11.11, Calls: Information Retrieval, Syntax & Pragmatics

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LINGUIST List:  Vol-11-11. Tue Jan 11 2000. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 11.11, Calls: Information Retrieval, Syntax & Pragmatics

Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Wayne State U.<aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. <hdry at linguistlist.org>
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                      Sudheendra Adiga <sudhi at linguistlist.org>
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1)
Date:  Tue, 28 Dec 1999 13:13:01 -0500
From:  Bob Krovetz <krovetz at research.nj.nec.com>
Subject:  Comp Ling: Information Retrieval in Context/ SIGIR 2000

2)
Date:  Mon, 10 Jan 2000 17:35:09 -0000
From:  Dirk Bury <dirk at linguistics.ucl.ac.uk>
Subject:  UCL CONFERENCE ON THE INTERACTION BETWEEN SYNTAX AND PRAGMATICS

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

Date:  Tue, 28 Dec 1999 13:13:01 -0500
From:  Bob Krovetz <krovetz at research.nj.nec.com>
Subject:  Comp Ling: Information Retrieval in Context/ SIGIR 2000

         SIGIR 2000: Information Retrieval in Context

         TWENTY-THIRD ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL ACM SIGIR
            CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT
                   IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

                        July 24-28 2000
                   Department of Informatics
  Athens University of Economics and Business Athens, Greece

                        CALL FOR PAPERS
           For details see: http://sigir2000.aueb.gr


SIGIR is the major international forum for the presentation of
new research results and the demonstration of new  systems and
techniques in  the broad field of information  retrieval (IR).
The  Conference and Program Chairs  invite all those concerned
with issues of IR  to submit original  research contributions,
posters,  and proposals  for  tutorials,  workshops,  and
demonstrations  of  systems,  for  presentation at SIGIR 2000.
All contributions should be submitted to the appropriate Chair,
as indicated  below ( see the  Conference  web site for further
details: http://sigir2000.aueb.gr ).

TOPICS
Information  Retrieval  is contextual. IR functionalities form
part  of  increasingly  complex  information systems serving a
great  variety  of information tasks and behaviors. SIGIR 2000
seeks  original  research  contributions in the broad field of
information  storage  and retrieval, covering the handling  of
all types of information, user behavior in information systems,
and theories, models, and implementations of IR systems. Topics
relevant to SIGIR include but are not limited to:

* IR Theory, including logical, statistical and interactive IR
  models, data fusion.
* Experimentation: test collections, interactive IR experiments,
  evaluation measures, experimental design, testing methodology,
  scalability.
* Natural  Language  Processing:  word  sense  disambiguation,
  discourse analysis, summarization for the purposes of IR, use
  of linguistic resources for IR.
* Contextual  IR:  multi-media  IR,  cross-lingual IR systems,
  speech retrieval,  dialogue  management, (non)feature-based
  indexing, information seeking and task embedded IR.
* Interface  issues:  user  &  use  modeling,  human-computer
  interaction, search strategies.
* Filtering, Extraction, Routing, and Text Classification.
* Systems and Implementation Issues: integration with database
  systems,  networked  systems  and  the internet, compression,
  efficient query evaluation.
* Applications: electronic publishing,  digital libraries, text
  mining, WWW-related issues, semistructured document retrieval.

SIGIR 2000 IMPORTANT DATES:
==========================

* January 21: Original research paper submissions due. See the
  Submission Instructions Section below for details.

* February 11: Proposals  for  tutorials,  workshops,  posters,
  panels and demonstrations due. See the Submission Instructions
  Section below for details.

* April 1: Notification of acceptance of all submissions.

* May 1: Final camera-ready copy of all submissions due.

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
=======================

RESEARCH PAPERS

Research papers must consist of original contributions (that is,
not previously published and not currently being considered for
publication elsewhere) and must contain a clear statement of the
problem addressed and the context in which it arises. Papers must
also contain appropriate references to prior work and must indicate
what contribution the work makes to the primary field of Information
Retrieval. Researchers relatively new to the field of IR should
get examples from, e.g., previous SIGIR conferences, the ACM
Transaction on Information Systems (TOIS), the Journal of the
American Society for Information Science (JASIS), etc.

Papers (5 copies) should be submitted in English to the Program
Co-Chair responsible for the geographic region of the first author.
Papers should contain at most 5000 words. There are no formatting
requirements for submissions, but do not use font sizes smaller
than 10 point. The final version of the paper will have to fit
within 8 double-column pages, including all figures and bibliography,
so plan accordingly. Papers that are clearly longer than the limit
of 5,000 words will be rejected immediately.

