linguistlist.org>
Editor for this issue: Jody Huellmantel <jodylinguistlist.org>
cs.rutgers.edu>Reminder Call for Proposals: ACL Software Demonstrations Program The ACL 2000 Program Committee invites proposals for the Demonstrations Program, to be held in Hong Kong from October 3rd through 6th 2000 in Hong Kong. The focus of the demonstrated systems should be on research prototypes, both under development and finished, that demonstrate the progress in all fields of computational linguistics and language technology. This program is not for commercial systems which should be part of the ACL 2000 Exhibit Program. Areas of Interest We would like to encourage the submission of proposals for demonstrations of software related to any areas of computational linguistics and language technology. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to: * Demonstrations related to the thematic sessions o T1: NLP and open-domain question answering from text o T2: Machine learning and statistical NLP for dialog o T3: Text summarization o T4: Theoretical and technical approaches for Asian language processing * Natural language processing systems, e.g., dialog systems or machine translation systems, and tools to build them * Application systems using language technology components * Software for the evaluation of systems and research * Language corpora and related tools * Aids for teaching computational linguistics Format for Submissions Demo proposals must include the following parts, which should all be sent to the Demonstrations Chair * An abstract of the technical content to be demonstrated, not to exceed two pages, including title, authors, full contact information, thematic session or area, keywords, references and acknowledgments. * A short presentation script, including the basic items of the accompanying narrative, and either a web address for accessing the demo or visual aids (e.g., screen-shots, snapshots, or sketches). No more than 6 pages, total. * A detailed description of hardware and software requirements expected to be provided by the local organizer. Demonstrators are encouraged to be flexible in their requirements. Please state what you can bring yourself and what you absolutely must have provided. We will do our best to provide equipment and resources but nothing can be guaranteed at this point beyond space and power. Please contact the demo chair for any specific questions. Submissions Procedure Proposals should be submitted as soon as possible, but before June, 15th, to the ACL 2000 Demonstrations Chair (acl-2000-demosMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
cs.rutgers.edu>CALL FOR PAPERS ACL Workshop: COMPARING CORPORA October 2000 Hong Kong University of Science and Technology THEME ===== Anyone who has worked with corpora will be all too aware of differences between them. Depending on the differences, it may, or may not, be reasonable to expect results based on one corpus to also be valid for another. It may, or may not, be appropriate for a grammar, or parser, based on one to perform well on another. It may, or may not, be straightforward to port an application from a domain of the first text type to a domain of the second. Currently, characterisations of corpora are mostly textual and at different levels of generality. A corpus is described as ``Wall Street Journal'' or ``transcripts of business meetings'' or ``foreign learners' essays (intermediate grade)''. It would be desirable to be able to place a new corpus in relation to existing ones, and to be able to quantify similarities and differences. Allied to corpus-similarity is corpus-homogeneity. An understanding of homogeneity is a prerequisite to a measure of the similarity -- it makes little sense to compare a corpus sampled across many genres, like the Brown, with a corpus of weather forecasts, without first accounting for the one being broad, the other narrow. Given the centrality of corpora to contemporary language engineering, it is remarkable how little research there has been to date on the question. Biber's work, coming from sociolinguistics, has made a considerable impact, with various researchers in computational lingustics taking forward the model (Biber 1989, 1995). Studies in text classification, genre and sublanguage are also salient, but it is rarely evident how well the technologies ddeveloped in these fields are suited to measuring corpus similarity or homogeneity. The workshop will welcome contributions concerned with measuring and comparing corpora using quantitative methods, from any field. Where and when ============== The workshop will last half a day and will be on either 7th or 8th Oct, the main ACL conference being 3rd-6th October. The venue will be the same. Submissions: ============ Submissions are limited to original, unpublished work. Papers may not exceed 3200 words (exclusive of title page and references). They must be received by July 8, 2000, in hard copy (4 copies) OR postscript OR rtf format. Electronic delivery is to compcorpMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue