LINGUIST List 6.1457

Thu Oct 19 1995

Calls: APAHE, AAAI

Editor for this issue: <dseelyemunix.emich.edu>

Directory

1. Mel Hahn, APAHE, Language Education
2. Nancy Green, 2nd CFP: Implicature

CALL FOR PAPERS
Language Education for Asian and Pacific Americans in Higher Education

As a panel chair and member of the 1996 Conference Committee of Asians
and Pacific Americans in Higher Education (APAHE), I am announcing a
call for papers for our annual conference on March 8-10, 1996 at the
Miyako Hotel, 1625 Post St., San Francisco, CA.

I am chairing the panel that addresses the literacy acquisition issues
and needs of Asians and Pacific Americans in higher education,
specifically at a University of California campus. I am seeking
interested scholars, graduate students and professionals, who are
preferably, but certainly not limited to Asian and Pacific American and
who are interested in presenting their research on the complex issues
that accompany language instruction for Asian and Pacific American
immigrant and refugee students in higher education.

The theme of the conference will be "Affirmative Action and
Discrimination: Asian and Pacific Americans in Higher Education in
California." Our conference plan calls for a critical examination of
the complex relations between Asian Americans, a historically
discriminated racial minority and the policy of Affirmative Action.

Abstracts for individual papers are invited on topics that include
language acquisition, sociocultural studies and sociolinguistics, second
and foreign language pedagogy, academic literacy acquisition,
assessment, language program policy and planning, and language for
specific purposes. The deadline is November 1, 1995. For information,
write to Panel Chair, Dr. Melanie Hahn:

melhahnuclink2.berkeley.edu
(510) 642-3075

For more detailed and comprehensive information about the overall
conference search URL-WWW: http://garnet.berkeley.edu/~asianam

 Call for Participation (long version)
 AAAI Spring Symposium on
 COMPUTATIONAL IMPLICATURE: COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES TO
 INTERPRETING AND GENERATING CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE
 March 25-27, 1996 at Stanford University


Since the 1980's, several computational and formal approaches have
been developed to address pragmatic phenomena with the properties of
Gricean conversational implicatures. The purpose of this symposium
is to bring together researchers interested in developing computational
approaches to conversational implicature in non-figurative use of natural
language. The symposium will address the following related questions.

 - Is the notion of conversational implicature still useful?
 What role if any do Grice's maxims and Cooperative Principle still
 play in computational and formal approaches? What types of
 conversational implicature have been modeled successfully
 so far? What do they have in common? (E.g., with the exception
 of scalar implicatures, which are based upon Quantity, the majority
 seem to be based on Relevance. But is Relevance a well-defined notion?)
 What interesting classes of implicature have not yet been addressed?
 What are the reasons for generating conversational implicatures (e.g.,
 conciseness, politeness, avoiding misconceptions)?

 - How does conversational implicature relate to other discourse
 phenomena, e.g., coherence and discourse expectations?
 What is the role of linguistic (e.g., prosodic or pragmatic)
 constraints versus background knowledge?
 Are there classes of discourse phenomena (e.g., ellipsis) which it would
 be advantageous to analyze as types of conversational implicature
 although they are not currently recognized as such in the computational
 literature? What distinguishes conversational implicatures from other
 defeasible inferences in discourse (e.g., default inferences in text
 understanding)?

 - How successful have recent developments in discourse processing such as
 use of non-monotonic reasoning, abduction, and planning/plan inference
 been in modeling conversational implicature? How well do these models
 address related problems of intention, mutual belief, cancellation, and
 reinforceability? How well do they address both generation and
 interpretation? How should they be evaluated?
 Most models have focused on single classes of conversational
 implicature. What problems would arise in integrating them?
 Are they scalable? What are the knowledge acquisition and
 knowledge representation issues in using various formal
 models as the basis for implementing systems that recognize and
 generate implicatures?

 - What problems in conversational implicature should be addressed
 in the immediate future? E.g., how can corpora be used? What
 corpora are available for studying implicature? How does the
 problem of generating implicatures differ from the problem of
 interpreting them?


Program Committee:

Barbara Di Eugenio (Co-chair), Carnegie Mellon University
 Email: dieugenilcl.cmu.edu
Nancy Green (Co-chair), Carnegie Mellon University
 Email: nancy.greencs.cmu.edu
Julia Bell Hirschberg, AT&T Bell Laboratories
Marilyn Walker, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories
R. Michael Young, University of Pittsburgh


Submission Information:

Persons interested in participating should submit (1) a 4-6 page position
paper addressing one or more of the above questions, or (2) a 1-2 page
statement of interest describing the author's relevant work and publications.
We welcome diverse points of view on the nature of and proper treatment of
conversational implicature, provided that they contribute to the development
of computational approaches to discourse interpretation and generation.

Papers should be formatted with 11-point font and 1-inch margins, and
should include the author's email address. Please send 5 hard copies to:
Dr. Nancy Green, Re: AAAI-SSS96, Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon
University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890, USA.


Timetable for participants:

October 31, 1995 Submission deadline.
November 30, 1995 Notification of acceptance.
January 19, 1996 Papers to appear in working notes are due.
February 23, 1996 Registration deadline.


For more information:

Available via the url: http://www.isp.pitt.edu/implicature