LINGUIST List 11.2610

Sat Dec 2 2000

Calls: Balkan Sprachbund, Automatic Summarization

Editor for this issue: Jody Huellmantel <jodylinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Tomic, O., Balkan Sprachbund Properties
2. Priscilla Rasmussen, NAACL-01 Workshop on Automatic Summarization 2001

CALL FOR PAPERS

CONFERENCE ON THE BALKAN SPRACHBUND PROPERTIES
					within the framework of the Spinoza
Project, http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/spls
June 8-9 2001, University of Leiden, the Netherlands
The Balkan languages share sets of typological properties which have
contributed to the shaping of a uniform areal typological profile, referred
to as "Balkan language union" or "Balkan Sprachbund". A typological language
property is assumed to be areal if (a) shared by at least three languages of
the area, at least two of which belong to different genetic families, but
(b) not present in all the languages of the genetic family to which the
language of the area belongs (if it belongs to a language family, at all).
Since the amount, the extent and the limit of areal typological properties
necessary for granting membership into the Balkan Sprachbund, has not and
cannot be assessed independently, linguistic discussion on Balkan Sprachbund
membership has centered around specific properties.
Different analyses single out different arrays of Balkan Sprachbund
properties, though most of them agree on one phonological property - the
presence of the schwa phoneme - and six grammatical properties: (1)
substitution of the synthetic declension markers by analytic ones; (2)
grammaticalization of the category of definiteness through postpositive
definite articles; (3) pronominal doubling of objects; (4) analytic
expression of futurity; (5) analytic Perfect with an auxiliary verb
corresponding to have; (6) loss of the infinitive and its substitution by
subjunctive clauses. Two Balkan Slavic languages - Macedonian and Bulgarian,
two Balkan Romance languages - Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian, as well as
Albanian have been said to qualify for full membership; Romanian, Modern
Greek, Balkan Romani and a group of Serbo-Croatian, or rather Serbian
dialects - the Torlak ones - have been treated as peripheral members;
Standard Serbo-Croatian has been very marginally included; while Turkish has
been treated as a "donor" language.

Papers within any framework on any Balkan Sprachbund property, involving any
of the Balkan languages, as well as languages outside the Balkans which
exhibit areal properties encountered on the Balkans (e.g. the languages of
the Caucasus or the Volga area) invited. Papers dealing with more than one
language are strongly preferred.

Please send abstracts of no more than 500 words as attachments to an e-mail
message to o.tomiclet.leidenuniv.nl <mailto:o.tomiclet.leidenuniv.nl>.
Deadline March 15. Notification of acceptance by May 1.

Workshop on Automatic Summarization 2001
(pre-conference workshop in conjunction with NAACL2001)

Sunday, June 3, 2001
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

sponsored by
ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics)
MITRE Corporation

Organizing Committee:

Jade Goldstein 
Carnegie Mellon University
jade+cs.cmu.edu


Chin-Yew Lin
USC/Information Sciences Institute 
cylisi.edu


Workshop Website:

http://www.isi.edu/~cyl/was-naacl2001 (for the latest update)


I. OVERVIEW

The problem of automatic summarization poses a variety of tough challenges
in both NL understanding and generation. A spate of recent papers and
tutorials on this subject at conferences such as ACL, ANLP/NAACL, ACL/EACL,
AAAI, ECAI, IJCAI, and SIGIR point to a growing interest in research in this
field. Several commercial summarization products have also appeared. There
have been several workshops in the past on this subject: Dagstuhl in 94,
ACL/EACL in 97, the AAAI Spring Symposium in 98, and ANLP/NAACL in 2000. All
of these were extremely successful, and the field is now enjoying a period
of revival and is advancing at a much quicker pace than before. NAACL'2001
is an ideal occasion to host another workshop on this problem.



II. CALL FOR PAPERS

The Workshop on Automatic Summarization program committee invites papers
addressing (but not limited to):


Summarization Methods:

 use of linguistic representations, 
 statistical models,
 NL generation for summarization,
 production of abstracts and extracts,
 multi-document summarization,
 narrative techniques in summarization,
 multilingual summarization,
 text compaction,
 multimodal summarization (including summarization of audio),
 use of information extraction,
 studies and modeling of human summarizers,
 improving summary coherence,
 concept fusion,
 use of thesauri and ontologies,
 trainable summarizers,
 applications of machine learning,
 knowledge-rich methods.


Summarization Resources:

 development of corpora for training and evaluating summarizers,
 annotation standards,
 shared summarization tools,
 document segmentation,
 topic detection, and
 clustering related to summarization.


Evaluation Methods:

 intrinsic and extrinsic measures,
 on-line and off-line evaluations,
 standards for evaluation,
 task-based evaluation scenarios,
 user studies,
 inter-judge agreement.


Workshop Themes:



1. Summarization Applications

2. Multidocument Summarization

3. Multilingual Text Summarization

4. Evaluation and Text/Training Corpora

5. Generation for Summarization

6. Topic Identification for Summarization

7. Integration with Web and IR Access



III. FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION

Submissions must use the ACL latex style or Microsoft Word style
WAS-submission.doc (both available from the Automatic Summarization workshop
web page). Paper submissions should consist of a full paper (5000 words or
less, including references).



SUBMISSION QUESTIONS



Please send submission questions to cylisi.edu



SUBMISSION PROCEDURE



Electronic submission only: send the pdf (preferred), postscript, or MS Word
form of your submission to: cylisi.edu. The Subject line should be
"NAACL2001 WORKSHOP PAPER SUBMISSION". Because reviewing is blind, no author
information is included as part of the paper. An identification page must be
sent in a separate email with the subject line: "NAACL2001 WORKSHOP ID PAGE"
and must include title, all authors, theme area, keywords, word count, and
an abstract of no more than 5 lines. Late submissions will not be accepted.
Notification of receipt will be e-mailed to the first author shortly after
receipt.



DEADLINES (Tentative)

Paper submission deadline: January 19, 2001
Notification of acceptance
for papers: February 16, 2001
Camera ready papers due: March 2, 2001
Workshop date: June 3, 2001