Date: 25 Mar 1998 ----------------- ====================================================================== TOPICS: 1. A: INLG Registration & Program [Act by May 1st 1998] 2. CFP: TAG+ Workshop [Philadelphia - Deadline Apr 15th 1998] 3. A: CSLU Spring Short Courses [Portland, OR - May 5 - May 18] 4. JOB: ITRI Brighton PhD Studentship [Apply by Apr 30, 1998] 5. CFP: COLING/ACL98 Discourse Relations Workshop [Deadline Apr 6] 6. CFP: Special issue NRHM Adaptivity and User Modeling [Deadline Jun 1] 7. CFP: Computational Treatment of Portuguese - Brazil [Deadline May 4] 8. A: KPML Mailing List 9. P: Diana McKinnie [Generating reports from dictated X-ray reports] ====================================================================== ====================================================================== TOPIC 1: A: INLG Registration & Program [Act by May 1st 1998] From: Graeme Hirst ============================= 9th International Workshop on NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION 5-7 August 1998 Prince of Wales Hotel Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada REGISTRATION INFORMATION Preliminary details of the program and registration information and forms are now available for the 9th biennial Workshop on Natural Language Generation. This message gives basic information on participation. For full information, please visit the INLG-98 Website: http://logos.uwaterloo.ca/~inlg98 PROGRAM AND SCHEDULE: The workshop will begin with an opening reception on the evening of Tuesday 4 August, and end with lunch on Friday 7 August. The program includes approximately 30 papers, demonstrations, and a panel session to be presented over 2 1/2 days. (The complete list of accepted papers is on the conference Web site.) In addition, the social program includes an outing to Niagara Falls with dinner at the top of the Skylon Tower. LOCATION AND TRANSPORTATION: The workshop will be held at the Prince of Wales Hotel, in the scenic town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, which is easily accessible from Toronto International Airport. See our Web page on transportation for details of transfers to Niagara-on-the-Lake from Toronto International Airport, on Buffalo Airport as an alternative, and for directions to Niagara-on-the-Lake by car, bus, and train. REGISTRATION AND ACCOMMODATION: A discount accommodation-and-meal package has been negotiated with the Prince of Wales Hotel for the workshop. To get the discount, you must book your accommodation on the conference registration form, which is available from our Web site. Registration paid by credit card will be accepted by e-mail and fax. NOTE!!! Space at the workshop is limited. We will allocate space in the order that registrations are received, except that a space will be held for one author of each submitted paper (whether accepted or not) until **1 May 1998**. If the workshop is oversubscribed before the final June deadline, we will endeavour to find additional space, but cannot promise to succeed nor that any space found will be as cheap as the reserved space. Workshop registration and hotel reservations must be received by **1 June 1998**. Any unassigned hotel rooms will be released after this date. Late registrants will be accommodated only if space is available, and will have to pay the hotel's full rack rates. FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE: We anticipate having funds to subsidize attendance at the workshop by graduate students and unfunded researchers. Details should be known by mid-April. TOURISM: See the INLG Web pages for links to information on tourism in the Niagara region, Toronto, and Montreal. TRANSPORTATION TO MONTREAL FOR COLING: The workshop is to be held 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. WORKSHOP SPONSOR AND ORGANIZERS: The workshop is sponsored by the Association for Computational Linguistics and ACL SIGGEN (Special Interest Group on Natural Language Generation). The workshop is 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 enquiries concerning registration and accommodation: Jean Webster, University of Waterloo jrwebster@icr.uwaterloo.ca phone +1 519-888-4567 extension 5076. General workshop questions: Chrysanne DiMarco, University of Waterloo cdimarco@logos.uwaterloo.ca phone +1 519 888 4443 For more information, program, and registration forms, visit the INLG-98 Website: http://logos.uwaterloo.ca/~inlg98 ====================================================================== TOPIC 2: CFP: TAG+ Workshop [Philadelphia - Deadline Apr 15th 1998] From: Jennifer MacDougall TAG+ WORKSHOP -- FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS August 1 to August 3, 1998 TAG TUTORIALS -- PRELIMINARY ANNOUNCEMENT July 28 to July 31, 1998 Philadelphia, PA, USA URL: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~ircs/mol/tag98.html The fourth workshop on tree-adjoining grammars and related frameworks (hence the + after TAG) will be held at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania in August 1998, from August 1 to August 3. Previous workshops were held at Dagstuhl (1990), UPenn (1992), and Univ. Paris 7 (1994). Papers on all aspects of TAG (linguistic, mathematical, computational, and applicational), as well as papers relating TAGs to other frameworks, are invited. As in the past there will be some invited talks on other grammar formalisms which have interesting relationships to TAGs (for example, Categorial Grammars and HPSG). GUIDELINES FOR ABSTRACTS: Abstracts should be at most two pages (exclusive of references), and should be submitted in ASCII format, as a .ps file, or as SELF-CONTAINED latex file to jmacdoug@central.cis.upenn.edu. (If email is not available, please send the abstract to the address given below.) Please indicate on the abstract if you would prefer to give a short presentation (10 minutes) or a long one (30 minutes). The abstract should contain your name, address, and email address. Proceedings including extended versions (4 pages) of accepted abstracts will be available at the workshop. Deadline for submission for abstracts: April 15 Notification of acceptance: May 15 Deadline for submission of camera-ready extended abstract: July 6 Workshop Dates: August 1 to August 3 If you do not want to submit an abstract, but would like to attend, we would appreciate it if you could inform us by email by July 6 (unless you have already done so). If you would like to present a demo, please let us know as soon as possible, including information about required hard and software. PROGRAM COMMITTEE: Anne Abeille (Universit'e Paris 7) Tilman Becker (DFKI) Christy Doran (University of Pennsylvania) Robert Frank (Johns Hopkins University) Klaus Netter (DFKI) Richard Oehrle (University of Arizona) Owen Rambow (CoGenTex, Inc.) Giorgio Satta (Universita di Padova) Yuka Tateisi (University of Tokyo) K. Vijayshanker (University of Delaware) David Weir (University of Sussex) CONTACT ADDRESS: Jennifer MacDougall 553 Moore Building University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6389 USA Telephone: (215) 898-3191 FAX: (215) 898-0587 Email: jmacdoug@central.cis.upenn.edu TUTORIAL: Prior to the workshop there will be a tutorial (including labs and demos) from July 28 to July 31 1998. Details about the tutorial will be sent out soon. We are trying to get some partial support for some of the students attending the tutorials. If you may be interested in attending this tutorial, please contact Jennifer MacDougall at the address above (preferably by email) and we will send you more information. ORGANIZING COMMITTEE: Anne Abeille (Paris 7) Tilman Becker (DFKI) Owen Rambow (CoGenTex, Inc.) Giorgio Satta (Universita di Padova) K. Vijayshanker (University of Delaware) ====================================================================== TOPIC 3: A: CSLU Spring Short Courses [Portland, OR - May 5 - May 18] From: "Terri Durham" Institute in Portland, Oregon will be giving two spring short courses in May to coincide with the ICASSP '98 Conference in Seattle Washington. Please visit our web page for a full description of each course and to fill out your registration form. http://www.cse.ogi.edu/CSLU/shortcourse2/ If you have any questions please don't hesitate to give me a call. Thank You, Terri Durham CSLU Center Administrator PO Box 91000 Portland, OR. 97291 20000 NW Walker Rd., Beaverton, OR. 97006 Phone: 503-690-1630 // Fax: 503-690-1306 May 5-8th Text-to-Speech Synthesis Instructors: Paul Taylor Center for Speech Technology Research, University of Edinburgh Alan Black Center for Speech Technology Research, University of Edinburgh Michael Macon Center for Spoken Language Understanding, Oregon Graduate Institute May 18-22 Building Spoken Dialogue Systems Instructors: Stephen Sutton Center for Spoken Language Understanding, Oregon Graduate Institute Teaching Assistants: Andrew Cronk Center for