LINGUIST List 9.1715

Fri Dec 4 1998

Calls: Computational Lin, Computational Lin

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>



As a matter of policy, LINGUIST discourages the use of abbreviations or acronyms in conference announcements unless they are explained in the text.

Directory

  • Priscilla Rasmussen, Computaional Linguistics
  • Priscilla Rasmussen, Comutational Linguistics-General & Thematic Sessions

    Message 1: Computaional Linguistics

     Date: Wed, 2 Dec 98 15:59:25 EST
    From: Priscilla Rasmussen <rasmussecs.rutgers.edu>
    Subject: Computaional Linguistics


    Call for Tutorial Proposals

    Tutorials Chair:

    Richard Sproat Bell Labs - Lucent Technologies rwsresearch.bell-labs.com

    Call

    The Association for Computaional Linguistics '99 Program Committee invites proposals for the Tutorial Program for ACL '99, to be held at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA, June 20--26, 1999. The tutorials for ACL '99 will be held on June 20th.

    Each tutorial should be well-focused so that its core content can be covered in a three hour tutorial slot (including a 30 minute break). In exceptional cases, 6-hour tutorial slots are possible as well.

    There will be space and time for at most four three-hour tutorials.

    Submission Details

    Proposals for tutorials should contain:

    * A title and brief (< 500 word) content description of the tutorial topic. * The names, postal addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses of the tutorial speakers, with one-paragraph statement of the speaker's(s') research interests and areas of expertise. * Any special requirements for technical needs (computer infrastructure, etc.)

    Proposals should be submitted by electronic mail, in plain ASCII (iso8859-1) text as soon as possible, but no later than December 18th, 1998.

    The subject line should be: "ACL 99 TUTORIAL PROPOSAL".

    PLEASE NOTE: PROPOSALS WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED BY REGULAR MAIL OR FAX.

    Please submit your proposals and any inquiries to:

    Richard Sproat, ACL '99 Tutorials Chair Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies 600 Mountain Avenue, Murray Hill, NJ 07974 USA rwsresearch.bell-labs.com

    Practical Arrangements

    Accepted tutorial speakers must provide descriptions of their tutorials for inclusion in the Conference Registration material by March 1, 1999. The description must be provided in three formats: a latex version that fits onto 1/2 page; an ascii (iso8859-1) version that can be included with the email announcement; an HTML version that can be included on the Conference home page.

    Tutorial speakers will provide tutorial materials, at least containing copies of the overhead sheets used, by May 1, 1999.

    Finances: The current ACL policy is that tutorials are reimbursed at the following rate: $500 per session plus $25 per registrant in the range 21-50 plus $15 per registrant in excess of 50. Note that this is per tutorial, not per presenter: multiple presenters will split the proceeds, the default assumption being an even split. The ACL does not usually cover travel expenses except where the presenter(s) cannot get them through the usual mechanisms: for ACL members we assume that they would be coming to the meeting anyway. For people who are not ACL members, we would expect to pay for costs that they cannot get reimbursed elsewhere.

    Important Dates

    Submission Deadline for Tutorial Proposal: 18 Dec 1998 Notification of acceptance of Tutorial Proposal: 28 Dec 1998 Tutorial descriptions due to Tutorial Chair: 1 Mar 1999 Tutorial course material due to Tutorial Chair: 1 May 1999 Tutorials Date: 20 June 1999

    Message 2: Comutational Linguistics-General & Thematic Sessions

     Date: Wed, 2 Dec 98 15:55:10 EST
    From: Priscilla Rasmussen <rasmussecs.rutgers.edu>
    Subject: Comutational Linguistics-General & Thematic Sessions


    ACL '99 Call for Papers 37th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics 20--26 June, 1999 University of Maryland

    [You may find it easier to read this information on the Web at http://www.mri.mq.edu.au/conf/acl99]

    1. Paper Sessions

    1.1 Topics of Interest

    In a break with tradition, at this year's ACL conference we are experimenting with a new format. The technical sessions of the conference will be of two kinds. There will be General Sessions of the kind that have formed the conference programme in the past; however, there will also be a number of special Thematic Sessions, somewhat like a special issue of a journal, organised around themes proposed by members of the computational linguistics community. Our aim is to incorporate some of the intensity and excitement of the traditional post-conference workshops, without replacing those workshops. The conference structure will mean that the Thematic Sessions will run as parallel sessions, resulting in smaller and more focussed audiences. When you submit a paper to the conference, you will need to consider whether you want to present the paper in the General Sessions or in one of the Thematic Sessions, which are listed below.

    For the General Sessions, papers are invited on substantial, original, and unpublished research on all aspects of computational linguistics, including, but not limited to: pragmatics, discourse, semantics, syntax and the lexicon; phonetics, phonology and morphology; interpreting and generating spoken and written language; linguistic, mathematical and psychological models of language; language-oriented information retrieval and information extraction; corpus-based language modeling; machine translation and translation aids; natural language interfaces and dialogue systems; approaches to coordinating the linguistic with other modalities in multi-media systems; message and narrative understanding systems.

    Papers submitted to the Thematic Sessions are more narrowly targeted at specific topics. The complete list of Thematic Sessions is as follows; further information about each can be found at the indicated URL.

    D1: Dialogue Management in Interactive Spoken Dialogue Systems Chairs: Diane Litman and Marilyn Walker Motivation: The advent of real-time interactive spoken dialogue systems poses special challenges for dialogue management. Topics: evaluation, dialogue strategies, repair, system integration, learning/optimizing system behavior, corpus analysis, robust processing, and the requirements dialogue places on generation, speech recognition and synthesis. http://www.research.att.com/~diane/acl99-theme.html

    D2: Discourse Tagging: Uses, Results and Applications Chairs: Marilyn Walker, Julia Hirschberg and Owen Rambow Motivation: Empirical approaches to discourse processing often rely on tagging texts or dialogues with discourse tags from a wide range of tag sets. Topics: Discourse tagging for training or testing models of discourse structure, reference, translation, speech acts, topic identification, and speech recognition. http://www.research.att.com/~walker/dtag-acl99.html

    D3: Corpus-Based Approaches to Discourse and Dialogue Chair: Nancy Ide This theme treats corpus-based work on any aspect of discourse and dialogue analysis, including co-reference, segmentation, discourse structure, parsing, generation, etc., especially in the light of relevance to practical applications. http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~ide/calls/acl99-discourse.html

    D4: Lexicon and Discourse: Connections through Structure and Semantics Chairs: Laurence Danlos, Alistair Knott, and Bonnie Webber Motivation: With the lexicon becoming a central resource for computing properties of the sentence, one may consider similar gains for computing properties of discourse. Topics: Lexical semantics of discourse connectives and focus particles, discourse and lexical interpretation, lexicalized grammars for discourse. http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~alik/ACLtheme.html

    I1: NLP Techniques for Cross-Language Information Retrieval Chair: Douglas Oard Motivation: Systems that use queries or examples in one natural language to find text or speech in another are becoming increasingly important. Topics: NLP techniques for query translation, cognate matching and interlingual matching techniques, cross-language gisting using summarization or gloss translation. http://www.clis.umd.edu/conferences/acl99clir/

    I2: Exploring the Limits of Shallow Parsing Chair: Gregory Grefenstette Shallow parsing techniques provide a partial analysis of the syntactic structures. Theme covers research into: quantifying identifiable linguistic phenomena in a corpus; evaluating accuracy of dependency relations extracted by shallow parsers; approximation of full parsing with shallow parsers. http://www.xrce.xerox.com/research/mltt/DMHead/ACL99

    I3: Information Extraction from Spoken Language Data Chairs: Lynette Hirschman and David Palmer Motivation: Identifying relevant syntactic and semantic items (such as names, dates, and events) in speech data requires robust processing of misspellings, transcription errors, tokenization ambiguities and disfluencies. Topics: algorithms, architectures, and evaluation techniques for noisy data information extraction http://raven.bu.edu/conferences/ACL-IE99/

    I4: Natural Language Processing for Interactive Information Retrieval Chair: Hinrich Sch|tze This theme solicits papers that use NLP to enable better interactive information retrieval. Examples include query analysis, disambiguation, and classification of queries into semantic hierarchies, but we are especially interested in novel ideas. ftp://parcftp.xerox.com/pub/qca/schuetze/acl99.html

    I5: Robust Sentence-Level Interpretation Chairs: Carolyn Penstein Rose and Alon Lavie In contrast to information extraction and shallow parsing techniques, in this session we focus on robust approaches to full sentence interpretation, with an emphasis on empirical evaluation. Topics: pre-parsing repair, robust parsing, post-parsing repair, and user interaction. http://www.pitt.edu/~rosecp/topic.html

    I6: Topic Detection Chairs: James Allan and Bruce Croft We examine discovering structure and themes across many texts: finding the topics that underlie the text. It includes summarization, theme extraction, TDT detection, concept extraction, high-quality clustering, and related evaluations. http://ciir.cs.umass.edu/acl99

