<html>
<font size=3>*** Reminder: Submission Deadline is 1 April 2000 ***<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
Call for Papers<br>
<br>
Special Issue of Computational Linguistics: Anaphora and Ellipsis
Resolution <br>
<br>
Guest editors: Ruslan Mitkov, Branimir Boguraev, Shalom
Lappin<br>
<br>
<br>
Anaphora and ellipsis both account for cohesion in text and are
phenomena<br>
of active study in formal and computational linguistics alike.
The<br>
correct interpretation of anaphora and ellipsis, as well as the<br>
understanding of the relationship between them, is vital for
Natural<br>
Language Processing.<br>
<br>
After considerable initial research, and after years of relative
silence<br>
in the early eighties, these issues have attracted the attention of
many<br>
researchers in the last 10 years and much promising work on the topic
has<br>
been reported. Discourse-orientated theories and formalisms such as
DRT<br>
and Centering have inspired new research on the computational
treatment<br>
of anaphora. The drive towards corpus-based robust NLP solutions
has<br>
further stimulated interest, for alternative and/or data-enriched<br>
approaches. In addition, application-driven research in areas such
as<br>
automatic abstracting and information extraction, has independently<br>
identified the importance of (and boosted the research in) anaphora
and<br>
coreference resolution. Ellipsis resolution too, being of
particular<br>
importance to a number of Natural Language Understanding
applications<br>
such as dialogue and discourse processing, has received increasing<br>
attention. The growing interest in anaphora and ellipsis resolution
has<br>
been demonstrated clearly over the last 4--5 years through the MUC<br>
coreference task projects and at a number of related fora
(workshops,<br>
conferences, etc.).<br>
<br>
Against this background of expanding research and growing interest,
this<br>
special issue offers the opportunity for a high quality, and
timely,<br>
collection of papers on anaphora and ellipsis resolution.<br>
<br>
<br>
Topics<br>
<br>
The call for papers invites submissions of papers describing recent
novel<br>
and challenging work/results in anaphora and ellipsis resolution.<br>
The range of topics to be covered will include, but will not be
limited<br>
to:<br>
<br>
o new anaphora and ellipsis resolution algorithms,<br>
o factors in anaphora resolution: salience and interaction
of factors,<br>
o techniques in ellipsis resolution,<br>
o use of theories and formalisms in anaphora
resolution,<br>
o use of theories and formalisms in ellipsis
resolution,<br>
o applications of anaphora/coreference resolution,<br>
o applications of ellipsis resolution,<br>
o multilingual anaphora resolution,<br>
o evaluation issues,<br>
o use/production of annotated corpora for anaphora and
ellipsis.<br>
<br>
<br>
In addition, we expect papers addressing various issues of debate
related<br>
to the resolution of anaphora and ellipsis, such as:<br>
<br>
o Is it possible to propose a core set of factors used in
anaphora<br>
resolution?<br>
o When dealing with real data, is it at all possible to
posit<br>
"constraints", or should all factors
be regarded as "preferences"?<br>
o What is the case for languages other than English?<br>
o What degree of preference (weight) should be given to
"preferential"<br>
factors? How should weights best be
determined? What empirical<br>
data can be brought to bear on this?<br>
o What would be an optimal order for the application of
multiple<br>
factors? Would this affect the scoring
strategies used in selecting<br>
the antecedent?<br>
o Is it realistic to expect high precision over unrestricted
texts?<br>
o Is it realistic to determine anaphoric links in
corpora<br>
automatically?<br>
o Are all CL applications 'equal' with respect to their
requirements<br>
from an anaphora resolution module? What
kind(s) of compromises<br>
might be possible, depending on the NLP task,
and how would<br>
awareness of these affect the tuning of a
resolution algorithm for<br>
particular type(s) of input text?<br>
o Should ellipsis resolution be handled by syntactic or
semantic<br>
reconstruction?<br>
o Is it necessary to retrieve both syntactic and semantic
properties of<br>
the antecedent in the reconstructed
representation of the elided<br>
structure?<br>
<br>
Finally, we invite discussion on various open questions from both<br>
theoretical and computational point of view such as whether we
should<br>
construe ellipsis as entirely distinct from anaphora.<br>
<br>
<br>
Submissions and Reviewing<br>
<br>
The submission deadline is 1 April 2000. Authors can submit
either<br>
electronically or send 6 hard copies of their paper (for format and
style<br>
details, see
<a href="http://www.aclweb.org/cl" eudora="autourl">http://www.aclweb.org/cl</a>)
to:<br>
<br>
Ruslan Mitkov (R.Mitkov@wlv.ac.uk) <br>
School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences <br>
University of Wolverhampton <br>
Stafford St.<br>
Wolverhampton WV1 1SB<br>
United Kingdom <br>
<br>
Please note that in addition to the submission, a 100-word abstract
and<br>
details of the author (following the format given at<br>
<a href="http://www.aclweb.org/cl/submit.txt" eudora="autourl">http://www.aclweb.org/cl/submit.txt</a>)
should be emailed to R.Mitkov.<br>
<br>
Each submission will be reviewed both by experts appointed by the
editor<br>
of the journal and by members of the guest editorial board of the
special<br>
issue. In addition to the guest editors, <br>
<br>
Ruslan Mitkov (University of Wolverhampton), <br>
Branimir Boguraev (IBM Research, Yorktown Heights) and<br>
Shalom Lappin (University of London), <br>
<br>
the guest editorial board includes the following members:<br>
<br>
Nicholas Asher (University of Texas),<br>
Amit Bagga (GE CRD), <br>
Claire Cardie (Cornell University), <br>
David Carter (Speech Machines, Malvern),<br>
Eugene Charniak (Brown University),<br>
Walter Daelemans (University of Antwerp), <br>
Mary Dalrymple (Xerox PARC), <br>
Dan Hardt (Villanova University), <br>
Graeme Hirst (University of Toronto), <br>
Jerry Hobbs (SRI International), <br>
Aravind Joshi (University of Pennsylvania),<br>
Lauri Karttunen (Xerox Research Center Europe), <br>
Andrew Kehler (SRI International), <br>
Christopher Kennedy (Northwestern University), <br>
Massimo Poesio (University of Edinburgh), <br>
Monique Rolbert (University of Marseille), <br>
Stuart Shieber (Harvard University),<br>
Candy Sidner (Lotus Research), <br>
Marilyn Walker (AT&T).<br>
<br>
This call for paper is also available at <br>
<a href="http://www.wlv.ac.uk/sles/compling/news/text.html" eudora="autourl">http://www.wlv.ac.uk/sles/compling/news/text.html</a><br>
</font><br>
</html>