10.479, Calls: Machine Translation, Virtual Agents

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Wed Mar 31 16:15:41 UTC 1999


LINGUIST List:  Vol-10-479. Wed Mar 31 1999. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 10.479, Calls: Machine Translation, Virtual Agents

Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Wayne State U.<aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. <hdry at linguistlist.org>
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=================================Directory=================================

1)
Date:  Tue, 30 Mar 1999 20:55:33 +0900
From:  "Megumi Kiya" <aamt0002 at infotokyo.ne.jp>
Subject:  MT Summit VII Workshop

2)
Date:  Tue, 30 Mar 1999 21:18:46 +0100
From:  "Virtual Agents 99" <d.ballin at iti.salford.ac.uk>
Subject:  Virtual Agents 99 - CFP

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

Date:  Tue, 30 Mar 1999 20:55:33 +0900
From:  "Megumi Kiya" <aamt0002 at infotokyo.ne.jp>
Subject:  MT Summit VII Workshop



--------------------------------------------------------------
             Workshop on Machine Translation for
             Cross Language Information Retrieval
--------------------------------------------------------------

 Introduction

The goal of this workshop is to explore the role of MT in the context
of CLIR.  Undoubtedly searching, extracting and summarising
information from the Web is a major challenge demanding multilingual
solutions. Despite the fact that currently much textual WWW
information is in English, the situation is radically changing. In
addition, there is an increased amount of users who would prefer to
use sites and/or query in their native language.  There are different
strategies for CLIR involving document translation, query translation,
use of dictionaries.  The adoption of a strategy depends on the user
profile, the level of user interaction intended in the search process,
the targeted use of the documents retrieved and the availability of
linguistic resources, among others.

We invite papers on topics which link advances in Machine Translation
or related technologies to CLIR. Are existing MT solutions sufficient
for the information access demands of today?  What type of MT
linguistic analysis would be useful for CLIR?  How can we identify the
proper translations of query terms? How can we improve on existing
techniques to improve precision and recall? A non-exhaustive list,
which should serve as a starting point, follows:

* Issues in query translation and query expansion
* Alignment techniques for dictionary building
* Level and type of linguistic MT analysis for CLIR (shallow, chunking,
  ...)
* Type of  multilingual resources (corpora, dictionaries, terminologies)
  used in CLIR
* Role of terminology and ontologies in CLIR
* Translation Memories in CLIR
* Translation of index terms and descriptors
* CLIR involving  Asian languages  (problems and challenges)


Participation and Submission of Papers

Participation is limited to 30 persons. Participants will be selected
by the organizing committee, based on submitted papers.  Participants
will be expected to contribute to the workshop by either presenting a
talk or taking part in the discussions.

Researchers interested in participating in the workshop are invited to
submit long abstracts (up to three pages) on the listed research
topics.  Submissions may be sent by e-mail (PostScript files) or as
hardcopies (in triplicate) to the workshop organiser.  In the case
where you use non-Roman fonts, hardcopies are preferred.

The submissions will be reviewed and the accepted papers will be
published in the workshop proceedings. Participants selected for
giving a talk, will have to submit a full paper (up to 8 pages) for
the workshop proceedings.  For more information about the workshop,
please contact the Workshop Organiser.


Important Dates

Abstracts due by:  May 31, 1999.
Notification of acceptance:  June 30, 1999.
Camera-ready version of Final Paper due: August  2, 1999.
Main MT Summit: September 13-17, 1999.
Date of the Workshop: September 17, 1999.

Organising Committee
* Sophia Ananiadou, European Media Lab, Germany
* Christian Jacquemin, LIMSI, France
* Yoshihiko Hayashi, NTT Cyberspace Labs, Japan
* Mun Kew Leong, Kent Ridge Digital  Labs,  Singapore
* Sung Hyon Myaeng, Chungnam National University, Korea
* Hsin-Hsi Chen, National Taiwan University, Taiwan

Workshop Organiser
Please send abstracts / papers to:
Sophia Ananiadou
European Media Lab (EML)
Villa Bosch, Schloss-Wolfsbrunnenweg 33
D-69118  Heidelberg
Germany
Fax: +49-6221-533-298
Email: Sophia.Ananiadou at eml.villa-bosch.org




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

Date:  Tue, 30 Mar 1999 21:18:46 +0100
From:  "Virtual Agents 99" <d.ballin at iti.salford.ac.uk>
Subject:  Virtual Agents 99 - CFP


**********************************************************************
Workshop on Intelligent Virtual Agents (Virtual Agents 99)

		http://www.salford.ac.uk/cve/va99/
**********************************************************************

One day workshop prior to and in Association with the UK VR SIG 99 Conference

		The Centre for Virtual Environments
			University of Salford,
		      Salford, United Kingdom

			13th September 1999

Preliminary Call for Papers
-----------------------------

The field of Virtual Agents is a new and emerging area that is
starting to make its way out of research and into the commercial
world. The area brings together two disciplines, the field of
visualization covering areas such as 3D graphics, virtual reality,
computer animation, and multimedia, and the field of agents, both
within Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Artificial Life (ALIFE).

