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csli.Stanford.EDU>FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING FOR COMMUNICATION AIDS ACL/EACL'97 Workshop Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia (UNED) Madrid, Spain July 12th, 1997 http://www-csli.stanford.edu/users/aac/clworkshop.html Many people have some sort of disability which impairs their ability to communicate. Work in alternative and augmentative communication (AAC) devices attempts to address this need. For example, people who have speech impairments may use a text-to-speech generator, or a system which synthesises speech based on input using an alternative symbol system. Prosthetic devices of this sort must be usable in a great variety of settings. They should enable the user to be a full participant in ordinary conversations, to lead transactional encounters and to prepare speech for more formal occasions. The extent to which this is possible depends on a number of factors, both physical and cognitive. The speech impairment may be due to a physical disability which has no effect on the person's linguistic ability, or it may be due to a cognitive, language impairment. Often, some combination of physical and cognitive disabilities is involved. Other communication aids include systems designed for deaf users and text-to-speech devices for people with vision impairments. NLP techniques are currently in use in such devices but substantial improvement in performance is clearly possible. AAC provides the NLP researcher with relatively tractable applications of potential utility to millions of people worldwide. The aim of the workshop is to provide a forum in which researchers in communication aids for people with disabilities can discuss the problems involved in these applications and the solutions being investigated in current research. We also hope that researchers in all areas of CL/NLP will participate, to discuss ways in which their own work could contribute, even if they are not currently working on these applications. We seek papers which describe the utilisation of NLP in communication aids, including AAC devices for the speech and language-impaired, sign language interpretation and translation, and intelligent text-readers for blind people. We would also welcome contributions which describe the use of NLP techniques in aids for rehabilitation and training for language impairment. Participation by NLP researchers whose work might be applied in these areas is encouraged, possibly including: - statistical or symbolic techniques for word prediction (for speeding input to text-to-speech devices) - lexical resources which can be utilised for communication aids (e.g. for text retrieval of fixed messages) - language generation from partial input (e.g. icons, templates, telegraphic text) - aids for text comprehension - speech synthesis geared to the needs of the blind or language impaired These topics are intended as suggestions only: contributions would be welcome from any researchers with an interest in applying CL/NLP techniques to aid people with disabilities. SUBMISSION OF PAPERS Papers should be previously unpublished: a paper accepted for presentation at this workshop cannot be presented or have been presented at any other meeting with published proceedings. Parallel submission is allowed; however if your paper is accepted for this workshop and you decide to present it here, we will ask you to withdraw it from any other events. Papers will be reviewed by the program committee, with additional reviewers being recruited if necessary. Papers must not exceed 3200 words (excluding references). Electronic submission is strongly preferred, either as a self-contained LaTeX file or PostScript. Hard copy submissions should include eight copies of the paper. Final versions of accepted papers will be required in LaTeX using a standard submission style (to be made available via WWW/ftp). Papers will be published in the workshop proceedings: if the papers submitted are of a sufficiently high quality, a book may subsequently be produced by CSLI Publications. We welcome presentations which include system demonstrations or video - audio-visual requirements should be described when the paper is submitted. Since attendance at the workshop will be limited to a total of about 40 people, potential participants who do not wish to present a paper should send a brief (max 100 word) description of interest to the address below by April 28th. Potential participants who would like an overview of AAC before the workshop might want to consult: McCoy et al, 1990: `Applying Natural Language Processing techniques to Augmentative communication systems' in proceedings of Coling-90 and Edwards (editor), 1995: `Extra-ordinary human-computer interaction' Cambridge University Press which contains several relevant papers. Also see http://alpha.mic.dundee.ac.uk/~slanger/workshop.html for abstracts of the recent workshop on NLP and communication aids for non-speaking people. DEADLINES Submissions due March 28th 1997 Statements of interest due April 28th 1997 Authors notified (by email) April 28th 1997 Final versions due May 30th 1997 ADDRESS FOR PAPERS AND STATEMENTS OF INTEREST Ann Copestake CSLI Ventura Hall Stanford University Stanford CA 94305-4115 USA aacMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
cs.columbia.edu>***** DEADLINE EXTENDED!!!!!! DEADLINE EXTENDED!!!!!! READ BELOW ***** ACL'97/EACL'97 Workshop on INTELLIGENT SCALABLE TEXT SUMMARIZATION (at ACL'97/EACL'97 Joint Conference) Madrid, Spain July 11, 1997 SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS With the explosion in the quantity of on-line information in recent years, demand for text summarization technology appears to be growing. Commercial companies are increasingly starting to offer text summarization capabilities, often bundled with information retrieval tools. These recent developments offer opportunities as well as substantial challenges for research in text summarization. In general, such developments create a practical need for summarization systems which scale up when applied to large volumes of unrestricted text. At ACL'97/EACL'97, a particular challenge is to identify the niches where natural language processing (NLP) can make an impact. For example, there are applications which require characterizing the content of large text collections to support data mining functions, but NLP has not been used much in such applications. Traditionally, shallower techniques have been leveraged to achieve the desired levels of scalability and domain-independence, but recent advances in robust information extraction as well as approaches integrating statistical and symbolic techniques open up possibilities for more powerful yet scalable summarization techniques. With the renewed interest in text summarization, another challenge is to develop criteria to help evaluate different methodologies, in order to better advise investors and the interested public on technology choices. While there have been focused workshops in the past on text summarization, they have pre-dated the tremendous expansion of on-line information access fueled by the recent growth of the World Wide Web. This workshop would bring together researchers interested in advancing the scientific frontiers of text summarization to meet these new practical challenges and opportunities. Submissions are invited on original research in all aspects of text summarization, including, but not limited to: * Statistical, linguistic, and knowledge-based techniques in intelligent summarization * Multimodal summarization strategies * Exploiting advances in information extraction in summarization * Text generation for scalable summarization * Classification criteria for summarization systems * Evaluation methods and metrics * Summarization in operational contexts: requirements, architectures, lessons learned * Tailoring summaries to particular users, tasks, and contexts * Theoretical foundations, including cognitive models * Combining scalability with abstraction in summarization * Summarization across multiple documents/sources * Multilingual summarization Criteria for selection will include clarity, originality, relevance, and significance of results. Attendees at the workshop MUST register for the main ACL/EACL conference. PROGRAM COMMITTEE Udo Hahn University of Freiburg Julian Kupiec Xerox Palo Alto Research Center Inderjeet Mani The MITRE Corporation (co-chair) Mark Maybury The MITRE Corporation (co-chair) Kathy McKeown Columbia University Boyan Onyshkevych US Department of Defense Dragomir Radev Columbia University Lisa Rau SRA International Kazuo Tanaka NTT Human Interface Laboratories SUBMISSION INFORMATION DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION: March 25, 1997 (the previously announced deadline, March 15, has been extended by 10 days). Acceptance Notification: April 28, 1997 Interested participants should submit a previously unpublished paper addressing a specific text summarization issue or reporting novel methods and results. Authors should indicate whether the paper is being submitted elsewhere. As the papers will be reviewed anonymously, please do not include author names in the body of the paper; instead provide a separate title page with title, author names and email addresses. The paper length (excluding separate title page) should be no longer than 8 pages. For email submissions, please submit postscript. (If the postscript doesn't print properly here, you may eventually have to submit a hardcopy, so please budget enough time for that.) For hardcopy submissions, please submit FIVE copies of the paper. Please send submissions to: Inderjeet Mani The MITRE Corporation, W640 1820 Dolley Madison Blvd McLean, VA 22102-3481, USA Phone: 1-703-883-6149 Fax: 1-703-883-1279 Email: imaniMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue