ACL'99 - 3 Workshop Announcements

Priscilla Rasmussen rasmusse at CS.RUTGERS.EDU
Mon Feb 22 21:18:44 UTC 1999


Below, separated by askerisks (*) are THREE ACL'99 associated Workshop
announcements:  1) Coreference and Its Applications; 2) Joint EMNLP
and Very Large Corpora; and 3) Relationship Between Discourse/Dialogue
Structure and Reference.

*********************************************************************

                            ACL'99 Workshop

                     COREFERENCE AND ITS APPLICATIONS

June 22, 1999

                         University of Maryland

                        College Park,
MD.  USA

                 http://www.cs.duke.edu/~amit/acl99-wkshp.html


WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION


Coreference is in some sense nature's own hyperlink. It conveys how
individual statements are connected within documents, across documents
and across bodies of human knowledge. Consequently coreference
resolution algorithms are at the core of Natural Language
Processing. Most of the work done on coreference deals with
a single language and a single text document (usually newswire).

As NLP research matures into "application" phases (as opposed to
theory-development), NLP systems are moving beyond traditional
research sources to document sets which reflect a more natural,
research-oriented mix.  This shift can be seen in both the document
sets and tasks used in recent HUB, MET, and TDT evaluations.  The
new sources consist of documents in several different languages,
documents with data from noisy sources, and documents containing
multimedia.  In order for NLP systems to make a successful
transition to these new sources, it is critical for coreference
resolution systems to also work on these new sources.

The workshop invites papers regarding the theory, design, and
evaluation of coreference resolution systems that deal with
non-traditional data sources.  In particular, we encourage
submission of papers for the following types of coreference:

    *-Cross-document coreference

    *-Coreference resolution in languages other than English

    *-Coreference resolution on noisy data

    *-Coreference resolution on non-text data (example: human speech)

    *-Coreference resolution on multimedia data

In addition, the workshop also invites papers on innovative NLP
applications that rely heavily on coreference resolution systems.

FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION

Paper submissions should consist of a full paper (5000 words or less,
including references).  Each submission should include a separate
title page providing the following information: the title, a short
abstract, names and affiliations of all the authors, the full address
of the primary author (or alternate contact person), including phone,
fax, and email.

Papers may be submitted by submitting three hard copies to:

Amit Bagga
General Electric CRD
Room K1-5C38B
1 Research Circle
Niskayuna, NY
12309.  USA

phone: 1-518-387-7077

email: bagga at crd.ge.com

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submission deadline:      March 29

Notification of acceptance:     April 16

Camera ready papers due: 	April 30

ORGANIZATION COMMITTEE
Co-Chairs:

Amit Bagga (Contact Person)
General Electric Corporate
Research and Development
K1-5C38B
1 Research Circle
Niskayuna, NY 12309.  USA

bagga at crd.ge.com
518-387-7077 (voice)
518-387-6845 (fax)

Breck Baldwin
Institute for Research in Cognitive Science
University of Pennsylvania
3401 Walnut Street, #400C
Philadelphia, PA 19104.  USA

breck at linc.cis.upenn.edu

Sara J. Shelton
US Department of Defense
9800 Savage Road, E24
Ft Meade, MD 20755. USA

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Amit Bagga - GE CRD
Breck Baldwin - University of Pennsylvania
Branimir Boguraev - IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Ed Hovy - Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI)
Mark T. Maybury - MITRE
Ruslan Mitkov - University of Wolverhampton
Sara Shelton - DoD


