12.757, Calls: Finiteness, Machine Translation

Tue Mar 20 02:33:12 UTC 2001

LINGUIST List:  Vol-12-757. Mon Mar 19 2001. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 12.757, Calls: Finiteness, Machine Translation

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

1)
Date:  Sun, 18 Mar 2001 16:36:35 -0000
From:  "Irina Nikolaeva" <i.nikolaeva at btinternet.com>
Subject:  Finiteness

2)
Date:  Mon, 19 Mar 2001 16:32:23 EST
From:  Priscilla Rasmussen <rasmusse at cs.rutgers.edu>
Subject:  Data-Driven Machine Translation (ACL-2001)

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

Date:  Sun, 18 Mar 2001 16:36:35 -0000
From:  "Irina Nikolaeva" <i.nikolaeva at btinternet.com>
Subject:  Finiteness

SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS

COFERENCE ON FINITENESS

UNIVERSITY OF KONSTANZ (GERMANY), May 11-13, 2001

Though routinely employed in the morphological and syntactic analysis of
many languages, if not all, the descriptive content and theoretical
import of the category of finiteness is so unclear as to render it
arbitrary and meaningless. The aim of the conference is to shed light on
this category by focusing on questions such as these:

- Is FINITENESS an elementary notion or is it defined in terms of more
basic notions (such as marking for tense, mood, person/number/other
agreement, being in construction with a non-oblique subject)?

- Assuming FINITENESS is not elementary, what are the patterns of more
basic functional categories that render such a derived category
meaningful? (For example, are there systematic correlations between
being marked for tense, mood, person/number/other agreement and being in
construction with a non-oblique subject?) Are such patterns
language-particular or are they universally predictable?

- What kinds of units can be said to be finite or non-finifte? Words or
word forms? Constructions/clauses/sentences? If both, how is the
FINITENESS of words related to that of constructions?

- As a word category, how does FINITENESS bear on word classes? (Is
finite what verbs are, and non-finite what not-so-verby verbs are, with
basic nouns and adjectives unrelated to verbs being outside the scope of
this category altogether?)

- As a construction category, how does FINITENESS bear on construction
classes?(Is finite what sentences and perhaps clauses are, and
non-finite what phrases and perhaps clauses are, if desentential?
Further, how do finite and non-finite distribute over main and
subordinate clauses?)

- How do finite and non-finite constructions differ as domains for
syntactic rules (e.g., binding, anaphora, case marking)? That is,what is
the relationship between FINITENESS and syntactic opacity?

- What about FINITENESS is subject to change? (For example, can finite
forms or constructions become non-finite, and vice versa? If so, what
are the mechanisms of change?

For purposes of this conference the overall angle on such questions
ought to be typological and theoretical: empirically determining
crosslinguistic variation and its limitations ought to be taken as
seriously as explaining what has been found, in whatever theoretical
framework.

Invited speakers include:

Elena Kalinina, Moscow State University

Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, University of Stockholm

Jaklin Kornfilt, Syracuse University

David Perlmutter, University of California, San Diego

Presentation will be allotted 30 minutes with an additional 15 minutes
for discussion. Abstract of one page should be submitted by March 30th,
2001. If you are submitting by regular mail, abstracts should be mailed
to:=20

Irina Nikolaeva, University of Konstanz, Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft,
Fach 175, Konstanz, D-78457.

If submitting electronically, please include the abstract in the body of
the message(do not send attachments!) and send it to:
irina.nikolaeva at uni-konstanz.de. Abstracts should include the author
information (author's name and affiliation, title of the paper, mailing
address, and e-mail address). Authors are encouraged to write their
papers, so that most of the papers to be presented in the conference
could be published later in an edited volume.

IMPORTANT DEADLINES:

Submission deadline: March 30th, 2001

Notification of acceptance, April 10th, 2001

Conference organizers:

Irina Nikolaeva=20

irina.nikolaeva at uni-konstanz.de

Frans Plank

frans.plank at uni-konstanz.de

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

Date:  Mon, 19 Mar 2001 16:32:23 EST
From:  Priscilla Rasmussen <rasmusse at cs.rutgers.edu>
Subject:  Data-Driven Machine Translation (ACL-2001)

              WORKSHOP ON DATA-DRIVEN MACHINE TRANSLATION

                              7 July  2001
                            Toulouse, France

              http://www.cs.unca.edu/~bruce/acl01/MT.html

- ----------------------------------------------------------------------
With the increased availability of online corpora, data-driven
approaches have become central to the NL community.  A variety of
data-driven approaches have been used to help build Machine
Translation systems -- example-based, statistical MT, and other
machine learning approaches -- and there are all sorts of
possibilities for hybrid systems. We wish to bring together proponents
of as many techniques as possible to engage in a discussion of which
combinations will yield maximal success in translation.

We propose to center the workshop on Data Driven MT, by which we mean
all approaches which develop algorithms and programs to exploit data
in the development of MT, primarily the use of large bilingual corpora
created by human translators, and serving as a source of training data
for MT systems. The workshop will focus on the following topics:

- statistical machine translation (modeling, training, search)
- machine-learning in translation
- example-based machine translation
- acquisition of multilingual training data
- evaluation of data driven methods (also with rule-based methods)
- combination of various translation systems; integration of classical
  rule-based and data driven approaches
- word/sentence alignment

An especially important question that we wish to address is which
techniques are best for each of the subparts of a complete MT system -
e.g. learning grammars, building lexicons, parsing input data,
determining transfer principles, generating target text, etc.

WORKSHOP CHAIRS

         Jessie Pinkham, Microsoft Research jessiep at microsoft.com
         Kevin Knight, USC/ISI, knight at isi.edu
         Franz Josef Och, RWTH Aachen, och at cs.rwth-aachen.de

INVITED SPEAKER

        Hermann Ney, RWTH Aachen

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

          Srinivas Bangalore, AT&T Research
          Ralf Brown, CMU
          Francisco Casacuberta, Polytechnic Univ. of Valencia
          Eugene Charniak, Brown University
          Ulf Hermjakob, USC/ISI
          Pierre Isabelle, Xerox Research Centre Europe
          Bob Moore, MSR
          Masaaki Nagata, NTT
          Norbert Reithinger, DFKI
          Philip Resnik, Univ. of Maryland
          Eiichiro Sumita, ATR
          Koichi Takeda, IBM Japan
          Enrique Vidal, Polytechnic Univ. of Valencia
          Stephan Vogel, Univ. of Kaiserslautern
          Hideo Watanabe, IBM TRL

SUBMISSIONS

Papers describing original work in the area of Data Driven Machine
Translation should be submitted electronically in Postscript or PDF
format to:

       Deborah Coughlin,  mailto:deborahc at microsoft.com

Submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings and
should not exceed eight (8) pages, including references. We strongly
recommend the use of ACL LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word Style
files tailored for this year's conference. They are available from the
ACL-2001 program committee Web-site at:

         http://acl2001.dfki.de/style/

The paper should not include the authors' names and affiliations.
As reviewing will be blind, the submission must be associated with an
email containing the following information (ASCII text):

      TITLE: title of the paper
      AUTHORS: list of authors
      EMAIL: email of author for correspondence
      KEYWORDS: keywords, topic sub-areas, ...
      ABSTRACT: abstract of the paper

IMPORTANT DATES

          Paper submissions             6 April 2001
          Notification of acceptance    27 April 2001
          Camera-ready copies due       16 May 2001
          Workshop dates                7 July 2001

REGISTRATION

The registration fee for the workshop will be posted at a later stage.
The registration fee includes attendance of the workshop and a copy of
workshop proceedings. Follow the registration instructions at the ACL
site and indicate that you would like to attend the Data-Driven MT
workshop.

MORE INFORMATION

     http://www.cs.unca.edu/~bruce/acl01/MT.html

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