The first page must contain the title of the paper, an abstract
of not more than 150 words, and up to 6 keywords taken from the
list at the end of this Call for Submissions. No page in the paper,
including the first page, should indicate the author(s) or their
affiliation(s). The purpose of omitting author names and affiliations
is to facilitate blind reviewing. Therefore, authors should make an
attempt to disguise who they are if possible, by omitting
acknowledgements in the submitted version of the paper, and by
refraining from phrases such as
  "In our earlier work [cite author-name] ..."
Authors should cite their work when required but attempt not to
make it obvious that the cited work is their own, if possible.

Please indicate if the paper is to be considered for the Best
Student Paper Award. This Award requires that the first and primary
author be a fulltime student at time of submission, that he or she
is responsible for much of the work, and that he or she will present
the paper should it be accepted.

In addition, authors must provide a separate cover page with the
title, the author name(s), the author affiliation(s), the same
list of keywords as on the first page, plus complete contact
information (mailing address, telephone, fax, and e-mail) for the
author to whom correspondence should be sent. All correspondence
with the authors will be through email. The information on this
cover page must also be sent by email to the respective regional
Program Co-Chair. Submissions must arrive before 21 January 2000.

Authors in the Americas should mail 5 hardcopies of the submission
and 1 cover page hardcopy as described above to:
  Nicholas Belkin
  School of Communication, Information & Library Studies,
  Rutgers University, 4 Huntington Street,
  New Brunswick NJ 08901-1071, USA
  Email: nick at belkin.rutgers.edu
  Phone: +1-732-932-8585
  Fax: +1-732-932-6916

Authors in Europe and Africa should mail 5 hardcopies of the
submission and 1 cover page hardcopy as described above to:
  Peter Ingwersen
  Royal School of LIS,
  Birketinget 6, DK 2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark
  Email: pi at db.dk
  Phone: +45-32-58-60-66
  Fax: +45-32-84-02-01

Authors in Asia, Australia and the Pacific should mail 5 hardcopies
of the submission and 1 cover page hardcopy as described above to:
  Mun-Kew Leong
  (Attn: SIGIR Submission),
  Kent Ridge Digital Labs,
  21 Heng Mui Keng Terrace, Singapore 119613
  Email: mkleong at krdl.org.sg
  Phone: +65-874-7864
  Fax: +65-774-4998


TUTORIALS

SIGIR 2000 will begin with a full day of tutorials, each of which
should cover a single topic in detail. Proposals are solicited for
tutorials of either a half day (3 hours plus breaks) or full day
(6 hours plus breaks).  Submissions should be made to the Tutorials
Chair and should include a cover sheet and an extended abstract.
The cover sheet should specify:
     1.the length of the tutorial.
     2.the intended audience (introductory, intermediate, advanced).
     3.complete contact information for the contact person and other
       presenters.
     4.brief biographies (max. 2 paragraphs) of the presenters.
The extended abstract should be 3 to 5 pages, and should include an
outline of the tutorial, along with descriptions of the course
objectives and course materials.

Tutorial proposals must be sent via email by 11 February 2000 to:
  Alan Smeaton (Email: asmeaton at compapp.dcu.ie)

WORKSHOPS

Proposals are solicited from individuals and groups for one-day
workshops to be held on the fifth day of the conference. Submissions
(up to 1,000 words) should include the theme and goal of the workshop,
planned activities, maximum number of participants, the selection
process for participants, and a list of potential participants.
Include a CV for each organizer describing relevant qualifications
and experience. After the workshop, organizers are to provide an
article for the SIGIR Forum which summarizes the workshop.

Workshop proposals must be sent via email by 11 February 2000 to:
  Bob Krovetz (Email: krovetz at research.nj.nec.com)

PANELS AND DEMONSTRATIONS

Proposals for panel sessions should be sent to the Panels Chair by
prospective moderators.  Panels should address issues of interest
to the general information retrieval community, and should be designed
to stimulate lively debate between panelists and audience. Panel
proposals (2-3 pages) must include:
     1.complete contact information for the moderator.
     2.the rationale for addressing this topic as a panel.
     3.the names and affiliations of the panel members.
     4.a description of how the panel will be structured, with
       emphasis on how general participation will be encouraged.
Abstracts of panel presentations will appear in the proceedings.

Demonstrations offer first-hand experience with Information
Retrieval systems, whether advanced operational systems or research
prototypes. The demonstration proposal should indicate how the
demonstration illustrates new ideas, should provide the technical
specifications of the system and should include references to other
literature. The hardware, software, and network requirements should be
indicated in a separate cover letter. A one-page abstract describing
each demonstration accepted will be published in the proceedings.