Spoken Language Understanding, Oregon Graduate Institute Ed Kaiser Center for Spoken Language Understanding, Oregon Graduate Institute ====================================================================== TOPIC 4: JOB: ITRI Brighton PhD Studentship [Apply by Apr 30, 1998] From: postgrad-admissions@itri.brighton.ac.uk Information Technology Research Institute University of Brighton PhD Studentship for October 1998 Application deadline: 30 April 1998 The Information Technology Research Institute (ITRI) invites applications for a three-year EPSRC studentship award to commence in October 1998. The studentship will be awarded in one (or more) of the following topics in Computational Linguistics: DOCUMENT GENERATION (including TEXT GENERATION): architectures; corpus analysis; diagrammatic reasoning; discourse; evaluation; hybrid generation; implementation; layout; multilinguality; multimodality; representation languages; pragmatics; tools LEXICONS: corpus analysis; evaluation; lexical statistics; lexicalized grammars; lexicography; lexicon induction from text; multilinguality; representation; tools; tuning; word sense disambiguation NATURAL LANGUAGE INTERFACES: dialogue; interface design Applicants should have a good honours degree or equivalent in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics or Linguistics. EPSRC studentships are restricted to UK or EU residents. Residents of the UK are eligible for fees and a maintenance allowance; other EU residents are only eligible for fees (and so would need to be able to support themselves during their studies). The EPSRC baseline rate of maintenance allowance is currently approx 5,295 pounds sterling per annum. For further general information on EPSRC studentships, please consult http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/in-depth/indpfram.htm. Further information on the Institute's research programme can be found on the ITRI home page (http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk) and information about students and how to apply on our research students page (http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/students). If we already have your application on file for consideration this year, you do not need to apply again. Deadline for applications: 30 April 1998 For additional advice and information, please contact: Ms. Vivienne Wicks, Research Administrator Information Technology Research Institute University of Brighton Lewes Rd. Brighton BN2 4GJ, UK Email: postgrad-admissions@itri.brighton.ac.uk Tel: +44 1273 642900 Fax: +44 1273 642908 ====================================================================== TOPIC 5: CFP: COLING/ACL98 Discourse Relations Workshop [Deadline Apr 6] From: Coling-ACL '98 workshop "Discourse Relations and Discourse Markers" August 15, 1998 Université de Montréal Montréal/Canada (See also: http://flp.cs.tu-berlin.de/~marker/aclcolingws.html) The notion of discourse relation has received many different 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: o What are sound methodologies for comparing similar discourse markers (contrastive studies, distribution analyses, etc.)? o What are sound methodologies for relating discourse relations with potential realizations? o Are there discourse relations that are always lexically signalled? Are there any that are never lexically signalled? o What non-lexical (i.e., syntactic or prosodic) means are used to signal a relation? o In production, how does one decide whether to signal a relation at all? o In production, how does one motivate a choice among candidate signals for a given relation? o In production, how does the choice of signal interact with other decisions (in particular, those of linearizing some tree or graph structure)? o In analysis, is it possible to reliably infer discourse relations from surface cues? o In analysis, how can one disambiguate polysemous signals such as "and", "since" (temporal or causal) etc.? o What are useful lexical representations of discourse markers, for both analysis and production? o 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? o Are there significant differences between realizations in spoken and written language? o How do individual languages differ in terms of any of the above issues? Organizing committee The workshop is organized by Manfred Stede (TU Berlin) Leo Wanner (University of Stuttgart) Eduard Hovy (ISI/USC, Marina del Rey) Requirements for submission Papers are invited that address any of the topics listed above. Maximum length is 8 pages including figures and references. Please use A4 or US letter format and set margins so that the text lies within a rectangle of 6.5 x 9 inches (16.5 x 23 cm). Use classical fonts such as Times Roman or Computer Modern, 11 to 12 points for text, 14 to 16 points for headings and title. LaTeX users are encouraged to use the style file provided by ACL: http://coling-acl98.iro.umontreal.ca/colaclsub.sty Papers can be submitted either electronically in PostScript format, or as hardcopies. Submissions from North America should be sent to: Eduard Hovy Information Sciences Institute 4676 Admiralty Way Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695 U.S.A. hovy@isi.edu Submissions from elsewhere should be sent to either of the following: Manfred Stede Leo Wanner TU Berlin Computer Science Department KIT Project Group Intelligent Systems Group Sekr. FR 6-10 University of Stuttgart Franklinstr. 28/29 Breitwiesenstr. 20-22 D-10587 Berlin D-70565 Stuttgart Germany Germany stede@cs.tu-berlin.de wannerlo@informatik.uni-stuttgart.de Timetable Deadline for electronic submissions: April 6, 1998 Deadline for hardcopy submissions: April 9 (arrival date) Notification of acceptance: May 25, 1998 Final manuscripts due: June 15, 1998 Program committee Sandra Carberry (U Delaware) Barbara DiEugenio (U Pittsburgh) Eduard Hovy (USC/ISI) Alistair Knott (U Edinburgh) Alex Lascarides (U Edinburgh) Owen Rambow (Cogentex Inc.) Ted Sanders (U Utrecht) Donia Scott (U Brighton) Wilbert Spooren (U Tilburg) Manfred Stede (TU Berlin) Keith Vander Linden (Calvin College) Marilyn Walker (ATT Labs) Leo Wanner (U Stuttgart) ====================================================================== TOPIC 6: CFP: Special issue NRHM Adaptivity and User Modeling [Deadline Jun 1] From: Maria Milosavljevic The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 1998 call for submissions on the themes of 'adaptivity and user modeling in hypertext/hypermedia systems', and 'hypermedia for museums and cultural heritage'. NRHM (previously Hypermedia, one of the original journals on the subject) is a refereed annual review journal covering research on practical and theoretical developments in hypermedia, interactive multimedia and related technologies. The new editorial team has introduced themed issues, each issue (normally 10-12 papers) will review and explore one or two topical themes from a variety of perspectives. The main theme of the 1997 issue was the evaluation of hypermedia and multimedia systems. The themes for the 1998 issue of the New Review will be: - hypermedia for museums and cultural heritage Theme editors Douglas Tudhope and Daniel Cunliffe - adaptivity and user modeling in hypertext/hypermedia systems: Guest editors Peter Brusilovsky and Maria Milosavljevic (also see Adaptive Hypertext and Hypermedia Home Page http://www.education.uts.edu.au/projects/ah/index.html) Papers should be submitted to the appropriate theme editors no later than June 1st 1998. For Instructions to Authors, see http://www.comp.glam.ac.uk/~NRHM/ or contact the Editor. Submissions are welcomed on all aspects of the two themes, including but not restricted to: Adaptive hypermedia user modeling in adaptive hypermedia adaptive educational hypermedia systems adaptive information systems adaptive museum hypermedia adaptive navigation support natural language techniques for dynamic hypertext generation adaptive WWW navigation aids adaptive visualization of hypertext structure empirical studies of adaptive hypermedia content adaptation in hypertext and hypermedia personalized information spaces adaptivity and adaptability in a hypermedia context adaptive information retrieval Guest editors Peter Brusilovsky - plb@cs.cmu.edu School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA. Maria Milosavljevic - mariam@mpce.mq.edu.au MRI Language Technology Group, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia. Hypermedia for Museums and Cultural heritage hypermedia link services networked access time-varying interactive presentations image, audio and video databases navigation design intelligent hypermedia and agents web-based museum hypermedia spatial and temporal models evaluation and studies of use metadata and intellectual access thesauri and semantic representations copyright /IPR for digital multimedia standards Editor Douglas Tudhope - dstudhope@glamorgan.ac.uk Department of Computer Studies University of Glamorgan Pontypridd, Mid-Glamorgan CF37 1DL Wales, UK fax +1443-482715 tel +1443-482271 Associate Editor (US) Andrew Dillon - adillon@ucs.indiana.edu Associate Editor (UK) Daniel Cunliffe - djcunlif@glamorgan.ac.uk For subscription information, contact Taylor Graham Publishing, 500 Chesham House, 150 Regent Street, London W1R 5FA, UK. ====================================================================== TOPIC 7: CFP: Computational Treatment of Portuguese - Brazil [Deadline May 4] From: lucia@dc.ufscar.br (Lucia Rino) III PROPOR WORKSHOP ON THE COMPUTATIONAL TREATMENT OF THE WRITTEN AND SPOKEN PORTUGUESE LANGUAGE November 3-4, 1998 PUCRS Campus Porto Alegre - RS BRAZIL Sponsored by the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC) Organized by the Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS) CALL FOR PAPERS Along with the XIV SBIA'98 (Artificial Inteligence Brazilian Symposium), to be held in Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil, in the PUCRS Campus between 04 and 06 of November, 1998, there will be carried out the III PROPOR - III WORKSHOP ON THE COMPUTATIONAL TREATMENT OF THE WRITTEN AND SPOKEN PORTUGUESE LANGUAGE - on the 3rd and 4th of November, 1998. The former two PROPOR workshops occurred in Portugal and in Brazil, respectively in Feb/1993 and Oct/1996. The third one intends to bring together researchers working on Computational Linguistics, specially those whose work is in any sense related to the processing of the Portuguese language. The main goals of the workshop are to provide the means for the researchers to exchange information and to explore and discuss the availability of resources to solve problems related to Natural Language, having Portuguese as the central language. Contributions should address one or more of the following topics: * The automatic interpretation of the Portuguese language * The automatic generation of the Portuguese language * Verbal discourse processing: problems and resources of the Portuguese language * Differences and similarities between the treatment of spoken and written Portuguese The above topics naturally include a broader discussion on Natural Language Processing as such, and other issues in the Computational Linguistics spectrum. Researchers are invited to submit articles or demoes, in order to integrate, and exchange, experiences with the participants during the event. Workshop organization The workshop will consist of technical pannels, conference and discussion sessions. Participants are also invited to present demoes and systems resulting from project and development of software. Requirements for submission Papers and software are invited that address any of the topics listed above, preference given to conclusive work. Work reporting ongoing MsC or PhD research can be submitted to the Workshop of Unconcluded Dissertations and Theses, which is held along with SBIA'98. In this case, submission requirements can be found in the following address: http://www.inf.pucrs.br/~flavio/sbia98/sbia98.html. IMPORTANT DEADLINES Technical papers and software descriptions: May 04, 1998 (mailing date) Notification of acceptance: July 01, 1998 (by email) =46inal manuscripts due: August 15, 1998 (mailing date) No electronic submission will be accepted. INSTRUCTIONS FOR SUBMISSION Manuscripts must be written either in Portuguese or in English. Please use A4 letter format, doubleline spacing, classical fonts such as Times Roman or Computer Modern, 12 points for text, 14 to 16 points for headings and title. Maximum length is 15 pages including figures and references. Small caps or figures must be avoided, since the manuscripts may be reduced for the proceedings. The content of the first page must include the title of the article, the author(s) fullname(s), institution of origin, address, and a summary of the work. Faxed or emailed work will not be accepted for revision. Software descriptions must contain title, goals and a short characterization, besides the names of the authors, their institution of origin and address, and the specification of software/hardware needs for demoes. =46our hardcopy copies of both, technical papers or software descriptions, must be accompanied by a letter of submission containing the title of the work, authors, and the name of the contact person. Submissions should be sent to: Vera L=FAcia Strube de Lima Instituto de Informatica -PUCRS Av. Ipiranga, 6681 - Pr=E9dio 16 - Sala 160 CEP 90619-900 Porto Alegre Brasil E-mail: vera@andros.inf.pucrs.br Organizing committee Vera L=FAcia Strube de Lima (PUCRS) Flavio Moreira de Oliveira (PUCRS) Rosa Maria Viccari (UFRGS) Program committee Ariadne M. B. R. Carvalho (IC-UNICAMP) Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza (DI-PUCRJ) Elisabete Ranchhod (FL-UL) Isabel Trancoso (INESC) Jacques Robin (DI-UFPe) Jos=E9 Gabriel Pereira Lopes (FCT-UNL) Laura S. Garcia (CEFET-PR) L=FAcia Machado Rino (DC-UFSCar) Mike Dillinger (IL-UFMG) Raul S. Wazlawick (DI-UFSC) Rosa Maria Viccari (II-UFRGS) Vera L=FAcia Strube de Lima(II-PUCRS) ====================================================================== TOPIC 8: A: KPML Mailing List From: Elke Teich Announcing the KPML mailing list KPML (Komet-Penman MultiLingual) is a grammar development environment for Systemic Functional Grammars and a sentence generator for English, German, Dutch and a few other languages. The system was developed at the Institute for Integrated Publication and Information Systems (IPSI) of the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD), Darmstadt, Germany (http://www.darmstadt.gmd.de/IPSI/index.html) and is now being further developed at the Center for Language and Communication research at the University of Stirling, UK (http://www.stir.ac.uk/english/communication). KPML is based on the Penman system for generation of English sentences originally developed at the Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California. Added functionalities include - multilinguality - facilities for versioning and back-up for large-scale grammar resources - graphic-based grammar writing tools - graphic-based grammar exploration tools - tools for preparing teaching materials - specialized example and test suite management tools. KPML has been used in a number of projects and is currently one of the most popular platforms for developing grammars for generation. Users of the system currently develop generation grammars for languages as diverse as English, German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Finnish, Greek, Czech, Russian and Bulgarian. More information about KPML can be found at http://www.stir.ac.uk/english/communication/Computational-tools/ including the requirements for installing the system, downloading the system, documentation etc. You might also want to have a look at a sample generated document where the text parts are generated with KPML: http://www.darmstadt.gmd.de/publish/komet/kometpave-pics-96.html Other relevant pages: KPML basic: http://www.stir.ac.uk/english/communication/Computational-tools/kpml.html KPML documentation (online): http://www.darmstadt.gmd.de/publish/komet/kpml-1-doc/kpml.html KPML documentation (downloadable hardcopy): file://ftp.darmstadt.gmd.de/pub/komet/KPML-1.0/ The Grammar Exploration Tool: http://www.stir.ac.uk/english/communication/Computational-tools/Grexplorer/grexplorer.html The generation grammar bank: http://www.stir.ac.uk/english/communication/Computational-tools/generation-bank.html This mailing list offers users of KPML the opportunity of exchanging information, seeking and giving advice in issues of linguistic specification and computational implementation, announcing and making available add-on functionalities and new resources etc. The list is managed by the department of English Linguistics, Institute of Applied Linguistics, Translation and Interpreting of the University of the Saarland, Saarbruecken, Germany (http://www.uni-sb.de/~sl16eset/elke.html). Subscribe NOW and keep in touch! To subscribe send e-mail to elke@dude.uni-sb.de by putting 'subscribe MY-E-MAIL-ADDRESS' in the subject field. ====================================================================== TOPIC 9: P: Diana McKinnie [Generating reports from dictated X-ray reports] From: Diana McKinnie I am a PhD student in the Medical Informatics program at the University of Utah. My project deals with generating natural language reports from parsed, dictated X-ray reports. I find the field of natural language generation fascinating and frustrating. I look forward to talking to others with the same fascinations and frustrations. My e-mail address at the University is: d.mckinnie@m.cc.utah.edu. Thanks- Diana McKinnie ====================================================================== eof ======================================================================