12.2740, Calls: Phonology, Acquisition&Usage of Ling Knowledge

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Thu Nov 1 21:09:11 UTC 2001


LINGUIST List:  Vol-12-2740. Thu Nov 1 2001. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 12.2740, Calls: Phonology, Acquisition&Usage of Ling Knowledge

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>

Reviews (reviews at linguistlist.org):
	Simin Karimi, U. of Arizona
	Terence Langendoen, U. of Arizona

Editors (linguist at linguistlist.org):
	Karen Milligan, WSU 		Naomi Ogasawara, EMU
	Jody Huellmantel, WSU		James Yuells, WSU
	Michael Appleby, EMU		Marie Klopfenstein, WSU
	Ljuba Veselinova, Stockholm U.	Heather Taylor-Loring, EMU
	Dina Kapetangianni, EMU		Richard Harvey, EMU
	Karolina Owczarzak, EMU		Renee Galvis, WSU

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

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Editor for this issue: Renee Galvis <renee at linguistlist.org>
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=================================Directory=================================

1)
Date:  Wed, 31 Oct 2001 12:31:55 -0500
From:  reiss <reiss at alcor.concordia.ca>
Subject:  North American Phonology Conference--corrected dates

2)
Date:  Thu, 1 Nov 2001 15:13:28 +0100 (MET)
From:  Bj|rn Gamb{ck <gamback at sics.se>
Subject:  AAAI Spring Symposium: Acquiring Linguistic Knowledge for Information          Access

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

Date:  Wed, 31 Oct 2001 12:31:55 -0500
From:  reiss <reiss at alcor.concordia.ca>
Subject:  North American Phonology Conference--corrected dates

Call for papers

Second North American Phonology Conference (NAPhC2)

The Linguistics Program at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec
will host the Second North American Phonology Conference (NAPhC2) from
April 26-28th, 2002.

We are pleased to announce that the following phonologists
have all accepted invitations to the conference:

Patricia Keating (UCLA)
John McCarthy (UMass)
David Odden (Ohio)
Carole Paradis (Laval)
Douglas Pulleyblank (UBC)


The theme of the conference is "I-Phonology", in the sense of
"I-language" discussed, among other places, in Chomsky's _Knowledge of
Language_ (1986). We thus encourage submission of empirical and formal
investigations into the nature of individual I-phonologies, as well as
into the nature of the human phonological faculty.

Students are encouraged to submit abstracts. Abstract length is not
limited--complete papers may be submitted for evaluation. Papers may
be submitted and presented in French or English. Accepted papers will
be allotted 40 minutes, including discussion time.  Papers not
accepted as talks will be considered for the Poster Sessions.

Please indicate in your message if you do NOT want to be considered
for a poster presentation. Abstracts must be submitted electronically
to

naphc at modlang-hale.concordia.ca

Deadline for receipt of abstracts is December 1, 2001. Registration
information will be provided after the announcement of the program in
January.

Preferred formats in decreasing order are pdf, ps, plain text, rtf,
WORD (Mac or Windows), WordPerfect (Linux, Mac or Windows).  Word and
Wordperfect users should use no other phonetics fonts than SIL Doulos
(available at http://www.sil.org/computing/fonts/encore-ipa.html ).
If you make a ps or pdf file under Windows or Mac, please verify its
integrity before sending it. Do not send any compressed files--make
sure your mail program does not compress automatically.

Further information will soon be available at
 http://modlang-hale.concordia.ca/naphc.html

Organizers
Mark Hale & Charles Reiss

hale1 at alcor.concordia.ca
reiss at alcor.concordia.ca



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

Date:  Thu, 1 Nov 2001 15:13:28 +0100 (MET)
From:  Bj|rn Gamb{ck <gamback at sics.se>
Subject:  AAAI Spring Symposium: Acquiring Linguistic Knowledge for Information          Access


ACQUIRING (AND USING) LINGUISTIC (AND WORLD) KNOWLEDGE FOR INFORMATION ACCESS

  The 2002 AAAI Spring Symposium Series, March 25-27, 2002
      at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

            http://www.sics.se/~jussi/aaaiss02/

CALL FOR PAPERS

EXTENDED DEADLINE: NOVEMBER 27

* Theory for Systems; Application for Theories

- Information Access Tasks Need Text Understanding.
To move forward the research frontier in the general field of
information access, one of the bottlenecks we need to address is
understanding textual content somewhat better. While full text
understanding remains a distant and possibly unattainable goal,
advances in content analysis beyond the simple word-occurrence
statistics or name-recognition algorithms used today would seem to be
desirable.

