LINGUIST List 9.656

Tue May 5 1998

Calls: Grammatical Inference, Applied Computing

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

Directory

1. Vasant Honavar, ICGI-98
2. George Angelos Papadopoulos, ACM SAC'99 - Track on Coordination

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 Call For Participation

 Fourth International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference (ICGI-98)
		http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~icgi98/icgi98.html

 Program Co-Chairs: Vasant Honavar and Giora Slutzki Iowa State University

 July 12-14, 1998
 Iowa State University
 Ames, Iowa, USA.
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 Cosponsored by
 International Institute of Theoretical and Applied Physics
 Iowa State University

 and

 In cooperation with
 American Association for Artificial Intelligence
 IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society
 ACL Special Interest Group on Natural Language Learning
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Grammatical Inference, variously refered to as automata induction, grammar
induction, and automatic language acquisition, refers to the process of
learning of grammars and languages from data. Machine learning of grammars
finds a variety of applications in syntactic pattern recognition, adaptive
intelligent agents, diagnosis, computational biology, systems modelling,
prediction, natural language acquisition, data mining and knowledge
discovery.

Traditionally, grammatical inference has been studied by researchers in
several research communities including: Information Theory, Formal
Languages, Automata Theory, Language Acquisition, Computational Linguistics,
Machine Learning, Pattern Recognition, Computational Learning Theory, Neural
Networks, etc.

Perhaps one of the first attempts to bring together researchers working on
grammatical inference for an interdisciplinary exchange of research results
took place under the aegis of the First Colloquium on Grammatical Inference
held at the University of Essex in United Kingdom in April 1993. This was
followed by the (second) International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference,
held at Alicante in Spain, the proceedings of which were published by
Springer-Verlag as volume 862 of the Lectures Notes in Artificial
Intelligence, and the Third International Colloquium on Grammatical
Inference, held at Montpellier in France, the proceedings of which were
published by Springer-Verlag as volume 1147 of the Lecture Notes in
Artificial Intelligence. Following the success of these events and the
Workshop on Automata Induction, Grammatical Inference, and Language
Acquisition, held in conjunction with the International Conference on
Machine Learning at Nashville in United States in July 1997, the Fourth
International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference will be held from July 12
through July 14, 1998, at Iowa State University in United States.

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The conference seeks to provide a forum for presentation and discussion of
original research papers on all aspects of grammatical inference including,
but not limited to:

 * Different models of grammar induction: e.g., learning from examples,
 learning using examples and queries, incremental versus non-incremental
 learning, distribution-free models of learning, learning under various
 distributional assumptions (e.g., simple distributions), impossibility
 results, complexity results, characterizations of representational and
 search biases of grammar induction algorithms.
 * Algorithms for induction of different classes of languages and
 automata: e.g., regular, context-free, and context-sensitive languages,
 interesting subsets of the above under additional syntactic
 constraints, tree and graph grammars, picture grammars,
 multi-dimensional grammars, attributed grammars, parameterized models,
 etc.
 * Theoretical and experimental analysis of different approaches to
 grammar induction including artificial neural networks, statistical
 methods, symbolic methods, information-theoretic approaches, minimum
 description length, and complexity-theoretic approaches, heuristic
 methods, etc.
 * Broader perspectives on grammar induction -- e.g., acquisition of
 grammar in conjunction with language semantics, semantic constraints on
 grammars, language acquisition by situated agents and robots,
 acquisition of language constructs that describe objects and events in
 space and time, developmental and evolutionary constraints on language
 acquisition, etc.
 * Demonstrated or potential applications of grammar induction in natural
 language acquisition, computational biology, structural pattern
 recognition, information retrieval, text processing, adaptive
 intelligent agents, systems modelling and control, and other domains.

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Invited Papers

 1. J. Feldman, International Computer Science Institute and University of
 California, Berkeley, CA, USA. Topic: Natural Language Acquisition
 (Exact title to be announced).
 2. A. Brazma, European Bioinformatics Institute, Cambridge. Topic: Pattern
 Discovery in Biosequences. (Exact title to be announced).

