19.2645, Calls: Cog Sci,Computational Ling/Greece; Cog Sci/France

Fri Aug 29 19:39:17 UTC 2008

LINGUIST List: Vol-19-2645. Fri Aug 29 2008. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 19.2645, Calls: Cog Sci,Computational Ling/Greece; Cog Sci/France

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

Reviews: Randall Eggert, U of Utah  
         <reviews at linguistlist.org> 

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/

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

Editor for this issue: F. Okki Kurniawan <okki 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: 29-Aug-2008
From: Albert Gatt < a.gatt at abdn.ac.uk >
Subject: TUNA Referring Expression Generation Challenge 2009 

2)
Date: 29-Aug-2008
From: Guillaume Desagulier < gdesagulier at univ-paris8.fr >
Subject: AFLiCo III: 'Grammars in Construction(s)'

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:34:45
From: Albert Gatt [a.gatt at abdn.ac.uk]
Subject: TUNA Referring Expression Generation Challenge 2009
E-mail this message to a friend:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/emailmessage/verification.cfm?iss=19-2645.html&submissionid=188328&topicid=3&msgnumber=1  

Full Title: TUNA Referring Expression Generation Challenge 2009 
Short Title: TUNA-REG'09 

Date: 30-May-2009 - 31-May-2009
Location: Athens, Greece 
Contact Person: Albert Gatt
Meeting Email: a.gatt at abdn.ac.uk
Web Site: http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/research/genchal09/tuna 

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 31-Dec-2008 

Meeting Description:

Third edition of the TUNA Shared Task and Evaluation Challenge for Referring
Expressions Generation. 

First Call for Participation

TUNA Referring Expression Generation Task 2009

Part of Generation Challenges 2009, in conjunction with ENLG 2009.

Generation Challenges 2009 is being organised to provide a common
forum for a number of different NLG Shared Tasks (see
http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/research/genchal09/).

As part of Generation Challenges 2009, we are organising a TUNA Progress Test.
This will be the third, and final, shared task involving the TUNA Corpus of
referring expressions. TUNA was first used in the Pilot Attribute Selection for
Generating Referring Expressions (ASGRE) Challenge, which took place between May
and September 2007; and again for three of the shared tasks in the Referring
Expression Generation (REG) Challenge 2008, which was completed in May and
presented during a special session at INLG'08. The TUNA'09 Task replicates one
of the three tasks from REG 2008, the TUNA-REG Task. It uses the same test data,
to enable direct comparison against the 2008 results.

1. Background
Referring Expression Generation (REG) has been the subject of intensive research
in the NLG community, giving rise to significant consensus on the problem
definition, as well as the nature of the inputs and outputs of REG algorithms.
Typically, such algorithms take as input a domain, consisting of objects and
their attributes, together with an intended referent, and output a set of
attributes true of the referent which distinguish it from other objects in the
domain. An additional stage is to map these attributes to a natural language
expression (usually a noun phrase).

2. Data
The TUNA Corpus consists of a set of human-produced descriptions of objects in a
visual domain of pictures of furniture and people, annotated at the semantic
level and paired with a domain representation. In addition to the domain, each
description is provided as a word string (i.e. the original human-produced
description), as the set of attributes included in the description, and as a
combination of the two (where the word string is annotated with the attributes).

The corpus was collected via an elicitation experiment, in which one
between-subjects condition controlled the use of the location of an object in
descriptions (+/-Location).  In keeping with the earlier shared tasks involving
TUNA, only the singular data will be used for the TUNA'09 Task.

For the REG Challenge 2008, a new test set was generated by replicating the
original experiment. This test set has not been released in any form, and will
be used again for the 2009 edition. 

For full details about the data collection and corpus annotation scheme, see:
http://www.csd.abdn.ac.uk/~agatt/pubs/tuna-corpus.pdf

3. The TUNA'09 Task
The TUNA'09 Task is a replication of the TUNA-REG Task carried out as part of
REG Challenges 2008. As in REG Challenges 2008, there will be a variety of
evaluation methods to compare systems (see Section 4 below), and participants
can choose which of the evaluation criteria to optimise for.
(i). Input: Following the standard REG problem definition, the input will be a
TUNA domain representation, consisting of objects and their properties, with one
object designated as the intended referent.
(ii). Output: Participating systems will need to map from a TUNA domain
representation to a natural language description that describes the target referent.

4. Evaluation
The TUNA data set is composed of the following subsets:
(i). A development set consisting of 150 corpus items (input domain + human
description), divided into furniture and people descriptions;
(ii). A training set consisting of 593 corpus items (input domain + human
description), divided into furniture and people descriptions;
(iii). A test set consisting of 112 corpus items (input domain only), divided
into furniture and people descriptions. This test set was created through a
replication of the original TUNA elicitation experiment. It was built so that
for every input domain there are two human-authored outputs by different
individuals. Evaluation of system-produced descriptions will be carried out by
averaging against both human descriptions in the corresponding input domain.

Participants will compute evaluation scores on the development set (using code
provided by the organisers), and the organisers will perform evaluations on the
test data set. We will again use a range of different evaluation methods,
including intrinsic and extrinsic, automatically assessed and human-evaluated.
Intrinsic evaluations assess properties of peer systems in their own right,
whereas extrinsic evaluations assess the effect of a peer system on something
that is external to it, such as its effect on human performance at a given task
or the added value it brings to an application.

Full details of the evaluation methods will be announced to registered
participants.

5. Participation
Registration is now open at the TUNA'09 Task homepage
(http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/research/genchal09/tuna). Once they have
registered, participants will be sent the TUNA'09 Participants' Pack which
includes complete documentation and the training and development data sets.

6. Proceedings and Presentations
The Generation Challenges 2009 meeting will be held as a special session at ENLG
2009. The session will include overviews of all the shared tasks, including the
TUNA'09 Task. The participating systems will additionally be presented as papers
in the ENLG'09 proceedings, and as posters during the ENLG'09 poster session.

TUNA'09 Challenge Papers will not undergo a selection procedure with multiple
reviews, but the organisers reserve the right to reject material which is not
appropriate given the participation guidelines.

7. Important Dates
Aug 15, 2008  First Call for Participation in TUNA'09 Task; TUNA'09 data sets
available
Dec 1-31, 08  TUNA'09 test data submission: 1. submit system report; 2. download
test data; 3. submit outputs within 48h 
Dec 31, 2009  Final deadline for submission of TUNA'09 test data outputs 
Jan 01-31, 09 TUNA'09 Evaluation period
Mar 01, 2009  Submission deadline for camera-ready papers and reports 
Mar 30-31, 09 Generation Challenges 2009 meeting at ENLG'09 (dates to be confirmed)

8. Organisation
Albert Gatt, Computing Science, University of Aberdeen, UK
Anja Belz, NLTG, University of Brighton, UK
Eric Kow, NLTG, University of Brighton, UK

TUNA'09 Task homepage: http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/research/genchal09/tuna
Generation Challenges homepage: http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/research/genchal09
Generation Challenges email: nlg-stec at itri.brighton.ac.uk

-------------------------Message 2 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:34:53
From: Guillaume Desagulier [gdesagulier at univ-paris8.fr]
Subject: AFLiCo III: 'Grammars in Construction(s)'
E-mail this message to a friend:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/emailmessage/verification.cfm?iss=19-2645.html&submissionid=188326&topicid=3&msgnumber=2 

Full Title: AFLiCo III: 'Grammars in Construction(s)' 

Date: 27-May-2009 - 29-May-2009
Location: Paris (University of Nanterre), France 
Contact Person: Guillaume Desagulier
Meeting Email: gdesagulier at univ-paris8.fr
Web Site: http://aflico.asso.univ-lille3.fr 

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science 

Call Deadline: 15-Nov-2009 

Meeting Description:

The Third International AFLiCo Conference will take place in Paris X Nanterre,
27-29 May 2009. 

Call for Papers

The concept of grammar will be examined in regard to its place in cognitive
linguistics which range from Langacker's Cognitive Grammar to so-called
construction grammars. Construction grammars (Fillmore & Kay) endeavor to
describe grammar in terms of grammatical constructions. This hypothesis
currently fuels a vast paradigm and applies to a large variety of linguistic
phenomena in morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.

See conference site for further information regarding more general points of
discussion which can be addressed.

Invited speakers: H.C. Boas (University of Texas, Austin); G. Fauconnier
(University of California); Jacques François (University of Caen); A. Goldberg
(Princeton University); B. Victorri (Lattice, ENS, Paris); Richard Watts
(University of Bern)

General session: submission deadline November 15th 2008
Theme session: submission deadline October 20th 2008

-----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-19-2645	