Information retrieval is a blunt information access task, and
information-retrieval systems deliver useful results with a simple
text and content model. Much better models are necessary for
information access tasks that involve information refinement, meaning
tasks that involve processing information in text - and some specific
questions in information retrieval proper are fairly
knowledge-intensive such as query expansion or questions related to
multilinguality.

In addition, the dynamic nature of both information needs and
information sources will make a flexible model or set of models a
necessity. Models must either be adaptive or easily adapted by some
form of low-cost intervention; and they must support incremental
knowledge build-up. The first requirement involves acquisition of
information from unstructured data; the second involves finding an
inspectable and transparent model and developing an understanding of
knowledge-intensive interaction.

- Text Understanding Needs a Theory.
Whatever the type of model, it must be represented in some way. But
knowledge modeling, semantics, or ontology construction are areas
marked by the absence of significant consensus either in points of
theory or scope of application. Even the terminology and success
criteria of the somewhat overlapping fields are fragmented. Some
approaches to content modeling lay claim to psychological realism,
others to inspectability; some are portable, others transparent; some
are robust, others logically sound; some efficient, others
scalable. There is no explicit standard and not even any accepted
practice to adhere to or to deviate from.

- Information Access Tasks Give Focus to Modeling.
It is too much to hope for a set of standards to emerge from the
intellectually fairly volatile and fragmented area of semantics or
cognitive modeling. But in our application areas - namely, those in
the general field of information access - external success criteria
are better established. Compromise from theoretical underpinnings in
the name of performance is not only possible but even desirable.

* Target Audience

The focus of this workshop are models and model tasks. We aim to bring
together researchers that work with any kind of text analysis with the
aim of understanding text, and with information access applications in
mind: In particular, research groups that have a working system
capable of processing a fair amount of text which uses knowledge about
either text, domain, or both; or researchers with either a design for
a knowledge model or theories about text and textuality, who have
performed large-scale experiments on text to validate their ideas.

The idea is to attract participation from diverse fields with the goal
of identifying reasonable interfaces between analyses of various type.

Participants would be encouraged not only to relate successes their
approach has engendered but failures due to lack of knowledge or due
to unsatisfactory modeling; other participants would be encouraged to
discuss and offer contributions to the goal. Ideally, projects would
invite each other to work with material they already are working with
and to investigate cross-pollination of different approaches.

* Submissions

We invite submissions of research abstracts position papers - and in
particular - system demonstrations and experience reports on all
subjects related to the acquisition and usage of linguistic knowledge
in the information access field, including (but not limited to):

       Application areas / Information access tasks;
       Techniques for acquiring knowledge from text;
       Knowledge representation formats.

The submission should about 1-3 pages of text, preferably in plain
text, HTML or self-contained LaTeX.

Some "challenge questions" which the authors might want to address:

    1.How does my model adjust to a new domain or to previously unknown
      material?
    2.How can the knowledge in my model be inspected, assessed, and
      hand-edited except in a near-full-scale trial?
    3.How well does the model perform in a large-scale trial? (By ANY
      metric!)
    4.What additional knowledge or theory does my model need to perform
      better?

Unsatisfactory answers are encouraged if they invite further
cooperation between groups!  Submissions should be sent by e-mail to
Jussi Karlgren (jussi at sics.se).

* Dates (Now extended due to world events.)

       ABSTRACTS DUE: NOVEMBER 27
       Notification of acceptance: November 30
       Camera-ready copy: January 21
       Registration deadline: February 15
       Symposium: March 25-27

* Graduate students, take note

There is some (very limited) funding available for graduate student
travel. If you are a graduate student, please indicate this on your
submission.

* Organizing Committee

  Jussi Karlgren (chair), Swedish Institute of Computer Science
    (jussi at sics.se);
  Pentti Kanerva (cochair), CSLI, Stanford University
    (pkanerva at csli.stanford.edu);
  Björn Gambäck (cochair), Swedish Institute of Computer Science
    (gamback at sics.se);
  Marti Hearst, SIMS, University of California, Berkeley
    (hearst at sims.berkeley.edu);
  Robert Hecht-Nielsen, HNC Software
    (r at hnc.com);
  Tony Plate, Bios Group
    (Tony.Plate at biosgroup.com).

- ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Prof. Björn Gambäck, tekn.dr. (Ph.D.)        Tel: +46 - (0)8 - 633 15 35
Swedish Institute of Computer Science        Mob: +46 - (0)70- 568 15 35
Box 1263,  SE - 164 29 Kista,  Sweden        Fax: +46 - (0)8 - 751 72 30

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