LINGUIST List 14.3527

Fri Dec 19 2003

Calls: Text/Corpus Ling/Portugal; Phonology/UK

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

Directory

1. p, Workshop on Multimodal Corpora
2. patrick.honeybone, Twelfth Manchester Phonology Meeting

Workshop on Multimodal Corpora
Short Title: MMCORPORA
	
Date: 25-May-2004 - 25-May-2004
Location: Lisbon, Portugal
Contact: Peter Kuehnlein
Contact Email: mmorganizerslubitsch.lili.uni-bielefeld.de
Meeting URL: http://lubitsch.lili.uni-bielefeld.de/MMCORPORA
	
Linguistic Sub-field: Text/Corpus Linguistics

Call Deadline: 24-Jan-2004
	
This is a session of the following conference: 4th International
Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation
	

Meeting Description:
	
Workshop on Multimodal Corpora:
Models of Human Behaviour for the Specification and Evaluation of
Multimodal Input and Output Interfaces
	
http://lubitsch.lili.uni-bielefeld.de/MMCORPORA/
Centro Cultural de Belem
LISBON, Portugal
25th May 2004
	
In Association with
4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation
LREC2004 http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2004/index.php
Main conference 26-27-28 May 2004 

ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS

Workshop on Multimodal Corpora: Models of Human Behaviour for the
Specification and Evaluation of Multimodal Input and Output Interfaces
	
http://lubitsch.lili.uni-bielefeld.de/MMCORPORA/
Centro Cultural de Belem
LISBON, Portugal
25th May 2004
	
In Association with
4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation
LREC2004 http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2004/index.php
Main conference 26-27-28 May 2004
	
Motivations
The primary purpose of this one day workshop is to share information
and engage in the collective planning for the future creation of
usable pluridisciplinary multimodal resources. It will focus on the
following issues regarding multimodal corpora: how researchers build
models of human behaviour out of the annotations of video corpora, how
they use such knowledge for the specification of multimodal input
(e.g. merging users gestures and speech) and output
(e.g. specification of believable and emotional behaviour in Embodied
Conversational Agents) in human computer interfaces, and finally how
they evaluate multimodal systems (e.g. full system evaluation and
glass box evaluation of individual system components).
	
Topics to be addressed in the workshop include, but are not limited to:
* Models of human multimodal behaviour in various disciplines
* Integrating different sources of knowledge (literature in
socio-linguistics, corpora annotation)
* Specifications of coding schemes for video annotations
* Guidelines, standards, specifications, models and best practices for
multimedia and multimodal corpora
* Parallel multimodal corpora for different languages
* Methods, tools, and procedures for the acquisition, creation,
management, access, distribution, and use of multimedia and multimodal
corpora
* Methods for the extraction and acquisition of knowledge
(e.g. lexical information, modality modelling) from multimedia and
multimodal corpora
* Ontological aspects of the creation and use of multimodal corpora
* Machine learning for and from multimedia (i.e., text, audio, video),
multimodal (visual, auditory, tactile), and multicodal (language,
graphics, gesture) communication
* Exploitation of multimodal corpora in different types of
applications (information extraction, information retrieval, meeting
transcription, multisensorial interfaces, translation, summarisation,
www services, etc.)
* Multimedia and multimodal metadata descriptions of corpora
* Applications enabled by multimedia and multimodal corpora
* Benchmarking of systems and products; use of multimodal corpora for
the evaluation of real systems
* Processing and evaluation of mixed spoken, typed, and cursive (e.g.,
pen) language processing
* Automated multimodal fusion and/or multimodal generation (e.g.,
coordinated speech, gaze, gesture, facial expressions)
* Techniques for combining objective and subjective evaluations, and
for making evaluations cost-effective, predictive and fast
	
The output of the workshop will be the following:
* Better knowledge of the potential of major models of human
multimodal behaviour
* Challenging issues in the usability of multimodal corpora
* Fostering of a pluridisciplinary community of multimodal researchers
and multimodal interface developers
	
Reasons of interest
Multimodal resources feature the recording and annotation of several
communication modalities such as speech, hand gesture, facial
expression, body posture, graphics Several researchers have been
developing such multimodal resources for several years, often with a
focus on a limited set of modalities or on a given application
domain. A number of projects, initiatives and organisations have
addressed multimodal resources with a federative approach:

* At LREC2002, a workshop had addressed the issue of Multimodal
Resources and Multimodal Systems Evaluation
http://www.limsi.fr/Individu/martin/wslrec2002/MMWorkshopReport.doc
* At LREC2000, a 1st workshop had addressed the issue of multimodal
corpora, focussing on meta-descriptions and large corpora
http://www.mpi.nl/world/ISLE/events/LREC%202000/LREC2000.htm
* The European 6th Framework program (FP6), started in 2003, includes
multilingual and multisensorial communication as one of the major R&D
issue, and the evaluation of technologies appears as a specific item
in the Integrated Project instrument presentation
http://www.cordis.lu/ist/so/interfaces/home.html
* NIMM was a work group on Natural Interaction and MultiModality which
ran under the IST-ISLE project (http://isle.nis.sdu.dk/). In 2001,
NIMM compiled a survey of existing multimodal resources (more than 60
corpora are described in the survey), coding schemes and annotation
tools. The ISLE project was developed both in Europe and in the USA
(http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/sb/isle.html)
* EcorporaA (European Language Resources Association) launched in
November 2001 a survey about multimodal corpora including marketing
aspects (http://www.icp.inpg.fr/EcorporaA/).
* A Working Group at the Dagstuhl Seminar on Multimodality recorded,
in November 2001, 28 questionnaires from researchers on multimodality,
from which 21 have been announcing their attention to record other
multimodal corpora in the
future. (http://www.dfki.de/~wahlster/Dagstuhl_Multi_Modality/)
* Other surveys have been recently made about multimodal annotation
coding schemes and tools (COCOSDA, LDC, MITRE).
	
Yet, existing annotation of multimodal corpora until now have been
made mostly on an individual basis, each researcher or team focusing
on its own needs and knowledge about modality specific coding schemes
or application examples. Thus, there is a lack of real common
knowledge and understanding of how to proceed from annotations to
usable models of human multimodal behaviour and how to use such
knowledge for the design and evaluation of multimodal input and
embodied conversational agent interfaces. Furthermore, the evaluation
of multimodal interaction poses different (and very complex) problems
than the evaluation of monomodal speech interfaces or WYSIWYG direct
interaction interfaces. There is a number of recently finished and
ongoing projects in the field of multimodal interaction in which
attempts have been made to evaluate the quality of the interfaces in
all meanings that can be attached to the term 'quality'. There is a
widely felt need in the field for exchanging information on multimodal
interaction evaluation with researchers in other projects. One of the
major outcomes of this workshop should be better understanding of the
extent to which evaluation procedures developed in one project
generalize to other, somewhat related projects.
	
Important dates
* 1st December 2003: Call for papers and demonstrations
* 24 January 2004: Deadline for paper submission
* 29 February 2004: Acceptance notifications and preliminary program
* 21 March 2004: Deadline final version of accepted papers
* 25 May 2004: Workshop
	
For more details, especially concerning the submission process and
details for the Program Commitee and Organizers, please visit the
workshop website http://lubitsch.lili.uni-bielefeld.de/MMCORPORA
	

Twelfth Manchester Phonology Meeting 
Short Title: 12mfm 

Date: 20-May-2004 - 22-May-2004
Location: Manchester, United Kingdom
Contact: Patrick Honeybone
Contact Email: patrick.honeyboneed.ac.uk 
Meeting URL: http://www.englang.ed.ac.uk/mfm/12mfm.html 

Linguistic Sub-field: Phonology ,Phonetics
Call Deadline: 15-Feb-2004 


Meeting Description:

SPECIAL SESSION: 'Phonology and Loanword Adaptation'
There is no conference theme - abstracts can be submitted on anything,
but a special themed session has been organised featuring invited
speakers:
* Michael Kenstowicz
* Carole Paradis
* Moira Yip BACKGROUND
We are pleased to announce our Twelfth Manchester Phonology Meeting
(12mfm). The mfm is the UK's annual phonology conference, held in late
May every year in Manchester and organised by people in various parts
of the country, and abroad. In an informal atmosphere, we discuss a
wide range of topics, including the phonological description of a wide
range of languages, issues in phonological theory, aspects of
phonological acquisition and implications of phonological change;
anyone interested in phonology can submit an abstract on anything
phonological. Full papers will last around 30 minutes with around 10
minutes for questions, and there will be a high-profile poster session
lasting one and a half hours.


