LINGUIST List 7.1307

Fri Sep 20 1996

Calls: Human-computer conversations, Applied NLP (revised)

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

Directory

1. Yorick Wilks, Practical human-computer conversations on Lake Como 1997
2. Priscilla Rasmussen, Fifth Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing (Revised)

CALL FOR EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST: PLEASE RECIRCULATE THIS WIDELY

1st INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON HUMAN-COMPUTER CONVERSATION

Bellagio, Italy, 14-16 July, 1997

We are seeking expressions of interest before formally announcing a
rather different kind of workshop: one that will survey and
demonstrate techniques for practical, plausible, human computer
conversation. The workshop would be in the spirit of the Loebner
Competition meetings, but would not constitute any kind of "Turing"
competition under controlled deception conditions, but would, we hope,
give opportunity for extensive demonstrations of working
conversational systems, preferably without domain restrictions.

As well as practical demonstrations we would hope for papers and
discussions on How-To-Do-It: including abstract discussions of the
computer individual as well as reports of practical experiences of
using the large resources and knowledge data bases now available
through forms of information retrieval and natural language processing
and their impact (together with fast access techniques) on
high-quality conversation simulations. The meeting is not intended to
be yet another get together on linguistic methods for dialogue
modelling or human-computer interaction, but rather based on the
assumption that, in a range of places, great strides are actually
being made in real conversation simulations from practical techniques
and points of view, and that all would benefit from face-to-face
interaction on this, as well as exploring the industrial/commercial
applications of these technologies in HCI/WWW environments in the very
near future.

The proposed site is the Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni, in Bellagio,
Italy, on Lake Como, the legendary site of Pliny's villa where the two
arms of the lake meet, and one of the most beautiful spots in the
world, though easily reached from Milan. The date, 14-16 July 1997,
immediately follows the EACL/ACL in Madrid. Working system
demonstrations would be central, and there would also be a range of
panels on aspects of the state of the art.

Interest is solicited by email at the address below from anyone with
new ideas, results or ongoing work to report on any aspect of
human-computer conversation, or those with an interest in or
commitment to the exploitation of this technology. The emphasis
should be on the software techniques for communication in natural
language and NOT on speech recognition or speech synthesis. Given
sufficient interest a committee will be established and conditions for
submission announced before the end of November 1996. Please put
Serbelloni in the message line of your email. Updatings of
developments for this workshop will be posted to:
http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/research/ilash/Meetings/Bellagio/

*********************************
Professor Yorick Wilks
AI and NN Research Group,
Department of Computer Science
University of Sheffield
Regent Court
211 Portobello St.,
Sheffield S1 4DP
UK

phone: (44) 114 282 5561
fax: (44) 114 278 0972
email: yorickdcs.shef.ac.uk
www: http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/People/Y.Wilks
*********************************

		 	 Call for Papers
 Fifth Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing
		 Washington Marriott Hotel
			 Washington, DC
		 March 31 - April 3, 1997
			 sponsored by the
	 Association for Computational Linguistics

The conference is intended to bring together researchers, system
implementers, and managers from around the world to exchange
information on the application of natural language processing to
real-world problems. Through technical presentations, case studies,
tutorials, and demonstrations, it will examine how specific
approaches, techniques, and resources have proven valuable for
particular applications in text and speech processing.

AREAS OF INTEREST
Original contributions are solicited in all areas of applied natural
language processing, including but not limited to: text and message
processing; spoken language understanding; machine translation;
information retrieval; computer-aided language learning; grammar and
style checking; instructional systems; help systems; text and spoken
language generation; database retrieval systems; multilanguage systems
and multimedia systems. Contributions may address applications, novel
characteristics of implemented systems, tools and methods for system
development (for example, for corpus analysis, knowledge acquisition,
and system customization and maintenance), resources (such as corpora
and lexicons), implementation techniques, and evaluation methods.
Papers that critically evaluate an approach or language processing
strategy are especially welcome.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Sessions will be organized and contributions will be reviewed by the
program committee:

	Ralph Grishman (chair), New York University
	Chinatsu Aone, SRA Corp.
	Rusty Bobrow, BBN
	Martha Evens, Illinois Institute of Technology
	Lynette Hirschman, MITRE Corp.
	Eduard Hovy, Univ of Southern California/Information Sciences 
	Institute

	Yuji Matsumoto, Nara Institute of Science and Technology
	Boyan Onyshkevych, U. S. Dept. of Defense
	Tomek Strzalkowski, General Electric Corporate Res. and Dev.
	Henry Thompson, Univ. of Edinburgh
	Hans Uszkoreit, DFKI Saarbruecken
	Marc Vilain, MITRE Corp.

and by other reviewers selected by the program committee.

REQUIREMENTS FOR SUBMISSION
A paper accepted for presentation at this meeting cannot be presented
or have been presented at any other meeting with publically available
proceedings. Papers that are being submitted to other conferences
must indicate this on the submission (on the identification page).

Papers may be submitted to both the ANLP 97 and ACL 97 conferences, so
long as this is indicated on the submission, and a paper accepted for
ANLP 97 is subsequently withdrawn from ACL 97 (the submission deadline
for ACL 97 is shortly before the notification date for ANLP 97).

TYPES OF PRESENTATIONS
* Full technical papers (a maximum of 8 proceedings pages)
* Briefer technical notes (a maximum of 4 proceedings pages) focussing
 on a single technical or implementation issue
* System presentations with demos: demo sessions will be organized
 as part of the conference, consisting of presentations of novel
 system features followed by system demos. Full support for demos
 will be provided. Submissions for demo sessions should include
 a technical paper or note describing the system, emphasizing its
 novel characteristics and relating it to other work described in
 the literature. System descriptions will normally be the length
 of a technical note (4 pages maximum) but technical papers (8 pages
 maximum) will be considered if warranted by the novel technical
 material. Each paper must be accompanied by a set of printed
 graphics or, if possible, a video of the system to be presented,
 in order to judge its value as a demo presentation. These
 submissions will be reviewed on the same schedule as technical
 papers.
* Videos (maximum 15 minutes) that display interesting research on
 NLP applications to real-world problems. Promotional videos are
 acceptable so long as their main focus is on giving a clear and
 realistic idea of how natural language processing is being used,
 rather than on advertising a company or product. Videos will be
 reviewed on the same schedule as technical papers. Accepted videos
 will be organized into an ongoing video presentation.

 Authors should submit one copy of their videotape, accompanied by
 a submission letter granting permission to copy the tape to a
 standard format, along with two copies of a one to two page
 abstract that includes the title, the name, address, and email
 of the authors, the tape format of the submitted tape (VHS
 (preferred), NTSC, PAL, or SECAM), and the duration. Tape
 submissions should be sent to the same address as hard-copy
 papers (see below).
* Student posters describing ongoing student research work
 (a maximum of 3 proceedings pages).

SUBMISSION FORMAT
The submission should consist of an identification page plus the
actual paper. Because reviewing will be blind, the actual paper
should not contain the authors' names or addresses. Furthermore,
self-references that reveal the authors' identity (e.g., "We
previously showed (Smith, 1991)...") should be avoided. Instead use
references like "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...".

The identification page should include the title, the paper type
(paper, note, demo paper, student), the name, full address and
affiliation, and email address of each author, the indication
"student: yes" if an author is an ACL student member, and a brief
abstract, in the following format:

title:	A Really Universal Semantic Representation
type:	paper
author:	Ralph Grishman
address: Computer Science Department
	New York University
	715 Broadway, Room 703
	New York, NY 10003
email:	grishmancs.nyu.edu
author:	Know One Atoll
address: Computer Science Department
	New York University
	715 Broadway, Room 701
	New York, NY 10003
email: atollcs.nyu.edu
student: yes
abstract: This paper describes a new universal semantic
representation, based on the recently decoded conversations of
humpback whales. Using interviews with several species, we present
evidence of its efficacy as an interlingua for inter-species machine
translation, and its advantages over previous, anthropocentric
representations.

The paper should be prepared in the format of an ACL proceedings paper
(two column, single spaced, but with no author information) and must
conform to the length requirements for the type of submission. Please
do not submit double-spaced papers.

Electronic Submissions
Electronic submissions should consist of the material of the
identification page, as a simple ASCII file, followed by a single
self-contained LaTeX file for the paper itself. This should be sent
as a single mail message to anlp97cs.nyu.edu, with the subject line
"submission", on or before November 7, 1996.

Electronic submissions must use the ACL proceedings style (aclap.sty)
which can be obtained by ftp (as described below). A model paper,
model.tex, is also available from the ftp site.

Hard Copy Submissions
Five copies of the paper and one copy of the identification page
should be sent to

ANLP 97
Computer Science Department
New York University
715 Broadway, 7th Floor
New York, NY 10003

In the case of hard-copy submissions, an email message with the
information on the identification page and the subject line "hard copy
submission" should be sent to anlp97cs.nyu.edu. Hard copy
submissions must be received by November 7, 1996; late papers will be
returned unopened.

DEMOS
In addition to the demo sessions, there will be booths for the
presentation of demos throughout the conference. All demo presenters
will be asked to provide brief system descriptions; these will be
included in a demo proceedings volume, which will complement the
volume of technical papers. Sites interested in presenting a demo at
the conference should send a note by email to anlp97cs.nyu.edu by
December 6, 1996 with the subject line "demo", giving a brief
description of the demo, and indicating whether there will be a
requirement for any equipment beyond that which will be provided by
the demonstrator.

VENUE
The meeting will be held at the Washington Marriott Hotel, in downtown
Washington, D.C. from March 31 (Monday) through April 3, 1997.
Tutorials are scheduled for Monday, with technical sessions on Tuesday
through Thursday.

Early April is usually one of the nicest times in Washington, with the
cherry blossoms just starting to come out. We have planned the
location, in combination with a wide-ranging technical program, to
encourage participation from government and industry.

Local arrangements are being handled by John White of PRC,
white_johnpo.gis.prc.com.

SCHEDULE
Nov. 7, 1996		Submissions due
Jan. 22, 1997		Notification of acceptance / rejection
Feb. 12, 1997		Final papers due
March 31-Apr. 3, 1997	Conference

TUTORIALS
The conference will include a set of tutorials on the first day, March
31. Proposals for tutorials should be sent to the program chair.


FEEDBACK
We're looking to develop a broad conference program with multiple
"tracks" to meet the needs of a wide range of attendees. Send queries
and comments to the program chair, Ralph Grishman, New York
University, grishmancs.nyu.edu.

FTP and WWW SITE
We have placed the ACL style file (aclap.sty) and a model LaTeX paper
(model.tex) at the New York University FTP site. To obtain the style
file,

	$ ftp cs.nyu.edu
	Name: anonymous
	Password: grishmancs.nyu.edu [not echoed]
	ftp> cd pub/nlp/anlp97
	ftp> get aclap.sty
	ftp> quit
	$

These files can also be accessed through the WWW page we have set up
for the conference, http://cs.nyu.edu/cs/projects/proteus/anlp97