Date: 2 Jan 1997 ----------------- ====================================================================== TOPICS: 1. NEW! SIGGEN WEB SITE 2. Contribute: workshop papers, thesis, siggen directory. 3. ELRA News 4. CFP: RIAO'97 Computer Assisted Information Searching On Internet 25 June 97, Montreal - Deadline March 3, 1997 5. NLP Research Positions in Sydney, Australia 6. CFP: EMNLP-2 (SIGDAT) - Deadline: March 3, 1997 August 1-2, 1997 (Immediately following AAAI-97) - Brown University 7. CFP: EUROSPEECH 97 - Deadline: 1 February 1997 Rhodes, Greece, 22-25 September 1997 8. CFP: BISFAI'97 - Deadline: February 2nd 1997 June 16-18, 1997, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel ====================================================================== ====================================================================== Topic 1: From: siggen@cs.bgu.ac.il (Michael Elhadad) Subject: SIGGEN Web site Happy new year! SIGGEN is finally moving to the era of the World Wide Web. The SIGGEN Web site is: Please check it and contribute material to add there. Send me all your comments. I have been thinking about adding a members directory. I believe the best way is if you want to have your name and http address added there with a short description of your interests, please mail them to me and I will maintain the directory (until someone contributes a program to do these things automatically). From now on, I will add conference and workshop announcements on the Web site and only send pointers in the newsletter (which will become much shorter). With the new year, feel free again to contribute to this newsletter: send questions, update on your research, paper announcements, reaction on published papers, reviews etc. The newsletter is sent approximately every two months. If you want to remove your name from the list, please send email to siggen@cs.bgu.ac.il. ====================================================================== Topic 2: From: siggen@cs.bgu.ac.il (Michael Elhadad) Subject: Previous workshop papers Many people have observed that many Generation papers have appeared in one of the previous Workshops on Generation. These papers are difficult to find. We should make every effort to make them more available. This is a call to all authors of papers previously published in one of the Generation Workshops to send to SIGGEN a pointer to the file(s) of the paper. The SIGGEN Web site also contains pointers to generation resources: papers, thesis, software. Contribute! ====================================================================== Topic 3: From: elra@calvanet.calvacom.fr (Khalid Choukri) Subject: INFORMATION FROM ELRA (European Language Resources Association) INFORMATION FROM THE European Language Resources Association ELRA News ELRA (European Language Resources Association), was founded in Luxembourg in February 1995, as a non-profit organization, with the goal of promoting the creation, verification and distribution of Language Resources (LR). In addition to helping users and developers, government agencies, and other interested parties exploit language resources for a wide variety of use, ELRA serves as the European repository for EU-funded language resources, and interact with similar bodies in other parts of the world. Funded in the medium term by membership fees, grants from the European Commission and national governments, together with projects income, the Association will be financially self-supporting in the long run. A 12-member Board is in charge of the strategy and objectives to be adopted by the Association. Relevant LR are Spoken Databases, Lexica, Grammars, Written Corpora and Terminological Data. These are required for the development of speech and text processing systems for a large number of applications in various information technology areas. ELRA licences LR for R&D, as soon as these are made available. According to the agreements made between ELRA and its providers, resources can be either reserved for research purposes or used for the development of products and services. Licence agreements, drawn with the support of lawyers, are used for negotiations. Such contracts are available at ELRA office. Lexica, Corpora (spoken and written), Grammars and Tools are described in easy-to-understand presentation forms. All these documents can be found on the ELRA Web site. ELRA Newsletters --------------- A Newsletter is released by ELRA every Quarter. The next three issues will primarily and alternatively be devoted to each of the 3 Colleges of the Association : spoken, written and terminological resources. The October Newletter (vol.1 n.3) is already available at ELRA office. It is entirely dedicated to Terminology. The next two issues will be dedicated to written and spoken resources. The ELRA Web site ----------------- The ELRA Web site is now available in English and French. The URL addresses are: English version: French version : ELRA Language Resources catalogue --------------------------------- A catalogue of the LR negotiated or under negotiation by ELRA can be found on our Web site. For quotation, please refer to this site or directly to ELRA office. A published version is released twice a year (together with number 1 and 3 of the Newsletter). Resources appearing in the catalogue are separated according to the three Colleges : spoken resources, written resources (corpora, lexica and tools) and terminological resources. The catalogue consists of : 1) Spoken resources : 30 databases (recordings from microphone, telephone, continuous speech, isolated words, several languages, etc.). 2) Written resources : * 9 monolingual and multilingual corpora * 12 monolingual lexica * Over 30 multilingual lexical * A linguistic software platform and Grammars Development platform 3) Terminological resources : over 90 databases with a wide range of domains and several languages (French, English, German, Spanish, Danish, Italian, Catalan, Turkish, Polish, Portuguese). ELRA Membership --------------- ELRA members are entitled to substantial discounts on public prices of the resources and other products (such as the Guide for Terminology Agreements and several commercial reports). ELRA membership is open to any organization, public or private, with full membership (including voting privileges) being available to organizations registered in Europe. Purely for organizational purposes, members will be assigned to one of the Colleges on the basis of their main area of interest. The annual membership fee has been set at a modest ECU 1,000 to encourage broad participation. You may also opt to join more than one College, in which case you will be required to pay multiple membership fees. Please ask for a membership form or download it from the ELRA Web site. For further information : ELRA/ELDA 87, Avenue d'Italie FR-75013 PARIS FRANCE Tel : +33 01 45 86 53 00 Fax : +33 01 45 86 44 88 E-mail : elra@calva.net http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html ====================================================================== Topic 4: From: Abdellatif.Saoudi@irin.univ-nantes.fr (Abdellatif Saoudi) CALL FOR PAPERS 5TH RIAO CONFERENCE COMPUTER ASSISTED INFORMATION SEARCHING ON INTERNET 25th-27th June 1997 McGill University, Montreal, Quebec H3A 2T7,Canada, ========================================================= "RIAO 97" will be the fifth conference in the series. RIAO 85 took place in France, RIAO 88 at MIT (Cambridge MA., U.S.A.), RIAO 91 in Barcelona, Spain, and RIAO 94 in New York. The Conference is organized by the "CENTRE DE HAUTES ETUDES INTERNATIONALES D'INFORMATIQUE DOCUMENTAIRE" (CID) Paris. Facing the growth of document information available throught the Internet way (Web sites, NewsGroups or emails), it is necessary to offer new technologies, mechanisms and systems to manage all that information. The huge amount of information implies rapid indexing and retrieval engines, efficient datamining and knowledge discovery systems in oder to find relevant or strategic information. On one hand,linguistic tools are necessary when managing textual information ; one the other hand specifics problems have to be solved regarding the management of multimedia information : multimedia information characterisation, search mechanisms, multimedia interfaces. Tools are also necessary to deal with the diversity of the information source. Where is the relevant information stored? Which are the best sources? How can heterogeneous repositories be queried, ...? Finally, the current ways of diffusing information such as the Internet lead to security problems that must not be overlooked. The purpose of this conference is to confront specialists in media contents with specialists in Web-based searching. More specifically, papers are expected to cover one or more of the following topics : A - Rapid indexing and retrieval engines, automatic abstracting B - Evaluation of linguistic tools in information retrieval C - Information Retrieval from several repositories - Identification of duplicated documents in different repositories (different languages, structures or versions), - Unification of documents from heterogeneous repositories ; datawarehousing, - Interest of the use of datamining and knowledge discovery strategies when querying large repositories, - Evaluation of repository for a given search strategy. D - Technology watch techniques using strategy on the Web ; content adressable electronic mail, news group, WWW systems. E - Architecture - How can large data flows be exploited by information retrieval tools, - Distributed, multi-agent architectures F - Image - Image content characterisation, human and automatic image description methods, - Image search strategies G - Sound - Sound content characterisation, - Automatic identification of sound type: speech, music..., - Spoken language recognition, - Word-spotting. H - Content-based compression techniques I - Multimedia interfaces : Iconic, navigational, speech interface to web search J - Data security problems: copyright protection, internet crime K - Web-related international conventions and policies IMPORTANT DATES : =================== Closing date for submission: 20 January 1997 Notification of acceptance: 10 March 1997 Camera-ready copy: 10 May 1997 Conference start-date: 25 June 1997 Detailed information regarding RIAO-97 can be found on the World Wide Web Server : http://www.sciences.univ-nantes.fr/RIAO97/ ====================================================================== Topic 5: From: Robert Dale Subject: NLP Research Positions in Sydney, Australia Are you in the northern hemisphere? Chilly, huh? Well: why not carry out research in language technology in Sydney, Australia ... The Microsoft Research Institute's Language Technology Group, situated on the campus of Macquarie University in Sydney, is currently seeking to hire two research scientists. The successful candidates will work on a number of ongoing and new projects in the areas of natural language processing and language engineering. We are particularly interested in hiring people to work in the following three areas: automatic text generation; intelligent text processing and information extraction; and connecting language and action. Generally, we expect research staff to spend approximately 50% of their time working on group projects, and 50% pursuing other research avenues of their own devising. We are particularly interested in candidates with previous experience in one or more of the following areas: corpus-based and statistical methods; message extraction and understanding; the use of natural language processing techniques in information retrieval; the design and development of dialogue systems; text planning; and linguistic realisation. Applicants should have a postgraduate degree in computational linguistics, computer science or linguistics, and competence in several areas drawn from the following portfolio: Computational linguistic theory: a basic understanding of parsing techniques; a grounding in one or more syntactic theories; a familiarity with techniques in statistical text processing; an understanding of issues in discourse processing; an awareness of the breadth of issues in the field; and The ability to program (well!) in one or more of: C, C++, or Lisp. MRI offers excellent computational facilities and the opportunity to work in an expanding team that carries out leading-edge research in language technology. MRI is located on the campus of Macquarie University in North Ryde, a suburb of Sydney, Australia, one of the world's most beautiful cities. The positions will become available from January 1997, although actual start dates are negotiable. The positions are open to those considering postdoctoral positions as well as more experienced candidates. Please send your application (including a CV and list of publications) by email to Robert Dale (Robert.Dale@mq.edu.au) as soon as possible and by January 1st 1997 at latest. Early indications of interest would be useful if received by December 13th 1996. Informal enquiries can be sent to the same address. Find out more about MRI at ====================================================================== Topic 6: From: yarowsky@blaze.cs.jhu.edu (David Yarowsky) Subject: Call for Papers - EMNLP-2 The Association for Computational Linguistics and its Special Interest Group SIGDAT announce the Second Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-2) Preliminary Call For Papers WHEN: August 1-2, 1997 (Immediately following AAAI-97) WHERE: Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA CONFERENCE DESCRIPTION: In the spirit of SIGDAT events, this conference will offer a general forum for novel research in corpus-based and statistical natural language processing. Areas of interest include (but are not limited to): - robust parsing, phrase structure analysis - part of speech tagging - term and name identification - word sense disambiguation - morphological analysis - anaphora resolution - event categorization - discourse structure identification - alignment of parallel texts and bilingual terminology - language modelling - lexicography - machine translation - spelling and grammar correction SPECIAL SESSIONS: INFORMATION EXTRACTION and INFORMATION RETRIEVAL In addition, we encourage submissions that describe and evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, and recent advances in corpus-based NLP as applied to INFORMATION EXTRACTION and INFORMATION RETRIEVAL (IR). In recent years a number of corpus-based techniques for the automatic linguistic annotation of text have been developed. How well do these techniques for lexical tagging, parsing, anaphora resolution, etc., handle the specific problems encountered in practical language processing tasks like information extraction and information retrieval? When and how do current techniques fail? What new methods have been developed to address the deficiencies of existing algorithms for these tasks or to address problems specific to information extraction? What problems still lack an adequate empirical solution? How can data-driven NLP methods be used to improve the performance of IR systems? Conversely, how can feedback from an IR system effectively inform empirical techniques for natural language understanding? PROGRAM CHAIRS: Claire Cardie Cornell University (chair) Ralph Weischedel BBN Systems and Technologies (co-chair) LOCAL ARRANGEMENTS: Eugene Charniak Brown University SPONSOR: SIGDAT (ACL's special interest group for linguistic data and corpus-based approaches to NLP) FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION: Authors should submit a full-length paper (3500-8000 words) either electronically or in hardcopy. Electronic submissions should be mailed to "cardie@cs.cornell.edu" and must either be (a) plain ascii text, (b) a single postscript file (US letter format), or (c) a LaTex file. In the latter case, please use the aclsub style file and include only .EPS (encapsulated postscript) figures. The aclsub style file is available at