List of Accepted Papers

 1. Stochastic Regular Tree Language Inference, Rafael C. Carrasco, Jose
 Oncina and Jorge Calera
 2. The Data Driven Approach Applied to the OSTIA Algorithm, Jose Oncina
 3. Approximate Learning of Random Subsequential Transducers, Antonio
 Castellanos
 4. How considering incompatible state mergings may reduce the DFA
 induction search tree, Francois Coste and Jacques Nicolas
 5. Learning Regular Grammars to Model Musical Style: Comparing Different
 Coding Schemes, P. P. Cruz-Alcazar and E. Vidal-Ruiz
 6. Using symbol clustering to improve probabilistic automaton inference,
 Pierre Dupont and Lin Chase
 7. Learning a Subclass of Context-Free Languages J. Emerald, K.
 Subramanian, and D. Thomas
 8. Learning a determinisitic finite automaton with a recurrent neural
 network, L Firoiu, T Oates, and P R Cohen
 9. Learning Feature-Based Phrase-Structure Rules with the Grammar
 Inference Tool, B. Geistert
 10. Learning Stochastic Finite Automata from Experts, Colin de la Higuera.
 11. A stochastic search approach to grammar induction Hugues Juille and
 Jordan Pollack
 12. Grammar Model and Grammar Induction in the System NL Page, Keselj
 13. Results of the Abbadingo One DFA Learning Competition and a New
 Evidence Driven State Merging Algorithm K.J. Lang, B.A. Pearlmutter and
 R. Price
 14. Transducer-learning Experiments on Language Understanding Pics and E.
 Vidal
 15. Learning k-variable pattern languages efficiently stochastically finite
 on average from positive data Peter Rossmanith and Thomas Zeugmann
 16. Locally Threshold Testable Languages in Strict Sense: Application to
 the Inference Problem, Jose Ruiz, Salvador Espana, and Pedro Garcia
 17. Grammatical Inference in Document Recognition, Saidi, Tayeb-bey
 18. Learning a Subclass of Linear Languages from Positive Structural
 Information, Jose Sempere and G. Nagaraja
 19. Why Meaning Helps Learning Syntax, Isabelle Tellier
 20. A Performance Evaluation of automatic Survey Classifiers, Viechnicki
 21. Applying grammatical inference by learning a language model for oral
 dialogue Jacques Chodorowski and Laurent Miclet
 22. A polynomial Time incremental Algorithm for learning DFA, R. Parekh, C.
 Nichitu, V. Honavar

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Conference Format and Proceedings

The conference will include oral and possibly poster presentations of
accepted papers, a small number of tutorials and invited talks. All accepted
papers will appear in the conference proceedings to be published by
Springer-Verlag as a volume in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence
which is part of the Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Series.

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Financial Support

Limited financial support might be available, subject to the availability of
funds, for:

 * scientists (especially junior researchers) from developing countries,
 especially for those who can find other sources of support for extended
 visit at a US institution
 * graduate students and postdocs from US institutions

Additional details will be posted as they become available.

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Registration Information

Early Registration Deadline: May 21, 1998. Presenting authors of accepted
papers should register by May 11, 1998.

Registration Fees: The conference registration includes the conference
proceedings and the banquet (on Monday, July 13, 1998).

 * Author/Conference Attendee
 o By May 21, 1998: US $200
 o After May 21, 1998: US $250

 * Full-time Student
 o By May 21, 1998: US $100
 o After May 21, 1998: US $150
 * Airport Shuttle: US $15 (one way)


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Program Committee

Technical Program Chairs:
Vasant Honavar and Giora Slutzki, Iowa State University, USA.

Technical Program Committee:
R. Berwick, MIT, USA
A. Brazma, European Bioinformatics Institute, Cambridge, UK.
M. Brent, Johns Hopkins University, USA
C. Cardie, Cornell University, USA
W. Daelemans, Tilburg University, Netherlands
D. Dowe, Monash University, Australia
P. Dupont, University Jean Monnet at St. Etienne, France.
D. Estival, University of Melbourne, Australia
J. Feldman, International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, USA
L. Giles, NEC Research Institute, Princeton, USA
J. Gregor, University of Tennessee, USA
C. de la Higuera, University Jean Monnet at St. Etienne, France
A. Itai, Technion, Israel
T. Knuutila, University of Turku, Finland
J. Koza, Stanford University, USA
K. Lang, NEC Research Institute, Princeton, USA.
M. Li, University of Waterloo, Canada
E. Makinen, University of Tampere, Finland
L. Miclet, ENSSAT, Lannion, France.
G. Nagaraja, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India
H. Ney, University of Technology, Aachen, Germany
J. Nicolas, IRISA, France
R. Parekh, Allstate Research and Planning Center, Menlo Park, USA
L. Pitt, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
D. Powers, Flinders University, Australia
L. Reeker, National Science Foundation, USA
Y. Sakakibara, Tokyo Denki University, Japan.
C. Samuelsson, Lucent Technologies, USA
A. Sharma, University of New South Wales, Australia.
E. Vidal, U. Politecnica de Valencia, Spain

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Local Arrangements Committee

Dale Grosvenor, Iowa State University, USA.
K. Balakrishnan, Iowa State University, USA.
R. Bhatt, Iowa State University, USA
J. Yang, Iowa State University, USA.

