Appel: LREC 2002 Workshop on Learning for Advanced HLT Applications

[Alexis Nasr]

                         Call for Papers

			LREC 2002 Workshop
'Learning for Advanced HLT Applications: from Language Resources to
Processes'
         2nd June 2002, Las Palmas, Canary Islands - Spain


Motivation and Aims

The application of Human Lamguage Technology to current IT trends
requires large amounts of specific linguistic resources. However,
existing large scale resources are never intended (i.e. designed
and handcrafted) for specific application tasks.

In order to bridge the existing gap, a variety of methods for
acquisition, adaptation and integration of linguistic resources have
been proposed in the NLP research area since the late 80's.
Machine learning and statistical techniques have been largely employed
as major devices able to deal with the scale and the complexity of the
problem. Although a large area of research, the impact of these
technologies on the applications is still low with respect to their
potential. Open problems are:

- the unclear targets of the learning activity: no general consensus
exists among the proposed approaches to the quality and quantity of
linguistic information needed for the different tasks (e.g. which is the
suitable representation that captures selective information from the LR
training material able to optimize parsing accuracy? Is it fully
grammatical, like in bracketed corpora, or lexical);

- the heterogeneity of sources: relevant information for the adaptation
task can be distributed in different repositories (lexical knowledge
bases and texts) or expressed differently (in different languages
and/or raw, e.g. texts, vs. semistructured data, e.g. HTML/XML formats);

- the architectural idiosyncrasies: the proposed learning system makes
reference to different sources of information in different pipelined (or
redundant as in voting) application architectures.

- the application scope: current applications make a limited use (if
any) of available adaptation technologies. This often limits the scale
reachable by the current HLT aplications;

The above issues are orientative towards the complexity of the problem
in current research given the enormous potential of the application
field in areas like Web Mining, Question Answering and Knowledge
Management.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers of both academic and
industrial organizations interested in:

- Theoretical and Practical aspects of adaptive Natural Language
Processing
- Models of Acquisition and Integration of Domain Knowledge
- Integration of induction models from heterogeneus data (lexicons vs.
ontologies, texts vs. HTML/XML pages)
- Learning Multlingual Information exploiting Multilingual Resources
(e.g. EuroWordnet)
- Theoretical and Practical aspects of Lexical Acquisition in
multilingual scenarios
- Architectures for learning, adaptation, and integration of LR
- Adaptive HLT applications (including but not limited to search,
retrieval, navigation and QA)

Papers are invited for presenting theoretical and methodological aspects
of Machine Learning of Natural Language as well as approaches making
effective use of adaptive methods in the perspective of pre-industrial
or industrial applications.


Program Committee

Michael Brent         	Washington University in Saint Louis, USA
Roberta Catizone        University of Sheffield
Walter Daelemans        CNTS/Language Technology Group, Antwerp
Ralph Grishman          Department of Computer SCience, NYC
M. V. Marabello         KnowledgeStones S.p.A
Raymond Mooney          University of Texas at Austin, USA
M. T. Pazienza          University of Roma, Tor Vergata
G. Rigau                Polytechnical University of Catalunia
Horatio Rodriguez       Polytechnical University of Catalunia
A. Setzer               University of Sheffield
N. Webb                 University of Sheffield
Y. Wilks                University of Sheffield
Rémi Zajac              New Mexico State University,
F.M. Zanzotto           University of Roma, Tor Vergata

Contact person

Roberta Catizone
University of Sheffield
211 Portobello Street, Regent Court, S1 4DP Sheffield (UK)
phone: +44 114 2221897; fax +44 114 2221810
r.catizone at dcs.shef.ac.uk


Time schedule (Important Dates)
   Deadline for workshop abstract submission:   22th of February 2002
   Notification of acceptance:                  15th of March 2002
   Final version of paper for proceedings:      15th of April 2002
   Workshop:                                    2st of June 2002

Agenda
   Morning Session:
   - 1st Invited Talk (8:00-9:00)
   - Technical Papers (9:00-11:30)
   - 2nd Invited Talk (11:30-12:30)
   - Panel and Round Table (12:30-1:30)

A summary of the intended workshop Call for Participation.

 In the workshop the following invited speakers are expected:
   - Roberto Basili (University of Roma, Tor Vergata)
   - Fabio Ciravegna (University of Sheffield)

A panel session on "Adaptive Technologies and their implications on
advanced HLT applications (IR, IE, Q&A and KM)"

Distinguished panelists will be invited. Some of them confirmed their
participation and among others:
  - Nino Varile (EC Commission)
  - F. Gardin (AISoftware)

Submissions

 Papers should describe existing research connected to the topics
 of the workshop. The presentation at the workshop will be 30
 minutes long (20 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for
 questions and discussion). Each submission should show: title;
 author(s); affiliation(s); and contact author's e-mail address,
 postal address, telephone and fax numbers. Abstracts (maximum
 2  A4 pages, plain-text format).

 The final version of the accepted papers should be no longer than
 10  A4 pages. Instructions for formatting and presentation of
 the final version will be sent to authors upon  notification
 of acceptance.
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