**********************************************************************

> >                                First Call For Papers
> >
> >                         (EMNLP/VLC-99) JOINT SIGDAT CONFERENCE ON
> >                 EMPIRICAL METHODS IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING AND
> >                            VERY LARGE CORPORA
> >
> > Sponsored by SIGDAT (ACL's Special Interest Group for Linguistic Data
> > and Corpus-based Approaches to NLP)
> >
> >                                  June 21-22, 1999
> >                              University of Maryland
> >
> >                                In conjunction
> >
> > ACL'99: the 37th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational
> > Linguistics
> >
> > This SIGDAT-sponsored joint conference will continue to provide a forum
> > for new research in corpus-based and/or empirical methods in NLP.  In
> > addition to providing a general forum, the theme for this year is
> >
> > "Corpus-based and/or Empirical Methods in NLP for Speech, MT, IR, and
> > other Applied Systems"
> >
> > A large number of systems in automatic speech recognition(ASR) and
> > synthesis, machine translation(MT), information retrieval(IR),  optical
> > character recognition(OCR) and handwriting recognition have become
> > commercially available in the last decade.  Many of these systems use
> > NLP technologies as an important component. Corpus-based and empirical
> > methods in NLP  have been a major trend in recent years. How useful are
> > these techniques when applied to real systems, especially when compared
> > to rule-based methods?  Are
> > there any new techniques to be developed in EMNLP and from VLC in order
> > to improve the state-of-the-art of ASR, MT, IR, OCR, and other applied
> > systems? Are there new ways to combine corpus-based and empirical
> > methods with rule-based systems?
> >
> > This two-day conference aims to bring together academic researchers and
> > industrial practitioners to discuss the above issues, through technical
> > paper sessions, invited talks, and panel discussions. The goal of the
> > conference is to raise an awareness of what kind of new EMNLP techniques
> > need to be developed in order to bring about the next breakthrough in
> > speech recognition and synthesis, machine translation, information
> > retrieval and other applied systems.
> >
> > The conference solicits paper submissions in (and not limited to) the
> > following areas:
> >
> > 1) Original work in one of the following technologies and its relevance
> > to speech, MT, or IR:
> >       (a) word sense disambiguation
> >       (b) word and term segmentation and extraction
> >       (c) alignment
> >       (d) bilingual lexicon extraction
> >       (e) POS tagging
> >       (f) statistical parsing
> >       (g) others (please specify)
> >
> > 2) Proposals of new EMNLP technologies for speech, MT, IR, OCR, or other
> > applied systems (please specify)
> >
> > 3) Comparative evaluation of the performance of EMNLP technologies in
> > one of the areas in (1) and that of its
> > rule-based or  knowledge-based counterpart in a speech, MT, IR, OCR or
> > other applied systems
> >
> >
> > Submissions Requirements
> >
> > Submissions should be limited to original, evaluated work. All papers
> > should include background survey and/or reference to previous work.  The
> > authors should provide explicit explanation when there is no evaluation
> > in their work. We encourage paper submissions related to the conference
> > theme. In particular, we encourage the authors to include in their
> > papers, proposals and discussions of the relevance of their work to the
> > theme . However,  there will be a special session in the conference to
> > include corpus-based and/or empirical
> > work in all areas of natural language processing.
> >
> > Important Dates
> >
> > March  31             Submission of full-length paper
> > April  30             Acceptance notice
> > May    20             Camera-ready paper due
> > June   21-22          Conference date
> >
> > Program Chair
> >
> > Pascale Fung
> > Human Language Technology Center
> > Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
> > University of Science and Tehnology (HKUST)
> > Clear Water Bay, Kowloon
> > Hong Kong
> > Tel: (+852)  2358 8537
> > Fax: (+852)  2358 1485
> > Email: pascale at ee.ust.hk
> >
> > Program Co-Chair
> > Joe Zhou
> > LEXIS-NEXIS, a Division of Reed Elsevier
> > 9555 Springboro Pike
> > Dayton, OH 45342
> > USA
> > Email: joez at lexis-nexis.com
>

**********************************************************************

                              CALL FOR PAPERS

                ACL'99 Workshop on the Relationship Between
                 Discourse/Dialogue Structure and Reference
                                June 21 1999
                           University of Maryland

		http://www.isi.edu/~marcu/discourse-ref-acl99/

		    ---------------------------------

  The relationship between the structure of discourse and dialogue and
the
  use of referring expressions has been the focus of much research in
  linguistics, computational linguistics, and psycholinguistics.
Although
  individual efforts have been couched in a variety of frameworks
ranging
  from (S)DRT and RST to Centering, they all share two underlying
  assumptions:

    1. The structure of discourse affects the interpretation of
referring
       expressions and the space of anaphoric accessibility.
    2. The use of referring expressions restricts the set of possible
       discourse interpretations.

  However, most approaches address only one of these two views on the
  relation between structure and reference. And although several
theories
  explaining this relationship exist, few have made a significant impact
  on practical applications such as discourse parsing, summarization,
  generation, and name-entity recognition.

  This workshop will provide a forum for researchers in all areas of
  linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics who are
  interested in advancing the state of the art in understanding the
  relationship between discourse/dialogue structure and reference.
  Submissions are invited on, but not limited to, the following topics
and
  issues:

    1. Linguistic issues:
               + what is the relation between lexico-grammatical
                 constructs, referring expressions, and the structure of
                 discourse/dialogue?
    2. Psycholinguistic issues:
               + how does the use of referents affect the human
                 interpretation of discourse/dialogue?
    3. Corpus-specific issues:
               + what coding schemata and annotation tools should one
use
                 in order to encode the relation between
                 discourse/dialogue structure and reference?
    4. Representation issues:
               + how should discourse/dialogue structures and referents
be
                 represented?
               + how should one represent the relationship between them:
                 as preferences; or as constraints?
    5. Algorithmic issues:
               + how can discourse/dialogue structures, referents, and
                 co-referential links be identified and computed?
               + knowledge-intensive vs. shallow approaches
               + rule-driven vs. statistical vs. corpus-based approaches
               + Wordnet-based approaches
               + how do discourse/dialogue structure and referential
                 expressions interact in natural language generation?
    6. General issues:
               + what are the commonalities of current approaches to
                 studying the relation between discourse/dialogue and
                 referents?
               + what are the differences?
               + what are the arguments against a relation between
                 discourse/dialogue structure and reference?
               + how language-dependent is the relation between
                 discourse/dialogue structure and reference?

  Post-Workshop Dissemination:

  Selected papers from the workshop will be compiled into a volume
  tentatively scheduled to appear in the Text, Speech, and Language
  Technology book series from Kluwer Academic Press.

  Submission Procedure:

     * Authors are requested to submit one electronic version of their
       papers OR four hardcopies. Please submit hardcopies only if
       electronic submission is impossible.
     * Maximum length is 8 pages including figures and references.
     * Please conform with the traditional two-column ACL Proceedings
       format. Style files can be downloaded from
       http://www.isi.edu/~marcu/stylefiles/ or from
       ftp://ftp.cs.columbia.edu/acl-l/Styfiles/Proceedings/.

       Submission should be sent to:

       Nancy Ide
       Department of Computer Science
       Vassar College
       124 Raymond Avenue
       Poughkeepsie, New York 12604-0520 USA
       Fax: (+1 914) 437 7498
       WWW: http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~ide
       E-mail: ide at cs.vassar.edu

  Timetable:

               Deadline for submissions: March 26, 1999.
               Notification of acceptance: To Be Announced.
               Camera ready copies due: To Be Announced.

  Organizing committee:

     * Dan Cristea - University "A.I. Cuza" of Iasi, Romania.
     * Nancy Ide - Vassar College, USA.
     * Daniel Marcu - Information Sciences Institute/University of
       Southern California, USA.

  Program Committee:

     * Nicholas Asher (University of Texas)
     * Eugene Charniak (Brown University)
     * Udo Hahn (Freiburg University)
     * Lynette Hirschman (MITRE Corp.)
     * Graeme Hirst (University of Toronto)
     * Massimo Poesio (University of Edinburgh)
     * Ehud Reiter (University of Aberdeen)
     * Michael Strube (University of Pennsylvania)
     * Wietske Vonk (Max Planck Institute)
     * Marilyn Walker (AT&T)

  Related Events

     * ACL'99
     * ACL'99 SIGDIAL Business Meeting
     * ACL'99 Workshop on Tagging
     * ACL'99 Workshop on Coreference and Its Applications
     * EuroLAN'99 Summer School



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