LINGUIST List 12.944

Thu Apr 5 2001

Calls: Natural Lang Generation, Salish Languages

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

Directory

1. Priscilla Rasmussen, Natural Language Generation (ACL 2001) DEADLINE EXTENSION
2. UBCWPL, Salish and Neighboring Languages (ICSNL 36)

[ Extended submission deadline: **22 April** ]


 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

 Sponsored by IBM, 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 and related 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, posters, demos)

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 and demo 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, ...>
 # TYPE: <paper> / <poster> / <demo>
 # ABSTRACT: <abstract of the paper>

Send your submission to Helmut Horacek <horacekcs.uni-sb.de>.


IMPORTANT DATES

 Paper submissions *** 22 April 2001 ***
 Notification of acceptance 6 May 2001
 Camera-ready copies due 16 May 2001
 Registration deadline as ACL
 Workshop dates 6-7 July 2001


REGISTRATION

The registration fee for the workshop will be posted at a later stage. The
registration fee includes attendance of the workshop and a copy of workshop
proceedings. Follow the registration instructions at the ACL site and
indicate that you would like to attend the NLG workshop.

People wishing to attend the workshop but not submitting papers should send
a notification of attendance: a 1-2 page stating interest to participate,
work done in NLG so far, and potential contributions / material for
discussions about one of the topics. This informationn will help with the
organisation of discussions and allow for an informal and highly
interactive character of the workshop. Notifications of attendance should
be sent to Leo Wanner <wannerloinformatik.uni-stuttgart.de>.


MORE INFORMATION

 Check the following web site for updates about the NLG workshop:
 http://www.cs.unca.edu/~bruce/acl01/NLG.html

ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS

Thirty-sixth International Conference on Salish and Neighboring
Languages

August 8, 9, and 10, 2001

This year's conference will be hosted by the Stolo Nation, in conjunction
with the UBC Department of Linguistics. The conference will take place at
the Skowkale Hall which is located on 7686B Chilliwack River Road in
Chilliwack, BC on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday August 8, 9, and 10.
Papers on all aspects of the study, preservation, and teaching of Salish and
neighboring languages are welcome.

TRAVEL AND ACCOMMODATION

Best Western Rainbow Country Inn (telephone: 604- 795-3828, address: 43971
Industrial Way, Chilliwack. This is about 10 minutes away from the
conference site). 
Chilliwack Motor Inn (telephone: 604- 792-8501, address: 8120 Young St.,
Chilliwack. This is about 15 minutes away from the conference).
Comfort Inn (telephone: 604- 858-0636, address: 45405 Luckakuck Way (right
beside the Cottonwood Mall). This is located about 5 minutes away).
Travel Lodge Inn (telephone: 604- 792-4240, address: 45466 Yale road,
Chilliwack. This is located about 10 minutes from conference site).


CONFERENCE FEE

o A registration fee of $40.00 CDN will be charged for the conference
(students $20.00, elders no charge). This will cover on-site costs.


PREPRINTS

o This year the conference preprints will be printed and distributed by the
UBC Working Papers in Linguistics.

IF YOU ARE SUBMITTING A PAPER

o Please follow the UBCWPL style sheet, as follows:

Manuscripts should be printed camera-ready on a laser printer. Do not
number pages, but pencil numbers lightly on the back of the page.
Font:
-12 point font throughout, footnotes 10 point, all in Times font.

Margins:
-No right justification.
-All margins should be 1 inch except the outside (binding) margin which
should be 1.5 inches. This means that odd numbered pages (for example, page
1) will have a 1.5 inch margin on the left and a 1 inch margin on the right,
whereas even numbered pages (for example, page 2) will have a 1 inch margin
on the left and a 1.5 inch margin on the right. Top and bottom margins for
all pages are 1 inch.
 
First Page:
-Leave a blank line, then enter the title of the paper on the next line,
centred and bolded.
-Only capitalize the first word and other standardly capitalized words.
-Leave a blank line, then enter your name, centred but not bolded. On the
next line, state your affiliation e.g. University of British
Columbia centred, but not bolded
-Leave two blank lines, then enter the abstract of the paper. Abstract
should be indented 0.5 inches on both sides and fully justified. The
abstract should summarize the main point of the paper and should be less
than 150 words.
-Leave two blank lines then begin with the text.

Spacing and section headings:
-Single space. Do not leave a blank line between paragraphs. Indent each
paragraph 0.5 inches.
- Please number your sections starting at 1 (not 0).
- Do not include a final period. For example,
 1 Introduction
 1.1 Consonant inventory
-Bold the headings and left-align (not underlined, centred or italicized.)
-Leave one blank line before each heading, and one after.
-Separate example sentences from the text with one blank line.

Footnotes:
-Put footnotes at the bottom of the page and separate from the text with a
two inch line.
-Footnotes should be single-spaced with no blank line between entries.
-Do not indent.

References:
-Do not start a new page. Rather, leave two blank lines after the last line
of text and then enter the bolded heading 'References' left-aligned.
-Leave one blank line, then begin listing references.
-Single-space references; do not leave blank lines between entries.
-Additional lines of individual references should be indented 0.5 inches
(hanging indent). 
Examples:
Book:
Kim, E. 1998. How to Write a Style Sheet. New York: Academic Press.
Article in Journal:
Caldecott, M. 1998. A Day in the Life of a Graduate Linguistics Student: A
Theoretical
 Approach. Linguistic Inquiry, 200, 145-160.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the editors:
 
Linguistics-UBCWPLarts.ubc.ca
 

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION:
Papers for the 36th International Conference on Salish and Neighboring
Languages FRIDAY, June 6, 2001. Papers received after this will not be
accepted.

Papers should be submitted to:

The editors: 
ICSNL 2001
UBCWPL
c/o Department of Linguistics, UBC
E-270 1866 Main Mall
Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z1
Canada.

TO ORDER PREPRINTS

Mail order form to UBCWPL at the above address, together with a cheque or
money order made out to the UBC Working Papers in Linguistics.

ICSNL 36 Conference Proceedings Order Form:

I enclose $25.00 CDN/ $20.00 US each, for ( ) copies of ICSNL 36.

Check one:
( ) Please mail my copy to the address below.
( ) Please hold my copy for pickup at the conference.

Add the following mailing charges if you wish your copy to be mailed to
you before the conference:

If ordering from Western Canada: $3.50 CDN
If ordering from Eastern Canada: $5.50 CDN
If ordering from US (surface mail): $6.80 CDN or $4.50 US
If ordering from US (air mail): $9.05 CDN or $6.00 US
If ordering from outside N. America (surface mail): $7.60 CDN or $5.00 US
If ordering from outside N. America (air mail): $17.00 CDN or $12.00 US

Name:

Mailing Address:

e-mail address:

Telephone:

o Orders for a copy of the conference proceeding must be received by June
20, 2001. Only a limited number of copies of ICSNL 36 will be available for
purchase at the conference.


LATE PAPERS

o Late papers will be scheduled as time permits. Authors of late papers are
expected to bring 40 to 50 copies of the entire text of the paper and make
them available the first day of the conference. Be sure to contact Martina
Wiltschko at <wmartinainterchange.ubc.ca> before July 15, if you plan to
present a late paper, to ensure that you can be included in the conference
schedule.

o If you plan to attend the conference, submit a paper, or order preprints,
please e-mail Martina Wiltschko at your earliest convenience. Your response
will help us plan. In addition, feel free to pass this e-mail message on to
anyone else who might be interested in the conference.