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infotokyo.ne.jp>-------------------------------------------------------------- Workshop on Machine Translation for Cross Language Information Retrieval -------------------------------------------------------------- Introduction The goal of this workshop is to explore the role of MT in the context of CLIR. Undoubtedly searching, extracting and summarising information from the Web is a major challenge demanding multilingual solutions. Despite the fact that currently much textual WWW information is in English, the situation is radically changing. In addition, there is an increased amount of users who would prefer to use sites and/or query in their native language. There are different strategies for CLIR involving document translation, query translation, use of dictionaries. The adoption of a strategy depends on the user profile, the level of user interaction intended in the search process, the targeted use of the documents retrieved and the availability of linguistic resources, among others. We invite papers on topics which link advances in Machine Translation or related technologies to CLIR. Are existing MT solutions sufficient for the information access demands of today? What type of MT linguistic analysis would be useful for CLIR? How can we identify the proper translations of query terms? How can we improve on existing techniques to improve precision and recall? A non-exhaustive list, which should serve as a starting point, follows: * Issues in query translation and query expansion * Alignment techniques for dictionary building * Level and type of linguistic MT analysis for CLIR (shallow, chunking, ...) * Type of multilingual resources (corpora, dictionaries, terminologies) used in CLIR * Role of terminology and ontologies in CLIR * Translation Memories in CLIR * Translation of index terms and descriptors * CLIR involving Asian languages (problems and challenges) Participation and Submission of Papers Participation is limited to 30 persons. Participants will be selected by the organizing committee, based on submitted papers. Participants will be expected to contribute to the workshop by either presenting a talk or taking part in the discussions. Researchers interested in participating in the workshop are invited to submit long abstracts (up to three pages) on the listed research topics. Submissions may be sent by e-mail (PostScript files) or as hardcopies (in triplicate) to the workshop organiser. In the case where you use non-Roman fonts, hardcopies are preferred. The submissions will be reviewed and the accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings. Participants selected for giving a talk, will have to submit a full paper (up to 8 pages) for the workshop proceedings. For more information about the workshop, please contact the Workshop Organiser. Important Dates Abstracts due by: May 31, 1999. Notification of acceptance: June 30, 1999. Camera-ready version of Final Paper due: August 2, 1999. Main MT Summit: September 13-17, 1999. Date of the Workshop: September 17, 1999. Organising Committee * Sophia Ananiadou, European Media Lab, Germany * Christian Jacquemin, LIMSI, France * Yoshihiko Hayashi, NTT Cyberspace Labs, Japan * Mun Kew Leong, Kent Ridge Digital Labs, Singapore * Sung Hyon Myaeng, Chungnam National University, Korea * Hsin-Hsi Chen, National Taiwan University, Taiwan Workshop Organiser Please send abstracts / papers to: Sophia Ananiadou European Media Lab (EML) Villa Bosch, Schloss-Wolfsbrunnenweg 33 D-69118 Heidelberg Germany Fax: +49-6221-533-298 Email: Sophia.AnaniadouMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
iti.salford.ac.uk>********************************************************************** Workshop on Intelligent Virtual Agents (Virtual Agents 99) http://www.salford.ac.uk/cve/va99/ ********************************************************************** One day workshop prior to and in Association with the UK VR SIG 99 Conference The Centre for Virtual Environments University of Salford, Salford, United Kingdom 13th September 1999 Preliminary Call for Papers ----------------------------- The field of Virtual Agents is a new and emerging area that is starting to make its way out of research and into the commercial world. The area brings together two disciplines, the field of visualization covering areas such as 3D graphics, virtual reality, computer animation, and multimedia, and the field of agents, both within Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Artificial Life (ALIFE). Only recently has the price and power of computers made virtual agents a viable option to explore scientifically. Despite being a relatively new field of research, large strides have been made in a short time. Lately there has been a marked increase in interest with virtual agents in diverse industries such as entertainment, education, engineering, and film. At the 13th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI98), a very successful workshop was held on Intelligent Virtual Environments. Participants felt a follow-up workshop should be organised in 1999 and since a major theme had been that of Virtual Agents, this was chosen as the theme of the forthcoming workshop. People researching virtual agents tend to come from either the visualization or agent community. The two communities have much to learn from each other, if wheels are not to be reinvented on both sides. This workshop aims to bring these two communities together to discuss the current state-of-the-art in virtual agents, together with leading international keynote speakers, and to create a roadmap for the future of this technology. Topics of interest include (but not limited to) * Virtual and physical agent interaction * Augmented virtual agents * Emotionally driven synthetic characters * New tools and technologies for the building of virtual agents * Human interaction with virtual agents (e.g. voice recognition) * Perception in virtual agents * Intelligent virtual actors * Novel applications of virtual agents * The use of virtual agents for training * Biologically inspired virtual agents * Virtual agents in shared worlds * Virtual ecosystems Paper Submission If you are interested in contributing please send an extended abstract 1000 - 2000 words. Extended abstracts and final papers should be sent electronically, in Word, HTML or Postscript to: va99Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue