LINGUIST List 2.18

Wednesday, 23 Jan 1991

Confs: MT Evaluators' Forum, NLP evaluation, AMOL

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1. falkedal kirsten, MT Evaluators' Forum: Call for Participation
2. NANCY M. IDE, NLP evaluation workshop
3. , call for papers AMOL

Evaluators' Forum: Call for Participation.

The International Working Group on Evaluation of Machine Translation Systems
is organising a four day meeting from April 21st to 24th, 1991, for the
discussion of evaluation techniques.

The primary purpose of the meeting is to provide evaluators with a forum for
the exchange of experience and of views on effective techniques. The meeting
will therefore be structured around critical presentations of particular
techniques. In order to facilitate fruitful discussion, the number of
participants will be limited.

Participation is invited from those with past or present experience of
evaluation, and from those who expect to be involved in the evaluation of
machine (assisted) translation systems.

The meeting will be held in the Grand Hotel des Rasses, Ste. Croix, Vaud,
Switzerland. The hotel is situated on the balcony of the Jura mountains,
looking down on the lake of Neuchatel and across to the Alps. Access to
Yverdon, the nearest substantial town, is easy, with direct rail links from
Geneva and Zurich airports. From there a regular train service will take
participants to Ste. Croix in a little over half an hour. The hotel will
provide transport for the remaining short road journey.

The workshop fee is 750 Sfrs., which includes registration and documentation,
accommodation and all meals from dinner on the evening of Saturday April 20th
to lunch on Wednesday, April 24th., transport between the hotel and Ste. Croix
and access to all hotel facilities (swimming pool, tennis courts, mini-golf
etc.).

Intending participants should send a brief (2 page maximum) description of
their potential contribution by January 31st, 1991 to



 Kirsten Falkedal
 ISSCO
 54 rte des Acacias
 CH-1227 Carouge
 Switzerland

 e-mail: kirstendivsun.unige.ch
 voice: (+41) (22) 705 7114
 fax: (+41) (22) 300 1086

from whom further information may also be obtained.

Margaret King Gudrun Magnusdottir 
ISSCO Dept. of Computational Linguistics
 University of Gothenburg Sweden

 CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

 Workshop for Evaluation of Natural Language Processing Systems

 18 June 1991
 University of California
 Berkeley, CA

There has been increased concern with the evaluation of natural language
processing (NLP) systems over the past few years. The evaluation of NLP
systems is essential in order to measure the capabilities of individual
systems, to measure technical progress and growth in the field, and to
provide a basis for selecting NLP systems to best fit the communication
requirements of application domain systems. This 1991 Workshop is a follow
on to the workshop on evaluation held in December of 1988 at the Wayne Hotel
in Wayne, PA. Technical report RADC-TR-89-302 on the previous workshop is
available from Rome Laboratory.

Important issues for any evaluation effort and relevant to this workshop
include identification of the items or capabilities to be evaluated,
choosing between "black box" and "glass box" approaches, definition of
evaluation criteria, development of methods or procedures for evaluation,
determination of evaluation metrics, and determination of the type of output
to be produced by the evaluation procedures. The areas of NLP relevant for
this workshop include syntactic analysis, semantic analyisis, pragmatic
analysis, lexical processing, morphology, sharable knowledge bases and
ontologies, speech understanding, and trainable systems.

The purpose of this workshop is to provide a forum for computational
linguists to report on and discuss current efforts and activities, research
progress, new approaches, problems and issues; to promote scientific
interchange on important evaluation issues; and to generate recommendations
and directions for future investigations in the evaluation area.

Workshop attendance will be by invitation, limited to 45 people. The
workshop will be held June 18th at the University of California, Berkeley
Campus, in association with the 29th Annual Meeting of the Association for
Computational Linguistics.

SUBMISSIONS:

Interested participants should submit a 3-5 page abstract of their
presentation and a brief description of their research activities. Persons
desiring to attend the workshop, but not make a presentation, should send only
a brief description of their research activities. All persons should include
name, mailing address, phone number, and electronic mail address. Submission
may be transmitted via electronic mail, U.S. Postal Service, or FAX. If
hardcopy is submitted, please include six copies (including the original).
Send submissions to:

 Jeannette G. Neal, Ph.D.
 Calspan Corporation
 P.O. Box 400, Buffalo, NY 14225
 (716) 631-6844
 FAX: (716) 631-6722
 nealcs.buffalo.edu

SCHEDULE:

 March 1, 1991 Submissions due
 April 1, 1991 Notification of acceptance/invitation

ORGANIZATION AND PROGRAM COMMITTEE:

 Jeannette G. Neal, Calspan Corporation (Committee Chair)
 Tim Finin, Unisys Center for Advanced Information Technology
 Ralph Grishman, New York University
 Christine Montgomery, Language Systems, Inc.
 Sharon Walter, Rome Laboratory

SUPPORT for this workshop is provided by Rome Laboratory.

 Final Call for Papers

 SECOND MEETING ON MATHEMATICS OF LANGUAGE

 May 17-18, 1991
 Yorktown Heights, New York, USA

 Sponsored by the
 Association for Mathematics of Language
 (A Special Interest Group of the
 Association for Computational Linguistics)

Submissions are invited from all areas of study which deal with
the mathematical properties of natural language. These areas
include, but are not limited to, formal mathematical models of
syntax, semantics, and/or phonology; computational complexity of
natural language processing; mathematical theories of language
learning; parsing theory; quantitative models of language.

In particular we are looking for papers on the interface of syntax
and semantics, and on mathematical approaches to historical linguistics.

This is the second in a series of meetings on the mathematics of
language. The first such meeting was held at the University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor in October, 1984. This second meeting will be
supported by the IBM Corporation and perhaps others.

It is anticipated that the papers from the meeting will be published
after peer review in a collection or a special journal issue. No
unrefereed proceedings are planned.

All contributions are to be made electronically. We need an
abstract of between two and five pages, by February 28, 1991.
The addresses for this and any other correspondence are:

 MOL2IBM.COM

 MOL2YKTVMH.BITNET

Authors will be notified around March 31, 1991, by electronic mail.
Please enclose your e-mail address when you send in your abstract.

MOL2 Program Committee:

William Baxter (Michigan), A.K. Joshi (Penn), Edward Keenan
(UCLA), Alexis Manaster-Ramer (Wayne State University and
IBM, Co-Chair), M. Andrew Mosher, (UCLA), Daniel Radzinski (Brown),
Walter Savitch (UCSD), Thomas Wasow (Stanford), Wlodek Zadrozny
(IBM, Co-Chair)