LINGUIST List 2.147

Thursday, 18 Apr 1991

Misc: Conference and Software

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Alexa T. McCray, Reminder: Workshop on Language and Information Processing
2. "Patrick W. Conner", COLLATE

 ** REMINDER **

 CALL FOR PAPERS

 PAPERS DUE: May 31, 1991

 WORKSHOP ON LANGUAGE AND INFORMATION PROCESSING

 October 27, 1991
 Washington, D.C.

The American Society for Information Science (ASIS) invites sub-
missions for a Language and Information Processing Workshop, to
be held on October 27, 1991 at the ASIS '91 meeting in Washington,
D.C. The theme of ASIS '91 is "Systems Understanding People,
People Understanding Systems".

The purpose of the workshop is to bring together researchers who are
concerned with the potentially significant role of sophisticated natural 
language processing (NLP) in intelligent information retrieval (IR). 
The workshop will focus on the progress that has been made to date on 
the application of NLP methods to the IR problem and will provide a forum 
for discussing some promising areas for future research. Submitted papers 
must reflect substantive work done at the intersection of NLP and IR. 
Papers should emphasize completed work rather than future plans.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE:

 Alexa T. McCray, National Library of Medicine
 Elizabeth Liddy, Syracuse University
 Carl Weir, Unisys
 David Lewis, University of Massachusetts

FORMAT FOR SUBMISSIONS:

Submit 5 copies of a draft paper, not exceeding 10 single-spaced
pages (exclusive of references) to arrive no later than May 31,
1991. A cover page should include the title, full names of all
authors, the address of the primary author, including an e-mail
address if possible, and a short abstract. Send submissions to
the workshop chair:

 Alexa T. McCray
 National Library of Medicine
 Bldg. 38A/9N905, Mail Stop 54
 Bethesda, Md. 20894

 Phone: (301) 496-9300
 Internet: mccraynlm.nih.gov


SCHEDULE:

 Submissions should be sent to arrive by May 31, 1991.
 Notification of acceptance will be made by July 15, 1991.
 Camera-ready papers will be due on September 16, 1991.
 Workshop will be held on October 27, 1991.


WORKSHOP INFORMATION:

The workshop will be held in conjunction with the 54th annual
meeting of the American Society for Information Science (October
27-31, 1991). A full proceedings of the workshop will be made
available to those attend. The workshop will be open to all 
interested researchers, but presentations will be limited to 
accepted papers. There will be a $30.00 workshop registration fee
which will be used to cover the cost of preparing the proceedings
and providing refreshments. Lunch will not be provided.

[This notice is posted as a service to subscribers, and the LINGUIST editors 
make no guarantee as to the quality or efficacy of the software in question.]

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Version 1.0 of Collate -- a new program for the collation of large
textual traditions -- is now available.

About Collate
----------------
Collate aims to help scholars in the preparation of a critical edition
based on many sources. It can collate simultaneously up to a hundred
texts at once. It can deal with richly marked-up texts (with special
treatment for editorial comments embedded in the text, location
markers, editorial expansions and separate collation of punctuation). It
provides powerful facilities to allow the scholar to tailor the collation
and it can output in many different formats.

Collate works interactively with the collation being written to a
window as the scholar watches. The scholar may intervene at any point
to alter the collation, using either of the tools RSet VariantS or
RRegulariseS. RSet VariantS allows the scholar to over-rule the collation
offered by Collate and impose his own collation, even writing a variant
that does not appear in the sources into the collation. RRegulariseS
enables the scholar to intervene to regularise any word or phrase in any
source at any point. The regularisation can be set for a particular word
at every point in every source, or for that word only at that place in that
source, or various other combinations. Collate will record all variants
set and every regularisation made and remember them next time it runs.
The scholar can adjust the collation in other ways, switching the base
text, suppressing agreements with the base text and collating
punctuation tokens separately.

The collation may be output in various critical apparatus forms
(including several formats recommended by the Text Encoding
Initiative), or scholars may dictate their own format. Through an
interface to the EDMAC macros, developed by John Lavagnino of
Brandeis University and Dominik Wujastyk of the Wellcome Institute
for the production of complex critical editions with the typesetting
language TeX, editions with up to five levels of apparatus can be created
direct from the output of Collate. The EDMAC macros and an
implementation of TeX (OzTeX) are provided with the program.
Automatic generation of hypertext electronic editions from the output is
also possible.

Texts Collate can Process
-----------------------------
The length of texts Collate can process is limited only by the storage
capacity of the computer. The only requirement is that the text be
divided into blocks containing no more than 32768 words each. Collate
works on both prose and verse and has been tested successfully on texts
in many languages (including Malay, Sanskrit, Latin, Middle English
and Old Norse).

A set of Guidelines for Transcription, provided with the program,
explains the format transcription files should have so that they can be
processed by Collate. The transcription files must be plain ASCII files
and can be prepared on any computer. A simple word-processor,
Transcribe, is also provided with Collate: this includes various functions
specially designed to help transcription.

The History of Collate
--------------------------
Collate has been developed as part of the Computers and Manuscripts
Project, funded for three years from 1st September 1989 by the
Leverhulme Trust at the Oxford University Computing Service with
support from Apple Computer. Collate has been written by the Research
Officer for the Project, Peter Robinson (PETERRAC.UK.OX.VAX).
The Project Director is Susan Hockey.

Program Availability and Requirements
----------------------------------------------
Collate 1.0 runs only on Macintosh computers (Classic or higher) and
requires one megabyte of memory to operate. A hard disc is
recommended. It can be ordered from:
The Computers and Manuscripts Project
Oxford University Computing Service
13 Banbury Road
Oxford OX2 6NN
England.
(Phone: 0865 273200; fax 0865 273275; email
PETERRAC.UK.OX.VAX).

The program costs 20 pounds UK, 40 dollars US. Cheques should be made
payable to the Oxford University Computing Service; cheques in pounds
must be drawn on a British bank.

Documentation, sample files, Transcribe (version 1.1) and the OzTeX
implementation of TeX for the Macintosh, together with the EDMAC
macros, are provided with the program.

[End Linguist List, Vol. 2, No. 147]