11.0289 conferences

Humanist Discussion Group (humanist@kcl.ac.uk)
Mon, 22 Sep 1997 07:32:15 +0100 (BST)

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 11, No. 280.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>

[1] From: "David L. Gants" <dgants@parallel.park.uga.edu> (142)
Subject: 1st Int Conf on Lang & Resources Eval CFP

[2] From: "David L. Gants" <dgants@parallel.park.uga.edu> (119)
Subject: 9th INLG Workshop Call for Papers

--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun, 21 Sep 1997 14:22:26 -0400 (EDT)
From: "David L. Gants" <dgants@parallel.park.uga.edu>
Subject: 1st Int Conf on Lang & Resources Eval CFP

>> From: Priscilla Rasmussen <rasmusse@cs.rutgers.edu>

*PRELIMINARY ANNOUNCEMENT*

FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE RESOURCES AND EVALUATION

GRANADA, SPAIN, 28-30 MAY 1998

The First International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation has
been initiated by ELRA and is organized in cooperation with other
associations and consortia, including EAFT, EAGLES, EDR, ELSNET, ESCA,
FRANCIL, LDC, PAROLE, TELRI, etc., and with the sponsorship of major
national and international organizations, including ARPA, the European
Commission - DG XIII and the NSF. Cooperation and co-sponsorship with other
institutions is currently being sought.

CONFERENCE TOPIC

In the framework of the Information Society, the pervasive character of
language technologies and their relevance to practically all the fields of
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has been widely recognized.

Two issues are currently considered particularly relevant for promoting
international cooperation: the availability of language resources and the
methods for the evaluation of resources, technologies and products.

The term language resources (LR) refers to sets of language data and
descriptions in machine readable form, used specifically for building,
improving or evaluating natural language and speech algorithms or systems,
and in general, as core resources for the software localization and language
services industries, for language studies, electronic publishing,
international transactions, subject-area specialists and end users.
Examples of linguistic resources are written and spoken corpora,
computational lexicons, grammars, terminology databases, basic software
tools for the acquisition, preparation, collection, management,
customization and use of these and other resources.

The relevance of evaluation in Language Engineering is increasingly
recognized. This involves assessment of the state-of-the-art for a given
technology, measuring the progress achieved within a program, comparing
different approaches to a given problem and choosing the best solution,
knowing its advantages and drawbacks, assessment of the availability of
technologies for a given application, and finally product benchmarking. It
accompanies research and development in Human Language Technologies, and has
driven important advances in the recent past in various aspects of both
written and spoken language processing. Although the evaluation paradigm
has been studied and used in large national and international programs,
including the US ARPA HLT program, EU Language Engineering projects, the
Francophone Aupelf-Uref program and others, particularly in the localization
industry (LISA and LRC), it is still subject to substantial unresolved basic
research problems.

The aim of this Conference is to provide an overview of the
state-of-the-art, discuss problems and opportunities, exchange information
on ongoing and planned activities, present language resources and their
applications, discuss evaluation methodologies and demonstrate evaluation
tools, explore possibilities and promote initiatives for international
cooperation in the areas mentioned above.

CONFERENCE TOPICS

The following non-exhaustive list gives some examples of topics which could
be addressed by papers submitted to the Conference:

