LINGUIST List 13.1838

Tue Jul 2 2002

Calls: Text & Speech & Dialogue, Machine Translation

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

Directory

1. Robert Batusek, TSD 2002 - Call for Demonstrations
2. Deborah Coughlin, Call for Customization Strategies for MT Workshop

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 TSD 2002 - CALL FOR DEMONSTRATIONS AND PARTICIPATION
*********************************************************

Fifth International Conference on TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOGUE
(TSD 2002)
Brno, Czech Republic, 9-12 September 2002
http://www.fi.muni.cz/tsd2002/


The conference is organised by the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk
University, Brno and the Faculty of Applied Sciences, University of
West Bohemia, Pilsen. The conference is supported by International
Speech Communication Association.

SUBMISSION OF DEMONSTRATION ABSTRACTS

Authors are invited to present actual projects, developed software and
hardware or interesting material relevant to the topics of the
conference. The authors of the demonstrations should provide the
abstract not exceeding one page as plain text. The submission must be
made using an online form available at the conference www pages.

The organisers will prepare the computers with multimedia support for
demonstrators. Faculty of Informatics has at its disposal a fast
internet connection allowing internet-based projects to be
demonstrated. The faculty network provides a wireless (IEEE 802.11b -
WiFi) connection to the internet as well.


IMPORTANT DATES

Submission of demonstration papers:
July 31, 2002

Conference date:
September 9-12, 2002


TSD SERIES

TSD series evolved as a prime forum for interaction between
researchers in both spoken and written language processing from the
former East Block countries and their Western colleagues. Proceedings
of TSD form a book published by Springer-Verlag in their Lecture Notes
in Artificial Intelligence series.

TOPICS

Topics of the TSD 2002 conference will include:
text corpora;
automatic morphology;
word sense disambiguation;
lexical semantics and semantic networks;
parsing and part-of-speech tagging;
machine translation;
multi-lingual issues;
information retrieval;
text/topic summarization;
knowledge representation and reasoning;
speech modeling;
speech coding;
speech segmentation;
speech prosody;
automatic speech recognition;
text-to-speech synthesis;
speaker identification and verification;
dialogue systems;
development of dialogue strategies;
prosody and emotions in dialogues;
user modeling;
assistive technologies based on speech and dialogue;
markup languages related to speech and dialogue (VoiceXML, SSML, ...).


CONFERENCE PROGRAM

The conference program will include oral presentations and
poster/demonstration sessions with sufficient time for discussions of
the issues raised. The demonstration papers will not appear in the
Proceedings of TSD 2002 but will be published electronically at the
conference website. Preliminary program of the conference is already
available there.

The program includes two invited talks.

Prof. Ronald Allan Cole (Monday, September 9)
Perceptive Animated Interfaces: The Next Generation of Interactive
Learning Tools

Prof. James Pustejovsky (Tuesday, September 10)
When Corpus Meets Theory: Creating Lexical Semantic Databases

The Wednesday afternoon of the conference is reserved for a trip to
the South Moravian region Lednice - Valtice. We will see the chateau
at Lednice with its large botanical gardens and beautiful
surroundings. In the evening there will be the conference dinner in
the famous wine cellar in Valtice chateau, where a traditional
cembalon band will play.

TSD 2002 is supported by International Speech Communication
Association (ISCA).


CONFERENCE FEES

The conference fee depends on the date of payment and on your
status. It includes one copy of the Proceedings, refreshments, social
events and a daytrip. The fee does not include accommodation.

Full participant:
Late payment (by August 15th): Euro 300
On-site payment: Euro 350

Student:
Late payment (by August 15th): Euro 200
On-site payment: Euro 250

The payment may be refunded up until August 15th at the cost of 50
Euros. No refund is possible after this date.


ACCOMMODATION

The organizing committee will arrange an accommodation in a student
dormitories in a walking distance from the place of the Conference at
a reasonable price. The actual list of available hotels and prices is
accessible at the website.


ADDRESS

All correspondence regarding the conference should be addressed to:

Dana Komarkova
TSD 2002 Faculty of Informatics
Masaryk University
Botanicke 68a
CZ-602 00 Brno
Czech Republic
telephone: +420 5 41 512 359
fax: +420 5 41 212 568
e-mail: tsd2002fi.muni.cz
The official TSD 2002 homepage is: http://www.fi.muni.cz/tsd2002/


LOCATION

The conference will take place at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk
University, Brno, Czech Republic.

Brno is the the second largest city in the Czech Republic with
population of almost 400,000, and is the country's judiciary and
trade-fair centre. Brno is the capital of Moravia, which is in the
south-east part of the Czech Republic. It had been the King's town
since 1347 and with its six Universities it forms a cultural center of
the region.

Brno can be reached easily by direct trains or buses from Prague (200
km) or Vienna (130 km).

For the participants with some extra time, some nearby places may also
be of interest.

The local ones include:

Brno Castle now called Spilberk, Veveri Castle, Old and New City
Halls, the Augustine Monastery with St. Thomas Church and crypt of
Moravian Margraves, Church of St. James, Bishops Church of St. Peter &
Paul, Cartesian Monastery in Kralovo Pole, famous villa Tugendhat
designed by Mies van der Rohe and other important buildings of
between-war Czech architecture.

For those willing to venture out of Brno, Moravian Karst with Macocha
Chasm and Punkva caves, battlefield of Battle of three emperors
(Napoleon, Russian Alexander and Austrian Franz - battle by
Austerlitz), Chateau of Slavkov (Austerlitz), Pernstejn Castle,
Buchlov Castle, Lednice Chateau, Buchlovice Chateau, Letovice Chateau,
Mikulov with one of the greatest Jewish cemeteries in Central Europe,
Telc - the town on the list of UNESCO and many others are all within
an easy reach.

Call for Abstracts for the
AMTA workshop on Customization Strategies for MT

 **Abstract submission deadline: July 7**


Machine translation systems must have customization capabilities in
order to claim success as a commercial product or a research
prototype. Minimally, these include the ability to add translations
for new words and phrases, but may also include more sophisticated
functionality such as adapting to new syntactic structures or writing
styles, and may even be the means of acquiring all the system's
translation knowledge (e.g., in statistical systems), We propose to
bring MT developers and researchers together to discuss the
customization capabilities of their systems, with an emphasis on using
common data for the discussion.

This workshop is intended to cover all types of customization
strategies, although preference in selection will be given to novel
strategies. We encourage participation from MT developers of
commercial systems, and researchers working on all types of MT systems
(traditional transfer, interlingua, example-based, or statistical).

To make the discussion more interesting, we request that participants
demonstrate the customization capabilities of their system using data
freely available to everyone, such as Hansard data for French-English
or other data available from ELRA or LDC. Microsoft has also agreed
to make technical manual data available for several language pairs
(English and any of these: French, Spanish, German, Japanese) for
purposes of research related to this workshop. (For access to this
data please send email to CustomWSmicrosoft.com.)

We request that interested parties submit a two page abstract with the
following information:

- overview of your MT system

- description of customization capabilities

- comparison of this strategy to other known strategies

- data that will be used to test capability

- proposed evaluation to determine the effectiveness of the
	 customization

- estimate of time that would be required to customize for the
	 chosen domain, based on your sample run.

Dates:

 Call for participation:		June 8

 Abstract submission deadline: July 7

 Acceptance notification: July 22

 Early registration for AMTA: July 31

 Papers due:				September 6

 AMTA workshop October 8

Instructions for submission:

All submissions should be in English, and it is recommended that they
be submitted in one of the following three formats: PDF (preferred);
PostScript; Microsoft Word. All submissions will be received and
processed using the Conference Management Toolkit (CMT) located at
http://cmt.research.microsoft.com/CustomWS.

Authors should follow the instructions at the CMT web site to
register, enter information about themselves and their abstract, and
upload a copy of their abstract in one of the acceptable formats by
the submission deadline. Report any problems with the website to
CustomWSmicrosoft.com.

For information on obtaining Microsoft Data to participate in the
workshop, please contact CustomWSmicrosoft.com

Organizers: Jessie Pinkham, Deborah Coughlin, Bill Dolan