LINGUIST List 13.1097

Sat Apr 20 2002

Calls: Natural Lang Learning, Artificial Intelligence

Editor for this issue: Renee Galvis <reneelinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Antal van den Bosch, CoNLL-02 - Second Call for Papers and Shared Task
2. AIMSA'02 Secretariat, Final CFP: AIMSA'02

 SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS and
 SECOND CALL FOR PARTICIPATION IN SHARED TASK: NAMED ENTITY RECOGNITION

 CoNLL-2002
 Sixth Conference on Natural Language Learning

 COLING-2002 workshop W11
 Taipei, Taiwan, August 31 - September 1, 2002

 http://www.aclweb.org/signll/conll02/cfp.html

Background and Scope
- ------------------

CoNLL is the yearly meeting organized by SIGNLL, the Association for
Computational Linguistics Special Interest Group on Natural Language
Learning. Previous CoNLL meetings were held in Madrid (1997), Sydney
(1998), Bergen (1999) Lisbon (2000) and Toulouse (2001). The 2002
event will be held as a two-days workshop at the 19th International
Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), 24 August --
September 1, 2002 in Taipei, Taiwan.

CoNLL is organized in cooperation with SIGDAT, who have merged this
year's Very Large Corpora (VLC) workshop with CoNLL-2002. The Learning
Language in Logic (LLL) workshop series has also merged this year with
CoNLL. Researchers in VLC and LLL are encouraged to submit their paper
to CoNLL-2002.

CoNLL is an international forum for discussion and presentation of
research on natural language learning. We invite submission of papers
about natural language learning topics, including, but not limited to:

 * Computational models of human language acquisition
 * Computational models of the origins and evolution of language
 * Learning from very large corpora
 * Learning language in logic
 * Machine learning methods applied to natural language processing
 tasks (speech processing, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics,
 discourse processing, language engineering applications)
 * Symbolic learning methods (Rule Induction and Decision Tree
 Learning, Lazy Learning, Inductive Logic Programming, Analytical
 Learning, Transformation-based Error-driven Learning)
 * Biologically-inspired methods (Neural Networks, Evolutionary
 Computing)
 * Statistical methods (Bayesian Learning, HMM, maximum entropy,
 SNoW, Support Vector Machines)
 * Reinforcement Learning
 * Active learning, ensemble methods, meta-learning
 * Computational Learning Theory analysis of language learning
 * Empirical and theoretical comparisons of language learning methods
 * Models of induction and analogy in Linguistics


Special Theme
- -----------

As in previous years, in addition to submissions on the general topics
listed above, we encourage submissions on a special theme. This year's
special theme is:

 Using unsupervised and semi-supervised learning methods
 in natural language learning

Many machine learning approaches to natural language problems require
supervision, typically in the form of labeled examples. Due to the
difficulty annotating data, there has been a significant interest
recently in the study of methods that can benefit from large amounts
of unlabeled data, perhaps in addition to relatively small amounts of
labeled examples. The purpose of the special theme is to present and
discuss progress in this direction in the context of natural language
learning and highlight both theoretical and experimental studies on a
variety of approaches to these issues.


Special Session: Shared Task - Named Entity Recognition
- -----------------------------------------------------

This year's workshop will also accept submissions for a shared task:
named entity recognition. Participating groups will be provided with
the same training and testing material (in several languages), and
will all use the same evaluation criteria, thus allowing comparison
between various learning methods. Currently there are data files
available for one language: Spanish. Data for another Western European
language will be made available for the final evaluation phase.

More information on the shared task is available at:

 http://lcg-www.uia.ac.be/conll2002/ner/


Invited Speaker
- -------------

John Lafferty (School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University,
Pittsburgh, PA, USA)


Submissions
- ---------

Main Session Submissions

 Submit an abstract of maximum 1500 words (Postscript, PDF or plain
 text ASCII) by May 2nd, 2002 electronically to the address below.
 Authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to produce a full paper
 to be published in the proceedings of the workshop, which will be
 available at the workshop for participants, and distributed
 afterwords by COLING. Final submissions must follow the COLING style
 (http://www.ikp.uni-bonn.de/coling2002/psg.html). We strongly
 recommend the use of these style files also in the submission.

 Submit main session abstracts to:

 Dan Roth, danruiuc.edu
 Department of Computer Science,
 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
 1304 West Springfield Ave. Urbana, IL 61801 USA
 Tel: 217 244 7068 Fax: 217 244 6500

 or

 Antal van den Bosch, Antal.vdnBoschkub.nl
 Computational Linguistics, Tilburg University,
 P.O. Box 90153
 NL-5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands
 Tel: +31.13.4663117 Fax: +31.13.4663110

Shared Task Submissions

 Submit an abstract of maximum 1500 words describing the learning
 approach, and your results on the test set by May 15, 2001 to the
 address below (preferably by email). A special section of the
 proceedings will be devoted to a comparison and analysis of the
 results and to a description of the approaches used. Submit shared
 task submissions to:

 Erik Tjong Kim Sang, eriktuia.ua.ac.be
 Centrum Nederlandse Taal en Spraak
 Linguistics, Department of Germanic languages and literature
 UIA, University of Antwerp
 Universiteitsplein 1, B-2610 Wilrijk, Belgium


Important Dates
- -------------

 * Deadline for Abstract Submission: May 2, 2002
 * Deadline for Shared Task Submission: May 15, 2002
 * Notification: May 22, 2002
 * Deadline camera-ready full paper: June 8, 2001
 * Conference: August 31-September 1, 2002