    L1: Parsing of inflective, agglutinative and/or free word order languages Chair: Jan Hajic Parsing of languages displaying non-analytical, non-fixed word order behavior to a large extent poses specific problems which are expected to be addressed. All aspects of dealing with such problems are welcome, including morphological, syntactic and semantic processing. http://ufal.ms.mff.cuni.cz

    L2: MT/NLP for Languages of Low Diffusion Chairs: Doug Jones and Boyan Onyshkevych Motivation: Adequate large-scale MT or other NLP systems do not exist for the bulk of the world's languages, nor are there significant on-line resources for them. Topics: how to build large-scale MT/NLP systems and resources for these other languages; how to leverage minimal resources (including native language expertise)

    L3: Word Segmentation and Lexical Acquisition in Asian Languages Chair: Masaaki Nagata Motivation: Exchange ideas and experiences on word segmentation among Asian researchers as well as between Asian and Western researchers. Topics: Theories and applications of tokenization and dictionary construction techniques for languages that do not put space between words, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Thai. http://www.milab.is.tsukuba.ac.jp/word-seg-acl99

    M1: Automated Analysis and Evaluation of Free Text Chairs: Jill Burstein and Claudia Leacock Motivation: To bring together researchers who are interested in the evaluation of essays and other free text for purposes of assessment and instruction. Topics: Identification and analysis of textual features; generation of feedback to authors; evaluation of system results. http://www.ets.org/research/acl99.html

    M2: The Use of Large-Coverage Lexical Resources for Tagging and Parsing Chair: Max Silberztein Motivation: To present dictionary-based projects and results whose starting point is either machine readable dictionaries, raw lists or large corpora Topics: large-coverage lexical resources, construction of dictionaries, corpus processing http://www.ladl.jussieu.fr/confs/acl99/acl99.html

    M3: Prosody Modelling In NLG/Speech Generation Chairs: Elke Teich and Sandra Williams Motivation: Integrating natural language generation and speech synthesis. Topics: Reconciling syntactic, semantic and prosodic representations; determination of intonation focus and contour according to context; adaptations of NLG architectures for speech generation. http://www.mri.mq.edu.au/~swilliam/acl99theme/

    M4: Design, Implementation, and Uses of Controlled Languages Chairs: Tony Hartley and Cecile Paris Motivation: Controlled languages are increasingly used to enhance readability, facilitate automatic processing of documents, and guide input to generation systems. Important concerns are the development and enforcement of controlled languages. Topics: authoring environments, design principles, corpus analysis, controlled language applications. http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/events/acl99/clang.html

    M5: Computational Psycholinguistics Chair: Philip Resnik Motivation: Discussing empirical and theoretical studies on psychologically motivated computational models of human language processes, as opposed to NLP applications, emphasizing non-introspective data, statistical methods, and the relationship between linguistic competence and performance. Topics: Computational studies involving processes such as lexical access, parsing, interpretation, generation, disambiguation, acquisition. http://umiacs.umd.edu/~resnik/acl99_cpl/

    Before submitting a paper to a Thematic Session, you should read the information about each of these themes provided on the separate web pages.

    During the conference itself, some sessions may be video-taped. Presenters will be alerted to this possibility and will be able to request that the cameras are turned off during their presentations.

    1.2 Requirements

    Requirements are the same regardless of whether your are submitting a paper to the general sessions or the thematic sessions; see the separate Call for Student Papers for information on requirements for papers submitted to the Student Sessions. Papers should describe original work; they should emphasize completed work rather than intended work and they should indicate clearly the state of completion of the reported results. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation results should be included. A paper accepted for presentation at the ACL Meeting cannot be presented or have been presented at any other meeting with publicly available published proceedings. Papers that are being submitted to other conferences must indicate this on the title page.

    1.3 Format for Submission

    The format of submissions is the same regardless of whether your are submitting a paper to the General Sessions or the Thematic Sessions; see the separate Call for Student Papers for information on requirements for papers submitted to the Student Sessions. Authors should submit preliminary versions of their papers for review, not to exceed 3200 words (exclusive of references). Papers should be headed by a title page containing the paper ID code (see below), the names of all authors, the title, a short (5 line) summary, up to five keywords specifying the subject area (for the General Sessions) or an indication of the Thematic Session to which the paper is being submitted, the word count (excluding figures and bibliography) and a notice of multiple submission, if required. Papers outside the specified length and/or without an ID code are liable to rejection without review.

