16.2912, Calls: Computational Ling/USA;General Ling/USA

Fri Oct 7 17:44:06 UTC 2005

LINGUIST List: Vol-16-2912. Fri Oct 07 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.2912, Calls: Computational Ling/USA;General Ling/USA

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Wayne State U <aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry at linguistlist.org>

Reviews (reviews at linguistlist.org) 
        Sheila Dooley, U of Arizona  
        Terry Langendoen, U of Arizona  

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/

The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, Wayne
State University, and donations from subscribers and publishers.

Editor for this issue: Kevin Burrows <kevin at linguistlist.org>
================================================================  

As a matter of policy, LINGUIST discourages the use of abbreviations
or acronyms in conference announcements unless they are explained in
the text.

To post to LINGUIST, use our convenient web form at 
http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.html. 

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

1)
Date: 03-Oct-2005
From: Nicolas Nicolov < nicolas at umbrialistens.com >
Subject: AAAI 2006 Spring Symposium on 'Computational Approaches to Analysing Weblogs' 

2)
Date: 03-Oct-2005
From: Lyn Fogle < gurt at georgetown.edu >
Subject: Georgtown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 2006 

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Fri, 07 Oct 2005 13:41:54
From: Nicolas Nicolov < nicolas at umbrialistens.com >
Subject: AAAI 2006 Spring Symposium on 'Computational Approaches to Analysing Weblogs' 

Full Title: AAAI 2006 Spring Symposium on 'Computational Approaches to Analysing
Weblogs' 
Short Title: AAAI-CAAW 2006 

Date: 27-Mar-2006 - 29-Mar-2006
Location: Stanford, California, USA 
Contact Person: Nicolas Nicolov
Meeting Email: aaai2006_weblog_symposium at umbrialistens.com
Web Site: http://www.umbrialistens.com/aaai2006_weblog_symposium/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics; Computational Linguistics; Discourse
Analysis; Lexicography; Morphology; Syntax; Text/Corpus Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 07-Oct-2005 

Meeting Description:

AAAI 2006 Spring Symposium on 'Computational Approaches to Analysing Weblogs' 

INTRODUCTION

Weblogs are web pages which provide unedited, highly opinionated personal
commentary. Often a weblog (also referred to as blog) is a chronological
sequence of entries which include hyperlinks to other resources. A blog is
conveniently maintained and published with authoring tools.

The blogosphere as a whole can be exploited for outreach opinion formation,
maintaining online communities, supporting knowledge management within large
global collaborative environments, monitoring reactions to public events and is
seen as the upcoming alternative to the mass media.

Semantic analysis of blogs represents the next challenge in the quest for
understanding natural language. Their light content, fragmented topic structure,
inconsistent grammar, and vulnerability to spam makes blog analysis extremely
challenging when faced with questions like: can the implicit and explicit
communities implied by content and link structure be used to determine the
relevance and influence of bloggers? Can a blog segment be identified as a
summary of a linked story in order to use both as training data for
summarization research? Can we determine how information percolates through mass
media outlets and blogs? Can blogs with multimedia content be stored in a way
that allows us to search across different modalities? Can we find consumer
complaints, discover vulnerabilities of products, and predict trends?

The fast growing blogosphere is a vast resource which is a fruitful domain for
AI investigations. For example:

Natural language processing and machine learning researchers are looking at
extracting factual information from text; can blogs be processed in a robust
manner and can knowledge bases be populated with facts from blogs?

Social network researchers and graph theory researchers are concerned with
inferring community structure; analyzing the linkage patterns among blog entries
can provide explicit community structure; can we infer implicit communities
through the content of the blogs?

Political scientists are looking at ways of identifying influencers in a
community; who are the influential bloggers whose voice is echoed by others?

Multimedia researchers are attempting to categorize audio and video content,
aggregate information from diverse sources (textual, audio, video); can visual
blogs be stored in a way that allows search across different modalities?

Market analysis researchers are concerned with what people think of the products
and services of a company; can we process blogs automatically and find consumer
complaints and breaking reports about vulnerabilities of products; also when
does a burst of blogging activity become a trend?

Social psychologists are looking at the response to current events, including
emotional and attitudinal dimensions as well as content and patterns of
influence. Can we do something challenging?

