LINGUIST List 7.1275

Fri Sep 13 1996

Calls: Plurilingual data, AAAI Symposium on NLP for WWW

Editor for this issue: Ann Dizdar <dizdartam2000.tamu.edu>

Directory

1. "Li Wei", Workshop on Transcribing, Encoding and Analysing Plurilingual Data
2. Kavi Mahesh, CFP: AAAI Symposium on NLP for WWW

Workshop on Transcribing, Encoding and Analysing Plurilingual Data

Organizers: LIPPS Group (Mark Sebba, Melissa Moyer, Penelope
Gardner-Chloros, and Roeland van Hout)

 The initial idea to create an international language
interaction data-base goes back to discussions held by members of the
Network on Code-Switching and Language Contact established by the
European Science Foundation (ESF) at the International Summer School
on Code-Switching held at Leeuwarden, The Netherlands in September
1994. At the Leeuwarden meeting the Language Interaction in
Plurilingual and Plurilectal Speakers Group (LIPPS GROUP) was set up
with the goal of proposing a set of guidelines for transcription, and
encoding, as well as making diverse language interaction data
accessible to researchers in the field.
 The increase of language interaction studies over the past
decade on different language pairs now enables researchers to begin
asking questions that previously could not be addressed either because
of the lack of data or the disperse location of the data. The need for
a comparative approach of data sets was already called for by Muysken
(1991) in order to determine what patterns of language interaction
result from structural restrictions, and to what extent these patterns
are the result of specific sociolinguistic influences or pressures.
 Research on language interaction (i.e. all types of
language practices in multilingual or multidialectal communities)
covers a variety of social and linguistic perspectives. The LIDES
project is committed to making different types of language interaction
data accessible to researchers working from different theoretical and
methodological standpoints. This commitment entails developing a
transcription and coding scheme to account for all types of data so
that investigators with different research concerns can benefit from
the LIDES CORPUS.
 The LIPPS group seeks to provide support and technical advice
to researchers in the field of language interaction; in particular,
offer guidance for transcribing and coding schemes, as well as systems
for transferring existing data in "computer readable" form to the
LIDES format, promote a forum open to researchers of language
interaction and language contact from all perspectives (theoretical,
psycholinguistic, qualitative, and quantitative), pool language
interaction data for use by members, adapt the transcription and
coding scheme (CHAT) and the analytical programs (CLAN) from the
CHILDES project developed by Brian MacWhinney and associates (1995) at
Carnegie Mellon to the special needs of researchers working with
language interaction data, safeguard and guarantee the ethical use of
the data contributed to the LIDES CORPUS
 
Organization: 
 The Workshop will take place as a special session of the
International Symposium on Bilingualism 9-12 April, 1997 in Newcastle
upon Tyne. A 30-minute presentation by the LIPPS Group will be
followed by a 30 minute discussion of the Coding Manual, giving
examples of its practical applications.
 Contributions are invited from researchers with empirical
multilingual data who have encountered problems of transcribing,
encoding and analysing them and who have suggestions to make in order
to solve these and other related problems.
 Those who are interested in contributing, please contact either
Dr Melissa Moyer: ilfi2cc.uab.es or Dr Li Wei: li.weincl.ac.uk

For further information of the International Symposium on 
Bilingualism and registration forms, see: 
http://www/ncl/ac/uk/walshaw/html, or contact: Mrs Gillian Cavagan, 
ISB Administrator, Department of Speech, University of Newcastle upon 
Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK, Fax: +44 (0)191 222 6518

	 1997 AAAI Spring Symposium Series Call for Participation
		 March 24-26, 1997
	 Stanford University, California

	NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING FOR THE WORLD WIDE WEB

		 Call for Participation
 **Submission deadline** October 25, 1996
 Web site: http://crl.nmsu.edu/users/mahesh/aaai-web-nlp-symposium.html

Sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence

The American Association for Artificial Intelligence presents the 1997
Spring Symposium Series, to be held Monday through Wednesday, March
24-26, 1997, at Stanford University.

NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING FOR THE WORLD WIDE WEB

The World Wide Web (WWW) is rapidly becoming a powerful medium for
human communication and dissemination of information. Most information
on the WWW is expressed in natural language texts. Yet, most software
tools built for the WWW do not apply natural language processing (NLP)
techniques for searching, retrieving, presenting, or generating texts.

The field of NLP has the potential to offer better tools that exploit
the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of natural language texts, than
current ones based mostly on keyword matching and database indexing
methods, for easing the overload of texts on the users. The WWW in
turn is an excellent domain to develop practical applications of NLP.

Additionally, NLP and machine translation (MT) can ease language
barriers on the WWW by providing multilingual solutions to both
accessing information on the WWW and aiding the generation and
translation of texts for the WWW. Potential applications of NLP
include (but are in no way limited to) automatic and interactive
summarization and machine translation of WWW documents, information
brokering (natural language interfaces for assisting users in finding
the right information on the WWW), document filtering and personalized
newspapers (collecting and presenting current articles of personal
interest to users), and automatic generation of WWW documents.

This symposium aims to bring together researchers in various
subdisciplines of NLP and from the Web community to address
applications of NLP for improving the use of the WWW. The symposium
will include several sessions for presenting papers and on-line
demonstrations with ample time set aside for discussions,
commentaries, working groups, and a panel.

The World Wide Web will be used extensively for exchanging papers
and for discussions before and after the symposium. Additional
information about the symposium is available at
http://crl.nmsu.edu/users/mahesh/aaai-web-nlp-symposium.html and
http://www.aaai.org/Symposia/symposia.html.

Submission Information:

We invite papers describing concrete applications of NLP techniques
for the WWW as well as position papers concerning what NLP can and
cannot do for the WWW or what should NLP as a field do in order to
meet the challenges and opportunities provided by the WWW. WE STRONGLY
ENCOURAGE ON-LINE DEMONSTRATIONS OF WORKING NLP APPLICATIONS ON THE
WWW. The focus of the symposium is on NLP applications and as such, we
invite submissions that treat WWW documents as natural language texts
(i.e., with NL syntax and semantics, as opposed to just strings or
databases). Papers addressing NLP problems characteristic of the WWW,
such as hypertext, multilingual, and multimedia documents, are
especially encouraged.

Papers should be no longer than 10 pages (font size no smaller than
11pt) with a title, abstract, and names and addresses of authors.
Please also indicate if the paper is to be reviewed as a position
paper or an application paper. Electronic submission (by e-mail to
maheshcrl.nmsu.edu or by ftp://crl.nmsu.edu/incoming/) is strongly
encouraged. Hardcopy submissions (5 copies) may be sent to: Kavi
Mahesh, Computing Research Laboratory, Box 30001, Dept. 3CRL, Room
292B, New Science Hall, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM
88003-0001, (505) 646-5861.

Timetable:

 Submissions due: October 25, 1996.
 Notification of acceptance: November 25, 1996.
 Final papers due: January 17, 1997.

Program Committee:

 Lynn Carlson, US Department of Defense, lmcarlsafterlife.ncsc.mil;
 Kavi Mahesh (Chair), New Mexico State University, maheshcrl.nmsu.edu;
 Sergei Nirenburg, New Mexico State University, sergeicrl.nmsu.edu;
 Ashwin Ram, Georgia Institute of Technology, ashwin.ramcc.gatech.edu;
 Philip Resnik, University of Maryland, resnikumiacs.umd.edu.

General Information:

Several other AAAI Spring Symposia are being held at the same time.
Each symposium will be limited to between forty and sixty
participants. Each participant will be expected to attend a single
symposium. Working notes will be prepared and distributed to
participants in each symposium.

A general plenary session, in which the highlights of each symposium
will be presented, will be held on Tuesday, March 25, and an informal
reception will be held on Monday, March 24.

In addition to invited participants, a limited number of other
interested parties will be able to register in each symposium on a
first-come, first-served basis. Registration information will be
available by December 15, 1996. To register, contact
 AAAI, 445 Burgess Drive, Menlo Park, CA 94025
 (415) 328-3123 (415) 321-4457 (fax)
 sssaaai.org
 http://www.aaai.org/Symposia/Spring/1997/sssregistration-97.html