Panel and Demonstration proposals must be sent via email by
11 February 2000 to:
  James Allan (Email: allan at cs.umass.edu)

POSTERS

SIGIR 2000 poster presentations offer researchers an opportunity to
present late-breaking results, significant work in progress,
or research that is best communicated in an interactive or graphical
format. Abstracts of posters will appear in the conference proceedings.
Three copies of an extended abstract (roughly 3-4 pages) should be
submitted to the Posters Chair. The abstract should emphasize the
research problem and the methods being used, and be headed only
by the title of the poster. In addition, a separate cover page
is required containing the title of the poster, along with
the name and affiliation of the author(s), and complete contact
information for the author to whom correspondence should be sent.

Poster proposals must be sent via email by 11 February 2000 to:
  Amit Singhal (Email: singhal at research.att.com)


AWARDS

During the conference the following awards will be given:

*  The Gerard Salton award
*  Best scientific paper award
*  Best paper presentation award
*  Best student paper award (first author should be student)

CONFERENCE ORGANISATION
=======================

Conference Chair:
Emmanuel Yannakoudakis
Athens University of Economics and Business,
Department of Informatics,
76 Patission Street, Athens 104 34, Greece (eyan at aueb.gr),
Phone: +30-1-8214145,  Fax. : +30-1-8203356

Programme Chairs:
* For The Americas: Nicholas Belkin
  Professor and Director of the Ph.D.Program,
  School of Communication, Information & Library Studies,
  Rutgers University, 4 Huntington Street, New Brunswick NJ
  08901-1071, USA (nick at belkin.rutgers.edu)
  Phone: +1-732-932-8585, Fax: +1-732-932-6916

* For Europe and Africa: Peter Ingwersen
  Royal School of LIS, Birketinget 6, DK 2300 Copenhagen S,
  Denmark, (pi at db.dk)
  Phone: +45-32-58-60-66, Fax: +45-32-84-02-01

* For Asia, Australia and the Pacific: Mun-Kew Leong
  (Attn: SIGIR Submission), Kent Ridge Digital Labs,
  21 Heng Mui Keng Terrace, Singapore 119613
  (mkleong at krdl.org.sg)
  Phone: +65-874-7864, Fax: +65-774-4998

Tutorials Chair: Alan Smeaton
School of Computer Applications, Dublin City
University Glasnevin, Dublin 9, Ireland
(asmeaton at compapp.dcu.ie)
Phone: +353-1-7045262, Fax: +353-1-7045442

Workshops Chair: Bob Krovetz
NEC Research Institute,
4 Independence Way, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA
(krovetz at research.nj.nec.com)
Phone: +1-609-951-2773, Fax: +1-609-951-2483

Panels and Demonstrations Chair: James Allan
Computer Science Department, University of Massachusetts,
Amherst, MA 01003-4610, USA
(allan at cs.umass.edu)
Phone: +1-413-545-3240, Fax: +1-413-545-1789

Posters Chair: Amit Singhal
AT&T Labs-Research, Rm A-281, Shannon Laboratory,
180 Park Avenue, Florham Park, NJ 07932, USA
(singhal at research.att.com)
Phone: +1-973-360-8335, Fax: +1-973-360-8970

Publicity Chair: Anestis Konstantinidis
(mvazirg at aueb.gr)

Treasurer: Elias Lypitakis
(eal at aueb.gr)

Awards Chair: Efthimis Efthimiadis
School of Library & Information Science, University of Washington
Box 352930, Seattle, WA 98195-2930, USA
(efthimis at u.washington.edu)
Phone: +1-206-616-6077, Fax: +1-206-616-3152


REVIEWING PROCESS:
The  SIGIR  2000  Programme  Committee  is  organized with an
International  Programme  Committee (IPC) and three  Regional
Programme  Committees (RPC). Both the  IPC and  the RPCs  are
designed to reflect the broadening topic areas of IR research.
The reviewing process for SIGIR 2000 will  be  in  two stages.
There will first be initial reviews by at least three members
of the RPCs for each submission. For each paper, an IPC member
will be responsible for producing a review and recommendation
integrating the three initial reviews. All submissions will be
refereed "blind",  that is,  without  identification  of their
authors.  For  further information  on the  requirements  for
submission of contributions, and evaluation criteria, see the
Conference web site: http://sigir2000.aueb.gr

INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:

Jun Adachi, NACSIS, Japan
Maristella Agosti, University of Padua, Italy
Ricardo Baeza-Yates, University of Chile, Chile
Marcia Bates, UCLA, USA
Jamie Callan, Carnegie-Mellon University, USA
W. Bruce Croft, University of Massachusetts, USA
Susan Dumais, Microsoft Research, USA
Edward A. Fox, Virginia Tech, USA
Norbert Fuhr, University Dortmund, Germany
Donna Harman, NIST, USA
William Hersh, Oregon Health Sciences University, USA
Kalervo Jarvelin, University Tampere, Finland
David Lewis, AT&T Labs, USA
Elizabeth Liddy, Syracuse University, USA
Gary Marchionini, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill,USA
Mark Maybury, MITRE, USA
Alistair Moffat, University of Melbourne, Australia
Sung-Hyon Myaeng, Chungnam National University, Korea
Douglas Oard, University of Maryland, USA
Steve Robertson, Microsoft Research, UK
Alan Smeaton, Dublin City University, Ireland
Karen Sparck Jones, University of Cambridge, UK
Keith van Rijsbergen, University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK
Ellen Voorhees, NIST, USA
Ross Wilkinson, CSIRO, Australia
Peter Willett, University of Sheffield, UK
Kam-Fai Wong, Chinese University of Hong Kong, China


COOPERATING ORGANISATIONS:
ACM SIGIR, BCS IRSG, Greek Computer Society, others requested.


SIGIR 2000 PAPER SUBMISSION KEYWORD CHOICES - GROUPED ROUGHLY BY TOPIC
(submissions should include up to 6 keywords on both the first page
and the cover page)

IR theory and models (general), statistical/probabilistic models,
logic-based models, term expansion/thesauri, relevance feedback
algorithms/evaluation, text clustering, filtering/routing, passage
retrieval, retrieval using document structure, structured queries,
change in queries over time, evaluation (general), test collections,
testing methodology, scalability of evaluation, information brokers,
distributed collections, merging search results/information synthesis,
systems and implementation (general), architectures for IR systems,
architectures for WWW search, scalability of IR systems, efficiency
indexing for IR systems, efficient query evaluation , compression and
other optimizations for IR, integration with database systems ,
information access in digital libraries, natural language processing for
IR (general), stemming/morphological analysis, tokenization/parsing,
thesaurus construction , phrase detection and use, word sense
disambiguation and IR, text segmentation, discourse analysis and IR,
summarization/abstracting and IR, question answering, translation,
cross-lingual indexing/retrieval, information seeking behavior
(general), individual differences in information-seeking,
field/empirical studies of the information seeking process, theoretical
discussion of the information seeking process, embedding search within
larger tasks , user studies (general), comparing interfaces for
information access, methodology for evaluating interactive IR, user
interface (UI) design for IR (general), information visualization for IR
(general), UIs/visualization for collection overviews and topic spaces,
UIs/visualization for categories/subject codes, UIs/visualization for
query generation and specification, UIs/visualization organizing and
displaying retrieval results, UIs/visualization for source selection,
UIs/visualization for hypertext search and navigation, integrating
navigation and search, animation and IR interfaces, structuring
information to aid search and navigation, structuring information for
different user populations, navigation versus ad hoc search, monitoring
user behavior to improve search, automated presentation of information,
adaptive IR interfaces, adaptive ranking algorithms , cognitive models
and IR, user models and information access, information seeking
dialogues , sensemaking, collaboration and IR, collaboritive filtering,
social techniques for organization and search, reading/annotating and
IR, knowledge-based systems and IR, semantic nets/conceptual graphs and
IR, case-based reasoning and IR, machine learning and IR, text
categorization, planning and IR, IR agents (general), architectures for
IR agents, IR and avatars, (semi) automated search assistants, MMIR
(general), content-based indexing/retrieval (general), image
indexing/retrieval, text image indexing/retrieval, OCR/degraded images
indexing/retrieval, video indexing/retrieval, speech indexing/retrieval,
general audio indexing/retrieval, metadata for retrieval of non-text
information, efficient search over non-textual information, query
languages for non-textual information, results analysis and presentation
for MMIR, evaluation theory and methodology for MMIR, test collection
development for MMIR , application areas (general), biomedical
informatics, legal informatics, entertainment and IR, education and IR,
exploiting hyperlink structure, event detection and tracking, text data
mining, search and ecommerce, search and mobile systems, IR interaction
with the physical world.


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

Date:  Mon, 10 Jan 2000 17:35:09 -0000
From:  Dirk Bury <dirk at linguistics.ucl.ac.uk>
Subject:  UCL CONFERENCE ON THE INTERACTION BETWEEN SYNTAX AND PRAGMATICS


	C A L L   F O R   P A P E R S

CONFERENCE ON THE INTERACTION BETWEEN SYNTAX AND PRAGMATICS

        April 5-6, 2000
        University College London

This conference precedes the Spring Meeting of the Linguistics
Association of Great Britain (LAGB), which takes place at UCL on April
6-8. It is supported by the LAGB and UCL.

