LINGUIST List 3.662

Wed 02 Sep 1992

Confs: NWAVE; EUROSLA; AAAI Symposium

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Directory

1. Rosina Lippi-Green, NWAVE at Ann Arbor
2. Vera Regan, EUROSLA Conference Announcment
3. Bonnie J. Dorr, CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: AAAI-93 SPRING SYMPOSIUM SERIES

NWAVE will be held at UM/Ann Arbor this October 15-18 (Thursday
through Sunday).
We are currently preparing the registration mailing including
scheduled talks and speakers, workshop descriptions, travel
information, etc.
The mailing list for NWAVE is very old and contains many errors; we
are trying to update it as best we can.
If you are on the mailing list and know that we have your correct
address, please send an e-mail message confirming that fact.
If you would like to be on the mailing list and are not, or if you
suspect we have an old address for you, please send current
information.
The registration mailing will go out next week.

Please send information regarding mailing addresses to:
rosinarosina.german.lsa.umich.edu

Eurosla Annual Conference 1993
Preliminary notice

The Third Annual conference of EUROSLA (European Second Language
Association) will be in:

 Sofia, Bulgaria
 17th to 20th June, 1993

Conference Organiser
Professor A. Danchev,
Faculty of Classical and Modern Languages,
15 Tsar Osvobodital Blvd.,
Sofia 1000, Bulgaria.
Fax: +359-2-463589

Membership Secretary:
Dr Vera Regan,
Dept of French,
University College Dublin,
Belfield, Dublin 4
Ireland.
email: vmreganirlearn.ucd.ie

Vera Regan Internet: vmreganirlearn.ucd.ie
French Department CREN/Bitnet/Earn: vmreganirlearn
University College Dublin Phone: +353 1 706-8448
Belfield, Dublin 4; Ireland Fax: +353 1 269-4409

Building Lexicons for Machine Translation

The lexicon plays a central role in any machine translation (MT)
system, regardless of the theoretical foundations upon which the
system is based. However, it is only recently that MT researchers
have begun to focus more specifically on issues that concern the
lexicon, e.g., the automatic construction of multi-lingual semantic
representations. Large dictionaries are important in any natural
language application, but the problem is especially difficult for MT
because of cross-linguistic divergences and mismatches that arise from
the perspective of the lexicon. Furthermore, scaling up dictionaries
is an essential requirement for MT that can no longer be dismissed.

This symposium provides a forum for researchers from the fields of MT
and the lexicon focus on the intersection of the two fields, rather
than their broader concerns. A number of fundamental questions will
be addressed:

-- What lexical levels are required by a machine translation
 system? Syntactic? Lexical semantic? Ontological? What do the
 representations at each of these levels look like, and how
 would they be constructed?

-- What are the interdependencies between these levels? Can we
 take advantage of interacting linguistic constraints from each
 level for the construction of lexical representations? Should
 the levels be kept as separate layers and related explicitly
 or should they be combined into one layer and be related
 implicitly? Should all levels be represented in the same or
 in different, dedicated formalisms? What are the implications of these
 choices for MT system architecture, processing of the relevant
 knowledge, interaction between components of MT systems, applicability
 of the resulting knowledge sources in different types of MT mappings?

-- Can automatic procedures be used for the construction of
 lexical representations? What existing resources should we be using
 and what aids do we have to transform these resources into appropriate
 representations for MT? To what extent is it possible to acquire
 elements of contrastive knowledge (mapping information) using existing
 techniques (e.g., work on bilingual corpora, example based approaches,
 etc.)?

-- To what extent is it possible to share lexicons? If the
 representations and the actual knowledge are tailored to
 a specific system (e.g., style of grammar or choice of domain
 knowledge base) then how can sharing be achieved?
 How much representations and knowledge are tied to specific
 approaches to MT system construction, and, to the extent that
 they are, how much can people come to some agreement on some of
 those other issues so that they can share lexicons?

-- Are bilingual dictionaries useful for the construction of
 computational lexicons for MT? What is the role of example
 sentences and phrases in bilingual dictionaries? Can we extract
 information from pairwise examples in order to achieve example-based
 translation? Can we use bilingual dictionaries for the extraction of
 grammatical information?

-- What are the different types of MT mappings (transfer,
 interlingual, statistically based, memory-based, etc.) and how do
 these mappings affect the representation that is used in the lexicon?

-- What types of MT divergences and mismatches must be accommodated
 in the lexicon (i.e., cases where the target-language sentence
 has a different structure, or conveys different information,
 from that of the source language)? Are these problems that
 any translation system must deal with regardless of the MT mapping
 that is used? If so, can we construct lexicons that accommodate these
 divergences regardless of the translation mapping that is used? Can
 we incorporate information about the respective portions of
 lexical/non-lexical knowledge needed to decide on suitable candidates
 for target constructions and on lexical clues for strategies for such
 decisions?

-- Can we, or have we, achieved language-independence in the
 representations that are used in the lexicon? Can we support an
 interlingual approach to machine translation based on current
 technology and resources?

All interested participants should submit five copies of a one- to
five-page abstract (not including the bibliography) by October 16,
1992 to:

Bonnie Dorr
Department of Computer Science / UMIACS
University of Maryland
A.V. Williams Building
College Park, MD 20742

FAX or electronic submission will not be accepted. Each submission
should include the names and complete addresses of all authors.
Correspondence will be sent to the authors by e-mail, unless otherwise
indicated. Also, authors should indicate under the title which of the
questions and/or topic listed above best describes their paper (if
none is appropriate, please give a set of keywords that best describe
the topic of the paper).

Authors will be notified of the Program Committee's decision by
November 16, 1992. Submissions will be judged on clarity,
significance, and originality. An important criterion for acceptance
is that the abstract clearly contributes to the theme of building
lexicons for machine translation. Abstracts focusing on one of these
two areas (i.e., MT or the lexicon) will be given a lower priority
than those that address issues that lie at their intersection.

Program Committee: Michael Brent (michaelcogsci.cog.jhu.edu), Johns
Hopkins University; Bonnie Dorr (chair) (bonnieumiacs.umd.edu),
University of Maryland; Sergei Nirenburg (sergeinl.cs.cmu.edu),
Carnegie Mellon University; Elaine Rich (ai.richmcc.com),
Microelectronics and Computer Technology; Patrick Saint-Dizier
(stdizieririt.irit.fr), CNRS, Universite' Paul Sabatier