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cs.rutgers.edu>Call for Papers Workshop on Evaluation for Language and Dialogue Systems ACL/EACL 2001 Toulouse, France July 6-7, 2001 WORKSHOP GOALS The aim of this two day workshop is to identify and to synthesize current needs for language-technology evaluation. The first day of the workshop will focus on one of the most challenging current issues in language engineering: the evaluation of dialogue systems and models. The second day will extend the discussion to address the problem of evaluation in language engineering more broadly and on more theoretical grounds. The space of possible dialogues is enormous, even for limited domains like travel information servers. The generalization of evaluation methodologies across different application domains and languages is an open problem. Review of published evaluations of dialogue models and systems suggests that usability techniques are the standard method. Dialogue-based system are often evaluated in terms of standard, objective usability metrics, such as task-completion time and number of user actions. In the past, researchers have proposed and debated theory-based methods for modifying and testing the underlying dialogue model, but the most widely used method of evaluation is usability testing, although more precise and empirical methods for evaluating the effectiveness of dialogue models have been proposed. For task-based interaction, typical measures of effectiveness are time-to-completion and task outcome, but the evaluation should focus on user satisfaction rather than on arbitrary effectiveness measurements.Indeed, the problems faced in current approaches to measurement of effectiveness dialogue models and systems include: Direct measures are unhelpful because efficient performance on the nominal task may not represent the most effective interaction Indirect measures usually rely on judgment and are vulnerable to weak relationships between the inputs and outputs Subjective measures are unreliable and domain-specific For its first day, the workshop organizers solicit papers on these issues, with particular emphasis on methods that go beyond usability testing to address the underlying dialogue model. Representative questions to be addressed include: o How do we deal with the combinatorial explosion of dialogue states? o How can satisfaction be measured with respect to underlying dialogue models? o Are there useful direct measures of dialogue properties that do not depend on task efficiency? o What is the role of agent-based simulation in evaluation of dialogue models? Of course, the problems faced in evaluating dialogue and system models are found in other domains of language engineering, even for non-interactive processes such as part-of-speech tagging, parsing, semantic disambiguation, information extration, speech transcription, and audio document indexing. So the issue of evaluation can be viewed at a more generic level, raising fundamental, theoretical questions such as: o What are the interest and benefits of evaluation for language engineering? o Do we really need these specific methodologies, since a form of evaluation sould always be present in any scientific investigation? o If evaluation is needed in language engineering, is it the case for all domains? o What form should it take? Technology evaluation (task-oriented in laboratory environment) or field/user Evaluation (complete systems in real-life conditions)? We have seen before that the the evaluation of dialogue models is still unsolved, but for domains where metrics already exists, are they satisfactory and sufficient? How can we take into account or abstract from the subjective factor introduced by human operators in the process? Do similarity measures and standards offer appropriate answers to this problem? Most of the efforts focus on evaluating process, but what about the issue of language resources evaluation? For its second day of work, the workshop organizers solicit papers on these issues, with the intent to address the problem of evaluation both from a broader perspective (including novel applications domains for evaluation, new metrics for known tasks and resource evaluation) and a more theoretical point of view (including formal theory of evaluation and infrastructural needs of language engineering). NOTE: People who would like to submit a paper on lexical semantic disambiguation evaluation should consider the parallel workshop, on July 5-6, for the closure of the SENSEVAL-2 evaluation campaign. - ----------------------------------------------------------- WORKSHOP ORGANIZATION The organization of each of the two days of the workshop will reflect the workshop's two main themes. Each day will begin with a session of presentations of selected papers and follow with panel discussions to synthesize and develop possible methodologies from additional selected workshop papers. WORKSHOP PARTICIPATION The workshop seeks participation from people involved or interested in the problem of evaluation in language processing and the research and industrial communities that study and implement dialogue models for natural-language interaction systems. The first part of the workshop will specifically draw on the natural-language interaction community, for instance like the one developing at the confluence of SIGdial and SIGCHI, which will find in this workshop an atmosphere more flavored by computational-linguistics related issues (see, for example, the First SIGdialWorkshop on Discourse and Dialogue). The second part of the workshop is intended to provide a forum for a broader audience more in the spirit of the one that attended the LREC'2000 Satellite Workshop on Evaluation (see http://www.limsi.fr/TLP/CLASS), in particular offering an opportunity to people involved in language engineering evaluation (e.g ., the CLASS audience) in the context of national or transnational projects or programs, both in Europe and abroad. - ----------------------------------------------------------- SUBMISSION DETAILS Paper submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings and should not exceed eight (8) pages, including references. We strongly recommend the use of ACL LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word Style files tailored for this year's conference. They are available from the ACL-2001 program committee Web site at http://acl2001.dfki.de/style/. Papers should be submitted electronically, as either a LaTeX, Word or PDF file to either: Patrick Paroubek, papMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
cs.rutgers.edu>*** First Call for Papers*** WORKSHOP ON COLLOCATION: Computational Extraction, Analysis and Exploitation ACL'2001 Conference Toulouse, France July 7th, 2001 We invite papers on topics relating to the theme of collocation and more particularly their computational extraction, analysis and exploitation. This workshop follows the French ATALA workshop on collocation which took place in Paris, France on January 2001 and seeks to go forward so as to explore the wider perspective of computational linguistics. The term "collocation" was introduced in the nineteen thirties by J. R. Firth, founder member of the British Contextualist school, to characterise certain linguistic phenomena of cooccurrence that stem principally from the linguistic competence of native speakers (Firth 1957). By its very nature collocation remains a relatively fuzzy concept, the consequence of which being that traditional grammarians and semanticists have tended to ignore it, the exception being some lexical semanticists as Cruse (1986). The study of collocation is above all a practical one aimed at assisting language learners and translators in their tasks. Essentially idiomatic in nature, collocation defies rigid formalisation which explains the existence of different schools of thought between those seeking a descriptive contextualised view of linguistic phenomena and those who seeks formalised applications for translation, lexicography or computational purposes. This has led to a variety of approaches based around a general core meaning for the phenomenon. For several years, NLP has been concerned with collocation largely through the following fields: Formalisation through specialised formalisms for different NLP tasks: dictionary formalism such as lexical function; HPSG, LFG, TAG, ... formalisms for analysis or generation. Extraction from monolingual or bilingual texts or dictionairies using either raw statistics or statistics combined with linguistic information such as part-of-speech or grammar dependancy. Exploitation through specific NLP systems dedicated to second language learning or translation, or for such NLP tasks as information retrieval or thematic structuration. This workshop aims to guage the extend to which the role of collocation as a phenomenon in applied linguistics is now being taken into account in formal linguistics and NLP and addresses the following topics (not limitative): Formal description of collocation through existing or dedicated specialised formalisms New methods adopted for the identification of collocations. This would include statistics and also more linguistic oriented methods. NLP systems dedicated to collocation. Exploitation of collocations for other NLP tasks through monolingual or multilingual environments. This workshop addresses researchers in all fields of theoretical and applied computational linguistics and most particularly those working in automatic and assisted machine translation, dictionnary building and computationally assisted language teaching as well as those concerned with information retrieval and text mining. ORGANIZERS Biatrice Daille IRIN - University of Nantes, France - dailleMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue