LINGUIST List 13.707

Fri Mar 15 2002

Calls: Computational Ling, Natural Lang Processing

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

Directory

1. Jan Hajic, EMNLP'02 - Call for papers
2. Dragomir Radev, Second CFP: ACL WS on Effective Tools and Methodologies for Teaching NLP and CL

 EMNLP 2002

 2002 Conference on Empirical Methods
 in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2002) 

 CALL FOR PAPERS
 (see also http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/~hajic/emnlp02)

SIGDAT, the Association for Computational Linguistics' special
interest group on linguistic data and corpus-based approaches to NLP,
invites submissions to EMNLP 2002. The conference will be held at
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA on July 6-7,
immediately preceding the anniversary 40th meeting of the ACL (ACL
2002).

We are interested in papers from academia, government, and industry on
all areas of traditional interest to the SIGDAT community and aligned
fields, including but not limited to:

 information extraction
 information retrieval
 language and dialog modeling
 lexical acquisition
 machine translation
 multilingual technologies
 question answering
 statistical parsing
 summarization
 tagging
 term and named entity extraction
 word sense disambiguation
 word, term, and text segmentation

As a follow-up to last year's focus on analyzing the current
"Successes and Challenges" in the corpus-based methods, we encourage
submissions on the theme

 "The Next Big Thing in Data-driven NLP"

We solicit papers that describe attempts to substantially and
radically deviate from current practice of simple adaptations of
existing and usually well-studied methods. All directions of a
venture to a territory previously unknown (or once abandoned for one
reason or another) to NLP are welcome, such as but not limited to

using Really Large Corpora (cf. last year's Brill's talk);
using previously neglected methods, including
 those from non-NLP fields, such as biology, nuclear
 physics, or finance, with promising results and/or 
 reasonable potential for the future; 
employing known methods in a radically different way or on
 problems they were not tried upon previously, with truly
 significant improvement;
combining intuition-based and data-based methods (finally!)
 with substantially improved results on known problems.

We stress though that such papers, however radical they content might
be, stick to the usual practice of documenting the results using
standard experimental and evaluation practice. That does not exclude
that authors provide extended final section in their submissions,
discussing perhaps even slightly speculatively what the future might
look like.

 -----------
 Submissions
 -----------

Requirements: Submissions must describe original, completed,
unpublished work, and include concrete evaluation results when
appropriate. Papers being submitted to other meetings must provide
this information (see submission format); in the event of multiple
acceptances, authors are requested to immediately notify the EMNLP
program chair (hajicufal.mff.cuni.cz) and choose which meeting to
present and publish the work at as soon as possible - EMNLP cannot
accept for publication or presentation work that will be (or has been)
published elsewhere.

Format: Submissions must be electronic only (contrary to last year's
EMNLP!), and consist of full papers of not more than 3200 words
(exclusive of references). Authors are strongly encouraged to use the
LaTeX style files or MSWord equivalents available here -- these
formats will ease the transition to the proceedings version.

Reviewing will be blind. No information identifying the authors should
be in the paper: this includes not only the authors' names and
affilations, but also self-references that reveal authors' identities;
for example, "We have previously shown (Smith 1999)" should be changed
to "Smith (1999) has previously shown". A separate identification
page is required: see below.

Procedure: First, an electronic notice of intent to submit is
required. Please email (emnlp02ufal.mff.cuni.cz) (subject line EMNLP
2002 ITS) by April 4 with the following information:
Paper title 
Authors' names, affiliations, and email addresses 
Contact author 
A short list of keywords 
A short (no more than 5 lines) summary of the contents 
Whether or not the paper is under consideration for other conferences
	(please specify)

As a reply to the ITS, a 3-digit ID number will be sent back as an
acknowledgement. This number will be important for identification of
the submission proper.

Second, an electronic version of the paper in PostScript format, named
<an-ID-number-received-as-a-reply-to-the-IST>.ps, formatted for A4
or a letter-size paper (without identifying information) together with
a single text-only ("ASCII") file, named
<an-ID-number-received-as-a-reply-to-the-IST>.txt, containing all
the information from the notice of intent to submit (i.e., title,
authors, contact author, keywords, summary, and multiple-submission
information must be received by <font color="red">April 9, 23:00 GMT
DST (6pm EDT) at the following address: <a
href="mailto:emnlp02ufal.mff.cuni.cz">emnlp02ufal.mff.cuni.cz.
Please use gzip or plain old zip (or PKZIP) for compression to ensure
nothing is lost during the email transfer.

In case of difficulties sending the PostScript version, please
generate a PDF format instead (and name it accordingly:
&lt;an-ID-number-received-as-a-reply-to-the-IST>.pdf). Let us stress
again that the PostScript format is nevertheless strongly preferred.

Only in case of really, REALLY unsolvable difficulties in sending the
electronic version, please send a single hardcopy of the paper and the
ID page to

EMNLP 2002 Submissions
Jan Hajic
UFAL - Linguistics
MFF UK
Malostranske nam. 25
CZ-11800 Prague 1
Czech Republic

The EMNLP committee is not responsible for postal delays or other
e-mail and mail problems. Submissions that do not conform to the
guidelines above are subject to rejection without review.

