THE AUSTRALIAN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING FORTNIGHT
incorporating
New Methods in Natural Language Processing Conference
Computational Natural Language Learning Conference
Australian Natural Language Postgraduate Workshop
Sunday January 11th to Saturday 24th 1998
All around Australia
ANLPF - AUSTRALIAN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING FORTNIGHT
The Australian NLP community is pleased to announce that it will be hosting
two international NLP conferences in January 1998, and has organized a
fortnight of associated activities around the country, to ensure that you
are able to make the most of your trip to Australia.
The NeMLaP and CoNLL conferences will be sharing tutorials and workshops:
NeMLaP will focus broadly on methods and specifically on textual NLP;
CoNLL conference will focus specifically on learning as it relates
broadly to any aspects of linguistic theory, modelling or processing.
Papers may be submitted for coordinated consideration for the two
conferences and the associated workshops.
Immediately following ANLPF there will an opportunity to join an ANLPF trip
to the Red Centre and/or to Kangaroo Island. The annual Australasian Computer
Science Week (ACSW) follows in Perth (February 2 to 5), a week after ANLPF. The
ACSW conference week incorporates:
ACSC'98 - The 21st Australasian Computer Science Conference
ACAC'98 - The 3rd Australasian Computer Architecture Conference
ADC'98 - The 9th Australian Database Conference
CATS'98 - The 4th Australasian Theory Symposium
ANLPF will thus take you around most of Australia's major cities and
sights: Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide - and if you stay on, also Kangaroo
Island, Coober Pedy, Ayer's Rock and Perth. The 1998 Loebner Prize for
Artificial Intelligence will also be held in Sydney, at the PowerHouse
Museum, on Sunday 11th January, and an International Human-Computer
Conversation Workshop may also be held immediately before ANLPF in
conjunction with that event.
But... Don't read this if you can help it - hit the web straight away:
http://www.cs.flinders.edu.au/research/AI/ANLPF
Fuller details are available on the web, and you'll find your way around
the information much more easily. But for the email addicts, we present
the formal call for papers for CoNLL and NeMLaP, and summarize the timetable
and submission requirements for the fortnight.
TIMETABLE FOR CoNLL, NeMLaP and workshops
1997
Expressions of interest - discount if you reply by Jun 23
Workshop and Tutorial Proposals Jul 7
Submission of Conference papers Aug 31
Acceptance notification Oct 7
Email Submission of Workshop Papers Oct 8
Workshop Acceptances sent Oct 24
Email Submission of SIGNLL Group Descriptions Nov 1
Final camera ready copy due Nov 8
Earlybird/author registration deadline Nov 8
Mailing of registration package Nov 30
1998
Blue Mountains - ANLPF Tutorials Jan 11-14
Sydney - NeMLaP Main Conference Jan 15-17
Melbourne - Australian NL Postgraduate Workshop Jan 19-20
Adelaide - CoNLL Main Conference Jan 22-24
CALL FOR EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST - questionnaire
Having developed such an ambitious and elaborate program, it would be
helpful to have an better idea of how many registrants to expect, and to
which parts of the program, and we therefore hereby call for expressions of
interest, and ask for the return of an email questionnaire. In
appreciation of their taking the time to respond, those that return their
expressions of interest by June 23 will receive a special discount on
registration. The questionnaire includes anticipated pricing and is
available from our web site or by emailing the anlpf address below.
Addresses for submissions/proposals/enquiries
anlpf@ai.ist.flinders.edu.au - Expressions of Interest
(questionnaire/questions)
anlpt@ai.ist.flinders.edu.au - Tutorial Proposals
anlpw@ai.ist.flinders.edu.au - Workshop Proposals and ANLPW Submissions
nemlap@ai.ist.flinders.edu.au - Submissions to NeMLaP
conll@ai.ist.flinders.edu.au - Submission to CoNLL (papers/abstract/group)
NeMLaP - NEW METHODS IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING
The NeMLaP3 conference on New Methods in Natural Language Processing will
be held in Sydney from Sunday January 11th to Saturday January 17th and
will cover all kinds of new techniques or novel approaches in the area of
Natural Language Processing. The main conference (Thu 15 to Sat 17) will
be preceded by the joint ANLPF Tutorial Program in the nearby Blue
Mountains (Sun 11 to Wed 14), which will cover all kinds of techniques and
methodologies which can profitably be applied to language.
NeMLaP3 will be the third in a series of conferences focusing on theories
and methodologies that provide alternatives to the mainstream techniques of
symbolic computational linguistics. This series of international
conferences provides a forum for researchers in the broad area of new
methods in NLP, i.e., symbolic and non-symbolic techniques and
analogy-based, statistical and connectionist processing, to present their
most recent research and to discuss its implications.
Papers should present heretofore unpublished research addressing any topic
involving the exploration of new techniques for NLP. Topics of interest
include (but are not limited to) the following:
Example- and Memory-based MT
Corpus-based NLP
Bootstrapping techniques
Analogy-based NLP
Connectionist NLP
Statistical MT/NLP
Theoretical issues of sub-symbolic vs. symbolic NLP
Hybrid approaches
NeMLaP Invited Speakers are:
Walter Daelemans, Tilburg University
Christer Samuelsson, Bell Laboratories
CoNLL - COMPUTATIONAL NATURAL LANGUAGE LEARNING
SIGNLL, the ACL's Special Interest Group on Natural Language Learning, will
be holding the CoNLL98 conference on Computational Natural Language
Learning in Adelaide at the end of the second week, from Thursday 22nd
January till Saturday 24th January.
The field of natural language learning (NLL) is not a new one; research in
it has been pursued for more than forty years under various guises
including Machine Learning of Natural Language, Grammatical Inference, and
Psycholinguistic Modelling. The last seven years, however, have seen a
growth in interest and, correspondingly, in meetings addressing this topic.
CoNLL provides continuity and a unified focus for an area which is starting
to become a coherent field in its own right. This will be the second event
bearing the name CoNLL.
Papers are sought on both applied and theoretical topics, and are not
limited to any particular area, level or application of language or language
technology. Papers should present heretofore unpublished research
addressing any topic on the application of machine-learning methods to
natural language or the computer implementation of linguistic or
psycholinguistic models of language acquisition. Such topics may occur in
(but are not restricted to):
acquisition of grammar/syntax
acquisition of phonology and/or morphology
acquisition of pragmatics and discourse structure
acquisition of semantic and ontological relations
computational models of language acquisition
computational models in cognitive linguistics
computational models of universal grammar
computational models in psycholinguistics
computational models in neurolinguistics
computational models of ontogenesis of speech and language
comparative evaluation of different learning techniques
theoretical models in formal lingusitics and learning theory
statistical and information-theoretic classification
learning speech recognition/synthesis systems
learning machine translation systems
learning auditory scene analysis
adaptive and optimizing NLP systems
computational lexicon acquisition
connectionist language learning
linguistic knowledge discovery
automatic tagging
ANLPF TUTORIAL PROGRAM
The tutorial program from Sunday 11th January to Wednesday 14th January
will emphasize basic and advanced methods which have been usefully applied
in NLP and will include the following invited tutorials.
Walter Daelemans, Introduction to Memory-based Learning
Tilburg University and its application to Lexical
Acquisition
Christer Samuelsson, Introduction to Statistical Methods
Bell Laboratories in Natural Language Processing
David Dowe, Introduction to Snob, MML and Mixture Modelling
Monash University
Dominique Estival Introduction to Grammatical Formalisms
Melbourne University for Natural Language
Processing
Robert Dale Introduction to Natural Language Generation
Macquarie University &
Microsoft Research Inst
ANLPW - AUSTRALIAN NATURAL LANGUAGE POSTGRADUATE WORKSHOP + other workshops
ANLPW will be the third Australian NLP Summer Workshop, traditionally held
as part of the Australasian Computer Science Week. This workshop is
intended to provide an opportunity for Australian PhD/Masters/Honours students
to present their research and interact with each other, but papers from
international students are also most welcome.
The Australian NL Postgraduate Workshop will be held at Melbourne University
on Monday 19th and Tuesday 20th January.
Proposals for other workshops to be held during ANLPF are also invited, and
should be sent to the ANLPW address above. The standard ANLPF submission
format, length and instructions apply to papers submitted to workshops, but
note
that later deadlines apply to workshop submissions.
SUBMISSION SPECIFICATIONS common to all ANLPF events
Submissions are requested in PostScript in a format which is similar to ACL
proceedings (final published form). Instructions, model papers and templates
for various text processing systems are all available from our web pages.
Hardcopy submission is possible, but an earlier deadline applies and
submission
must be in triplicate - the physical addresses for submission can be found in
the web pages. Authors may request that their papers be considered for
multiple
events, but should direct their submissions to their preferred event (program
committee) alone. Do not send the same paper to multiple addresses.
Full Length Papers
No more than 10 pages in the submission format, including figures and
references. One page in this format is about 700-800 words. Versions
without author information may be submitted for blind refereeing, but
authors are requested to comply with the full instructions in the web pages.
CoNLL Short Abstracts
Up to 2 pages in the submission format, including figures and references. One
page in this format is about 700-800 words. Approximately 15%-30% of the
CoNLL speaking slots will be awarded to short abstracts, depending on the
number and quality submitted. Each accepted short abstract will be alotted
two pages in the conference proceedings. Abstracts will be processed
according to the same schedule as full length papers.
SIGNLL Meeting - Group Descriptions
As is customary with SIGNLL sponsored events, a SIGNLL Meeting will be held
at CoNLL which will give opportunity for members hear about SIGNLL plans
and also to find out about other members and their groups' research.
SIGNLL members may submit 1-2 page abstracts in the submission format
describing their research group and its projects. One abstract per group
will be included in the proceedings. 5 minute slots at the SIGNLL Meeting
will be allocated to selected groups. There is a separate late deadline for
group abstracts.
NeMLaP PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Claire Cardie, Cornell Uni, USA
Walter Daelemans, Tilburg Uni, NL
Robert Dale, Macquarie Uni
Mark Ellison, Edinburgh Uni, UK
Dominque Estival, Melbourne Uni, Australia
Junichi Tsujii, Tokyo Uni, Japan
Chris Manning, Sydney Uni, Australia
Kemal Oflazer, Bilkent Uni, Turkey
David Powers, Flinders Uni, Australia
Christer Samuelsson, Bell Labs, USA
Harold Somers, UMIST, UK Atro Voutilainen, Helsinki Uni, Finland
Peter Wallis, DSTO, Australia
Dekai Wu, HKUST, Hong Kong
David Yarowsky, Johns Hopkins Uni, USA
Ingrid Zukerman, Monash Uni, Australia
CoNLL PROGRAM COMMITTEE
The SIGNLL Officers and International Advisory Committee
(http://www.cs.unimaas.nl/~antal/signll/signll-home.html)
in collaboration with the NeMLaP Program Committee.
Coordinated refereeing will be performed for the two main conferences and
approved workshops.
ANLPF ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
David Powers, Flinders Uni
Sandra Williams, Macquarie Uni/Microsoft Research Inst
Chris Manning, Sydney Uni
Dominique Estival, Melbourne Uni
Robert Dale, Macquarie Uni/Microsoft Research Inst
Peter Wallis, Defence Sci+Tech Org
-- powers@acm.org http://www.cs.flinders.edu.au/people/DMWPowers.html
Associate Professor David M. W. Powers David.Powers@flinders.edu.au
ACM SIGART Editor; ACL SIGNLL President Facsimile: +61-8-8201-3626
Director, AI Lab, Dept of Computer Science UniOffice: +61-8-8201-3663
The Flinders University of South Australia Secretary: +61-8-8201-2662
GPO Box 2100, Adelaide South Australia 5001 HomePhone: +61-8-8357-4220
++
Direct email at present: powers@uia.ua.ac.be UIA: +32-3-820.27.68
Currently on leave at: Facsimile: +32-3-820.27.62
Universitaire Instelling Antwerpen - Departement Germaanse
SIGART is the Association for Computational Machinery's
Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence
SIGNLL is the Association for Computational Linguistic's
Special Interest Group on Natural Language Learning