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dcs.shef.ac.uk>FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT THIRD WORKSHOP ON HUMAN-COMPUTER CONVERSATION Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, Italy 12-14 July, 1999 The Workshops on Human-Computer Conversation in Bellagio, Italy, took place in 1997 and 1998, as small groups of experts from industry and academia met to discuss this pressing question for the future of Language Engineering, not as an academic question only, but chiefly to bring forward for discussion computer demonstrations and activities within company laboratories that were not being published or discussed. The Workshops were highly successful in these aims and we now wish to widen participation and add distinguished speakers, as well as introducing more theoretical topics, though without losing the practical emphasis. The site remains one of the finest in the world, and it promoted excellent and intimate discussions in 1997 and 1998. All details, including previous program, program committee, accomodation and travel, details of registration (a form is attached below for the convenience of some) are on the web site: http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/research/units/ilash/Meetings/bellagio/ Invited speakers include (not all have yet accepted): Dr B Alabisio, Microsoft, USA Dr J Hutchens, UWA, Australia Prof. G Leech, University of Lancaster, UK Dr M Moens, University of Edinburgh, UK Dr U Reithinger, DFKI-Saarbruecken, DE Contributions are invited on any aspect of human-computer conversation, as are demonstrations. Two page abstracts should be sent by mail or email to the address at the bottom according to the following timetable: Deadline for submission: 15 April 1999 Notice of acceptance: 15 May 1999 Camera ready paper due: 15 June 1999 The European Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) has endorsed the meeting and endorsements have been sought from ELSNET, SigDial and the European Commission. Submissions and further enquiries to: Yorick Wilks Department of Computer Science University of Sheffield Regent Court 211 Portobello St., Sheffield S1 4DP UK phone: (44) 114 282 5561 fax: (44) 114 222 1810 email: yorickMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
cs.ust.hk>First Call For Papers (EMNLP/VLC-99) JOINT SIGDAT CONFERENCE ON EMPIRICAL METHODS IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING AND VERY LARGE CORPORA Sponsored by SIGDAT (ACL's Special Interest Group for Linguistic Data and Corpus-based Approaches to NLP) June 21-22, 1999 University of Maryland In conjunction ACL'99: the 37th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics This SIGDAT-sponsored joint conference will continue to provide a forum for new research in corpus-based and/or empirical methods in NLP. In addition to providing a general forum, the theme for this year is "Corpus-based and/or Empirical Methods in NLP for Speech, MT, IR, and other Applied Systems" A large number of systems in automatic speech recognition(ASR) and synthesis, machine translation(MT), information retrieval(IR), optical character recognition(OCR) and handwriting recognition have become commercially available in the last decade. Many of these systems use NLP technologies as an important component. Corpus-based and empirical methods in NLP have been a major trend in recent years. How useful are these techniques when applied to real systems, especially when compared to rule-based methods? Are there any new techniques to be developed in EMNLP and from VLC in order to improve the state-of-the-art of ASR, MT, IR, OCR, and other applied systems? Are there new ways to combine corpus-based and empirical methods with rule-based systems? This two-day conference aims to bring together academic researchers and industrial practitioners to discuss the above issues, through technical paper sessions, invited talks, and panel discussions. The goal of the conference is to raise an awareness of what kind of new EMNLP techniques need to be developed in order to bring about the next breakthrough in speech recognition and synthesis, machine translation, information retrieval and other applied systems. The conference solicits paper submissions in (and not limited to) the following areas: 1) Original work in one of the following technologies and its relevance to speech, MT, or IR: (a) word sense disambiguation (b) word and term segmentation and extraction (c) alignment (d) bilingual lexicon extraction (e) POS tagging (f) statistical parsing (g) others (please specify) 2) Proposals of new EMNLP technologies for speech, MT, IR, OCR, or other applied systems (please specify) 3) Comparetive evaluation of the performance of EMNLP technologies in one of the areas in (1) and that of its rule-based or knowledge-based counterpart in a speech, MT, IR, OCR or other applied systems Submissions Requirements Submissions should be limited to original, evaluated work. All papers should include background survey and/or reference to previous work. The authors should provide explicit explanation when there is no evaluation in their work. We encourage paper submissions related to the conference theme. In particular, we encourage the authors to include in their papers, proposals and discussions of the relevance of their work to the theme . However, there will be a special session in the conference to include corpus-based and/or empirical work in all areas of natural language processing. Important Dates March 31 Submission of full-length paper April 30 Acceptance notice May 20 Camera-ready paper due June 21-22 Conference date Program Chair Pascale Fung Human Language Technology Center Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering University of Science and Tehnology (HKUST) Clear Water Bay, Kowloon Hong Kong Tel: (+852) 2358 8537 Fax: (+852) 2358 1485 Email: pascaleMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue