[Corpora-List] CFP - Deadine Extension Oct 31, 2003, TALIP Special Issue - Recent Advances in Statisitcal Language Modeling

[Chin-Yew Lin]

CALL FOR PAPERS (Deadline Extended: Oct 31, 2003)

"Recent Advances in Statistical Language Modeling - Beyond N-grams"
Special issue of ACM Transactions on Asian Language Information
Processing
(TALIP)

Guest Editors:
Jianfeng Gao, Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China
Chin-Yew Lin, ISI, University of Southern California, USA

Website:
http://www.isi.edu/~cyl/TALIP

Theme:
Statistical language modeling (SLM) aims to estimate probability
distribution of various linguistic units, such as words, sentences,
and documents, for the purpose of many natural language applications.
Over the last two decades, many attempts have been made to improve
the state of the art. In this issue, we solicit papers showing recent
advances of SLM in both theory and applications.

Theory:
It is ironical that the most popular language model (n-grams) uses very
little language knowledge. In recent years, many attempts have been made
that try to "put language back into language model". But little
improvement
has been achieved so far in realistic applications due to two major
obstacles: (1) the number of parameters of the knowledge-based models is

usually too large to estimate; (2) the construction and use of these
models
requires a large annotated training corpus and a decoder that assigns
linguistic structure, which are not always available. We are seeking
ideas
that enhance our understanding of these core problems in SLM. We
encourage
submissions that describe principles, concepts or models on which work
in
SLM could be based.

Application:
SLM has been successfully applied in many applications such as speech
recognition, Asian language input, information retrieval, and machine
translation. We welcome submissions that demonstrate significant
improvement
in performance using knowledge-based models, present novel applications
of
SLM in new areas such as paraphrasing, question answering, and text
summarization, or how SLM techniques are used in novel ways to improve
the
system's performance.

Areas of interest include, but are not limit to:

-    Theory of statistical language modeling (SLM), including
o        Formal models (N-gram model, HMM, maximal entropy model,
structural
         language model, word/class model, grammar model, etc.)
o        Parameter estimation (model smoothing/combination/adaptation)
o        Evaluation
o        Resource (tagged training data) for SLM

-    Applications of SLM, including the application of SLM in the areas
of
o        Paraphrasing
o        Question answering
o        Text summarization
o        Speech recognition
o        Asian language input
o        Information retrieval
o        Named entity recognition
o        Text generation
o        Machine translation

-    Other statistical natural language processing methods beyond the
scope of SLM, e.g. statistical parsing, machine learning for NLP etc.

The tentative plan is to publish this special issue as volume 3, issue
1,
January 2004.

Instructions for Submission

Papers should follow the style guidelines for the ACM Transactions on
Asian
Language Information Processing
(http://www.cintec.cuhk.edu.hk/~talip/web/).
Papers should be sent to the guest editors, by the submission date
listed below.
The submission should be either:

-     Electronically to jfgao at microsoft.com. The "Subject:" line should
be:
TALIP Special Issue Submission.
The following formats are acceptable:

             - Postscript
             - Adobe PDF

If you cannot produce an electronic version in either of these formats,
or if
the editor informs you of a problem with your electronic submission,
then please
follow the instructions for hardcopy submission.

-    Or, Three hardcopies to:

      Jianfeng Gao
      Microsoft Research Asia
      5F, Beijing Sigma Center
      No. 49, Zhichun Road, Haidian District
      Beijing, 100080, P.R.C

      or

      Chin-Yew Lin
      USC/Information Sciences Institute
      4676 Admiralty Way
      Marina del Rey, CA 90292
      USA


Important Dates
Call for Papers: April 1, 2003
Submission of Papers: October 31, 2003 (extended!)
Notification of Acceptance: January 15, 2004
Final Version Due: March 15, 2004
Special Issue Date: June, 2004


--------------------------------------------------------------
Chin-Yew LIN
email: cyl at isi.edu          USC Information Sciences Institute
tel: 310-448-8711           4676 Admiralty Way
fax: 310-822-0751           Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695
homepage: http://www.isi.edu/~cyl