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ISI.EDU>--- CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS --- Association for Machine Translation in the Americas AMTA-98 Conference, Langhorne, PA, October 28-31, 1998 MACHINE TRANSLATION AND THE INFORMATION SOUP (MT in a growing field of language technologies) Following successful AMTA conferences in 1994 and 1996, the third conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas will be held in Langhorne, PA, at the Sheraton Bucks County Hotel, on October 28-31, 1998. The MT Summit last year commemorated the 50th anniversary of machine translation. During that time, MT grew from a tantalizing dream to a respectable and stable scientific-linguistic enterprise, with users, commercial systems, university research, and Government participation. But until very recently, MT has been performed in a relatively isolated manner, as a distinct enterprise. This situation is changing rapidly. The explosive growth of the web has brought multilingual text into the reach of nearly everyone with a computer. It is increasingly urgent that the various types of language processing technologies--information retrieval, automated summarization, multimodal and multilingual display, and machine translation--be interconnected. Once again there will be something for everyone! Retaining the pattern established by its predecessors, AMTA-98 will offer a blend of invited talks, panel discussions, research papers, system demonstrations and descriptions, tutorials, workshops, book exhibits, and social events. The four days of the conference will also facilitate gatherings of the Special Interest Groups on topics ranging from interlinguas and ontologies, lexicons, standards and data exchange, MT on PCs, and MT evaluation. The overall intent of the conference is to bring together MT developers, researchers, and users, to share the latest information on MT and to forge partnerships for addressing the challenge of language barriers that impede communication on the Information Highway. Participation by members of AMTA's sister organizations in Europe and Asia is strongly encouraged. Invited talks and panel discussions will highlight topical and controversial questions, encouraging lively interactions, as they did at past conferences. In the theory sessions, technical papers will address a wide range of topics, while in practical sessions, the problems of developing and bringing MT systems to market or intergrating MT technology into the workplace will be discussed. In addition, booths can be rented to display systems and products. CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS General Chair: Eduard Hovy, USC Information Sciences Institute Program Chairs: David Farwell, CRL, New Mexico State University Laurie Gerber, SYSTRAN Software, Inc. (San Diego) Local Arrangements Chair: Martha Palmer, University of Pennsylvania AMTA-98: PAPER AND SYSTEM DESCRIPTION/DEMONSTRATION SUBMISSIONS. Authors/system developers are invited to submit three kinds of presentations: 1. Theoretical papers: Unpublished papers are requested about original work on all aspects of Machine Translation. However, given the theme of this year's conference, special consideration will be given to papers which address advances in multilingual language and information technologies which have a potential impact on machine translation. Papers should be in English, not longer than 10 pages, with minimum character font size of 11 pt. 2. System descriptions with optional system demonstrations: Approx. 25 minutes will be allocated per system description/demo. Submissions should be in English, not longer than 4 pages. If a system demonstration is included, please provide the following information: - hardware platform, - operating system, - name and contact information of system operations specialist. 3. Studies of users experiences with implementing MT or testing its applicability to some task. Users and marketing consultants are especially welcome to submit. Studies should be in English, not longer than 8 pages, with minimum character font size of 11 pt. First page: All types of submission should include a separate title page with the following information: - paper title, - author(s)' name(s), address(es), telephone and fax numbers, email address(es), - one-paragraph abstract, - for theoretical papers: subject area keyword(s) for user studies: the words "User study" for system descriptions/demos: the words "System description/demo". Submissions are due at address below on June 1, 1998. Authors will be notified of acceptance on July 15, 1998. Final copies of papers are due on August 31, 1998. Softcopy submissions (papers that do not print will be returned to the author): email address: davidMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
ISI.EDU>Call for papers Coling/ACL 98 workshop Discourse Relations and Discourse Markers August 15, 1998 Universite de Montreal Montreal/Canada The notion of discourse relation has received many interpretations, some of which are hardly compatible with one another. Nonetheless, there is a consensus among researchers that intersegment relations hold between adjacent portions of a text and that these relations may be signalled by linguistic means, including so-called cue phrases, aspect and mood shifts, theme inversions, and other markers. The workshop intends to bring together researchers working on discourse relations and discourse markers in different linguistic traditions and different NLP applications. The particular focus of the workshop is the issue of discourse relations from the viewpoint of linguistic realization. Specifically, contributions should address one or more of the following questions: * What are sound methodologies for comparing similar discourse markers (contrastive studies, distribution analyses, etc.)? * What are sound methodologies for relating discourse relations with potential realizations? * Are there discourse relations that are *always* lexically signalled? Are there any that are *never* lexically signalled? * What non-lexical (i.e., syntactic or prosodic) means are used to signal a relation? * In production, how does one decide whether to signal a relation at all? * In production, how does one motivate a choice among candidate signals for a given relation? * In production, how does the choice of signal interact with other decisions (in particular, those of linearizing some tree or graph structure)? * In analysis, is it possible to reliably infer discourse relations from surface cues? * In analysis, how can one disambiguate polysemous signals such as "and", "since" (temporal or causal) etc.? * What are useful lexical representations of discourse markers, for both analysis and production? * What are useful representations of discourse relations (and the entities they relate), such that they facilitate the realization decision? What features would one like to have handy in a representation so that choices can be made easily? * Are there significant differences between realizations in spoken and written language? * How do individual languages differ in terms of any of the above issues? Organizing committee The workshop is organized by Manfred Stede (Technical University, Berlin) Leo Wanner (University of Stuttgart) Eduard Hovy (ISI/USC, Marina del Rey) This call for papers as well as future information on the workshop can be found at http://www.cs.tu-berlin.de/~marker/aclcolingws.html Requirements for submission Papers are invited that address any of the topics listed above. Maximum length is 8 pages including figures and references. Please use A4 or US letter format and set margins so that the text lies within a rectangle of 6.5 x 9 inches (16.5 x 23 cm). Use classical fonts such as Times Roman or Computer Modern, 11 to 12 points for text, 14 to 16 points for headings and title. LaTeX users are encouraged to use the style file provided by ACL: http://coling-acl98.iro.umontreal.ca/colaclsub.sty. Papers can be submitted either electronically in PostScript format, or as hardcopies. Submission from North America should be sent to: Eduard Hovy Information Sciences Institute 4676 Admiralty Way Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695 U.S.A. hovyMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue