10.59, Calls: Artificial Intelligence, Information Extraction

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Thu Jan 14 23:58:36 UTC 1999


LINGUIST List:  Vol-10-59. Thu Jan 14 1999. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 10.59, Calls: Artificial Intelligence, Information Extraction

Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Wayne State U.<aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. <hdry at linguistlist.org>
            Andrew Carnie: U. of Arizona <carnie at linguistlist.org>

Reviews: Andrew Carnie: U. of Arizona <carnie at linguistlist.org>

Associate Editors:  Martin Jacobsen <marty at linguistlist.org>
                    Brett Churchill <brett at linguistlist.org>
                    Ljuba Veselinova <ljuba at linguistlist.org>

Assistant Editors:  Scott Fults <scott at linguistlist.org>
		    Jody Huellmantel <jody at linguistlist.org>
		    Karen Milligan <karen at linguistlist.org>

Software development: John H. Remmers <remmers at emunix.emich.edu>
                      Chris Brown <chris at linguistlist.org>

Home Page:  http://linguistlist.org/


Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karen at linguistlist.org>
 ==========================================================================

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=================================Directory=================================

1)
Date:  Thu, 14 Jan 1999 15:32:10 +0100
From:  Jan Alexandersson <Jan.Alexandersson at dfki.de>
Subject:  'KNOWLEDGE AND REASONING IN PRACTICAL DIALOGUE SYSTEMS'

2)
Date:  Thu, 14 Jan 1999 17:16:07 -0500
From:  dayne at jprc.com
Subject:  Machine Learning for Information Extraction

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Thu, 14 Jan 1999 15:32:10 +0100
From:  Jan Alexandersson <Jan.Alexandersson at dfki.de>
Subject:  'KNOWLEDGE AND REASONING IN PRACTICAL DIALOGUE SYSTEMS'





			Call for Papers


	           IJCAI-99 Workshop NLP-2
      International Joint Congress on Artificial Intelligence

	KNOWLEDGE AND REASONING IN PRACTICAL DIALOGUE SYSTEMS

		    Endorsed by SIGDIAL


Applications utilizing spoken natural language interaction are becoming
increasingly common, mainly due to the development of speech technology. In
addition to speech recognition and speech synthesis these systems require
dialogue capabilities that would allow users to be engaged in a natural and
efficient interaction.

For the sake of robustness and portability current practical dialogue systems
tend to rely on simple models for dialogue management (e.g. state transition
diagrams or dialogue grammars) and simple representations (if any) of domain or
task knowledge (e.g. frames) and for certain applications, such as information
retrieval from a database, these models actually appear to be sufficient.  On
the other hand, dialogue models developed within AI tend to emphasize the
relation between utterances and speakers' goals and plans, the importance of
being able to reason about other agents' beliefs and intentions, and the need
for domain knowledge and discourse representation for resolving anaphoric and
deictic references.  Somewhere in between we also find proposals that either
augment the simpler dialogue models with generic and specific domain knowledge,
or restrict the role of plan inference to specific situations.

The workshop aims at studying the need for knowledge and reasoning in dialogue
systems from theoretical and practical perspectives. Besides the innovative
aspect of research, an emphasis is also laid on the importance of implemented
dialogue systems as test-beds for evaluating the usefulness of theories and
ideas, and on improvements in practical system abilities supporting a more
natural and efficient interaction.

We primarily seek contributions which discuss one or more of the following
issues:

- - What is the relation between different proposed knowledge sources,
such as discourse models, task models, domain models, conceptual models
and user models?

- - How are such models integrated and coordinated?

- - What are their roles in dialogue systems and how can they improve
  the analysis/generation of user/system utterances?

- - What types of knowledge and reasoning is useful for various kinds of
  applications and situations?

- - How can domain models and discourse models be used to handle focus
  and topic shifts?  Do the models support topic associations in free
  conversations?

- - How dependent is the system's functioning on a particular domain
  model? Can modularity of a system be supported if its domain model
  is changed to a different one?

- - Can domain models be automatically built? How can empirical methods
  be used in building domain models?

- - How can we evaluate domain models and their importance to the
  dialogue systems?


Participants
v============

The workshop will be kept small, with a maximum of 40 participants.  Preference
will be given to active participants selected on the basis of their submitted
papers.

According to IJCAI rules, all workshop attendees must register for the main
conference.

Workshop format
===============

Ample time is allowed for commenting on the papers and open group discussion,
thus ensuring time for discussions that go beyond ordinary conference style
commenting. The workshop is intended to be a genuinely interactive event and a
forum where new ideas and insights can take form via the collaboration of
experts with diverse backgrounds. Demonstration of software could be organised
as part of the main IJCAI conference.


Program comittee
==================

Masahiro Araki, Kyoto University, Japan
Rolf Carlson, KTH, Sweden
Koiti Hasida, ETL, Japan
Diane Litman, AT&T, USA
Susan McRoy, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA
Massimo Poesio, University of Edinburgh, UK
Mieke Rats, Compuleer, The Netherlands
Norbert Reithinger, DFKI, Germany
David Sadek, France Telecom, France
David Traum, University of Maryland, USA
Ingrid Zukerman, Monash University, Australia


Submissions
===========

Potential participants are invited to submit extended abstracts on the topics
outlined above. Submissions should be no longer than 6 (six) pages exclusive of
references, single spaced, and be in line with the IJCAI-style sheet,
obtainable from

                http://www.dsv.su.se/ijcai-99/


Electronic submissions (in postscript format) should be sent to Jan
Alexandersson at:

		jan.alexandersson at dfki.de


Alternatively, three hard copies can be mailed to the corresponding
address below.

