LINGUIST List 9.208

Wed Feb 11 1998

Calls: TSD'98, Rules and Rule-following

Editor for this issue: Martin Jacobsen <martylinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Ivan Kopecek, A Workshop on TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOG (TSD'98)
2. Bocz Andras, Multidisciplinary Colloquium on Rules and Rule-Following

FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS

 A Workshop on TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOG (TSD'98)
 Brno, Czech Republic, 23-26 September 1998

The workshop is organized by the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk
University, Brno, and the Faculty of Applied Sciences, University of
West Bohemia, Pilsen, under the auspices of the Dean of the Faculty of
Informatics of Masaryk University.


Please visit the workshop's homepage:

http://www.fi.muni.cz/tsd98/

VENUE
Brno, Czech Republic

TOPICS

TSD'98 will be concerned with topics in the field of natural language
processing, in particular:

- Corpora, texts and transcription
- Speech analysis, recognition and synthesis
- Their intertwining within NL dialog systems.

Topics of the workshop will include (but are not limited to):

- Text corpora and tagging
- Transcription problems in spoken corpora
- Sense disambiguation
- Links between text and speech oriented systems
- Parsing issues, especially parsing problems in spoken texts
- Multilingual issues, especially multilingual dialog systems
- Information retrieval and text/topic summarization
- Speech modeling 
- Speech segmentation
- Speech recognition 
- Text-to-speech synthesis
- Dialog systems
- Development of dialog strategies 
- Assistive technologies based on speech and dialog
- Applied systems and software


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Baudoin Genevieve (France)
Ferencz Attila (Romania)
Hanks Patrick (Great Britain, chair)
Hermansky Hynek (USA)
Kopecek Ivan (Czech Republic)
Matousek Vaclav (Czech Republic)
Mueller Johannes (Germany)
Noeth Elmar (Germany)
Pala Karel (Czech Republic)
Pavesic Nikola (Slovenia)
Schukat-Talamazzini E. Guenter (Germany)
Skrelin Pavel (Russia)


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Bartek Ludek
Batusek Robert
Komarkova Dana (secretary) e-mail: dkomarfi.muni.cz
Kopecek Ivan (chair) e-mail: kopecekfi.muni.cz
Matousek Vaclav
Pala Karel
Smrz Pavel
Staudek Jan
Zackova Eva (PRINCIPAL CONTACT) e-mail: glumfi.muni.cz
Zizka Jan

SUBMISSION OF PAPERS

Abstracts of no more than 500 words [plain ASCII text only, please]
should be submitted to the following e-mail address on or before May
15, 1998:

glumfi.muni.cz

Submissions should include, in addition to the abstract itself, the
name of the author(s), affiliation, address, telephone number, fax
number, and e-mail address. Electronic submissions will be
acknowledged by e-mail, so please contact us if no acknowledgement is
received. Acceptance of submissions will likewise be notified by
e-mail. Accepted papers will be published in the Proceedings of
TSD'98.

Authors of abstracts that are accepted will be requested to send their
papers in PostScript form (in LLNCS format) to the above by e-mail
before August 17th. LaTeX word processor is preferred but not
required. Format instructions (and LLNCS LaTeX format) will be sent to
authors together with the notification of acceptance. Requests for
participation will be processed on a "first come first served" basis.


IMPORTANT DATES

Friday, May 15, 1998 ..... Submissions of Abstracts due
Tuesday, June 30, 1998 ..... Notification of acceptance sent to the
	authors
Monday, August 17, 1998 ..... Final papers (camera ready) due
Wednesday, September 23, 1998 ...... Workshop date


FEES AND COSTS

Registration fee:

80.- USD (includes proceedings, refreshments, social events and trip)

Accommodation and food:
Double room (shared with other participant): 130.- USD
Single room: 190.- USD

The full cost of the Workshop will therefore be either 210,- USD or
270,- USD, depending on whether accommodation is shared. Further
details will be announced later.


OFFICIAL LANGUAGE

The official language of the event will be English, but papers on
issues relating to text and speech processing in languages other than
English are strongly encouraged.


ADDRESS

All correspondence regarding the workshop should be addressed to:

Dana Komarkova
Faculty of Informatics
Masaryk University
Botanicka 68a
60200 Brno
Czech republic
tel.: +420 5 41 512 359
fax: 
e-mail: dkomarfi.muni.cz


OUTLINE OF THE PROGRAMME

All sessions of the workshop will be plenary (no parallel sessions).
The format will consist of paper presentations (generally 20 minutes)
followed by discussion (10 minutes). The workshop will also include
social events, an excursion to the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk
University Brno, and a trip in the vicinity of Brno (the Moravian
Karst, including the beautiful Macocha Chasm).


LOCATION

Hotel Myslivna, where the workshop will take place, is a comfortable
hotel in beautiful woods on a hill near a natural reservation area
very close to Brno. The surrounding is very quiet and suitable for
walks and hiking (jogging) routes.

Brno is the capital of Moravia, which is in the south-east part of the
Czech Republic. It is the second-largest town in the Czech Republic
(with a population of about half a million). It had been a royal city
since 1347. There are six universities in Brno. Historical and
artistic places of interest include:

 -- Brno castle (now called Spilberk)
 -- Veveri castle
 -- The Old and New City halls
 -- The Augustine monastery, with St Thomas' Church and crypt of
 Moravian margraves
 -- The Church of St James 
 -- The "Bishops' Church" of St Peter & St Paul
 -- The famous villa Tugendhadt, designed by Mies van der Rohe
 -- Many other important examples of Czech architecture between 
 the wars (1918-38).

