Corpora: FOUR ANLP/NAACL-2000 Workshop Calls for Papers

From: Priscilla Rasmussen (rasmusse@cs.rutgers.edu)
Date: Wed Jan 12 2000 - 23:14:43 MET

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    The following four Calls for Papers for workshops associated with the
    ACL-sponsored ANLP/NAACL-2000 Conference are included below, separated
    by dash lines:

    1)Workshop on Conversational Systems
      May 4, 2000, following ANLP/NAACL 2000

    2)EMBEDDED MACHINE TRANSLATION SYSTEMS WORKSHOP II
      Thursday, May 4, 2000

    3)Workshop on Applied Interlinguas: Practical Applications of Interlingual
      Approaches to NLP
      Sunday, April 30, 2000

    4)Workshop on Reading Comprehension Tests as Evaluation for
      Computer-Based Language Understanding Systems
      Thursday, May 4th, 2000, Seattle, Washington, USA

    -----------------------------------------------------------------------
                                    Call for Papers
                            Workshop on Conversational Systems
                          May 4, 2000, following ANLP/NAACL 2000

    The purpose of this workshop is to focus the discourse and dialogue
    community on best practices as well as theory of conversational
    systems, both speech based and text based. The workshop will also
    bring together creators of working conversational systems to discuss their
    efforts, both successes and limitations.

    In this workshop we encourage papers on either theoretical or applied
    research with a focus on results in working systems. We also welcome
    papers on working systems that provide a critical appraisal of their
    capabilities as well as their limitations; we encourage such papers to
    provide the criteria of critique that the authors feel are most
    relevant to their work. This workshop will consider in particular:

    - How can systems be designed so that it is easier to build
    applications in new domains?
    - What significant features of dialogue are beyond current working
    systems? What proposals show the most promise for capturing these
    features?
    - What knowledge does a system need to represent about a domain, tasks
    and discourse to support intelligent conversational interaction?
    - What can be learned from data and what should be learned from data?
    Can robust systems be built for domains where there is not a large amount
    of data available?
    - What is the role of natural language generation in conversational systems?
    - What aspects of discourse prosody are now feasible in conversational
    systems?
    - What aspects of nonverbal behavior are now feasible -- and worthwhile
    implementing -- in conversational systems?
    - How can the real-world performance of conversational systems be measured
    and anticipated? How can the performance of different systems be compared?

    In addition to the presentation of papers and the discussions that
    will result from them, we plan demonstration sessions and a panel
    session. The demonstration sessions will be open to anyone who wishes
    to bring their conversational systems for demonstration to other
    members of the workshop. Presenters are asked to submit a paper that
    is specifically directed at a demonstration of their current systems.
    These papers should cover the following topics as well as others the
    presenters think are relevant:

    -a short system description,
    -an example dialogue or dialogues, as space permits,
    -discussion of the most important contribution of the work,
    -discussion of the most significant limitation of the work.

    These papers will be included in the workshop proceedings.

    In the panel session we plan to bring together a set of experts to
    compare various approaches (including frame-based, finite-state,
    plan-based and statistical and logical reasoning-based) to dialogue in
    working conversational systems.

    A website which will provide additional information on the workshop as
    it becomes available is located at:
    http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/traum/ConvSys/.

    I. IMPORTANT DATES
    Paper submission deadline: February 4, 2000
    Notification of acceptance for papers: March 1, 2000
    Camera ready papers due: March 13, 2000
    Workshop date: May 4, 2000

    II. FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION

    Submissions must use the ACL latex style or ACL Microsoft Word style,
    both of which can be found at
    http://www.gte.com/AboutGTE/gto/anlp-naacl2000/cfp_submission.html. Paper
    submissions should consist of a full paper of 8 pages (including
    references). Please send submission questions to Alex
    Rudnicky,air@cs.cmu.edu, before, not after, January 31, 2000.

    Submission Procedure:

    Electronic submission only: send the pdf (preferred), postscript or
    MS Word form of your submission to: Alex Rudnicky, air@cs.cmu.edu. The
    Subject line should be "ANLP-NAACL2000 WORKSHOP PAPER
    SUBMISSION". Because reviewing is blind, no author information is
    included as part of the paper. An identification page must be sent in
    a separate email with the subject line: "ANLP-NAACL2000 WORKSHOP ID
    PAGE" and must include title, all authors, theme area, keywords, word
    count, and an abstract of no more than 5 lines. Late submissions will
    not be accepted. Notification of receipt will be e-mailed to the first
    author shortly after receipt.

    The Organizing Committee for this workshop includes:

    Candy Sidner, Lotus (Chair)
    James Allen, Univ. of Rochester
    Harald Aust, Philips Corp.
    Phil Cohen, Oregon Graduate Institute
    Justine Cassell, Media Lab, MIT
    Laila Dybkjaer, University of Southern Denmark
    X.D. Huang, Microsoft
    Masato Ishizaki, Japan Adv. Institute of Science and Technology
    Candace Kamm, AT&T
    Lin-Shan Lee, Taiwan University
    Susann Luperfoy, Akamai Technologies
    Patti Price, SRI International
    Owen Rambow, AT&T
    Norbert Reithinger, DFKI Saarbruecken
    Alex Rudnicky, Carnegie Mellon University
    Stephanie Seneff, MIT
    Dave Stallard, BBN/GTE
    David Traum, University of Maryland
    Marilyn Walker, AT&T
    Wayne Ward, Univ of Colorado, Boulder

    ------------------------------------------------------------------------

        ****************** CALL FOR PAPERS ***************************
     
                        EMBEDDED MACHINE TRANSLATION SYSTEMS
                                    WORKSHOP II
                      held in conjunction with NAACL/ANLP2000

                              Thursday, May 4, 2000
                             Seattle, Washington, USA

             Embedded MT Systems homepage for this workshop
              http://lamp.cfar.umd.edu/Embedded_MT_Systems

    WHAT IS AN "EMBEDDED MACHINE TRANSLATION (MT) SYSTEM"?

    An "embedded MT system" is a computational system with one
    or more MT engines among its components. These systems
    accept multilingual, multimodal inputs and create various outputs
    that enable the users to access the original information in their
    own language. An MT component embedded in an end-to-end system
    allows users to perform their specific tasks on foreign language
    input that they previously only had been able to perform in
    their native language. To date, these tasks have included
    summarization, content extraction, filtering and document
    retrieval.

    BACKGROUND

    The first workshop on Embedded MT Systems was held in conjunction
    with the biennial meeting of the Association for Machine Translation
    in the Americas (AMTA), in October, 1998, in Langhorne, PA. The
    Embedded MT Systems Workshop II is a response to the growing
    community commitment to translingual information research,
    e.g., the DARPA TIDES initiative. By holding the workshop at
    the combined NAACL and ANLP conferences this year, there will be
    an opportunity for a multi-disciplinary mix of researchers and
    to attend, contribute and benefit from the workshop.

    WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

    The strengths and weaknesses of machine translation engines
    have become better understood and accepted. There has been a marked
    increase in the development of a range of computer systems containing
    an MT component. This workshop will focus on the system designs, the
    associated information access tasks of such end-to-end systems,
    and the measures of system effectiveness.

    Of particular interest are systems that accept one or another of
    various types of input including hard-copy pages, online text
    files, and speech (natural or transcribed). These inputs
    present real-world, noisy data that challenge MT engine capabilities.
    We would like to know the degradation in performance that
    these challenges present and the compensation strategies that
    system developers have tested or used. We also seek
    submissions describing possible channel-specific feedback
    processes from other system components that help correct the
    noisy input.

    Papers describing multiple MT engines and algorithms for selecting
    among their outputs are encouraged. It would be interesting
    to hear how these complex MT components have been integrated into
    specific applications. For example, do certain MT engines produce
    results better suited for summarization, retrieval, or online
    foreign language tutoring?

    The field of MT evaluation currently lacks an adequate methodology.
    There are no widely used standards and few statisticians have been
    called upon to assess the metrics that have been proposed. We will
    look for submissions that include measures for the individual system
    components and end-to-end system evaluation. Also of interest are
    measures that evaluate user performance on specific tasks.

    We expect that the range of papers from both the first and this
    second workshop will provide sufficient material for us to pursue
    a special journal issue dedicated to Embedded MT Systems.

    IMPORTANT DATES

    Intent to submit: Friday, Feb. 11, 2000
    Paper submission deadline: Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2000
    Notification of acceptance of papers: Friday, March 3, 2000
    Camera-ready papers due: Monday, March 13, 2000

    SUBMISSION PROCEDURE

    Electronic submission of Intent to Submit should have the
    following subject line:
       "NAACL-ANLP2000 WORKSHOP - Intent to submit"
    Body of message should include Identification Page information:
       - title of submission
       - names of all authors
       - primary author name and email address, phone and fax
       - presentation type preference
           (select one or more per system: demo, poster, or paper)
       - keywords

    Authors may submit short papers, full-length papers, poster
    presentations and/or demos.

    For electronic submission, include the Identification
    Page Information (see above) as a separate page from the paper
    itself. Reviewing will be blind. No author information should be
    included with the main body of the paper. Full paper submissions
    may be up to 5000 words in length, including references.
    Submissions for poster presentations and short papers may be up
    to 2000 words in length, including references.

    Demo presentations are encouraged in conjunction with papers
    or posters. For demo-only presentations, submissions up to
    two pages long should describe the system design and
    capabilities with respect to (ii) above:
    an end-to-end process flow covering the system
    input, any pre-MT processing, the MT component itself, any
    post-MT processing, and the system output.

    FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION

    Submissions must use the ACL latex style or Microsoft Word style.
    Both are available from the ANLP-NAACL2000 Conference web page:
        http://www.gte.com/AboutGTE/gto/anlp-naacl2000/

    Please send submissions and questions to: voss@arl.mil
    Notification of receipt will be sent to the primary author.

    ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

    Carol Van Ess-Dykema, US Dept. of Defense
    Clare R. Voss, US Army Research Lab
    Florence Reeder, MITRE Corp.

    PROGRAM COMMITTEE

    Gary Coen, Boeing Phantom Works
    Bob Frederking, LTI, Carnegie Mellon Univ.
    Laurie Gerber, SYSTRAN
    Inge Gorm Hansen and Henrik Selsoe Sorenson, Copenhagen Business School
    Lori Levin, LTI, Carnegie Mellon Univ.
    Bill Ogden, CRL, NMSU
    Kathi Taylor, Georgetown U.

    -------------------------------------------------------------------------

                         CALL FOR PAPERS

                 Workshop on Applied Interlinguas:
        Practical Applications of Interlingual Approaches to NLP
      (pre-conference workshop in conjunction with ANLP-NAACL2000)

                      Sunday, April 30, 2000
                     Seattle, Washington, USA

    The organizing committee wishes to invite submissions to the Workshop
    on the Practical Applications of Interlingual Approaches to NLP which
    will be held on Sunday, April 30, 2000, in conjunction with the
    ANLP-NAACL2000.

    Interlingual approaches to NLP have been developed within the field of
    Machine Translation. The central goal is to analyze natural language
    expressions in terms of a representation language that will capture
    those aspects of a communication which permit the generation of an
    equivalent expression in some other language (that is, a
    representation of the communicative intent of the utterance). An
    interlingual representation of some utterance should ideally represent
    what was said by whom and to whom and relevant information about
    where, when, why and how it was said. The representations are usually
    very rich and extremely knowledge intensive. Many aspects of such
    representation systems are unknown or underdeveloped.

    Often, though not invariably, the lexicon of an IL representation will
    be drawn from the names of nodes in an Ontology, representing classes,
    events, or concepts. The syntax of the IL prescribes how these nodes
    are combined into an utterance representation. An IL-based approach to
    Machine Translation then specifies how a source language sentence can
    be analyzed into an IL representation and how this representation can
    then generate a natural language output.

    This workshop will focus on these latter two aspects of the IL
    approach: the syntax of the IL and the techniques used to analyze and
    generate natural language. The uses of an Ontology outside of
    Knowledge-based Machine Translated is a related, but slightly
    different subject.

