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cs.rutgers.edu>[ Extended submission deadline: **22 April**] **** EXTENDED CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS **** WORKSHOP ON HUMAN LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGY AND KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT ACL/EACL 2001 Conference Toulouse, France July 6-7, 2001 Human language technologies promise solutions to challenges in human computer interaction, information access, and knowledge management. Advances in technology areas such as indexing, retrieval, transcription, extraction, translation, and summarization offer new capabilities for learning, playing and conducting business. This includes enhanced awareness, creation and dissemination of enterprise expertise and know-how. This workshop aims to bring together the community of computational linguists working in a range of areas (e.g., speech and language processing, translation, summarization, multimedia presentation, content extraction, dialog tracking) both to report advances in human language technology, their application to knowledge management and to establish a road map for the Human Language Technologies for the next decade. The road map will comprise an analysis of the present situation, a vision of where we want to be in ten years from now, and a number of intermediate milestones that would help in setting intermediate goals and in measuring our progress towards our goals. The workshop will be structured into two days, the first which will address new research in human language technology for knowledge management that addresses problems including but not limited to: * Expert Discovery: Modeling, cataloguing and tracking of distributed organizations and communities of experts. * Knowledge Discovery: Identification and classification of knowledge from unstructured multimedia data. * Knowledge Sharing: Awareness of and access to enterprise expertise and know-how. Human language technology promises solutions to these challenges through technologies such as: * Automated retrieval, extraction, and enrichment of information and knowledge from multimedia, multilingual, and multiparty information sources. * Translingual or crosslingual retrieval, presentation, and sharing of knowledge. * Automated detection and tracking of emerging topics from unstructured multimedia data (e.g., documents, web, video news broadcasts). * Use of knowledge sources to facilitate knowledge mapping and access (e.g., lexicosemantic such as Word-Net, semantic such as geospatial Gazetteers, semistructured such as thesauri, encyclopedia, fact books) * Automated question-answering from heterogeneous source * Intelligent tools that support the automated bibliometrics and document analysis/understanding in support of discovery of distributed experts and communities of expertise * Summarization and presentation generation of knowledge (e.g., knowledge maps, lessons learned). * Modeling of user knowledge, beliefs, plans, (dis)abilities and preferences from queries, created artifacts, and human computer interactions. The second day of the workshop will target the formulation and refinement of a road map for the Human Language Technologies for the next decade. Participants will help formulate grand challenge problems, discuss possible data sets and/or evaluation metrics/methods that could form the basis of more scientific methods, articulate the role of and necessary advances in human language technology to solve these challenges, as well as identify and characterize early innovations and issues (e.g., robustness, scalability, ontology, privacy). PROGRAM COMMITTEE * Mark Maybury (Chair), The MITRE Corporation, mayburyMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
cs.rutgers.edu>[ Extended submission deadline: **22 April** ] ACL/EACL 2001 Workshop 8th EUROPEAN WORKSHOP ON NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION 6-7 July 2001 Toulouse, France http://www.cs.unca.edu/~bruce/acl01/NLG.html Sponsored by IBM, Endorsed by SIGGEN - ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Natural language generation (NLG) constitutes the production of meaningful texts in natural languages from some underlying non-linguistic representation of information. Accomplishing this goal may be envisioned for a number of different purposes, including standardized and/or multi-lingual reports, summaries, machine translation, dialog applications, and embedding in multi-media and hypertext environments. Consequently, the automated production of language is associated with a large number of highly diverse tasks whose appropriate orchestration in high quality poses a variety of theoretical and practical problems. Relevant issues include content selection, text organization, the production of referring expressions, aggregation, lexicalization, and surface realization, as well as coordination with other media. This workshop is part of a bi-annual series of workshops about natural language generation that runs since 1987. Previous European workshops have been held at Royaumont, Edinburgh, Judenstein, Pisa, Leiden, Duisburg, and Toulouse. The goal of the workshop is to be an informal meeting which facilitates the dissemination of knowledge and expertise in the field. The workshop will focus on the following topics: * Search methods for NLG (in content planning and realization) There seems to be a substantial discrepancy between application-oriented systems and principled approaches to NLG. Accomodating a standard pipeline architecture with suitable heuristic preferences to the intended functionality of a system stands in contrast to several principled approaches to searching which have been tried out so far. These include blackboard architectures, constraint propagation and, more recently genetic algorithms and statistical techniques. A comparison of these methods in terms of their potential and limitations is likely to improve understanding about this issue. Gained insights could prove fruitful for building applications in a more general and, thus, better reusable way, especially in large-scale applications such as summarization and machine translation. * Differences in information organization between source and presentation specifications (and methods to bridge between these) Whether the generation task is to verbally express contents of some knowledge base or to produce multi-lingual presentations from language-neutral or similar representations, there are strong similarities in building the target representations: In the overwhelming number of cases, the ordering and embedding of elements in the source representation is reflected by the ordering and embedding of their corresponding realizations at the surface. Often, this reflection is systematic, many times even simple. But a few cases prove complex and involve a major restructuring of the surface structure when compared to the source structure. A major emphasis of this topic is on collecting such complex cases, identifying commonalities between them and discussing restructuring techniques. Accepted papers on these and related topics will be scheduled for presentation. The majority of the time will be devoted to discussions, either in sequence or in parallel, depending on the number of participants. We are considering organizing a panel. For the focus topics above, we will contact a number of competent researchers to address the topic from a specific perspective according to their experience. In addition, we will ask some of them to prepare material / concrete examples for discussions. WORKSHOP CHAIRS Helmut Horacek Univ. of the Saarland Nicolas Nicolov IBM T.J. Watson Research Center Leo Wanner Univ. of Stuttgart PROGRAMME COMMITTEE John Bateman Univ. of Bremen Dan Cristea Univ. of Iasi Robert Dale Macquarie University Laurence Danlos Universite Paris 7 Marc Dymetman Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble Michael Elhadad Ben-Gurion Univ. Kristiina Jokinen Univ. of Art and Design Helsinki Richard Kittredge Univ. of Montreal & CoGenTex Daniel Marcu ISI, Univ. of Southern California Chris Mellish Univ. of Edinburgh Sergei Nirenburg CRL, New Mexico Owen Rambow AT&T Research Ehud Reiter Univ. of Aberdeen Manfred Stede Technical University of Berlin Michael Zock LIMSI, CNRS SUBMISSIONS (papers, posters, demos) Papers describing original work in the area of NLG in particular related to the workshop focus topics above should be submitted electronically. Papers should be 6-8 pages long in PDF format. We recommend a A4, two-column format like the ACL proceedings: http://acl2001.dfki.de/style/ We also invite poster and demo submissions (free format, up to 6 page, PDF). The submissions should be associated with a cover email containing the following information (ASCII text): # TITLE: <title of the paper> # AUTHORS: <list of authors> # EMAIL: <email of author(s) for correspondence> # KEYWORDS: <keywords, topic sub-areas, ...> # TYPE: <paper> / <poster> / <demo> # ABSTRACT: <abstract of the paper> Send your submission to Helmut Horacek <horacekMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue