LINGUIST List 9.377

Sat Mar 14 1998

Calls: Senseval & Lexicography, Computational Ling

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

Directory

1. Adam Kilgarriff, SENSEVAL 2nd call for participants and papers
2. SIGPHON98, SIGPHON98 Workshop

 **************************************** 
 * SECOND CALL FOR PARTICIPATION *
 * WSD EVALUATION EXERCISE *
 * (SENSEVAL) *
 * *
 * WORKSHOP ANNOUNCEMENT *
 * "SENSEVAL AND THE LEXICOGRAPHY LOOP" *
 ****************************************

 Sponsored by ACL SIGLEX and EURALEX

There are now many automatic Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) programs
but it is currently very hard to determine which are better, which
worse, and where the strengths and weaknesses of each lie. There is
widespread agreement that the field urgently needs an evaluation
framework. Under the auspices of ACL SIGLEX and EURALEX, a pilot will
take place in the course of 1998. As in ARPA evaluation exercises,
the framework comprises:

1)	definition of task and scoring metric
2)	preparation of a set of manually tagged correct answers
3)	a dry run, with sample data distributed to participants
4)	distribution of test data to participants;
 participants sense-tag and return;
 taggings scored against correct answers
5)	workshop to discuss results, lessons learned, way forward

We shall be undertaking evaluation for at least English, French, 
Italian and Spanish. The workshop will be held at

 	 Herstmonceux Castle, Sussex, UK 
 on
 Sept 2-4 1998

If you have a working WSD program (or will have one by Summer 1998),
and would like to subject it to objective, quantitative evaluation, or
if you have skills or resources that you would like to contribute to
the exercise, first look at 

	http://www.itri.bton.ac.uk/events/senseval/exp-interest.html

and then mail your expression of interest to

 senseval-coorditri.bton.ac.uk

 Timetable
 =========

As soon as possible:
 expressions of interest to be registered
By end of:
April 98:	'dry run' data samples distributed to participants
June 98:	test data distributed to participants, and, one week 
		later, returned with taggings
July 98:	correct answers and scores made available
Sept 98:	workshop

The workshop will comprise:

	(1) reports/papers on the manual tagging and other aspects of
the evaluation exercise 
	(2) reports/papers from participants on the design and
performance of their system
	(3) other related research papers
	(4) working sessions on the way ahead for WSD evaluation

The deadline for "other related research papers" is 

 16th April 1998

* Preference will be given to papers discussing WSD, with particular
attention to evaluation issues
* Maximum submission length: 6 pages
* First page to include title, abstract, and author's name(s) and
contact details 
* Electronic submission of postscript documents permitted 
but must be supported by hard copy to arrive not later than 23rd April
(in case of printing problems).

	email:		senseval-submissionsitri.bton.ac.uk
	hard copy:	SENSEVAL Submissions
			ITRI
			University of Brighton
			Lewes Road
			Brighton BN2 4GJ, UK

Full details available at http://www.itri.bton.ac.uk/events/senseval/

 Adam Kilgarriff
 SENSEVAL co-ordinator

 The Second CFP
 =====================================
 <<C A L L ----- F O R ----- P A P E R S>>
 =====================================


 The Computation of Phonological Constraints
 ===========================================

 The 4th Meeting of the ACL
 Special Interest Group in Phonology
 (http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~sigphon/98)

 In conjunction with
 The COLING-ACL'98 Joint Conference
 Montreal, Canada, 15th August 1998


The Meeting
- ---------
Constraint-based theories of phonology have become enormously popular
in recent years. Such theories express generalizations by stating how
and when a language's phonological forms are constrained, rather than
relying on rules that actively modify the forms.

Computational ideas have often provided an impetus for these
innovations. Koskenniemi's (1983) 2-level morphophonological processor
introduced parallel constraining relations as an alternative to an
ordered system of rewrite rules. Declarative Phonology (c 1990)
focusses on the unity of representations and rules as constraints,
drawing on various computational ideas from unification to temporal
logic to finite-state calculi.

