Information Retrieval List Digest 200 (February 14, 1994) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/irld/irld-200 IRLIST Digest ISSN 1064-6965 February 14, 1994 Volume XI, Number 7 Issue 200 ********************************************************** I. NOTICES A. Meeting Announcements/Calls for Papers 1. RIAO '94: Papers 2. RIAO '94: Demonstrations 3. AAAI '94 III. JOB ANNOUNCEMENTS 1. UK PhD Studentships at Leeds, England ********************************************************** I. NOTICES I.A.1. Fr: Pierre Zanettacci Re: RIAO '94 CALL FOR PAPERS RIAO'94 Intelligent Multimedia Information Retrieval Systems and Management Rockefeller University New York, N. Y. October 11-13, 1994 Sponsored by the European Union with the participation of INRIA, France Telecom Organized by the Centre de Hautes Etudes Internationales d'Informatique Documentaire (CID, France), and the Center for the Advanced Study of Information Systems (CASIS, USA) Conference Chairs: Dr F. Seitz, Rockefeller University Prof. J.L. Funck Brentano, Hopital Necker Paris This conference, held every three years since 1985, allows researchers, product developers and companies to present and demonstrate the latest evolutions in information retrieval. New trends in hardware organization, telecommunication networks, hyperlinking, heterogeneous document creation, computational linguistics, and other fields modify the way that information retrieval can be imagined. This conference is a forum for innovative responses to this field as well as to related problems in very large databases, public access to information, multimedia information retrieval, interface specifications, and others. In addition to regular paper presentations, the conference will offer prototype and product demonstrations. Major topics include, but are not limited to: I. New paradigms for Information Retrieval II. Linguistic Analysis for Automatic Treatment: Full-text analysis; Indexing and retrieval using NLP; Multilingual interfaces and systems; Automatic abstracting. III. Large Knowledge Bases: Electronic dictionaries; Thesaurus, hyperbases using semantic networks, neuronal networks, conceptual graphs; Case-based reasoning systems for text; Multi-expert systems; Genetic information bases. IV. Digitized Document Understanding and Retrieval: Text, sound and image management for IR; Automatic extraction of factual information, multimedia indexing and retrieval; Automatic information structuring and linking in hypertext and hypermedia; Compound and multisource documents, active documents, speech documents V. Information Reading: Intelligent navigational aids; User understanding and modeling; Query formulation and expansion VI. Openness, Interoperability and Integration: How to achieve device independent portable information; Import/Export facilities; Communications between heterogeneous SRIs; Intelligent E-mails; Systems and interface integration; Standardization (SGML, HyTime, ...) VII. Multimodal Interfaces: Interfaces with several means of interaction (voice, mouse, keyboard, pointer, ...); Multilingual interfaces; Interaction with iconic languages; New visualization technologies. VIII. Confidentiality and Intellectual Property. IX. Measure and Evaluation. X. Experimental Applications. INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS: Papers must be validated by a prototype or working model. The authors may be asked to demonstrate their prototype or working model to a member of the program committee. The authors are expected to give a demonstration of their system during a time separate from their oral presentation. It is advisable that these demonstrations run oon standard material. PAPERS should not exceed 20 double-spaced pages, including figures and text. Send four copies of paper including authors names, address, telephone and fax numbers, e-mail address, and an abstract of at most 20 lines. DATES: March, 15 1994: Four Hard-copy of submissions must be received. May 15, 1994: Authors notified of acceptance CASIS/RIAO94 C.I.D. c/o P. Brodnitz RIAO'94 55 Perry St. #4A 36, rue Ballu New York, New York 10014 75009 Paris USA FRANCE Tel/fax 212-714-1421 tel: (33) 1 42-85-04-75 e-mail: cid@nuri.inria.fr fax: (33) 1 48-78-49-61 fax: (33) 1 45-26-84-45 e-mail: cid@nuri.inria.fr ********** I.A.2. Fr: Pierre Zanettacci Re: RIAO '94 Demos CALL FOR PRODUCT DEMONSTRATIONS RIAO'94 Intelligent Multimedia Information Retrieval Systems and Management Rockefeller University New York, N. Y. October 11-13, 1994 Sponsored by the European Union with the participation of INRIA, France Telecom Organized by the Centre de Hautes Etudes Internationales d'Informatique Documentaire (CID, France), and the Center for the Advanced Study of Information Systems (CASIS, USA) This conference, held every three years since 1985 (Grenoble, MIT, Barcelona) allows researchers, product developers and companies to present and demonstrate the latest evolutions in information retrieval. New trends in hardware organization, telecommunication networks, hyperlinking, heterogeneous document creation, computational linguistics, and other fields modify the way that information retrieval can be imagined. This conference is a forum for innovative responses to this field as well as to related problems in very large databases, public access to information, multimedia information retrieval, interface specifications, and others. One of the most attractive features about RIAO is the 'melting pot' produced by the simultaneous presentation of advanced research and innovative products. In order to ensure the most effective quality we stress the following points: -- the products selected for demonstration are in a limited number, and are chosen by a committee of industry experts, on the basis of innovation and responsiveness to the current and future market needs. This selection is itself a guarantee of quality. -- a free space will be reserved for the demonstration of the selected products, and a public presentation for each of these selected products will be organized. Companies and organizations which market innovative and competitive hardware and software related to the conference themes will benefit from the extensive communication effort associated with the exhibition. They will be able to contact potential clients directly, to gauge the competition, and to meet the best specialists in the domain. In addition to regular paper presentations, the conference will highlight hardware and software tools and application products that facilitate or provide solutions in the field of (or related to) information retrieval. These should be commercially available products (i.e. not in research or development stage) TOPICS: A -- HARDWARE AND NETWORKS: 1 -- New hardware designs for information retrieval Parallel computers Neuronal networks 2 -- Storage devices and publishing media CDI, CD-ROM, PhotoCD, CD-R, etc. 3 -- Interface devices (vocal, 3D, multimodal, OCR, etc.) 4 -- Telecommunications and networks WAN and LAN new services Data superhighways Intelligent e-mail 5 -- Information Kiosks, Groupware tools B -- SOFTWARE TOOLS 1 -- Linguistics techniques Natural language processing Semantic networks Automatic translation Automatic abstract construction 2 -- Artificial Intelligence Tools Knowledge Bases Conceptual Graphs other AI techniques 3 -- Interoperability Import/export facilities Multilingual systems Others 4 -- Data Organization for Storage and Retrieval of Large and/or Distributed Data Bases Heterogeneous Documents Hypermedia 5 -- Interfaces and Interactivity Tools On-line and contextual help Navigational Aids Smart Agents User modeling Virtual reality 6 -- Measurement and Evaluation C -- INFORMATION RETRIEVAL SERVICES AND PRODUCTS 1 -- On-Line Data Banks, Information Services 2 -- Electronic Document Management, Office Information Systems 3 -- Image and Multimedia Banks 4 -- Electronic Encyclopedias 5 -- Electronic Libraries INFORMATION FOR DEMONSTRATORS: Please send trade documentation about your product along with a cover letter specifying which topic and subtopic your product falls under, to arrive by MARCH 18, 1994, to one of the addresses below. CASIS/RIAO94 C.I.D. c/o P. Brodnitz RIAO'94 55 Perry St. #4A 36 rue Ballu New York, New York 10014 75009 Paris USA FRANCE Tel/fax 212-714-1421 tel: (33) 1 42-85-04-75 e-mail: cid@nuri.inria.fr fax: (33) 1 48-78-49-61 fax: (33) 1 45-26-84-45 e-mail: cid@nuri.inria.fr A questionnaire will be sent back to you. It must be filled out and returned by APRIL 15, 1994. A preliminary selection will be made by the committee of experts based on this information, and the selected applications will then be submitted to more detailed expertise. The final decision of the committee will be released by MAY 30, 1994. APPLICATION COMMITTEE CHAIRS: Robert J. Glushko, Passage Systems, Inc. J. M. Font, Image+ ********** I.A.3. Fr: Sy Ali Re: AAAI '94 AAAI 1994 Fall Symposium Knowledge Representation for Natural Language Processing in Implemented Systems November 4-6, 1994 The Monteleone Hotel, New Orleans, Louisiana CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: This symposium is intended to be a meeting of researchers actively working on implemented knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR) systems for general natural language processing (NLP) in order to assess the current state of that field. Specific topics of interest include the following: Expressiveness and generality of the representation language with respect to natural language. For example, coverage of complex object descriptions and treatment of quantification. What are the trade-offs in increasing the expressiveness of the representation language to support natural language? Inference methods that parallel reasoning in natural language. Natural deduction systems, for example, are so called because of the apparent naturalness of the proof procedure. Another example is surface reasoning, based on the syntactic structure of the natural language. Ability of the formalism or system to capture important semantic and pragmatic aspects of natural language. For example, the computational relationship between the representation language and the parser/generator. Is it possible to define the representation language to facilitate this relationship? At what cost? How many or kinds of representation languages are needed for general NLP? Many NLP systems actually use two representation languages: a semantic representation language that captures the semantics of a sentence, and a knowledge representation language that is used to do reasoning and represent the system's general knowledge about the domain. Typically these languages are quite different, with the former being a much more powerful language (including modalities, lambda expressions and other higher order constructs, generalized quantifiers, etc) and the latter being what the system's reasoning engine actually operates on, usually something more or less equivalent to first-order logic, (or an even more restricted vivid representation like a relational database) This raises the question of how these languages relate to each other, and if it is possible (or desirable) to have a semantic representation language that supports inference. Stands on issues such as: - What problems are solved, and how to use the solution(s). - What areas need work. - Defense or attacks of the standard design of morphology-syntax- semantics-pragmatics. Submissions to the symposium should address these topics by showing some text that an actual implemented system can understand, how the information contained in that text is represented, what background information is used by the system, how that information is represented, how the system processes the knowledge to do interesting things (such as answering interesting questions about the text), and how the information is processed into answers. Reports on projects whose purpose is to simulate human understanding of texts will be preferred over projects whose purpose is to provide natural language interfaces to databases, planners, or to pragmatically oriented knowledge bases. The format of this symposium will be designed to encourage interaction amongst the participants. To this end, new, previously unpublished work- in-progress on the topics of the symposium is most desirable, as are stands on the issues outlined above. Submission Information Potential attendees should submit an extended abstract of no more than 10 pages (exclusive of references), twelve point, double-spaced, with one inch margins. Submissions not conforming to these guidelines will not be reviewed. The symposium format will also include one or more panel discussions on the issues listed above. Attendees wishing to participate in panels, or wishing to suggest other panel topics, should indicate their interest and include a current vita along with their extended abstract. Demonstrations of working NLP/KRR systems are also of interest, however attendees must provide their own hardware and software support. Attendees interested in this option should indicate what they are planning on demonstrating, and how they propose to do so. This information should be provided with their extended abstract in a cover letter that clearly states their interest in this option. Email submission is preferred, and should be directed to the Symposium Chair at ssa231f@csm560.smsu.edu and syali@cs.buffalo.edu Preferred email submission formats are: stand-alone LaTeX, PostScript, or plain text (for abstracts without complex figures, etc). If email submission is not possible, then five copies of the paper should be mailed to the Symposium Chair: Syed S. Ali Chair, AAAI Fall Symposium on Knowledge Representation for Natural Language Processing in Implemented Systems Department of Computer Science Southwest Missouri State University 901 South National Avenue Springfield, MO 65804 (417) 836-5773 SUBMISSION DATES: - Submissions for the symposium are due on April 15, 1994. - Notification of acceptance will be given by May 17, 1994. - Material to be included in the working notes of the symposium must be received by August 19, 1994. ATTENDANCE: The symposium will be limited to between forty and sixty participants. Working notes will be prepared and distributed to participants in the symposium. A general plenary session, in which the highlights of each symposium will be presented, will be held on November 5, and an informal reception will be held on November 4. In addition to invited participants, a limited number of other interested parties will be able to register in each symposium on a first-come, first- served basis. Registration will be available by mid-July 1994. To obtain registration information write to the AAAI at 445 Burgess