LINGUIST List 14.3070

Mon Nov 10 2003

Calls: Computational Ling/France; Computational Ling

Editor for this issue: Andrea Berez <andrealinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Nicola Cancedda, PASCAL workshop on Text Understanding and Mining
2. strube, 5th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue

* * * C A L L F O R P A P E R S A N D C H A L L E N G E S * * *

PASCAL Workshop on Learning Methods for Text Understanding and Mining

January 26-29, 2004
Grenoble (France)

Important facts:
- Abstract of scientific contributions, submission due: November 28,
2003
- Challenge proposals, submission due: December 5, 2003

INTRODUCTION
- ----------

PASCAL (Pattern Analysis, Statistical Modelling and Computational
Learning) is the name of a Network of Excellence sponsored by the
European Union as part of its IST program. It brings together experts
from basic research areas such as Statistics, Optimisation and
Computational Learning and from a number of application areas, with
the objective of integrating research agendas and improving the state
of the art in all concerned fields.

As part of its activities, the PASCAL network organises a workshop on
the subject of "Learning Methods for Text Understanding and
Mining". The aim of the workshop is twofold:
- Introducing to experts in statistics, computational learning and
optimization problems issuing from text understanding and mining which
are both relevant and suitable to be tackled within their framework;
- Proposing "challenges" (i.e.: concrete benchmark tasks) that will
help measuring improvements in the state of the art.

THE WORKSHOP
- ----------

In order to achieve these objectives, the Workshop will be organised
as follows:

- Jan 26 (afternoon only): Pre-workshop: Presentation of the results
of the EU IST project KerMIT ("Kernel Methods for Images and Text",
 http://www.euro-kermit.org).

- Jan 27: Tutorials
 - Machine Learning applied to Text Analysis: Overview (E. Gaussier)
 - Memory-based Language Processing (W.Daelemans)
 - Text Mining (D.Mladenic and M.Grobelnik)
 - Kernel Methods for Natural Language Processing (J-M. Renders)

- Jan 28: Contributed scientific talks

- Jan 29: Challenge proposals and discussion

We anticipate that participants might attend only part of the
workshop.

SCIENTIFIC CONTRIBUTIONS
- ----------------------

For the day of January 28, submissions of abstracts are invited in the
following areas of interest:

- Machine learning of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and
translation models
- Learning approaches to Document Retrieval, Categorization, Filtering
and Clustering
- Text mining
- Learning approaches leveraging document structure
- Machine Learning for Information Extraction
- Unsupervised and semi-supervised learning for Natural Language

Of special interest are contributions addressing linguistic components
less commonly made the object of Machine Learning approaches (e.g.:
compositional semantics), as well as contributions addressing the
simultaneous learning of multiple linguistic components.

In order to foster fruitful discussions and eventually collaborations
between the scientific communities represented at the workshop,
scientific contributions should, whenever possible, emphasize the
limits of the approaches described, and explicitely mention what
difficult and important problems remain to be solved, if any.

Selected presentations will be allocated slots of 30
minutes. Presentation abstracts should be up to 4 pages long, in PDF
or PS format, and suitable to be printed on A4 paper. They should be
sent by e-mail to Nicola Cancedda at the address:

Nicola.Canceddaxrce.xerox.com

CHALLENGES
- --------

For the day of January 29, we invite submissions of proposals for
PASCAL challenges. The selected proposals will be presented in slots
of 30 minutes each in the morning, and will serve as a basis for the
discussion that will be held in the afternoon. Besides a description
of the problem to be solved, proposals should explicitely address:
- Format of the evaluation (TREC-like contrastive evaluation, permanent
 web-based evaluation tool, ...);
- Public availability of data and other required resources;
- Estimated effort to build up resources, if any, not currently in the
public domain;
- Results already obtained on the data (if any);
- Key-words

We anticipate that some funding will be available from the PASCAL
budget to cover part of the expenses incurred in actually running
challenges.

