LINGUIST List 12.2243

Fri Sep 14 2001

Calls: Computational Ling, Machine Translation

Editor for this issue: Richard John Harvey <richardlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Priscilla Rasmussen, Computational Linguistics: Call for Bids to Host ACL 2004
2. Priscilla Rasmussen, Special Issue of Machine Translation

			CALL FOR BIDS TO HOST ACL 2004

Basic Information

In conjunction with its European chapter, the Association for
Computational Linguistics invites proposals to host the 41st Annual
Meeting of the ACL (ACL '04). The ACL conferences are usually held
during the early summer (June or July). The location of ACL
conferences rotates on a three year cycle: in 2004 the ACL conference
will be cosponsored with the European chapter of the ACL, and located
in Europe, the Middle East or North Africa. Proposals coming from any
European country, the Middle East and North Africa are eligible. The
conference format will consist of a main conference and up to 10
workshops and tutorials organized just before or after the conference.

The proposal submission process is in two stages. First, draft
proposals are sought from prospective proposers. Based on the
evaluation of the draft proposals, selected proposers will be invited
to submit full proposals.

Draft proposals are due on the 1st December 2001, and will be
evaluated by a joint ACL/EACL committee. Selected proposers will be
informed at the end of February 2002. Full proposals are due on 15
April 2002.

Draft proposals should include:

Location (accessibility, conference venue, hotels, student dorms)

Local CL Community

Proposed Date

Meeting space (space for plenary sessions, tutorials, workshops, posters,
exhibits, demos and small meetings)

A/V equipment

Food/Entertainment/Banquet/Receptions

Local Arrangements (chairs, committee, volunteer labour, registration 
handling)

Sponsorships

Budget estimates

Suggestions for a general chair may optionally be included, but the final
decision rests with the ACL conference organizing committee.

Proposals will be evaluated in relation to a number of site selection criteria
(unordered):

Experience of Local Arrangement team.

Local CL community support.

Local government and industry support.

Accessibility and attractiveness of proposed site.

Appropriateness of proposed dates.

Adequacy of conference and exhibit facilities for the anticipated number
of registrants

Adequacy of residence accommodations and food services in a range of price
categories and close to the conference facilities.

Adequacy of budget projections and expected surplus.

Balance with regard to the geographical distribution of previous conferences.

Draft proposals should be sent electronically to the ACL vice-president
elect, Mark Johnson, at Mark_JohnsonBrown.edu

Submission Dates:

Draft proposals are due on 1 December 2001;

Full proposals are due on 15 April 2002.

Useful resources:

Submitters are encouraged to view recent previous successful bids,
which are archived on http://www.aclweb.org/archive/bids.html, the ACL
archive web site.

 CALL FOR PAPERS
 SPECIAL ISSUE of MACHINE TRANSLATION

 Embedded MT Systems: Leveraging for Real World Applications
 http://lamp.cfar.umd.edu/Embedded_MT_Systems/

GUEST EDITORS:
Carol Van Ess-Dykema, U.S.Department of Defense,cjvanesafterlife.ncsc.mil
Clare R. Voss, Army Research Laboratory, vossarl.army.mil

An "embedded machine translation (MT) system" is a computational
system with one or more MT engines embedded among its components. These
systems accept various well-formed and degraded types of multilingual
and multi-modal input, including
 * hard-copy pages (original and OCR-ed image),
 * online files (web pages, word processing files, email),
 * video (image and text),
 * speech (natural signal and transcribed).
>From this range of input, such systems enable users to access the
original, foreign language information in their own language.

Traditionally, the term "MT" has been associated with the task of
single document translation. More recently, MT engines within embedded
larger systems have been used to facilitate tasks that require processing
multilingual information both within and across documents. Several
real-world applications have led to the widespread use of embedded MT
systems for cross-language tasks, such as:
 * content extraction * document filtering
 * information retrieval * question-answering
 * summarization

This call is for original or updated research articles on embedded MT
systems. Authors should address two or more of the following foci in
their papers:
1. Input Focus, such as
- Processing methods for range of system input
- Real-time analysis of input
- Channel-specific feedback processes from system components to correct
 noisy input
- Multiple document or channel input integration for summarization or
 other tasks

2. MT Methods Focus, such as
- Symbolic, statistical, or hybrid techniques for translation
- Machine learning applied to construction of MT engine components
- Weighting of candidates for selection of high quality MT output
- Quick ramp-up MT engines

3. System Design Focus, such as
- Architectures to support novel cross-language tasks
- Systems with multiple MT engines
- Pre-MT compensation components or strategies that adjust speech and
 OCR degraded input
- Post-MT processing of output for display to user
- Integration of system output within application software

4. Evaluation Focus, such as
- Linguistic measures of MT component performance
- Task-based measures of system effectiveness
- Experimental designs for assessing or comparing system effectiveness
- Software tools for assisting or automating evaluation process
- Algorithms

The idea of this special issue originates from workshops at ANLP/NAACL-2000
and AMTA-98. Authors from these workshops are encouraged to submit papers
describing progress on their systems and incorporating feedback from
workshop participants. We also encourage other researchers developing
embedded MT systems to submit papers.

Note that, for this special issue, two types of papers will be considered
for review: long papers (20 pages or more) and short papers (less than 20
pages). Longer papers are advised for research projects that have been
implemented and evaluated. Shorter papers are appropriate for recent
research initiatives. We would ideally like to have papers of both types
in the journal.

SPECIAL ISSUE REVIEW BOARD

Lynn Carlson, U.S. Department of Defense
Gary Coen, Boeing Mathematical and Computing Technologies
Mike Dillinger, Logos Corporation
Robert Frederking, Carnegie Mellon University
Laurie Gerber, Language Technology Broker
Ulf Hermjakob, ISI/University of Southern California
Pierre Isabelle, Xerox Research Centre Europe
Lori Levin, Carnegie Mellon University
Kathryn Taylor, AAT/CIA
Takehito Utsuro, Toyohashi University of Technology
Remi Zajac, New Mexico State University
Joe F. Zhou, Intel China Research Center

SCHEDULE
Call for papers issued: 1 June 2001
Papers due: 19 October 2001
Notification to authors: 22 February 2002

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE
Initial submissions should be sent to:
1. Guest Editors cjvanesafterlife.ncsc.mil, vossarl.army.mil
2. Publishing Editor tamara.welschotwkap.nl

>For initial submissions only, authors should send electronic copies
(postscript, pdf, rtf, or doc) to the Guest Editors AND the Publishing
Editor. Please indicate that the submission is for the Special Issue of
Machine Translation on Embedded MT Systems: Leveraging for Real World
Applications.

>Formatting instructions for final submissions will be made available with
acceptance. The Guest Editors will notify the submitters of the acceptance
status of their papers. All other information concerning the Special Issue
will be posted on the homepage.

Questions about submissions should be directed to the two Guest Editors by
email, rather than the Journal or Publishing Editors.