Corpora: CfP: ROMAND 2002 RObust Methods in Analysis of Natural language Data

Thu May 2 20:01:16 UTC 2002

[***** Apologies for multiple postings ****].

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ROMAND 2002
2nd Workshop on
RObust Methods in Analysis of Natural language Data
(URL: http://scie02.info.uniroma2.it/ROMAND02.htm)

jointly held with
SCIE 2002 - International Summer Convention on
Information Extraction
                                                                                                                        on July 17 2002

at ESA-Esrin (European Space Agency), Frascati, Rome (Italy)

Motivations and Goals
=====================

The ability of dealing with odd (i.e. ill-formed or simply partial)
sentences is largely exhibited by humans. This allows to rather easily
manage unknown words (e.g. proper nouns never encountered before), to
tackle odd grammatical constructions, to force the interpretation of
illegal syntactic structures (e.g. gaps in the information streams as in
remote/telephonic dialogue) as well as the ability of resorting always to
partial information during the interpretation of uncomplete (or erroneous)
input.

All of the above phenomena are interesting aspects of what has been
recently called robustness in NLP processing (Menzel,1997). The modeling of
such phenomena within computational devices is thus more than a relevant
research area either for linguistic research as well as for the design of
real NLP systems. Robustness has been traditionally stressed as a general
desirable property of any computational model and system. NLP engineering
methods and NLP systems are crucially faced by problems caused by the noise
found in the "real" target texts. However, the nature of these problems and
their interactions with the different levels of the language analysis
process exhibits specific properties that are hardly approached by
exisisting software engineering criteria and practice. Moreover, the above
research area is also central from a linguistic point of view. Effective
models of robusteness, tha are able to fill gaps or to recover from
deficiencies against wrong or poor input streams, pose challanges to the
expresiveness of any underlying explanatory language theory. Cognitive
aspects of robustness are here also playing the role of experimental
evidence as well as definitory knowledge.

The interdisciplinary nature of these research theme is even more critical
as without a systematic validation within "real" NLP systems no linguistic
or psycholinguistic definition of robustness is possible, that is
objectively captured and assessed. The success of a recent Special Issue of
the Journal of Natural Language Engineering (Cambridge University Press) is
a further evidence of the relevance of these problems within the current
research trends. ROMAND 2002 is the second of a series of workshop that
aims at bringing together researchers working on robust methods in natural
language processing. The term natural language is here intended as all
possible modalities of human communication and it is not restricted to
written or spoken language.

The main goal of the workshop will be to bring together researchers working
in fields like artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, language
engineering, human-computer interaction, cognitive science who are facing
with the problem of feasible and reliable systems implementation.
Theoretical aspects of robustness in NLP are welcome as well as engineering
and industrial experiences.

The workshop will be jointly held with the SCIE 2002 Summer Convention on
Information Extraction which will be held in Frascati, Rome (Italy) from
July 16th to 18th. The ROMAND workshop will be held during the SCIE 2002
week on the 19th.

Topics
======

Abstracts are invited on all topics related to robustness in natural
language processing, including, but not  limited to:

   * Robust Text Analysis
   * Information Extraction
   * Robust Parsing
   * Natural Language Architectures
   * Hybrid methods in computational linguistics and language engineering
   * Text Mining
   * Robust Semantics
   * Underspecification
   * Spoken Dialogue systems
   * Multimodal human-computer interfaces
   * NLP and Soft Computing
   * Multimedia document analysis

Submissions
===========

Papers from the first two ROMAND workshops will be considered for
publication on a book on Robust Methods in Analysis of Natural language
Data for an International Editor. Among the submitted papers relevant
results on robustness or significant position papers will be considered for
inclusion on the above book.

Authors should submit the final version of the paper of at most 12 pages
following the ACL/Coling formatting instructions.

Authors are encouraged to submit papers electronically (both printable
versions (postscript or pdf format) or sources, i.e. Word97-2000, will be
accepted) to: Roberto Basili (basili at info.uniroma2.it).

Also hardcopy submission will be accepted at:

Roberto Basili
e-mail: basili at info.uniroma2.it

Dept. of Computer Science, Systems and Management
University of Roma Tor Vergata
Via di Tor Vergata
00133 Roma (ITALY)

tel:     +39 06 72597391
fax:    +39 06 72597460

Workshop Committee
==================

Program chairs:

   * Roberto Basili                 basili at info.uniroma2.it
   * Vincenzo Pallotta            Vincenzo.Pallotta at epfl.ch

 Program Committee

    * Afzal Ballim (EPFL and Japan Tobacco International)
    * Philippe Blache (University of Aix-en-provence)
    * Rens Bod (University of Amsterdam)
    * Jean-Pierre Chanod (XEROX Grenoble)
    * Dan Cristea (University of Iasi)
    * Rodolfo Delmonte (University of Venice)
    * Wolfgang Menzel (University of Hamburg)
    * Martin Rajman (EPFL-LIA)
    * Giorgio Satta (University of Padova)
    * Srinivas Bangalore (University of Pennsylvania)
    * Atro Voutilainen (University of Helsinki)
    * Patrick Ruch (University of Geneva and EPFL)

Organization
============

This year's workshop is jointly held with the "SCIE 2002 - International
Summer Convention on Information Extraction " ( SCIE 2002 ).  The workshop
will take place at the ESA (European Space Agency) premises at Frascati
(Rome, Italy). The workshop is endorsed by:

   * AI*IA (Associazione Italiana per l'Intelligenza Artificiale).

Registration
============

Details about the registration procedure and the on-line registration form
could be found at: http://scie02.info.uniroma2.it/Registration.htm

The registration fee will be:
Normal registration: 100 Euros
For SCIE2002 attendee: 40 Euros

Travel information and Accomodation
===================================
Details about the travel information to Frascati, local accomodation and
the access to the workshop site could be found at http://scie02.info.uniroma2.it/ConVen.htm

Further Information
===================

For any information related to the organization, please contact:

Roberto Basili
e-mail: basili at info.uniroma2.it

Dept. of Computer Science, Systems and Management
University of Roma Tor Vergata
Via di Tor Vergata
00133 Roma (ITALY)

tel:     +39 06 72597391
fax:    +39 06 72597460

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