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

[Jason Eisner]

The Center for Language and Speech Processing at the Johns Hopkins
University invites research proposals for an NSF-funded Summer
Workshop on Language Engineering, to be held in Baltimore, MD, USA,
from July 5 to August 18, 2006.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS 

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION IS OCTOBER 14, 2005 

You may already have a good idea about the purpose of these six-week
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:

  * Multilingual Speech Recognition 
  * Rich transcription of Speech 
  * Speech diarization 
  * Speech and Text Machine Translation 
  * Translingual information detection and extraction 
  * Speech Synthesis 
  * Information Retrieval 
  * Topic detection and tracking 
  * Text Summarization 
  * Question answering 

The research topics explored by teams in previous workshops can serve
as good examples for your proposal (http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/workshops).

Once the topics are selected, we attempt to bring the best researchers
to the workshop to pursue the research collaboratively for six
weeks. Authors of successful proposals will typically become the team
leaders. Each topic brings together a diverse team of leading
researchers and students. The senior participants 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 24, 2005.
Proposals passing this initial screening will be presented to a
peer-review panel that will meet in Baltimore. This meeting is
tentatively scheduled for November 11 - 13, 2005.  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 or
four research topics will finally be selected for the 2006 workshop.

Would you be interested and available to participate in the 2006
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 sent via e-mail (clsp at jhu.edu), via fax
(410-516-5050), or via regular mail (CLSP, Johns Hopkins University,
3400 N. Charles St., Barton Hall, 320, Baltimore, MD 21218).