Corpora: Final Call for Proposals: JHU Summer Workshop on Language Engineering

[Johns Hopkins WS02]

FINAL CALL FOR WORKSHOP TEAM PROPOSALS

The Center for Language and Speech Processing at the Johns Hopkins
University invites research proposals for a Summer Workshop on Language
Engineering, to be held in Baltimore, MD, USA, from July 8 to August 16,
2002.

The deadline for submitting a 1-2 page proposal is October 8, 2001.

You may already have a good idea about the purpose of these summer
workshops, which we have hosted every year since 1995: We attempt to
identify specific research topics (suitable for a six week team
exploration) on which progress is needed to advance the state of the art
in various fields of Language Engineering such as:

* Speech recognition
* Trans-lingual information detection and extraction
* Machine translation
* Speech synthesis
* Information retrieval
* Topic detection and tracking
* Text summarization
* Question answering

The research topics of the participating teams in previous workshops can
serve as a good example (see http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/workshops). Having
identified such topics through the review process described below, we then
attempt to get the best researchers to collaboratively work on them.

You may also have a good idea about the typical participants of these
summer workshops: the workshops bring together diverse teams of leading
researchers and students. The senior participants in the workshop are
university professors and industrial and governmental researchers working
in widely dispersed locations. The graduate students are familiar with the
field and are selected in accordance with their demonstrated performance,
usually by the senior researchers. The undergraduates, selected through a
national search, are entering seniors who are new to the field and who
have shown outstanding academic promise.

We are soliciting proposals for research projects from a wide range of
academic and government institutions, as well as from industry. An
independent panel of experts will screen all proposals received by the
deadline for suitability to the workshop goals and format. Results of this
screening will be announced no later than October 22, 2001. Proposals
passing this initial screening will be presented to a peer-review panel
that will meet in Baltimore on November 9-11, 2001. One or two authors of
the screened proposals and other leading researchers will be invited to
this meeting. It is expected that the proposals will be revised at this
meeting to address any outstanding concerns or new ideas. Out of these
panel reviews and ensuing discussion, three research topics will finally
be selected for the 2002 workshop. Authors of successful proposals will
typically be the team leaders.

Would you be interested and available to participate in the 2002 Summer
Workshop? If so, we ask that you submit a one or two page research proposal
for consideration, detailing the problem to be addressed and a rough
agenda to be followed by the team in the six-week period. If your proposal
passes the initial screening, we will invite you to join us for the
organizational 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 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 take an active role
in pursuing it.

Proposals may be faxed (410-516-5050), sent via e-mail (sec at clsp.jhu.edu)
or via regular mail (CLSP, Johns Hopkins University, 320 Barton Hall, 3400
N. Charles St., Barton 320, Baltimore, MD 21218).