    To date, such approaches have been essentially theoretical (although a
    number of limited applications exist). One of the criticisms of such
    approaches is that they are impractical -- requiring too much
    hand-coding or too deep a knowledge-representation to be
    useful. However, several examples of IL specifications are available.
    For example, there is

    the Text Meaning Representation of the Mikrokosmos Knowledge-based
    Machine Translation system at the Computing Research Laboratory
    (http://crl.nmsu.edu/Research/Projects/mikro/index.html).

    the IL used in ISI's GAZELLE MT project
    (http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/mt/interlingua.html)

    IL representations of a Spanish text produced by the KANT system at
    the Language Technologies Institute
    (http://www.lti.cs.cmu.edu/IRW/)
    (http://www.lti.cs.cmu.edu/Research/Kant)

    IL representation developed for a speech-to-speech system dealing with
    travel planning by the Consortium for Speech Translation Advanced
    Research (C-STAR)
    (http://www.c-star.org)

    Interlingual approaches offer powerful semantics-based and
    pragmatics-based solutions to any number of NLP problems
    (disambiguation, reference resolution, interpretation of figurative
    speech to name a few). This workshop will focus on methods for making
    interlingual approaches tractable within specific, well-defined tasks
    not only for machine translation but for a range of NLP applications.

    The goal of the workshop is to stimulate interest in more cognitive
    research in NLP while focusing such work on near term, practical
    applications. Papers are invited on:

     - methods for developing (or extending) underlying knowledge sources,
     - techniques for processing in the face of knowledge-poor sources or
       gaps in knowledge sources,
     - interlingual approaches to particular NLP tasks (reference
       resolution, disambiguation, interpretation of ellipsis, etc.),
     - interlingual approaches to different NLP applications
       (MT--including speech-to-speech translation, Information
       Extraction, Summarization, NL generation, Intelligent Tutoring
       Systems, etc.).

    Since there is limited work on the application of IL approaches to NLP
    currently, concept design papers are encouraged. Preference will be
    given to actual research projects focusing on actual processing
    problems and exploiting extant sources, but any contribution should
    clearly focus on one of the topics above.

    The workshop will consist of 6 30-minute presentations, each followed
    by a half-hour discussion, beginning with two informal 6-minute
    critical responses from reviewers followed by a short rebuttal by the
    author and open discussion. Ideally, the critical responses will also
    be available by the March 1 acceptance date, but in no case later
    than March 31. All critiques and rebuttals received by March 13 will
    be included in the proceedings. The remainder will be made available
    at the workshop itself.

    The Journal of Machine Translation will consider the results of the
    workshop for publication in a special issue in 2001. In addition, the
    contributions will be published as an NAACL workshop proceedings.

    The program committee (and initial discussants) includes:

    Bonnie Dorr UMIACS-UMd
    David Farwell CRL-NMSU
    Stephen Helmreich CRL-NMSU
    Eduard Hovy ISI-USC
    Kevin Knight ISI-USC
    Lori Levin LTI-CMU
    Teruko Mitamura LTI-CMU
    Keith Miller MITRE
    Sergei Nirenburg CRL-NMSU
    Mari Olsen Microsoft
    Boyan Onyshkeyvch DOD
    Florence Reeder MITRE
    Harry Somers UMIST
    Yorick Wilks USheffield

    The workshop is sponsored in part by the Special Interest Group on
    Interlinguas of the Association for Machine Translation in the
    Americas. For further information about this series of workshops see:
    http://crl.nmsu.edu/Events/FWOI/index.html.

    Dates

    Submission of papers: February 4, 2000
    Notification of acceptance: March 1, 2000
    Submission of Final Copies: March 13, 2000
    Critiques of Accepted Papers: March 31, 2000
    Author's Rebuttals: April 21, 2000
    Workshop: April 30, 2000

    The dates related to the preparation of a special issue of the Journal
    of Machine Translation will be made public at the workshop.

    Paper Requirements

    Submissions must use the ACL latex style or Microsoft Word style (both
    available from the ANLP-NAACL2000 Conference web page --
    http://www.gte.com/AboutGTE/gto/anlp-naacl2000/). Paper submissions
    should consist of a full paper (5000 words or less, including
    references). Please send papers and submission questions to
    shelmrei@crl.nmsu.edu.

    Cost

    There will be a registration fee of $50.00 per person. A banquet for
    the participants and guests will be organized separately for Sunday
    evening.

