ACL/COLING-98
Workshop on
TRANSLINGUAL INFORMATION MANAGEMENT
CURRENT LEVELS AND FUTURE ABILITIES
August 16, 1998 (following ACL/COLING-98)
University of Montreal, Montreal (Quebec, Canada)
CALL FOR PAPERS
DESCRIPTION
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The development of natural language applications which handle
multi-lingual and multi-modal information is the next major challenge
facing the field of computational linguistics. Over the past 50 years,
a variety of language-related capabilities has been developed in areas
such as machine translation, information retrieval, and speech
recognition, together with core capabilities such as information
extraction, summarization, parsing, generation, multimedia planning
and integration, statistics-based methods, ontologies, lexicon
construction and lexical representations, and grammar. The next few
years will require the extension of these technologies to encompass
multi-lingual and multi-modal information.
Extending current technologies will require integration of the various
capabilities into multi-functional natural language systems. However,
there is today no clear vision of how these technologies could or
should be assembled into a coherent framework. What would be involved
in connecting a speech recognition system to an information retrieval
engine, and then using machine translation and summarization software
to process the retrieved text? How can traditional parsing and
generation be enhanced with statistical techniques? What would be the
effect of carefully crafted lexicons on traditional information
retrieval?
This workshop is a follow-on to an NSF-sponsored workshop held in
conjunction with the First International Conference on Language
Resources and Evaluation in Granada, Spain (May 1998), at which an
international panel of invited experts will consider these questions
in an attempt to identify the most effective future directions of
computational linguistics research--especially in the context of the
need to handle multi-lingual and multi-modal information. The
follow-on ACL workshop is intended to open the discussion to the
computational inguistics community as a whole. The workshop will
include ample time for discussion. A report summarizing the
discussions at Granada will be available before the ACL workshop.
TOPICS
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The workshop will focus on the following fundamental questions:
1. What is the current level of capability in each of the major areas
of the field dealing with language and related media of human
communication?
2. How can (some of) these functions be integrated in the near future,
and what kind of systems will result?
3. What are the major considerations for extending these functions to
handle multi-lingual and multi-modal information, particularly in
integrated systems of the type envisioned in (2)?
In particular, we will consider these questions in relation to the
following areas:
o multi-lingual resources (lexicons, ontologies, corpora, etc.)
o information retrieval, especially cross-lingual and cross-modal
o machine translation
o automated (cross-lingual) summarization and information
extraction
o multimedia communication, in conjunction with text
o evaluation and assessment techniques for each of these areas
o methods and techniques (both statistics-based and linguistics-
based) of pre-parsing, parsing, generation, information
acquisition, etc.
We invite submissions which report on work in these areas. All papers
should clearly identify how the work addresses the issues and
questions outlined above.
SUBMISSIONS
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Only hard-copy submissions will be accepted. Authors should submit six
(6) copies of the full-length paper (3500-5000 words).
Submissions should be sent to:
Nancy Ide
Department of Computer Science
Vassar College
124 Raymond Avenue
Poughkeepsie, New York 12604-0520
USA
Style files and templates for preparing submissions can be found at
http://coling-acl98.iro.umontreal.ca/Styles.html
The official language of the conference is English.
IMPORTANT DEADLINES
-------------------
Submission Deadline: March 23, 1998
Notification Date: May 15, 1998
Camera ready copy due: June 15, 1998
SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE
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Charles Fillmore University of California Berkeley, USA
Robert Frederking Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Ulrich Heid (tentative) University of Stuttgart, Germany
Eduard Hovy Information Sciences Institute, USA
Nancy Ide Vassar College, USA
Lauri Karttunen (tentative) Rank Xerox Research, France
Kimmo Koskenniemi (tentative) University of Helsinki, Finland
Mun Kew Leong National University of Singapore
Joseph Mariani LIMSI/CNRS, France
Mark Maybury The Mitre Corporation, USA
Sergei Nirenburg (tentative) New Mexico State University, USA
Akitoshi Okumura (tentative) NEC, Japan
Martha Palmer University of Pennsylvania, USA
James Pustejovsky Brandeis University, USA
Peter Schaueble ETH, Switzerland
Oliviero Stock IRST, Italy
Felisa Verdejo UNED, Spain
Piek Vossen University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Wolfgang Wahlster DFKI, Germany
ORGANIZERS
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Robert Frederking, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Eduard Hovy, ISI, University of Southern California, USA
Nancy Ide, Vassar College, USA
INFORMATION
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Information on the workshop can be found at
http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~ide/translingual.html
Inquiries may be addressed to the organizers:
Robert Frederking <ref@nl.cs.cmu.edu>
Eduard Hovy <hovy@isi.edu>
Nancy Ide <ide@cs.vassar.edu>