12.430, Calls: Dialogue Systems, Wordnet/Lexical Resources

Fri Feb 16 21:08:04 UTC 2001

LINGUIST List:  Vol-12-430. Fri Feb 16 2001. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 12.430, Calls: Dialogue Systems, Wordnet/Lexical Resources

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Wayne State U.<aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Dry, Eastern Michigan U. <hdry at linguistlist.org>
            Andrew Carnie, U. of Arizona <carnie at linguistlist.org>

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	Terence Langendoen, U. of Arizona

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	Lydia Grebenyova, EMU		Jody Huellmantel, WSU
	James Yuells, WSU		Michael Appleby, EMU
	Marie Klopfenstein, WSU		Ljuba Veselinova, Stockholm U.

Software: John Remmers, E. Michigan U. <remmers at emunix.emich.edu>
          Gayathri Sriram, E. Michigan U. <gayatri at linguistlist.org>

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

1)
Date:  Thu, 15 Feb 2001 15:34:55 EST
From:  Priscilla Rasmussen <rasmusse at cs.rutgers.edu>
Subject:  NAACL-2001 Workshop on Adaptation in Dialogue Systems CFP Reminder

2)
Date:  Thu, 15 Feb 2001 15:40:03 EST
From:  Priscilla Rasmussen <rasmusse at cs.rutgers.edu>
Subject:  NAACL-2001 Workshop on WordNet and Other Lexical Resources CFP         Reminder

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

Date:  Thu, 15 Feb 2001 15:34:55 EST
From:  Priscilla Rasmussen <rasmusse at cs.rutgers.edu>
Subject:  NAACL-2001 Workshop on Adaptation in Dialogue Systems CFP Reminder

NAACL 2001 Workshop on
Adaptation in Dialogue Systems

http://www.cs.utah.edu/~cindi/AdaptDial.html

Overview

The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers
investigating the application of learning and adaptation to dialogue
systems, both speech and text based.

Methods for learning and adaptation show promise for enhancing the
robustness, flexibility, and overall accuracy of dialogue systems. While
researchers in many parts of computational linguistics who use these
methods have begun to form communities, the burgeoning set of activities
within dialogue has remained relatively disparate. We are interested in
adaptation that includes learning procedures as well as decision making
methods aimed at dynamically reconfiguring dialogue behavior based on the
context. We would also like to explore techniques that allow a dialogue
system to learn with experience or from data sets gathered from empirical
studies. Researchers looking at methods to automatically improve different
modules of dialogue systems, or the system as a whole, have not had many
opportunities to come together to share their work. We thus welcome
submissions from researchers supplementing the traditional development of
dialogue systems with techniques from machine learning, statistical NLP,
and decision theory.

Call For Papers

We solicit papers from a number of research areas, including:

- Use of machine learning techniques at all levels of dialogue, from
     speech recognition to generation; from dialogue strategy to user
     modeling
- Adapting to the user as a dialogue progresses
- Dialogue as decision making under uncertainty
- User and user group modeling
- Use of corpora in developing components of dialogue systems,
     including issues in annotation
- Evaluation of adaptive dialogue systems
- Comparison of different techniques in applying adaptive techniques to
      dialogue

We also hope to include a session for the demonstration of working
systems, as time permits. The demonstration sessions will be open to
anyone who wishes to bring their adaptive conversational systems for
demonstration to other members of the workshop. Presenters are asked to
submit a paper that is specifically directed at a demonstration of their
current systems.

Important Dates (2001):

 Paper submission deadline:              Feb 19
 Notification of acceptance for papers:  Mar 16
 Camera ready papers due:                Mar 30
 Workshop date:                          Jun 4

Paper Submission

Electronic submission only: send the postscript or pdf form of your
submission to: timpaek at microsoft.com. The Subject line should be
"NAACL2001 WORKSHOP PAPER SUBMISSION". A cover page should be included
with title, all authors, theme area, keywords, word count, and an
abstract of no more than 5 lines. Late submissions will not be
accepted. Notification of receipt will be e-mailed to the first author
shortly after receipt. Please address any questions to
timpaek at microsoft.com

Submissions must use the NAACL latex style or Microsoft Word style. Paper
submissions should consist of a full paper (6 pages or less).  The
templates are available at the workshop web site.

Organizers

 Eric Horvitz         Microsoft Research         horvitz at microsoft.com
 Tim Paek             Microsoft Research         timpaek at microsoft.com
 Cindi Thompson       University of Utah         cindi at cs.utah.edu

Program Committee

 Jennifer Chu-Carroll         IBM
 Peter Heeman                 Oregon Graduate Institute
 Diane Litman                 AT & T Labs
 Candace Sidner               MERL
 Marilyn Walker               AT & T Labs

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

Date:  Thu, 15 Feb 2001 15:40:03 EST
From:  Priscilla Rasmussen <rasmusse at cs.rutgers.edu>
Subject:  NAACL-2001 Workshop on WordNet and Other Lexical Resources CFP         Reminder

WordNet and Other Lexical Resources:
Applications, Extensions and Customizations
http://www.seas.smu.edu/~moldovan/mwnw/

NAACL 2001 Workshop

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh

3 and 4 June, 2001

Sponsored by the Association for Computational Linguistics Special
Interest Group on the Lexicon.

Previously announced as two different workshops:
- WordNet: Extensions and NLP Applications
- Customizing Lexical Resources

Lexical resources have become important basic tools within NLP and
related fields. The range of resources available to the researcher is
diverse and vast - from simple word lists to complex MRDs and
thesauruses. The resources contain a whole range of different types of
explicit linguistic information presented in different formats and at various
levels of granularity. Also, much information is left implicit in the
description, e.g. the definition of lexical entries generally contains
genus, encyclopaedic and usage information.

The majority of resources used by NLP researchers were not intended
for computational uses. For instance, MRDs are a by-product of the
dictionary publishing industry, and WordNet was an experiment in
modelling the mental lexicon.

In particular, WordNet has become a valuable resource in the human
language technology and artificial intelligence. Due to its vast
coverage of English words, WordNet provides with general
lexico-semantic information on which open-domain text processing is
based. Furthermore, the development of WordNets in several other
languages extends this capability to trans-lingual applications,
enabling text mining across languages. For example, in Europe, WordNet
has been used as the starting point for the development of a
multilingual database for several European languages (the EuroWordNet
project).
Other resources such as the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
and Roget's Thesaurus have also been used for various NLP tasks.

The topic of this workshop is the exploitation of existing resources
for particular computational tasks such as Word Sense Disambiguation,
Generation, Information Retrieval, Information Extraction, Question
Answering and Summarization. We invite paper submissions that include
but are not limited to the following topics:

- Resource usage in NLP and AI

- Resource extension in order to reflect the lexical coverage within a
  particular domain;

- Resource augmentation by e.g. adding extra word senses, enriching
the information associated with the existing entries.
For instance, recently, several extensions of the WordNet lexical
database have been initiated, in the United States and abroad, with
the goal of providing the NLP community with additional knowledge that
models pragmatic information not always present in the texts but
required by document processing;

- Improvement of the consistency or quality of resources by
  e.g. homogenizing lexical descriptions, making implicit lexical
  knowledge explicit and clustering word senses;

- Merging resources, i.e. combining the information in more than one
  resource e.g. by producing a mapping between their senses. For
  instance, WordNet has been incorporated in several other linguistic
  and general knowledge bases (e.g. FrameNet and CYC);

- Corpus-based acquisition of knowledge;

- Mining common sense knowledge from resources;

- Multilingual WordNets and applications;

Paper submission

 Submissions must use the NAACL latex style or Microsoft Word style
 (see workshop website). Paper submissions should consist of a full
 paper (6 pages or less).

Submission procedure

Electronic submission only. For U.S. papers please send the pdf or
postscript file of your paper to: moldovan at seas.smu.edu. Please submit
papers from other countries to w.peters at dcs.shef.ac.uk.  Because
review is blind, no author information is included as part of the
paper.  A separate identification page must be sent by email including
title, all authors, theme area, keywords, word count, and an abstract
of no more than 5 lines. Late submissions will not be
accepted. Notification of receipt will be e-mailed to the first author
shortly after receipt.  Please address any questions to
moldovan at seas.smu.edu or w.peters at dcs.shef.ac.uk

Important dates

 Paper submission deadline: February 20, 2001

 Notification of acceptance: March 10, 2001

 Camera ready due: March 25, 2001

 Workshop date: June 3 and 4, 2001

Organizers

Sanda Harabagiu, SMU, sanda at seas.smu.edu
Dan Moldovan, SMU, moldovan at seas.smu.edu
Wim Peters, University of Sheffield, wim at dcs.shef.ac.uk
Mark Stevenson, University of Sheffield, marks at dcs.shef.ac.uk
Yorick Wilks, University of Sheffield, yorick at dcs.shef.ac.uk

Programme Committee

Roberto Basili (Universita di Roma Tor Vergata)
Martin Chodorow (Hunter College of CUNY)
Christiane Fellbaum (Princeton University)
Ken Haase (MIT)
Sanda Harabagiu (SMU)
Graeme Hirst (University of Toronto)
Robert Krovetz, NEC
Claudia Leacock (ETS)
Steven Maiorano (AAT)
Rada Mihalcea (SMU)
Dan Moldovan (SMU)
Simonetta Montemagni (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, Pisa)
Martha Palmer (University of Pennsylvania)
Maria Tereza Pazienza (Universita di Roma Tor Vergata)
Wim Peters (University of Sheffield)
German Rigau (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya)
Mark Stevenson (University of Sheffield)
Randee Tengi (Princeton University)
Paola Velardi (University of Roma "La Sapienza")
Ellen Voorhees (NIST)
Piek Vossen (Sail Labs)
Yorick Wilks (University of Sheffield)

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