8.14, Calls: ACL '97/EACL '97, Nat. Lg. Engineering

Wed Jan 15 22:48:02 UTC 1997

LINGUIST List:  Vol-8-14. Wed Jan 15 1997. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 8.14, Calls: ACL '97/EACL '97, Nat. Lg. Engineering

Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. <aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. <hdry at linguistlist.org>
            T. Daniel Seely: Eastern Michigan U. <seely at linguistlist.org>

Review Editor:     Andrew Carnie <carnie at linguistlist.org>

Associate Editors: Ljuba Veselinova <ljuba at linguistlist.org>
                   Ann Dizdar <ann at linguistlist.org>
Assistant Editor:  Sue Robinson <sue at linguistlist.org>
Technical Editor:  Ron Reck <ron at linguistlist.org>

Software development: John H. Remmers <remmers at emunix.emich.edu>

Editor for this issue: Susan Robinson <sue at linguistlist.org>
 ==========================================================================

Please do not use abbreviations or acronyms for your conference
unless you explain them in your text.  Many people outside your
area of specialization will not recognize them.   Thank you for
your cooperation.

=================================Directory=================================

1)
Date:  Thu, 9 Jan 1997 09:58:46 -0500
From:  jburstein at ets.org (Jill C Burstein)
Subject:  ACL '97/EACL '97 Workshop *** Call for Papers ***

2)
Date:  Thu, 9 Jan 97 12:10:11 GMT
From:  Stefan Langer <slanger at mic.dundee.ac.uk>
Subject:  Journal of Natural Language Engineering

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Thu, 9 Jan 1997 09:58:46 -0500
From:  jburstein at ets.org (Jill C Burstein)
Subject:  ACL '97/EACL '97 Workshop *** Call for Papers ***

     --------------------------------------------------------
			CALL FOR PAPERS
                        ACL'97/EACL'97 Workshop
			July 11 or 12, 1997
			Madrid, Spain
    --------------------------------------------------------
		"From Research to Commercial Applications:
		Making NLP Technology Work in Practice"

Success in the marketplace is one form of validation for NLP
techniques and underlying theories. The broad vision of this workshop
is to bring together researchers to discuss commercial or
commercial-bound systems that use NLP for either text or speech. We
are interested in learning about systems that show promise in re-using
NLP techniques, and in the process of technology transfer for NLP
applications.  Another topic of interest in this workshop is
industry-based practical considerations involving NLP technology.
The workshop should invoke discussion about experiences and
problems -- technical, logistic, or cultural -- among people
working on operational and commercial NLP applications.

The workshop will begin a dialogue among researchers to explore issues
in technology transfer and the re-use of domain-specific systems.  New
applications could get leverage from using successful existing NLP
technologies.  The ability to re-use NLP technology for diverse
applications should not only give the application a solid grounding,
but should also save time and money.  For example, text generation
techniques are being used to build prototypes for essay analysis by
Educational Testing Service.  Other types of NLP technology re-use
need to be identified for different applications. Closely related to
the re-use of domain-specific technology is the issue of constructing
general purpose tools that can be shared by the community, e.g., for
tokenization, proper-noun detection, tagging, NP-identification, etc.

Another purpose of the workshop is to explore industry-based
practicalities that often guide the design of NLP technology.
General practicalities that might be discussed are customization
and trade-offs between accuracy and other requirements,
such as speed, and ease of use. For example, determining the
appropriate balance between reporting false positives and
false negatives in information retrieval; what depth/breadth
of coverage is "enough" in grammar checking; and how can
adaptive systems, such as speaker-dependent speech recognizers,
train themselves to the user without becoming obtrusive.

Discussion of the issues above would help to create connections
between both academic and industry-based research efforts to build a
solid infrastructure for NLP technology re-use and lead to a deeper
understanding of commercial NLP potential.

WORKSHOP ORGANIZATION:

Presentations will last for 20 minutes, followed by a 10 minute
discussion period.  Papers will be organized around themes. Ideally,
we would like to include the following sessions:

1. Commercial/commercial-bound systems using NLP
2. Software re-use
3. Technology transfer

SUBMISSIONS:

Authors should submit a full length paper (not exceeding 3,200 words,
exclusive of references) and must include a descriptive abstract of
about 200 words. Electronic submissions are encouraged and should
be submitted as described below.  The title page should include
title of the paper,names, addresses, e-mail address, telephone and
fax number of all authors.  Any correspondence will be addressed to
the first author.

FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION:

Papers should be original work. Papers may be submitted either
electronically or in hard copy.  Electronic or hard-copy
submissions must use the ACL submission style (aclsub.sty)
retrievable from the ACL LISTSERV server via anonymous
ftp:

	ftp ftp.cs.columbia.edu
	Name: anonymous
	Password: <your email address>
	cd acl-l/ACL97
	get aclsub.sty

Electronic submissions should be mailed to jburstein at ets.org
or ftp to:

	ftp clarity.princeton.edu
	Name: anonymous
	Password: <your e-mail address>
	cd incoming/workshop97
	put <name of your paper*>

Electronic submissions must either be a) plain ascii text,
b) a single postscript file, or c) a single latex file
following the ACL-97 submission style sheet (see ftp site above).