Despite the growing relevance of blogs and an ever increasing population of
bloggers existing research has hardly addressed the spectrum of issues that
arise in analyzing blogs. Blogs are a different kind of document than the
relatively clean text that NLP research is based on. Such differences in term of
structure, content and grammaticality will be a challenge considering that blogs
will likely represent the most common way of publicly accessible personal
expression.

AREAS OF INTEREST

This symposium aims to bring together researchers from different subject areas
(e.g., computer science, linguistics, psychology, statistics, sociology,
multimedia and semantic web technologies) and foster discussions about ongoing
research in the following areas:

[01] AI methods for ethnographic analysis through blogs.

[02] Blogosphere vs. mediasphere; measuring the influence of blogs on the media.

[03] Centrality/influence of bloggers/blogs; ranking/relevance of blogs; web
pages ranking based on blogs.

[04] Crawling/spidering and indexing.

[05] Human Computer Interaction; blogging tools; navigation.

[06] Multimedia; audio/visual blogs processing; aggregating information from
different modalities.

[07] Semantic analysis; cross-blog name tracking; named relations and fact
extraction; discourse analysis; summarization.

[08] Semantic Web; semantic blogging; unstructured knowledge management.

[09] Sentiment analysis; polarity/opinion identification and extraction.

[10] Social Network Analysis; communities identification; expertise discovery;
collaborative filtering.

[11] Text categorization; gender/age identification; spam filtering.

[12] Time Series Forecasting; measuring predictability of phenomena based on blogs.

[13] Trend identification/tracking. 

SUBMISSION

People interested in participating should email a technical paper (up to 8
pages), a short paper (up to 4 pages), a poster or demo description (up to 2
pages), a position paper or a statement of interest (1 page) to the e-mail
specified in the Contacts section by midnight (PST) of Oct 7, 2005.

Each submission must include a list of areas of interest (e.g., Area of
Interest: 03, 04, 10) as reported in section Areas of Interest.

To ensure maximum interaction among participants, the number of participants
will be limited to 60. To ensure maximum diversity, the number of participants
per organization will be limited in the event the overall participation limit is
reached.

HOW TO SUBMIT

Decide on a type of submission:

-technical paper (up to 8 pages); 
- short paper (up to 4 pages); 
- poster (up to 2 pages); 
- demo description (up to 2 pages); 
- position paper (1 page); 
- statement of interest (1 page).

Follow the instructions and use the appropriate macros and templates to edit
your document (the usage of LaTeX stylesheet is encouraged and PDF submissions
are recommended).

E-mail your submission to the address specified in the Contacts section by
midnight (PST) of Oct 7, 2005.

ACCEPTED PAPERS:

- accepted papers in camera-ready format must be submitted following the AAAI
instructions by midnight (PST) of Jan 27, 2006.

- authors of accepted papers must fax signed permission to distribute forms to
+1 650-321-4457 by midnight (PST) of Jan 27, 2006.

- authors of accepted papers requiring special audio visual equipment (such as a
US VCR or 35mm slide projector or overhead) for their presentations should fill
in and fax an audio-visual form to +1 650-321-4457 by midnight (PST) of Jan 27,
2006.

PRESENTATION RECOMMENDATIONS

The Organizing Committee may ask the authors of particularly salient position
papers to explicitly present their position at the workshop to foster
discussion. Presenters will be asked to make the slides of the presentation
available on the workshop home page in HTML, PDF, or plain text.

Please follow the AAAI overhead projection guidelines for preparing your foils.

IMPORTANT DATES

Oct 7, 2005 Submissions due. 
Nov 4, 2005 Acceptance/rejection notices are mailed out. 
Nov 30, 2005 Graduate student travel grant application due. 
Jan 10, 2006 Acceptance/rejection notices for student travel grant are mailed out. 
Jan 27, 2006 Fax ''Permission to Distribute'' and A/V requests to +1 650-321-4457. 
Jan 27, 2006 Submit camera-ready versions via the AAAI web site. 
Feb 10, 2006 Registration deadline. 
Feb 24, 2006 Final (open) registration deadline. 
Mar 27, 2006 Start of the symposium. 
Mar 29, 2006 End of the symposium. 

STUDENT FUNDING

We have a very limited amount of funds to assist with travel expenses graduate
students who have their submissions accepted. If you want to be considered for
partial funding, please send an application to the e-mail specified in the
Contacts section by midnight (PST) of Nov 30, 2005. The application should include:

- current resume;
- one paragraph as statement of interest (no more than 250 words);
- one paragraph (no more than 250 words) written by your advisor in support of
your application;
- detailed budget for your travel expenses (all matching funds and department
contributions must be clearly delineated).

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

- Nicolas Nicolov, Umbria, Inc. 
- Franco Salvetti, Univ. of Colorado at Boulder and Umbria, Inc. 
- Mark Liberman, Univ. of Pennsylvania. 
- James H. Martin, Univ. of Colorado at Boulder. 

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

- Paolo Avesani, ITC-irst, Italy. 
- Bran Boguraev, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA. 
- Claire Cardie, Cornell Univ., USA. 
- Scott Carter, UC Berkeley, USA. 
- Steve Cayzer, HP Labs Bristol, UK. 
- Thierry Declerck, DFKI Language Technology Lab, Germany. 
- Michelle Gumbrecht, Stanford Univ., USA. 
- Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan Univ., Israel. 
- Roy Lipski, Corpora Software, UK. 
- Cameron Marlow, MIT Media Lab, US. 
- Lluís Màrquez, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain. 
- Rada Mihalcea, Univ. of North Texas, USA. 
- Peter Norvig, Google Inc., USA. 
- Peter Pirolli, PARC, USA. 
- Oana Postolache, Univ. of Saarland, Germany. 
- John Prager, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA. 
- Alessandro Provetti, Univ. of Messina, Italy. 
- Drago Radev, Univ. of Michigan, USA. 
- Jonathon Read, Univ. of Sussex, UK. 
- Ellen Riloff, Univ. of Utah, USA. 
- Irina Rish, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA. 
- James G. Shanahan, Turn Inc., USA. 
- Suresh Sood, Univ. of Technology Sydney, Australia. 
- Savitha Srinivasan, IBM Almaden Research Center, USA. 
- Carlo Strapparava, ITC-irst, Italy. 
- V.S. Subrahmanian, Univ. of Maryland at College Park, USA. 
- Belle Tseng, NEC Labs America, USA. 
- Janyce M. Wiebe, Univ. of Pittsburgh, USA. 
- Tong Zhang, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA. 

SYMPOSIUM PROCEEDINGS

We are planning to publish the proceedings of the symposium as AAAI Technical
Report.

CONTACTS

aaai2006_weblog_symposium at umbrialistens.com

-------------------------Message 2 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Fri, 07 Oct 2005 13:41:59
From: Lyn Fogle < gurt at georgetown.edu >
Subject: Georgtown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 2006 

Full Title: Georgtown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 2006 
Short Title: GURT 06 

Date: 03-Mar-2006 - 05-Mar-2006
Location: Washington, DC, USA 
Contact Person: Lyn Fogle
Meeting Email: gurt at georgetown.edu
Web Site: http://www.georgetown.edu/events/gurt/2006/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics; Applied Linguistics; General
Linguistics; Language Acquisition; Language Description; Sociolinguistics 

Call Deadline: 01-Nov-2005 

CONFERENCE NOTICE AND CALL FOR PAPERS:
WE ARE NOW ACCEPTING ABSTRACT SUBMISSIONS

Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 2006

Endangered and Minority Languages and Language Varieties: 
Defining, Documenting, and Developing

March 3-5, 2006
Washington, DC

Co-organizers: Kendall King & Natalie Schilling-Estes
Georgetown University Linguistics Department

The Faculty of Languages and Linguistics at Georgetown University is pleased to
announce the 2006 Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics
(GURT). The theme of this year's conference is  'Endangered and Minority
Languages and Language Varieties: Defining, Documenting and Developing'. GURT
will take place on the campus of Georgetown University in Washington, DC, March
3-5. 

Confirmed plenary speakers include Nancy Hornberger, William Labov, Suzanne
Romaine, Elana Shohamy, and Walt Wolfram. The conference will also feature
symposia organized by Joy Kreeft Peyton, Ofelia Garcia, Teresa McCarty, Leena
Huss & Pia Lane, and Cristina Sanz.

We invite proposals for colloquia, individual papers, and poster presentations
related to the conference theme.  The proposal submission deadline is November
1, 2005.

For more details about the conference or to submit an abstract, please visit our
website at http://www.georgetown.edu/events/gurt/2006/

-----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-16-2912	