		Jan Alexandersson
		DFKI GmbH
		Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3
		D-66123 Saarbruecken
		GERMANY


The accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings which will be
distributed to each participant. Further publication channels will be explored
and decided at the workshop.


Important dates
===============

Electronic submission deadline:			1 March, 1999
Paper submission deadline:			3 March, 1999
Notification of acceptance:			23 April, 1999
Audio-visual requirements for accepted papers:	30 April 1999
Camera-ready paper for the workshop notes:	21 May, 1999
Workshop:					2 August, 1999


Organizing Committee
====================

Lars Ahrenberg (Co-chair)
  Department of Computer and Information Science
  Link"oping University
  S-581 83 Link"oping, Sweden
  tel: +46 13 282422
  fax: +46 13 142231
  email: lah at ida.liu.se

Jan Alexandersson (Chair)
  German Research Institute of Computer Science, DFKI GmbH
  Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3
  66 123 Saarbr"ucken
  Germany
  tel: +49-681-3025347
  fax: +49-681-3025341
  email: jan.alexandersson at dfki.de

Kristiina Jokinen (Co-chair)
 ATR Interpreting Telecommunications Research Laboratories
 2-2 Hikaridai, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun
 Kyoto 619-0288 Japan
 tel: +81-774-95-1342
 fax: +81-774-95-1308
 email: kjokinen at itl.atr.co.jp

Arne J"onsson (Co-chair)
  Department of Computer and Information Science
  Link"oping University
  S-581 83 Link"oping, Sweden
  tel: +46 13 281717
  fax: +46 13 142231
  email: arnjo at ida.liu.se


Further information
===================

Should you have any questions or need additional information on the workshop,
please contact any of the organizing committee members by e-mail or at the
addresses above.

Further information on the IJCAI-99 conference, including updated information
on hotel and travel information, can be obtained from the IJCAI home page at

                http://www.dsv.su.se/ijcai-99/

Updated information on this workshop and the final papers will be made
available via the workshop home page:

		http://www.ida.liu.se/~nlplab/ijcai-ws.html


-------------------------------- Message 2 -------------------------------

Date:  Thu, 14 Jan 1999 17:16:07 -0500
From:  dayne at jprc.com
Subject:  Machine Learning for Information Extraction


                    =============================
                        Call for Participation
                    =============================


                             AAAI-99
            American Association for Artificial Intelligence
                           Workshop on
               Machine Learning for Information Extraction

                          July 18 or 19, 1999
                           Orlando, Florida

                http://www.isi.edu/~muslea/RISE/ML4IE/


The dramatic growth in the number and size of on-line textual
information sources has fueled increasing research interest in the
information extraction (IE) problem. Given a set of text documents
from some domain, an IE system automatically populates a pre-defined
database by extracting relevant fragments from the documents. Manually
constructed IE systems cannot adapt to domain changes, and must be
adapted for each new problem domain. In consequence, various machine
learning (ML) techniques---symbolic learning, inductive logic
programming, wrapper induction, statistical methods, and grammar
induction---have recently been applied to the IE problem. This
research has led to IE systems for several genres---newswire articles,
medical texts, Web pages, and Usenet posts---that automatically learn
to perform IE.

The purpose of this workshop is to provide a forum for exploring the
commonality underlying this diversity of problem domains and
approaches. The workshop has three goals:

  1. to bring together communities of researchers that address the IE
     problem from different perspectives (e.g., the use of natural
     language processing for IE from grammatical text vs. extraction
     from semistructured documents in the context of the information
     integration problem);

  2. to deepen the IE community's understanding of the state of the
     art; and

  3. to identify remaining IE-related problems for which ML
     techniques might be appropriate.


TOPICS appropriate to this workshop include:

  - novel or improved ML techniques for IE;
  - novel types of IE domains;
  - extraction from structured and semi-structured documents;
  - effective use of features such as linguistic structure, mark-up,
    and document formatting; and
  - metrics and benchmarks for evaluating IE systems.


FORMAT: In the interest of promoting as much discussion as possible,
the number of paper presentations will be limited in favor of panels,
invited talks, and posters.  Attendance is limited to 40
participants. To be invited, please submit either a short paper (up to
6 pages) or a research statement (up to two pages, including related
publications). In addition to traditional research papers, we
encourage the submission of both position papers and survey papers.


SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS: Papers may be submitted by emailing the URL
of a postscript version to mecalif at ilstu.edu. If this is not possible,
please contact mecalif at ilstu.edu.


IMPORTANT DATES:
          Submission deadline:        March 12, 1999
          Notification date:          March 26, 1999
          Date for camera-ready copy: April 21, 1999
          Workshop date:              July 18 or 19, 1999


WORKSHOP COMMITTEE:

  Mary-Elaine Califf               Dayne Freitag
  Applied Computer Science         Just Research
  Campus Box 5150                  4616 Henry Street
  Illinois State University        Pittsburgh, PA 15213 - USA
  Normal, IL 61790-5150 - USA      email: dayne at jprc.com
  email: mecalif at mail.ilstu.edu    phone: +1 412-683-8592
  phone: +1 309-438-5203           fax: +1 412-683-4175
  fax: +1 309-438-5113

  Nicholas Kushmerick              Ion Muslea
  Department of Computer Science   Information Sciences Institute / USC
  University College Dublin        4676 Admiralty Way
  Dublin 4 - IRELAND               Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695 - USA
  email: nick at ucd.ie               email: muslea at isi.edu
  phone: +353 1-706-2479           phone: +1 310-822-1511 x787
  fax: +353 1-269-7262             fax: +1 310-822-0751

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