ROMAND 2000 - Call for Papers

[TALN2000]

                                             First Call for Papers

                                                  ROMAND 2000

                     1st workshop on RObust Methods in Analysis of Natural
language Data

                                           Department of Computer Science
                                 Swiss Federal Institute of Technology -
Lausanne
                                                  October 19-20 2000

                                          http://lithwww.epfl.ch/romand2000/

ROMAND 2000 is the first of a series of workshop that aims at bringing
together researchers working on robust methods in natural language processing.
The term "natural language" is 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, 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 held in collaboration with the TALN 2000 conference (le
Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles - Automatic Natural Language
Processing) which will be held in Lausanne from October 16th to 18th. The
ROMAND workshop will be held just afterwards, from the 19th to 20th.

We invite abstracts on all topics related to robustness in natural language
processing, including, but not  limited to:

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


SUBMISSION PROCEDURE:

Authors should submit an anonymous extended abstract of at most 6 (included
references) single-column pages with 10' body font size (for talks with a
duration of 20' plus 10' discussion) together with a separate page specifying
the authors' names, affiliation, address, and e-mail address. The abstracts
should be submitted electronically (in postscript or pdf format) to:
romand at epfl.ch.

IMPORTANT DATES:

Papers due: July 23rd
Acceptance notice: August 14th
Final version due:  September 28th
Conference: October 19-20

WORKSHOP COMMITTEE:

Program chairs are

Afzal Ballim                 Afzal.Ballim at epfl.ch
Vincenzo Pallotta            Vincenzo.Pallotta at epfl.ch
Hatem Ghorbel                Hatem.Ghorbel at epfl.ch

Program committee

Steve Abney
Wolfgang Menzel
Jean-Pierre Chanod
Alberto Lavelli
Rens Bod
Giorgio Satta
Joachim Niehren
Roberto Basili
Maria Teresa Pazienza
Manuela Boros
Diego Molla' Aliod
Hervé Bourlard
B. Srinivas
C.J. Rupp
Peter Asveld


ORGANIZATION:

This year's workshop is organized in collaboration with the TALN 7eme
conférence annuelle sur LE TRAITEMENT AUTOMATIQUE DES LANGUES NATURELLES (
http://liawww.epfl.ch/taln2000/ ).  The workshop will take place at the Swiss
Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne. The workshop is endorsed by ATALA
(Association pour le Traitement Automatique des LAngues).

REGISTRATION:

Details about the registration procedure will be posted later at the official
web site. The registration fee will be:

     Normal registration:          150.- CHF
     For registered TALN attendee: 100.- CHF

FURTHER INFORMATION:

For any information related to the organization, please contact:

Vincenzo Pallotta

DI-LITH EPFL
IN F Ecublens
1015 Lausanne
Switzerland

tel. +41-21-693 52 97
fax. +41-21-693 52 78
Vincenzo.Pallotta at epfl.ch

News about the conference will be posted on the workshop's Web page at
http://lithwww.epfl.ch/romand2000/