    To identify each paper, an ID code must be acquired by filing an electronic paper registration form, available on the web at http://www.mri.mq.edu.au/conf/acl99/register.html: on successful completion of this form an ID code will be sent to the designated author by e-mail. If you cannot access the electronic paper registration form, send email to acl99mri.mq.edu.au with subject IDFORM for an automatic reply.

    To assist in the refereeing process, we would be very grateful if authors prepare a web-browsable (e.g. HTML, PostScript, PDF) electronic version of their papers. The electronic paper registration form contains a field where you can provide this information.

    We strongly recommend the use of ACL-standard LaTeX (plus bibstyle and trivial example) or Word style files for the preparation of submissions. These styles include a place for the required information such as ID code and word count, and allow for a graceful transition to the style required for publication. These files are available from the conference web site at http://www.mri.mq.edu.au/conf/acl99.

    If you cannot use the ACL-standard styles directly, a description of the required format is at http://www.mri.mq.edu.au/conf/acl99/style/substyle.html. If you cannot access this web page, send email to acl99mri.mq.edu.au with subject SUBSTYLE for an automatic reply.

    1.4 Submission and Reviewing Procedure

    The submission procedure is the same regardless of whether your are submitting a paper to the General Sessions or the Thematic Sessions; see the separate Call for Student Papers for information on submission details for papers submitted to the Student Sessions. Four (4) paper copies of each paper (printed on both sides of the page if possible) should be submitted to the following address:

    ACL Programme Committee c/o Ken Church AT&T Labs - Research 180 Park Ave, Office D235 PO Box 971 Florham Park NJ 07932-0971 USA

    Enquiries can be addressed to the Programme Committee by email at acl99mri.mq.edu.au (Robert Dale, Chair and Ken Church, co-Chair). In extreme cases, if you cannot make contact electronically you can reach us by sending a fax, clearly marked "ACL Programme Committee", to +61 2 9850 9529. This fax number is for information enquiries only. PLEASE NOTE THAT FAXED SUBMISSIONS OF PAPERS ARE NOT ACCEPTABLE.

    Reviewing of papers submitted to the General Sessions will, as in previous years, be managed by an international Conference Programme Committee consisting of Area Chairs, each of whom will have the assistance of a team of reviewers. Reviewing of papers for the Thematic Sessions will be managed by the chairs of the Thematic Sessions, with the assistance of teams of reviewers; final decisions on the technical programme content (both General Sessions and Thematic Sessions) will be made by the Programme Committee.

    1.5 Schedule

    Submissions must be received by January 25th 1999. Late submissions (those arriving on or after January 26th 1999) will be returned unopened. Acknowledgements will be emailed soon after receipt. Notification of acceptance will be sent to authors (by email) on March 22nd 1999. Camera-ready copies of final papers prepared in a double-column format, preferably using a laser printer, must be received by May 3rd 1999, along with a signed copyright release statement. Detailed formatting guidelines will be provided to authors with their acceptance notice. The paper sessions, including general, theme and student papers, will take place on June 23rd--26th 1999.

    2. Student Sessions

    There will again be special Student Sessions organized by a committee of ACL graduate student members. ACL student members are invited to submit short papers on any of the topics listed above for the General Sessions. The papers will be reviewed by a committee of students and faculty members for presentation in workshop-style sessions and publication in a special section of the conference proceedings. A separate Call for Papers for the Student Sessions is being issued and is available at http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~melanie/acl99/.

    3. Tutorials

    The meeting will include a programme of tutorials on June 20th 1999 immediately preceding the workshops and technical sessions, and at the same venue as the conference. A separate Call for Tutorial Proposals is being issued and is available at http://www.bell-labs.com/project/tts/acl99tut.html.

    4. Workshops

    As in other years, ACL '99 will be accompanied by a number of workshops. These will be held on June 21st--22nd 1999, immediately after the tutorials and before the technical sessions. The ACL has a policy on workshops. A separate Call for Workshop Proposals will be issued soon.

    5. Demos

    A separate Call for Demo Proposals will be issued at a later date.

    6. Venue and Local Organisation

    The conference will be held at the University of Maryland from 20th through 26th June, 1999. The Local Arrangements Committee is chaired by Bonnie Dorr; see http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/research/CLIP/acl99/index.html for local arrangements information.

    7. Timetable

    The dates here pertain only to the General Sessions and Thematic Sessions: see the separate Calls for Student Session Papers, Tutorial Proposals and Workshops for the timetabling associated with those elements of the conference.

    Paper submissions deadline: January 25, 1999 Notification of acceptance: March 22, 1999 Camera ready papers due: May 3, 1999 ACL'99 Conference: June 20--26, 1999