LINGUIST List 8.1337

Mon Sep 22 1997

Confs: Lang Generation, Lang & Resources Eval

Editor for this issue: Anita Huang <anitalinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Priscilla Rasmussen, 9th INLG Workshop Call for Papers
2. Priscilla Rasmussen, 1st Int Conf on Lang & Resources Eval CFP

	 =============================
 9th International Workshop on 
 NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION

 5-7 August 1998

 Prince of Wales Hotel 
 Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada


 CALL FOR PAPERS
		 

(For more information, visit http://logos.uwaterloo.ca/~inlg98 )

The 9th biennial Workshop on Natural Language Generation will be held
in the scenic town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, near Niagara Falls, in
Ontario, Canada, on 5-7 August 1998.

The INLG workshop is the principal gathering for researchers in
natural language generation, providing a pleasant atmosphere for
stimulating and informative talks on all aspects of the topic. The
workshop attracts a healthy mixture of researchers from both
universities and research institutes, graduate students, and visitors
from related fields such as machine translation, multimedia
presentation planning, and parsing. About 65 people are expected to
attend the workshop, which traditionally has had a very diverse
international representation.

The town of Niagara-on-the-Lake is in the heart of one of Canada's
major fruit-growing and wine regions, and is 30 minutes' drive from
Niagara Falls. It is one of the oldest settlements in Canada, with
many fine examples of Victorian architecture. Niagara-on-the-Lake
bills itself as the prettiest town in Canada, and many would agree:
its main streets are quaint and picturesque, with many interesting
shops, cafes, and restaurants. It is also the home of the Shaw
Festival, one of the top North American repertory theatre companies.

The workshop is sponsored by the Association for Computational
Linguistics and ACL SIGGEN (Special Interest Group on Natural Language
Generation).

The workshop is in the week immediately prior to the joint conference
of COLING and ACL, in Montreal, Canada (10-14 August 1998). After the
workshop, a bus will take participants who wish to attend COLING / ACL
directly to the Toronto train station, for an express train to
Montreal (approximately 4 hours).



TOPICS OF INTEREST 

Of interest are papers on all topics relating to the automated
production of natural language, including but not limited to:
discourse structure; grammar; lexis and lexical choice; text planning
and schemas (macroplanning); sentence planning (microplanning);
semantics and knowledge representation; register, genre, and
pragmatics; generator architecture; realization; generator
applications; system descriptions; generator evaluation; planning of
text formatting; generation in multimedia planning and presentation
systems; speech synthesis.

Also welcomed are demonstrations of generation systems, or modules of
systems, running either via the Web or on a Sun computer to be
provided at the workshop.


REQUIREMENTS FOR SUBMISSION

Papers should describe unique work not published before. They should
emphasize the creative and interesting aspects of the work, but should
also describe empirical validation and testing as much as possible.

Papers that are being submitted to other conferences must state this
fact on the first page.


FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION

Theoretical papers must not exceed 10 pages, including title,
references, figures, etc. Please use no smaller than 11pt font, with
margins of 1 inch / 2.5 cm all around. Papers not satisfying the
specified length and formatting requirements will be rejected without
review.

System demonstrations will be reviewed as well. Please send an
outline, clearly marked as a system demonstration in the heading, that
describes the demonstration, including if possible screen shots.
Outlines may not exceed 4 pages, all included, using font no smaller
than 11pt and margins of 1 in / 2.5 cm all around. Outlines not
satisfying the specified length and formatting requirements will be
rejected without review.


ELECTRONIC SUBMISSION 

Electronic submissions should be in the form of a PostScript file.
This file should be sent to hovyisi.edu, with the subject field "INLG
submission".


SUBMISSION IN HARD COPY 

Hardcopy submission is possible too. Five copies of the paper or
demonstration outline should be sent to:

 Eduard Hovy, INLG-98
 Information Sciences Institute 
 4676 Admiralty Way 
 Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695 
 U.S.A.


DEADLINES

Electronic submissions must be received by 28 January 1998, so that
they can be printed and checked for completeness. Electronic
submissions will be accepted only if they can be printed at ISI.

Hardcopy submissions must be received by 1 February 1998. Late papers
will be returned unreviewed.

