17.30, Calls: Computational Ling/UK;Text/Corpus Ling/Italy

Tue Jan 10 22:44:20 UTC 2006

LINGUIST List: Vol-17-30. Tue Jan 10 2006. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 17.30, Calls: Computational Ling/UK;Text/Corpus Ling/Italy

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Wayne State U <aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry at linguistlist.org>

Reviews (reviews at linguistlist.org) 
        Sheila Dooley, U of Arizona  
        Terry Langendoen, U of Arizona  

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/

The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, Wayne
State University, and donations from subscribers and publishers.

Editor for this issue: Kevin Burrows <kevin at linguistlist.org>
================================================================  

As a matter of policy, LINGUIST discourages the use of abbreviations
or acronyms in conference announcements unless they are explained in
the text.

To post to LINGUIST, use our convenient web form at 
http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.html. 

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

1)
Date: 09-Jan-2006
From: Johan Bos < jbos at inf.ed.ac.uk >
Subject: Inference in Computational Semantics 

2)
Date: 09-Jan-2006
From: Briony Williams < b.williams at bangor.ac.uk >
Subject: Workshop on 'Strategies for Developing Machine Translation for Minority Languages' 

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2006 17:41:44
From: Johan Bos < jbos at inf.ed.ac.uk >
Subject: Inference in Computational Semantics 

Full Title: Inference in Computational Semantics 
Short Title: ICoS-5 

Date: 20-Apr-2006 - 21-Apr-2006
Location: Buxton, England, United Kingdom 
Contact Person: Johan Bos
Meeting Email: jbos at inf.ed.ac.uk
Web Site: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~ipratt/ICoS-5/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Semantics 

Call Deadline: 16-Jan-2006 

Meeting Description:

The next International workshop on Inference in Computational Semantics (ICoS-5) will take place from 20th-21st April at the University of Derby College, Buxton, England. ICoS-5 is intended to bring together researchers interested in inference-oriented NLP from areas such as Computational Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Formal Semantics, and Logic. 

FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS

5th workshop on
INFERENCE IN COMPUTATIONAL SEMANTICS
ICoS-5
Buxton, England, 20-21 April 2006

http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~ipratt/ICoS-5/

              Submission deadline: 16 January 2006

Endorsed by SIGSEM, the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Special Interest Group (SIG) on computational semantics.

ABOUT ICOS

Natural Language Processing has reached a stage where the exploration
and development of inference is one of its most pressing tasks. On the
theoretical side, it is clear that inference plays a key role in such
areas as semantic construction and the management of discourse and
dialogue. On the practical side, the use of sophisticated inference
methods could lead to improvements in application areas such as
natural language generation, automatic question answering, and spoken
dialogue systems.

ICoS-5 is intended to bring together researchers interested in
inference-oriented NLP from areas such as Computational Linguistics,
Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Formal Semantics, and
Logic.

We invite submissions addressing the theme of inference in
computational semantics broadly construed. Subjects relevant to ICoS-5
include but are not restricted to:

- natural language generation
- natural language pragmatics
- discourse and dialogue processing
- (spoken) dialogue systems
- underspecified representations
- ambiguity resolution
- interfacing lexical and computational semantics
- lexically-driven inference
- inference for shallow semantics
- inference in question answering
- recognising textual entailment
- background knowledge: use and acquisition
- applications of semantic resources
  (e.g. CYC, WordNet, FrameNet, PropBank, ontologies)
- automatic ontology creation
- common-sense reasoning in NLP
- temporal and epistemic reasoning
- resource-bounded inference
- applications of automated reasoning
  (e.g. model building, model checking, theorem proving)
- alternative inference strategies
  (e.g. abduction, nonmonotonic reasoning, default)
- decidable fragments of natural language
- controlled languages
- natural language inference in decidable logics
  (e.g. description logic)
- probabilistic and statistical approaches to inference
- machine learning and inference
- inference and information extraction and/or text mining
- novel applications (e.g. semantic web)
- evaluation methodologies and resources for inference
- robustness and scalability of inference
- system descriptions

Submitted papers should not exceed 10 pages (A4, single column, 12
point font) including references.  All submissions must be in PDF, and
must be sent by email to icos5 at coli.uni-sb.de.

SYSTEM DEMONSTRATIONS

We also encourage submission of papers describing systems that show
aspects of inference in computational semantics. There will be a
separate slot at the workshop where people can demonstrate their
systems. System descriptions should follow the same submission
guidelines as regular papers.

IMPORTANT DATES

     Submission Deadline: January 16, 2006.
     Notification: February 20, 2006.
     Final Versions: March 20, 2006.
     Conference: April 20-21, 2006.