One current constraint-based theory is Optimality Theory (OT)
(Prince&Smolensky 1993). This theory found, at least partial,
inspiration in computational work by Smolensky on the relation between
symbolic and subsymbolic computation. Although this link with
connectionism has been left largely unexplored, OT has proved to be a
computationally productive theory, giving rise to several theoretical
papers on computational issues related to complexity and learnability,
as well as inspiring a number of implementations.

This workshop is designed to foster the link between computational
work and constraint-based phonology in general. To this end, it
invites submissions on topics related to the computation of any
constraint-based phonological formalism, including but not limited to
the three mentioned above. Here are some example topics:

 * the computational interpretation of phonological theories,
 * constraint ranking and interaction, eg. as in OT,
 * implementations of particular analyses,
 * results in the complexity of constraint application,
 * algorithms for learning constraints or constraint ranking,
 * results on the learnability of such constraints,
 * novel formalisms for constraint-based phonology,
 * representational issues raised by constraint-based approaches.

In short, papers are invited which address computational issues in
constraint-based theories of phonology.

Submission
- --------
 What: original research, not published elsewhere
 a completed study is prefered to proposals and progress reports
 originality, topicality and clarity will be the assessment criteria 
 How: submissions must be sent by email to sigphon98cogsci.ed.ac.uk 
 When: April 20 Submissions due
 May 22 Notification of acceptance
 June 23 Final (accepted) versions due


Submission Format
- ---------------
(Note that apart from the Medium and Length sections, these
requirements are as for submissions to COLING-ACL98.)
 Medium: postscript, emailed to sigphon98cogsci.ed.ac.uk
 please check postscript compatibility using either
 ghostview, or by printing the postscript file
 before sending
 Length: 10 pages maximum (including references and appendices)
 optional extra page for abstract in a second language
 Paper size: Please use A4 page-size
 Typesetting: LaTeX is encouraged, but not required.
 Layout: set margins so that text lies centred within a rectangle of
 6.5 x 9 inches (16.5 x 23 cm)
 Use Times Roman or Computer Modern font
 11 to 12 point for text
 14 to 16 point for headings and title
 centred page numbers in footers
 2 columns after title and abstract
 figures may range across columns

Since reviewing will be blind, a separate identification notice should
be emailed (in ASCII) to sigphon98cogsci.ed.ac.uk. It should include:
 title 
 author(s) name(s) 
 affiliation(s) 
 complete addresses 
 abstract in English
 submission to other conferences ('none' or list) 
 and author of record (for correspondence). 

Authors should not identify either themselves or their affiliations,
either directly or indirectly in the body of the text (the postscript
file).

Authors should use the COLING-ACL98 style files and templates for
preparing submissions (see http://coling-acl98.iro.umontreal.ca/Styles.html). 
This will help ensure that the layout requirements are met, and that
the effort required to format the final version will be minimized.


Registration
- ----------
Registration is open only to those registered for the main COLING/ACL
conference (see http://coling-acl98.iro.umontreal.ca/MainPage.html).
There will be an additional fee for the workshop (yet to be
determined). The 1997 ACL workshop fee was US$60.

ACL/EACL reserves the right to cancel any workshop if the number of
participants is below 25 persons.


Organisation
- ----------
Organiser: T. Mark Ellison (Edinburgh)

Organising/Program Committee: Steven Bird (Edinburgh)
 Jason Eisner (Pennsylvania)
 Bruce Tesar (Rutgers)
 Markus Walther (Duesseldorf)

Correspondence
- ------------
Should be sent to: SIGPHON98
 Centre for Cognitive Science
 Edinburgh University
 2 Buccleuch Place
 Edinburgh EH8 9LW, UK
 Tel. +44 (131) 650-4416
 Fax. +44 (131) 650-6626
 email: sigphon98cogsci.ed.ac.uk
 web: http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~sigphon/98