SPECIAL SESSION
There is no conference theme - abstracts can be submitted on anything,
but, following the success of such sessions in previous years, a
special themed session has been organised on 'Phonology and Loanword
Adaptation'. This will feature invited speakers and conclude in an
open discussion session when contributions from the audience will be
very welcome. Abstracts on this theme are also certainly welcome.

SPECIAL SESSION SPEAKERS (in alphabetical order)
* Michael Kenstowicz (MIT, USA)
* Carole Paradis (Universit� Laval, Canada)
* Moira Yip (University College London, UK)


ABSTRACT SUBMISSION
**This is a summary - please consult the website for full details**
* There is no conference theme - abstracts can be submitted on
anything. Abstracts should be sent to Patrick Honeybone by email
(patrick.honeyboneed.ac.uk) by 15th February 2004.
* Abstracts should be no longer than one side of A4, with 2.5cm or one
inch margins, single-spaced, with a font size no smaller than 12, and
with normal character spacing.
* Please send two copies of your abstract - one of these should be
anonymous and one should include your name, affiliation and email at
the top of the page, directly below the title.
* Please use one of these formats for your abstract: rtf, Word, pdf,
or plain text. If you need to use a phonetic font in your abstract,
either embed it in a pdf file, or use the SILdoulos93 font, which can
be downloaded for free from this site:
www.sil.org/computing/fonts/encore-ipa2.html.
* Please indicate whether you would prefer to present your work as an
oral paper or a poster, or whether you would be prepared to present it
in either form.
* If you need technical equipment for your talk, please say so in the
message accompanying your abstract and we will do our best to provide
it, although this cannot be guaranteed.
* We aim to finalise the programme, and to contact abstract-senders by
mid-March. At present, there are no plans for publishing the general
proceedings of the Meeting. We would like to keep the mfm as an
informal forum where speakers can air new ideas which are still in the
early stages of development.

**Further important details** concerning abstract submission are
available on the conference website - please make sure that you
consult these before submitting an abstract:
www.englang.ed.ac.uk/mfm/12mfm.html
 

ORGANISERS 

Organising Committee:
The first named is the convenor and main organiser - if you would like
to attend or if you have any queries about the conference, please feel
free to get in touch with me (patrick.honeyboneed.ac.uk, or phone +44
(0)131 651 1383).
* Patrick Honeybone (Edinburgh)
* Ricardo Berm�dez-Otero (Newcastle upon Tyne)
* Wiebke Brockhaus-Grand (Manchester)
* Philip Carr (Montpellier-Paul Val�ry)
* Jacques Durand (Toulouse-Le Mirail)
* Nigel Vincent (Manchester)


Advisory Board:
* Jill Beckman (Iowa) 
* Mike Davenport (Durham) 
* Daniel L. Everett (Manchester)
* Paul Foulkes (York)
* S.J. Hannahs (Durham) 
* John Harris (UCL)
* Larry Hyman (Berkeley) 
* Martin Kr�mer (Ulster) 
* Marc van Oostendorp (Meertens Instituut)
* Glyne Piggott (McGill) 
* Catherine O. Ringen (Iowa)
* Tobias Scheer (Nice) 
* Dan Silverman (Illinois, Edinburgh)
* Moira Yip (UCL)


A NOTE ON DATE CLASHES 
We are aware that the mfm dates clash with those of the Third North
American Phonology Conference
(www-cmll.concordia.ca/linguistics/naphc/). We find this *very
unfortunate indeed* but there is unfortunately nothing that can be
done now by the organisers of either conference to move their dates,
as venues were booked and speakers invited independently and cannot
now be changed. For our part, we recognise that it would have been
good if there had been some way of consulting with the organisers of
other phonology conferences to avoid this kind of thing, but we
blindly went ahead with dates around 20th of May, as we always have in
the past. We hope very much that this can be avoided in future, and
propose to work to set up some means to allow this. We think, though,
that the phonological world is big enough to support two conferences
simultaneously...