Date: 20 Dec 1995 ----------------- ====================================================================== TOPICS: 1. Request: Robot communication (from brainhard@etoy.com) 2. CFP NLP and Industrial Applications Conf (from ) Deadline: January 31, 1996 -- Moncton, New-Brunswick, CANADA 3. CFP ECAI-96 Workshop on Dialogue Processing in Spoken Language Systems Deadline: March 1, 1996 -- Budapest, Hungary. (From: ) ====================================================================== Topic 1: From: brainhard@etoy.com (brainhard - etoy.INTELLIGENCE) Date: Wed, 6 Dec 1995 Hi I am from etoy (www.etoy.com). We are extending our virtual offices by 7 robots talking to each other in a chatter. The goal is to permanently feed the robots with individual sentences from each of the 7 etoy.boys. The robots are sort of replacement individuals for us humans. Now I haven't found the right software-robot and I would like to know if you could give me a pointer to who or where I could find adequate programs. The needs are: - The software must run on our unix/linux-server (best would be on perl, c or other languages would also work) - I want to access the txt-sources the robot relies on,for individualising the robot on each of the 7 etoy-members (we will build scripts to transfer sentences directly from email to a source-file) Thank you very much for your reply Greetings Etoy Brainhard (luzius bernhard) brainhard@etoy.com ====================================================================== Topic 2: From: Chadia Moghrabi Subject: CFP: NLP+IA 96/ TAL+AI 96 ********************** CALL FOR PAPERS & EXHIBITS ************************** ================Appel aux communications & expositions ===================== INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING AND INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS NLP+IA 96 Conference internationale sur le traitement automatique des langues et ses applications industrielles TAL+AI 96 JUNE/juin 4 - 6, 1996 Moncton, New-Brunswick, CANADA TOPICS OF INTEREST: The NLP Study Group (GRETAL) at l'Universite de Moncton is organizing an international conference on NLP with industrial applications as its focus. The conference will address a number of issues: What are NLP's recent developments from a theoretical and a practical angle, what kinds of challenges it faces, how could it help to improve productivity, how could it help to improve quality of products and services? What quality control criteria should it be adopting? Papers are invited on all aspects of natural language processing, including, but not limited to, * natural language understanding and generation of textual, spoken and hand-written language, * natural language interfaces to databases, expert systems, or industrial applications * machine translation, computer aided translation, translation aids, * syntax, semantics, pragmatics, lexicon, morphology, * computer assisted language learning, * dictionaries, corpora, & other language resources * multimodality * multilinguality * NLP industrial applications * papers of every kind that can help bridge the gap between the theory and practice of NLP. LANGUAGE: Authors are invited to submit preliminary versions of their papers not exceeding 1000 words (exclusive of references) either in English or in French, the two official languages of the conference. Proceedings would be published in the language of the submitted texts. Simultaneous translation of the presentations would be available at the conference. SUBMISSION: 1) The first page should be an identification page containing the title, the first author's name, affiliation, address, a five (5) line summary and a five (5) keyword list specifying the subject area. 2) Papers, 1000 words in length, should be submitted preferably by e-mail in Postscript or in 4 hard copies (A4 page size, 12 pt, times roman, 2.5 cm (1 inch) margins all around) to: NLP+IA 96 / TAL+AI 96 Dr. Chadia Moghrabi, professeure GRETAL Departement d'informatique Universite' de Moncton Moncton, N. B. CANADA E1A 3E9 Phone: (506) 858-4521 Fax: (506) 858-4541 E-mail: nlp-ia@umoncton.ca 3) For both kinds of submissions, a plain text version of the identification page should be sent separately by electronic mail, using the single word: SUBMISSION/soumission in the subject line. TITLE/Titre: FIRST AUTHOR/ Premier auteur: ADDRESS/Adresse: KEYWORDS/Mots clefs: ABSTRACT/Resume: REFEREEING: All extended abstracts shall be refereed by three members of the program committee. INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM COMMITTEE: Lars Ahrenberg (Linkoeping U., Sweden) Susan Armstrong (ISSCO, U. Geneva, Switzerland) Christian Boitet (U. Grenoble, France) Pierrette Bouillon (U. Geneva, Switzerland) Nicoletta Calzolari (Inst, of Comp. Ling., Pisa, Italy) Jaime Carbonell (Carnegie-Mellon U., USA) Veronica Dahl (Simon-Fraser U., Canada) Chrysanne DiMarco (U. Waterloo, Canada) Gerard Ellis (Royal Melbourne Inst. of Tech., Australia) Pierre Isabelle (CITI, Canada) Eva Hajicova (Charles U., Prague) Susan Haller (U. Wisconsin, USA) Eduard Hovy (ISI, USA) John Hutchins (East-Anglia, UK) Margaret King (ISSCO, U. Geneva, Switzerland) Richard Kittredge (U. Montreal, Canada) Guy Lapalme (U. Montreal, Canada) Gudrun Magnusdottir (U. Gothenburg, Sweden) Yuji Matsumoto (Nara Inst. of Sc.& Tech., Japan) Marie Meteer (BBN, USA) Chadia Moghrabi (U. Moncton, Canada) Johanna Moore (U. Pittsburgh, USA) Allan Ramsay (UMIST, UK) Geoffrey Sampson (U. Sussex, UK) Joerg Schuetz (U. Saarbrucken, Germany) Manfred Stede (TU Berlin, Germany) Thierry van Steenberghe (U. Louvain, Belgium) Junichi Tsujii (U. Tokyo, Japan) SCHEDULE: Extended abstracts are to be submitted by the 31st of january 1996. Notification of receipt will be mailed to the first author soon after receipt. Authors will be notified of acceptance by 15 March 1996. Camera-ready copies of final full papers must be received by the 1st of May 1996 along with registration fees. Authors are also requested to indicate their intention to participate in the conference as soon as possible to the same e-mail address with the single word INTENTION in the subject line. EXHIBITS: Anyone wishing to arrange an exhibit or present a demonstration should send a brief electronic description along with a specification of physical requirements (table size, power, telephone connections, number of chairs, etc.) to the same address with the single word EXHIBIT in the subject line. OTHER ACTIVITIES: Accompanying persons can enjoy the lovely outdoor living in New-Brunswick and visit the highest tides in the world. Moncton is only 20km away from the sandy beaches of Shediac, la Capitale mondiale du homard. The lobster season would be open, so everybody can indulge in delicious meals of the famous Atlantic lobster. CONFERENCE ORGANIZATION: The conference is organized by GRETAL, Groupe d'etude sur le traitement automatique des langues at the Universite' de Moncton. The members of the organizing committee are: Chadia Moghrabi, Professor of Computer Science, Conference chair Sadek Eid, Professor of Industrial engineering, director Manufacturing Technology Centre, and Conference co-chair Jalal Almhana, Professor of Computer Science Louise Bosi, Professor of French Studies Julien Chiasson, Director & professor of Computer Science Gaston Losier, Ad. director, Centre d'innovation scientifique et technologique en industrie Charles Zama, Ad. director, Centre de traduction et de terminologie juridique Paul Tarau, Professor of Computer Science DEADLINES: Intention to participate as soon as possible Extended abstract submission January 31, 1996 Notification of acceptance March 15, 1996 Camera-ready & registration May 1 , 1996 ====================================================================== Topic 3: From: Elisabeth Maier Subject: ECAI-96 Workshop: Dialogue Processing in Spoken Language Systems (CfP) CALL FOR PAPERS AND PARTICIPATION ECAI-96 Workshop on Dialogue Processing in Spoken Language Systems 12th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-96) Budapest, Hungary currently scheduled for August 12 or 13, 1996 ORGANIZING COMMITTEE -------------------- Elisabeth Maier Marion Mast Susann LuperFoy DFKI Saarbruecken Erlangen University MITRE PROGRAM COMMITTEE ----------------- Nick Campbell ATR, Japan Morena Danieli CSELT, Italy Norman Fraser VOCALIS, UK Julia Hirschberg AT&T, USA Susann LuperFoy MITRE, USA Elisabeth Maier DFKI Saarbruecken, Germany Marion Mast Erlangen University, Germany WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION -------------------- The development of dialogue components for interactive systems that employ speech as input and/or output modality has to take into account problems that are specific for the treatment of spoken language. Among these problems are the following: * Segmentation of dialogue contributions into basic units While for dialogue systems that cope with written / typed language a sentence can serve as basic unit for dialogue modeling, this approach cannot be applied for the treatment of spontaneous speech or even read speech, where phrasing of sentences may differ from speaker to speaker. Spoken input is often incomplete, incorrect and contains interruptions and repairs; full sentences occur only very occassionaly. Therefore, new basic units for the development of dialogue models have to be proposed in order to also capture fragmentary input. Related to this problem is the determination of the boundaries that exist between the various dialogue units in longer single-speaker dialogue turns. While for written language punctuation and paragraphing serve as indicator for segmentation, reliable cues for the