Date: 07 Dec 1997 ----------------- ====================================================================== TOPICS: 1. Q: Evaluation of NL dialogue systems? 2. CFP: COLING-ACL 98 -- Call for Workshop and tutorial proposals -- Deadline: 31 Dec 97 3. CFP: Book -- Advances in Scalable Text Summarization Deadline: 30 Dec 97 4. CFP: ETAI -- Electronic Transactions on AI 5. CFP: TAPD'98 -- Tabulation in Parsing and Deduction Deadline: 12 Dec 97 6. CFP: SIGDAT'98 -- Very Large Corpora Deadline: 20 Apr 98 7. CFP: FOIS'98 -- Formal Ontology in Information Systems Deadline: 15 Dec 97 8. CFP: Discourse Relations and Discourse Markers -- Coling/ACL'98 Deadline: 10 Mar 98 9. CFP: INLG'98 -- International Workshop on NL Generation Deadline: 28 Jan 98 10.JOB: ITRI, Brighton -- Research opportunities 11.JOB: ELRA/ELDA ====================================================================== ====================================================================== Topic 1: Q: Evaluation of NL dialogue systems? From: "gas0" Ramon Lopez-Cozar Delgado Electronics and Computer Technology Dept. University of Granada 18071 Granada, Spain e-mail: gas0@elvira.ugr.es Fax: +34-58-243230 Dear SIGGEN colleagues: I am a PhD student and a researcher in the Department of Electronics and Computer Technology at the University of Granada. I am working on a natural language dialogue system that aims to answer product orders and questions of clients in fast-food restaurants. It may be considered a rule-based expert system whose behaviour is decided from a recorded dialogue corpus obtained at a real restaurant. The system is quite developed at the moment, though it needs some improvement to enhance the level of understanding and naturalness. I would like to get information about the available evaluation methods of such a system, as well as information about the evaluation of natural language dialogue systems in general (used techniques, bibliography, web sites, etc.). In order to provide more information, I enclose a short abstract about the system I am working on. --- Abstract ---- The system goal is to simulate the restaurant-clerk behaviour. It must be able to provide information and ask client questions similarly to how a human clerk does. In addition we want it to process spontaneous voiced-speech, which at a linguistic level means to consider phenomena such as unnecessary word repetition, grammatical order change, anaphora, discordances, context information, grammatical mistakes, etc. We also expect a learning ability for the system to allow new information (foods, drinks, ingredients, etc.) acquisition from client interaction. The basis for the system development is as follows: - Unnecessary information in client utterance: Usually, not all words in a sentence are necessary to obtain its semantic interpretation, which can be achieved from meaning words only (keywords). To obtain such interpretation, the system uses keywords and a keyword lattice analysis. This analysis is carried out by means of syntactic and semantic rules. From dialogue corpus we found out that clients usually use a small number of words in their utterances (communication client-clerk tends to be telegram-like), therefore a system dictionary can be size-reduced. - Use of a small number of patterns: Clients tend to communicate using a small number of patterns to order products, ask questions, or modify previous product orders. Using these patterns the system can extract most semantic meanings from clients' utterances. In case the meaning cannot be obtained, clients are asked to help the system understanding process or to repeat the utterance input differently. The system is a compound of several modules: Input Interface, Control Module, Memory Module, Restaurant-product Knowledge Base, Lexicon, and Output Interface. At the moment the system takes about 30.000 C++ code lines. Its inputs and outputs are natural language text sentences. Its Input interface is well developed but still needs to define some syntactic and semantic rules, since now only product orders and questions are carried out. We are about to start the Modification Module set up. This module will be activated when the desire of modification of previous orders is detected in client input. Also, the Learning Module needs to be started. This module will be activated when "possible" unknown foods, ingredients, drinks, etc. are detected in client input. These new products will be learnt, so they could be recognized the next time they appear in client sentences. The Natural Language Generator needs improvement to enhance the expression power, though at the moment, the system can build both syntactically and semantically right sentences, in a very natural fashion, by using pronouns and context information available at the moment of the natural language generation. The system uses a graphic interface that now is useful but simple. In future we would like to improve it by including product-pictures and graphics of the "artificial" restaurant-clerk face, in order to improve a friendly communication. We think the integration of the system in a voice-controlled response system represents its best application. To do so, it would need a speech-to-text interface that provides a text-word sequence from client voice. A text-to-speech interface should transform the system output into synthesized voice. Theoretically the whole system could be part of an automatic front-end dialogue system for clients in restaurants, or for those at home who use telephone for ordering. --- End of Abstract ------ I do not know if this short abstract would be enough for you to get an idea of the system, so in case you need any further information, or in case you have any comment or remark, please let me know. I look forward to hearing from you soon. Thanks again. Sincerely, Ramon Lopez-Cozar Delgado Electronics and Computer Technology Dept. University of Granada 18071 Granada Spain. ====================================================================== Topic 2: CFP: COLING-ACL 98 -- Call for Workshop and tutorial proposals From: pete@sharp.co.uk (Pete Whitelock) COLING-ACL '98 WORKSHOPS & TUTORIALS CALL FOR PROPOSALS University of Montreal Montreal Quebec Canada The Programme Commitee would like to receive proposals for tutorials and workshops to be held in conjunction with the Joint COLING-ACL Conference. TUTORIALS Tutorials will be held on Sunday 9th August, the day preceeding the conference proper. Tutorials may address any topic of current or possible future relevance to the field. The duration of each tutorial should be approximately 3 hours. Those interested in presenting a tutorial should send a 300-500 word proposal to Pete Whitelock, pete@sharp.co.uk, describing the relevance of the subject matter to the conference participants, an outline of the tutorial's content, and a short statement of the proposer's relevant experience. WORKSHOPS Workshops will be held on Saturday 15th and Sunday 16th of August, immediately following the conference proper. Workshops will normally be one day in length, but may extend to a second day if required. Those interested in organising a workshop should send a brief proposal to Pete Whitelock, pete@sharp.co.uk, describing the topic of the workshop and its relevance to Coling, the approximate number of participants expected and the likely duration of the workshop, and a short statement of the proposer's relevant experience. It is hoped that it will be possible to accomodate all proposals for tutorials and workshops, but the room space available will place an upper limit on the number. Since proposals will be accepted primarily on a first-come first-served basis, proposers are encouraged to submit as early as possible. Early submission is particularly important if workshop presentations are to be refereed. In any event, no proposals will be accepted after the final deadline of Dec 31st. ====================================================================== Topic 3: CFP: Book -- Advances in Scalable Text Summarization From: Inderjeet Mani CALL FOR PAPERS (BOOK) ADVANCES IN SCALABLE TEXT SUMMARIZATION Inderjeet Mani and Mark Maybury, editors With the explosion in the quantity of on-line information in recent years, demand for text summarization technology appears to be growing. Commercial companies are starting to offer text summarization capabilities, often bundled with information retrieval tools. Further, there is considerable interest in mining information from large databases, many of which have text content. These recent developments offer opportunities as well as substantial challenges for research in text summarization. In general, such developments have created a practical need for summarization systems which scale up when applied to large volumes of unrestricted text. In response to this challenge, a number of new approaches have emerged. Traditionally, shallower techniques have been leveraged to achieve the desired levels of scalability and domain-independence, but recent advances in robust information extraction as well as approaches integrating statistical and symbolic techniques have opened up possibilities for more powerful yet scalable summarization techniques. With the renewed interest in text summarization, another challenge is to develop rigorous criteria to help evaluate different methodologies, in order to better advise investors and the interested public on technology choices. This state-of-the-art collection will bring together research aimed at advancing the scientific frontiers of text summarization to meet these new practical challenges and opportunities. **The principal aim of this book is to collect some of the key results to date and to identify promising research issues for the benefit of students, corporate researchers, and research program managers interested in learning more about this field.** Submissions are invited on original research in all aspects of text summarization, including, but not limited to: TECHNIQUES * Statistical, linguistic, and knowledge-based techniques in intelligent summarization * Text summary generation * Capturing cohesion and coherence relations in text * Exploiting advances in information extraction in summarization * Exploiting domain knowledge in scalable text summarization * Combining scalability with abstraction in summarization * Tailoring summaries to particular users, tasks, and contexts NEW PROBLEMS * Multilingual summarization * Multimodal summarization * Multi-document/multi-source summarization FUNDAMENTAL ISSUES in THEORY AND PRACTICE * Classification of summarization systems * Theoretical foundations, including cognitive models * Evaluation methods and metrics * Summarization in operational contexts: requirements, architectures, lessons learned Criteria for selection will include clarity, originality, relevance, and significance of results. The papers will be reviewed by a committee of experts. In addition, authors will be asked to relate the content of their papers to other related papers in the book. In addition to new contributions, the book will also include reprints of classic papers in the field. Submission Information DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION: December 30, 1997 PAPERS REVIEWED BY: March 15, 1997 DRAFT TO PUBLISHERS: July 15, 1997 Interested authors should submit to the address below three copies of a previously unpublished paper no more than 20 pages long, single-spaced, addressing a specific text summarization issue or reporting novel methods and results. Authors should indicate whether the paper is being submitted elsewhere. Please include your name and address on the first page. For more information, please contact: Dr. Inderjeet Mani The MITRE Corporation, W640 11493 Sunset Hills Road Reston, Virginia 22090, USA Internet: imani@mitre.org Phone: (703) 883-6149 Fax: (703) 883-1379 ====================================================================== Topic 4: CFP: ETAI -- Electronic Transactions on AI From: Elisabeth Andre *** Call for Papers for the First Issues of the *** ETAI - ELECTRONIC TRANSACTIONS ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Organized and published under the auspices of the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI) http://www.ida.liu.se/ext/etai AREA: Intelligent User Interfaces SCOPE: The ETAI is organized into several specialized areas. The area of Intelligent User Interfaces focuses on design principles, methodologies and tools that make man-machine communication easier and more effective. For ETAI, papers are invited from the whole spectrum of Intelligent User Interfaces research. Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to: - knowledge-based tools and environments for user interface design and development - adaptive and customizable user interfaces - user modeling - intelligent interface agents and agent-based interaction - knowledge-based presentation of information - intelligent interfaces to the internet, for tasks such as design, presentation, access and navigation - natural-language and multimodal interfaces - intelligent front-ends to multimedia, hypermedia and virtual environments - architectures for intelligent user interfaces - evaluation and analysis of intelligent user interfaces applications, such as tutoring and advisory systems, computer-supported collaborative work, computer-aided design, decision-support systems, information kiosks CONTRIBUTIONS: The ETAI welcomes contributions for the first issues of the area: Intelligent User Interfaces. Beside high-quality papers, we seek conference and workshop reports, book reviews and links to software that is available and can be run over the net. Submission guidelines can be found under http://www.ida.liu.se/ext/etai/submission.html For more details contact the area editor (address see below). AREA EDITOR: Elisabeth Andre, DFKI, Germany AREA EDITORIAL COMMITTEE (as of September 1997): Niels Ole Bernsen, Odense University, Denmark Peter Brusilovsky, CMU, USA Lynda Hardmann, CWI, NL James Lester, North Carolina State University, USA Joe Marks, MERL, USA Chris Mellish, University of Edinburgh, UK Ehud Reiter, University of Aberdeen, UK Constantine Stephanidis, FORTH, Greece Oliviero Stock, IRST, Italy Annika Waern, SICS, Sweden WHAT IS THE ETAI? The ETAI represents a novel approach to electronic publishing. We do not simply inherit the patterns from the older technology, but instead we have rethought the structure of scientific communication in order to make the best possible use of international computer networks as well as electronic document and database technologies. Articles submitted to the ETAI are reviewed in a 2-phase process. After submission, an article is open to public online discussion in the area's News Journal. After the discussion period of three months, and after the authors have had a chance to revise it, the article is reviewed for acceptance by the ETAI, using confidential peer review and journal level quality criteria. This second phase is expected to be rather short because of the preceding discussion and possible revision. During the entire reviewing process, the article is already published in a "First Publication Archive", which compares to publication as a departmental tech report. Compared to mailgroups, the News Journals offer a more persistent and reputable forum of discussion. Discussion contributions are preserved in such a way that they are accessible and referencable for the future. In other words, they also are to be considered as "published". One additional type of contributions in News Journals is for links to software that is available and can be run over the net. This is particularly valuable for software which can be run directly from a web page. The creation of bibliographies, finally, is a traditional activity in research, but it is impractical in paper-based media since by their very nature, bibliographies ought to be updated as new articles arrive. The on-line maintenance of specialized bibliographies within each of its topic areas is a natural function in the ETAI. For more details see: http://www.ida.liu.se/ext/etai/ ADDRESS FOR FURTHER INFORMATION: Elisabeth Andre DFKI GmbH Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3 D-66123 Saarbruecken Germany Phone: +49 681 302 5267 Fax: +49 681 302 5341 email: andre@dfki.de ====================================================================== Topic 5: CFP: TAPD'98 -- Tabulation in Parsing and Deduction From: Eric Villemonte de la Clergerie TAPD'98 1st Workshop on 'Tabulation in Parsing and Deduction' April 2-3, 1998 Paris, France Organized by INRIA in collaboration with CEDRIC of CNAM WEB page: http://pauillac.inria.fr/~clerger/tapd.html MOTIVATIONS Tabulation techniques are becoming a common way to deal with highly redundant computations occurring, for instance, in Natural Language Processing, Logic Programming, Deductive Databases, or Abstract Interpretation, and related to phenomena such as ambiguity, non-determinism or domain ordering. Different approaches, including for example Chart Parsing, Magic-Set rewriting, Memoization, and Dynamic Programming, have been proposed whose key idea is to keep traces of computations to achieve computation sharing and loop detection. In addition, tabulation also offers more flexibility to investigate new parsing or proof strategies and to represent ambiguity by shared structures (Shared Proof or Parse Forest). The first objective of this workshop is to compare and discuss these different approaches. The second objective is to present tabulation and tabular systems to potential users in different application areas. One major area of application is Natural Language Processing, where tabulation has been known for a long time (CKY, Earley, chart parsing). However, sophisticated tabulation techniques are required for the more and more complex grammatical formalisms now used in NLP (unification, constraints, structural complexity). Contributions in other areas, such as picture parsing, genome analysis, or complete deduction techniques, are also encouraged. TOPICS (not exclusive) -- Tabulation Techniques: Chart Parsing, Tabling, Memoization, Dynamic Programming, Magic Set, Generic Fix-Point Algorithms -- Applications: Parsing, Generation, Logic Programming, Deductive Databases, Abstract Interpretation, Deduction in Knowledge Bases, Theorem Proving -- Static Analysis: Improving tabular evaluation -- Parsing or resolution strategies. -- Efficiency issues: Dealing with large tables (structure sharing, term indexing), Execution models, Exploiting the domain ordering (subsumption). -- Shared structures (parse or proof forest): Formal analysis, representation and processing. WORKSHOP FORMAT: The workshop will be a 2-day event that provides a forum for individual presentations of the accepted contributions as well as group discussions. SUBMISSION PROCEDURE: Authors are invited to submit before December 12, 1997 a 4-page position paper or abstract concerning a theoretical contribution or a system to be presented. Due to tight time constraints, submissions will be handled exclusively electronically (LaTeX, PostScript, dvi or ascii format). Submissions should include the title, authors' names, affiliations, addresses, and e-mail. Submissions must be sent to Eric.Clergerie@inria.fr The collection of selected papers will be available at the workshop. After the workshop, authors are invited to submit a full paper for publication in a special issue of the Journal of Logic Programming oriented towards Natural Language Processing. The authors should note that this second submission will be treated according to the standards of the Journal of Logic Programming. SCHEDULE: Submission of contributions: 12 December 1997 Notification of acceptance: 26 January 1998 Final versions due: 20 February 1998 PROGRAM COMMITTEE: Bernard Lang (chairman) -- INRIA, France Francois Bry -- University of Munich, Germany Eric de la Clergerie -- INRIA, France Marc Dymetman -- Xerox, France Mark Johnson -- Brown University, USA Baudouin Le Charlier -- University of Namur, Belgium Mark Jan Nederhof -- University of Groningen, NL David Rosenblueth -- University of Mexico, Mexico Manuel Vilares -- University of La Coruna, Spain David S. Warren -- University of New York at Stony Brook, USA ORGANIZING COMMITTEE: Francois Barthelemy -- CNAM, Paris, France Eric de la Clergerie -- INRIA, Rocquencourt, France Bernard Lang -- INRIA, Rocquencourt, France Manuel Vilares -- University of La Coruna, Spain LOCAL ORGANIZATION: Claudie Thenault -- INRIA, Relations Exterieures, France ORGANIZATION: Up-to-date information will be available at http://pauillac.inria.fr/~clerger/tapd.html For request, please contact: Eric de la Clergerie INRIA Rocquencourt Tel: +33 1 39 63 54 10 Domaine de Voluceau - BP 105 Fax: +33 1 39 63 53 30 78153 Le Chesnay Cedex E-mail: Eric.Clergerie@inria.fr ====================================================================== Topic 6: CFP: SIGDAT'98 -- Very Large Corpora From: Eugene Charniak SIXTH WORKSHOP ON VERY LARGE CORPORA Preliminary Call for Papers WHEN: August 15-16, 1998 (immediately following ACL/COLING-98) WHERE: University of Montreal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION: As in past years, the workshop will offer a general forum for new 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 PROGRAM CHAIR: Eugene Charniak Brown University SPONSOR: SIGDAT (ACL's special interest group for linguistic data and corpus-based approaches to NLP) FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION: Only hard-copy submissions will be accepted. Authors should submit six (6) copies of their full-length paper (3500-8000 words) to Eugene Charniak at the Johns Hopkins University address below. Authors should consult the primary call for papers in February for updated specifications. SCHEDULE: Submission Deadline: April 20, 1998 Notification Date: June 1, 1998 Camera ready copy due: June 22, 1998 CONTACT: Eugene Charniak e-mail ec@cs.brown.edu Address: Before February 1, 1998 and After June 1, 1998 Department of Computer Science Brown University Providence RI 02912-1910 Address: From February 1, 1998 until June 1, 1998 Department of Computer Science Johns Hopkins University NEB 224, 3400 N. Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21218-2694 ====================================================================== Topic 7: CFP: FOIS'98 -- Formal Ontology in Information Systems From: Alessandro Artale INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON FORMAL ONTOLOGY IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOIS'98 In conjunction with the 6th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning KR'98 TRENTO, ITALY, JUNE 6-8, 1998 Under the auspices of the Project ONTOINT (Ontological Tools for Heterogeneous Knowledge Organization and Integration) funded by the Italian National Research Council Research on ontology is becoming increasingly widespread in the computer science community. Its importance has been recognized in fields as diverse as qualitative modelling of physical systems, natural language processing, knowledge engineering, information integration, database design, geographic information science, and intelligent information access. Various workshops addressing the engineering aspects of ontology have been held in the past few years. However, ontology - by its very nature - ought to be a unifying discipline. Insights in this field have potential impacts on the whole area of information systems. In order to provide a solid general foundation for this work, it is therefore important to focus on the common scientific principles and open problems arising from current tools, methodologies, and applications of ontology. The purpose of this conference is to take a first step in this direction. As the heterogeneity of the program committee indicates, the conference will have a strongly interdisciplinary character. Expected participants include computer science practitioners as well as linguists, logicians, and philosophers. Although the primary focus of the conference is on theoretical issues, methodological proposals as well as papers addressing concrete applications from a well-founded theoretical perspective are welcome. TOPICS Examples of problem areas that may be addressed at the conference include: THEORETICAL ISSUES * Foundations: parthood, constitution, identity, integrity, dependence, causality * Kinds of entity: particulars vs. universals, continuants vs. occurrents, abstracta vs. concreta, attributes, relations, qualities, quantities, tropes or moments, states, situations, environments * Matter, space, time, motion, change * Natural kinds, organisms, artifacts * The ontology of social reality: legal and administrative entities, artistic expressions * The ontology of information and information processing: representations, signs, software products, virtual reality, cyberspace * Top-level ontological taxonomies: new proposals or critical analyses of existing ones * Cognitive foundations of ontological distinctions * Kinds of ontology: top-level ontologies, domain ontologies, task ontologies, application ontologies * Ontological commitment APPLICATION AREAS * Knowledge organization, integration and standardization * Intelligent information access * Information systems design * Knowledge engineering * Conceptual modelling * Qualitative modelling * Lexical semantics * Terminology integration * Product knowledge integration * Geographic information systems * Legal information systems TOOLS AND METHODOLOGIES * Ontological and linguistic instruments for conceptual analysis * Methodologies for ontology development, maintenance, and integration SUBMISSION OF PAPERS Papers will be selected on the basis of a rigorous review of full paper contributions. Authors should submit 5 copies to the Conference Chair by December 19, 1997. Papers received after the deadline or not conforming to the submission format will be rejected without review. Submitted papers must be unpublished and substantially different from papers under review. Papers that have been or will be presented at small workshops/symposia whose proceedings are available only to attendees may be submitted. Each submission should include a title page containing the title, author(s), affiliation(s), submitting author's mailing address, telephone number, fax number and e-mail address, as well as an abstract and keywords indicating the topic areas listed above that best describe the contribution. Submissions must be at most 16 pages, excluding the title page and the bibliography, with a maximum of 38 lines per page and an average of 75 characters per line (corresponding to the LaTeX article-style, 12pt) using LaTeX or Microsoft Word. Papers should be sent in 5 copies. Fax or electronic submissions will not be accepted. Those proposing to submit papers must complete the form at the WWW address by Monday December 15, 1997. If intending authors do not have WWW access, then an e-mail message must be sent to by the same date, giving details of any proposed submission in the following format: Title: Author: <Last name, initials> Author: <Insert as many more author lines as necessary> ... CorrespondingAuthor: <name of corresponding author> CorrespondingEmail: <email of corresponding author> CorrespondingAddress: <address of corresponding author> Keywords: <insert list of keywords, preferably chosen from above list> Abstract: <insert short abstract, max 200 words> EndAbstract: <mark the end of the short abstract thus> Should intending authors not have e-mail access, the information above should be sent by letter to arrive to the Conference Chair by Monday December 15, 1997. The proceedings will be published in the IOS-Press (Amsterdam) bookseries 'Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications' and will be available at the conference. Final camera-ready copies of the accepted papers will be due by March 9, 1998. Authors will be responsible for preparing the final camera-ready in conformity with the formatting requirements laid down by the publisher (see instructions at the FOIS'98 web page http://mnemosyne.itc.it:1024/fois98/submissions.html). Final papers will be allowed at most fourteen (14) pages in the conference proceedings style (corresponding to approximately 20 article-style LaTex pages). SCHEDULE Monday, December 15, 1997 Electronic abstracts due Friday, December 19, 1997 Papers due Friday, February 6, 1998 Results sent to authors Monday, March 9, 1998 Final papers due Saturday-Monday, June 6-8, 1998 FOIS'98 CONFERENCE COMMITTEE CONFERENCE CHAIR ORGANIZATION CHAIR Nicola Guarino Alessandro Artale National Research Council ITC-IRST LADSEB-CNR Povo, I-38050 Trento, Italy Corso Stati Uniti, 4 e-mail: artale@irst.itc.it I-35127 Padova, Italy e-mail: guarino@ladseb.pd.cnr.it ORGANIZING COMMITTEE Alessandro Artale - Enrico Franconi (ITC-IRST, Trento, Italy) Nicola Guarino - Claudio Masolo (LADSEB-CNR, Padova, Italy) Luca Pazzi - Sonia Bergamaschi (Univ. of Modena, Italy) Geri Steve - Aldo Gangemi (ITBM-CNR, Roma, Italy) Cristiano Castelfranchi - Rino Falcone (IP-CNR, Roma, Italy) ====================================================================== Topic 8: CFP: Discourse Relations and Discourse Markers -- Coling/ACL'98 From: Eduard Hovy <hovy@ISI.EDU> Coling/ACL 98 workshop Discourse Relations and Discourse Markers August 15, 1998 Universite de Montreal Montreal/Canada The notion of discourse relation has received many interpretations, some of which are hardly compatible with one another. Nonetheless, there is a consensus among researchers that intersegment relations hold between adjacent portions of a text and that these relations may be signalled by linguistic means, including so-called cue phrases, aspect and mood shifts, theme inversions, and other markers. The workshop intends to bring together researchers working on discourse relations and discourse markers in different linguistic traditions and different NLP applications. The particular focus of the workshop is the issue of discourse relations from the viewpoint of linguistic realization. Specifically, contributions should address one or more of the following questions: * What are sound methodologies for comparing similar discourse markers (contrastive studies, distribution analyses, etc.)? * What are sound methodologies for relating discourse relations with potential realizations? * Are there discourse relations that are *always* lexically signalled? Are there any that are *never* lexically signalled? * What non-lexical (i.e., syntactic or prosodic) means are used to signal a relation? * In production, how does one decide whether to signal a relation at all? * In production, how does one motivate a choice among candidate signals for a given relation? * In production, how does the choice of signal interact with other decisions (in particular, those of linearizing some tree or graph structure)? * In analysis, is it possible to reliably infer discourse relations from surface cues? * In analysis, how can one disambiguate polysemous signals such as "and", "since" (temporal or causal) etc.? * What are useful lexical representations of discourse markers, for both analysis and production? * What are useful representations of discourse relations (and the entities they relate), such that they facilitate the realization decision? What features would one like to have handy in a representation so that choices can be made easily? * Are there significant differences between realizations in spoken and written language? * How do individual languages differ in terms of any of the above issues? Organizing committee The workshop is organized by Manfred Stede (Technical University, Berlin) Leo Wanner (University of Stuttgart) Eduard Hovy (ISI/USC, Marina del Rey) This call for papers as well as future information on the workshop can be found at http://www.cs.tu-berlin.de/~marker/aclcolingws.html Timetable Deadline for electronic submissions: March 10, 1998 Deadline for hardcopy submissions: March 13 (arrival date) Notification of acceptance: May 1, 1998 Final manuscripts due: June 12, 1998 ====================================================================== Topic 9: CFP: INLG'98 -- International Workshop on NL Generation From: Graeme Hirst <gh@cs.toronto.edu> ============================= 9th International Workshop on NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION 5-7 August 1998 Prince of Wales Hotel Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS (For more information, visit http://logos.uwaterloo.ca/~inlg98 ) The 9th biennial Workshop on Natural Language Generation will be held in the scenic town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, near Niagara Falls, in Ontario, Canada, on 5-7 August 1998. The INLG workshop is the principal gathering for researchers in natural language generation, providing a pleasant atmosphere for stimulating and informative talks on all aspects of the topic. The workshop attracts a healthy mixture of researchers from both universities and research institutes, graduate students, and visitors from related fields such as machine translation, multimedia presentation planning, and parsing. About 65 people are expected to attend the workshop, which traditionally has had a very diverse international representation. The town of Niagara-on-the-Lake is in the heart of one of Canada's major fruit-growing and wine regions, and is 30 minutes' drive from Niagara Falls. It is one of the oldest settlements in Canada, with many fine examples of Victorian architecture. Niagara-on-the-Lake bills itself as the prettiest town in Canada, and many would agree: its main streets are quaint and picturesque, with many interesting shops, cafes, and restaurants. It is also the home of the Shaw Festival, one of the top North American repertory theatre companies. The workshop is sponsored by the Association for Computational Linguistics and ACL SIGGEN (Special Interest Group on Natural Language Generation). The workshop is in the week immediately prior to the joint conference of COLING and ACL, in Montreal, Canada (10-14 August 1998). After the workshop, a bus will take participants who wish to attend COLING / ACL directly to the Toronto train station, for an express train to Montreal (approximately 4 hours). TOPICS OF INTEREST Of interest are papers on all topics relating to the automated production of natural language, including but not limited to: discourse structure; grammar; lexis and lexical choice; text planning and schemas (macroplanning); sentence planning (microplanning); semantics and knowledge representation; register, genre, and pragmatics; generator architecture; realization; generator applications; system descriptions; generator evaluation; planning of text formatting; generation in multimedia planning and presentation systems; speech synthesis. Also welcomed are demonstrations of generation systems, or modules of systems, running either via the Web or on a Sun computer to be provided at the workshop. REQUIREMENTS FOR SUBMISSION Papers should describe unique work not published before. They should emphasize the creative and interesting aspects of the work, but should also describe empirical validation and testing as much as possible. Papers that are being submitted to other conferences must state this fact on the first page. FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION Theoretical papers must not exceed 10 pages, including title, references, figures, etc. Please use no smaller than 11pt font, with margins of 1 inch / 2.5 cm all around. Papers not satisfying the specified length and formatting requirements will be rejected without review. System demonstrations will be reviewed as well. Please send an outline, clearly marked as a system demonstration in the heading, that describes the demonstration, including if possible screen shots. Outlines may not exceed 4 pages, all included, using font no smaller than 11pt and margins of 1 in / 2.5 cm all around. Outlines not satisfying the specified length and formatting requirements will be rejected without review. ELECTRONIC SUBMISSION Electronic submissions should be in the form of a PostScript file. This file should be sent to hovy@isi.edu, with the subject field "INLG submission". SUBMISSION IN HARD COPY Hardcopy submission is possible too. Five copies of the paper or demonstration outline should be sent to: Eduard Hovy, INLG-98 Information Sciences Institute 4676 Admiralty Way Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695 U.S.A. DEADLINES Electronic submissions must be received by 28 January 1998, so that they can be printed and checked for completeness. Electronic submissions will be accepted only if they can be printed at ISI. Hardcopy submissions must be received by 1 February 1998. Late papers will be returned unreviewed. Notification of receipt will be e-mailed to the first author (or designated author) soon after receipt. Authors will be notified of acceptance before 10 March 1998. Camera-ready copies of final papers prepared in a format to be specified, preferably using a laser printer, must be received by 15 June 1998, along with a signed copyright release statement. WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS The workshop is being organized by Chrysanne DiMarco of the University of Waterloo, with the assistance of Graeme Hirst of the University of Toronto. The Program Chair is Eduard Hovy of USC/ISI. General workshop questions: Chrysanne DiMarco, cdimarco@logos.uwaterloo.ca, phone +1 519 888 4443 General paper-submission questions: Eduard Hovy, hovy@isi.edu, phone +1 310 822 1510 x731 PROGRAM COMMITTEE Eduard Hovy, USC/ISI, Marina del Rey (chair) Stephan Busemann, DFKI, Saarbruecken Susan Haller, University of Wisconsin-Parkside Helmut Horacek, University of the Saarland Xiaorong Huang, Formal Systems, Toronto Kristiina Jokinen, ATR, Kyoto Guy Lapalme, University of Montreal Elisabeth Maier, DFKI, Saarbruecken Chris Mellish, University of Edinburgh Marie Meteer, BBN Jon Oberlander, University of Edinburgh Cecile Paris, CSIRO, Sydney Owen Rambow, CoGenTex Inc., Ithaca Ehud Reiter, University of Aberdeen Elke Teich, Macquarie University, Sydney Marilyn Walker, AT&T Labs Research, Florham Park For more information, visit the INLG-98 Website: http://logos.uwaterloo.ca/~inlg98 ====================================================================== Topic 10: JOB: ITRI, Brighton -- Research opportunities From: Donia Scott <donia.scott@itri.bton.ac.uk> <http://www.itri.bton.ac.uk/posts/summer97.html> ITRI, University of Brighton The Information Technology Research Institute (ITRI) at the University of Brighton, is a major centre for research in Computational Linguistics and Language Engineering. Our principal research areas are natural language generation, lexicons, corpora and human computer interfaces. Our current research programme addresses the following theoretical issues: anaphora, architectures for natural language generation, automated interface design, constraint based reasoning, controlled languages, corpora, diagrammatic reasoning, discourse, document design, integrating text and graphics, lexical knowledge bases, lexical representation, multilinguality, natural language interfaces, text generation, underspecification, word sense disambiguation. The Institute is comprised of around twenty staff and students: research professors, readers, research fellows, research assistants, postgraduate students and technical and administrative staff. We also regularly host visiting researchers from other universities worldwide. The Institute is housed in a self-contained brand new office suite with excellent computing and network facilities and full administrative support. As a dedicated research department, we place great emphasis on career management and development, and participation in the wider research community. We are currently recruiting to fill up to six fixed-term research posts over the next few months, ranging from research officers to principal research fellows for up to three or five years in duration. A number of PhD studentships may also be available. If you are interested in working with us, we would be interested in hearing from you. Please address all enquiries, enclosing a CV if possible, to the address below. Suitable potential candidates will be sent further information. Meanwhile, more detailed information regarding the Institute is available on our web site. Ms Vivienne Wicks, Research Administrator, Information Technology Research Institute, University of Brighton, Lewes Road, Brighton, BN2 4GJ, United Kingdom. Tel: +44 1273 642900 Email: admin@itri.brighton.ac.uk Fax: +44 1273 642908 URL: http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/ ====================================================================== Topic 11: JOB: ELRA/ELDA From: elra-elda@calva.net (Malin Nilsson) ---------------------------------------------------------------- TECHNICAL ASSISTANT at ELRA/ELDA in Paris ---------------------------------------------------------------- ELRA, the European Language Resources Association, has an immediate vacancy for a Technical assistant for ELDA, its Paris-based distribution agency. ELRA, a non-profit association registered in Luxembourg, was established in 1995 and receives financial support from the European Commission and national governments to promote the development and exploitation of Language Resources - monolingual and multilingual lexica, text corpora, speech databases and terminology - in Europe. Enjoying strong backing from the language engineering industry, ELRA's operations are conducted by the CEO and his team at ELDA. The role of the new technical assistant will be to contribute to the work of a small support team in the development of the infrastructure for the collection, validation, and licensing of LR and in the interactions with the relevant players (i.e. producers, owners and users of LR who may be in the industrial, commercial or academic world; and governmental and non-governmental agencies), with a particular focus on textual and terminological resources. This position yields excellent opportunities for young, creative, and motivated candidates wishing to participate actively in establishing/building the European Union Language Engineering field. Terms and conditions of employment are subject to negotiation, but will be commensurated with the responsibilities of the post and will include performance-based incentives. ELRA will pay relocation expenses for the selected candidate. This is initially a one-year appointment with a strong possibility of a further two years or permanent employment. Qualifications: - Excellent track record in Language Engineering and related fields. - Technical experience in design and development of Language Engineering solutions (preference for candidats with experience in the fields of written text and/or terminology). - Experience in collecting, validating, and marketing language resources, software or other forms of intellectual property. =09 - Experience in packaging language resources for distribution using= CD-ROM, ftp facilities, etc.. will be a plus. - Citizenship of, or residency papers for an EU country. - Ability to work in at least two European languages including English. Applicants should send a cover letter addressing the points listed above, together with a current Curriculum Vitae, to: ELRA Distribution Agency (ELDA), Dr. Khalid Choukri, 87, Avenue d'Italie F-75013 Paris, France Fax +33 1 45 86 44 88; e-mail: elra@calvanet.calvacom.fr For more information on ELRA, see:http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html (English) or /ELRA/fr/home.html (French) Initial applications by e-mail will be accepted with follow-up by post/fax. ====================================================================== eof ======================================================================