Special issue on natural language processing for augmented communication
Announcement and call for papers
A special issue of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering will be
entirely dedicated to NLP research in the field of AAC (Alternative &
Augmentative Communication).
A forum for publication of research on AAC
So far, the results of NLP research to assist disabled people have been
mainly published in journals and proceedings focussing on disabilities and
rehabilitation. This special issue of the Journal of Natural Language
Engineering will present applications of current research in the area to the
language processing research community.
NLP for Communication Aids
People with disabilities leading to difficulties in communication often face
a restricted life in terms of social interaction and personal development.
Communication aids have been designed to help non-speakers and other
disabled people to communicate independently. Although many AAC-systems are
available, there are major problems to be overcome in the design of these
systems if they are to help the users to participate more in social
interaction. In the past years, methods from NLP have contributed to reduce
the cognitive load imposed on the users of AAC systems. They have helped to
increase communication fluency and enhanced the performance of word
prediction and message retrieval algorithms. Today, communication aids often
include advanced techniques from NLP. This trend is supported by the fact
that research on language processing is increasingly concerned with real
language use. The resulting current interest in corpora research and in
broad-coverage lexicons in computational linguistics is reflected in recent
developments of AAC systems. It is also true that the NLP research community
can benefit from results in AAC research. Years of research in close
collaboration with users of the systems has led to realistic solutions which
can supply new ideas and insights to other research areas in concerned with
language processing.
Workshop papers
Natural Language Processing for Communication Aids has been the subject of a
workshop in Dundee in September 1996. Results and papers from the workshop
are expected to form the core of this issue of the Journal of Natural
Language Engineering.
Other contributions
Submissions of additional papers covering any aspect of Natural Language
Processing for communication aids are invited. All submissions will be
considered for publication via the usual peer refereeing process. Possible
subjects include, but are not limited to:
* enhanced word prediction using linguistic knowledge
and/or statistics
* extracting knowledge for AAC-systems from corpora
* message retrieval involving NLP
* machine translation of symbol sequences into natural language
Submissions
Deadline for submissions: 17th March 1997 Papers should be between 5000 and
8000 words in length. Submissions should be sent to the guest editor,
preferably by electronic mail (address see end of this document). Please
state "submission NLE" in the subject line. Floppy disks or hard copies can
be sent to the adress below.
Format Submissions in Latex format are strongly preferred A LaTeX style
file, together with sample instructions to authors for how to use it etc.,
is available at:
<ftp://ftp.cup.cam.ac.uk/pub/texarchive/journals/latex/nle.all> Authors are
strongly encouraged to use this format.
Other submission formats:
ASCII text
HTML
Word processor document (WordPerfect or Word or RTF) Please contact the
guest editor for formatting details
Further information
Homepage of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering:
http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk/Journals/JNLSCAT/nle/nle.html
Webpage for this call:
http://alpha.mic.dundee.ac.uk/~slanger/ws/call.html
Submissions, further questions:
Stefan Langer
MicroCentre, University of Dundee
Park Wynd Dundee
DD1 4HN
Scotland, UK
Tel: +44 1382 345080
Fax: +44 1382 345509
e-mail: slanger@mic.dundee.ac.uk
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Stefan Langer Tel: +44 1382 344150
MicroCentre Fax: +44 1382 345509
University of Dundee e-mail: slanger@mic.dundee.ac.uk
Dundee DD1 4HN
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