Important Dates

Submission deadline: April 9, 2002 
Acceptance notification: May 8, 2002 
Camera-ready copy due: June 6, 2002 
Conference: July 6-7, 2002 

Conference Organizers

Jan Hajic (chair), Charles University, Prague, Czech
Republic (hajicufal.mff.cuni.cz)

Yuji Matsumoto (co-chair), Nara Institute of Science and Technology
(matsuis.aist-nara.ac.jp)

Conference URL http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/~hajic/emnlp02

 EFFECTIVE TOOLS AND METHODOLOGIES FOR TEACHING NLP AND CL

			 An ACL 2002 Workshop

	 July 7, 2002 (the day before the main conference)
			Philadelphia, PA, USA
	 http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~radev/TeachingNLP

			 Co-chairs:

		 Chris Brew, Ohio State University
		Dragomir Radev, University of Michigan


INTRODUCTION

Natural Language Processing (and Computational Linguistics) courses
have been enjoying a large interest in the last few years. More and
more universities are offering both introductory and advanced
classes. Over the years, faculty from different departments have been
developing their classes by introducing and refining new lectures,
software, and projects. Some of the main challenges in teaching NLP
are:

1. Teaching to a diverse audience, consisting of a mix of students in
 Linguistics, Computer Science, Information Science, and
 Bioinformatics; both undergraduate and graduate; and with a wide
 range of proficiency in linguistics, computer theory, or
 programming.

2. Selecting an appropriate focus for a course, e.g., theory
 vs. applications, symbolic vs. empirical, text-only
 vs. text+speech, etc.

3. Finding an appropriate place of an NLP/CL course within a larger
 curriculum, e.g., in Artificial Intelligence, Computational
 Linguistics, Cognitive Science, or Language Engineering.

4. Finding the right links to related areas, such as Theoretical
 Linguistics, Information Retrieval, Speech Science, Cognitive
 Science, Artificial Intelligence, or Genetic/Molecular Biology.

5. Choosing appropriate assignments to provide the right mix of
 theoretical, programming and data analysis exercises.

6. Designing software for educational purposes and developing
 tutorials on existing software.

This ACL workshop on Effective Tools and Methodologies for Teaching
NLP/CL will address these challenges. The workshop will bring together
college faculty with experience in teaching such courses as well as
future teachers (e.g., current graduate students).


CALL FOR PAPERS

We will be soliciting short papers (4-6 pages) on the following
topics:

1. Effective course lectures

2. Innovative assignments and projects

3. Educational software

4. Web resources

5. Curriculum issues (e.g., developing an effective multi-course CL
 program) 

6. Teaching NLP in different departments: Computer Science,
 Linguistics, Information Science, etc.

7. Connecting teaching and research

8. Seminar-style courses

9. Choice of programming languages (and programming requirements in
 general) 

10. Teaching NLP in languages other than English

11. Evaluation issues (outcomes assessment, educational measurement,
 etc.) 

In addition to these papers, the organizers will be collecting
pointers to educational resources on the Web, including course notes,
assignments, tutorials, software, and demos.

The workshop will feature a panel discussing longer-term activities
such as a mailing list for instructors, an archive of educational
materials, etc.

Submissions should be formatted according to the ACL style guide
(http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~lindek/acl02/style) and must be in either
PS, PDF, or DOC format. These should be sent electronically to
radevumich.edu by the deadline shown below. Hard copies will be
accepted only if the authors explicitly make such arrangements the
co-chairs at least one week prior to the official submission date. In
that case, the hard copies will still have to arrive by the submission
date.

We will assemble printed proceedings, however the ultimate goal of
this workshop would be laying the groundwork for further professional
collaboration in teaching NLP/CL, creating an ACL SIG, and building a
clearinghouse for educational materials.


IMPORTANT DATES

Papers due: March 29, 2002
Acceptance or rejection notification: April 22, 2002
Camera-ready versions due: May 17, 2002
Workshop: July 07, 2002


REGISTRATION

Registration fees are $50 for regular participants and $0 (free) for
up to 10 lower income participants (e.g., graduate students and/or
participants from Eastern Europe, Africa, and other disadvantaged
areas of the world).

Candidates for registration fee waivers should indicate their interest
to the program co-chairs by April 22. Authors of accepted papers will
have priority, then authors of rejected papers, then all others.


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Chris Brew (co-chair), Ohio State University, cbrewling.ohio-state.edu
Dragomir Radev (co-chair), University of Michigan, radevumich.edu

Robert Dale, Macquarie University, rdalempce.mq.edu.au
Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto, ghcs.toronto.edu
Eduard Hovy, USC/ISI, hovyisi.edu
Andy Kehler, University of California, San Diego, kehlerling.ucsd.edu
Lillian Lee, Cornell University, lleecs.cornell.edu
Gina Levow, University of Chicago, levowcs.uchicago.edu
Diane Litman, University of Pittsburgh, litmancs.pitt.edu
Chris Manning, Stanford University, manningcs.stanford.edu
James Martin, University of Colorado, martincs.colorado.edu
Detmar Meurers, Ohio State University, dmling.ohio-state.edu
Massimo Poesio, University of Essex, poesioessex.ac.uk
James Pustejovsky, Brandeis University, jamespcs.brandeis.edu
Ehud Reiter, University of Aberdeen, ereitercsd.abdn.ac.uk
Philip Resnik, University of Maryland, resnikumiacs.umd.edu
Ellen Riloff, University of Utah, riloffcs.utah.edu
Matt Stone, Rutgers University, mdstonecs.rutgers.edu
Rich Thomason, University of Michigan, richthomason.org
Hans Uszkoreit, University of the Saarland and DFKI, uszkoreitdfki.de
Bonnie Webber, University of Edinburgh, bonniedai.ed.ac.uk
Dekai Wu, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, dekaics.ust.hk


- 
Dragomir R. Radev radevumich.edu
Assistant Professor of Information, Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science, and Linguistics, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Phone: 734-615-5225 Fax: 734-764-2475 http://www.si.umich.edu/~radev