15.84, Calls: Text/Corpus Ling/Portugal; Semantics/France

Wed Jan 14 22:30:06 UTC 2004

LINGUIST List:  Vol-15-84. Wed Jan 14 2004. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 15.84, Calls: Text/Corpus Ling/Portugal; Semantics/France

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1)
Date:  Tue, 6 Jan 2004 05:59:59 -0500 (EST)
From:  p at uni-bielefeld.de
Subject:  Workshop on Multimodal Corpora

2)
Date:  Tue, 6 Jan 2004 10:00:24 +0100
From:  Manfred Krifka <krifka at rz.hu-berlin.de>
Subject:  ESSLLI Workshop on Questions

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

Date:  Tue, 6 Jan 2004 05:59:59 -0500 (EST)
From:  p at uni-bielefeld.de
Subject:  Workshop on Multimodal Corpora

Workshop on Multimodal Corpora
Short Title: MMCORPORA

Date: 25-May-2004 - 25-May-2004
Location: Lisbon, Portugal
Contact: Peter Kuehnlein
Contact Email: mmorganizers at lubitsch.lili.uni-bielefeld.de
Meeting URL: http://lubitsch.lili.uni-bielefeld.de/MMCORPORA

Linguistic Sub-field: Text/Corpus Linguistics
Call Deadline: 24-Jan-2004
This is a session of the following conference: 4th International
Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation

Meeting Description:

The primary purpose of this one day workshop is to share information
and engage in the collective planning for the future creation of
usable pluridisciplinary multimodal resources. It will focus on the
following issues regarding multimodal corpora: how researchers build
models of human behaviour out of the annotations of video corpora, how
they use such knowledge for the specification of multimodal input
(e.g. merging users gestures and speech) and output
(e.g. specification of believable and emotional behaviour in Embodied
Conversational Agents) in human computer interfaces, and finally how
they evaluate multimodal systems (e.g. full system evaluation and
glass box evaluation of individual system
components).

                   SECOND AND FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS

                              Workshop on

                         MULTIMODAL CORPORA:

                      MODELS OF HUMAN BEHAVIOUR
                FOR THE SPECIFICATION AND EVALUATION
              OF MULTIMODAL INPUT AND OUTPUT INTERFACES

           http://lubitsch.lili.uni-bielefeld.de/MMCORPORA/

       Centro Cultural de Belem, LISBON, Portugal, 25th may 2004

                         In Association with
4th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE RESOURCES AND EVALUATION LREC2004
             http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2004/index.php
                  Main conference 26-27-28 May 2004

MOTIVATIONS

The primary purpose of this one day workshop is to share information
and engage in the collective planning for the future creation of
usable pluridisciplinary multimodal resources.  It will focus on the
following issues regarding multimodal corpora: how researchers build
models of human behaviour out of the annotations of video corpora, how
they use such knowledge for the specification of multimodal input
(e.g. merging users' gestures and speech ) and output
(e.g. specification of believable and emotional behaviour in Embodied
Conversational Agents) in human computer interfaces, and finally how
they evaluate multimodal systems (e.g. full system evaluation and
glass box evaluation of individual system components).

Topics to be addressed in the workshop include, but are not limited
to:
* Models of human multimodal behaviour in various disciplines
* Integrating different sources of knowledge (literature in
socio-linguistics, corpora annotation)
* Specifications of coding schemes for annotation of multimodal video
corpora
* Parallel multimodal corpora for different languages
* Methods, tools, and best practice procedures for the acquisition,
creation, management, access, distribution, and use of multimedia and
multimodal corpora
* Methods for the extraction and acquisition of knowledge
(e.g. lexical information, modality modelling) from multimedia and
multimodal corpora
* Ontological aspects of the creation and use of multimodal corpora
* Machine learning for and from multimedia (i.e., text, audio, video),
multimodal (visual, auditory, tactile), and multicodal (language,
graphics, gesture) communication
* Exploitation of multimodal corpora in different types of
applications (information extraction, information retrieval, meeting
transcription, multisensorial interfaces, translation, summarisation,
www services, etc.)
* Multimedia and multimodal metadata descriptions of corpora
* Applications enabled by multimedia and multimodal corpora
* Benchmarking of systems and products; use of multimodal corpora for
the evaluation of real systems
* Processing and evaluation of mixed spoken, typed, and cursive (e.g.,
pen) language processing
* Automated multimodal fusion and/or generation (e.g., coordinated
speech, gaze, gesture, facial expressions)
* Techniques for combining objective and subjective evaluations, and
for making evaluations cost-effective, predictive and fast

The output of the workshop will be the following:
* Better knowledge of the potential of major models of human
multimodal behaviour
* Challenging issues in the usability of multimodal corpora
* Fostering of a pluridisciplinary community of multimodal researchers
and multimodal interface developers

RATIONALE

Multimodal resources feature the recording and annotation of several
communication modalities such as speech, hand gesture, facial
expression, body posture, graphics.

