LINGUIST List 10.382

Thu Mar 11 1999

Calls: Machine Translations, Grammar Systems

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

Directory

1. Francis Bond, Machine Translation
2. Carlos Martin Vide, Grammar Systems/Final Call

- ----------------------------------------------------------------------
		 8th International Conference on
 Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation
				TMI-99
			 August 23-25, 1999
			 Chester, UK
	 http://www.ccl.umist.ac.uk/events/tmi99/


	 Final Announcement and Call for Papers
 -------------------------------------- 
The eighth conference in the TMI series will take place over 
August 23-25, 1999 in the historic city of Chester, UK.

In addition to general theoretical and methodological issues, TMI-99
will have a major theme:

	 Modalities and MT: Where can MT be used?

Submissions referring to the above theme are encouraged. However,
substantial, original, and unpublished research on any other issues
relevant to machine translation and multi-lingual processing are also
welcome.

Details on submissions and submission guidelines, along with a Latex
style file, can be found on our web site <www.ccl.umist.ac.uk/events/tmi99/>.
Papers should be in English, not longer than 10 pages (around 5,000 words).


			 Important dates
			
Paper submissions due March 12, 1999 *** tomorrow ***
Acceptance notification May	 14, 1999
Final copies due July	 2, 1999
Conference dates
	 Tutorials: Aug	 22, 1999
	 Papers and Panels:	 Aug	 23-25, 1999
	 Workshops:		 Aug	 26, 1999

Address for email submissions is <tmifornost.icl.kecl.ntt.co.jp>.

Tutorial Program:
- ---------------

Two tutorials are being offered. Participants can choose either a
one-day introduction to MT and translation tools, comprising of five
consecutive sessions, or a half day tutorial on acquiring knowledge
for MT in low density languages.

* Introduction to MT and translation tools
 - Overview John Hutchins 
 - Localisation Reinhard Schaeler 
 - Translation workstations and translation memory Ian Gordon
 - Developments at EU translation service Dimitri Theologitis
 - Evaluation of MT systems Jorg Schutz

* Acquisition of Knowledge about Sergei Nirenburg
 a Low-Density Language for Use in MT

Full details of the program, including a synopsis of each tutorial, a
schedule, and details of how to register, will be found at the web
site: <http://www.ccl.umist.ac.uk/events/tmi99/tutorials.html>;.


Workshops:
- --------

After the conference (August 26th), we will hold two one-day workshops
(in parallel). Both workshops are soliciting submissions on relevant
topics. Full details of the workshops can be found on their web sites.
A short description of each is given below.


Workshop: Constraints on Machine Interpretation
Conveners: Susanne J. Jekat (Hamburg Uni), Jan Amtrup (CRL)
Email: jekatinformatik.uni-hamburg.de, jamtrupcrl.nmsu.edu
Web site: http://crl.nmsu.edu/~jamtrup/tmi99/

Synopsis:

The translation of spoken utterances (MI, Machine Interpreting) is one
of the most challenging tasks within the field of MT. There are still
several phenomena which are unknown or insufficiently described and
are not accounted for in the systems currently available. These
phenomena affect all stages of processing within MT systems.

As a consequence, an MI system does not only contain the additional
components needed to analyze and synthesize speech, but the core
modules have to be adapted to the demands of speech-to-speech
communication as well.

The workshop ``Constraints on Machine Interpretation'' calls for
contributions relevant for the translation of spoken language,
including, but not limited to: Speech recognition, language
recognition, speaker identification; Prosody and its use in MI
systems; Analysis, transfer and generation of spoken input utterances;
Architecture and design of MI systems and their user interfaces;
Dialog behavior, design and analysis; Evaluation of MI systems.


Workshop: Problems and Potential of English-to-German MT systems
Convener: Claudia Gdaniec (IBM T.J. Watson Research Center)	
Email: cgdaniecus.ibm.com
Web site: http://www.research.ibm.com/people/g/cgdaniec/tmi99.html

Synopsis:

Many German speakers have had a chance, and a need, to taste
English-German MT translation through the many products available on
the market and through the growing opportunities on the
Internet. Reactions have been anywhere from acceptance to
disappointment to derision. This workshop is aimed at getting
developers, researchers, and users together for an opportunity to
present, discuss -- and ideally reach some agreement on -- the status
vof, and desired and possible improvements to, English-to-German MT
systems.

The workshop will address the many areas of MT application: heavy-duty
translation of technical documentation; casual in-house and at-home
translation; on-the-fly Web page translation; MT in information and
knowledge management; MT in electronic commerce; Internet chat and
e-mail translation. There will be presentations of positive and negative
experiences with text types and linguistic quality as well as of
desired priorities in terms of linguistic domains and technical
requirements by users, developers, and researchers.

		 Important dates for workshops

Paper submissions due April 14, 1999
Acceptance notification June 1, 1999
Final copies due July 2, 1999



			 Conference Site

The conference meetings will be held at Chester College, in the city
of Chester UK. More information about the conference site can be
found at the web site: http://www.ccl.umist.ac.uk/events/tmi99/.

TMI-99 is supported by the European Association for Machine
Translation and by Aslib, The Association for Information Management.


