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Leibniz.lili.uni-bielefeld.de>This is the First Call for Papers for the WORKSHOP ======== "Integrating Information from Different Channels =============================================== in Multi-Media-Contexts" ======================= to be held as part of ESSLLI 2000 at Birmingham (UK), August 6-18, 2000 URL: http://www.lili.uni-bielefeld.de/~wicic - --------------------------------------------------------------------- Description: In everyday situations agents must combine information from different sources: Reference and predication can be based both on gestural and spoken information. Inferences demand extracting information from diagrams and the text built around them. Focus of attention is often indicated by visual, gestural or acoustic means. The growing number of researchers interested in multimodal information reflects its practical relevance, not least in the construction of man-machine interfaces. In order to model complex multimodal information, a notion of composite signal is called for in which the different "threads of information" are integrated. Understanding composite signals may be necessary for all fields of science dealing with information, whether empirically or formally oriented. Research in this area is bound up with logical, linguistic, computational and philosophical problems like - assessing the semantic contribution of information from different sources, - compositionality in the construction of information - extending the notions of reference, truth and entailment in order to capture the content of "mixed information states" and - experimentally measuring the activity on different channels or - investigating timing problems concerning "interleaving threads" of information. Despite their foundational flavour, emerging theories in this area have applications in domains as diverse as discourse analysis (monitoring and back-channelling behaviour), styles of reasoning, robotics (reference resolution by pointing) and Virtual Reality (integration of gesture and speech). Consequently, the workshop is addressed to scholars from different fields: We welcome experimental researchers investigating e.g. gesture, eye movement or other means of focussing in relation to speech. At the same time workshop contributions of linguists, logicians or computer scientists are invited who work on the description and the formal modelling of complex signals. Finally, work concerning the simulation of production or understanding of complex signals, Virtual Reality type, neural net like or other, is also encouraged. - --------------------------------------------------------------------- For further and occassionally updated information, please visit http://www.lili.uni-bielefeld.de/~wicic Kenneth Holmqvist (LUCS), Hannes Rieser (SFB360) and Peter Kuehnlein (SFB360)Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
wlv.ac.uk>(Please use this corrected version - many thanks) Call for Papers Special Issue of Computational Linguistics: Anaphora and Ellipsis Resolution Guest editors: Ruslan Mitkov, Branimir Boguraev, Shalom Lappin Anaphora and ellipsis both account for cohesion in text and are phenomena of active study in formal and computational linguistics alike. The correct interpretation of anaphora and ellipsis, as well as the understanding of the relationship between them, is vital for Natural Language Processing. After considerable initial research, and after years of relative silence in the early eighties, these issues have attracted the attention of many researchers in the last 10 years and much promising work on the topic has been reported. Discourse-orientated theories and formalisms such as DRT and Centering have inspired new research on the computational treatment of anaphora. The drive towards corpus-based robust NLP solutions has further stimulated interest, for alternative and/or data-enriched approaches. In addition, application-driven research in areas such as automatic abstracting and information extraction, has independently identified the importance of (and boosted the research in) anaphora and coreference resolution. Ellipsis resolution too, being of particular importance to a number of Natural Language Understanding applications such as dialogue and discourse processing, has received increasing attention. The growing interest in anaphora and ellipsis resolution has been demonstrated clearly over the last 4--5 years through the MUC coreference task projects and at a number of related fora (workshops, conferences, etc.). Against this background of expanding research and growing interest, this special issue offers the opportunity for a high quality, and timely, collection of papers on anaphora and ellipsis resolution. Topics The call for papers invites submissions of papers describing recent novel and challenging work/results in anaphora and ellipsis resolution. The range of topics to be covered will include, but will not be limited to: o new anaphora and ellipsis resolution algorithms, o factors in anaphora resolution: salience and interaction of factors, o techniques in ellipsis resolution, o use of theories and formalisms in anaphora resolution, o use of theories and formalisms in ellipsis resolution, o applications of anaphora/coreference resolution, o applications of ellipsis resolution, o multilingual anaphora resolution, o evaluation issues, o use/production of annotated corpora for anaphora and ellipsis. In addition, we expect papers addressing various issues of debate related to the resolution of anaphora and ellipsis, such as: o Is it possible to propose a core set of factors used in anaphora resolution? o When dealing with real data, is it at all possible to posit "constraints", or should all factors be regarded as "preferences"? o What is the case for languages other than English? o What degree of preference (weight) should be given to "preferential" factors? How should weights best be determined? What empirical data can be brought to bear on this? o What would be an optimal order for the application of multiple factors? Would this affect the scoring strategies used in selecting the antecedent? o Is it realistic to expect high precision over unrestricted texts? o Is it realistic to determine anaphoric links in corpora automatically? o Are all CL applications 'equal' with respect to their requirements from an anaphora resolution module? What kind(s) of compromises might be possible, depending on the NLP task, and how would awareness of these affect the tuning of a resolution algorithm for particular type(s) of input text? o Should ellipsis resolution be handled by syntactic or semantic reconstruction? o Is it necessary to retrieve both syntactic and semantic properties of the antecedent in the reconstructed representation of the elided structure? Finally, we invite discussion on various open questions from both theoretical and computational point of view such as whether we should construe ellipsis as entirely distinct from anaphora. Submissions and Reviewing The submission deadline is 1 April 2000. Authors can submit either electronically or send 6 hard copies of their paper (for format and style details, see http://www.aclweb.org/cl ) to: Ruslan Mitkov (R.MitkovMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue