LINGUIST List 10.1122

Sat Jul 24 1999

Calls: Mary R. Haas Award, Natural Lang Engineering

Editor for this issue: Jody Huellmantel <jodylinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Keren Rice, SSILA book award: call for manuscripts
2. Jan van Kuppevelt, NLE SPECIAL ISSUE: SECOND CALL

24 July 1999

The Mary R. Haas Award is presented annually by The Society for the
Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas for an unpublished
manuscript from a younger scholar that makes a significant substantive
contribution to the knowledge of American Indian languages. The
selection committee is now accepting submissions for the 1999 Mary R.
Haas Award. Submissions should be monographs (dissertations are
preferred) or other works reflecting substantial effort, including
full dictionaries or edited collections of texts. Scholars with or
without academic affiliation are encouraged to submit their work, but
holders of tenured faculty positions are not normally eligible. The
selection committee has not specified how recently a work should have
been completed, so any dissertation of reasonably recent vintage
dealing specifically with a Native American language or languages
qualifies.

A single clean copy of the manuscript (unbound if possible) should be
submitted, together with a short letter describing the circumstances
of the work. The awardee will be selected by a standing committee of
the Society including Sally McLendon, Keren Rice, Louanna Furbee, and
Douglas R. Parks. Although the award carries no stipend, SSILA will
work with the author to arrange for the publication of the winning
manuscript, where possible, in the University of Nebraska Press
series, Studies in the Anthropology of North American Indians. The
committee will only be able to consider manuscripts written in
English.

Manuscripts should be mailed to: Keren Rice, SSILA Book Award,
Dept. of Linguistics, University of Toronto, 130 St. George Street,
Toronto, Ontario, CANADA M5S 3H1 (tel: 416/978-1763; e-mail:
ricechass.utoronto.ca). Since I will photocopy and distribute copies
to the other committee members, a loose copy is preferred. All
submissions should be received no later than August 15, 1999.

The 1998 winner of the Mary R. Haas Award was Anna M. S. Berge, for
her University of California - Berkeley dissertation, Topic and
Discourse Structure in West Greenlandic Agreement Constructions. The
work, in the words of the selection committee, stands out in
providing a clear and accessible discourse-based analysis of
ergativity, switch-reference, topic, and theme in West Greenlandic,
demonstrating both breadth and depth in a difficult and important area
of West Greenlandic structure. It represents a valuable
permanent contribution to Eskimo linguistics, to the study of
discourse in the native languages of the Americas, and to the study of
discourse in general.

 ***SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS***


 Natural Language Engineering

 Special Issue on

 Best Practice in Spoken Language Dialogue Systems Engineering



NLE SPECIAL ISSUE AS A DISC INITIATIVE

A special issue on Best Practice in Spoken Language Dialogue Systems
Engineering will be published by the journal of Natural Language
Engineering (NLE; Cambridge University Press) in the beginning of
2000. This issue is an initiative of the European Esprit project DISC.


BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

The interest in Spoken Language Dialogue Systems (SLDSs) has increased
enormously over the last few years and has led to a situation in which
there is a great need, shared by developers, deployers and customers
alike, for effective guidelines, which will enable them to make
well-formed design and implementation decisions, in accordance with
broad consensus of what must be 'best practice' in this particular
engineering domain. The purpose of this special issue is to bring
together leading views on what might be considered to be best practice
in the development and evaluation of SLDSs.


THEME

In agreement with the main goal of DISC, the general theme for the
special issue is what could be taken as best practice in SLDS
engineering, given the availability of different technological options
with their inherent merits and limitations which are subject to
different constraints on system (component) realization. 

We are interested in new, high quality papers which address, along the
lines of the objectives above, one or more of the following issues:
(i) best practice in the development and evaluation of SLDSs as a
whole or (ii) best practice in the development and evaluation of one
or more of the following system aspects: speech recognition, speech
synthesis, natural language understanding and generation, dialogue
management, human factors, and system integration. 

All papers should fall within the scope of NLE, as described in the
instructions for contributors to the journal. This mainly implies that
the research views, comparative discussions, etc. described in the
papers must have a clear potential for practical application, in this
particular case meaning that they contribute to guidelines for SLDSs
best practice (see also the NLE web site, the reference of which is
given below).


SUBMISSIONS

The length of a paper should be 10-12 journal pages. Electronic
submissions should be sent as a postscript file by e-mail to the
(co-ordinating) special issue editor.

In order to get a better impression of the full range of submissions,
authors are asked to e-mail a short statement of their intention to
submit a paper to the co-ordinating special issue editor as soon as
possible.


REVIEW PROCEDURE

All papers, both those submitted by members of DISC and from outside
the project, will be double reviewed and triple reviewed if necessary.


The review committee consists of seven members of the DISC consortium,
one member of the DISC Advisory Panel, three members of the NLE
editorial board and a group of ten external referees. In case of a
very large number of submissions the review committee will be extended
accordingly. 

Referees (not including DISC members) are:

 James Allen (University of Rochester, USA)
 Peter Bosch (IBM Scientific Centre Heidelberg, Germany)
 Phil Cohen (OGIST, USA)
 Robin Cooper (University of Goeteborg, Sweden)
 James Glass (MIT, USA)
 Julia Hirschberg (ATT Labs Research, USA)
 Eduard Hovy (University of Southern California, USA)
 Stephen Isard (University of Edinburgh, UK)
 Lauri Karttunen (Rank Xerox Research, France)
 Susann Luperfoy (IET, USA)
 Karen Sparck Jones (Cambridge University, UK)
 David Traum (University of Maryland, USA)
 Marilyn Walker (ATT Labs Research, USA)
 Yorick Wilks (University of Sheffield, UK)


IMPORTANT DATES

* Intention to Submit Due Date: as soon as possible
* Paper Due Date: September 1, 1999
* Revision Due Date: December 15, 1999
* Acceptance Date: January 2000
* Publication Date: February/March 2000 


SPECIAL ISSUE EDITORS

The special issue editors are the IMS group participating in the DISC
project:

Jan van Kuppevelt (co-ordinating editor) kuppeveltims.uni-stuttgart.de
Ulrich Heid	 heidims.uni-stuttgart.de
Hans Kamp	 kampims.uni-stuttgart.de

Editorial Address: NLE Special Issue, c/o Jan van Kuppevelt, 
 Institute for Computational Linguistics (IMS), 
 Azenbergstrasse 12, D-70174 Stuttgart - Germany.


FURTHER INFORMATION

Special issue web site: http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/NLE_Special_Issue/
NLE web site: http://www.cup.org/journals/jnlscat/nle/nle.html
DISC web site: http://www.elsnet.org/disc/