Information Retrieval List Digest 237 (December 19) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/irld/irld-237 IRLIST Digest ISSN 1064-6965 December 19, 1994 Volume XI, Number 44 Issue 237 ********************************************************** II. JOBS 1. Librarians: U. Central Florida III. NOTICES B. Meetings 1. TREC '95 (Text Retrieval Conference) 2. Digital Libraries '95 3. ACL '95 Corpus Workshop 4. Active Learning Symposium ********************************************************** II. JOBS II.1. Fr: Rochelle Ballard Re: U. Central Florida: Librarian Positions LIBRARIANS - FOUR POSITIONS University of Central Florida Orlando, FL A rapidly-growing state university, enrollment 26,000, fully automated library. GENERAL QUALIFICATIONS REQUIRED FOR EACH POSITION: ALA-accredited master's degree; ability to work effectively with faculty and students; ability to work independently and cooperatively in a team setting; excellent oral, written and interpersonal communication skills. COORDINATOR, FEE-BASED INFORMATION SERVICE RANK: ASSOCIATE, OR UNIVERSITY LIBRARIAN Reports to Head of Access Services. Responsible for Library Information Network Exchange (LINE), which provides reference, research, online searching, interlibrary loan/document delivery, and other library services to LINE clients, principally the central Florida business and professional community. Plans, promotes, coordinates, and evaluates services. Manages staff and operations. REQUIRED: Five years experience after the professional degree in an academic, research, corporate, or special library; extensive reference experience; advanced online searching skills using multiple systems such as DIALOG, BRS, LEXIS/NEXIS; excellent organizational skills; a strong commitment to client-centered service. DESIRED: Familiarity with traditional and emerging information resources and technologies; supervisory experience; marketing experience; demonstrated leadership ability; bibliographic instruction experience; experience with intellectual property research; evidence of active ongoing participation in the profession. POSTMARKED DEADLINE: February 3, 1995 Position Available: July 1, 1995 COORDINATOR, ONLINE SEARCH SERVICES RANK: ASSOCIATE, OR UNIVERSITY LIBRARIAN Reports to Head of Access Services. Responsible for the library's mediated computer search service to faculty, staff, and students. Plans, promotes, coordinates, and evaluates service; directs staff and operations. Expected to participate in reference, bibliographic instruction or collection development activities. REQUIRED: Five years experience after the professional degree in an automated library environment; familiarity with traditional and emerging information resources and technologies; advanced online searching skills using multiple systems such as DIALOG, BRS, LEXIS/NEXIS, STN. Demonstrated organizational skills; strong commitment to public service. DESIRED: Working knowledge of a variety of microcomputers, microcomputer software, and library computer applications; reference experience in an academic library; experience in bibliographic instruction; supervisory experience; demonstrated leadership ability. POSTMARKED DEADLINE: February 3, 1995 Position Available: June 1, 1995 GENERAL REFERENCE - Two New Positions RANK: INSTRUCTOR LIBRARIAN Reports to Head of Reference. Participates in a full range of reference and bibliographic instruction duties in a fast-paced environment including numerous electronic reference sources, U. S. and Florida documents, and patents. Some evening/weekend hours. Assignment may include collection development and/or online searching. REQUIRED: Must have ALA-accredited Master's degree by June 1, 1995. Familiarity with and willingness to work with automated reference sources; ability to manage diverse assignments; strong desire to participate actively in a dynamic instruction program; a strong commitment to public service and information literacy. DESIRED: An understanding of the application of emerging technologies to reference service; experience with microcomputers; subject expertise or coursework in the social sciences, sciences, or engineering. Commitment to professional development. Finalists will be expected to present a brief bibliographic instruction demonstration during the onsite interview. POSTMARKED DEADLINE: January 13, 1995 Positions Available: May 15 RANK/SALARY: The general reference positions are at the Instructor rank. Ranks for the coordinator positions are assigned based on background and experience. Minimum salaries: Instructor Librarian, $25,000; Associate Librarian, $29,500; University Librarian, $33,000. Submit cover letter addressing above qualifications; resume; and names, addresses, and telephone numbers for three professional references postmarked by deadline to: Victor F. Owen, Library Personnel Officer, University of Central Florida Library, P. O. Box 162666, Orlando, Florida 32816- 2666. FLORIDA APPLICATION AND SELECTION PROCEDURES ARE SUBJECT TO PUBLIC REVIEW. AA/EEO. ********************************************************** III. NOTICES III.B.1. Fr: Donna Harman Re: TREC (Text Retrieval Conference), January - November 1995 CALL FOR PARTICIPATION TEXT RETRIEVAL CONFERENCE November 1995 Conducted by: National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Sponsored by: Advanced Research Projects Agency Software and Intelligent Systems Technology Office (ARPA/SISTO) The goal of this conference is to encourage research in text retrieval from large document collections by providing a large test collection, uniform scoring procedures and a forum for organizations interested in comparing their results. Both adhoc queries against archival data collections and routing (filtering or dissemination) queries against incoming data streams are being tested. The conference is now the major experimental effort in the field. Participants will be expected to work with approximately a million documents (2 gigabytes of data), retrieving lists of ranked documents that could be considered relevant to each of 100 topics (50 routing and 50 adhoc topics). NIST will distribute the data and will collect and analyze the results. As before, the workshop will be open only to participating systems that submit results and to government sponsors. SCHEDULE: Jan. 16, 1995 -- deadline for participation applications Feb. 1 -- acceptances announced, and permission forms for data distributed to new participants. The documents come as 3 CD-ROMS containing about 3 gigabytes of data, in addition to 200 training topics and relevance judgments available via an ftp site. Mar. 1 -- program committee decisions on which groups present talks at the workshop Mar. 1 -- list of routing topics distributed May 1 (or earlier) -- new (supplemental) adhoc data distributed June 1 -- routing queries due at NIST; test data for routing distributed to groups after routing queries received at NIST June 1 -- 50 new test topics for adhoc test distributed Aug. 1 -- results from 50 routing queries and 50 adhoc topics due at NIST Oct. 1 -- relevance judgments and individual evaluation scores due back to participants Nov. 1-3 -- TREC-4 conference at NIST in Gaithersburg, Md. TASK DESCRIPTION: Participants will receive 3 gigabytes of data for use in training of their systems, including development of appropriate algorithms or knowledge bases. The 200 topics used in the first three TREC workshops, and the relevance judgments for these topics will also be available via ftp. The topics are in the form of a formatted user need statement (see attachment 1). Queries can either be constructed automatically from this topic description, or can be manually constructed. Two types of retrieval operations will be tested: a routing or filtering operation against new data, and an adhoc query operation against archival data. Fifty of the topics (selected from the 200 topics distributed for training) will be used by each group participating in the routing test to create formalized queries to be used for retrieval against new test data. Fifty new test topics (201-250) will be used as adhoc queries against 2 gigabytes of the training data (disks 2 and 3) plus some supplemental data (less than 250 megs). Results from both types of queries (routing and adhoc) will be submitted to NIST as the ranked top 1000 documents retrieved for each query. Scoring techniques including traditional recall/precision measures will be run for all systems and individual results will be returned to each participant. CONFERENCE FORMAT: The conference itself will be used as a forum both for presentation of results (including failure analyses and system comparisons), and for more lengthy system presentations describing retrieval techniques used, experiments run using the data, and other issues of interest to researchers in information retrieval. As there is a limited amount of time for these presentations, the program committee will determine which groups are asked to speak and which groups will present in a poster session. RESPONSE FORMAT AND SUBMISSION DETAILS: By Jan. 16, 1995 organizations wishing to participate should respond to the call for participation by submitting a summary of their text retrieval approach, not