20.3864, FYI: Call: JHU Summer Workshop on Language Engineering

Wed Nov 11 19:11:48 UTC 2009

LINGUIST List: Vol-20-3864. Wed Nov 11 2009. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 20.3864, FYI: Call: JHU Summer Workshop on Language Engineering

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1)
Date: 26-Oct-2009
From: Jason Eisner < clsp at jhu.edu >
Subject: Call: JHU Summer Workshop on Language Engineering

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:10:15
From: Jason Eisner [clsp at jhu.edu]
Subject: Call: JHU Summer Workshop on Language Engineering

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16th Annual JHU Summer Workshop
Call For Team Research Proposals
Deadline: Wednesday, November 18, 2009.

http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/workshops/ws10/CFP

The Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University
invites one-page research proposals for a Summer Workshop on Language
Engineering, to be held in Baltimore, MD, USA, June 21 to July 30, 2010.

Proposals should be suitable for a six-week team exploration, and should
aim to advance the state of the art in any of the various fields of Human
Language Technology (HLT). This year, proposals in related areas of Machine
Intelligence that share techniques with HLT, such as Computer Vision (CV),
are also strongly solicited.

Proposals are welcome on any topic of interest to HLT, CV and technically
related areas. For example, proposals may address novel topics or
long-standing problems in one of the following areas.

- Speech Technology: Proposals are welcomed that address any aspect of
information extraction from speech signal (message, speaker identity,
language,...). Of particular interest are proposals for techniques whose
performance would be minimally degraded by input signal variations, or
which require minimal amounts of training data.

- Natural Language Processing: Proposals for knowledge discovery from text
are encouraged, as are proposals in traditional fields such as parsing,
machine translation, information extraction, sentiment analysis,
summarization, and question answering. Proposals may aim to improve the
accuracy or enrich the output of such systems, or extend their reach by
improving their speed, scalability, and coverage of languages and genres.

- Visual Scene Interpretation: New strategies are needed to parse visual
scenes or generic (novel) objects, analyzing an image as a set of spatially
related components. Such strategies may integrate global top-down knowledge
of scene structure (e.g., generative models) with the kind of rich
bottom-up, learned image features that have recently become popular for
object detection. They will support both learning and efficient search for
the best analysis.

- Unsupervised and Semi-Supervised Learning: Novel techniques that do not
require extensive quantities of human annotated data to address any of the
challenges above could potentially make large strides in machine
performance as well as lead to greater robustness to changes in input
conditions. Semi-supervised and unsupervised learning techniques with
applications to HLT and CV are therefore of considerable interest.

Research topics selected for investigation by teams in past workshops may
serve as good examples for your proposal 
(http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/workshops).

An independent panel of experts will screen all received proposals for
suitability. Results of this screening will be communicated no later than
November 20, 2009. Authors passing this initial screening will be invited
to Baltimore to present their ideas to a peer-review panel on December 4-6,
2009. It is expected that the proposals will be revised at this meeting to
address any outstanding concerns or new ideas. Two or three research topics
and the teams to tackle them will be selected for the 2010 workshop.

We attempt to bring the best researchers to the workshop to collaboratively
pursue the selected topics for six weeks. Authors of successful proposals
typically become the team leaders. Each topic brings together a diverse
team of researchers and students. The senior participants come from
academia, industry and government. Graduate student participants familiar
with the field are selected in accordance with their demonstrated
performance. Undergraduate participants, selected through a national
search, are rising seniors: new to the field and showing
outstanding academic promise.

If you are interested in participating in the 2010 Summer Workshop we ask
that you submit a one-page research proposal for consideration, detailing
the problem to be addressed. If your proposal passes the initial screening,
we will invite you to join us for the December 4-6 meeting in Baltimore (as
our guest) for further discussions aimed at consensus. If a topic in your
area of interest is chosen as one of the two or three to be pursued next
summer, we expect you to be available for participation in the six-week
workshop. We are not asking for an ironclad commitment at this juncture,
just a good faith understanding that if a project in your area of interest
is chosen, you will actively pursue it. We in turn will make a good faith
effort to accommodate any personal/logistical needs to make your six-week
participation possible.

Proposals should be submitted via e-mail to clsp at jhu.edu by 4PM EST on Wed,
November 18, 2009. 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics

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