenic town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, near Niagara Falls, in
Ontario, Canada, on 5-7 August 1998.
The INLG workshop is the principal gathering for researchers in natural
language generation, providing a pleasant atmosphere for stimulating
and informative talks on all aspects of the topic. The workshop
attracts a healthy mixture of researchers from both universities and
research institutes, graduate students, and visitors from related
fields such as machine translation, multimedia presentation planning,
and parsing. About 65 people are expected to attend the workshop,
which traditionally has had a very diverse international
representation.
The town of Niagara-on-the-Lake is in the heart of one of Canada's
major fruit-growing and wine regions, and is 30 minutes' drive from
Niagara Falls. It is one of the oldest settlements in Canada, with
many fine examples of Victorian architecture. Niagara-on-the-Lake
bills itself as the prettiest town in Canada, and many would agree: its
main streets are quaint and picturesque, with many interesting shops,
cafes, and restaurants. It is also the home of the Shaw Festival, one
of the top North American repertory theatre companies.
The workshop is sponsored by the Association for Computational
Linguistics and ACL SIGGEN (Special Interest Group on Natural Language
Generation).
The workshop is 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
(approximately 4 hours).
TOPICS OF INTEREST
Of interest are papers on all topics relating to the automated
production of natural language, including but not limited to: discourse
structure; grammar; lexis and lexical choice; text planning and schemas
(macroplanning); sentence planning (microplanning); semantics and
knowledge representation; register, genre, and pragmatics; generator
architecture; realization; generator applications; system descriptions;
generator evaluation; planning of text formatting; generation in
multimedia planning and presentation systems; speech synthesis.
Also welcomed are demonstrations of generation systems, or modules of
systems, running either via the Web or on a Sun computer to be provided
at the workshop.
REQUIREMENTS FOR SUBMISSION
Papers should describe unique work not published before. They should
emphasize the creative and interesting aspects of the work, but should
also describe empirical validation and testing as much as possible.
Papers that are being submitted to other conferences must state this
fact on the first page.
FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION
Theoretical papers must not exceed 10 pages, including title,
references, figures, etc. Please use no smaller than 11pt font, with
margins of 1 inch / 2.5 cm all around. Papers not satisfying the
specified length and formatting requirements will be rejected without
review.
System demonstrations will be reviewed as well. Please send an
outline, clearly marked as a system demonstration in the heading, that
describes the demonstration, including if possible screen shots.
Outlines may not exceed 4 pages, all included, using font no smaller
than 11pt and margins of 1 in / 2.5 cm all around. Outlines not
satisfying the specified length and formatting requirements will be
rejected without review.
ELECTRONIC SUBMISSION
Electronic submissions should be in the form of a PostScript file.
This file should be sent to hovy(at)isi(dot)edu, with the subject field "INLG
submission".
SUBMISSION IN HARD COPY
Hardcopy submission is possible too. Five copies of the paper or
demonstration outline should be sent to:
Eduard Hovy, INLG-98
Information Sciences Institute
4676 Admiralty Way
Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695
U.S.A.
DEADLINES
Electronic submissions must be received by 28 January 1998, so that
they can be printed and checked for completeness. Electronic
submissions will be accepted only if they can be printed at ISI.
Hardcopy submissions must be received by 1 February 1998. Late papers
will be returned unreviewed.
Notification of receipt will be e-mailed to the first author (or
designated author) soon after receipt. Authors will be notified of
acceptance before 10 March 1998. Camera-ready copies of final papers
prepared in a format to be specified, preferably using a laser printer,
must be received by 15 June 1998, along with a signed copyright release
statement.
WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS
The workshop is being 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 workshop questions:
Chrysanne DiMarco, cdimarco(at)logos(dot)uwaterloo(dot)ca, phone +1 519 888 4443
General paper-submission questions:
Eduard Hovy, hovy(at)isi(dot)edu, phone +1 310 822 1510 x731
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Eduard Hovy, USC/ISI, Marina del Rey (chair)
Stephan Busemann, DFKI, Saarbruecken
Susan Haller, University of Wisconsin-Parkside
Helmut Horacek, University of the Saarland
Xiaorong Huang, Formal Systems, Toronto
Kristiina Jokinen, ATR, Kyoto
Guy Lapalme, University of Montreal
Elisabeth Maier, DFKI, Saarbruecken
Chris Mellish, University of Edinburgh
Marie Meteer, BBN
Jon Oberlander, University of Edinburgh
Cecile Paris, CSIRO, Sydney
Owen Rambow, CoGenTex Inc., Ithaca
Ehud Reiter, University of Aberdeen
Elke Teich, Macquarie University, Sydney
Marilyn Walker, AT&T Labs Research, Florham Park
For more information, visit the INLG-98 Website:
http://logos.uwaterloo.ca/~inlg98
Topic 10: JOB: ITRI, Brighton -- Research opportunities
From: Donia Scott <donia.scott(at)itri(dot)bton(dot)ac(dot)uk>
<http://www.itri.bton.ac.uk/posts/summer97.html>
ITRI, University of Brighton
The Information Technology Research Institute (ITRI) at the University
of Brighton, is a major centre for research in Computational Linguistics
and Language Engineering. Our principal research areas are natural
language generation, lexicons, corpora and human computer interfaces.
