Information Retrieval List Digest 338 (December 29, 1996) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/irld/irld-338.txt IRLIST Digest ISSN 1064-6965 December 29, 1996 Volume XIII, Number 51 Issue 338 ********************************************************** II. JOBS 1. UMASS: Postdoctdoral Positions: IR 2. UNC: 2 Tenure-track Positions: SLIS III. NOTICES A. Publications 1. FARNET's Washington Update B. Meetings 1. IBERAMIA '98 2. Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing 3. MULSAIC 97 4. WVLC-5 IV. PROJECTS C. Fellowships, Grants, Scholarships 1. U. Pitt.: Medical Informatics Training Program ********************************************************** II. JOBS II.1. Fr: Jean Ziemba Re: UMASS: Postdoctoral Positions, Information Retrieval The University of Massachusetts Department of Computer Science, Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR) invites applications for Postdoctoral Research Associate positions (search # 223). The CIIR specializes in the theoretical development and implementation of systems for text and multimedia retrieval, and in extraction and filtering software for large databases (URL = http://ciir.cs.umass.edu). Candidates research interests should be related to the general area of information retrieval which includes a wide range of topics such as retrieval models, text and multimedia representation, data mining using text databases, information visualization and browsing, indexing and object management for IR, interfaces, information routing and filtering, distributed information retrieval, and networked information discovery. We also invite applications for Research Scientist (Search 222) and Tenure Track faculty positions at the assistant professor level (Search 221). Applicants should have a Ph.D. in Computer Science or related area and should show evidence of exceptional research promise. These positions are grant-funded; reappointments will be contingent upon additional grant funding. To apply, send a letter with your vita and names of at least three references to: Search 223, c/o Chair of Faculty Recruiting, Department of Computer Science, LGRC, Box 34610, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003-4610. Review of vitae begins December 1, 1996 and will continue until available positions are filled. Salary commensurate with education and experience; comprehensive benefits package. Positions available subject to funding. The University of Massachusetts is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity employer. ********** II.2. Fr: Barbara Wildemuth Re: UNC: 2 Tenure-track Positions: SLIS The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announces two tenure-track positions (assistant and/or associate professors) in the School of Information and Library Science. The School offers an undergraduate minor in information systems (new in 1996), masters' degrees in information science and library science, and the Ph.D. (see http://www.ils.unc.edu for details). We are seeking dynamic colleagues who wish to actively participate in the continuing evolution of the School's curriculum and in the implementation of innovative teaching methods, in order to prepare graduates who are equipped to deal with the challenges of evolving information systems and their use. We are particularly interested in applications from scholars whose teaching and research interests address Internet technologies and networking, Web-based information retrieval, multimedia/hypermedia systems, database design, systems analysis, or some combination of these areas. Faculty members are expected to engage in research, to teach at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, to advise students, and to serve on School and University committees. Minimum qualifications include an earned doctorate by the starting date, a research agenda, and teaching excellence. Minimum salary is $42,500 for assistant; $47,500 for associate. The review process will begin Jan. 15, 1997; applications will be accepted until the position is filled. Preferred starting date is August 1997. Send letter of application, resume, and names of four references to: Dr. Barbara M. Wildemuth, School of Information and Library Science, CB # 3360, 100 Manning Hall, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3360. Phone: 919-962-8366; Fax: 919-962-8071; email: wildem@ils.unc.edu. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is an affirmative action, equal opportunity employer. ********************************************************** III. NOTICES III.A.1. Fr: Heather Boyles Re: FARNET's Washington Update FARNET's Washington Update --- December 22, 1996 IN THIS ISSUE: o Timeline for Internet indecency case at the Supreme Court o WIPO conference dealing with copyright and GII issues ends this week >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Written from FARNET's Washington office, "FARNET's Washington Update" is a service to FARNET members and other interested subscribers. We gratefully acknowledge EDUCOM's NTTF and the Coalition for Networked Information for additional support. If you would like more information about the Update or would like to offer comments or suggestions, please contact Heather Boyles at heather@farnet.org ********** III.B.1. Fr: Gabriel Pereira Lopes Re: IBERAMIA '98 IBERAMIA-98 SIXTH IBEROAMERICAN CONFERENCE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Lisbon, Portugal, October 5-9, 1998 Under the auspices of the Portuguese Association for Artificial for Artificial Intelligence THE AGE OF AI ATLANTIC DISCOVERIES "The portuguese dared to engage the great oceanic sea. They entered it fearlessly. They discovered new islands, new lands, new