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cs.rutgers.edu>FINAL CALL 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 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 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 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 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, ...> # ABSTRACT: <abstract of the paper> Send your submission to Leo Wanner <wannerloMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
cs.rutgers.edu>**FINAL CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS** ACL/EACL2001 Workshop on Sharing Tools and Resources for Research and Education Co-organised by ELSNET Toulouse, Saturday 7th July 2001 BACKGROUND: At a workshop at ACL 2000 in Hong Kong dedicated to Infrastructures for Global Collaboration there was an agreement between the main professional organisations in NLP and Speech (ACL and ISCA), and ELSNET, and the other meeting participants, that it would be useful to aim at a broadly supported, joint repository or catalogue for tools and materials for the language and speech communities. An ELSNET-sponsored workshop on educational issues held at EACL99 concluded that certain non-transient infrastructures needed to be instigated to raise the public perception of educational issues in NLP. It also concluded that a repository of shared materials, appropriately indexed for educational usage, would be a useful point of departure. This workshop will build on the consensus reached at these previous workshops. There will be two clear foci: one upon instruments for sharing tools and resources in general that addresses practical problems, and the other upon the technological and infrastructural issues surrounding the educational uses of repositories. Good examples of existing initiatives in this area are among others the ACL Natural Language Software Registry (hosted at DFKI, registry.dfki.de) which was set up as a repository for tools for the distinct fields of Human Language Techology (HLT), the ELRA/ELDA, LDC, TELRI and Elsnet resources catalogues and repositories (http://www.icp.inpg.fr/ELRA, http://www.ldc.upenn.edu, http://www.telri.de and http://www.elsnet.org/resources.html), OLAC (a worldwide network of language archives at www.language-archives.org), and JEWELS (http://www.elsnet.org/jewels), an as-yet incomplete EU funded website for educational materials in Language and Speech. A third theme concerns how to build upon existing initiatives as sources of data or inspiration. AIM AND SCOPE OF THE WORKSHOP: The main goal of the workshop is to discuss methods for the improvement and extension of existing repositories; the educational uses of repositories; the closer interlinking between different kinds of repositories (tools and resources); global infrastructures for the achievement of joint actions. However, we expect the scope of the workshop to be much wider than that, as the issues addressed are of general interest to everybody who believes that sharing tools and resources is essential for the progress of research and education in our field. Contributions of papers and demonstrations are solicited that address the above themes. The following list of topics is suggestive rather than exhaustive: * Repositories versus catalogues * Mechanisms and infrastructures for sharing and describing content * Repository management * Standards for exchange, description, and annotation * Metadata descriptions * Quality assessment * Structure and content of an NLP/CL repository * Tools and materials for NLP/CL education * Web-based teaching methods for NLP/CL SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS FOR PAPERS * Electronic submissions only (PostScript, Word, or PDF), following the appropriate ACL latex style or Microsoft Word style. Submissions should not exceed eight (8) pages, including references. You can download the appropriate style or template files using the following link: acl2001.dfki.de/style. In case of problems with the submission format, please contact one of the co-chairs. * Submissions to either co-chair (Mike Rosner and Thierry Declerck). All submissions will be acknowledged. * Please provide a list of keywords in the separate header page and indicate the best fitting subtopic(s) from the above list. SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS FOR DEMONSTRATIONS * Demos may be submitted with or without an accompanying paper. * Please write a 2-page description of the demo and send to either co-chair. Please let us know about special hardware requirements over and above the standard PC + beamer without internet access provided by default CONFIRMED COMMITTEE MEMBERS - Thierry Declerck (DFKI) Co-chair (Repository) declerckMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue