[Corpora-List] Extended Deadline: CfP PASCAL workshop on Text Understanding and Mining

[Nicola Cancedda]

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* * *  C A L L  F O R  P A P E R S  A N D  C H A L L E N G E S  * *

PASCAL Workshop on Learning Methods for Text Understanding and Mining

January 26-29, 2004
Grenoble (France)

Important facts:
- Abstract of scientific contributions, submission due: EXTENDED to
December 5, 2003
- Challenge proposals, submission due: EXTENDED to December 10, 2003

INTRODUCTION
------------

PASCAL (Pattern Analysis, Statistical Modelling and Computational
Learning) is the name of a Network of Excellence sponsored by the
European Union as part of its IST program. It brings together
experts from basic research areas such as Statistics, Optimisation
and Computational Learning and from a number of application areas,
with the objective of integrating research agendas and improving the
state of the art in all concerned fields.

As part of its activities, the PASCAL network organises a workshop
on the subject of "Learning Methods for Text Understanding and
Mining". The aim of the workshop is twofold:
- Introducing to experts in statistics, computational learning and
optimization problems issuing from text understanding and mining
which are both relevant and suitable to be tackled within their
framework;
- Proposing "challenges" (i.e.: concrete benchmark tasks) that will
help measuring improvements in the state of the art.

THE WORKSHOP
------------

In order to achieve these objectives, the Workshop will be organised
as follows:

- Jan 26 (afternoon only): Pre-workshop: Presentation of the results
of the EU IST project KerMIT ("Kernel Methods for Images and Text",
http://www.euro-kermit.org ).

- Jan 27: Tutorials
  - Machine Learning applied to Text Analysis: Overview
    (E. Gaussier)
  - Memory-based Language Processing (W.Daelemans)
  - Text Mining (D.Mladenic and M.Grobelnik)
  - Kernel Methods for Natural Language Processing (J-M. Renders)

- Jan 28: Contributed scientific talks

- Jan 29: Challenge proposals and discussion

We anticipate that participants might attend only part of the
workshop.

SCIENTIFIC CONTRIBUTIONS
------------------------

For the day of January 28, submissions of abstracts are invited in
the following areas of interest:

- Machine learning of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and
  translation models
- Learning approaches to Document Retrieval, Categorization,
  Filtering and Clustering
- Text mining
- Learning approaches leveraging document structure
- Machine Learning for Information Extraction
- Unsupervised and semi-supervised learning for Natural Language

Of special interest are contributions addressing linguistic
components less commonly made the object of Machine Learning
approaches (e.g.: compositional semantics), as well as contributions
addressing the simultaneous learning of multiple linguistic
components.

In order to foster fruitful discussions and eventually
collaborations between the scientific communities represented at the
workshop, scientific contributions should, whenever possible,
emphasize the limits of the approaches described, and explicitely
mention what difficult and important problems remain to be solved,
if any.

Selected presentations will be allocated slots of 30
minutes. Presentation abstracts should be up to 4 pages long, in PDF
or PS format, and suitable to be printed on A4 paper. They should be
sent by e-mail to Nicola Cancedda at the address:

Nicola.Cancedda at xrce.xerox.com


CHALLENGES
----------

For the day of January 29, we invite submissions of proposals for
PASCAL challenges. The selected proposals will be presented in slots
of 30 minutes each in the morning, and will serve as a basis for the
discussion that will be held in the afternoon. Besides a description
of the problem to be solved, proposals should explicitely address:
- Format of the evaluation (TREC-like contrastive evaluation,
permanent web-based evaluation tool, ...);
- Public availability of data and other required resources;
- Estimated effort to build up resources, if any, not currently in
the public domain;
- Results already obtained on the data (if any);
- Key-words
We anticipate that some funding will be available from the PASCAL
budget to cover part of the expenses incurred in actually running
challenges.

The PASCAL joint programme of activities also envisages the
definition of theoretical challenges. We thus also invite
submissions of theoretical questions and open problems relevant to
the application of statistical learning and optimisation to problems
in Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval and Textual
Information Access. Such proposals should provide, besides the
question itself, a justification of its relevance and a concise
overview of related available relevant results.

As for scientific contributions, proposals concerning tasks less
commonly addressed with Machine Learning techniques will receive
special consideration.

Challenge proposals should be up to 4 pages long, in PDF or PS
format, and suitable to be printed on A4 paper. They should be sent
by e-mail to Florence d'Alché-Buc at the address:

florence.dalche at lip6.fr

IMPORTANT DATES
---------------
Please note the following deadlines:
- Abstracts of scientific presentations: EXTENDED to December 5,
  2003
- Challenge proposals: EXTENDED December 10, 2003
- Notification of acceptance: December 23, 2003
- Paper camera-ready deadline: January 16, 2004
- Workshop date: January 26-29, 2004

SPONSORSHIP
-----------
The workshop will be partly funded by a grant from the European
Network of Excellence "PASCAL".

ORGANIZERS
----------
* Nicola Cancedda (Xerox Research Centre Europe)
  Nicola.Cancedda at xrce.xerox.com
* Florence d'Alché-Buc (LIP6, University of Paris 6)
  florence.dalche at lip6.fr


PROGRAMME COMMITTE
------------------

* Nicola Cancedda (Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble, France)
* Alexander Clark (ISSCO/ETI, University of Geneva, Switzerland)
* Florence d'Alché-Buc (LIP6, University of Paris 6, France)
* Walter Daelemans (University of Antwerp, Belgium)
* Ido Dagan (Bar Ilan University, Israel)
* Eric Gaussier (Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble, France)
* Cyril Goutte (Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble, France)
* Marko Grobelnik (Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia)
* Dunja Mladenic (Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia)
* Jean-Michel Renders (Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble, France)