Programme Committee
- -----------------

 Dan Roth (University of Illinois, Urbana, USA (co-chair)
 Antal van den Bosch (Tilburg University, Netherlands) (co-chair)
 Thorsten Brants (PARC, USA)
 Claire Cardie (Cornell University, USA)
 Ken Church (AT&T Labs-Research, USA)
 James Cussens (University of York, UK)
 Walter Daelemans (University of Antwerp, Belgium)
 Diane Litman (University of Pittsburgh, USA)
 Raymond Mooney (University of Texas at Austin, USA)
 John Nerbonne (Groningen University, Netherlands)
 Miles Osborne (University of Edinburgh, UK)
 David Powers (Flinders University, Australia)
 Adwait Ratnaparkhi (WhizBang! Labs-Research, USA)
 Erik Tjong Kim Sang (University of Antwerp, Belgium)
 David Yarowsky (Johns Hopkins University, USA)

The Tenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence:
		Methodology, Systems, Applications
			AIMSA 2002
 
	 Varna, Bulgaria, 4-6th September, 2002


			CALL FOR PAPERS
 http://www.aimsa02.org

The AIMSA conference series has provided a biennial forum for the
presentation of AI research and development since 1984. The
conference, which is held in Bulgaria, covers the full range of topics
in Artificial Intelligence and related disciplines and provides an
ideal forum for international scientific exchange between
Central/Eastern Europe and the rest of the world. AIMSA 2002 is
sponsored by ECCAI, European Coordinating Committee for Artificial
Intelligence.
	
PROGRAMME COMMITTEE CHAIR

Donia R. Scott
ITRI, University of Brighton,
Lewes Road, Brighton BN2 1GA, UK
Email: aimsa02itri.bton.ac.uk
Tele: +44 (0) 1273 642900

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

Gennady Agre			(Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)
Elisabeth Andre			(University of Augsburg)
Ivan Bratko			(University of Ljubljana )
Ben du Boulay			(University of Sussex)
Christiano Castelfranchi 	(University of Siena)
Christo Dichev			(Winston-Salem state University)
Danail Dochev			(Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)
Barbara Dunin-Keplicz		(Warsaw University)
David Forsyth			(UC, Berkeley)
Vladimir Khoroshevsky		(Russian Academy of Sciences)
Igor Kononenko			(University of Ljubljana)
Irena Koprinska			(University of Sydney)
Fangzhen Lin 		(Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
Derek Long			(University of Durham)
Pavol Navrat			(Slovak University of Technology)
Peter Norvig			(Google Inc)
Radoslav Pavlov			(Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)
Dan Tufis			(Romanian Academy for Artificial Intelligence)
Dimitar Vakarelov		(University of Sofia)
Franz Wotawa			(Technical University of Vienna)


PROGRAMME COMMITTEE SECRETARIAT

Anja Wedberg
ITRI, University of Brighton,
Lewes Road, Brighton BN2 1GA, UK
Email: aimsa02itri.bton.ac.uk
Tele: +44 (0) 1273 642900
Fax: +44 (0) 1273 642908


IMPORTANT DATES 

Submission deadline: 		May 4, 2002
Notification of acceptance: 	June 2, 2002
Deadline for final papers: 	June 25, 2002
Conference: 		 September 4-6, 2002

Submissions should describe original research. 

Papers should be submitted electronically to aimsa02itri.bton.ac.uk
in PDF format. Papers should be written in English, single-spaced, 12
point type with no more than 50 lines per page and up to 5000 words
(10 pages maximum including the title page). The first page should
contain the title of the paper, names and addresses of all authors
(including e-mail, if available), an abstract (100-150 words) and a
list of keywords.

Guidelines on the format of final papers will be available on the
AIMSA'2002 Style Guide page.

A paper accepted for presentation at AIMSA'2002 cannot be presented or
have been presented at another meeting with publicly available
published proceedings. Papers that are being submitted to other
conferences must indicate this on the title page, as must papers that
contain significant overlap with previously published work.

Over-lengthy or late submissions will be rejected without review. 

Notification of receipt and acceptance of papers will be sent to the
first author.

SELECTION OF PAPERS

The conference welcomes submissions of original, high quality papers
in all areas of Artificial Intelligence, including but not limited to:

AI in Education 
automated reasoning 
computer vision 
data mining 
distributed AI 
human-computer interaction 
information retrieval 
intelligent user interfaces 
knowledge representation
logic programming 
machine learning 
multi-agent systems 
multimedia systems 
natural language processing 
neural networks 
planning 
robotics 
web-based technology

All submissions will be subject to academic peer review by at least
two members of the program committee. Selection criteria include
accuracy and originality of ideas, clarity and significance of
results, and quality of presentation.

For each accepted paper, at least one author is required to attend the
conference to present the paper.

The best paper of the conference, as selected by the AIMSA'2002
programme committee, will receive the Best Paper Award during the
conference.

LANGUAGE

The official language of the conference is English.

CONFERENCE LOCATION

AIMSA 2002 will be held at the oldest Bulgarian Black Sea resort of
St. Constantine. It is located in a beautiful natural park with a
wonderful combination of sea coast, woods and hot mineral springs. The
resort is only 8 km from the town of Varna. Varna has an
international and domestic airport with flights to and from Sofia (the
capital city of Bulgaria). There are also direct flights connecting
the major European cities with Sofia and Varna.

ORGANIZATION

* Bulgarian Artificial Intelligence Association
* Institute Information Technologies (IIT-BAS)
* Union of Bulgarian Mathematicians with the support of the Bulgarian Society 
for Cognitive Science and of the Bulgarian Association for Pattern Recognition.

LOCAL ORGANIZATION CHAIR

Danail Dochev,
Institute of Information Technologies (IIT-BAS)
Acad. G. Bonchev 29A, 1113 Sofia, Bulgaria
E-mail docheviinf.bas.bg
Voice: (+ 359 2) 70 75 86
Fax: (+ 359 2) 72 04 97