http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/People/cardie/emnlp/aclsub.sty or via ftp from ftp.cs.cornell.edu/pub/cardie/emnlp/aclsub.sty. Hardcopy submissions should be mailed to Claire Cardie (address below), and should include six (6) copies of the paper. REQUIREMENTS: Papers should describe original work. A paper accepted for presentation cannot be presented or have been presented at any other meeting. Papers submitted to other conferences will be considered, as long as this fact is clearly indicated in the submission. SCHEDULE: Submission deadline: March 3, 1997 Notification date: April 21, 1997 Camera-ready copy due: June 10, 1997 Conference dates: August 1-2, 1997 CONTACTS: Claire Cardie Ralph Weischedel Cornell University BBN Systems and Technologies Department of Computer Science 70 Fawcett Street 4142 Upson Hall Cambridge, MA 02138 Ithaca, NY 14850 USA USA cardie@cs.cornell.edu weischedel@bbn.com (607)255-9206 (617)873-3496 ====================================================================== Topic 7: From m.scordilis@wcl.ee.upatras.gr Mon Dec 23 17:46:27 1996 Subject: EUROSPEECH'97 FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS European Speech Communication Association (ESCA) EUROSPEECH'97 5th EUROPEAN CONFERENCE20 ON SPEECH COMMUNICATION AND TECHNOLOGY RHODES, GREECE 22-25 SEPTEMBER 1997 FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS AIMS The Fifth biennial European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology, EUROSPEECH'97, of the European Speech Communication Association (ESCA), will be held on the island of Rhodes, Greece, organized by the University of Patras, Wire Communications Laboratory. Rhodes is situated in the southern Aegean Sea, in the Mediterranean and it is famous for its natural beauty, its archeological treasures and its highly developed tourism. ESCA is the European organization that promotes research, development and applications in SPEECH COMMUNICATION AND TECHNOLOGY. Host cities of the previous conferences were Paris (1989), Genova (1991), Berlin (1993) and Madrid (1995). The upcoming conference will include the latest developments in this field of major international importance, presented in oral and poster sessions . Furthermore it will include several keynote addresses by distinguished scientists. All presentations and printed material will be in English, which is the official language of the conference. In addition to the technical program, an exhibition of products, services and prototypes related to Speech and Language Communication and Technology will be held during the conference. Prospective authors are invited to propose papers in any of the listed technical areas. TECHNICAL AREAS A. Speech production and perception B. Phonetics and phonology C. Prosody D. Neurophysiology, psychoacoustics and psycholinguistics of speech E. Auditory modeling F. Speech analysis and modeling G. Neural networks for speech and language processing H. Robust speech processing, signal enhancement and noise reduction I. Text-to-speech synthesis J. Speech and audio coding and transmission K. Speech recognition and understanding L. Language modeling M. Spoken dialogue systems design N. Speaker and language recognition O. Spoken language resources, assessment, standards and human factors P. Multimodal speech and language processing20 Q. Technology for speech and language acquisition and learning R. Applications for speech, language and hearing disorders and aids for the communication impaired S. Speech and language engineering for the telecommunications T. Systems, hardware and architectures for speech processing U. Applications of speech technology V. Other related areas or emerging techniques and applications SUBMISSION OF ABSTRACTS Abstracts of original, not elsewhere published papers may be submitted either by post (four copies must be submitted) or by e-mail in postcript or ascii format only. They must be received no later than 1 February 1997 together with the completed EUROSPEECH'97 Abstracts Cover Form given below. Abstracts should not exceed two A4 pages (including figures and references). All submissions will be acknowledged. E-mail abstracts will be acknowledged within 24 hours. If they are not acknowledged, please check the e-mail address and resubmit. All abstracts will be refereed by the Scientific Programme Committee. Submission of an abstract implies a commitment to present the paper if accepted. ABSTRACTS SUBMISSION ADDRESS: EUROSPEECH'97 Wire Communications Laboratory Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Patras 26110 Rion, Patras, GREECE E-mail: Abstracts-EURO97@wcl.ee.upatras.gr SPECIAL SESSIONS EUROSPEECH'97 will include a Special Session on "Education for Language & Speech Communication Sciences", which aims to address educational issues of Phonetics, Spoken Language Engineering, Speech and Language Therapy, Computer assisted learning (CAL) and the use of internet. Abstracts submitted for this session must be indicated in the space provided in the Abstracts Cover Form. For more information please contact: Gerrit Bloothooft 20 Research Institute for Language and Speech (OTS) Trans 10, 3512 JK Utrecht, The Netherlands Phone: +31.30.2536042 Fax: +31.30.2536000 Email: Gerrit.Bloothooft@let.ruu.nl SCHEDULE Submission of abstracts To be received by 1 February 1997 Notification of acceptance To be mailed out by 1 