LINGUIST List 11.1176

Tue May 23 2000

Calls: Corpus Ling TELRI, Comp Ling EMNLP/VLC-2000

Editor for this issue: Naomi Ogasawara <naomilinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Milena Slavcheva, Corpus Lingustics: Fifth TELRI Seminar, Slovenia
2. Hinrich Schuetze, Comp Ling: EMNLP/VLC-2000, Hong Kong

Second Call for Papers
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5th TELRI Seminar
Corpus Lingustics: How to Extract Meaning from Corpora
22-24 September 2000
Ljubljana, Slovenia

The fifth in the series of TELRI (Trans-European Language Resources
Infrastructure) seminars will be held in Ljubljana, Slovenia, on 22-24
September 2000 with the theme "Corpus Linguistics: How to Extract Meaning
from Corpora".

Theme

The universe of discourse, that is, the ensemble of all communication
acts of a discourse community, functions as an autonomous semantic
system. This does not contest that texts may also refer to some
discourse-external reality. But first and foremost texts, text
segments and text elements refer to previous occurrences: they
address, paraphrase and rearrange segments and elements that have been
used before, in the same text or in other texts. Corpus linguistics
detects and analyzes the recurrence of meaningful conglomerates in the
discourse, combining statistical and categorial approaches and
resulting in the structured presentation of the evidence. This
evidence represents the shareable meaning of text segments and text
elements. The paraphrases we find in the discourse tell us how to
understand them; usage, that is, information on how segments and
elements are embedded in their contexts, tells us how to produce texts
in which they are being used. Corpus linguistics is about extracting
meaning from (monolingual, comparable or parallel) corpora. Corpus
linguistics generates the semantic knowledge which is the basis of
language practice as in information extraction, translation or foreign
language document authoring. Corpus linguistics is the prime approach
to Human Language Technology if we understand HLT as the technology
for dealing with general unrestricted language as opposed to
controlled languages as formal calculi.

The TELRI Seminar will feature contributions focussing on all aspects of
extracting meaning from corpora.

Invited Speakers

To be announced.

Young Researchers Workshop

A pre-seminar workshop on Thursday, September 21, is dedicated to
presentations of work in progress by young researchers, that is, graduate
students and young research fellows. Seminar fees will be waived for young
researchers presenting at the Seminar. TELRI will investigate further
possibilities for financial support.

Software Demonstrations

A goal of the seminar is to stimulate cooperation between industry and
academia in the West and in Central and Eastern Europe. The programme will
include sessions devoted to demonstrating commercial and public domain
software with emphasis on information extraction systems. Seminar fees will
be waived for software presenters.

Papers

Papers and presentations should be 30 minutes long including discussion. A
selection will be published after the seminar. Fees will be waived for
accepted speakers. 

Submission Guidelines

Authors are requested to submit abstracts which should not exceed 600
words. The address for electronic submission is: telri-adminids-mannheim.de

Fees

Academic participants: 	 EUR 50/20*
Industrial participants: EUR 100/30*
Students: 			 EUR 20/10*

* refers to fees for participants from CEE/NIS

Schedule

Abstract Submission Due: 5 June 2000
Notification of Acceptance: 10 July 2000

Venue

This year's TELRI seminar will take place in Ljubljana, the capital of
Slovenia, a medieval town at the crossroads of Mediterranean and
Central-European cultures. The venue of the seminar will be the Faculty
of Arts, located near the historical centre of the town and within
walking distance to most hotels. The Faculty itself has recently been
extended with an annexe, which provides new, well-equipped and airy
classrooms for the seminar sessions as well as a cafeteria for the
coffee breaks. OHP and beamer will be available in the presentation
rooms; Internet access will be provided in the computer lab in the main
building. 

Further Information

Further information can be obtained from:
http://www.telri.de/
http://nl.ijs.si/telri00/
telri-adminids-mannheim.de

 CALL FOR PAPERS

 (EMNLP/VLC-2000) 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)

 October 7-8, 2000
 Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

 In conjunction with
 ACL-2000: The 38th Annual Meeting of the
 Association for Computational Linguistics

 This conference aims to bring together academic researchers and
 industrial practitioners to discuss empirical and corpus-based natural
 language processing through technical paper sessions, invited talks,
 and panel discussions. Topics of interest include (but are not
 limited to):

 * statistical parsing
 * language and dialog models
 * machine translation
 * information retrieval
 * information extraction
 * comparative evaluation of empirical vs. rule- and knowledge-based
 technologies
 * lexical acquisition
 * statistical language understanding
 * phrase identification
 * noun phrase coreference
 * question answering
 * word sense disambiguation
 * word and term segmentation and extraction
 * alignment
 * bilingual lexicon extraction
 * text categorization

 This year, we are especially interested in papers discussing these
 topics in the context of web-oriented applications.

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 SUBMISSIONS

 Submissions are limited to original, unpublished and empirically
 evaluated work. Reviewing of papers will be blind. Electronic
 submissions are required; author instructions, stylesheets and
 a web-based submissions interface may be found at
 http://nlp.cs.jhu.edu/~sigdat2k. Submitted papers should conform to
 the colacl.sty style file (or the provided MSWord equivalent) for final
 2-column format, with the exception that name, affiliation and address
 should be replaced with 'XXX'. Full paper-length submissions are
 strongly encouraged, and should not exceed 9 pages in specified format.
 Submissions must be received on or before June 26, 2000.

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 Important Dates:
 June 26 Submission of full-length paper
 July 28 Acceptance notice
 August 29 Camera-ready paper due
 October 7-8 Conference date

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 Program Chair: Hinrich Schuetze, GroupFire (hinrichgroupfire.com)
 Program Co-Chair: Keh-Yih Su, Behavior Design Corp. (kysubdc.com.tw)

 http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~schuetze/emnlp-vlc2000.html