Corpora: Final Call for papers - ws on Coherence in Generated Multimedia

[Ivandre Paraboni]

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                    Final Call for Papers

               Coherence in Generated Multimedia

               12 June 2000, Mitzpe Ramon, Israel

                    Workshop associated with
       International Natural Language Generation Conference
                    (INLG-2000, 13-16 June)

           http://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~nlg2000/ws3.html

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              Coherence in Generated Multimedia

Keywords:

     - Generation of multimedia documents/presentations
     - Cross-media coreference, deixis, and anaphora
     - Media allocation, layout, and synchronization


More and more often, Natural Language Generation is performed as
a component of a larger Multimedia Presentation System, whose
output consists of language and/or speech combined with graphics,
animation, non-speech audio, etcetera. Recent years have seen
a growing interest in various issues relevant for the design of
such systems, such as the issue of multimedia system architecture
(e.g., Bordegoni et al. 1997) and media allocation (e.g., ETAI
1997-8). It is gradually becoming clear that a Multimedia
Presentation System forces its designers to rethink some
fundamental issues, at the core of which is a generalized notion
of document coherence, which subsumes the purely linguistic
notion of coherence, and which can take different forms depending
on the type of document.

This workshop invites submission of papers that shed light on
the issue of discourse coherence in relation to the generation of
documents / presentations in which *** natural language + at least
one other medium *** play a nontrivial role. Topics of interest
include but are not limited to:

- Document/presentation structure. How can theories of
  discourse structure (e.g. Rhetorical Structure Theory)
  be enhanced to cover types of discourse that combine
  natural language/speech and other media?
- Media allocation. How does the system decide what
  combination of media is used for expressing a given
  item of information, and how can authors be allowed
  to influence such decisions?
- Interlinguality. For example, what types of semantic
  formalism are most suitable for expressing the meanings
  of expressions that use different media (e.g., pictures
  as well as text)?
- `Fusion' of information from different media. For
  example, how can the referring expressions generated by
  a Multimedia Presentation System be simplified if the
  system is able to use pointing?
- Cross-media coreference, deixis, and anaphora. For
  example, when are expressions like `the method illustrated
  in figure 5' felicitous, and how can a system be enabled
  to generate such expressions?
- Media layout (in the case of a written document) and
  media synchronization (e.g., in the case of a presentation
  by a life-like agent).
- Corpora. Multimedia corpora are an obvious potential
  source of information for multimedia generation, but
  how can connections between different media be captured?
  (E.g., how should pictures, graphs, or gestures be
  annotated?)
- System architecture. For example, can the requirements of
  generating coherent multimedia be reconciled with the
  advantages of a pipeline architecture (e.g. Reiter 1994,
  McKeown et al. 1992)?
- Evaluation of the quality (e.g. coherence) of documents
  or presentations generated by a Multimedia Presentation
  System.

Presentations containing live demonstrations are welcome, but
there is also room for purely theoretical contributions. Each
presentation will be followed by a comment from one of the
other participants, who will have been enabled to see the final
version of the paper beforehand.

                       Submissions:

Submissions (deadline: 31 March) have a preferred length of
about 5 double-spaced pages (not counting title page, abstract,
and references). See INLG main conference page
(http://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~nlg2000/) for details about the use
of Latex (preferred) or Word.  The deadline for camera-ready
final versions is 4 May.  Authors are asked to indicate
explicitly in their submission any special requirements that
they may have (e.g. use of VCR, internet access, data projector)
beyond an overhead projector.

                       References:

- AIR (1995). Special Issue "Integration of Natural Language
  and Vision Processing: Intelligent Multimedia". Artif.
  Intell. Review 9, Nos.2-3.
- Bordegoni et al (1997). Bordegoni, Faconti, Feiner, Maybury,
  Rist, Ruggieri, Trahanias, and Wilson (1997): A Standard
  Reference Model for Intelligent Multimedia Presentation
  Systems. Computer Standards and Interfaces 18, pp.477-496.
- ETAI (1997, 1998). ETAI News Journal on Intelligent User
  Interfaces, Vol 1, No's 1 and 2. See especially <http://
  www.dfki.de/etai/statements/reiter-nov-97-responses.html>.
- Maybury and Wahlster (1998). Readings in Intelligent User
  Interfaces. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco.
- McKeown et al. (1992). McKeown, Feiner, Robin, Seligman,
  Tanenblatt. Generating Cross-references for Multimedia
  Explanation. In Procs. of Tenth National Conf. on Artif.
  Intell., p.9-16. Menlo Park.
- Reiter (1994). Has a Consensus NL Generation Architecture
  Appeared, and is it Psycholinguistically Plausible? In Proc.
  of 7th Int. Generation Ws. Kennebunkport, Maine.


List of organizers (in alphabetical order)

    Elisabeth Andre (Saarbruecken)
    Phil Cohen (OGI, Oregon)
    John Lee (Co-chair, Edinburgh)
    James Lester (Raleigh, North Carolina)
    Johanna Moore (Edinburgh)
    Jon Oberlander (Edinburgh)
    Ivandre Paraboni (Brighton)
    Ehud Reiter (Aberdeen)
    Thomas Rist (Saarbruecken)
    Laurent Romary (Loria)
    Donia Scott (Brighton)
    Kees van Deemter (Co-chair, Brighton)

Contact for questions: <Kees.van.Deemter at itri.brighton.ac.uk>

At a later stage, there will be more information concerning the
workshop on the web at http://www.hcrc.ed.ac.uk/~john/inlg-mm

Submission addresses: Submissions should be sent to *both* of
the co-chairs:

     <john at cogsci.ed.ac.uk>                 (John Lee)
     <Kees.van.Deemter at itri.brighton.ac.uk> (Kees van Deemter)

Please say "INLG Multimedia ws submission" in the subject line
of your message.


Deadlines:

Submissions due by 31 March
Notification of acceptance: 21 April
Camera-ready papers due by 4 May

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