segmentation of spoken language still have to be determined. It can be expected that dialogue models that build on such a new notion of basic dialogue units differ significantly from dialogue models that treat only written language. A contrastive examination of the differences between dialogue models that treat spoken and written dialogue contributions is a point of future research. * Interaction of prosody and dialogue processing For some of the above-mentioned issues the consideration of prosody can contribute to a solution of the problems. Prosody can perform many functions such as chunking turns into smaller units, emphasizing important information, indicating discontinuities (e.g. interruptions, corrections), expressing intention and emotion. Therefore components which make prosodic information accessible to dialogue processing become more and more important. * Robustness Robustness of all components is an important issue in the design and the development of spoken language systems. With respect to dialogue components robustness is related to the following topics: * recognition errors and missing information * unexpected input * clarification * disfluencies * Evaluation So far the evaluation of spoken language systems has been focusing on the quality of the speech components. Evaluation criteria for the dialogue components of such systems are still to be developed. A careful evaluation can contribute to the improvement of the system with respect to what a user expects from the machine and how she adjusts to its abilities. Therefore criteria like user acceptance and user satisfaction have to be taken into account. We invite contributions that address any of the topics indicated above and provide innovative solutions. We are also interested in seeing papers that discuss NEW APPLICATIONS addressing the above-mentioned problems. SUBMISSIONS ----------- Papers (maximally 10 pages, point size no less than 12) can be submitted either as hard copy or in electronic form (prefered): Hard copy submissions should consist of four copies and have to be sent to the address indicated below. Electronic submissions will be accepted for papers in self-contained Latex style or plain text. They must not refer to any external files or styles. Papers generated from other sources, e.g., Word, must be submitted by mail. Papers must include on the first page: the title, author's name(s), affiliation, complete mailing address, phone number, fax number, e-mail, an abstract of 300 words maximum, and up to five keywords. Each paper will be refereed by at least two members of the program committee. In order to encourage discussions before the workshop we intend to make all submitted papers electronically available. We will announce the site address after the submission date. DEADLINES --------- Hardcopies AND postscript files must arrive not later than 1st March 1996 at the address below. >>>>>>>>>>>>> Submission Deadline: March 1, 1996 >>>>>>>>>>>>> Notification Date: April 1, 1996 >>>>>>>>>>>>> Final Workshop Programm: April 20, 1996 >>>>>>>>>>>>> Final Papers Due: May 15, 1996 PUBLICATION ----------- Workshop proceedings will be published by ECAI. We currently also investigate the possibility to publish the workshop papers in book form. WORKSHOP PARTICIPATION ---------------------- Since workshop attendance will be limited to maximally 40 people, persons without a paper should contact the organizers as soon as possible. Preference will be given to people who present a paper, to their co-authors and to persons who submitted a paper. Other persons interested in attending will be asked to provide a one-page description of their background and of their interest in the workshop. REGISTRATION ------------ This workshop will take place directly before the general ECAI-conference. It is an ECAI policy, that workshop participation is not possible without registration for the general conference. ADDRESSES --------- Papers have to be submitted to the following address: Elisabeth Maier DFKI GmbH Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3 D-66123 Saarbruecken Germany e-mail: Elisabeth.Maier@dfki.uni-sb.de Please address any further correspondence to Marion Mast Friedrich-Alexander-Universitaet Erlangen-Nuernberg Lehrstuhl fuer Mustererkennung (Inf. 5) Martensstr. 3 D- 91058 Erlangen Germany e-mail: mast@informatik.uni-erlangen.de WEB PAGES --------- For further information about this workshop we will install Web Pages that can be retrieved via the ECAI-96 home page. The address of the home page is http://wwwis.cs.utwente.nl:8080/mars/ECAI96.html. Information about ECAI-96 workshops is listed under http://www.dfki.uni-sb.de/ecai96/workshops.html ====================================================================== eof ======================================================================