[Corpora-List] Call for Proposals: JHU Summer Workshop on Language Engineering

[jeisner at linc.cis.upenn.edu]

CALL FOR RESEARCH 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, Maryland, USA, from July 14 to
August 22, 2003.

The deadline for submitting proposals is October 15, 2002.

You may already have a good idea of the purpose of these six-week summer
workshops, which we have hosted every year since 1995.  Each workshop
team (eight or more people) explores a specific research topic that will
help advance the state of the art in some area of Language Engineering,
such as

* Speech recognition
* Translingual 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 of 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 from 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 23,
2002. Proposals passing this initial screening will be presented to a
peer-review panel that will meet in Baltimore on November 8-10,
2002. 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 2003
workshop. Authors of successful proposals will typically be the team
leaders.

Would you be interested and available to participate in the 2003 Summer
Workshop? If so, we ask that you submit a one-page research proposal for
consideration, detailing the problem to be addressed and a rough work
agenda for the workshop. 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 or four
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 want to
have an active role in pursuing it.

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