Date: 01 Nov 93 --------------- ====================================================================== TOPICS: 1992--1993 SIGGEN Annual Report Job offers: USC/ ISI Position: Research Scientist (parsing) Research Programmer (Design and impl. of NLP software) GMD/IPSI Darmstadt: Computational Linguist Wanted (Discourse) ====================================================================== 1992 -- 1993 Annual Report Welcome to SIGGEN for the new year. Please notice the new address: "siggen@bengus.bgu.ac.il" This is the result of the elections we held late this spring to coordinate the transition process for the board of directors that coordinates this ACL special interest group. As you will recall, Karen Kukich and Marie Meteer volunteered to leave the board to create new openings, and we (the board at the time) decided to ask for two classes of volunteers to replace them, one a "professional", who had finished their degree and was out in the world and one graduate student. The results of the nominations and voting were as follows: PROFESSIONAL VOLUNTEERS: Michael Elhadad 23 Cecile Paris 21 Koenraad Desmedt 17 GRAD STUDENT VOLUNTEERS: Manfred Stede 25 Nicolas Nicolov 24 Massimo Fasciano 9 Since Michael Elhadad had also graciously volunteered his computer time and effort to manage the query board, he now has that task, replacing Marie Meteer. The other principal duty on the board is to act as the "report writer" and liaison to the ACL executive committee, was taken up by me, David McDonald, allowing Karen Kukich to take a rest from her very active life in that capacity. There are now roughly 170 people on the siggen mailing list, up about fifty percent from last year. Last year our query board served as the forum for a lengthy discussion of the raison d'etre for this ACL special interest group and the kinds of actions that should be taken by its standing committee. That committee now consists of five people: David McDonald, Robert Dale, Michael Elhadad, Johanna Moore, and Manfred Stede; and it will evolve through more elections next year and beyond. This year we sponsored several workshops (listed below) which is to say that we lent moral support, coordinated schedules with other ACL activities, and occasionally helped channel some of the ACL's funds to them. There appears to be a concensus that this is the right kind of role for Siggen's standing committee; in particular that this committee should *not* itself organize or govern meetings in the generation community. There is, however, a need to accumulate and keep a "group memory" of how meetings have been done so that people will not continually need to be starting from scratch each time, especially for the International meeting every two years, and the Siggen committee and the organizing committee for next year's International meeting have taken on the job of making sure that this happens. SIGGEN co-sponsored three workshops last year: 1) The Nato Advanced Research Workshop on Burning Issues in Discourse, Maratea, Italy, 13th - 15th April, 1993. The proceedings of the meeting are available for a fee of 8 US dollars or 5 pounds sterling from: Donia Scott, Information Technology Research Institute, University of Brighton, Brighton Bn1 4AT, England 2) The Fourth European Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Pisa - Italy - April 28-30, 1993. There was a brief report on it posted to the list last year written by Robin Fawcett. 3) The ACL Workshop on Intentionality & Discourse Structure, Columbus, Ohio, June 21, 1993. The procedings are available from the ACL. A revised version (23rd February 1993) of Robert Dale's NLG bibliography, in compressed PostScript form, is available by anonymous ftp from scott.cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Internet 129.215.144.3). This version includes new material that has appeared in the last year, plus a significant number of additions and corrections provided by members of the community. Seventh International Workshop on Natural Language Generation The location and dates for next year's international workshop have been set. It will be held during the week of June 21st, 1994, from Monday evening through Friday afternoon, at the Nonantum Inn in Kennebunkport Maine (USA), which is on the coast about an hour and a half drive north of Boston. The full call for papers will be posted soon. Submissions will be due February 15th, 1994. The meeting is being organized by a committee set up at the last international meeting in Lugarno Italy consisting of David McDonald, Robin Fawcett, Eduard Hovy, Marie Meteer, Donia Scott, and Koenraad DeSmedt. Addresses for the Siggen committee: David McDonald 14 Brantwood Road Arlington, MA 02174-8004 USA mcdonald@cs.brandeis.edu Robert Dale University of Edinburgh Centre for Cognitive Science 2 Buccleuch Place Edinburgh EH8 9LW Scotland R.Dale@edinburgh.ac.uk Michael Elhadad Dept of Mathematics and Computer Science Ben Gurion University of the Negev Beer Sheva 84105, Israel elhadad@bengus.BGU.AC.IL Johanna Moore University of Pittsburgh 520 LRDC Pittsburgh, PA 15260 USA jmoore@cs.pitt.edu Manfred Stede Department of Computer Science University of Toronto Toronto M5S 1A4, Canada mstede@cs.toronto.edu ====================================================================== Date: 19 Oct 1993 Subject: NLP jobs offered From: hovy@bartok.isi.edu (Eduard Hovy) NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING POSITIONS OPEN The Information Sciences Institute (ISI) of the University of Southern California (USC) is seeking to fill two new positions within the PENMAN natural language project. Current PENMAN researchers include Dr. Eduard Hovy (project leader, ISI research scientist, and USC faculty), Dr. Kevin Knight (ISI research scientist and USC faculty), Dr. Masayo Iida (ISI research scientist), Dr. John Bateman (ISI research scientist, on leave to IPSI Institute, Darmstadt), Mr. Richard Whitney (systems programmer), and several visiting scientists and graduate students. At the present time, the PENMAN project is collaboratively constructing the PANGLOSS Machine Translation system, together with the Center for Machine Translation at Carnegie Mellon University and the Computing Research Laboratory at New Mexico State University. In the past, PENMAN research has focused on automated English sentence generation, discourse, text planning, semantic knowledge acquisition and organization, and classification-based parsing. A new effort is focusing on the construction of a broad-coverage Japanese parser for the PANGLOSS system. Applicants for both positions should send a resume and names of references to: Dr. Eduard Hovy Information Sciences Institute of USC 4676 Admiralty Way Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695 tel: 310-822-1511 fax: 310-823-6714 Resumes may also be sent electronically to hovy@isi.edu. The PENMAN project is part of the Intelligent Systems Division at USC/ISI, which also contains the LOOM Knowledge Representation project, Prof. Paul Rosenbloom's portion of the SOAR project investigating architectures for intelligent reasoning, the SIMS multiple database access project, the EXPECT explainable expert systems project, the DRAMA software development environments project, and the HUMANOID interface construction environment project. The division is directed by Dr. William Swartout. Successful applicants will work in a stimulating intellectual atmosphere with excellent computational and administrative support, in a prime, virtually smogless location overlooking the Pacific Ocean. USC/ISI is an Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action Employer ============================================================== Position: Research Scientist USC/ISI Focus: Natural Language parsing Description: Natural Language parsing research, with an emphasis on broad-coverage, statistical techniques. The candidate will design and build a system for parsing Japanese texts, and this system will be a key component in an operational interlingual machine translation system. Given the large scale of the project, there will be an emphasis on the automatic acquisition of grammatical and lexical knowledge. The candidate will collaborate closely with a Japanese specialist and a systems programmer. Qualifications: The applicant should hold a Ph.D. in Computer Science and should have experience in natural language processing using statistical techniques. ============================================================== Position: Research Programmer USC/ISI Focus: Design and implementation of NLP software Description: Implementation and maintenance of large-scale natural language processing software. Components include parsing/generation systems and linguistic resources. In addition, the candidate will build human-machine interfaces that make the systems easy to use, augment, and demonstrate. Qualification: A degree in computer science, masters preferred. Strong skills in LISP programming as well as UNIX, interface building, and modular systems design. Useful experience: AI and/or NLP software, manipulation of large bodies of text, CLIM, Prolog. ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 27 Oct 93 From: bateman@darmstadt.gmd.de (Dr. John Bateman) Subject: Computational Linguist Position Available Computational Linguist Wanted ============================= The text generation department KOMET of the GMD Institute IPSI in Darmstadt is seeking a computational linguist to work on a challenging EC-funded basic research project concerned with extended written discourse. Applicants for the position should have a very good general background in computational linguistics, the ability to take independent decisions, and either prior experience, or the commitment to become familiar, with the following areas: * approaches to discourse structure, particularly rhetorical structure theory, macro structures, generic structures * modern computational linguistic unification formalisms, such as TFS, TDL, CUF, FUF, ALE, ALEP, Life or similar * LISP The main body of work spans formalization and implementation of models of discourse, the (hand-)analysis of texts, and the hypothesis of discourse mechanisms. Implementation will be broadly in the context of a text generation system. The main languages of the project are English, German, and Dutch. Candidates should have sufficient knowledge of English to participate in writing papers and the preparation of deliverables. There is considerable interaction with our partner sites in Saarbruecken, Tilburg, Edinburgh and Madrid and so some travelling will be involved. Candidates should be prepared to commence work in Darmstadt in December 1993; salary is in the range BAT-IIa/b, depending on experience. The project will run until October 1995, follow up projects are planned. Interested applicants should send a CV or contact: John Bateman KOMET Department GMD-IPSI Dolivostr. 15 64293 Darmstadt, Germany. tel.: 06151/869-826 e-mail: bateman@gmd.de ====================================================================== eof