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alcor.concordia.ca>Call for papers Second North American Phonology Conference (NAPhC2) The Linguistics Program at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec will host the Second North American Phonology Conference (NAPhC2) from April 26-28th, 2002. We are pleased to announce that the following phonologists have all accepted invitations to the conference: Patricia Keating (UCLA) John McCarthy (UMass) David Odden (Ohio) Carole Paradis (Laval) Douglas Pulleyblank (UBC) The theme of the conference is "I-Phonology", in the sense of "I-language" discussed, among other places, in Chomsky's _Knowledge of Language_ (1986). We thus encourage submission of empirical and formal investigations into the nature of individual I-phonologies, as well as into the nature of the human phonological faculty. Students are encouraged to submit abstracts. Abstract length is not limited--complete papers may be submitted for evaluation. Papers may be submitted and presented in French or English. Accepted papers will be allotted 40 minutes, including discussion time. Papers not accepted as talks will be considered for the Poster Sessions. Please indicate in your message if you do NOT want to be considered for a poster presentation. Abstracts must be submitted electronically to naphcMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
sics.se>ACQUIRING (AND USING) LINGUISTIC (AND WORLD) KNOWLEDGE FOR INFORMATION ACCESS The 2002 AAAI Spring Symposium Series, March 25-27, 2002 at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. http://www.sics.se/~jussi/aaaiss02/ CALL FOR PAPERS EXTENDED DEADLINE: NOVEMBER 27 * Theory for Systems; Application for Theories - Information Access Tasks Need Text Understanding. To move forward the research frontier in the general field of information access, one of the bottlenecks we need to address is understanding textual content somewhat better. While full text understanding remains a distant and possibly unattainable goal, advances in content analysis beyond the simple word-occurrence statistics or name-recognition algorithms used today would seem to be desirable. Information retrieval is a blunt information access task, and information-retrieval systems deliver useful results with a simple text and content model. Much better models are necessary for information access tasks that involve information refinement, meaning tasks that involve processing information in text - and some specific questions in information retrieval proper are fairly knowledge-intensive such as query expansion or questions related to multilinguality. In addition, the dynamic nature of both information needs and information sources will make a flexible model or set of models a necessity. Models must either be adaptive or easily adapted by some form of low-cost intervention; and they must support incremental knowledge build-up. The first requirement involves acquisition of information from unstructured data; the second involves finding an inspectable and transparent model and developing an understanding of knowledge-intensive interaction. - Text Understanding Needs a Theory. Whatever the type of model, it must be represented in some way. But knowledge modeling, semantics, or ontology construction are areas marked by the absence of significant consensus either in points of theory or scope of application. Even the terminology and success criteria of the somewhat overlapping fields are fragmented. Some approaches to content modeling lay claim to psychological realism, others to inspectability; some are portable, others transparent; some are robust, others logically sound; some efficient, others scalable. There is no explicit standard and not even any accepted practice to adhere to or to deviate from. - Information Access Tasks Give Focus to Modeling. It is too much to hope for a set of standards to emerge from the intellectually fairly volatile and fragmented area of semantics or cognitive modeling. But in our application areas - namely, those in the general field of information access - external success criteria are better established. Compromise from theoretical underpinnings in the name of performance is not only possible but even desirable. * Target Audience The focus of this workshop are models and model tasks. We aim to bring together researchers that work with any kind of text analysis with the aim of understanding text, and with information access applications in mind: In particular, research groups that have a working system capable of processing a fair amount of text which uses knowledge about either text, domain, or both; or researchers with either a design for a knowledge model or theories about text and textuality, who have performed large-scale experiments on text to validate their ideas. The idea is to attract participation from diverse fields with the goal of identifying reasonable interfaces between analyses of various type. Participants would be encouraged not only to relate successes their approach has engendered but failures due to lack of knowledge or due to unsatisfactory modeling; other participants would be encouraged to discuss and offer contributions to the goal. Ideally, projects would invite each other to work with material they already are working with and to investigate cross-pollination of different approaches. * Submissions We invite submissions of research abstracts position papers - and in particular - system demonstrations and experience reports on all subjects related to the acquisition and usage of linguistic knowledge in the information access field, including (but not limited to): Application areas / Information access tasks; Techniques for acquiring knowledge from text; Knowledge representation formats. The submission should about 1-3 pages of text, preferably in plain text, HTML or self-contained LaTeX. Some "challenge questions" which the authors might want to address: 1.How does my model adjust to a new domain or to previously unknown material? 2.How can the knowledge in my model be inspected, assessed, and hand-edited except in a near-full-scale trial? 3.How well does the model perform in a large-scale trial? (By ANY metric!) 4.What additional knowledge or theory does my model need to perform better? Unsatisfactory answers are encouraged if they invite further cooperation between groups! Submissions should be sent by e-mail to Jussi Karlgren (jussiMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue