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Editor for this issue: Susan Robinson <suelinguistlist.org>
ets.org>-------------------------------------------------------- CALL FOR PAPERS ACL'97/EACL'97 Workshop July 11 or 12, 1997 Madrid, Spain -------------------------------------------------------- "From Research to Commercial Applications: Making NLP Technology Work in Practice" Success in the marketplace is one form of validation for NLP techniques and underlying theories. The broad vision of this workshop is to bring together researchers to discuss commercial or commercial-bound systems that use NLP for either text or speech. We are interested in learning about systems that show promise in re-using NLP techniques, and in the process of technology transfer for NLP applications. Another topic of interest in this workshop is industry-based practical considerations involving NLP technology. The workshop should invoke discussion about experiences and problems -- technical, logistic, or cultural -- among people working on operational and commercial NLP applications. The workshop will begin a dialogue among researchers to explore issues in technology transfer and the re-use of domain-specific systems. New applications could get leverage from using successful existing NLP technologies. The ability to re-use NLP technology for diverse applications should not only give the application a solid grounding, but should also save time and money. For example, text generation techniques are being used to build prototypes for essay analysis by Educational Testing Service. Other types of NLP technology re-use need to be identified for different applications. Closely related to the re-use of domain-specific technology is the issue of constructing general purpose tools that can be shared by the community, e.g., for tokenization, proper-noun detection, tagging, NP-identification, etc. Another purpose of the workshop is to explore industry-based practicalities that often guide the design of NLP technology. General practicalities that might be discussed are customization and trade-offs between accuracy and other requirements, such as speed, and ease of use. For example, determining the appropriate balance between reporting false positives and false negatives in information retrieval; what depth/breadth of coverage is "enough" in grammar checking; and how can adaptive systems, such as speaker-dependent speech recognizers, train themselves to the user without becoming obtrusive. Discussion of the issues above would help to create connections between both academic and industry-based research efforts to build a solid infrastructure for NLP technology re-use and lead to a deeper understanding of commercial NLP potential. WORKSHOP ORGANIZATION: Presentations will last for 20 minutes, followed by a 10 minute discussion period. Papers will be organized around themes. Ideally, we would like to include the following sessions: 1. Commercial/commercial-bound systems using NLP 2. Software re-use 3. Technology transfer SUBMISSIONS: Authors should submit a full length paper (not exceeding 3,200 words, exclusive of references) and must include a descriptive abstract of about 200 words. Electronic submissions are encouraged and should be submitted as described below. The title page should include title of the paper,names, addresses, e-mail address, telephone and fax number of all authors. Any correspondence will be addressed to the first author. FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION: Papers should be original work. Papers may be submitted either electronically or in hard copy. Electronic or hard-copy submissions must use the ACL submission style (aclsub.sty) retrievable from the ACL LISTSERV server via anonymous ftp: ftp ftp.cs.columbia.edu Name: anonymous Password: <your email address> cd acl-l/ACL97 get aclsub.sty Electronic submissions should be mailed to jbursteinMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
mic.dundee.ac.uk>JOURNAL OF NATURAL LANGUAGE ENGINEERING Special issue on natural language processing for augmented communication Announcement and call for papers A special issue of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering will be entirely dedicated to NLP research in the field of AAC (Alternative & Augmentative Communication). A forum for publication of research on AAC So far, the results of NLP research to assist disabled people have been mainly published in journals and proceedings focussing on disabilities and rehabilitation. This special issue of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering will present applications of current research in the area to the language processing research community. NLP for Communication Aids People with disabilities leading to difficulties in communication often face a restricted life in terms of social interaction and personal development. Communication aids have been designed to help non-speakers and other disabled people to communicate independently. Although many AAC-systems are available, there are major problems to be overcome in the design of these systems if they are to help the users to participate more in social interaction. In the past years, methods from NLP have contributed to reduce the cognitive load imposed on the users of AAC systems. They have helped to increase communication fluency and enhanced the performance of word prediction and message retrieval algorithms. Today, communication aids often include advanced techniques from NLP. This trend is supported by the fact that research on language processing is increasingly concerned with real language use. The resulting current interest in corpora research and in broad-coverage lexicons in computational linguistics is reflected in recent developments of AAC systems. It is also true that the NLP research community can benefit from results in AAC research. Years of research in close collaboration with users of the systems has led to realistic solutions which can supply new ideas and insights to other research areas in concerned with language processing. Workshop papers Natural Language Processing for Communication Aids has been the subject of a workshop in Dundee in September 1996. Results and papers from the workshop are expected to form the core of this issue of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering. Other contributions Submissions of additional papers covering any aspect of Natural Language Processing for communication aids are invited. All submissions will be considered for publication via the usual peer refereeing process. Possible subjects include, but are not limited to: * enhanced word prediction using linguistic knowledge and/or statistics * extracting knowledge for AAC-systems from corpora * message retrieval involving NLP * machine translation of symbol sequences into natural language Submissions Deadline for submissions: 17th March 1997 Papers should be between 5000 and 8000 words in length. Submissions should be sent to the guest editor, preferably by electronic mail (address see end of this document). Please state "submission NLE" in the subject line. Floppy disks or hard copies can be sent to the adress below. Format Submissions in Latex format are strongly preferred A LaTeX style file, together with sample instructions to authors for how to use it etc., is available at: <ftp://ftp.cup.cam.ac.uk/pub/texarchive/journals/latex/nle.all>; Authors are strongly encouraged to use this format. Other submission formats: ASCII text HTML Word processor document (WordPerfect or Word or RTF) Please contact the guest editor for formatting details Further information Homepage of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering: http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk/Journals/JNLSCAT/nle/nle.html Webpage for this call: http://alpha.mic.dundee.ac.uk/~slanger/ws/call.html Submissions, further questions: Stefan Langer MicroCentre, University of Dundee Park Wynd Dundee DD1 4HN Scotland, UK Tel: +44 1382 345080 Fax: +44 1382 345509 e-mail: slangerMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue