Date: 27 Apr 1994 ----------------- ====================================================================== TOPICS: IGW7 Registration info and programme (D.McDonald) Computation and Language Electronic Preprint Server (S.Shieber) New AI Journal: JAIR (S.Minton) Call for paper: Cognitive Science of NLP - Dublin (A.Monaghan) Deadline: May 13th. Announcing the release of Wild_Life 1.0 (P.VanRoy) ====================================================================== [Administrative Note: The SIGGEN list is opened to questions, opinions, announcements of publications by the members, availability of tech-reports, research lab descriptions etc. If you have material you want to make available to the other members of the list, we maintain an ftp archive for that purpose: black.bgu.ac.il:pub/siggen. We also keep there an archive of the mailing list. Post your contributions to siggen@black.bgu.ac.il] ====================================================================== From: mcdonald@cs.brandeis.edu 7th International Workshop on Natural Language Generation 21-24 June 1994 Nonantum Inn Kennebunkport, Maine USA Continuing the tradition of earlier meetings, recently in Trento, Italy (1992) and Pittsburgh, PA, (1990), the 7th International Workshop on Natural Language Generation aims to bring together researchers interested in language generation. This year's meeting will be held at an inn on the coast of Maine, one hundred miles north of Boston, providing a relaxing atmosphere for focused discussions and easy access for both domestic and international travelers. The registration form and workshop schedule are attached below. Please return registration form to: David McDonald, 14 Brantwood Road, Arlington, MA 02174-8004, USA phone: +1 617-646-4124 fax: +1 617-648-1735 Internet: mcdonald@cs.brandeis.edu The workshop attendance is limited by the size of the Inn, which can accommodate approximately 100 participants. Should more people wish to attend than can be accommodated, attendance will be first come first served after preference has been given to the people who submitted papers and the program committee. Please register early to ensure yourself a place and help us in the local arrangements. We encourage those who have running systems to bring demonstrations. Send email to mcdonald@cs.brandeis.edu with a description of your system and the machine requirements. NOTE: Some funding is available for students or others who do not have funds to attend. Please apply by MAY 15 and include an itemized budget and a description of your current work in natural language generation. Apply by email to David McDonald, mcdonald@cs.brandeis.edu. Organizing committee: Robin Fawcett (Cardiff, U.K.) Eduard Hovy (USC/ISI, USA) David McDonald (Brandeis, USA), chairman Marie Meteer (BBN, USA), local arrangements chair Donia Scott (ITRI, U.K.) Koenraad de Smedt (Leiden University, NL) ------------------- cut here --------------------- 7th International Workshop on Natural Language Generation Registration Form Name: Affiliation: Address: Email address: Registration includes room for 4 nights, meals, transportation to and from Logan International Airport, reception, outing, and more. Registration before June 1: ___ Sharing a room: $320.00 ___ Single room: $440.00 Preferred roomate:_________________ Registration after June 1: ___ Sharing a room: $370.00 ___ Single room: $490.00 Preferred roomate:_________________ (Please contact us for family rates.) Payment must be in US dollars. Make checks/money orders payable to IGW-7. Contact us directly for bank transfer information. Special dietary or other needs: Banquet meal choice: ___ Traditional Maine Lobster Dinner ___ Steak ___ Vegetarian Please include a 1 to 2 paragraph description of yourself and your work as it relates to natural language generation for our participants booklet, which will be handed out at the workshop. Transportation: Kennebunkport is a two hour drive north of Boston. We will be providing bus transportation from Logan International Airport late afternoon/early evening on Monday June 20 and returning Friday afternoon, June 24. We will determine exact times when we have more information on flight schedules, so please let us know your projected travel plans as early as possible. We can make other arrangements for those who cannot fit into this schedule; however, we need to know well in advance. ------------------- cut here --------------------- 7TH INTERNATIONAL GENERATION WORKSHOP TENTATIVE SCHEDULE Monday, June 19: Evening arrival Tuesday, June 20 8:45 Opening remarks 9:00 DISCOVERY AND FORMAT OF INPUT STRUCTURES FOR TACTICAL GENERATION Mark Seligman 10:00 DPOCL: A PRINCIPLED APPROACH TO DISCOURSE PLANNING R. Michael Young & Johanna D. Moore 11:00 Content selection mini-session: BUILDING UNDERLYING STRUCTURES FOR MULTIPARAGRAPH TEXTS Robert Granville TEXT PLANNING MODEL IN THE DOMAIN OF BILINGUAL STATISTICAL REPORTS Benoit Lavoie SEQUENCING AS A PLANNING TASK Daniel D. Suthers 12:00 DISCOURSE PLANNING AS AN OPTIMIZATION PROCESS Ingrid Zukerman & Richard McConachy 1:30 INTENTIONS, STRUCTURE AND EXPRESSION IN MULTI-LINGUAL INSTRUCTIONS Cecile L. Paris & Donia R. Scott 2:00 CONTENT AND RHETORICAL STATUS SELECTION IN INSTRUCTIONAL TEXTS Leila Kosseim & Guy Lapalme 2:30 EXPRESSING PROCEDURAL RELATIONSHIPS IN MULTILINGUAL INSTRUCTIONS Judy Delin, Anthony Hartley, Donia Scott, Keith Vander Linden 4:00 Poster Session: SITUATION VIEWPOINTS FOR GENERATION Henry Hamburger & Dan Tufis CONTENT SELECTION AND ORGANIZATION AS A PROCESS INVOLVING COMPROMISES Helmut Horacek BIDIRECTIONAL INCREMENTAL GENERATION AND ANALYSIS WITH CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR AND INDEXED QUASI-LOGICAL FORM. Torbjoern Lager & William J Black TOWARD A MULTIDIMENSIONAL FRAMEWORK TO GUIDE THE AUTOMATED GENERATION OF TEXT TYPES Julia Lavid & Eduard Hovy CORECT: COMBINING CSCW WITH NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION FOR COLLABORATIVE REQUIREMENTS CAPTURE John Levine and Chris Mellish GENERATION IN THE LOLITA SYSTEM: AN ENGINEERING APPROACH Mark H. Smith, Roberto Garigliano, & Richard G. Morgan REPRESENTING CONCEPTUAL AND LINGUISTIC KNOWLEDGE FOR MULTI- LINGUAL GENERATION IN A TECHNICAL DOMAIN Stefan Svenberg SIGN-LANGUAGE GENERATION IN ZARDOZ: AN ENGLISH TO SIGN- LANGUAGE TRANSLATION SYSTEM Tony Veale & Alan Conway 8:30 Invited Speaker: James Pustejovsky, Brandeis University Wendesday, June 21 8:30 ON MOVING ON ON ONTOLOGIES Robin P. Fawcett 9:30 ON THE CREATIVE USE OF LANGUAGE: THE FORM OF LEXICAL RESOURCES David D. McDonald & Federica Busa 11:00 SEMANTIC LEXICONS: THE CORNERSTONE FOR LEXICAL CHOICE IN NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION Evelyne Viegas and Pierrette Bouillon 11:30 GENERATING EVENT DESCRIPTIONS WITH SAGE: A SIMULATION AND GENERATION ENVIRONMENT Marie Meteer 1:00 TOWARDS AN ACCOUNT OF CAUSATION IN A MULTILINGUAL TEXT GENERATION SYSTEM Liesbeth Degand 1:30 GENERATING CONTEXT APPROPRIATE WORD ORDERS IN TURKISH Beryl Hoffman 2:30 OUTING and BANQUET Thursday, June 22 9:00 HAS A CONSENSUS NL GENERATION ARCHITECTURE APPEARED, AND IS IT PSYCHOLINGUISTICALLY PLAUSIBLE? Ehud Reiter 9:30 THE ROLE OF COGNITIVE MODELING IN COMMUNICATIVE INTENTIONS Owen Rambow and Marilyn Walker 11:00 RECOGNIZING DIGRESSIVE QUESTIONS USING A MODEL FOR INTERACTIVE GENERATION Susan M. Haller 11:30 GENERATING INDIRECT ANSWERS TO YES-NO QUESTIONS Nancy Green & Sandra Carberry 1:30 REAL-TIME NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION IN NL-SOAR Robert Rubinoff & Jill Fain Lehman 2:00 GENERATING COOPERATIVE SYSTEM RESPONSES IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL DIALOGUES Markus Fischer, Elisabeth Maier, & Adelheit Stein 3:30 Invited Speaker: Mari Ostendorf, Boston University 5:00 Panel discussion (to be announced) 8:30 Demos Friday, June 23 9:00 USING A TEXTUAL REPRESENTATION LEVEL COMPONENT IN THE CONTEXT OF DISCOURSE AND DIALOGUE GENERATION Franck Panaget 9:30 BUILDING ANOTHER BRIDGE OVER THE GENERATION GAP Leo Wanner 11:00 PLANNING REFERENCE CHOICES FOR ARGUMENTATIVE TEXTS Xiaorong Huang 11:30 TOWARDS THE APPLICATION OF TEXT GENERATION IN AN INTEGRATED PUBLICATION SYSTEM Elke Teich, John Bateman 12:30 Closing remarks ====================================================================== From: shieber@das.harvard.edu (Stuart Shieber) Dear colleagues: Increasingly, preprints of papers on topics relating to computation and language are being distributed electronically over the Internet and other networks connected to it, by email, anonymous FTP, and other means, through informal mailing lists and ad hoc arrangements. In an effort to promote and rationalize this burgeoning mode of information exchange, we have set up a fully automated electronic archive with email, ftp, and WWW/Mosaic interfaces for papers on the topics of: o computational linguistics, o natural-language processing, o speech