* Please use the following naming conventions. The filename is
the last name of the first author:

smith.ps 	the .ps version of the paper
smith.ascii 	the .ascii version of the paper
		(if postscript not available)
smith.author	the .ascii file of the title page
		(title, authors names, addresses, abstract)

Hard copy submissions must be received by March 10. Send to:

	Jill Burstein
	ETS, MS 11-R
	Rosedale Road
	Princeton, NJ 08541
	USA
        Tel: (609)734-5823

REQUIREMENTS:

A paper accepted for presentation cannot be presented or have
been presented at any other meeting.  Please indicate in your
submission if you have submitted your paper to another conference.

SCHEDULE:

Submissions Deadline: 	March 10, 1997
Notification Date:	April 16, 1997
Camera ready copy due:	April 28, 1997

PROGRAM CHAIRS:

Jill Burstein, Educational Testing Service
Claudia Leacock, Princeton University

ORGANIZING AND PROGRAM COMMITTEE MEMBERS:

Andrew Golding, Mitsubishi Electric
Mary Dee Harris, Language Technology, Inc.
Kevin Knight, USC/ISI
Karen Kukich, Bellcore
Lisa Rau, SRA International
Yael Ravin, IBM, T.J. Watson Research Center
Susanne Wolff, Educational Testing Service
Wlodek Zadrozny, IBM, T.J. Watson Research Center

-------------------------------- Message 2 -------------------------------

Date:  Thu, 9 Jan 97 12:10:11 GMT
From:  Stefan Langer <slanger at mic.dundee.ac.uk>
Subject:  Journal of Natural Language Engineering

JOURNAL OF NATURAL LANGUAGE ENGINEERING

Special issue on natural language processing for augmented communication

Announcement and call for papers

A special issue of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering will be
entirely dedicated to NLP research in the field of AAC (Alternative &
Augmentative Communication).

A forum for publication of research on AAC

So far, the results of NLP research to assist disabled people have been
mainly published in journals and proceedings focussing on disabilities and
rehabilitation. This special issue of the Journal of Natural Language
Engineering will present applications of current research in the area to the
language processing research community.

NLP for Communication Aids

People with disabilities leading to difficulties in communication often face
a restricted life in terms of social interaction and personal development.
Communication aids have been designed to help non-speakers and other
disabled people to communicate independently. Although many AAC-systems are
available, there are major problems to be overcome in the design of these
systems if they are to help the users to participate more in social
interaction. In the past years, methods from NLP have contributed to reduce
the cognitive load imposed on the users of AAC systems. They have helped to
increase communication fluency and enhanced the performance of word
prediction and message retrieval algorithms. Today, communication aids often
include advanced techniques from NLP. This trend is supported by the fact
that research on language processing is increasingly concerned with real
language use. The resulting current interest in corpora research and in
broad-coverage lexicons in computational linguistics is reflected in recent
developments of AAC systems. It is also true that the NLP research community
can benefit from results in AAC research. Years of research in close
collaboration with users of the systems has led to realistic solutions which
can supply new ideas and insights to other research areas in concerned with
language processing.

Workshop papers

Natural Language Processing for Communication Aids has been the subject of a
workshop in Dundee in September 1996. Results and papers from the workshop
are expected to form the core of this issue of the Journal of Natural
Language Engineering.

Other contributions

Submissions of additional papers covering any aspect of Natural Language
Processing for communication aids are invited. All submissions will be
considered for publication via the usual peer refereeing process. Possible
subjects include, but are not limited to:

   * enhanced word prediction using linguistic knowledge
     and/or statistics
   * extracting knowledge for AAC-systems from corpora
   * message retrieval involving NLP
   * machine translation of symbol sequences into natural language

Submissions

Deadline for submissions: 17th March 1997 Papers should be between 5000 and
8000 words in length. Submissions should be sent to the guest editor,
preferably by electronic mail (address see end of this document). Please
state "submission NLE" in the subject line. Floppy disks or hard copies can
be sent to the adress below.

Format Submissions in Latex format are strongly preferred A LaTeX style
file, together with sample instructions to authors for how to use it etc.,
is available at:
<ftp://ftp.cup.cam.ac.uk/pub/texarchive/journals/latex/nle.all> Authors are
strongly encouraged to use this format.

Other submission formats:

ASCII text

HTML

Word processor document (WordPerfect or Word or RTF) Please contact the
guest editor for formatting details

Further information

Homepage of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering:
   http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk/Journals/JNLSCAT/nle/nle.html

Webpage for this call:
   http://alpha.mic.dundee.ac.uk/~slanger/ws/call.html

Submissions, further questions:

Stefan Langer
MicroCentre, University of Dundee
Park Wynd Dundee
DD1 4HN
Scotland, UK
Tel: +44 1382 345080
Fax: +44 1382 345509
e-mail: slanger at mic.dundee.ac.uk

************************************************************
Stefan Langer             Tel: +44 1382 344150
MicroCentre               Fax: +44 1382 345509
University of Dundee      e-mail: slanger at mic.dundee.ac.uk
Dundee DD1 4HN
************************************************************

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