TMI-99 Officers:
 Program Chair: Francis Bond, NTT CS Labs, Kyoto
 Local Chairs: Arturo Trujillo and Harold Somers, UMIST, Manchester
 General Chair: Sergei Nirenburg, NMSU, Las Cruces NM

Please address any further enquiries to the program chair:

Francis Bond			 <bondcslab.kecl.ntt.co.jp>
Machine Translation Research Group 
NTT Communication Science Laboratories 
2-4 Hikari-dai, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun, Kyoto, JAPAN, 619-0237
Tel: 0774-93-5313 (+81)
Fax: 0774-93-5345 (+81)
- ----------------------------------------------------------------------

 Final Call for Papers

Workshop: GRAMMAR SYSTEMS: A FORMAL LANGUAGE THEORETIC MULTI-AGENT
ARCHITECTURE

To be held at the 9th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association
for Computational Linguistics (EACL'99), Bergen, Norway, June 12, 1999.

In cooperation with the IFIP Working Group 1.2 on Descriptional Complexity.

Scope:

The theory of grammar systems is a recent branch of formal language theory
intending to model complex distributed systems. A basic reference in the
field is E. Csuhaj-Varju, J. Dassow, J. Kelemen & Gh. Paun (1994), Grammar
systems: a grammatical approach to distribution and cooperation. Gordon &
Breach, London. For a more recent survey, see J. Dassow, Gh. Paun & G.
Rozenberg, "Grammar systems", in G. Rozenberg & A. Salomaa, eds. (1997),
Handbook of formal languages, 2: 155-213. Springer, Berlin. For the most
recent work, see Acta Cybernetica, 12.4 (1996), ed. E. Csuhaj-Varju;
Computers and Artificial Intelligence, 15.2-3 (1996), eds. J. Kelemen & Gh.
Paun; Grammars, 1.3 (1998), ed. J. Kelemen; and Gh. Paun & A. Salomaa, eds.
(1999), "Grammatical models of multi-agent systems". Gordon & Breach, London.

In traditional formal language theory, a language is usually generated by
one grammar. In contrast, in this new framework language generation is
regarded as a joint activity of several grammars working together under
different strategies. In this way, for instance, the non-context-free
language a^nb^nc^n is easily generated using only context-free rules
suitably distributed through several machines.

There are two main classes of devices of this kind: Cooperating Distributed
Grammar Systems (CDGS, where, all the grammars starting from the same
axiom, at each step of the derivation process one grammar rewrites the
string according to a cooperation protocol) and Parallel Communicating
Grammar Systems (PCGS, where, each grammar starting from its own axiom, at
each step of the derivation process each grammar rewrites its own string
and, at a certain moment, some communication symbol appears forcing the
combination of such strings in a certain manner). Some recent derivations
of the theory include eco-grammar systems, colonies and networks of
language processors.

Grammar systems intend to model distribution, at the same time increasing
the generative capacity and decreasing the descriptional complexity. They
are being preliminarily used to model natural language
understanding/generation systems as well as other empirical data from
artificial intelligence. Each one of the grammars is an agent and the whole
is a modular architecture. This formal architecture seems potentially close
to the kind of data natural language processing systems face.

So far, developments in the field have mainly come from theoretical
computer science, and now it's time to check these systems against natural
language processing problems. The aims of the workshop are to present this
new theory and to suggest trends of development in the field of natural
language processing. As well, the organizers welcome contributions from
theoretical as well as applied closely related areas, especially those
discussing formal language theoretic-inspired models of natural language
problems and those presenting other multi-agent processing systems.

The workshop may be of interest to the community attending EACL'99 in
search of new formal processing architectures.

Programme committee:

Erzsebet Csuhaj-Varju (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest)
Jurgen Dassow (University of Magdeburg, Germany)
Rudolf Freund (Vienna University of Technology, Austria)
Lila Kari (University of Western Ontario, London, Canada)
Jozef Kelemen (Silesian University, Opava, Czech Republic; University of
 Economics, Bratislava, Slovakia)
Alica Kelemenova (Silesian University, Opava, Czech Republic)
Carlos Martin-Vide (Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona, Spain)
Alexandru Mateescu (University of Turku, Finland)
Victor Mitrana (University of Bucharest, Romania)
Gheorghe Paun (Romanian Academy, Bucharest)
Grzegorz Rozenberg (University of Leiden, The Netherlands)
Arto Salomaa (University of Turku, Finland)
Detlef Wotschke (University of Frankfurt, Germany)

Organizers:

Erzsebet Csuhaj-Varju (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest)
Jurgen Dassow (University of Magdeburg, Germany)
Jozef Kelemen (Silesian University, Opava, Czech Republic; University of
 Economics, Bratislava, Slovakia)
Carlos Martin-Vide (Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona, Spain)
Gheorghe Paun (Romanian Academy, Bucharest)

Contact person:

Carlos Martin-Vide
Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics and Language Engineering (GRLMC)
Rovira i Virgili University
Pl. Imperial Tarraco, 1
43005 Tarragona
Spain
Phone: +34-977-55-9543
Fax: +34-977-55-9597
E-mail: cmvastor.urv.es, cmvtinet.fut.es
Web site: http://www.urv.es/centres/Grups/grlmc/grlmc.html

Submissions:

Full submissions should preferably be sent through e-mail to the contact
person as postscript files. Technical instructions for camera-ready
formatting will be provided to the authors of the papers selected.
Proceedings will be available at the workshop.

Schedule:

March 26, 1999: Submission deadline
April 9, 1999: Notification of acceptance
April 23, 1999: Camera-ready copy
June 12, 1999: Workshop