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mail4.ai.univie.ac.at>FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS AND PARTICIPATION for the Workshop on "CONCEPT to SPEECH GENERATION SYSTEMS" (EXTENDED DEADLINE: MARCH 14, 1997) Friday, July 11, 1997 in conjunction with 35th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL'97/EACL'97 Joint Conference) July 7-11, 1997 Madrid, Spain Information about the workshop can also be retrieved from: http://www.dfki.uni-sb.de/~finkler/acl97-cts/index.html - ------------------- FOCUS OF THE WORKSHOP - ------------------- Concept-to-Speech (CTS) generation, i.e., the production of synthetic speech on the basis of pragmatic, semantic, and discourse knowledge offers a challenging and relatively new field of research in intelligent user interfaces. The questions raised in such an environment range from pragmatics, semantics, and (morpho-)syntax to phonology and phonetics. The modelling of prosody (at symbolic and acoustic level) serves as one of the open questions within this paradigm. Obviously, the development of a CTS system is very demanding. Successful work within the framework of CTS relies on the ability to integrate efforts from a number of disciplines, such as Computational Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, and Signal Processing. The workshop will provide a forum to bring together researchers from the fields of natural language generation and speech synthesis. The aim of the workshop is to stimulate interchange of innovative ideas and results of diverse aspects of CTS generation in order to bridge the gap between these fields. Among the challenging aspects of a CTS system, we propose to address issues of the following list in the first place: * How can systems for natural language generation be adapted in order to utilize new realization options to the generation process that are offered in the CTS framework? * How can issues in the time-course of the interleaved process for generation and synthesis (when-to-say) be dealt with? Which requirements on speech synthesis are to be fulfilled in an incremental approach to spoken language production? * Due to its inherent integrational property, being influenced by a whole number of representational levels, modelling of prosody will be one of the major topics of the workshop. * How can approaches in the Text-to-Speech tradition to synthesis show their adaptability to Concept-to-Speech? We invite contributions that provide solutions to any of the topics indicated above or that present innovative applications addressing the abovementioned issues. - ---------------- PROGRAM COMMITTEE - ---------------- Robert BANNERT Univ. of Umea, Sweden John BATEMAN, GMD Darmstadt, Germany Mary BECKMAN, Ohio State Univ., USA Carlos GUSSENHOVEN, Univ. of Nijmegen, The Neetherlands Bjorn GRANSTROeM, KTH Stockholm, Sweden Elisabeth MAIER, DFKI Saarbruecken, Germany Scott PREVOST, MIT Boston, USA Mark STEEDMAN, Univ. of Pennsylvania, USA - ------------- WORKSHOP FORMAT - ------------- The workshop will be a full-day event that provides a forum for individual presentations as well as group discussions. In the presentation part, authors of accepted papers will describe their results and positions (about 30 minutes each). A plenary discussion of about one hour length will take place. - ------------------------ REQUIREMENTS & SUBMISSIONS - ------------------------ Authors should submit a full length paper not exceeding 3200 words (exclusive of references). Due to tight time constraints, initial submissions and reviewing will be handled exclusively electronically. Joint submissions with the `Interactive Spoken Dialog Systems' ACL/EACL workshop are allowed. If there are sufficient joint submissions a joint session may be scheduled. Please indicate on the title page that your abstract is a joint submission. 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 Submissions have to be mailed as a single LaTeX file or a single postscript file. Mails should be sent to cts-97Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
ets.org>-------------------------------------------------------- FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS ACL'97/EACL'97 Workshop July 12, 1997 Madrid, Spain -------------------------------------------------------- 35th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and 8th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics "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