    -----------------------------------------------------------------------

                                  Call for Papers

            Workshop on Reading Comprehension Tests as Evaluation for
                  Computer-Based Language Understanding Systems

               Thursday, May 4th, 2000, Seattle, Washington, USA
            (post-conference workshop in conjunction with ANLP-NAACL2000)

    Reading Comprehension tests, such as the one below, are designed to help
    evaluate a reader's understanding of a text passage.

      How Maple Syrup is Made

      Maple syrup comes from sugar maple trees. At one time, maple
      syrup was used to make sugar. This is why the tree is called a
      "sugar" maple tree.

      Sugar maple trees make sap. Farmers collect the sap. The best
      time to collect sap is in February and March. The nights must be
      cold and the days warm.

      The farmer drills a few small holes in each tree. He puts a
      spout in each hole. Then he hangs a bucket on the end of each
      spout. The bucket has a cover to keep rain and snow out. The sap
      drips into the bucket. About 10 gallons of sap come from each
      hole.

      1. Who collects maple sap? (Farmers)
      2. What does the farmer hang from a spout? (A bucket)
      3. When is sap collected? (February and March)
      4. Where does the maple sap come from? (Sugar maple trees)
      5. Why is the bucket covered? (to keep rain and snow out)

    Such tests exist in many languages, have human performance benchmarks
    associated with them, and come in a variety of types (short-answer,
    multiple choice) and levels of difficulty. In addition, they are
    generally written to make each story and set of questions
    self-contained, in order to require as little outside knowledge as
    possible to answer the questions.

    The focus of the proposed workshop will be to explore the following
    questions:

    - Can such exams be used to evaluate computer-based language
      understanding effectively and efficiently?
    - Would they provide an impetus and test bed for interesting and
      useful research?
    - Are they too hard for current technology?
    - Or are they too easy, such that simple hacks can score high,
      although there is clearly no understanding involved?

    The most direct method of exploring these questions is to choose a set
    of tests and build a system that takes these tests. Some preliminary
    results indicate that such tests are tractable, but not trivial and
    that linguistic processing is helpful (Hirschman, et al. ACL-99). A
    test set, evaluation routines, prototype system, and documentation are
    available upon request to light@mitre.org.

    We hope that a number of submissions will present results based on
    actual reading comprehension systems. In addition, we encourage
    submissions that report on other kinds of tests or similar tests in
    other languages, or that address our list of questions by other
    means. Note that submissions are encouraged that describe work in
    progress with preliminary empirical results.

    Invited speaker:

    Karen Kukich (Educational Testing Service)

    "NLP Tools for Analyzing TOEFL Reading Comprehension Passages and
    Items"

    Format for Submission

    Authors are asked to submit previously unpublished papers only; a
    workshop proceedings will be published. Our target submission length
    is 2000 words but both shorter and longer submissions will also be
    considered. Electronic submission of postscript will be accepted.
    Hard copy submissions should include 4 copies of the paper. Since the
    papers will be reviewed anonymously, please do not place the author
    name on the paper. Instead include a separate title page with title,
    abstract, author, and e-mail address. Unless requested otherwise,
    notification of acceptance will be sent electronically to the first
    author. Parallel submission is unproblematic; however if your paper
    is accepted to this workshop and you decide to present it here, we
    will ask you to withdraw it from any other events.

    Important Dates

    Deadline for submission: February 11th, 2000
    Notification of authors: March 1st, 2000
    Final versions due: March 10th, 2000

    Address for Submission and Further Information

    Marc Light
    The MITRE Corporation
    202 Burlington Rd.
    M/S K329
    Bedford, MA 01730
    USA
    Phone: 1-781-271-5579
    light@mitre.org

    (The mailing list, read-comp@linus.mitre.org, has been set up to
    discuss reading comprehension tests as evaluation for computer-based
    language understanding systems. It is open subscription and
    unmoderated. To subscribe, send email to majordomo@linus.mitre.org
    with 'subscribe read-comp' in the body.)

    Program Committee:

    Eric Brill
    Eugene Charniak
    Mary Harper
    Marc Light (chair)
    Ellen Riloff
    Ellen Voorhees



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