Date: 10 Jun 1996 ----------------- ====================================================================== TOPICS: 1. Autumn School - roesner@faw.uni-ulm.de (Dietmar Roesner) Sept 23-27, Magdeburg, Germany 2. HLT Survey on the WWW - vincew@cse.ogi.edu 3. Job Offer: ELRA - Language Resources Consultant - elra@calvanet.calvacom.fr (Khalid Choukri) 4. Dissertation defense: Concise Natural Language Generation from Formal Specifications - Hercules Dalianis 5. Postgraduate Studentship - Univ of WOLVERHAMPTON - 6. KOMET-Penman (Multilingual) - ====================================================================== Topic 1: Subject: Call for Participation> Autumn School of GLDV, Date: Sept 23-27, Magdeburg, Germany From: roesner@faw.uni-ulm.de (Dietmar Roesner) First Announcement Herbstschule (autumn school) of the Gesellschaft f"ur linguistische Datenverarbeitung (GLDV; association for linguistic data processing) Challenges for computational linguistics: coping with multiple languages, media and sciences September 23 - 27, 1996 Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Germany ============================================================ courses: (5 lessons, 1 1/2 hours each) Elisabeth Andre' (German Center for Artificial Intelligence, Saarbr"ucken) (DFKI Saarbr"ucken) Intelligent Multimedia Userinterfaces John Batemann (GMD Darmstadt) Multilingual Multilingual Text Generation for Information Systems Hans Haller (IAI Saarbr"ucken) Elements of Quality Assurance on Texts: Controlled Language and Grammar Checking Programs Roland Hausser (University of Erlangen-N"urnberg) Semantic Parsing Chris Mellish (University of Edinburgh) Applied Automatic Generation of Texts and Hypertexts Dietmar R"osner (University of Magdeburg) Knowledge Representation with Terminological Logics All but Chris Mellishs courses will be held in German, therefore a basic knowlege of German language is required. We try to provide scholarships for -- primarily -- students from Eastern Europe. Please send your application to the address below. Registration Fees before 30 June, 1996 Members of GLDV Nonmembers students: 80,-- DM 100,-- DM others : 120,-- DM 150,-- DM Registration Fees after 30 June, 1996 Members of GLDV Nonmembers students: 120,-- DM 160,-- DM others : 140,-- DM 200,-- DM Further information including abstracts of the courses, a list of hotels and their prices, a description of the location together with a registration form will soon be available on the homepage of autumn school '96 at http://www-ai.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/herbstschule96.html If you want to book a bed in the youth hostel, please note it on the registration form. ============================================================= Otto-von-Guericke Universit"at Magdeburg Institut f"ur Informations- und Kommunikationssysteme Prof. Dr. Dietmar R"osner Universit"atsplatz 2 D-39106 Magdeburg tel: +49/391/67-1 87 18 fax: +49/391/67-1 20 18 email: herbstschule@iik.cs.uni-magdeburg.de www: http://www-ai.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/herbstschule96.html ====================================================================== Topic 2: Subject: HLT Survey on the WWW Date: Thu, 9 May 96 13:16 PDT From: vincew@cse.ogi.edu A book entitled "Survey of the State of the Art of Human Language Technology" is now available at http://www.cse.ogi.edu/CSLU/HLTsurvey/ . The survey consists of articles by 97 authors in the following chapters: 1. Spoken Language Input 2. Written Language Input 3. Language Analysis and Understanding 4. Language Generation 5. Spoken Output Technologies 6. Discourse and Dialogue 7. Document Processing 8. Multilinguality 9. Multimodality 10. Transmission and Storage 11. Mathematical Methods 12. Language Resources 13. Evaluation Within a few months, the Survey will be published as a book by Giardini Publishers in Italy and by Cambridge University Press elsewhere. The electronic version of the Survey will remain on-line, but will be modified slightly based on copy-editing by the publishers. The Survey was funded by the National Science Foundation and the European Commission, with additional support provided by the Center for Spoken Language Understanding at the Oregon Graduate Institute and the University of Pisa. Enjoy! Editorial Board Ron Cole Editor-in-Chief Joseph Mariani Hans Uszkoreit Annie Zaenen Victor Zue Managing Editors Giovanni Battista Varile Antonio Zampolli -------------------------------------------------- Vince Weatherill Center for Spoken Language Understanding Oregon Graduate Institute of Science & Technology vincew@cse.ogi.edu 503-690-1142 __________________________________________________ ====================================================================== Topic 3: Subject: ELRA - JOB ADVERTISEMENT FOR A LANGUAGE RESOURCES CONSULTANT Date: Tue, 14 May 1996 From: elra@calvanet.calvacom.fr (Khalid Choukri) JOB ADVERTISEMENT FOR A LANGUAGE RESOURCES CONSULTANT The European Language Resources Association (ELRA) was established in February 1995, with the encouragement of the European Commission, to promote the development and exploitation of Language Resources (LR). Language Resources include all data necessary for language engineering, such as monolingual and multilingual lexica, text corpora, speech databases and terminology. The role of the non-profit Association is to promote the production of LR and to collect, validate, and make them available to users. It will gather information on market needs and encourage the Commission and other funding bodies to support the development of the LR most urgently needed. The Association has members drawn from every country in the European Union and expects to attract subscribers from throughout the world. At present, ELRA is financed from membership fees and grants; in the future the Association will derive income from the sale of licences to users world wide. After an initial start-up period of four years, it is planned that the Association will be financially independent and self-supporting. more information about ELRA available from the web: http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html ELRA is seeking someone to undertake a short-term (3-4 months) full-time temporary contract related to Language Resources identification. The appropriate candidate should be well-established in the field, having a thorough knowledge of the Language Resources (LRs) area. He or she should also be aware of related ongoing projects within the EU, and be willing to devote his or her time to this work. This will carried out in coordination with ELRA experts and under the ELRA's CEO supervision. (Citizenship of, or residency papers for an EU country required) The tasks to be carried out are briefly summarized below. 0. Proposition for a workplan (tasks, budget). 1. Listing the major written corpora and lexicon resources (state of the Art) 2. Contacting potential suppliers to complete / review the list 3. Identifying the technical work that is still to be done (estimating the effort of packaging the data into a marketable product) 4. Ascertaining the legal situation regarding ownership and copyright 5. Negotiating the marketing of such resources through ELRA/ELDA and estimating the revenues/costs-effectiveness. 6. Signing "letter of intent" for such marketing arrangements on behalf of ELRA/ELDA. 7. Reporting to the CEO and handling over all information for contract conclusion with priorities/hierarchies set up regarding the each resources. The work is planned for a period of three months starting by the 20th of May. A list of deliverables should be produced: D1 - A list of LRs suppliers (with identified LRs) to be approached, "letter of intent" sample due 30 May D2 - First progress Report, due 30 June D3 - Second progress Report, due 30 July D4 - Estimates for product collection D5 - Signed letters of intent D4 and D5 are due by September 10th. The sub-contract will be split onto two phases: Phase 1: Tasks 1 and 2, Deliverable D1 Phase 2: Tasks 3 to 7, Deliverables D2 to D7, Compensation: A Basic sub-contract for phase 1 will be concluded and then a second one for phase 2. Compensation will be based on the number of agreements that will be concluded ("bonus performance"). A separate budget will be allowed for Travel expenses. For more information please contact: Khalid CHOUKRI ELRA Executive Director Tel. +33 1 45 86 53 00 Fax. +33 1 45 86 44 88 87, Avenue D'ITALIE, 75013 PARIS Email: elra@calvanet.calvacom.fr Web: http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html .................................... ====================================================================== Topic 4: From: Hercules Dalianis Subject: Public Dissertation Defence Date: Wed, 29 May 1996 Public dissertation defence: Title: Concise Natural Language Generation from Formal Specifications At The Royal Institute of Technology, Room F2, 7th Floor, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Electrum, Kistag}ngen 16, Kista, Stockholm, Sweden, Monday, June 10 Juni 1996, 13.00 hrs Respondent: Hercules Dalianis Opponent: Dr. David McDonald Supervisors: Dr. Carl Gustaf Jansson and Dr. Eduard Hovy Abstract In natural language generation a computer automatically creates natural language, e.g. English, Chinese, or Greek, from a computational representation. One use of Natural Language Generation is to describe software systems. Formal specification is a method to describe computer system for software development purposes. Most people do not understand formal languages, but they understand natural languages, therefore it is desirable to have a tool which automatically generates natural language from a formal specification. To generate natural language from computational representations, a number of processes must be carried out. Part of the process called sentence planning is the task of aggregation. Aggregation, which has been called ellipsis or coordination in Linguistics, is the process which removes redundancies during generation of a natural language discourse without losing any information, making text more fluent and easily read. People do aggregation all the time without thinking about it. The content of software engineering tools, data bases and expert systems, etc., is often highly redundant and needs