- Issues in the design, construction and use of LR (theoretical & best
practice)
- Guidelines, standards, specifications, models for LR.
- Organizational issues in the construction, distribution and use of LR.
- Methods, tools, procedures for the acquisition, creation, management,
access, distribution, use of LR
- Legal aspects and problems in the construction, access and use of LR
- Availability and use of generic vs. task/domain-specific LR
- Methods for the extraction and acquisition of knowledge (e.g., terms,
lexical information, language modeling) from LR
- Monolingual vs. multilingual LR
- National and international activities and projects
- LR and the needs/opportunities of the emerging multimedia cultural industry.
- Industrial production of LR
- Integration of various modalities in LR (speech, vision, language)
- Exploitation of LRs in different types of applications (language
technology, information retrieval, vocal interfaces, electronic commerce, etc.)
- Industrial LR requirements and the community's response
- Analysis of user needs for LR
- Evaluation, validation, quality assurance of LR
- Benchmarking of systems and products; resources for benchmarking and
evaluation
- Priorities, perspectives, strategies in the field of LR - national and
international policies
- Needs, possibilities, forms, initiatives of/for international cooperation
- Evaluation in written language processing (text retrieval, terminology
extraction, message understanding, text alignment, machine translation,
morphosyntactic tagging, parsing, text understanding, summarization,
localization, etc)
- Evaluation in spoken language processing (speech recognition and
understanding, voice dictation, oral dialog, speech synthesis, speech
coding, speaker and language recognition, etc)
- Evaluation of document processing (document recognition, on-line and
off-line machine and handwritten character recognition, etc)
- Evaluation of (multimedia) document retrieval and search systems
- Qualitative and perceptive evaluation
- Evaluation of products and applications
- Blackbox, glassbox and diagnostic evaluation of systems
- Situated evaluation of applications
- Evaluation methodologies, protocols and measures
- Mechanisms of LR distribution and marketing
- Economics of LRs

IMPORTANT DATES

1. Submission of summaries for proposed papers: (approximately 800 words):
1 December 1997

E-mail submission in ASCII form is encouraged. Otherwise, five hard copies
should be submitted.

- E-mail submissions should be sent to

lrec@ilc.pi.cnr.it

- Postal submissions should be sent to

Antonio Zampolli - LREC
Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale del CNR
via della Faggiola, 32
56100, Pisa, ITALY

2. Notification of acceptance: 15 February 1998

3. Final version of the paper: 20 April 1998

The papers accepted will be included in the Conference Proceedings.

PROGRAM

The program will include both papers and poster sessions. In addition, the
Program will also include invited speakers, and a number of panels on the
major themes of the Conference.

In particular, it is planned to organize a panel on various aspects and
perspectives of international cooperation, with the participation of
representatives of the major European, North American and Asian sponsoring
agencies.

WORKSHOPS

Half-day pre- and post-conference Workshops can be organized, at the
request of a presenter, to permit the discussion and debate of topics of
current interest.

The format of each Workshop will be determined by the Workshop organizer,
who will set any necessary deadlines for the participants. The next
announcement, to be circulated in September, will provide guidelines on how
to submit a proposal for a Workshop to the Program Committee.

SYSTEMS AND LR DEMONSTRATIONS

Various platforms will be available for language resources and tools
presentations and unreferenced systems demonstrations. Organizations
interested in presenting systems should contact the local demonstration
organizers, whose address will be provided in the next announcement.

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE

The full composition of the Scientific Committee will be listed in the next
announcement.

The Conference Chair is Antonio Zampolli (Istituto di Linguistica
Computazionale del CNR and President of ELRA, via della Faggiola, 32, Pisa
56100, Italy).

The Secretariat of the Conference is provided by Khalid Choukri (ELRA, 87,
Avenue d'Italie, F-75013, Paris, FRANCE).

The conference organizing committee consists of: Harald Hoege (Siemens,
Munich, Germany). Bente Maegaard (CST, Copenhagen, Denmark), Joseph Mariani
(LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France), Angel Martin-Municio (President of the Real
Academia de Ciencias, Madrid, Spain), Antonio Zampolli (Istituto di
Linguistica Computazionale, Pisa, Italy).

--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun, 21 Sep 1997 14:16:00 -0400 (EDT)
From: "David L. Gants" <dgants@parallel.park.uga.edu>
Subject: 9th INLG Workshop Call for Papers

>> From: Priscilla Rasmussen <rasmusse@cs.rutgers.edu>

=============================
9th International Workshop on
NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION

5-7 August 1998

Prince of Wales Hotel
Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada

CALL FOR PAPERS

(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@isi.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@logos.uwaterloo.ca, phone +1 519 888 4443

General paper-submission questions:
Eduard Hovy, hovy@isi.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

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