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microsoft.com>--- CALL FOR PAPERS --- The Association for Machine Translation in the Americas *** SUBMISSION GUIDELINES HAVE CHANGED *** *** SEE UPDATED GUIDELINES BELOW *** AMTA-2002 Conference Location: Tiburon, California Dates: October 8-12, 2002 The Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA) is pleased to announce its fifth biennial conference, planned for October 8-12, 2002, in Tiburon (near San Francisco), California. CONFERENCE THEME: From Research to Real Users Ever since the showdown between Empiricists and Rationalists a decade ago at TMI-92, MT researchers have hotly pursued promising paradigms for MT, including data-driven approaches (e.g., statistical, example-based) and hybrids that integrate these with more traditional rule-based components. During the same period, commercial MT systems with standard transfer architectures have evolved along a parallel and almost unrelated track, increasing their coverage (primarily through manual update of their lexicons, we assume) and achieving much broader acceptance and usage, principally through the medium of the Internet. Web page translators have become commonplace; a number of online translation services have appeared, including in their offerings both raw and post-edited MT; and large corporations have been turning increasingly to MT to address the exigencies of global communication. Still, the output of the transfer-based systems employed in this expansion represents but a small drop in the ever-growing translation marketplace bucket. Now, 10 years later, we wonder if this mounting variety of MT users is any better off, and if the promise of the research technologies is being realized to any measurable degree. In this regard, we pose the following questions: Why aren't any current commercially available MT systems primarily data-driven? Do any commercially available systems integrate (or plan to integrate) data-driven components? Do data-driven systems have significant performance or quality issues? Can such systems really provide better quality to users, or is their main advantage one of fast, facilitated customization? If any new MT technology could provide such benefits (somewhat higher quality, or facilitated customization), would that be the key to more widespread use of MT, or are there yet other more relevant unresolved issues, such as system integration? If better quality, customization, or system integration aren't the answer, then what is it that users really need from MT in order for it to be more useful to them? We solicit participation on these and other topics related to the research, development, and use of MT in the form of original papers, demonstrations, workshops, tutorials, and panels. We invite all who are interested in MT to participate, including developers, researchers, end users, professional translators, managers, and marketing experts. We especially invite users to share their experiences, developers to describe their novel systems, managers and marketers to talk about what is happening in the marketplace, researchers to detail new capabilities or methods, and visionaries to describe the future as they see it. We also welcome and encourage participation by members of AMTA's sister organizations, AAMT in Asia and EAMT in Europe. INVITED SPEAKERS We are pleased to announce that invited speakers for the conference will include Yorick Wilks and Ken Church, both notable participants at TMI-92, and Jaap van der Meer, former president of ALPNET. We anticipate that the speakers will provide a sharp and stimulating focus on the theme of the conference. Further details regarding the conference, including a call for Tutorial and Workshop proposals, may be found on the AMTA Web site at: http://www.amtaweb.org/AMTA2002/ CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS Elliott Macklovitch, General Chair Stephen D. Richardson, Program Chair Violetta Cavalli-Sforza, Local Arrangements Chair Bob Frederking, Workshops and Tutorials Laurie Gerber, Exhibits Coordinator *** PLEASE NOTE THAT THE SUBMISSION GUIDELINES HAVE CHANGED*** *** UPDATED GUIDELINES ARE PROVIDED BELOW *** PAPER AND SYSTEM DESCRIPTION/DEMONSTRATION SUBMISSIONS GUIDELINES We are pleased to announce that the AMTA-2002 conference proceedings will be published in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series by Springer-Verlag. (LNCS/LNAI series home page is located at: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/index.html) It is therefore recommended that initial submissions to AMTA-2002 adhere as closely as possible to the formatting guidelines for authors located at: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html These guidelines will need to be strictly adhered to for the final versions of submissions that are accepted for publication in the proceedings. All submissions should be in English, and it is recommended that they be prepared using Latex2e or Microsoft Word, per instructions at the authors' web site given above (see site for details on using other text processing systems). Once prepared, they should be submitted electronically for review in one of the following three formats: PDF (recommended) PostScript Microsoft Word All submissions will be received and processed using the Conference Management Toolkit (CMT), located at: http://cmt.research.microsoft.com/AMTA2002. Authors should follow the instructions at the CMT web site to register, enter information about themselves and their paper, and upload a copy of their paper in one of the acceptable formats by the submission deadline. Any questions regarding submissions or the use of this web site should be directed in email to: AMTA2002Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
uqam.ca>Call for papers for The Second Conference of the Federation on Natural Language Processing Language, Brain and Computation which will be held at the University of Venice, October 3-5, 2002. Description : Restrictions observed in a great variety of languages on the composition, displacement and dependencies of linguistic elements indicate that Universal Grammar includes abstract relations whose investigation is crucial to the formulation of a fine grained explanatory theory of human mind/brain. The investigation of natural language configurations contributes to our understanding of what is common to all languages, but not immediately accessible to human perception, the abstract relations inherent to Universal Grammar/Language Faculty. With configurations as part of the presumed Universal Grammar vocabulary, a number of phenomena can be analyzed from a new perspective. Notwithstanding the progress achieved, questions still remain with respect to the definition of grammar-specific relations, their role in the derivations, and their legibility at the interfaces with the external systems, conceptual-intentional and sensori-motor. The conference also aims to contribute to our understanding of the external systems. They can be seen as universal systems allowing for an optimal legibility of interface representations. We might think that, interacting with Universal Grammar, the Universal Parser incrementally recovers natural language configurations. From this viewpoint, questions arise with respect to the relative autonomy of the grammar and the parser, as well as the nature of the interaction of the external systems with the interface representations. The importance of configurational relations in computational linguistics has already been established, given the central role played by asymmetric c-command in principle-based parsing (generate and filter type) based on GB Theory. It might be the case that a computational model based on the generation and recovery of more basic relations (check and generate type), based on Minimalism, will constitute another step ahead in the field. The conference will bring together linguists, psycholinguists and computational scientists who addressed these issues in order to explore the formalization and the interaction of the grammar with the external systems. Call for papers : Abstracts are invited for thirty-minute talks (twenty minutes for presentation plus ten minutes for discussion). A limited number of oral presentations will be selected. In addition, abstracts can be sent for the poster session. Please Submit: an one-page abstract, 11 pt. single-line spacing, to : Language, Brain, and Computation Conference Committee Departement de linguistique Universite du Quebec - Montreal Case Postale 8888, Succursale Centre-Ville Montreal, Qc, H3C 3P8 Canada Specify oral presentation, poster or demo Send abstracts by FAX to: +514-987-0377 or (preferably) by e-mail to: di_sciullo.anne-marieMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue