9.15, Calls: Minority Languages, NLP-driven Systems

The LINGUIST List linguist at linguistlist.org
Wed Jan 7 16:19:26 UTC 1998


LINGUIST List:  Vol-9-15. Wed Jan 7 1998. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 9.15, Calls: Minority Languages, NLP-driven Systems

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 Editor: Ljuba Veselinova <ljuba at linguistlist.org>

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                    Anita Huang <anita at linguistlist.org>
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                    Elaine Halleck <elaine at linguistlist.org>

Software development: John H. Remmers <remmers at emunix.emich.edu>
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Editor for this issue: Anita Huang <anita 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. Also, if you are posting a
second call for the same event, please keep the message short.  Thank
you for your cooperation.

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

1)
Date:  Mon, 05 Jan 1998 23:02:15 +0100
From:  Lorenza Mondada <mondada at ubaclu.unibas.ch>
Subject:  Minority Languages in Contex. Diversity & Standardisation

2)
Date:  Mon, 05 Jan 1998 13:51:29 +0100
From:  Roberto Basili <basili at info.utovrm.it>
Subject:  ECML'98 TANLPS Workshop: First Call for Paper

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

Date:  Mon, 05 Jan 1998 23:02:15 +0100
From:  Lorenza Mondada <mondada at ubaclu.unibas.ch>
Subject:  Minority Languages in Contex. Diversity & Standardisation

Minority Languages in Contex. Diversity and Standardisation

Call for Papers (Deadline 16th Febuary 1998)

Congress to be held in Chur, Switzerland - 21st - 23rd  September 1998
Organising Committee:
Anna-Alice Dazzi-Gross, Mike Makosch, Lorenza Mondada, Jean-Fran\231ois de Pietro

Themes addressed by the congress
The aim of the congress is to stimulate the study and discussion of
contextual dimensions within which minority languages are spoken, shared
and taught. The congress will provide a forum for the exchange and
discussion of descriptive and comparative reports from a variety of
regional and national settings including those in Switzerland. The contexts
within which minority languages evolve can be described from differing
points of view along a continuum between two opposing poles. At one end of
the continuum lay attempts to achieve stability and homogeneity which are
usually articulated through projects aiming at the planning
and normalisation of minority languages in order to present these codes as
having equal status to adjacent majority languages. At the other end of the
continuum we find destabilisation and heterogeneity observable at points of
contact and overlap between minority and majority languages and often
leading to hybrid forms which challenge traditional notions of linguistic
code. These two poles involve a variety of actors and agents of differing
social and institutional status, all exercising varying degrees of
influence on the language situation in question. The congress will address
three thematic areas highlighting the full range of this continuum.
1: Standardisation of Minority Languages
2: Minority and Majority Languages: coexistence, relationships and overlap.
3: Minority Languages at School

Scientific and Practical Organization
The thematic development of each day will take place in a series of
parallel sessions run by those having responded to the call for papers and
whose contribution has been accepted by the scientific committee. Two types
of session are foreseen:
* Papers: 20 minutes presentation followed by 20 minutes discussion
* Workshops: 90 minutes within which data and/or hypotheses can be
presented, analysed and discussed in an interactive way
Responses to the call for papers should be sent to the scientific committee
(c/o L. Mondada, Romanisches Seminar, University of Basle, Stapfelberg 7/9,
CH 4051 Basle)

Deadlines:
Response to call for papers:	16th Febuary 1998
Notification of acceptance by the scientific Committee:	31st March 1998
Definitive programme to be sent by:	30th June 1998
Enrolment fees:
Speakers: SFr. 50.- (including dinner on Tuesday evening and
the published congress proceedings)
Participants: 		paid by 30.4.1998 		paid after 30.4.1998
students			SFr. 50.--			SFr.  70.-
VALS members		SFr. 80.--			SFr. 110.-
non-members		SFr. 100.--			SFr. 130.-
(including the published congress proceedings)
Dinner on Tuesday evening:				SFr. 50.--

______________________________________
You can send an abstract or ask further informations to:
Lorenza Mondada, Romanisches Seminar, University of Basle, Stapfelberg 7/9,
CH 4051 Basle, fax 0041-61-261.61.41, email: mondada at ubaclu.unibas.ch
______________________________________


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

Date:  Mon, 05 Jan 1998 13:51:29 +0100
From:  Roberto Basili <basili at info.utovrm.it>
Subject:  ECML'98 TANLPS Workshop: First Call for Paper


               ECML-98 Workshop: First Call for Papers


                            ECML-98 Workshop:
                   Towards adaptive NLP-driven systems:
         linguistic information, learning methods and applications


Organized by : 	
R. Basili, M .T. Pazienza (University of Roma, Tor Vergata), ITALY