INVITED SPEAKERS

     Christian Ebert (University of Bielefeld)
     Patrick Pantel  (ISI, University of Southern California)
     Stephen Pulman  (Oxford University)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

     Carlos Areces
     Peter Baumgartner
     Christoph Benzmueller
     Raffaella Bernardi
     Patrick Blackburn
     Johan Bos (co-chair)
     Harry Bunt
     Ann Copestake
     Dick Crouch
     Ido Dagan
     Kees van Deemter
     Nissim Francez
     Claire Gardent
     Alexander Koller (co-chair)
     Shalom Lappin
     Alex Lascarides
     Bernardo Magnini
     Katja Markert
     Dan Moldovan
     Jeff Pelletier
     Maarten de Rijke
     Michael Schiehlen
     Matthew Stone
     Bonnie Webber

PUBLICATION

As well as producing the workshop proceedings, we plan to publish a
selection of accepted papers as a book or special issue of a journal.

-------------------------Message 2 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2006 17:41:51
From: Briony Williams < b.williams at bangor.ac.uk >
Subject: Workshop on 'Strategies for Developing Machine Translation for Minority Languages' 

Full Title: Workshop on 'Strategies for Developing Machine Translation for Minority Languages' 

Date: 23-May-2006 - 23-May-2006
Location: Genoa, Italy 
Contact Person: Briony Williams
Meeting Email: b.williams at bangor.ac.uk

Linguistic Field(s): Text/Corpus Linguistics; Translation 

Call Deadline: 17-Feb-2006 

Meeting Description:

'Strategies for developing machine translation for minority languages'. Fifth SALTMIL Workshop on Minority Languages, Tuesday May 23rd (morning). A satellite workshop of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, May 24-26 2006, Genoa, Italy. 

FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

''Strategies for developing machine translation for minority languages''

           5th SALTMIL Workshop on Minority Languages
                on Tuesday May 23rd 2006 (morning)
           Magazzini del Cotone Conference Centre, Genoa, Italy

     Organised in conjunction with LREC 2006: Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Genoa, Italy, 24-26 May 2006 

Background

This workshop continues the series of LREC workshops organized by SALTMIL (SALTMIL is the ISCA Special Interest Group for Speech And Language Technology for Minority Languages:  http://isl.ntf.uni-lj.si/SALTMIL/ ): 

The minority or ''less resourced'' languages of the world are under increasing pressure from the major languages (especially English), and many of them lack full political recognition.  Some minority languages have been well researched linguistically, but most have not, and the vast majority do not yet possess basic speech and language resources (such as text and speech corpora, lexicons, POS taggers, etc) which would enable the commercial development of products. 

The workshop aims to share information on tools and best practice, so that isolated researchers will not need to start from nothing.  An important aspect will be the forming of personal contacts, which can minimise duplication of effort.  There will be a balance between presentations of existing language resources, and more general presentations designed to give background information needed by all researchers present.

Format

The workshop will begin with the following presentations from invited speakers:

 * Delyth Prys (University of Wales, Bangor):  ''The BLARK matrix and its relation to the language resources situation for the Celtic languages.''
 * Hermann Ney (Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule, Aachen, Germany):  ''Statistical Machine Translation with and without a bilingual training corpus''
 * Mikel Forcada (Universitat d'Alacant, Spain):  ''Open source machine translation: an opportunity for minor languages''
 * Lori Levin (Carnegie Mellon University, USA):  ''Omnivorous MT: Using whatever resources are available.''
 * Anna Sågvall Hein (University of Uppsala, Sweden):  ''Approaching new languages in machine translation.''

These talks will then be followed by a poster session featuring contributed papers.

Papers

Papers are invited that describe research and development in the following areas:

 * The BLARK (Basic Language Resource Kit) matrix at ELDA, and how it relates to minority languages.
 * The advantages and disadvantages of different corpus-based strategies for developing MT, with reference to a) speed of development, and b) level of researcher expertise required.
 * What open-source or free language resources are available for developing MT?
 * Existing resources for minority languages, with particular emphasis on software tools that have been found useful.

All contributed papers will be presented in poster format. All contributions will be printed in the workshop proceedings (CD). They will also be published on the SALTMIL website.

Timetable:

 * Paper submission deadline:   Feb 17, 2006
 * Notification of acceptance:  March 10, 2006
 * Final version of paper:      April 10, 2006
 * Workshop:                    May 23, 2006 (morning)       

Submissions:

Abstracts should be in English, and up to 4 pages long. The submission format is PDF.

Papers will be reviewed by members of the organising committee. The reviews are not anonymous.

Accepted papers may be up to 6 pages long. The final papers should be in the format specified for the proceedings by the LREC organisers. 

Each submission should include: title; author(s); affiliation(s); and contact author's e-mail address, postal address, telephone and fax numbers. 

Abstracts should be sent via e-mail to Briony Williams at b.williams @ bangor.ac.uk.  The deadline for submission is February 17th. 

Organising committee

 * Briony Williams (University of Wales, Bangor, UK:  b.williams @ bangor.ac.uk)
 * Kepa Sarasola (University of the Basque Country: ksarasola @ si.ehu.es)
 * Bojan Petek (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia: bojan.petek @ uni-lj.si)
 * Julie Berndsen (University College Dublin, Ireland: julie.berndsen @ ucd.ie)
 * Atelach Alemu Argaw (University of Stockholm, Sweden: atelach @ dsv.su.se)

-----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-17-30	