CFP: AAAI Spring Symposium - Cross Language Text and Speech Retrieval

David Hull (David.Hull@grenoble.rxrc.xerox.com)
Fri, 27 Sep 1996 15:02:52 +0200

Call for Participation
Cross-Language Text and Speech Retrieval
AAAI Spring Symposium
March 24-26, 1997
Stanford University, USA

With the spread of electronic networks around the globe, there is an
increasing need for language technology and information retrieval
techniques which work in a multilingual domain. This symposium is
designed to bring together researchers from Information Retrieval,
Knowledge Organization, Computational Linguistics, Machine
Translation, Speech Processing, and related fields to address the
problem of constructing search and retrieval systems that can operate
across languages boundaries. The goal of the symposium is to foster
the development of interdisciplinary approaches to this task. Some
examples of research problems which could be addressed include:

o Corpus-based vs. knowledge-based approaches.
o Interlingual vs. language-pair oriented approaches.
o Knowledge extraction, text summarization, and automated indexing.
o Exploiting multilingual knowledge structures (such as thesauri).
o Using machine translation for cross-language text retrieval.
o Achieving broad domain coverage.
o Evaluation of multilingual retrieval systems.

The symposium will begin with introductory talks to provide a shared
background to all participants. This will be followed by a mixture of
presentation and discussion sessions. The presentations will focus on
innovative techniques and interesting practical applications.
Substantial time will be allocated for commentary, questions, and
discussion of the material. The discussion sessions will address
important and controversial topics of timely interest to the
participants. Some of the discussion sessions may be run in parallel
to create smaller groups and encourage more participation in a
collaborative environment. There may also be joint sessions with the
symposia: Natural Language Processing and the World Wide Web and/or
Intelligent Integration and Use of Text, Image, Video and Audio
Corpora, if there is sufficient common interest.

Submission Information

Interested participants should submit an extended abstract or a brief
statement of background and interest (a few paragraphs is sufficient)
by October 25, 1996. Authors of accepted abstracts will be asked to
submit a short working paper (two to eight pages) by January 17,
1997. They will also be asked to prepare either an oral or a poster
presentation. Other participants may be asked to prepare a short
verbal critique of a specific working paper and to introduce the
discussion of that paper. Graduate students are encouraged to
participate.

Working papers and up to date information regarding the symposium will
be made available on the following web site:
http://www.ee.umd.edu/medlab/filter/sss
Potential participants are encouraged to join an electronic mailing
list for pre-conference discussion. This can be done in advance by
sending email to majordomo@glue.umd.edu with the following in the body
of the message: "subscribe sss email_address" where email_address is
your email address. In the months following the October deadline, the
format and topics for the symposium discussion sessions will be worked
out in this forum.

Potential participants in Europe Other potential participants
should address submissions to: should address submissions to:

David A. Hull (co-chair) Douglas W. Oard (co-chair)
e-mail: hull@xerox.fr e-mail: oard@glue.umd.edu
phone: +33-76-61-50-74 phone: (301)405-7590
fax: +33-76-61-50-99 fax: (301)314-9145

Electronic mail submission (ASCII, PDF, or postscript) is strongly
preferred. If you do not wish to be added to the electronic mailing
list, please indicate this along with your submission. Up to date
information regarding the symposium can be found at the web site
(http://www.ee.umd.edu/medlab/filter/sss).

Organizing Committee

Eduard Hovy, USC Information Sciences Institute, hovy@isi.edu
David Hull, Rank Xerox Research Centre, hull@xerox.fr
Doug Oard, University of Maryland College Park, oard@glue.umd.edu
Peter Schauble, ETH Zurich, schauble@inf.ethz.ch
Dagobert Soergel, University of Maryland College Park, ds52@umail.umd.edu