New Deadline for submissions: January 21, 2000

Invited speakers: Ruth Kempson and Luigi Rizzi

The conference addresses theoretical questions posed by movement
phenomena that seem to be motivated by pragmatic considerations.

In Government and Binding theory movement applies freely and may
therefore be exploited to satisfy conditions that hold at the
interface with the interpretive system. In English, for example, a
free fronting operation may lead to a focussed interpretation of the
shifted constituent: 'YOUR BOOK, you should give to Paul (not mine)'.

Since within the Minimalist framework movement needs to be triggered,
this account is no longer available. Accordingly, recent literature
proposes that interpretation-related movement is underpinned by a
feature-based system. In order to maintain the hypothesis that
movement is driven by feature checking, our inventory of features
should be extended to include features for TOPIC, FOCUS, SPECIFICITY,
DEFINITENESS and [illocutionary] FORCE etc. In the above example,
movement of 'your book' would be triggered by a head carrying the
feature [+FOCUS].

However, it is not obvious that notions like FOCUS have a place in
syntax. For instance, in recent work Noam Chomsky advocates a radical
separation of syntax and pragmatics when he talks of a "'dumb'
computational system", a system that does not have access to semantic
or discourse considerations. Moreover, it is not obvious whether
encoding pragmatic notions in syntax allows an empirically adequate
treatment of the phenomena associated with them.  Alternatively, we
could abandon the idea that triggers should be exclusively syntactic
and allow movement as long as it has an effect on interpretation, as
proposed by Tanya Reinhart. This however requires some sort of global
evaluation, which in turn gives rise to questions of computational
complexity.

We intend this conference to be interdisciplinary. We aim to bring
together researchers from both pragmatics and syntax to investigate
the interface between the two in more detail.  We therefore invite
relevant abstracts for 30 minute talks (excluding discussion time)
from syntax and pragmatics. We particularly encourage submissions
relating to topic and focus but will also consider abstracts from
other areas which have a bearing on the theoretical issues.

- --Submissions -- Deadline January 21, 2000
Abstracts should be no longer than one A4 page (8 1/2" by 11"),
11-point type single-spaced with one inch margins.  Please send five
anonymous copies and one camera-ready copy that includes the title,
author's name, affiliation and address. Along with the abstract send a
3"x5" card listing the title, author's name, affiliation, email
address, and s-mail address. The address for submissions is:
Syntax/Pragmatics Conference Committee, Department of Phonetics and
Linguistics, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT,
United Kingdom.

E-mail submissions
Abstracts should be sent as an attachment to a message with
the subject line "Abstract". They should be in plain text or Word
(some other formats may also be accepted). The body of the message
should contain the title and author information.  E-mail submissions
should be sent to: dirk at ling.ucl.ac.uk (Dirk Bury) by January 21, 2000.

- --Accommodation
Accommodation can be made available for conference participants in two
locations, both within five minutes' walk from the conference
location. Accommodation in Ramsay Hall, one of UCL's halls of
residence, consists of single bedrooms, with hand wash basins and
shared bathroom facilities, offered on a half-board basis
(i.e. breakfast and dinner provided) at the bargain price of £27.00
per person per night. To reserve accommodation in Ramsay Hall, please
contact Karen Froud karen at ling.ucl.ac.uk for further details as soon
as possible.

Accommodation in the Tavistock Hotel consists of either single or twin
bedrooms with ensuite facilities, television and radio, and the price
includes full breakfast. The Tavistock also has a wine-bar and
restaurant, and a pay garage is available for guests. Prices are
£65.00 per night for a single room and £83.60 for a twin room. To
reserve accommodation at the Tavistock Hotel, please contact them
directly on 0171 636 8383, asking for reservations and mentioning the
UCL conference (as we have a certain number of rooms set aside for
conference delegates).

Please note that accommodation in Central London in the spring is at a
premium, and the rooms reserved for conference delegates will be
allocated on a first-come first-served basis. Accommodation cannot be
guaranteed unless it is booked and paid for by February 24, 2000 at
the latest.

A form for registration and room booking including payment
details will be available shortly from our web page (see below).

- --For further information please contact:
Syntax/Pragmatics Conference Committee, Department of
Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London, Gower
Street, London WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom,
or d.bury at ucl.ac.uk (Dirk Bury),
or visit our website http://pitch.phon.ucl.ac.uk/conference

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