Notification of receipt will be e-mailed to the first author (or
designated author) soon after receipt. Authors will be notified of
acceptance before 10 March 1998. Camera-ready copies of final papers
prepared in a format to be specified, preferably using a laser
printer, must be received by 15 June 1998, along with a signed
copyright release statement.


WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS

The workshop is being organized by Chrysanne DiMarco of the University
of Waterloo, with the assistance of Graeme Hirst of the University of
Toronto. The Program Chair is Eduard Hovy of USC/ISI.

General workshop questions: 
 Chrysanne DiMarco, cdimarcologos.uwaterloo.ca, phone +1 519 888 4443

General paper-submission questions: 
 Eduard Hovy, hovyisi.edu, phone +1 310 822 1510 x731


PROGRAM COMMITTEE 

 Eduard Hovy, USC/ISI, Marina del Rey (chair) 
 Stephan Busemann, DFKI, Saarbruecken 
 Susan Haller, University of Wisconsin-Parkside 
 Helmut Horacek, University of the Saarland 
 Xiaorong Huang, Formal Systems, Toronto 
 Kristiina Jokinen, ATR, Kyoto 
 Guy Lapalme, University of Montreal 
 Elisabeth Maier, DFKI, Saarbruecken 
 Chris Mellish, University of Edinburgh 
 Marie Meteer, BBN 
 Jon Oberlander, University of Edinburgh 
 Cecile Paris, CSIRO, Sydney 
 Owen Rambow, CoGenTex Inc., Ithaca 
 Ehud Reiter, University of Aberdeen 
 Elke Teich, Macquarie University, Sydney 
 Marilyn Walker, AT&T Labs Research, Florham Park 


For more information, visit the INLG-98 Website:
 http://logos.uwaterloo.ca/~inlg98

*PRELIMINARY ANNOUNCEMENT*

FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE RESOURCES AND EVALUATION

GRANADA, SPAIN, 28-30 MAY 1998

The First International Conference on Language Resources and
Evaluation has been initiated by ELRA and is organized in cooperation
with other associations and consortia, including EAFT, EAGLES, EDR,
ELSNET, ESCA, FRANCIL, LDC, PAROLE, TELRI, etc., and with the
sponsorship of major national and international organizations,
including ARPA, the European Commission - DG XIII and the NSF.
Cooperation and co-sponsorship with other institutions is currently
being sought.


CONFERENCE TOPIC

In the framework of the Information Society, the pervasive character
of language technologies and their relevance to practically all the
fields of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has been
widely recognized.

Two issues are currently considered particularly relevant for
promoting international cooperation: the availability of language
resources and the methods for the evaluation of resources,
technologies and products.

The term language resources (LR) refers to sets of language data and
descriptions in machine readable form, used specifically for building,
improving or evaluating natural language and speech algorithms or
systems, and in general, as core resources for the software
localization and language services industries, for language studies,
electronic publishing, international transactions, subject-area
specialists and end users. Examples of linguistic resources are
written and spoken corpora, computational lexicons, grammars,
terminology databases, basic software tools for the acquisition,
preparation, collection, management, customization and use of these
and other resources.

The relevance of evaluation in Language Engineering is increasingly
recognized. This involves assessment of the state-of-the-art for a
given technology, measuring the progress achieved within a program,
comparing different approaches to a given problem and choosing the
best solution, knowing its advantages and drawbacks, assessment of the
availability of technologies for a given application, and finally
product benchmarking. It accompanies research and development in Human
Language Technologies, and has driven important advances in the recent
past in various aspects of both written and spoken language
processing. Although the evaluation paradigm has been studied and
used in large national and international programs, including the US
ARPA HLT program, EU Language Engineering projects, the Francophone
Aupelf-Uref program and others, particularly in the localization
industry (LISA and LRC), it is still subject to substantial unresolved
basic research problems.

The aim of this Conference is to provide an overview of the
state-of-the-art, discuss problems and opportunities, exchange
information on ongoing and planned activities, present language
resources and their applications, discuss evaluation methodologies and
demonstrate evaluation tools, explore possibilities and promote
initiatives for international cooperation in the areas mentioned
above.

CONFERENCE TOPICS

The following non-exhaustive list gives some examples of topics which
could be addressed by papers submitted to the Conference:

- Issues in the design, construction and use of LR (theoretical & best
practice)
- Guidelines, standards, specifications, models for LR.
- Organizational issues in the construction, distribution and use of
LR.
- Methods, tools, procedures for the acquisition, creation,
management, access, distribution, use of LR
- Legal aspects and problems in the construction, access and use of LR
- Availability and use of generic vs. task/domain-specific LR 
- Methods for the extraction and acquisition of knowledge (e.g., terms,
lexical information, language modeling) from LR
- Monolingual vs. multilingual LR
- National and international activities and projects
- LR and the needs/opportunities of the emerging multimedia cultural
industry.
- Industrial production of LR 
- Integration of various modalities in LR (speech, vision, language) 
- Exploitation of LRs in different types of applications (language
technology, information retrieval, vocal interfaces, electronic
commerce, etc.)
- Industrial LR requirements and the community's response 
- Analysis of user needs for LR 
- Evaluation, validation, quality assurance of LR 
- Benchmarking ofsystems and products; resources for benchmarking and
evaluation
- Priorities, perspectives, strategies in the field of LR 
- National and international policies 
- Needs, possibilities, forms, initiatives of/for international
cooperation
- Evaluation in written language processing (text retrieval,
terminology extraction, message understanding, text alignment, machine
translation, morphosyntactic tagging, parsing, text understanding,
summarization, localization, etc)
- Evaluation in spoken language processing (speech recognition and
understanding, voice dictation, oral dialog, speech synthesis, speech
coding, speaker and language recognition, etc)
- Evaluation of document processing (document recognition, on-line and
off-line machine and handwritten character recognition, etc)
- Evaluation of (multimedia) document retrieval and search systems
- Qualitative and perceptive evaluation
- Evaluation of products and applications
- Blackbox, glassbox and diagnostic evaluation of systems
- Situated evaluation of applications
- Evaluation methodologies, protocols and measures
- Mechanisms of LR distribution and marketing 
- Economics of LRs


IMPORTANT DATES

1. Submission of summaries for proposed papers: (approximately 800
words): 1 December 1997

E-mail submission in ASCII form is encouraged. Otherwise, five hard
copies should be submitted.

- E-mail submissions should be sent to 

 lrecilc.pi.cnr.it

- Postal submissions should be sent to 

		Antonio Zampolli - LREC
		Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale del CNR
		via della Faggiola, 32
		56100, Pisa, ITALY

2. Notification of acceptance:			15 February 1998

3. Final version of the paper:			20 April 1998

The papers accepted will be included in the Conference Proceedings.


PROGRAM

The program will include both papers and poster sessions. In
addition, the Program will also include invited speakers, and a number
of panels on the major themes of the Conference.

In particular, it is planned to organize a panel on various aspects
and perspectives of international cooperation, with the participation
of representatives of the major European, North American and Asian
sponsoring agencies.


WORKSHOPS

Half-day pre- and post-conference Workshops can be organized, at the
request of a presenter, to permit the discussion and debate of topics
of current interest.

The format of each Workshop will be determined by the Workshop
organizer, who will set any necessary deadlines for the participants.
The next announcement, to be circulated in September, will provide
guidelines on how to submit a proposal for a Workshop to the Program
Committee.


SYSTEMS AND LR DEMONSTRATIONS

Various platforms will be available for language resources and tools
presentations and unreferenced systems demonstrations. Organizations
interested in presenting systems should contact the local
demonstration organizers, whose address will be provided in the next
announcement.


SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE

The full composition of the Scientific Committee will be listed in the
next announcement.

The Conference Chair is Antonio Zampolli (Istituto di Linguistica
Computazionale del CNR and President of ELRA, via della Faggiola, 32,
Pisa 56100, Italy).

The Secretariat of the Conference is provided by Khalid Choukri (ELRA,
87, Avenue d'Italie, F-75013, Paris, FRANCE).

The conference organizing committee consists of: Harald Hoege
(Siemens, Munich, Germany). Bente Maegaard (CST, Copenhagen, Denmark),
Joseph Mariani (LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France), Angel Martin-Municio
(President of the Real Academia de Ciencias, Madrid, Spain), Antonio
Zampolli (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, Pisa, Italy).