to exceed two pages in length. The summary should include the strengths and significance of their approach to text retrieval, and highlight differences between their approach and other retrieval approaches. Groups that have participated in TREC-3 need to provide only two paragraphs, one describing their methods in TREC-3 and a second describing their plans for TREC-4. ALL RESPONSES (INCLUDING QUESTIONS ABOUT CONFERENCE PARTICIPATION, RESPONSE FORMAT, ETC.) should be submitted by Jan. 16, 1995 to the Program Chair, Donna Harman: harman@magi.ncsl.nist.gov SELECTION OF PARTICIPANTS: All participants must be able to demonstrate their ability to work with the data collection (either the full collection or the subset). The program committee will be looking for as wide a range of text retrieval approaches as possible, and will select the best representatives of these approaches as speakers at the conference. ********** III.B.2. Fr: Richard Furuta Re: Preliminary CFP: Digital Libraries '95 PRELIMINARY ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS Digital Libraries '95 June 11-13, 1995, Austin, Texas The Second International Conference on the Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries As a community, we are just beginning the process of addressing the challenging research problems posed by the advent of the digital library. Addressing these problems requires changes in our research environments--effective solutions require cooperation within widely interdisciplinary groups of scholars and the forging of new links not previously tested. Issues to be addressed include the technological, the representational, the organizational, the social, and the legal. In the founding conference in this series, Digital Libraries '94, we began to develop the common language that permits communication among the diverse communities of interest. We acknowledged strengths and weaknesses of technologies and techniques drawn from traditional areas of study. We recognized that digital libraries must build on the past experiences of traditional libraries but also must not be constrained by the physical limitations of the traditional library. CALL FOR PAPERS: We welcome your participation in Digital Libraries '95, the second in an annual series of international conferences. Full papers, 10 pages or less, will be considered for presentation at the conference. Papers accepted for presentation will be printed in a proceedings that will be distributed at the conference. We also will accept short papers (ranging from one to five pages in length) for consideration for inclusion in the proceedings. All topics relating to the design, implementation, and use of a digital library are welcome as the subject of papers. KEY DATES AND CONTACT INFORMATION: March 20, 1995 Full papers and short papers due April 14, 1995 Acceptance notification May 10, 1995 Final version of papers due June 11-13, 1995 Digital Libraries '95 (Austin, TX) Full and short papers should be sent in electronic form in PostScript (preferred) or ASCII format. We prefer incoming FTP. Please contact us for additional instructions. Digital Libraries '95 Hypermedia Research Laboratory Department of Computer Science Texas A&M University College Station, TX 77843-3112 Electronic mail: DL95@bush.cs.tamu.edu Telephone: (409)-862-3217 FAX: (409)-847-8578 WWW: http://bush.cs.tamu.edu/dl95/README.html ********** III.B.3. Fr: David Yarowsky Re: ACL '95 Corpus Workshop ACL's SIGDAT presents the THIRD WORKSHOP ON VERY LARGE CORPORA Preliminary Call for Papers WHEN: June 30, 1995 - immediately following ACL-95 (June 27-29) WHERE: MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION: The workshop will again offer a general forum for new research in corpus-based and statistical natural language processing. Areas of interest include (but are not limited to): sense disambiguation, part-of-speech tagging, robust parsing, term and name identification, alignment of parallel text, machine translation, lexicography, spelling correction, morphological analysis and anaphora resolution. This year, the workshop will be organized around the theme of: SUPERVISED TRAINING VS. SELF-ORGANIZING METHODS Is annotation worth the effort? Historically, annotated corpora have made a significant contribution. The tagged Brown Corpus, for example, led to important improvements in part-of-speech tagging. But annotated corpora are expensive. Very little annotated data is currently available, especially for languages other than English. Self-organizing methods offer the hope that annotated corpora might not be necessary. Do these methods really work? Do we have to choose between annotated corpora and unannotated corpora? Can we use both? The workshop will encourage contributions of innovative research along this spectrum. In particular, it will seek work in languages other than English and in applications where appropriately tagged training corpora do not exist. It will also explore what new kinds of corpus annotations (such as discourse structure, co-reference and sense tagging) would be useful to the community, and will encourage papers on their development and use in experimental projects. The theme will provide an organizing structure to the workshop, and offer a focus for debate. However, we expect and will welcome a diverse set of submissions in all areas of statistical and corpus-based NLP. FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION: Authors should submit a full-length paper (3500-8000 words), either electronically or in hard-copy. Electronic submissions must either be plain ascii text or a single latex file following the ACL-95 stylesheet (no separate figures or .bib files). Hard copy submissions should include four (4) copies of the paper. Authors should consult the primary call for papers in late January for updated specifications. SCHEDULE: Submission Deadline: March 10, 1995 Notification Date: April 10, 1995 Camera ready copy due: May 10, 1995 CONTACT: Ken Church David Yarowsky Room 2B-421 Dept. of Computer and Info. Science AT&T Bell Laboratories University of Pennsylvania 600 Mountain Ave. 200 S. 33rd St. Murray Hill, NJ 07974 USA Philadelphia, PA 19104-6389 USA e-mail: kwc@research.att.com email: yarowsky@unagi.cis.upenn.edu ********** III.B.4. Fr: David Lewis Re: Active Learning Symposium Call for Participation AAAI Fall Symposium on Active Learning November 10 - 12, 1995 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA SYMPOSIUM TOPIC: An active learning system is one that can influence the training data it receives by actions or queries to its environment. Properly selected, these actions can drastically reduce the amount of data and computation required by a machine learner. Active learning has been studied independently by researchers in machine learning, neural networks, robotics, computational learning theory, experiment design, information retrieval, and reinforcement learning, among other areas. This symposium will bring researchers together to clarify the foundations of active learning and point out synergies to build on. PARTICIPATION: The Symposium on Active Learning will be held as part of the AAAI Fall Symposium Series, and will be limited to between forty and sixty participants. Potential participants should submit a short position paper (at most two pages) discussing what they could contribute to a dialogue on active learning and/or what they hope to learn by participating. Suggested topics include: THEORY: What are the important results in the theory of active learning and what are important open problems? How much guidance does theory give to application? ALGORITHMS: What successful algorithms have been found for active learning? How general are they? For what tasks are they appropriate? EVALUATION: How can accuracy, convergence, and other properties of active learning algorithms be evaluated when, for instance, data is not sampled randomly? TAXONOMY: What kinds of information are available to learners (e.g. membership vs. equivalence queries, labeled vs. unlabeled data) and what are the ways learning methods can use them? What are the commonalities among methods studied by different fields? Papers should be sent by APRIL 14, 1995 to: David D. Lewis lewis@research.att.com AT&T Bell Laboratories 600 Mountain Ave.; Room 2C-408 Murray Hill, NJ 07974-0636 Electronic mail submissions are strongly preferred. FOR COMPLETE INFORMATION CONTACT: the AAAI at 445 Burgess Drive, Menlo Park, CA 94025 (fss@aaai.org). RELEVANT DATES April 14, 1995 Submissions for the symposia are due May 19, 1995 Notification of acceptance September 1, 1995 Working notes for symposium distributed November 10-12, 1995 Symposium held at MIT ********************************************************** IRLIST Digest is distributed from the University of California, Division of Library Automation, 300 Lakeside Drive, Oakland, CA. 94612-3550. Send subscription requests and submissions to: NCGUR@UCCMVSA.UCOP.EDU Editorial Staff: Clifford Lynch calur@uccmvsa.ucop.edu Nancy Gusack ncgur@uccmvsa.ucop.edu Mary Engle meeur@uccmvsa.ucop.edu The IRLIST Archives is now set up for anonymous FTP, as well as via the LISTSERV. 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