processing, o and related fields The success of such a system depends on its being actively supported, promoted, and used by the community. I hope that you will make your own papers available through this service, and will encourage your colleagues and students to do the same. In particular, I hope you will: o Retrieve a longer announcement message from the server, by sending a message to cmp-lg@xxx.lanl.gov with subject `get announce.txt' and empty body. o Retrieve information about how to subscribe to and use the server, by sending a message to cmp-lg@xxx.lanl.gov with subject `help' and empty body. o Subscribe to the server, so that you will automatically get regular listings of titles/authors/abstracts of papers submitted to the server. (I highly recommend subscribing, even if you expect to retrieve papers primarily through cmp-lg's WWW interface. Subscription means that you will be kept up to date on available papers without your having to remember to actively check for new papers. And the service will not stuff your mailbox; you will receive at most one message per day, and even that only on days new papers are submitted.) o Submit your own papers to the server, to make them widely and easily available to the community. ooo Most importantly, pass the word to your colleagues and students, either by forwarding this message to them, or sending them a personal note. I realize that this message may leave you with many unanswered questions about the functionality and operation of the cmp-lg archive server. Many of these questions will be answered in the announcement and help messages available as described above. However, if you have any further questions (or just want to register an opinion about the endeavor), please do not hesitate to contact me directly by reply email, or send a message to cmp-lg@xxx.lanl.gov with subject `comment' and your comments and questions in the body of the message. Thank you for your help in getting this project underway. Stuart Shieber shieber@das.harvard.edu ====================================================================== [NOTE: JAIR is a new AI journal of the same quality level as the AI Journal. They are looking for more submissions in NL.] From: Steve Minton ANNOUNCEMENT and CALL FOR PAPERS Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research The Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) invites submissions in all areas of AI. JAIR is a fully refereed journal that is distributed over the internet. In addition, each complete volume of JAIR is published by Morgan Kaufmann. Articles published in Volume 1 of JAIR currently include: Wellman, M.P. "A Market-Oriented Programming Environment and its Application to Distributed Multicommodity Flow Problems" Ginsberg, M.L. "Dynamic Backtracking" Gent, I.P. and Walsh, T. "An Empirical Analysis of Search in GSAT" Schlimmer, J.C. and Hermens, L.A. "Sofware Agents: Completing Patterns and Constructing User Interfaces" Bergadano, F., Gunetti, D. and Trinchero, U. "The Difficulties of Learning Logic Programs with Cut" Buchheit, M., Donini, F.M. and Schaerf, A. "Decidable Reasoning in Terminological Knowledge Representation Systems", Nilsson, N. "Teleo-Reactive Programs for Agent Control" Koppel, M., Feldman R. and Segre, A.M. "Bias-Driven Revision of Logical Domain Theories" Ling, C.X. "Learning the Past Tense of English Verbs: The Symbolic Pattern Associator vs. Connectionist Models" Cook, D.J. and Holder, L.B. "Substructure Discovery Using Minimum Description Length and Background Knowledge" Murphy, P.M. and Pazzani, M.J."Exploring the Decision Forest: An Empirical Investigation of Occam's Razor in Decision Tree Induction" JAIR articles are published in PostScript. (Eventually we plan to publish articles in both PostScript and HTML.) Authors are invited to accompany their articles with online appendices containing data, source code, Quicktime movies, etc. Articles are normally reviewed and returned to the author within six weeks. You can access JAIR articles online (at no charge) through a variety of means: -- By reading comp.ai.jair.announce and/or comp.ai.jair.papers -- Anonymous FTP from either of the two sites below: CMU: p.gp.cs.cmu.edu directory: /usr/jair/pub Genoa: ftp.mrg.dist.unige.it directory: pub/jair/pub -- By WWW. The URL is gopher://p.gp.cs.cmu.edu -- automated email If you would like to receive announcements as articles are published, send mail to