LINGUIST List 7.1456

Thu Oct 17 1996

Calls: Berkeley Ling Society, Natural lang generation

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

Directory

1. Berkeley Linguistics Society, Call: Berkeley Linguistics Society 23
2. Robert Dale, Computational Linguistics on Natural Language Generation

 THE BERKELEY LINGUISTICS SOCIETY
 BLS 23
 CALL FOR PAPERS

The Berkeley Linguistics Society is pleased to announce its
Twenty-Third Annual Meeting, to be held February 14-17, 1997. The
conference will consist of a Special Session on Friday, followed by a
General Session and a Parasession on Saturday through Monday.

General Session
The main session will cover areas of general linguistic interest.
Invited speakers include:
 BERNARD COMRIE, University of Southern California
 DAVID McNEILL, University of Chicago
 ALAN PRINCE, Rutgers University

Parasession
Pragmatics and Grammatical Structure
The parasession will accept papers bearing on all aspects of the
relationship between pragmatics and grammatical structure, such as how
pragmatics shapes grammar, how grammar constrains pragmatics, what
kinds of regular relationships can be found between pragmatic function
and linguistic form, and how grammar and pragmatics combine to
create/encode meaning. Invited speakers include:
 JOAN BYBEE, University of New Mexico
 WALLACE CHAFE, University of California, Santa Barbara
 LIVIA POLANYI, Rice University

Special Session:
Syntax and Semantics in Africa
The Special Session will feature research on the syntax and semantics
of African languages. We invite submissions concerning any African
language or language family from any framework, including formal,
functional, cognitive, sociolinguistic, and historical approaches.
Invited speakers include:
 JOAN BRESNAN, University of New Mexico
 HILDA KOOPMAN, University of California, Los Angeles
 DORIS PAYNE, University of Oregon

We encourage proposals from diverse theoretical frameworks and welcome
papers from related disciplines, such as Anthropology, Cognitive
Science, Computer Science, Literature, Philosophy, and Psychology.
Papers presented at the conference will be published in the Society's
Proceedings, and authors who present papers agree to provide
camera-ready copy (not to exceed 12 pages) by May 15, 1997.
Presentations will be allotted 20 minutes with 10 minutes for
questions. We ask that you make your abstract as specific as
possible, including a statement of your topic or problem, your
approach, and your conclusions. Please send 10 copies of an anonymous
one-page (8 1/2" x 11", unreduced) abstract. A second page, or
reverse side of the single page, may be used for data and references
only. Along with the abstract send a 3"x 5" card listing: (1) paper
title, (2) session (general session, parasession, or special session),
(3) for general session abstracts only, subfield, viz., Discourse
Analysis, Historical Linguistics, Morphology, Philosophy and
Methodology of Linguistics, Phonetics, Phonology, Pragmatics,
Psycholinguistics, Semantics, Sociolinguistics, or Syntax, (4) name(s)
of author(s), (5) affiliation(s) of author(s), (6) address to which
notification of acceptance or rejection should be mailed (in late
December 1996), (7) author's office and home phone numbers, (8)
author's e-mail address, if available. An author may submit at most
one single and one joint abstract. In case of joint authorship, one
address should be designated for communication with BLS. Send
abstracts to: BLS 23 Abstract Committees, 2337 Dwinelle Hall,
University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-2650. Abstracts for the
general session and parasession must be received by 4:00 p.m.,
November 18, 1996. Special session abstracts must be received by 4:00
p.m., November 25, 1996. We may be contacted by e-mail at
blsgarnet.berkeley.edu; however, we cannot accept e-mailed or faxed
abstracts. Additional guidelines for abstracts may be requested by
email (blsgarnet.berkeley.edu) or may found at our web site,
http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/lingdept/research/BLS.html

Registration Fees: Before February 7, 1997; $15 for students, $30 for
non-students;
After February 7, 1997; $20 for students, $35 for non-students.

Subject: Call for Submissions: Special Issue of Computational
Linguistics on Natural Language Generation


 Call for Submissions
 Special Issue of Computational Linguistics on
 Natural Language Generation

Guest Editors: Robert Dale, Barbara Di Eugenio, Donia Scott

The automatic generation of natural language texts is an important
aspect of most natural language applications, e.g.: systems aimed at
achieving interactive dialogue, report or instruction generation, and
machine translation. However, Natural Language Generation (NLG) has
for a long time been overshadowed by the study of natural language
understanding, encompassing tasks such as parsing and interpretation.
By all ways of measuring, NLG has received less attention: fewer
conferences, fewer dissertations and books, considerably less space in
textbooks, and less funding from research councils and industry.

Over the past few years, though, the situation has been
changing. First, NLG has formed an identity as a separate field of
research; second, the emergence of new application areas --- such as
automatic content creation for multimedia (e.g. WWW and speech);
multilingual information provision, including support tools for
technical authors and translators; and the generation of instructional
texts --- has led to the transfer of theoretical work into systems of
use outside of laboratory settings. The state of the art in NLG is
now such that researchers can start replicating each other's results
and building on each other's work.

The goal of this special issue of Computational Linguistics on Natural
Language Generation is to bring together a collection of papers that
will attest to the progress of the field and disseminate it to a wider
audience. We expect the papers in the Special Issue to address a
broad spectrum of issues in NLG, including discourse planning;
sentence planning; linguistic realisation; the development of lexical
and grammatical resources for generation systems; multilingual
generation; multimodal generation; and evaluation issues. The editors
welcome submission of papers on any topic in NLG. Papers which
describe fully implemented systems should place such description
within a wider context and pay attention to theoretical issues.

The deadline for submission of manuscripts is February 1st, 1997.

For hard copy submission: Six double-spaced hard copies should be
submitted, clearly marked as submissions to the Special Issue on
Natural Language Generation, to arrive on or before the deadline, to
the following address:

Julia Hirschberg, Editor
Computational Linguistics
2C-409
AT&T Labs -- Research
600 Mountain Avenue
Murray Hill NJ 07974
USA

email: aclresearch.att.com
tel: +1 908-582-7496
fax: +1 908-582-7550

Manuscripts may be submitted electronically; instructions are currently
available by anonymous ftp:

ftp://ftp.cs.columbia.edu/acl-l/Styfiles/CLstyle/submission-instructs.Z.