LINGUIST List 12.79

Mon Jan 15 2001

Calls: Finiteness, Automatic Summarization-EXTENSION

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

Directory

1. Irina Nikolaeva, Finiteness
2. Priscilla Rasmussen, NAACL'01 Automatic Summarization Workshop--DEADLINE EXTENSION

CALL FOR PAPERS
COFERENCE ON FINITENESS
UNIVERSITY OF KONSTANZ (GERMANY), May 11-13, 2001

Though routinely employed in the morphological and syntactic analysis
of many languages, if not all, the descriptive content and theoretical
import of the category of finiteness is so unclear as to render it
arbitrary and meaningless. The aim of the conference is to shed light
on this category by focusing on questions such as these:

- Is FINITENESS an elementary notion or is it defined in terms of more
basic notions (such as marking for tense, mood, person/number/other
agreement, being in construction with a non-oblique subject)?

- Assuming FINITENESS is not elementary, what are the patterns of more
basic functional categories that render such a derived category
meaningful? (For example, are there systematic correlations between
being marked for tense, mood, person/number/other agreement and being
in construction with a non-oblique subject?) Are such patterns
language-particular or are they universally predictable?

- What kinds of units can be said to be finite or non-finifte? Words
or word forms? Constructions/clauses/sentences? If both, how is the
FINITENESS of words related to that of constructions?

- As a word category, how does FINITENESS bear on word classes? (Is
finite what verbs are, and non-finite what not-so-verby verbs are,
with basic nouns and adjectives unrelated to verbs being outside the
scope of this category altogether?)

- As a construction category, how does FINITENESS bear on construction
classes?(Is finite what sentences and perhaps clauses are, and
non-finite what phrases and perhaps clauses are, if desentential?
Further, how do finite and non-finite distribute over main and
subordinate clauses?)

- How do finite and non-finite constructions differ as domains for
syntactic rules (e.g., binding, anaphora, case marking)? That is,
what is the relationship between FINITENESS and syntactic opacity?

- What about FINITENESS is subject to change? (For example,
can finite forms or constructions become non-finite, and
vice versa? If so, what are the mechanisms of change?

For purposes of this conference the overall angle on such questions
ought to be typological and theoretical: empirically determining
crosslinguistic variation and its limitations ought to be taken as
seriously as explaining what has been found, in whatever theoretical
framework.

Invited speakers include:
Elena Kalinina, Moscow State University
Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, University of Stockholm
Jaklin Kornfilt, Syracuse University
David Perlmutter, University of California, San Diego

Presentation will be allotted 30 minutes with additional 15 minutes
for discussion. Abstract of one page should be submitted by March
30th, 2001. If you are submitting by regular mail, abstracts should be
mailed to: Irina Nikolaeva, University of Konstanz, Fachbereich
Sprachwissenschaft, Fach 175, Konstanz, D-78457. If submitting
electronically, please include the abstract in the body of the message
(do not send attachments!) and send it to:
irina.nikolaevauni-konstanz.de. 

Abstracts should include the author information (author's name and
affiliation, title of the paper, mailing address, and e-mail
address). Authors are encouraged to write their papers, so that most
of the papers to be presented in the conference could be published
later in an edited volume.

IMPORTANT DEADLINES:
Submission deadline: March 30th, 2001
Notification of acceptance, April 10th, 2001

Conference organizers:
Irina Nikolaeva
irina.nikolaevauni-konstanz.de
Frans Plank
frans.plankuni-konstanz.de

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

New submission deadline: February 23, 2001

Organizing Committee:
Jade Goldstein Carnegie Mellon University jade+cs.cmu.edu
Chin-Yew Lin USC/Information Sciences Institute cylisi.edu

Program Committee:
Breck Baldwin Baldwin Language Tech
Hsin-Hsi Chen National Taiwan University
Udo Hahn Universitaet Freiburg
Eduard Hovy USC/Information Sciences Institute
Hongyan Jing Columbia University
Elizabeth Liddy Syracuse University
Daniel Marcu USC/Information Sciences Institute
Inderjeet Mani MITRE
Shigeru Masuyama Toyohashi University of Technology
Marie-Francine Moens Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Vibhu Mittal Google Research
Sung Hyon Myaeng Chungnam National University
Akitoshi Okumura NEC
Chris Paice Lancaster University
Dragomir Radev University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Karen Sparck-Jones University of Cambridge
Tomek Strzalkowski State University of New York,
Albany
Simone Teufel Columbia University

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



I. OVERVIEW

II. CALL FOR PAPERS

III. FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION



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: Feburary 23, 2001
Notification of acceptance for papers: March 23, 2001
Camera ready papers due: April 6, 2001
Workshop date: June 3, 2001