In the immediate surroundings of Brno are the Moravian Karst. with
Macocha Chasm and Punkva caves; the site of the "Battle of the Three
emperors" (Napoleon, Alexander of Russia, and Franz of Austria),
commonly known as the Battle of Austerlitz; the chateau of Slavkov
(Austerlitz); Pernstejn Castle; and many other attractions.


HOW TO REACH BRNO

Brno can be reached easily by direct trains from Prague, Vienna,
Bratislava, and Budapest, or by plane to Vienna and then by coach or
train (130 km). Another possibility is to go by plane to Prague and
then travel about 200 km by coach or train. Further travel details
will be given in future announcements.

Ivan Kopecek
kopecekfi.muni.cz
http://www.fi.muni.cz/~kopecek/

***************************************************************
SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS

Extended deadline: March 15, 1998

We are happy to announce a conference and workshop on

Multidisciplinary Colloquium on Rules and Rule-Following:
Philosophy, Linguistics and Psychology

between April 30-May 1-2, 1998 at 
Janus Pannonius University Pecs, Hungary

Keynote speakers:

Philosophy:	
Gyorgy Kampis, Lorand Eotvos University, Budapest
Kuno Lorenz, Universitat des Saarlandes, Saarbrucken, Germany

Linguistics:	
Pierre-Yves Raccah, Idl-CNRS, Paris 
Hubert Cuyckens, University of Antwerp, Belgium
			
Psychology: 	
Csaba Pleh, Lorand Eotvos University, Budapest
John Stewart, Idl-CRNS, Paris


Organizing Committee:

Laszlo Tarnay (Dept. of Philosophy, Janus Pannonius University, Pecs)
Laszlo I. Komlosi (Dept. of English, Janus Pannonius University, 
	(Pecs)
Andras Bocz (Dept. of English, Janus Pannonius University, Pecs)

e-mail:	tarnaybtk.jpte.hu; 
		komlosibtk.jpte.hu; 
		boczbtk.jpte.hu


Advisory Board:

Gabor Forrai (Budapest)
Gyorgy Kampis (Budapest)
Mike Harnish (Tucson)
Andras Kertesz (Debrecen)
Kuno Lorenz (Saarbruecken)
Pierre-Yves Raccah (Paris)
Janos S. Petofi (Macerata)

Aims and scopes:

The main aim of the conference is to bring together scholars from the
field of cognitive linguistics, philosophy and psychology to
investigate the concept of rule and to address various aspects of
rule-following. Ever since Wittgenstein formulated in Philosophical
investigations his famous 201 concerning a kind of rule-following
which is not an interpretation, the concept of rule has become a key
but elusive idea in almost every discipline and approach. And not only
in the human sciences. No wonder, since without this idea the whole
edifice of human (and possibly all other kinds of) rationality would
surely collapse. With the rise of cognitive science, and especially
the appearance of connectionist models and networks, however, the
classical concept of rule is once again seriously contested. To put
it very generally, there is an ongoing debate between the classical
conception in which rules appear as a set of formularizable initial
conditions or constraints on external operations linking different
successive states of a given system (algorithms) and a dynamic
conception in which there is nothing that could be correlated with a
prior idea of internal well-formedness of the system's states. The
debate centers on the representability of rules: either they are
conceived of as meta-representations, or they are mere faon de parler
concerning the development of complex systems. Idealizable on the one
hand, while token-oriented on the other. Something to be implemented
on the one hand, while self-controlling, backpropagational processing,
on the other. There is however a common idea that almost all kinds of
rule-conceptions address: the problem of learning. This idea
reverberates from wittgensteinian pragmatics to strategic non-verbal
and rule-governed speech behavior, from perceiving similarities to
mental processing.

Here are some haunting questions:

- How do we acquire knowledge if there are no regularities in the
world around us? - But how can we perceive those regularities? - And
how do we reason on the basis of that knowledge if there are no
observable constraints on infererring? - But if there are, where do
they come from and how are they actually implemented mentally? - And
finally: how do we come to act rationally, that is, in accordance with
what we have perceived, processed and inferred. We are interested in
all ways of defining rules and in all aspects of rule following, from
the definition of law, rule, regularity, similarity and analogy to
logical consequence, argumentational and other inferences, statistical
and linguistic rules, practical and strategic reasoning, pragmatic and
praxeological activities. We expect contribution from the following
research fields: game-theory, action theory, argumentation theory,
cognitive science, linguistics, philosophy of language, epistemology,
pragmatics, psychology and semiotics. We would be happy to include
some contributions from natural sciences such as neuro-biology,
physiology or brain sciences.

The conference is organized in three major sections: philosophy,
psychology and linguistics with six keynote lectures. Then
contributions of 30 minutes (20 for paper and 10 for discussion) will
follow. We also plan to organize a workshop at the end of each section


Abstracts:

Abstracts should be one-page (maximum 23 lines) specifying area of
contribution and the particular aspect of rule-following to be
addressed. Abstracts should be sent by e-mail to:

tarnaybtk.jpte.hu 	or
boczbtk.jpte.hu. 

Hard copies of abstracts may be sent to: Laszlo Tarnay Department of
Philosophy Janus Pannonius University, Ifjusag utja 6, H-7624 Pecs,
Hungary

Important dates:

Deadline for submission:	March 15, 1998

Notification of acceptance:	March 25, 1998

Conference:			April 30-May 1-2, 1998


***************************************************************
For those concerned there is a follow-up philosophical colloquium:

John McDowell: Mind and World - Kant in Analytic Philosophy

which discusses McDowell's recent book: Mind and World. Among would-be
participants are Barry Allen, Michael Williams and Robert Brandon. If
interested, contact Prof. Janos Boros, Dept. of Philosophy, Janus
Pannonius University. e-mail: borosbtk.jpte.hu