[Corpora-List] EACL03 workshop on the Reuse of Evaluation Resources

Wed Nov 13 12:59:05 UTC 2002

Dear Colleagues,

the EACL 2003 Workshop on the reuse of Evaluation Resources addresses
- among other topics - the reuse of corpora that have been developed for
evaluation
purposes and therefore, it might be of interest to some of you.
Detailed information on the workshop can be found in the following
call for papers.

All best,
Katerina Pastra

===============================================================
[Apologies for multiple postings]

 ***********************     Call for papers    ***********************

                         EACL 2003 Workshop on:

         “Evaluation Initiatives in Natural Language Processing:
        are evaluation methods, metrics and resources reusable?”

                    13 April 2003, Budapest, Hungary
             11th conference of the European Chapter of the
      Association for Computational Linguistics (April 12-17, 2003)
             http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~katerina/EACL03-eval

Introduction:
Systems that accomplish different Natural Language Processing (NLP)
tasks have different characteristics and
therefore, it would seem, different requirements for evaluation.
However, are there common features in evaluation
methods used in various language technologies? Could the evaluation
methods established for one type of systems be
ported/adapted to another NLP research area? Could automatic evaluation
metrics be ported? For instance, could
Papineni’s MT evaluation metric be used for the evaluation of generated
summaries? Could the extrinsic evaluation
method used within SUMMAC be applied to the evaluation of Natural
Language Generation systems? What are the
reusability obstacles encountered and how could they be overcome? What
are the evaluation needs of system types
such as dialogue systems, which have been less strenuously evaluated
till now, and how could they benefit from
current practices in evaluating Language Engineering technologies? What
are the evaluation challenges that emerge
from systems that integrate a number of different language processing
functions (e.g. multimodal dialogue systems
such as Smartkom)? Could resources (e.g. corpora) used for a specific
NLP task, be reused for the evaluation of
the output of an NLP system and if so, what adaptations would this
require?  John White suggested some years
ago a hierarchy of difficulty, or compositionality, of NLP tasks; if
correct, does this have implications for evaluation?

End-to-end evaluation of systems in a specific NLP area of research has
been attempted within both European
initiatives (e.g. EAGLES/ISLE, ELSE, TEMAA etc.) and U.S. evaluation
regimes with international participation
(e.g. MUC, TREC, SUMMAC). It has been reported that evaluation
techniques in the different Language
Engineering areas grow more similar (Hovy et al. 1999), a fact that
emphasizes the need for co-ordinated and
reusable evaluation techniques and measures. The time has come to bring
together all the above attempts to address
the evaluation of NLP systems as a whole and explore ways for reusing
established evaluation methods, metrics and
resources, thus, contributing to a more co-ordinated approach to the
evaluation of language technology.

Target audience:
The aim of this workshop is to bring together leading researchers from
various NLP areas (such as Machine
Translation, Information Extraction, Information Retrieval, Automatic
Summarization, Question-Answering, Dialogue
Systems and Natural Language Generation) in order to explore ways in
making the most of currently available
evaluation methods, metrics and resources.

Workshop format:
The workshop will be opened with an invited speaker who will introduce
the topic and present the research
questions and challenges that need to be addressed. Oral presentations
divided into thematic sessions will follow;
at the end of each session a panel discussion will take place. The
panels will consist of members of the
program committee. The workshop will close with an overview talk.

Topics of interest:
We welcome submissions of both discussion-papers and papers presenting
applied experiments relevant with -but
not limited to- the following topics:
- cross-fertilization of evaluation methods and metrics
- reuse of resources for evaluation (corpora, evaluation tools etc.)
- feasibility experiments for the reuse of established evaluation
methods/metrics/resources in different
NLP system types
- reusability obstacles and the notion of  compositionality of NLP tasks

- evaluation needs and challenges for less strenuously evaluated system
types (e.g. multimodal dialogue systems ),
possible benefits from established evaluation practices
- evaluation standards and reusability
- reuse within big evaluation initiatives
- application of e.g. Machine Translation methods to Information
Retrieval: implications for evaluation

Submission format:
Submissions must be electronic only, and should consist of full papers
of max. 8 pages (inclusive of references,
tables,figures and equations). Authors are strongly encouraged to use
the style-files suggested for the
EACL main conference submissions at:
http://ufal.ms.mff.cuni.cz/~hajic/eacl03/submission.html
Please, mail your submissions to Katerina Pastra:
e.pastra at dcs.shef.ac.uk

Important dates:
* Deadline for workshop paper submissions:
   TUESDAY, 7 January 2003 (NOTE: strict deadline)
* Notification of workshop paper acceptance:
   TUESDAY, 28 January 2003
* Deadline for camera-ready workshop papers:
   THURSDAY, 13 February 2003
* Workshop Date:
    SUNDAY, 13 April 2003

Program Committee:
Rob Gaizauskas (University of Sheffield, UK)
Donna Harman (NIST, US)
Lynette Hirschman (MITRE, US)
Maghi King (ISSCO, Switzerland)
Steven Krauwer (Utrecht University, Netherlands)
Inderjeet Mani (MITRE, US)
Joseph Mariani (LIMSI, France)
Patrick Paroubek (LIMSI, France)
Katerina Pastra (University of Sheffield, UK)
Martin Rajman (EPFL - Switzerland)
Karen Sparck-Jones (University of Cambridge, UK)
Horacio Saggion (University of Sheffield, UK)
Simone Teufel (University of Cambridge, UK)
Yorick Wilks (University of Sheffield, UK)

Registration details:
Information on registration fees and procedures will be published at the
main EACL 2003 conference pages at:
http://www.conferences.hu/EACL03/

For detailed and up-to-date information on the workshop please visit the
workshop’s website:
http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~katerina/EACL03-eval

For any queries, please don't hesitate to contact me.

Best,
Katerina Pastra

*************************************************************
Katerina Pastra
Research Associate & ILASH Research Co-ordinator
Natural Language Processing Group
Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield
*************************************************************
Regent Court - Room G35
211 Portobello Street, Sheffield, U.K.
Tel. +44 114 2221945
Fax  +44 114 2221810
http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~katerina
*************************************************************
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/corpora/attachments/20021113/4cabc96f/attachment.htm>