April 1997 Submission of photo-ready papers To be received by 20 May 1997 SATELLITE EVENTS ESCA WORKSHOP ON INTONATION, 18-20 September 1997, at Athens, Greece. Information contact: Antonis Botinis Tel: +30 1 7211119 Fax: +30 1 7228981 E-mail: tonesca@di.uoa.gr WWW server: http://www.di.uoa.gr/esca EU SPEECH PROJECTS DAY, Monday, 22 September 1997, 9:00-13:00, Convention Centre, Rodos Palace Hotel, Rhodes, Greece. Information contact: Giovanni Battista Varile European Commission, DG XIII E5 - Language Engineering Tel: +352 430 132 867 Fax: +352 430 134 999 E-mail: Giovanni.Varile@lux.dg13.cec.be COCOSDA WORKSHOP'97 (The International Coordinating Committee for Speech Databases and Speech I/O Systems Assessment), Friday, 26 September 1997, 9:00-13:00, Convention Centre, Rodos Palace Hotel. Information contact: Mark Liberman University of Pennsylvania Tel: +1 215 898 0464 Fax: +1 215 573 2175 E-mail: myl@unagi.cis.upenn.edu European Tutorial & Research Workshop on AUDIO-VISUAL SPEECH PROCESSING: Computational & Cognitive Science Approaches, 27-28 September 1997, Centre, Rodos Palace Hotel, Rhodes (Greece). Information contact: Christian BENOIT Institut de la Communication Parlee, UPRESA CNRS No 5009, Universite Stendhal,20 BP 25 X, F38040 Grenoble Cedex 9, FRANCE Tel: (+33).4.76.82.43.36 Fax: (+33).4.76.82.43.35 E-mail: benoit@icp.grenet.fr Web page: http://ophale.icp.grenet.fr/ COST WORKSHOP (Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical research), 26-27 September 1997, Athens, Greece. Information contacts: COST 249 COST 250 Continuous Speech Recognition Speaker Recognition in Telephony Jean Pierre Martens Andrea Paoloni Tel: +32 91 264 3395 Tel: +39 6 5480 3351 Fax: +32 91 264 3594 Fax: +39 6 5480 4405 E-mail: martens@elis.rug.ac.be E-mail: pao@fub.it WEB-SITE The Call for Papers, Call for Exhibitors and Sponsors, all necessary forms, and continuously updated information about the Conference, as well as about Greece and Rhodes, can be found at our web site at: ====================================================================== Topic 8: From: Leo Joskowicz Subject: BISFAI'97 ****** Call for Papers ****** BISFAI '97 The Fifth Bar-Ilan Symposium on Foundations of Artificial Intelligence June 16-18, 1997 Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel in cooperation with Israel Association for Artificial Intelligence Israeli Society for Theoretical Computer Science Gelbart Institute for Mathematical Sciences The Association for Mathematics of Language The Leibniz Center for Research in Computer Science The focus of BISFAI '97 will be on Intelligent Agents. The Symposium will, however, retain its broad scope, and welcomes high quality research papers in various areas of Artificial Intelligence, including machine learning, automated reasoning, knowledge representation, neural nets, natural language processing, etc. The concept of an agent has become important in both artificial intelligence and mainstream computer science. An agent is a hardware or software system that is automonous, interactive with and reactive to its environment and other agents. An agent can also be pro-active in taking the initiative in goal-directed behaviour. We solicit papers in all areas of Artificial Intelligence, and in particular in the area of Intelligent Agents. Agents have a clear and growing importance, both practical and theoretical. Because of their commercial relevance, we encourage practitioners from industry to submit papers dealing with various practical aspects. Distinguished Invited Speakers (tentative): C. Boutilier (U. of British Columbia) V. Lesser (U. of Massachusetts) J. Rosenschein (Hebrew U.) G. Shafer (Rutgers U.) Y. Shoham (Stanford U.) P. Struss (Technical University of Munich) W. Wahlster (DFKI GmbH) THE 1997 ISRAELI FEDERATED COMPUTING CONFERENCE: The Symposium will be part of the new Israeli Federated Computing Conference (IFCC). For contact points on this conference, see below). The IFCC will also include the Eighth Israeli Conference on Computer-Based Systems and Software Engineering (CBSE), which will take place on June 18-19, 1997, and the Fifth Israeli Symposium on Theory of Computing and Systems (ISTCS'97), which will take place on June 17-19, 1997. Paper Submission: Submit three hard copies of an extended abstract (4-10 pages), or full paper, by February 2nd 1997, to Leo Joskowicz Institute of Computer Science The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Givat Ram, Jerusalem 91904, Israel E-mail: josko@cs.huji.ac.il Authors will be notified of acceptance by 20th March 1997. A final version of the accepted will appear in the conference preprints, which will be distributed to participants at the symposium. Selected refereed full length papers will be published in a special issue of the Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence as a permanent record of the Symposium. These should be submitted shortly after the conclusion of the Symposium. Information on registration, accommodations, etc., will appear in future announcements, or contact: bisfai@cs.biu.ac.il. The web page site is: Symposium Chair S. Kraus (Bar-Ilan U.) Program Co-Chairs D. Lehmann (Hebrew U.) L. Joskowicz (Hebrew U.) ====================================================================== eof ======================================================================