Several researchers have been developing such multimodal resources for
several years, often with a focus on a limited set of modalities or on
a given application domain.  A number of projects, initiatives and
organisations have addressed multimodal resources with a federative
approach:
* At LREC2002, a workshop had addressed the issue of ''Multimodal
Resources and Multimodal Systems Evaluation''
http://www.limsi.fr/Individu/martin/wslrec2002/MMWorkshopReport.doc
* At LREC2000, a 1st workshop had addressed the issue of multimodal
corpora, focussing on meta-descriptions and large corpora
http://www.mpi.nl/world/ISLE/events/LREC%202000/LREC2000.htm
* The European 6th Framework program (FP6), started in 2003, includes
multilingual and multisensorial communication as one of the major R&D
issue, and the evaluation of technologies appears as a specific item
in the Integrated Project instrument presentation
http://www.cordis.lu/ist/so/interfaces/home.html
* NIMM was a work group on Natural Interaction and MultiModality which
ran under the IST-ISLE project (http://isle.nis.sdu.dk/). In 2001,
NIMM compiled a survey of existing multimodal resources (more than 60
corpora are described in the survey), coding schemes and annotation
tools. The ISLE project was developed both in Europe and in the USA
(http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/sb/isle.html)
* EcorporaA (European Language Resources Association) launched in
November 2001 a survey about multimodal corpora including marketing
aspects (http://www.icp.inpg.fr/EcorporaA/).
* A Working Group at the Dagstuhl Seminar on Multimodality recorded,
in November 2001, 28 questionnaires from researchers on multimodality,
from which 21 have been announcing their attention to record other
multimodal corpora in the
future. (http://www.dfki.de/~wahlster/Dagstuhl_Multi_Modality/)
* Other surveys have been recently made about multimodal annotation
coding schemes and tools (COCOSDA, LDC, MITRE).

Yet, existing annotation of multimodal corpora until now have been
made mostly on an individual basis, each researcher or team focusing
on its own needs and knowledge about modality specific coding schemes
or application examples.  Thus, there is a lack of real common
knowledge and understanding of how to proceed from annotations to
usable models of human multimodal behaviour and how to use such
knowledge for the design and evaluation of multimodal input and
embodied conversational agent interfaces.

Furthermore, the evaluation of multimodal interaction poses different
(and very complex) problems than the evaluation of monomodal speech
interfaces or WYSIWYG direct interaction interfaces. There are a
number of recently finished and ongoing projects in the field of
multimodal interaction in which attempts have been made to evaluate
the quality of the interfaces in all meanings that can be attached to
the term 'quality'.  There is a widely felt need in the field for
exchanging information on multimodal interaction evaluation with
researchers in other projects.  One of the major outcomes of this
workshop should be better understanding of the extent to which
evaluation procedures developed in one project generalise to other,
somewhat related projects.

IMPORTANT DATES

* 24 January 2004: Deadline for paper submission
* 29 February 2004: Acceptance notifications and preliminary program
* 21 March 2004: Deadline final version of accepted papers
* 25 May 2004: Workshop

SUBMISSIONS

The workshop will consist primarily of paper presentations and
discussion/working sessions.  Submissions should be 4 pages long, must
be in English, and follow the submission guidelines at
http://lubitsch.lili.uni-bielefeld.de/MMCORPORA

Demonstrations of multimodal corpora and related tools are encouraged
as well (a demonstration outline of 2 pages can be submitted).  As
soon as possible, authors are encouraged to send to
lrec at limsi.u-psud.fr a brief email indicating their intention to
participate, including their contact information and the topic they
intend to address in their submissions. Proceedings of the workshop
will be printed by the LREC Local Organising Committee.  The
organisers might consider a special issue of a suitable Journal for
selected publications from the workshop.

TIME SCHEDULE AND REGISTRATION FEE

The workshop will consist of a morning session and an afternoon
session, with a focus on the use of multimodal corpora for building
models of human behaviour and specifying/evaluating multimodal input
and output Human-Computer Interfaces.  There will also be time slots
for collective discussion and one coffee break in the morning and in
the afternoon.  For this full-day Workshop, the registration fee is
100 EURO for LREC Conference participants and 170 EURO for other
participants. These fees will include coffee breaks and the
Proceedings of the Workshop.

ORGANISING COMMITEE

Jean-Claude MARTIN, LIMSI-CNRS, martin at limsi.u-psud.fr
Elisabeth Den OS, MPI, Els.denOs at mpi.nl
Peter KoeHNLEIN, Univ. Bielefeld, p at uni-bielefeld.de
Lou BOVES, L.Boves at let.kun.nl
Patrizia PAGGIO, CST, patrizia at cst.dk
Roberta CATIZONE, Sheffield, roberta at dcs.shef.ac.uk

PRELIMINARY PROGRAM COMMITEE

Elisabeth AHLS%N
Jens ALLWOOD
Elisabeth ANDRE
Niels Ole BERNSEN
Lou BOVES
Stephanie BUISINE
Roberta CATIZONE
Loredana CERRATO
Piero COSI
Elisabeth Den OS
Jan Peter DE RUITER
Laila DYBKJR
David HOROWITZ
Bart JONGEJAN
Alfred KRANSTEDT
Steven KRAUWER
Peter KoeHNLEIN
Knut KVALE
Myriam LAMOLLE
Jean-Claude MARTIN
Joseph MARIANI
Jan-Torsten MILDE
Sharon OVIATT
Patrizia PAGGIO
Catherine PELACHAUD
Janienke STURM

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

Date:  Tue, 6 Jan 2004 10:00:24 +0100
From:  Manfred Krifka <krifka at rz.hu-berlin.de>
Subject:  ESSLLI Workshop on Questions

                                Call for papers

            Workshop: Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics of Questions
                               August 9-13, 2004

Organized as part of the European Summer School on Logic, Language, and
Information (ESSLLI), August 9-20, 2004 in Nancy, France.

Website of the summer school: http://esslli2004.loria.fr
Website of the workshop:
http://amor.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h2816i3x/ESSLLI_Questions.html

Workshop organizers:
- Ileana Comorovski, Universit Nancy 2
- Manfred Krifka, Humboldt-Universitt & Zentrum fr Allgemeine
  Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS), Berlin

Workshop Purpose:
The investigation of questions has deepened our understanding of
syntax (e.g.  the constraints on syntactic dependencies), of semantics
(e.g., the representation of non-declarative information) and of
pragmatics (e.g., the nature of speech acts). However, researchers
often took little notice of research on questions (and answers) in
adjacent fields. For example, syntacticians interested in multiple
constituent questions were unaware of the interpretation of different
types of multiple questions, and semanticists disregarded important
pragmatic factors like speaker bias.  This workshop tries to bring
together researchers that transcend such boundaries. The goal is to
gain not only a more profound understanding of questions, but of the
interaction of syntax, semantics and pragmatics in general.

Workshop Topics:
We invite contributions on typologically diverse languages, on
phenomena that draw on insights across sub-disciplines; a
non-exhaustive list of relevant phenomena is given below:
- multiple questions
- alternative questions
- embedded questions
- quantification into questions
- exhaustive and non-exhaustive questions
- biased questions
- questions and information structure: discourse-linking, topic, focus.
- echo questions
- intonation in sentences with interrogative interpretation
- theoretically relevant diachronic changes

Analyses of questions in context and of question-answer pairs are
particularly welcome.

Submission details:
We invite the submission of two-page anonymous abstracts for 20-minute
presentations (followed by ten minutes of discussion) to the following
adress: esslli at univ-nancy2.fr

Please write "ESSLLI questions workshop" in the subject heading and
the following information in the body of the message: title of paper,
author's name, affiliation, e-mail address, telephone number, and
postal address.  Abstracts may be sent as attached files in PDF format
(preferred), in RTF format, as plain text, or in MS Word format. The
accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings published by
ESSLLI.

Invited speakers:
- Chris Barker (San Diego)
- Joachim Sabel (Brussels)
- Robert van Rooy (Amsterdam)

Workshop program committee:
The workshop organizers and the invited speakers.

Important dates:
- Submission deadline: March 5, 2004
- Notification: April 19, 2004
- ESSLLI early registration: May 1, 2004
- Preliminary program: April 23, 2004
- Final papers for proceedings: May 15, 2004

Local arrangements/Financial aid:
All workshop partipants will be required to register for ESSLLI. The
registration fee for authors presenting a paper will correspond to the
early student/workshop speaker registration fee, if done before May 1,
2004.  Otherwise, it will correspond to the student/workshop speaker
registration fee.  A number of fee waiver grants will be made
available by the ESSLLI Organizing Committee on a competitive basis
and workshop participants are eligible to apply for those. Workshop
speakers who have difficulty in finding funding should contact the
local organizing committee to ask for the possibility for a
grant. ESSLLI offers no reimbursement for travel costs and
accommodation.

The workshop organizers are likely to be able to (partially) reimburse
the ESSLLI fee and/or to (partially) fund the travel expenses of a
limited number of workshop speakers.

This workshop is partly sponsored by the Universit Nancy 2, ATILF
(Analyse et traitement informatique de la langue franaise), and the
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) through the project "Syntax and
Semantics of Questions and Answers", at the ZAS, Berlin.

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