12.873, Calls: Natural Lang Generation, Sharing Tools/Research
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LINGUIST List: Vol-12-873. Wed Mar 28 2001. ISSN: 1068-4875.
Subject: 12.873, Calls: Natural Lang Generation, Sharing Tools/Research
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Software: John Remmers, E. Michigan U. <remmers at emunix.emich.edu>
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1)
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 16:10:10 EST
From: Priscilla Rasmussen <rasmusse at cs.rutgers.edu>
Subject: Natural Language Generation (ACL-2001)
2)
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 15:54:38 EST
From: Priscilla Rasmussen <rasmusse at cs.rutgers.edu>
Subject: Sharing Tools and Resources for Research and Education (ACL-2001)
-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 16:10:10 EST
From: Priscilla Rasmussen <rasmusse at cs.rutgers.edu>
Subject: Natural Language Generation (ACL-2001)
FINAL CALL
ACL/EACL 2001 Workshop
8th EUROPEAN WORKSHOP ON NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION
6-7 July 2001
Toulouse, France
http://www.cs.unca.edu/~bruce/acl01/NLG.html
endorsed by SIGGEN
- ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Natural language generation (NLG) constitutes the production of meaningful
texts in natural languages from some underlying non-linguistic
representation of information. Accomplishing this goal may be envisioned
for a number of different purposes, including standardized and/or
multi-lingual reports, summaries, machine translation, dialog applications,
and embedding in multi-media and hypertext environments. Consequently, the
automated production of language is associated with a large number of
highly diverse tasks whose appropriate orchestration in high quality poses
a variety of theoretical and practical problems. Relevant issues include
content selection, text organization, the production of referring
expressions, aggregation, lexicalization, and surface realization, as well
as coordination with other media.
This workshop is part of a bi-annual series of workshops about natural
language generation that runs since 1987. Previous European workshops have
been held at Royaumont, Edinburgh, Judenstein, Pisa, Leiden, Duisburg, and
Toulouse. The goal of the workshop is to be an informal meeting which
facilitates the dissemination of knowledge and expertise in the field. The
workshop will focus on the following topics:
* Search methods for NLG (in content planning and realization)
There seems to be a substantial discrepancy between
application-oriented systems and principled approaches to NLG.
Accomodating a standard pipeline architecture with suitable heuristic
preferences to the intended functionality of a system stands in
contrast to several principled approaches to searching which have been
tried out so far. These include blackboard architectures, constraint
propagation and, more recently genetic algorithms and statistical
techniques. A comparison of these methods in terms of their potential
and limitations is likely to improve understanding about this issue.
Gained insights could prove fruitful for building applications in a
more general and, thus, better reusable way, especially in large-scale
applications such as summarization and machine translation.
* Differences in information organization between source and
presentation specifications (and methods to bridge between these)
Whether the generation task is to verbally express contents of some
knowledge base or to produce multi-lingual presentations from
language-neutral or similar representations, there are strong
similarities in building the target representations: In the
overwhelming number of cases, the ordering and embedding of elements
in the source representation is reflected by the ordering and
embedding of their corresponding realizations at the surface. Often,
this reflection is systematic, many times even simple. But a few cases
prove complex and involve a major restructuring of the surface
structure when compared to the source structure. A major emphasis of
this topic is on collecting such complex cases, identifying
commonalities between them and discussing restructuring techniques.
Accepted papers on these topics will be scheduled for presentation. The
majority of the time will be devoted to discussions, either in sequence or
in parallel, depending on the number of participants. We are considering
organizing a panel. For the focus topics above, we will contact a number of
competent researchers to address the topic from a specific perspective
according to their experience. In addition, we will ask some of them to
prepare material / concrete examples for discussions.
WORKSHOP CHAIRS
Helmut Horacek Univ. of the Saarland
Nicolas Nicolov IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Leo Wanner Univ. of Stuttgart
PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
John Bateman Univ. of Bremen
Dan Cristea Univ. of Iasi
Robert Dale Macquarie University
Laurence Danlos Universite Paris 7
Marc Dymetman Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble
Michael Elhadad Ben-Gurion Univ.
Kristiina Jokinen Univ. of Art and Design Helsinki
Richard Kittredge Univ. of Montreal & CoGenTex
Daniel Marcu ISI, Univ. of Southern California
Chris Mellish Univ. of Edinburgh
Sergei Nirenburg CRL, New Mexico
Owen Rambow AT&T Research
Ehud Reiter Univ. of Aberdeen
Manfred Stede Technical University of Berlin
Michael Zock LIMSI, CNRS
SUBMISSIONS
Papers describing original work in the area of NLG in particular related to
the workshop focus topics above should be submitted electronically. Papers
should be 6-8 pages long in PDF format. We recommend a A4, two-column
format like the ACL proceedings: http://acl2001.dfki.de/style/
We also invite poster submissions (free format, up to 6 page, PDF).
The submissions should be associated with a cover email containing the
following information (ASCII text):
# TITLE: <title of the paper>
# AUTHORS: <list of authors>
# EMAIL: <email of author(s) for correspondence>
# KEYWORDS: <keywords, topic sub-areas, ...>
# ABSTRACT: <abstract of the paper>
Send your submission to Leo Wanner <wannerlo at informatik.uni-stuttgart.de>.
IMPORTANT DATES
Paper submissions *** 6 April 2001 ***
Notification of acceptance 27 April 2001
Camera-ready copies due 16 May 2001
Registration deadline as ACL
Workshop dates 6-7 July 2001
REGISTRATION
The registration fee for the workshop will be posted at a later stage. The
registration fee includes attendance of the workshop and a copy of workshop
proceedings. Follow the registration instructions at the ACL site and
indicate that you would like to attend the NLG workshop.
People wishing to attend the workshop but not submitting papers should send
a notification of attendance: a 1-2 page stating interest to participate,
work done in NLG so far, and potential contributions / material for
discussions about one of the topics. This informationn will help with the
organisation of discussions and allow for an informal and highly
interactive character of the workshop. Notifications of attendance should
be sent to Helmut Horacek <horacek at cs.uni-sb.de>.
MORE INFORMATION
Check the following web site for updates about the NLG workshop:
http://www.cs.unca.edu/~bruce/acl01/NLG.html
-------------------------------- Message 2 -------------------------------
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 15:54:38 EST
From: Priscilla Rasmussen <rasmusse at cs.rutgers.edu>
Subject: Sharing Tools and Resources for Research and Education (ACL-2001)
**FINAL CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS**
ACL/EACL2001 Workshop on
Sharing Tools and Resources for Research and Education
Co-organised by ELSNET
Toulouse, Saturday 7th July 2001
BACKGROUND:
At a workshop at ACL 2000 in Hong Kong dedicated to Infrastructures
for Global Collaboration there was an agreement between the main
professional organisations in NLP and Speech (ACL and ISCA), and
ELSNET, and the other meeting participants, that it would be useful to
aim at a broadly supported, joint repository or catalogue for tools
and materials for the language and speech communities.
An ELSNET-sponsored workshop on educational issues held at EACL99
concluded that certain non-transient infrastructures needed to be
instigated to raise the public perception of educational issues in
NLP. It also concluded that a repository of shared materials,
appropriately indexed for educational usage, would be a useful point
of departure.
This workshop will build on the consensus reached at these previous
workshops. There will be two clear foci: one upon instruments for
sharing tools and resources in general that addresses practical
problems, and the other upon the technological and infrastructural
issues surrounding the educational uses of repositories.
Good examples of existing initiatives in this area are among others
the ACL Natural Language Software Registry (hosted at DFKI,
registry.dfki.de) which was set up as a repository for tools for the
distinct fields of Human Language Techology (HLT), the ELRA/ELDA, LDC,
TELRI and Elsnet resources catalogues and repositories
(http://www.icp.inpg.fr/ELRA, http://www.ldc.upenn.edu,
http://www.telri.de and http://www.elsnet.org/resources.html),
OLAC (a worldwide network of language
archives at www.language-archives.org), and JEWELS
(http://www.elsnet.org/jewels), an as-yet incomplete EU funded website for
educational materials in Language and Speech.
A third theme concerns how to build upon existing initiatives as
sources of data or inspiration.
AIM AND SCOPE OF THE WORKSHOP:
The main goal of the workshop is to discuss methods for the
improvement and extension of existing repositories; the educational
uses of repositories; the closer interlinking between different kinds
of repositories (tools and resources); global infrastructures for the
achievement of joint actions. However, we expect the scope of the
workshop to be much wider than that, as the issues addressed are of
general interest to everybody who believes that sharing tools and
resources is essential for the progress of research and education in
our field.
Contributions of papers and demonstrations are solicited that address
the above themes. The following list of topics is suggestive rather
than exhaustive:
* Repositories versus catalogues
* Mechanisms and infrastructures for sharing and describing content
* Repository management
* Standards for exchange, description, and annotation
* Metadata descriptions
* Quality assessment
* Structure and content of an NLP/CL repository
* Tools and materials for NLP/CL education
* Web-based teaching methods for NLP/CL
SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS FOR PAPERS
* Electronic submissions only (PostScript, Word, or PDF), following
the appropriate ACL latex style or Microsoft Word style.
Submissions should not exceed eight (8) pages, including
references. You can download the appropriate style or template
files using the following link: acl2001.dfki.de/style. In case of
problems with the submission format, please contact one of the
co-chairs.
* Submissions to either co-chair (Mike Rosner and Thierry Declerck).
All submissions will be acknowledged.
* Please provide a list of keywords in the separate header page and
indicate the best fitting subtopic(s) from the above list.
SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS FOR DEMONSTRATIONS
* Demos may be submitted with or without an accompanying paper.
* Please write a 2-page description of the demo and send to either
co-chair. Please let us know about special hardware requirements
over and above the standard PC + beamer without internet access
provided by default
CONFIRMED COMMITTEE MEMBERS
- Thierry Declerck (DFKI) Co-chair (Repository) declerck at dfki.de
- Mike Rosner (Malta) Co-chair (Education) mros at cs.um.edu.mt
- Steven Krauwer (Utrecht University) Co-chair s.krauwer at elsnet.org
- Steven Bird (U. Penn) sb at unagi.cis.upenn.edu
- Bill Black (UMIST) (UMIST, Manchester, UK) wjb at co.umist.ac.uk
- Gosse Bouma (University of Groningen) gosse at let.rug.nl
- Koenraad de Smedt (University of Bergen) desmedt at uib.no
- Claire Gardent (CNRS, Nancy) claire.gardent at loria.fr
- Donna Harman (NIST) donna.harman at nist.gov
- Julia Hirschberg (ATT, ISCA) julia at research.att.com
- Jun'ichi Tsujii (Tokyo) tsujii at is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp
- Andy Way (Dublin City University) away at compapp.dcu.ie
- Antonio Zampolli (Univ. of Pisa), pisa at ilc.pi.cnr.it
DEADLINES
* Submission Deadline: 6th April 2001
* Notification Date: 27th April 2001
* Camera ready copy due: 16th May 2001
WORKSHOP URL
http://www.elsnet.org/acl2001-tools.html
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT
Michael Rosner mros at cs.um.edu.mt
Thierry Declerck declerck at dfki.de
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