Since most of the applications, from syntactic to semantic, are lexicon
driven, systematic and reliable acquisition on a large scale of linguistic
information is the real challenge to Natural Language Processing (NLP).
Empiricist view on Natural Language Processing and Learning has become
recently more attractive for a wider research community: computational
linguistics, artificial intelligence, psychology then seemed to converge on
a specific data-oriented perspective aiming to overcome the traditional
knowledge acquisition bottleneck.
It has been often noted that the limited attention paid by the machine
learning community to text and speech data seems unjustified. It is thus
more and more evident that empirical learning of Natural Language
Processing (NLP) can alleviate the NLP main problem by means of a variety
of methods for the automatic induction of lexical knowledge.
Lexical knowledge is often hard to compile by hand, and even harder to port
and reuse. NLP application systems have still a low impact on real world
problems, mainly due to the costs related to reusability and customization
of the required lexicons. In particular changes in the domain, causes
changes in the lexical information required in the underlying natural
language. Empirical, symbolic machine learning methods can be perfectly
suited for this task like automatic acquisition and adaptation of this
klnowledge. Rule induction, symbolic approaches to clustering, lazy
learning, and inductive logic programming, have been already proposed by a
growing community that is entering the challenge for theoretical (i.e.
methodological) and application purposes  A variety of techniques seems to
be combined in order to successfully design realistic inductive systems for
text processing: the target of this research are methodological and design
principles for systems combining linguistic and lexical learning
capabilities for large scale language processing tasks. This is what we
mean with adaptive NLP-driven  systems.
Within this research enterprise,  some issues can favour a sinergistic
process between NLP and ML areas: the access to large data sets, that are
even increasing over time, due to the telematics facilities available
nowaday; extending the set of typical classes of ML problems to other hard
cases (particularly dense in the NLP processes); adding inductive
capabilities to NLP system for tasks related to specific applications (i.e.
Information Extraction).

The proposed Workshop is thus aiming to stimulate reasearch and discussion
on the following aspects :
- Establishing results and evidencies on the suitability of different ML
   paradigms on specific levels of representation of lexical knowledge
   (morphology, syntax, linguistic inference among others)
- Comparison of the quantitative approaches to lexical acquisition with
   empirical symbolic methods
- Stimulating discussion on cognitive perspective of some models within a
  plausible architecture for Language Processing and Learning
- Establishing results on the applicability of the extracted/induce
  knowledge within NLP systems, with respect to assessed evaluation criteria,
  typical of the ML and Language Engineering (LE) area
- Case studies on adaptive NLP systems, i.e. effective NLP systems
  integrating linguistic inferences with inductive capabilities (WWW KB at
  CMU, ECRAN),
- Critical review of existing experiences on adaptive NLP systems
- Establishing guidelines for an evaluation framework of adaptive NLP
   systems : accuracy of the linguistic process, robustness of the induction
   process, ...
- Promote cooperation among research groups in Europe and USA to exchange
   ideas, data and tools for design and experiment architectures for
adaptive NLP systems

WorkShop format :

The Workshop is expected to cover the whole day.
In the first session, a part from an invited talk, we expect to cover
methodological issues. Papers related to advanced research on suitability
of learning paradigms for the different target lexical information will be
favoured. Prototypical examples in this area are studies on empirical
learning of tasks like POS tagging, induction of grammatical information,
symbolic learning of word sense disambiguation criteria and lexical
semantic information. A panel discussion is expected to close the morning
session and focus on principles of suitability for learning paradigms vs.
lexical levels.
In the second half of the day we expect to stimulate partecipants to cover
application areas, like IR and IE, by a couple of invited talks on existing
adaptive systems as a basis for presenting novel aspects on integration of
NLP capabilities with learning from experience (examples, errors,
performance).  A set of at least other 3 or 4 papers is expected to
concentrate on original research works that we know are currently under
development in several reasearch centres in Europe (Sheffield University,
Tilburg, Rome Tor Vergata and Torino University). A Panel discussion on the
implication of the adaptive paradigm on existing and potential NLP systems
will close the Workshop.

Program Committee

R. Basili (University of Roma, Tor Vergata, ITALY)
M. Craven (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
W. Daelemans (University of Tilburg, NEDERLANDS)
M.T. Pazienza (University of Roma, Tor Vergata, ITALY)
L. Saitta (University of Torino, ITALY)
C. Samuelssonn (Bell Labs, AT&T, USA)
Y. Wilks (University of Sheffield, UK)


Paper Submission:
============

Papers should not exceed 3000 words or 6 pages

Hard Copy Submission:

Three copies of the paper should be sent to:

Roberto Basili
Department of Computer Science, Systems and Production
University of Roma, Tor Vergata
Via di Tor Vergata
00133 Roma (ITALY)
e-mail: basili at info.utovrm.it

Electronic Submission:

Electronic submission may be in either self-contained Postscript
or RTF formats, to
   basili at info.utovrm.it
For each submission -- whether hard copy or electronic -- a separate plain
ascii text email
message should be sent to Roberto Basili, containing the following
information:

# NAME : Name of first author
# TITLE: Title of the paper
# PAGES: Number of pages
# FILES: Name of file (if attachments are submitted electronically)
# NOTE : Any relevant instructions
# KEYS : Keywords
# EMAIL: Email of the first author
# ABSTR: Abstract of the paper
         . . . . . .


Timetable:

Workshop Announcement and Call for Papers : 5 January 1998
Papers  due : 15 February 1998
Notification  of Acceptance : 5 March 1998
Final version due : 25 March 1998

- ----------------------------------------------------
Roberto Basili
Department of Computer Science, Systems and Production
University of Roma, Tor Vergata
Via di Tor Vergata
00133 Roma (ITALY)
e-mail: basili at info.utovrm.it
tel: +39 - 6 - 7259 7391
fax: +39 - 6 - 7259 7460
- ----------------------------------------------------


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