LINGUIST List 5.105

Mon 31 Jan 1994

Calls: Combining Statistical and Symbolic Approaches to Language

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1. Judith Klavans, Workshop on Combining Statistical and Symbolic Approaches to Language

 THE BALANCING ACT:
 Combining Symbolic and Statistical Approaches to Language

 1 July 1994
 New Mexico State University
 Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA

 A workshop in conjunction with the 32nd Annual Meeting of the
 Association for Computational Linguistics
 (27-30 June 1994)


A renaissance of interest in corpus-based statistical methods has
rekindled old controversies -- rationalist vs. empiricist
philosophies, theory-driven vs. data-driven methodologies, symbolic
vs. statistical techniques. The aim of this workshop is to set aside
a priori biases and explore the balancing act that must take place
when symbolic and statistical approaches are brought together. We
plan to accept papers from authors having a wide range of
perspectives, and to initiate a discussion that includes
philosophical, theoretical, and practical issues.

Submissions to the workshop must describe research in which both
symbolic and statistical methods play a part. All research of this
kind requires that the researcher make choices: What knowledge will be
represented symbolically and how will it be obtained? What
assumptions underlie the statistical model? What is the researcher
gaining by combining approaches? Questions like these, and the
metaphor of the balancing act, will provide a unifying theme to draw
contributions from a wide spectrum of language researchers.

ORGANIZERS:

 Judith Klavans, Columbia Univerisity
 Philip Resnik, Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Inc.

REQUIREMENTS: Papers should describe original work; they should
clearly emphasize the type of paper to be presented (e.g.
implementation, philosophical, etc.) and the state of completion of
the research. A paper accepted for presentation cannot be presented
or have been presented at any other meeting. In addition to the
workshop proceedings, plans for publication as a book require that
papers not have been published in any other publicly available
proceedings. Papers submitted to other conferences will be
considered, as long as this fact is clearly indicated in the
submission.

FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION: Following guidelines for the ACL meeting,
authors should submit preliminary versions of their papers, not to
exceed 3200 words (exclusive of references). Papers outside the
specified length and formatting requirements are subject to rejection
without review. Papers should be headed by a title page containing
the paper title, a short (5 line) summary and a specification of the
subject area(s). If the author wishes reviewing to be blind, a
separate page with author identification information must be
submitted.

SUBMISSION MEDIA: Papers may be submitted electronically or in hard
copy to either organizer at the addresses given below. Electronic
submissions should be either self-contained LaTeX source or plain
text. LaTeX submissions must use the ACL submission style (aclsub.sty)
retrievable from the ACL LISTSERV server (access to which is described
below) and should not refer to any external files or styles except for
the standard styles for TeX 3.14 and LaTeX 2.09. A model submission
modelsub.tex is also provided in the archive, as well as a
bibliography style acl.bst. Note that the bibliography for a
submission cannot be submitted as separate .bib file; the actual
bibliography entries must be inserted in the submitted LaTeX source
file. Be sure that e-mail submissions have no lines longer than 80
characters to avoid mailer problems.

Hard copy submissions should consist of four (4) copies of the paper.
A plain text version of the identification page should be sent
separately by electronic mail if possible, giving the following
information: title, author(s), address(es), abstract, content areas,
word count.

Schedule: Papers must be received by 15 March 1994. Late papers will
not be considered. Notification of receipt will be mailed to the
first author (or designated author) soon after receipt. Authors will
be notified of acceptance by 10 April 1994. Camera-ready copies of
final papers prepared in a double-column format, preferably using a
laser printer, must be received by 10 May 1994, along with a signed
copyright release statement. The ACL LaTeX proceedings format is
available through the ACL LISTSERV.

REGISTRATION: Registration fees are $25 for participants who register
by 15 May 1994. Late registrations will be $30. Registration
includes a copy of the proceedings, lunch, and refreshments during the
day. Payment in US$ checks payable to ACL or credit card payment
(Visa/Mastercard) can be sent to Philip Resnik at the address below.
Please submit the following information along with payment:

 name
 affiliation
 postal address
 email
 method of payment (check or credit card)
 credit card info (name, card number, expiration date)
 dietary requirements (vegetarian, kosher, etc)

ACL INFORMATION: For other information on the ACL conference which
precedes the workshop and on the ACL more generally, please use the
ACL LISTSERV, described below.

ACL LISTSERV: Listserv is a facility to allow access to an electronic
document archive by electronic mail. The ACL LISTSERV has been set up
at Columbia University's Department of Computer Science. Requests from
the archive should be sent as e-mail messages to

 listservcs.columbia.edu

with an empty subject field and the message body containing the
request command. The most useful requests are "help" for general help
on using LISTSERV, "index acl-l" for the current contents of the ACL
archive and "get acl-l <file>" to get a particular file named <file>
from the archive. For example, to get an ACL membership form, a
message with the following body should be sent:

 get acl-l membership-form.txt

Answers to requests are returned by e-mail. Since the server may have
many requests for different archives to process, requests are queued
up and may take a while (say, overnight) to be fulfilled.

The ACL archive can also be accessed by anonymous FTP. Here is an
example of how to get the same file by FTP (user typein is
underlined):

 $ ftp cs.columbia.edu
 -------------------
 Name (cs.columbia.edu:pereira): anonymous
 ---------
 Password:pereiraresearch.att.com << not echoed
 ------------------------
 ftp> cd acl-l
 --------
 ftp> get membership-form.txt.Z
 -------------------------
 ftp> quit
 ----
 $ uncompress membership-form.txt.Z
 --------------------------------

This file is listed under acl-l/ACL94/Workshop_balancing_act.ascii.Z.

SPONSORSHIP: This workshop is sponsored by the Association for
Computational Linguistics (ACL). It is organized by:

 Judith L. Klavans Philip Resnik
 Columbia University Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Inc.
 Department of Computer Science Mailstop UCHL03-207
 500 W 120th Street Two Elizabeth Drive
 New York, NY 10027, USA Chelmsford, MA 01824-4195 USA

 klavanscs.columbia.edu philip.resnikeast.sun.com
 Phone: (212) 939-7120 Phone: (508) 442-0841
 Fax: (914) 478-1802 Fax: (508) 250-5067


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