aggregation before it can be successfully paraphrased to natural language. This thesis addresses various aspects of aggregation. When do we need to carry out aggregation? What types of aggregations are there? Are there any general rules for how to aggregate? How are the rules related to each other? Aggregation may give rise to ambiguities: How can we solve them? How is aggregation related to the other generation processes? In this thesis we develop the concept of aggregation and provide a number of solutions to these questions and refer to the growing literature on the problem. This work contributes to a novel part of the sentence planning phase of natural language generation. ====================================================================== Topic 5: From: Ruslan Mitkov Subject: Studentship Date: Thu, 30 May 96 SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES AND EUROPEAN STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF WOLVERHAMPTON OPPORTUNITY FOR POSTGRADUATE STUDY IN COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE ENGINEERING The University of Wolverhampton invites applications for a PhD studentship from candidates interested in undertaking research in Computational Linguistics and Language Engineering. The project ------------- The successful applicant is expected to work on Language Engineering approaches to anaphor resolution which will complement the ongoing research on this topic at the School. Prerequisites --------------- Applicants should possess a good honours degree (or an equivalent degree if not obtained in a UK university) and will be expected to register for a higher degree (MPhil/PhD). Overseas candidates must have a good command of English. Candidates should have a background of Computational Linguistics. A good knowledge of one or more programming languages is essential. Bursary --------- The current value of the bursary is £ 5, 500. In addition, up to six teaching hours a week would be possible (in consultation with the supervisor and depending on the appropriateness of the various modules on offer). Application and deadline ---------------------------- Deadline for application is 25 June 1996. The following documents are requested: (i) Application form (to be obtained from Ms. Leslie Barlow Email L.Barlow@wlv.ac.uk, tel. 44-1902-323317, fax 44-1902-323316; please cite reference RS138). (ii) Curriculum Vitae (iii) covering letter in which research interests are outlined, previous (e.g. undergraduate) and/or current projects are summarised and background in both Computational Linguistics and programming is described. Applications should be sent to: Ms. Leslie Barlow The Research Support Unit University of Wolverhampton Dudley Campus Castle View Dudley, DY1 3HR United Kingdom Enquiries ---------- Those wishing to discuss this opportunity for postgraduate study in Computational Linguistics can contact Dr. R. Mitkov Email r.mitkov@wlv.ac.uk, tel. (44-1902) 322471. The appointment of a research student is part of the expansion of the Division of Linguistics in the School of Languages and European Studies and is in line with the research policy of the School which has designated Computational Linguistics and Language Engineering as areas of research excellence. Topics of active research are anaphor resolution, automatic abstracting, neural networks, natural language interfaces. ====================================================================== Topic 6: From: John Bateman Subject: KOMET-Penman (Multilingual) Date: Thu, 23 May 1996 Now available for comments: KOMET-Penman (Multilingual): KPML. The WWW-Online documentation of the latest release of the KPML multilingual generation environment is now available at: http://www.darmstadt.gmd.de/publish/komet/kpml-0.9-doc/kpml-doc.html The system provides extensive debugging and development facilities for large-scale systemic-functional linguistic resources; multilinguality in the resources is strongly supported. The latest release (KPML 0.9) includes graphically-oriented debugging facilities showing traversal through system networks and choosers, focused tracing facilities, resource maintenance, extensive example sets linked directly to the resource definitions, generation server capabilities, speedy generation options, and much more. 0.9 represents a final beta-release of the system and comments concerning all aspects of the system and its documentation are being actively sollicited. The next version of the documentation will also include an index, so suggestions for index terms are also very welcome! Further info: John Bateman (bateman@gmd.de). --------------------------------------------------------------------- ================================================================= Dr. John A. Bateman GMD/IPSI: KOMET Multilingual Text Generation Dolivostr. 15 tel.: +49/6151-869-826 D-64293 Darmstadt, Germany. fax.: +49/6151-869-818 ================================================================= URL: http://www.darmstadt.gmd.de/~bateman ====================================================================== eof ======================================================================