13.1934, Calls: Machine Translation, Linguistic Coding

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Thu Jul 18 02:04:53 UTC 2002


LINGUIST List:  Vol-13-1934. Wed Jul 17 2002. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 13.1934, Calls: Machine Translation, Linguistic Coding

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

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

1)
Date:  Tue, 16 Jul 2002 18:11:07 -0700
From:  "Deborah Coughlin" <deborahc at microsoft.com>
Subject:  AMTA-2002 - Call for Participation - online registration now available

2)
Date:  Wed, 17 Jul 2002 09:45:05 +0200
From:  Andrea Schalley <andrea at cis.uni-muenchen.de>
Subject:  "ONTOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE AND LINGUISTIC CODING" - SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS

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

Date:  Tue, 16 Jul 2002 18:11:07 -0700
From:  "Deborah Coughlin" <deborahc at microsoft.com>
Subject:  AMTA-2002 - Call for Participation - online registration now available

           --- CALL FOR PARTICIPATION ---
     --- ONLINE REGISTRATION NOW AVAILABLE! ---

The Association for Machine Translation in the Americas

AMTA-2002 Conference
Location:  Tiburon, California
Dates:  October 8-12, 2002

The Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA) is
pleased to announce its fifth biennial conference, planned for October
8-12, 2002, in Tiburon (near San Francisco), California.

Online registration is now available on the conference web site:
http://www.amtaweb.org/AMTA2002/

Register at a discounted rate until August 11, 2002!

A preliminary program, providing the schedule for tutorials,
workshops, exhibits, accepted papers, panels, and invited speakers for
the conference, is also now posted on the conference web site.

We look forward to seeing you in Tiburon!


CONFERENCE THEME: From Research to Real Users

Ever since the showdown between Empiricists and Rationalists a decade
ago at TMI-92, MT researchers have hotly pursued promising paradigms
for MT, including data-driven approaches (e.g., statistical,
example-based) and hybrids that integrate these with more traditional
rule-based components.

During the same period, commercial MT systems with standard transfer
architectures have evolved along a parallel and almost unrelated
track, increasing their coverage (primarily through manual update of
their lexicons, we assume) and achieving much broader acceptance and
usage, principally through the medium of the Internet. Web page
translators have become commonplace; a number of online translation
services have appeared, including in their offerings both raw and
post-edited MT; and large corporations have been turning increasingly
to MT to address the exigencies of global communication.  Still, the
output of the transfer-based systems employed in this expansion
represents but a small drop in the ever-growing translation
marketplace bucket.

Now, 10 years later, we wonder if this mounting variety of MT users is
any better off, and if the promise of the research technologies is
being realized to any measurable degree.  In this regard, we pose the
following questions:

Why aren't any current commercially available MT systems primarily
data-driven? Do any commercially available systems integrate (or plan
to integrate) data-driven components? Do data-driven systems have
significant performance or quality issues? Can such systems really
provide better quality to users, or is their main advantage one of
fast, facilitated customization? If any new MT technology could
provide such benefits (somewhat higher quality, or facilitated
customization), would that be the key to more widespread use of MT, or
are there yet other more relevant unresolved issues, such as system
integration? If better quality, customization, or system integration
aren't the answer, then what is it that users really need from MT in
order for it to be more useful to them?

INVITED SPEAKERS

We are pleased to announce that invited speakers for the conference
will include Yorick Wilks and Ken Church, both notable participants at
TMI-92, and Jaap van der Meer, former CEO of ALPNET.  We anticipate
that the speakers will provide a sharp and stimulating focus on the
theme of the conference.

CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS

Elliott Macklovitch, General Chair
Stephen D. Richardson, Program Chair
Violetta Cavalli-Sforza, Local Arrangements Chair
Bob Frederking, Workshops and Tutorials
Laurie Gerber, Exhibits Coordinator

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Arendse Bernth (IBM Research)
Christian Boitet (GETA, CLIPS, IMAG)
Ralf Brown (LTI, CMU)
Robert Cain (Foreign Broadcast Information Service)
Michael Carl (RALI)
Bill Dolan (Microsoft Research)
Laurie Gerber (Language Technology Broker)
Stephen Helmreich (CRL, NMSU)
Eduard Hovy (ISI, USC)
Pierre Isabelle (XRCE)
Christine Kamprath (Caterpillar)
Elliott Macklovitch (RALI)
Bente Maegaard (CST)
Michael McCord (IBM Research)
Robert C. Moore (Microsoft Research)
Hermann Ney (RWTH Aachen)
Sergei Nirenburg (CRL, NMSU)
Franz Och (RWTH Aachen)
Joseph Pentheroudakis (Microsoft Research)
Jessie Pinkham (Microsoft Research)
Fred Popowich (Gavagai Technology Inc.)
Florence Reeder (MITRE)
Harold Somers (UMIST)
Keh-Yih Su (Behavior Design Corp.)
Eiichiro Sumita (ATR)
Hans Uszkoreit (DFKI)
Lucy Vanderwende (Microsoft Research)
Hideo Watanabe (TRL, IBM)
Andy Way (Dublin City Univ.)
Eric Wehrli (Univ. of Geneva)
John White (Northrop Grumman IT)
Jin Yang (SYSTRAN)
Ming Zhou (Microsoft Research)


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

Date:  Wed, 17 Jul 2002 09:45:05 +0200
From:  Andrea Schalley <andrea at cis.uni-muenchen.de>
Subject:  "ONTOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE AND LINGUISTIC CODING" - SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS

                     Second Call for Papers

                           WORKSHOP
      "ONTOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE AND LINGUISTIC CODING"
                  Munich, February 26-28, 2003

                  at the 25th annual meeting of the
                     German Linguistics Society
           (Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Sprachwissenschaft)
- --------------------------------------------------

The relation between nonlinguistic knowledge and linguistic competence
is still a most controversially discussed issue. This workshop will
focus on a less often addressed aspect of this domain: Given that
every notion or concept of the human cognitive system that is amenable
to linguistic coding can be assigned a position in the ontological
hierarchies we have analytical knowledge of, what is the relation
between this systematic position and the structure of the linguistic
signs that encode it? Whereas phonetic realisations are largely
arbitrary, this does obviously not hold for semiotic
complexity. Cutting up the sign inventory of a language according to
an `expense' or `weight' hierarchy (roughly grammatical morpheme <
lexical root < derived stem < composed stem < phrase), it seems that
the encoded concepts tend to build a corresponding hierarchy of
basicness or elementarity: Grammatical morphemes preferably encode
very elementary categories, whereas concepts which require at least a
phrase to be encoded are in general highly derived.

The factual conditions are, of course, highly complex, one reason
being the combinatorial possibilities of the encoding
means. Accordingly, the governing principles are as yet known only in
rough outline. Existing findings need to be worked out, cf. Givón's
(1990) `Less predictable information will be given more coding
material', the preference for root-encoding of basic-level categories
(Rosch 1978), or what could be called Talmy's (2000) law, which states
that roots of motion verbs tend to co-encode, alongside with the
superconcept of motion itself, exactly one additional factor such as
path, manner, figure etc. Universal preferences are equally
interesting as typological differences and among the corresponding
cross-linguistic investigations, cross-modal studies comparing sound
and sign languages are especially revealing and welcome.

A focal point will be on eventity ontologies, in particular those for
motion eventities and communicative acts. As these complex themes
suggest an interdisciplinary approach, not only linguists are hereby
addressed, but also computer scientists, psychologists and
philosophers.

REFERENCES:
Givon, Talmy (1990): Syntax. vol II. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Talmy, Leonard (2000): Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Vol.1: Concept
        Structuring Systems. Cambridge, MA, London: MIT Press. Chapter 1:
        Lexicalization Patterns, 21-146.
Rosch, Eleanor (1978): Principles of Categorization. In: Rosch, Eleanor/
        Barbara B. Lloyd (eds.) Cognition and Categorization, Hillsdale, NJ:
        Lawrence Erlbaum, 27-48.

A more detailed description of the workshop can be found at
http://www.cis.uni-muenchen.de/~andrea/DGfS2003/


Invited speakers:
- ---------
Nicola Guarino (National Research Council Padua, Italy)
Leonard Talmy (SUNY at Buffalo, USA)


We invite abstracts for a 30 minute presentation (including
discussion).  Abstracts should not exceed one page (including
references) and should be sent electronically in one of the common
formats (preferably ASCII) to andrea at cis.uni-muenchen.de. Please send
your abstract until July 31, 2002.  Notification of acceptance is:
August 15, 2002. The program will be announced on September 15.


Organizers:
- ------
Andrea Schalley
Centrum fur Informations- und Sprachverarbeitung (CIS)
Universitat Munchen
andrea at cis.uni-muenchen.de

Dietmar Zaefferer
Institut fur Theoretische Linguistik
Universitat Munchen
zaefferer at germanistik.uni-muenchen.de


Important dates:
- ---------
deadline for abstracts: July 31, 2002
notification of acceptance: August 15, 2002
program announcement: September 15, 2002
workshop: February 26-28, 2003

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