Only recently has the price and power of computers made virtual agents
a viable option to explore scientifically. Despite being a relatively
new field of research, large strides have been made in a short
time. Lately there has been a marked increase in interest with virtual
agents in diverse industries such as entertainment, education,
engineering, and film.

At the 13th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI98), a
very successful workshop was held on Intelligent Virtual
Environments. Participants felt a follow-up workshop should be
organised in 1999 and since a major theme had been that of Virtual
Agents, this was chosen as the theme of the forthcoming workshop.

People researching virtual agents tend to come from either the
visualization or agent community. The two communities have much to
learn from each other, if wheels are not to be reinvented on both
sides. This workshop aims to bring these two communities together to
discuss the current state-of-the-art in virtual agents, together with
leading international keynote speakers, and to create a roadmap for
the future of this technology.

Topics of interest include (but not limited to)

* Virtual and physical agent interaction
* Augmented virtual agents
* Emotionally driven synthetic characters
* New tools and technologies for the building of virtual agents
* Human interaction with virtual agents (e.g. voice recognition)
* Perception in virtual agents
* Intelligent virtual actors
* Novel applications of virtual agents
* The use of virtual agents for training
* Biologically inspired virtual agents
* Virtual agents in shared worlds
* Virtual ecosystems


Paper Submission

If you are interested in contributing please send an extended abstract
1000 - 2000 words. Extended abstracts and final papers should be sent
electronically, in Word, HTML or Postscript to:
va99 at angmar.iti.salford.ac.uk. Final papers should be about 4000
words. The deadlines for submission are given below.

Demonstrations and Exhibits

An opportunity will exist for people to demonstrate their work. To
give us time to organise the floor space and technical requirements we
would like to be notified before the 6th August, contact us for
details of resources available: va99 at angmar.iti.salford.ac.uk.

Attendance

Anyone with an interest in virtual agents may attend - it is not
necessary to submit a paper in order to attend but people who do will
get priority. To encourage discussion and interaction there are a
limited number of places, so early registration is recommended.

Registration

The registration fee will be 30 and will include attendance at the
workshop on the 13th September, lunch, morning and afternoon
tea/coffee, and a copy of the proceedings. It is not necessary to
register for the UK VR-SIG on the 14th and 15th of September, if you
only wish to attend the virtual agent workshop.

Accommodation

Accommodation is available on site for those arriving before the
workshop or those staying on for the UK VR-SIG. Details will follow.

Programme Committee
Ruth Aylett,		Centre for Virtual Environments, UK - Chair
Daniel Ballin,		Centre for Virtual Environments, UK
Marc Cavazza		University of Bradford, UK
Dave Cliff,		Hewlett Packard Labs, Bristol, UK
Kerstin Dautenhahn,	University of Reading, UK
Chris Hand		Napier University, UK
Mike Luck,		University of Warwick, UK
Divine Ndumu,		BT Laboratories, UK
Paolo Petta,		Austrian Research Institute for AI, Austria
Peter Wavish,		Philips Research Labs, Redhill, UK
Mark Wells	        Televirtual, Norwich, UK


Keynote Speaker
Professor Demetri Terzopoulos
Department of Computer Science
University of Toronto

Professor Terzopoulos does pioneering work in artificial life, an
emerging field that cuts across computer science and biological
science. He devises computer models of animal locomotion, perception,
behaviour, learning and intelligence. Demetri Terzopoulos and his
students have created artificial fishes, virtual inhabitants of an
underwater world simulated on a powerful computer.  These autonomous,
lifelike creatures swim, forage, eat and mate on their own. Demetri
Terzopoulos has also done outstanding work on human facial
modelling. He and his co-workers have produced what is widely
recognised as the most realistic biomechanical model of the human face
to date. Expressive synthetic faces are useful in entertainment,
human-computer interaction, planning reconstructive facial surgery,
automated face recognition, and teleconferencing systems. Demetri
Terzopoulos is widely known as the inventor of deformable models, a
family of shape modelling algorithms that have bridged the fields of
computer vision and computer graphics and have opened up new avenues
of research in medical imaging and computer-aided design.

Audio / Visual

An overhead projector will be provided, as well as a TV-video
(PAL-VHS) and laptops (PC and Mac) running PowerPoint. Please notify
us prior the workshop if you need these.

If you have any other hardware requirements please contact us, and we
will try and accommodate them.

Important Dates
Submission of Extended Abstracts	11th June 1999
Notification re: Extended Abstracts	16th July 1999
Proposals for Demonstrations/Exhibits	6th August 1999
Submission of camera-ready copy		20th August 1999
Deadline for registration			20th August 1999
Intelligent Virtual Agents workshop		13th September 1999
UK VR SIG Conference			14th - 15th September 1999

Publication
All contributions will be considered for later publication in a
special journal issue, details of this will follow.

Contact Person and Further Details

Daniel Ballin,
The Centre for Virtual Environments
Business House
University of Salford,
Salford
M5 4WT, UK	
Email: d.ballin at iti.salford.ac.uk
Tel: +44-(0)161-295-2918
Fax: +44-(0)161-295-2925

http://www.salford.ac.uk/cve/va99/

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