Our current research programme addresses the following theoretical
issues: anaphora, architectures for natural language generation,
automated interface design, constraint based reasoning, controlled
languages, corpora, diagrammatic reasoning, discourse, document design,
integrating text and graphics, lexical knowledge bases, lexical
representation, multilinguality, natural language interfaces, text
generation, underspecification, word sense disambiguation.
The Institute is comprised of around twenty staff and students: research
professors, readers, research fellows, research assistants, postgraduate
students and technical and administrative staff. We also regularly host
visiting researchers from other universities worldwide.
The Institute is housed in a self-contained brand new office suite with
excellent computing and network facilities and full administrative
support. As a dedicated research department, we place great emphasis on
career management and development, and participation in the wider
research community.
We are currently recruiting to fill up to six fixed-term research posts
over the next few months, ranging from research officers to principal
research fellows for up to three or five years in duration. A number of
PhD studentships may also be available.
If you are interested in working with us, we would be interested in
hearing from you. Please address all enquiries, enclosing a CV if
possible, to the address below. Suitable potential candidates will be
sent further information. Meanwhile, more detailed information regarding
the Institute is available on our web site.
Ms Vivienne Wicks, Research Administrator, Information Technology
Research Institute, University of Brighton, Lewes Road, Brighton, BN2
4GJ, United Kingdom.
| Tel: +44 1273 642900 | Email: admin(at)itri(dot)brighton(dot)ac(dot)uk |
| Fax: +44 1273 642908 | URL: http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/ |
Topic 11: JOB: ELRA/ELDA
From: elra-elda(at)calva(dot)net (Malin Nilsson)
===============================================
TECHNICAL ASSISTANT at ELRA/ELDA in Paris
===============================================
ELRA, the European Language Resources Association, has an immediate vacancy
for a Technical assistant for ELDA, its Paris-based distribution agency.
ELRA, a non-profit association registered in Luxembourg, was established in
1995 and receives financial support from the European Commission and
national governments to promote the development and exploitation of Language
Resources - monolingual and multilingual lexica, text corpora, speech
databases and terminology - in Europe. Enjoying strong backing from the
language engineering industry, ELRA's operations are conducted by the CEO
and his team at ELDA.
The role of the new technical assistant will be to contribute to the work of
a small support team in the development of the infrastructure for the
collection, validation, and licensing of LR and in the interactions with the
relevant players (i.e. producers, owners and users of LR who may be in the
industrial, commercial or academic world; and governmental and
non-governmental agencies), with a particular focus on textual and
terminological resources.
This position yields excellent opportunities for young, creative, and
motivated candidates wishing to participate actively in
establishing/building the European Union Language Engineering field. Terms
and conditions of employment are subject to negotiation, but will be
commensurated with the responsibilities of the post and will include
performance-based incentives. ELRA will pay relocation expenses for the
selected candidate. This is initially a one-year appointment with a strong
possibility of a further two years or permanent employment.
Qualifications:
- Excellent track record in Language Engineering and related fields.
- Technical experience in design and development of Language Engineering
solutions (preference for candidats with experience in the fields of written
text and/or terminology).
- Experience in collecting, validating, and marketing language resources,
software or other forms of intellectual property. =09
- Experience in packaging language resources for distribution using=
CD-ROM,
ftp facilities, etc.. will be a plus.
- Citizenship of, or residency papers for an EU country.
- Ability to work in at least two European languages including English.
Applicants should send a cover letter addressing the points listed above,
together with a current Curriculum Vitae, to:
ELRA Distribution Agency (ELDA), Dr. Khalid Choukri, 87, Avenue d'Italie
F-75013 Paris, France
Fax +33 1 45 86 44 88; e-mail: elra(at)calvanet(dot)calvacom(dot)fr
For more information on ELRA, see:http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html
(English) or /ELRA/fr/home.html (French)
Initial applications by e-mail will be accepted with follow-up by post/fax.
eof