LINGUIST List 5.601

Tue 24 May 1994

Confs: Speech and language

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1. Paul Mc Kevitt, T

Subj: Speech and language

 **** SPEECH AND LANGUAGE AND SPEECH AND LANGUAGE AND SPEECH AND LANGUAGE ****

 CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

 AAAI-94 Workshop on
 Integration of Natural Language and Speech Processing

 Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-94)
 Seattle, Washington, USA

 Sunday/Monday, July 31st/August 1st, 1994

 Chair:
 Paul Mc Kevitt
 Department of Computer Science
 University of Sheffield, ENGLAND, EU

WORKSHOP COMMITTEE:

 Prof. Ole Bernsen (Roskilde, Denmark)
 Dr. Martin Cooke (Sheffield, England)
 Dr. Daniel Jurafsky (ICSI, Berkeley, USA)
 Dr. Steve Renals (Cambridge, England)
 Prof. Noel Sharkey (Sheffield, England)
 Dr. Eiichiro Sumita (ATR, Japan)
 Prof. Dr. Walther v.Hahn (Hamburg, Germany)
 Prof. Yorick Wilks (Sheffield, England)
 Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Wahlster (DFKI, Germany)
 Dr. Sheryl R. Young (CMU, USA)

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION:
There has been a recent move towards considering the integration of
perception sources in Artificial Intelligence (AI) (see Dennett 1991
and Mc Kevitt (Ed.) 1994). This workshop will focus on research
involved in the integration of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and
Speech Processing (SP). The aim here is to bring to the AI community
results being presented at computational linguistics (e.g.
COLING/ACL), and speech conferences (e.g. ICASSP, ICSLP).

Although there has been much progress in developing theories, models
and systems in the areas of NLP and SP we have just started to see
progress on integrating these two subareas of AI. Most success has
been with speech synthesis and less with speech understanding.

However, there are still a number of important questions to answer
about the integration of speech and language processing. How is
intentional information best gleaned from speech input? How does one
cope with situations where there are multiple speakers in a dialogue
with multiple intentions? How does discourse understanding occur in
multi-speaker situations with noise? How does prosodic information
help NLP systems? What corpora (e.g. DARPA ATIS corpora, MAP-TASK
corpus from Edinburgh) exist for integrated data on speech and
language?

The workshop is of particular interest at this time because research
in NLP and SP have advanced to the stage that they can each benefit
from integrated approaches. Also, such integration is important as
people in NLP and SP can gain insight from each others' work.

References

Dennett, Daniel (1991)
Consciousness explained
Harmondsworth: Penguin

Mc Kevitt, Paul (1994) (Guest Editor)
Integration of Natural Language and Vision Processing
Special Volume 8(1,2,3) of AI Review Journal
Dordrecht: Kluwer (forthcoming)

WORKSHOP TOPICS:
The workshop will focus on these themes:

 * Speech understanding

 * Dialogue & Discourse

 * Machine translation

 * Architectures

 * Site descriptions (Hamburg, JANUS-II, ATR, CMU)

PUBLICATION:

Workshop notes/preprints will be published by AAAI. If there is
sufficient interest we will publish a book on the workshop with AAAI
Press.

WORKSHOP CHAIR:

Paul Mc Kevitt
Department of Computer Science
Regent Court
University of Sheffield
211 Portobello Street
GB- S1 4DP, Sheffield
England, UK, EU.

e-mail: p.mckevittdcs.shef.ac.uk
fax: +44 742 780972
phone: +44 742 825572 (office)
 825590 (secretary)

ATTENDANCE:

We hope to have an attendance between 25-50 people at the
workshop.

If you are interested in attending then please send the following
form to p.mckevittdcs.shef.ac.uk as soon as possible:

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Name:

Affiliation:

Full Address:

E-mail:

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REGISTRATION ENQUIRIES FOR AAAI CAN BE MADE TO:

 NCAIaaai.org

REGISTRATION FEE:

Incorporated into the technical registration fee except for
those who are workshop attendees only.