jair-ed@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov asking to be placed on our subscriber mailing list. For more detailed information about JAIR see the file help.doc in our FTP or gopher sites, or send electronic mail to jair@cs.cmu.edu with the subject AUTORESPOND and the message body HELP. JAIR is published by AI Access Foundation and Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. --------------------------------------------------------------------- EXECUTIVE EDITOR Steven Minton ASSOCIATE EDITORS Jon Doyle Richard Korf Fausto Giunchiglia Wendy Lehnert Henry Kautz Richard Sutton Daniel Weld EDITORIAL BOARD Jan Aikins David Haussler Martha Pollack Yuichiro Anzai Julia Hirschberg Ross Quinlan Rodney Brooks Lawrence Hunter Edwina Rissland Murray Campbell Takeo Kanade Paul Rosenbloom Thomas Dean Hiroaki Kitano Stuart Russell Rina Dechter Pat Langley Erik Sandewall Gerald DeJong Ramon Lopez de Mantaras Bart Selman Johan de Kleer David McAllester Stuart Shieber Didier Dubois Kathleen McKeown Douglas Smith Edmund Durfee Stephen Muggleton Luc Steels David Etherington Hideyuki Nakashima Anthony Stentz Oren Etzioni Nils Nilsson Peter Struss Kenneth Forbus Toyoaki Nishida Hozumi Tanaka Michael Georgeff Christos Papadimitriou Austin Tate Matthew Ginsberg Judea Pearl David Touretzky Walter Hamscher Tomaso Poggio Michael Wellman ADVISORY BOARD Jaime Carbonell Kenneth Forbus Paul Rosenbloom Thomas Dietterich Peter Friedland Bart Selman Oren Etzioni Matthew Ginsberg ====================================================================== From: alex@compapp.dcu.ie (Alex Monaghan) Second Call for Papers for the Third International Conference on The COGNITIVE SCIENCE of NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING Dublin City University, 7-8 July 1994 Subject Areas: This is a non-exclusive list of subjects which fall within the scope of CSNLP. It is intended as a guide only. * Corpus-based NLP * Connectionist NLP * Statistical and knowledge-based MT * Linguistic knowledge representation * Cognitive linguistics * Declarative approaches to NLP * NLG and NLU * Dialogue and discourse * Human language processing * Text linguistics * Evaluation of NLP * Hybrid approaches to NLP Submissions may deal with theoretical issues, applications, databases or other aspects of CSNLP, but the importance of cognitive aspects should be borne in mind. Papers should report original substantive research. Theme: Corpus-Based Approaches ----------------------- Since the conference follows on the heels of the ACM SIGIR meeting, we have decided to emphasise the use of corpora in NLP. Papers dealing with corpus- based approaches (advantages, disadvantages, applications, etc.) will be preferred. Text and speech corpora are equally welcome. Invited Speakers: The following speakers have been invited to give keynote talks: Roger Garside, University of Lancaster Hans Kamp, Universitaet Stuttgart Cathy Sotillo, University of Edinburgh Not all are confirmed as yet. Registration and Accommodation: The registration fee will be IR#40, and will include proceedings, lunches and one evening meal. Accommodation can be reserved in the campus residences at DCU. Accommodation will be "First come, first served": there is a heavy demand for campus rooms in the summer. To register, contact Alex Monaghan at the addresses given below. Payment in advance is possible but not obligatory. This conference immediately follows SIGIR, a major Information Retrieval conference, also at DCU. There is a limited amount of funding available under the EC Human Mobility initiative, for participants who are under 35 and citizens of one of the 12 EC member states. *** Do they have to attend both? Where is the info on SIGIR? *** Submission of Abstracts: Those wishing to present a paper should submit a 400-word abstract to arrive not later than 13/5/94. Abstracts should give the author's full name and address, with Email address if possible, and should be sent to: CSNLP Alex Monaghan School of Computer Applications Dublin City University Dublin 9 Ireland Email submissions are also acceptable, plain ASCII text please to: alex@compapp.dcu.ie (internet) Completed papers should be around 8 pages long, although longer papers will be considered if requested. Camera-ready copy must be submitted to arrive in Dublin by 27/6/94. No particular conference style will be imposed, but papers should be legible (12pt laser printed) and well-structured. Deadlines: 13th May --- abstracts to arrive in Dublin 1st June --- notification of authors 27th June --- camera-ready copy to arrive in Dublin 1st July --- final date for registration, accommodation, meals etc. ====================================================================== From: vanroy@prl.dec.com Announcing the release of Wild_Life 1.0 --------------------------------------- Digital Equipment Corporation's Paris Research Laboratory is pleased to announce the release of Wild_Life 1.0, a prototyping system based on the LIFE language. LIFE (Logic, Inheritance, Functions, Equations) is an experimental programming language with a powerful facility for structured type inheritance. LIFE was conceived at MCC by Hassan Ait-Kaci. LIFE derives its syntax and resolution method from Prolog, and it is straightforward to modify Prolog programs to run under LIFE. However, the addition of functions, approximation structures (psi-terms), and inheritance greatly enriches the language and allows one to formulate efficient programs more easily, more concisely, and more naturally. The main design goals for the Wild_Life interpreter are functionality and robustness. Wild_Life has been implemented to be a reliable tool for prototyping applications that require representing and manipulating complex data structures, with many interdependencies. It comes with several powerful tools (including a preprocessor, parsers, and a graphical interface toolkit) that aid in prototyping. The system is available by anonymous ftp from gatekeeper.dec.com in pub/plan/Life1.01.tar.Z. Uncompress and untar this file to obtain the Life1.0 directory. See the README file for further instructions. This system runs on MIPS/Ultrix (DECstations), Alpha/OSF-1, SPARC/SunOS, and with minor changes is able to run on RS/6000 and SGI machines. If you port it to other machines, please send us a list of the changes that were necessary. The system includes: o A license agreement. o The C and LIFE source code of Wild_Life 1.0. o Documentation: a manual, a manpage, and documentation for the tools. o A set of tools written in LIFE: X interface, graphical interface toolkit, accumulator preprocessor, debugger, profiler, user interface shell, tokenizer, parser. o A set of example programs written in LIFE: SuperLint (a user-customizable checker for C programs), a flower-drawing program, an incremental Gaussian equation solver, a graphical displayer for cyclic objects, and various smaller programs. o A test suite: more than 300 programs to exhaustively test the system. The following e-mail addresses are relevant to LIFE: o life-users@prl.dec.com. A mailing list of people using LIFE or interested in specific aspects of LIFE: theory, implementation, or applications. o life-users-request@prl.dec.com. To request to be put on or removed from the life-users mailing list. o life-bugs@prl.dec.com. If you find a bug, please send the smallest self-contained program that illustrates the bug to this address. LIFE versus Prolog ------------------ It is our experience that after using LIFE, one feels a reluctance going back to Prolog again. The reason is simple: LIFE provides intuitive and elegant solutions to several of Prolog's frustrating limitations, without sacrificing any of its conveniences nor its formal appeal. Here are some of the features it supports: 1. Functions, including higher-order functions and arithmetic done right 2. Object-orientation 3. C-like records 4. Expandable data-structures: arrays and hash-tables 5. Type definitions and multiple inheritance 6. Correct manipulation of cyclic structures 7. Constraint coroutining 8. Global variables 9. Backtrackable in-place assignment 10. Persistent data structures Imagine what these features could do to *your* programs! Semantically, most of the above features are consequences of the two ways in which LIFE extends Prolog: 1. Herbrand terms are replaced by psi-terms. 2. Call-by-matching is added (Prolog only has call-by-unification). Migration from Prolog to LIFE is easy. The Wild_Life interpreter is of high quality. The largest programs written using it so far run over 10000 lines, for example the SuperLint program. We are working on a compiler that is efficient and scalable. That is, it will be competitive with the best implementations of Prolog and it will be usable for arbitrary large programs and data. The compiler is itself written in LIFE. ====================================================================== //eof