The PASCAL joint programme of activities also envisages the definition
of theoretical challenges. We thus also invite submissions of
theoretical questions and open problems relevant to the application of
statistical learning and optimisation to problems in Natural Language
Processing, Information Retrieval and Textual Information Access. Such
proposals should provide, besides the question itself, a justification
of its relevance and a concise overview of related available relevant
results.

As for scientific contributions, proposals concerning tasks less
commonly addressed with Machine Learning techniques will receive
special consideration.

Challenge proposals should be up to 4 pages long, in PDF or PS format,
and suitable to be printed on A4 paper. They should be sent by e-mail
to Florence d'Alch�-Buc at the address:

florence.dalchelip6.fr

IMPORTANT DATES
- -------------
Please note the following deadlines:
- Abstracts of scientific presentations: November 28, 2003
- Challenge proposals: December 5, 2003
- Notification of acceptance: December 23, 2003
- Paper camera-ready deadline: January 16, 2004
- Workshop date: January 26-29, 2004

SPONSORSHIP
- ---------
The workshop will be partly funded by a grant from the European
Network of Excellence "PASCAL".

ORGANIZERS
- --------
* Nicola Cancedda (Xerox Research Centre Europe)
 Nicola.Canceddaxrce.xerox.com
* Florence d'Alch�-Buc (LIP6, University of Paris 6)
 florence.dalchelip6.fr

PROGRAMME COMMITTE
- ----------------

* Nicola Cancedda (Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble, France)
* Alexander Clark (ISSCO/ETI, University of Geneva, Switzerland)
* Florence d'Alch�-Buc (LIP6, University of Paris 6, France)
* Walter Daelemans (University of Antwerp, Belgium)
* Ido Dagan (Bar Ilan University, Israel)
* Eric Gaussier (Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble, France)
* Cyril Goutte (Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble, France)
* Marko Grobelnik (Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia)
* Dunja Mladenic (Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia)
* Jean-Michel Renders (Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble, France)

5th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue
Short Title: SIGdial '04

Date: 30-Apr-2004 - 01-May-2004
Location: Boston, MA, United States of America
Contact: Michael Strube
Contact Email: sigdial04eml-research.de
Meeting URL: http://sigdial04.eml-research.de

Linguistic Sub-field: Computational Linguistics
Call Deadline: 12-Jan-2004

Meeting Description:

Continuing with a series of successful workshops in Hong Kong,
Aalborg, Philadelphia, and Sapporo this workshop spans the ACL and
ISCA SIGdial interest area of discourse and dialogue. This series
provides a regular forum for the presentation of research in this area
to both the larger SIGdial community as well as researchers outside
this community. The workshop is organized by SIGdial, which is
sponsored jointly by ACL and ISCA.


 First Announcement

	 5th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue

 Boston, April 30 and May 1, 2004

 (immediately preceding HLT-NAACL)

Continuing with a series of successful workshops in Hong Kong,
Aalborg, Philadelphia, and Sapporo this workshop spans the ACL and
ISCA SIGdial interest area of discourse and dialogue. This series
provides a regular forum for the presentation of research in this area
to both the larger SIGdial community as well as researchers outside
this community. The workshop is organized by SIGdial, which is
sponsored jointly by ACL and ISCA.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

We welcome formal, corpus-based, implementational or analytical work
on discourse and dialogue including but not restricted to the
following three themes:

(1) Discourse Processing and Dialogue Systems
Discourse semantic and pragmatic issues in NLP applications such as
text summarization, question answering, information retrieval
including topics like:
* Discourse structure, temporal structure, information structure;
* Discourse markers, cues and particles and their use;
* (Co-)Reference and anaphora resolution, metonymy and bridging
 resolution;
* Subjectivity, opinions and semantic orientation.

Spoken, multi-modal, and text/web based dialogue systems including
topics such as: 
* Dialogue management models;
* Speech and gesture, text and graphics integration;
* Strategies for preventing, detecting or handling miscommunication
 (repair and correction types, clarification and under-specificity,
 grounding and feedback strategies);
* Utilizing prosodic information for understanding and for
disambiguation.