Drive, Menlo Park, CA 94025 (fss@aaai.org). SPONSOR: American Association for Artificial Intelligence 445 Burgess Drive, Menlo Park, CA 94025 (415) 328-3123 fss@aaai.org ********************************************************** III.1. Fr: E S Atwell Re: UK PhD studentships at Leeds, England THE UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS Centre for Computer Analysis of Language And Speech (CCALAS) PhD RESEARCH SCHOLARSHIPS The University of Leeds has up to 5 Research Scholarships for full-time PhD study available for take up by UK students in October 1994. The scholarships cover academic fees at the UK rate and a maintenance grant of #4,950 a year. CLOSING DATE FOR APPLICATIONS: 11 MARCH 1994. To join the CCALAS research centre, you will need a BSc/BA (ideally First Class Honours) in Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Education, Engineering, English, Linguistics, Modern Languages, Philosophy, Psychology or a related discipline; and interest in corpus-based computational linguistics. Informal enquiries about research opportunities in CCALAS may be made to: Eric Atwell, tel 0532 335761, fax 0532 335468, email eric@scs.leeds.ac.uk ; or Clive Souter, tel 0532 335460, email cs@scs.leeds.ac.uk ; or Peter Roach, tel 0532 335759, fax 0532 335749, email peterr@psychology.leeds.ac.uk Application forms may be obtained from the Research Degrees and Scholarships Office (UK Studentships), The University, Leeds LS2 9JT, tel 0532 335771 COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS RESEARCH AT LEEDS UNIVERSITY: Computer Analysis of Language And Speech is a thriving research area, at Leeds as well as nationally and internationally. We are still a long way from general, robust systems that can fully `understand' Natural Languages such as English. However, it is possible to identify specific subproblems or `niche' applications where current theory and technology can be applied usefully. Several research funding agencies support research in this interdisciplinary area, including the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC), Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Ministry of Defence (MoD), Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), British Council, and Higher Education Funding Councils (HEFCs) special initiatives such as Knowledge Based Systems Initiative (KBSI) and New Technologies Initiative (NTI). Leeds University researchers have an excellent track record in winning research grants from these sources, and will continue to seek external research funding; the University is also contributing internal support. CCALAS is a focus for researchers from a range of departments at Leeds University, providing a `critical mass' of expertise and sharable resources for research over a broad range of fundamental and application-oriented topics involving the computer analysis of language and speech. CCALAS members offer postgraduate research supervision and taught course modules leading to the degree of MSc, MA, MPhil, or PhD. CCALAS members are also involved in externally-funded Research and Development projects, and welcome PhD students with research interests linked to these larger projects. CCALAS covers a broad range of computer corpus- and dictionary-based research including: computers in lexicography (Atwell, Cowie, Roach, Setter, Souter), corpus annotation (Arnfield, Atwell, Bull, Ghali, Hughes, Roach, Souter), corpus collocation analysis (Howarth, Cowie, Davidson), grammar-based reasoning (Mott, Silver), grammatical inference (Arnfield, Atwell, Demetriou, Hanlon, Hughes, Jost, Souter, Tarver, Ueberla), handwriting recognition (Atwell, Boyle, Hanlon), language and linguistics teaching (Atwell, Davidson, Hunter, Roach, Shivtiel), probabilistic parsing (Atwell, Hogg, Jost, O'Donoghue, Souter), speech act theory (Holdcroft, Millican, Wallis, Wynne), speech recognition (Atwell, Kirby, Lockhart, Mair, Sergant, Roach, Ueberla), speech synthesis (Moore, Roach, Scully), text generation (Cole, Grierson, Tawalbeh), word-sense semantic disambiguation and tagging (Atwell, Demetriou, Jost). Leeds University has over 15,000 students and 2,000 academic and research staff, making it one of the largest in Britain. Leeds is half-way between London and Edinburgh, linked by rail, motorway and air to the rest of the UK and Europe. It is the 20th largest city in the European Community, with the excellent arts, sport and other social facilites expected of a growing, multi-cultural metropolis; but it is also close to four National Parks. More background information on CCALAS, the University, and Leeds and its environs can be found in the University Postgraduate Prospectus. ********************************************************** IRLIST Digest is distributed from the University of California, Division of Library Automation, 300 Lakeside Drive, Oakland, CA. 94612-3550. 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