<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="text/html;charset=x-mac-roman">
<title></title>
</head>
<body text="#000000" bgcolor="#ffffff">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=x-mac-roman">
<title></title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=x-mac-roman">
<title></title>
<div align="center">Call For Papers [Submission Deadline: March, 31st
2004]<br>
</div>
<h1 align="center">ROMAND 2004</h1>
<div align="center">3rd workshop on RObust Methods in Analysis of
Natural language Data<br>
<br>
A satellite event of COLING 2004<br>
Geneva - August 29th 2004<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://lithwww.epfl.ch/romand2004/">http://lithwww.epfl.ch/romand2004/</a><br>
</div>
<br>
<div align="justify">Robustness in Computational Linguistics has been
recently recognized as a central issue for the design of interactive
applications based on natural language communication. If a failure of
the system can be acceptable in batch applications requiring a human
intervention, an on-line system should be capable of dealing with
unforeseen situations in a more flexible way. When we talk about system
failure we do not think at inherent program failures like infinite
loops or system exception, we consider, rather, failures related to the
processing of the input and its assimilation in the system's knowledge
base. A failure of this kind means simply that the system does not
"understand" the input. The automated analysis of natural language data
has become a central issue in the design of Intelligent Information
Systems. Processing unconstrained natural language data is still
considered an AI-hard task. However, various analysis techniques have
been proposed in order to address specific aspects of natural language.
In particular, recent interest has been focused on providing
approximate analysis techniques, assuming that when perfect analysis is
not possible, partial results may be still very useful.<br>
<br>
ROMAND 2004 is the third of a series of workshops aimed at bringing
together researchers and students that work in fields like artificial
intelligence, computational linguistics, human-computer interaction,
cognitive science and are interested in robust methods in natural
language processing and understanding. The term "natural language" is
intended as all the possible modalities of human communication and it
is not restricted to written or spoken language. Theoretical aspects of
robustness in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Understanding (NLU)
are welcome as well as engineering and industrial experiences. We are
also interested in research works that investigate different types of
linguistic modules integration, in order to characterise their
advantages and disadvantages with respect to different types of
applications, and works that propose different types of NLP/NLU
systems, ranging from sequential/pipelined architectures to more
loosely-coupled multi-level distributed architectures. <br>
</div>
<br>
We invite papers on all topics related to robustness in natural
language processing, including, but not limited to: <br>
<ul>
<li>Natural Language Architectures</li>
<li>Robust Morpho-Syntactic Parsing</li>
<li>Robust Semantics</li>
<li>Robust Discourse Analysis</li>
<li>Robust Computational Pragmatics</li>
<li>Complexity of linguistic analysis</li>
<li>Spell checking and automated spell correction</li>
<li>NLP and Soft Computing</li>
<li>Hybrid methods in computational linguistics</li>
<li>Information Extraction</li>
<li>Multimedia Document Analysis </li>
<li>Spoken Language Understanding</li>
<li>Multimodal Human-Computer Interfaces</li>
<li>Cognitive Linguistics</li>
</ul>
<h3>INVITED TALKS</h3>
Dr. Frank Keller University of Edinburgh: "Gradient Grammaticality:
Applications in Robust Parsing"<br>
<h3>SUBMISSION PROCEDURE: </h3>
Authors should submit an <u>anonymous</u> paper (avoiding, as much as
possible, hints for the identification of authors) of <u>at most 10
pages</u> (including pictures and references), intended for talks with
a duration of 20 minutes plus 10 minutes for discussions. The paper
should follow the <u>COLING formatting style</u> available on the main
conference web site (<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.issco.unige.ch/coling2004/">http://www.issco.unige.ch/coling2004/</a>),
and the
authors must also send us a <u>wrapper e-mail message</u> indicating: <br>
<ol>
<li>the AUTHOR'S NAMES, AFFILIATION, ADDRESS, and E-MAIL address of
(at least) the contacting author, </li>
<li>an ABSTRACT of the submitted paper (less than 500 words), </li>
<li>a list of KEYWORDS (no more than 5). </li>
</ol>
The papers should be submitted electronically in PDF (preferred) or
postscript format to: <br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="mailto:romand@epfl.ch">mailto:romand@epfl.ch</a>.<br>
<br>
<h3>IMPORTANT DATES: </h3>
Papers submission: March 31st<br>
Acceptance notification: May 7th <br>
Final version: June 4th <br>
Workshop: August 29th <br>
<h3>PROGRAM CHAIRS </h3>
Vincenzo Pallotta (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology - Lausanne,
International Computer Science Institute - Berkeley)<br>
Amalia Todirascu (University of Troyes and University of Iasi)<br>
<h3>PROGRAM COMMITTEE </h3>
Afzal Ballim<br>
Alberto Lavelli<br>
Alexander Clark<br>
Atro Voutilainen<br>
Bangalore Srinivas<br>
C.J. Rupp<br>
Dan Cristea<br>
Diego Moll-Aliod<br>
Eric Wherli<br>
Jos Iria<br>
Fabio Massimo Zanzotto<br>
Fabio Rinaldi<br>
Frank Keller<br>
Giovanni Coray<br>
Gnther Grz<br>
Hatem Ghorbel<br>
Jean-Cdric Chappelier<br>
Jean-Pierre Chanod<br>
Joachim Niehren<br>
John Carroll<br>
Kay-Uwe Carstensen<br>
Manuela Boros<br>
Maria Teresa Pazienza<br>
Martin Rajman<br>
Michael Hess<br>
Patrick Ruch<br>
Roberto Basili<br>
Rodolfo Delmonte<br>
Salah Ait-Mokhtar<br>
Susan Armstrong<br>
Wolfgang Menzel<br>
Yuji Matsumoto<br>
<h3>LOCAL ORGANIZATION</h3>
Violeta Seretan (University of Geneva) <br>
Hatem Ghorbel (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology - Lausanne)<br>
<br>
<h3>CONTACT INFORMATION:</h3>
All inquiries should be sent to [<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated"
href="mailto:romand@epfl.ch">romand@epfl.ch</a>]. Please note that
general organizational details (registration, accommodation, etc.) are
taken care of by COLING 2004, not by the workshop organizers.<br>
<br>
More information are available the workshop's Web page at
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://lithwww.epfl.ch/romand2004/">http://lithwww.epfl.ch/romand2004/</a>
<br>
<br>
</body>
</html>