Coling-ACL '98 Workshop
Multilingual Information Management:
Current Levels and Future Abilities
August 16, 1998
Universiti de Montrial
Montrial/Canada
The Coling/ACL workshop on Multilingual Information Management 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 considered 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 workshop is
intended to open the discussion to the computational linguistics
community as a whole.
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WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION
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?
The workshop will be organized as a series of panels reporting on the
outcome of discussions in the Granada workshop (a report summarizing
the discussions at Granada will be available before the Coling-ACL
workshop). Ample time for discussion will be included. The discussion
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)
o parsing, generation, information acquisition, etc.
o speech recognition and synthesis
o language and speaker identification and speech translation
Program Committee
Khalid Choukri, European Languages Resource Association
Charles Fillmore, University of California Berkeley, USA
Robert Frederking, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Ulrich Heid, University of Stuttgart, Germany
Eduard Hovy, Information Sciences Institute, USA
Nancy Ide, Vassar College, USA
Mun Kew Leong, National University of Singapore
Joseph Mariani, LIMSI/CNRS, France
Mark Maybury, The Mitre Corporation, USA
Sergei Nirenburg, New Mexico State University, USA
Akitoshi Okumura, NEC, Japan
Martha Palmer, University of Pennsylvania, USA
James Pustejovsky, Brandeis University, USA
Peter Schaueble, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Oliviero Stock, IRST, Italy
Felisa Verdejo, UNED, Spain
Piek Vossen, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Wolfgang Wahlster, DFKI, Germany
Antonio Zampolli, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, Italy
Organizers
Bob Frederking
Center for Machine Translation
Carnegie-Mellon University
Schenley Park
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890
Tel: (+1 412) 268-6656
Fax: (+1 412) 268-6298
Email: ref@nl.cs.cmu.edu
Eduard Hovy
Information Sciences Institute
of the University of Southern California
4676 Admiralty Way
Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695
Tel: (+1 310) 822-1511
Fax: (+1 310) 823-6714
Email: hovy@isi.edu
Nancy Ide
Department of Computer Science
Vassar College
124 Raymond Avenue
Poughkeepsie, New York 12604-0520 USA
Tel: (+1 914) 437 5988
Fax: (+1 914) 437 7498
E-mail: ide@cs.vassar.edu