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FURTHER DETAILS ARE AVAILABLE AT: http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~icgi98/icgi98.html

 PRELIMINARY CALL FOR PAPERS AND REFEREES
 ========================================
 (Apologies if you receive multiple copies) 


 1999 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC '99)

 Special Track on Coordination Models, Languages and Applications


 February 28 - March 2, 1999
 The Menger, San Antonio, Texas, U. S. A.


 (http://www.ucy.ac.cy/ucy/cs/SAC99.html)


SAC '99:
~~~~~~~~
Over the past thirteen years, the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
(SAC) has become a primary forum for applied computer scientists and
application developers from around the world to interact and present
their work. SAC'99 is sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Groups
SIGAda, SIGAPP, SIGBIO, and SIGCUE.

Authors are invited to contribute original papers in all areas of
experimental computing and application development for the technical
sessions. There will be a number of special tracks on such issues as
Programming Languages, Parallel and Distributed Computing, Mobile and
Scientific Computing, Internet and the WWW, etc.


Coordination Models, Languages and Applications Track:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A new special track on coordination models, languages and applications
will be held at SAC'99. The term "coordination" here is used in a
rather broad sense covering traditional models and languages (e.g.
ones based on the Shared Dataspace and CHAM metaphors) but also other
related formalisms such as configuration and architectural description
frameworks, systems modeling abstractions and languages, programming
skeletons, etc.

This track on coordination is held for the second time as part of ACM
SAC's events. The CFP for the ACM SAC'98 track attracted 33
submissions from 18 countries; 8 of those submissions were accepted as
regular papers and 4 more as short papers.

Major topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

 * Novel models, languages, programming and implementation techniques.
 * Relationship with other computational models such as object
 oriented, declarative (functional, logic, constraint) programming
 or extensions of them with coordination capabilities.
 * Applications (especially where the industry is involved).
 * Theoretical aspects (semantics, reasoning, verification).
 * Software architectures and software engineering techniques.
 * Middleware platforms (e.g. CORBA).
 * All aspects related to the modeling of Information Systems
 (groupware, Internet and the Web, workflow management, CSCW).


Track Program Chair:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
George A. Papadopoulos
Department of Computer Science
University of Cyprus
75 Kallipoleos Str., P.O.B. 537
CY-1678, Nicosia, CYPRUS

E-mail: georgecs.ucy.ac.cy

Tel: +357 2 338705/06, Fax: +357 2 339062


Guidelines for Submission:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Original papers from the above-mentioned or other related areas will
be considered. This includes three categories of submissions: 1)
original and unpublished research; 2) reports of innovative computing
applications in the arts, sciences, engineering, business, government,
education and industry; and 3) reports of successful technology
transfer to new problem domains. Each submitted paper will be fully
refereed and undergo a blind review process by at least three
referees.

The accepted papers in all categories will be published in the ACM
SAC'99 proceedings. There will also be a special issue of the Journal
of Programming Languages, Chapman & Hall (http://www.chapmanhall.com/
jp/default.html) with expanded versions of selected papers from those
that will be accepted for this special track as regular papers.

Submission guidelines must be strictly followed:

 * Submit six (6) copies of original manuscripts to the SAC '99
 Coordination Models, Languages and Applications Track Program Chair
 (address shown above). Alternatively, submit your paper electronically
 in uuencoded compressed postscript format; this is strongly encouraged.
 Fax submissions will not be accepted.

 * The author(s) name(s) and address(es) must not appear in the body
 of the paper, and self-reference should be in the third person.
 This is to facilitate blind review.

 * The body of the paper should not exceed 5,000 words (approximately
 15 pages, double-spaced).

 * A separate cover sheet (in the case of electronic submission this
 should be sent separately from the main paper) should show the title
 of the paper, the author(s) name(s) and affiliation(s), and the
 address (including e-mail, telephone, and FAX) to which
 correspondence should be sent.

 * All submissions must be received by August 17, 1998.

Anyone wishing to review papers for this special track should contact the
Track Program Chair at the address shown above.


Important Dates:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 * August 17, 1998: Paper Submission.
 * October 15, 1998: Author Notification.
 * December 1, 1998: Camera-Ready Copy.