CFP: ESSLLI'99 Workshop on Generation of Nominals

[Rodger Kibble]

           First Announcement and Call For Papers
           ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


                    ESSLLI-99 workshop on
         
           The Generation of Nominal Expressions

            University of Utrecht, The Netherlands
                      9-13 August 1999


Context: 

The workshop will take place in association with the 11th 
European Summer School "Logic Linguistics and Information" 
(ESSLLI), to be held in Utrecht, The Netherlands, from 9-20 
August 1999. The format of the workshop is 5 x 90 minutes on 
the 5 consecutive days of 9 to 13 August 1999.

The ESSLLI Summer School is organized under the auspices of the 
European Association for Logic, Language and Information (FoLLI).
Previous ESSLLI Summer Schools have been highly successful,
attracting around 500 students from Europe and elsewhere. The 
school has developed into an important meeting place and forum 
for discussion for students and researchers interested in the 
interdisciplinary study of Logic, Language and Information.
For more information see <http://esslli.let.uu.nl>. 


Workshop Description:
 
  If someone attempted to assess the `state of the art' of 
  linguistic research on nominal expressions by looking at 
  how present-day programs generate nominals, he or she would 
  no doubt underestimate gravely the level of sophistication 
  of theoretical work on nominals. It can be argued that this is 
  because existing work on the computational generation of nominals 
  has limited itself to relatively simple nominals, often focussing 
  on simple (singular) definite descriptions and pronouns.
  Alternatively, it might be contended that much of the theoretical 
  work in this area is not mature enough to be appicable in 
  generation. Be this as it may, work on the generation of nominals 
  has not profited much from theoretical research in formal semantics 
  and psycholinguistics on the meaning, interpretation and production 
  of nominal expressions. 
  
  This workshop will try to bridge the gap between theory and 
  practice in this area by focusing on the generation of nominal 
  expressions of different linguistic types including, for example, 
  indefinite and quantificational NPs (of different monotonicity 
  types). 
 
  The theme of the workshop is closely related to that of a number 
  of ongoing research projects, including the GNOME (`Generation of 
  NOMinal Expressions') project, in which the ITRI (Brighton) and 
  HCRC (Edinburgh/Durham) collaborate, and which is funded by the 
  EPSRC in the United Kingdom. 


  Topics for which submissions are invited include:
  
 (1) The influence of discourse context on the appropriateness
     and interpretation of a nominal expression
 (2) Descriptive issues concerning the treatment of plurality, 
     bridging, aggregation, eventualities, reference to text, 
     cross-modal reference, etc.
 (3) Representational issues (i.e., what kind of meaning
     representations should form the input to the generation 
     algorithm?)
 (4) Reversibility of grammars
 (5) Differences in textual style or `genre'
 (6) Psycholinguistic research relevant to computational 
     Natural Language Generation (NLG)
 (7) Corpus-based work leading to insights relevant for 
     computational NLG
 (8) Issues of system/algorithm evaluation.


Practical issues:

We welcome short (i.e., roughly 1000-1500 words) electronic 
submissions (send email to Rodger.Kibble at itri.brighton.ac.uk) 
on the theme of the workshop. Submissions should be in Postscript 
or plain ascii. Please include "ESSLLI99" in the Subject line of 
your message to make things easy for us.

In accordance with the description of the Workshop Description,
we encourage submissions about theoretical (e.g., formal semantic
or psycholinguistic), applied, or corpus-based work, as long as 
the work is clearly relevant for NLG programs. No matter what 
they consider the main focus of their work, we ask authors to 
*stress relevance for NLG* in their submission (and, later, in 
their presentation). This will ensure that all contributions will 
contain a common `core', notwithstanding their differences in 
perspective.

It is ESSLLI's practice to make sure that workshops go ahead only
if there turns out to be a sufficient level of interest, based on 
quantity and quality of submissions.

Workshop speakers are required to register for the Summer School; 
however, workshop speakers will be able to register at a reduced 
rate to be determined by the Organizing Committee. Limited funds 
are available to contribute to speakers' expenses in exceptional
circumstances.

 
Important dates:

- First call for papers: 22 October 1998
- Deadline for submissions of abstracts: 1 March 1999
- Notification of acceptance: 1 May 1999
- Workshop to be held: August 9-13


For any questions, please contact the organizers or
consult our web page at
<http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/projects/gnome/esslli99.html> 
which will shortly be available.


Rodger Kibble & Kees van Deemter
Information Technology Research Institute (ITRI)         
University of Brighton
Lewes Road, Watts Building         
Brighton BN2 4GJ
United Kingdom
  
Email: Rodger.Kibble at itri.brighton.ac.uk
       Kees.van.Deemter at itri.brighton.ac.uk
Fax: +44 1273 642908