LINGUIST List 15.302

Tue Jan 27 2004

Calls: Discourse Analysis/USA; Comptational Ling

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

Directory

1. Max Louwerse, 14th Annual Meeting of the Society for Text & Discourse
2. karinem, COLING 2004 Workshops

14th Annual Meeting of the Society for Text & Discourse 
Chicago, IL August 1-4, 2004

Final Call for Presenters

The Society for Text and Discourse will hold its Fourteenth Annual
Meeting at the Westin River North Hotel in Chicago, Illinois, from
Sunday through Wednesday, August 1-4, 2004 immediately preceding the
26th Annual Cognitive Science Conference, COGSCI 2004. The Society
for Text & Discourse is an international society of researchers who
investigate all aspects of discourse processing and analysis. The
purpose of the society is to consolidate research in discourse
processing, to enhance communication among researchers in different
disciplines, and contribute to the education and professional
development of those in the field or entering the field. Therefore,
we invite scholars from various disciplines (e.g., psychology,
linguistics, artificial intelligence, education, sociology,
anthropology, communications and philosophy) to attend and participate
in the annual meeting.

The deadline for submitting proposals is February 1, 2004.

Submission Information is at:
http://www.societyfortextanddiscourse.org/conferences/current.html

Thanks to those who have already submitted.
All submissions will be acknowledged with an email confirmation.

Jennifer Wiley
Program Chair
Society for Text & Discourse 2004 Annual Meeting std2004uic.edu

COLING 2004 Workshops 

Date: 28-Aug-2004 - 29-Aug-2004
Location: Geneva, Switzerland
Contact: Michael Hess
Contact Email: hessifi.unizh.ch 
Meeting URL: http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/cl/COLING2004/workshops.html 

Linguistic Sub-field: Computational Linguistics 
Call Deadline: 25-Mar-2004 

This is a session of the following conference: 20th International
Conference on Computational Linguistics


Meeting Description:

Following the regular program of the main conference, workshops on
current topics in Computational Linguistics will be held on 28th-29th,
August 2004, at the conference venue. Workshops will normally last one
day, but may extend to a second day if required. Proposals by
qualified individuals interested in organising a workshop are
solicited. 

COLING 2004 WORKSHOP Computational Approaches to Arabic Script-based
Languages

Saturday, August 28, 2004
University of Geneva
Geneva, Switzerland

CONFERENCE WEBSITE
http://www.issco.unige.ch/coling2004/


WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the study of the
languages of the Middle East, especially Arabic, Persian (Farsi),
Pashto and Urdu. This sudden and urgent interest is manifested by the
availability of funding for rapid development of practical systems for
processing large volumes of data in these languages. Computational
applications for proper name identification, entity recognition,
categorization, information retrieval, summarization, machine
translation and other implementations are currently in high
demand. This comes at a time when advances in formal and computational
linguistics over the last fifty years are being consolidated, while
work on machine learning and statistical methods has been showing
great promise.

Although there exists a considerable body of work in computational
linguistics specifically targeted to these middle eastern languages,
much of the research and development has been the result of
initiatives by individual research establishments or industry
firms. Furthermore, the usage of the Arabic script gives rise to
certain issues that are common to all these languages despite their
being of distinct language families. Hence, these languages share
properties such as the absence of capitalization, right to left
direction, lack of clear word boundaries, complex word structure, a
high degree of ambiguity due to non-representation of short vowels in
the writing system, and related encoding issues.

The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum for those involved in
the development of NLP systems in Arabic script languages to exchange
ideas, approaches and implementations of computational systems; to
discuss the common challenges faced by all practitioners; and to
assess the state of the art in the field. In addition, one of the aims
of the workshop is to identify promising areas for future
collaborative research in the development of NLP systems for Arabic
script languages. Solutions that are designed to solve the specific
problems of these languages could very well have wider applications
and relevance to the rest of the NLP community.

WORKSHOP TOPICS

Authors of papers in any area of NLP in Arabic script-based languages
are encouraged to apply. We encourage submissions dealing with
language-specific issues, as well as discussions of challenges imposed
by the usage of the Arabic script. Papers could be on �Euro" but not
limited to any of the following topics:

*Morphological analysis 
*Syntactic ambiguity resolution
*Relevance of shallow parsing
*Machine translation from and to Arabic script languages
*Sense disambiguation
*Homograph resolution
*Semantic analysis
*Entity recognition
*Information retrieval
*Classification of documents
*Text mining
*Summarization
*Statistical approaches
*Speech recognition and generation
*Lexical databases
*Knowledge and domain representation
*Spelling and grammar checking tools

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS

Papers should be original, previously unpublished work and should not
identify the author(s). They should emphasize completed work rather
than intended work. Papers that are being submitted to other
conferences must reflect this fact on the title page.

Submissions should be no longer than 8 pages (including figures and
references). Email submissions (ps or pdf) are preferred and should be
sent to both AliFarghalyaol.com and karineminxight.com by midnight
of the due date. Submissions should be in English. The papers should
be attached to an email indicating contact information for the
author(s) and paper�Euro(tm)s title. Formatting requirements for the
final version of accepted papers will be posted as soon as they become
available.

Hardcopy submissions should be sent to:
Ali Farghaly
SYSTRAN Software, Inc.
9333 Genesee Ave, Pl 1
San Diego, CA 92121
USA

IMPORTANT DATES 

Submissions due: March 25th, 2004
Notification date: April 25th, 2004
Deadline for camera ready copy:	May 25th, 2004

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

This workshop is organized by
Ali Farghaly (SYSTRAN Software, Inc.)
Karine Megerdoomian (Inxight Software and University of California,
San Diego)

The call for papers as well as future information on the workshop can
be found at http://members.cox.net/karinem/COLING2004

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Jan W. Amtrup, Bowne Global Solutions
Tim Buckwalter, Linguistic Data Consortium
Violetta Cavalli-Sforza, Carnegie Mellon University
Joseph Dichy, Lyon University
Andrew Freeman, University of Washington
Nizar Habash, University of Maryland, College Park
Masayo Iida, Inxight Software, Inc.
Simin Karimi, University of Arizona
Martin Kay, Stanford University
Kevin Knight, USC/Information Sciences Institute
Farhad Oroumchian, University of Wollongong in Dubai
Ahmed Rafea, The American University in Cairo
Jean Sennellart, SYSTRAN Software
Romi Zajac, SYSTRAN Software