(2) Corpora, Tools and Methodology
Corpus-based work on discourse and spoken, text-based and multi-modal
dialogue including its support, in particular:
* Annotation tools and coding schemes;
* Data resources for discourse and dialogue studies;
* Corpus-based techniques and analysis (including machine learning);
* Evaluation of systems and components, including methodology, metrics
 and case studies,
* Discovery from corpora.

(3) Pragmatic and/or Semantic Modeling
The pragmatics and/or semantics of discourse and dialogue (i.e., beyond 
a single sentence) including the following issues: 
* The semantics/pragmatics of dialogue acts (including those which are 
 less studied in the semantics/pragmatics framework);
* Models of discourse/dialogue structure and their relation to
 referential and relational structure;
* Prosody in discourse and dialogue;
* Models of presupposition and accommodation; operational models of 
 conversational implicature.


SUBMISSION OF PAPERS AND ABSTRACTS

The program committee welcomes the submission of long papers for full
plenary presentation as well as short papers and demonstrations. Short
papers and demo descriptions will be featured in short plenary
presentations, followed by posters and demonstrations.
 
* Long papers must be no longer than 8 pages, including title,
 examples, references, etc. In addition to this, two additional pages
 are allowed as an appendix which may include extended example
 discourses or dialogues, algorithms, graphical representations, etc.
 
* Short papers and demo descriptions should aim to be 4 pages or less
 (including title, examples, references, etc.)

Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or
publications must provide this information (see submission format); in
the event of multiple acceptances, authors must notify the program
chairs as to the meeting they choose to present their work by February
23, 2004, at the latest in order for their work to be included in the
proceedings. SIGdial 04 cannot accept for publication or presentation
work that will be (or has been) published elsewhere.

Authors are encouraged to make illustrative materials available, on
the web or otherwise. For example, excerpts of recorded conversations,
recordings of human-computer dialogues, interfaces to working systems,
etc.

IMPORTANT DATES (subject to change)

Submission January 12, 2004
Notification February 16, 2004
Final submissions March 08, 2004
Workshop	 April 30-May 01, 2004

WEBSITES
Workshop website: http://sigdial04.eml-research.de
Sigdial website: http://www.sigdial.org
HLT-NAACL04 website: http://www.hlt-naacl04.org

CONTACT
sigdial04eml-research.de


PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Michael Strube, EML Research gGmbH, Germany (co-chair)
Candy Sidner, MERL, USA (co-chair)

Jan Alexandersson, DFKI, Germany
Johan Bos, University of Edinburgh, UK
Sandra Carberry, University of Delaware, USA
Jean Carletta, University of Edinburgh, UK
Justine Cassell, Northwestern University, USA
Jennifer Chu-Carroll, IBM Research, USA
Mark Core, University of Edinburgh, UK
Deborah Dahl, Conversational Technologies, USA
Renato DeMori, Universite d'Avignon, France
Sadaoki Furui, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
Sanda Harabagiu, University of Texas at Dallas, USA
Koiti Hasida, Sony/AIST, Japan
Beth Ann Hockey, RIACS, USA
Amy Isard, University of Edinburgh, UK
Masato Ishizaki, University of Tokyo, Japan
Michael Johnston, AT&T Research, USA
Pamela Jordan, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Andrew Kehler, University of California San Diego, USA
Staffan Larsson, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Susann Luperfoy, Stottler Henke Associates, USA
Erwin Marsi, University of Tilburg, The Netherlands
Massimo Poesio, University of Essex, UK
Matthew Purver, Kings College London, UK
Alex Rudnicky, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
David Schlangen, University of Potsdam, Germany
Elizabeth Shriberg, SRI and ICSI, USA
Ronnie Smith, East Carolina University, USA
Manfred Stede, University of Potsdam, Germany
Oliviero Stock, ITC-IRST, Italy
Richmond Thomason, University of Michigan, USA
Syun Tutiya, Chiba University, Japan
Renata Vieira, UNISINOS, Brasil
Bonnie Webber, University of Edinburgh, UK
Janyce Wiebe, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Massimo Zancanaro, ITC-IRST, Italy
Michelle Zhou, IBM Research, USA