seas, new peoples, and what is more important, new heavens and new stars ... Now it is clear that these discoveries ... were not achieved through guesswork: our seamen set off well trained and provided with instruments and rules of astronomy and geometry." from Pedro Nunes, 1537 The Sixth IberoAmerican Conference on Artificial Intelligence will be held at Lisbon, Portugal, on October 5-9, 1998, under the auspices of the Portuguese Association for Artificial Intelligence (APPIA), in a unique cultural environment, precisely the headquarters of Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian (two museums, one for Modern Art and another for Classical Art, covering also the private collection of the founder, a library, permanent expositions, and a beautiful garden). At the same time the World Exposition (Expo'98), around the main topic of Oceans and commemorating the portuguese sea discovery of India (1498), will be open in the oriental side of Lisbon, creating a historic context for discussing the cooperation within the sciences of the artificial among the countries of the Atlantic rein, and under the theme of AI atlantic discoveries. Established in 1988 (Barcelona) by three Iberoamerican Associations of AI (AEPIA, SMIA and APPIA), after a first meeting in Morelia (Mexico) in 1986 of SMIA and AEPIA, the event was organized every two-years since then in Morelia (1990), La Habana (1992), Caracas (1994) and Cholula (1996), taking Portuguese and Spanish as oficial languages and with the aim to promote and difuse the research and development carried out in the countries associated with those two latin languages and connected by strong historical links from XVI century. Along the years, the Executive Committee of IBERAMIA was enlarged with the inclusion of AVINTA (Venezuela), SMC (Cuba) and SBC (Brazil). IBERAMIA-98 will run for the first time in a decade with a paper track in English (for submission and presentation) in order to close the links now with other AI communities where AI is more developed and explored. STRUCTURE: The scientific program will be structured along two main modules, the open discussion and the paper track. October 5, a bank holiday in Portugal, may be dedicated to see the World Fair Expo'98. The first day of the Conference (tuesday) is organized with tutorials directed to informatics professionals, the formal opening, the IBERAMIA lecture delivered by a distinguished iberoamerican researcher, and the declaration of the prize Jose Negrete awarded by the Scientific Committee to the best paper submitted. Also, and in parallel, working groups will be organized in order to discuss general topics (eg. scientific and industrial joint cooperation). The open discussion track (wednesday) will be composed by working sessions devoted to the most important areas of research in iberoamerican countries, the AI Education Symposium dedicated to confront ideas about the best ways to teach AI, a session to present the best M. Sc. or Ph. D. thesis of the whole region, and a video conference panel to establish bridges between Europe and America (involving those unable to attend this panel). The paper track (thursday and friday) will be composed by invited talks and paper presentations from all over the world on the full range of AI research and covering both theoretical and foundational issues, and applications as well. Some Workshops will be organized the week before, namely one on Distributed Artificial Intelligence (following the first one in Xalapa (Mexico) in 1996, before IBERAMIA-96, and on any other topics to be proposed by those interested in activating the current research. During the Conference there will be an exposition of books written by iberoamerican researchers and academics, access to the WWW pages of the AI associations sponsering the event, and demonstrations of AI industrial products designed in eberoamerican countries. The portuguese association (APPIA) will organize the week before the Sixth Advanced School on AI (EAIA-98) adopting English as the official language. PAPER PRESENTATIONS: The first track will be held mainly in latin languages (Portuguese and Spanish), but also in English (depending on the preference of the authors). The papers may be written in English. The second track will be conducted only in English. PUBLICATION: The invited lecture and the papers of the open discussion track will be published in the Proceedings of the Conference. The organizers intend to arrange the publication of the contributions to the paper track by some international publishing house. SUBMISSION: Submissions are namely requested in the following topics: Agent-oriented programming * Case-based reasoning * Computer vision * Constraint programming * Database mining tools and aplications * Explanation mechanisms * Foundations issues * Genetic algorithms * Hypothetical reasoning * Intelligent information retrieval * Intelligent tutoring and learning environments * Knowledge acquisition * Knowledge representation * Knowledge-based systems validation * Model-based reasoning * Multi-agent and distributed problem-solving * Natural language processing * Neural nets * Robotics * Temporal and spatial reasoning * Symbolic learning. IMPORTANT DATES: DEADLINE for submission of papers (Open Discussion and Full International tracks): FEBRUARY, 1, 1998 DEADLINE for submission of tutorials, working groups and workshops proposals: APRIL 2, 1998 DEADLINE for submission of proposals for the concurse of the best thesis (M. Sc. or Ph. D.): APRIL 2, 1998 Submit to: Chair: Dr. Jaime Sichman, Escola Politecnica, Universidade de Sao Paulo, Av. Professor Luciano Gualberto, no 158, travessa 3, CEPO 5508-900 Sao Paulo, SP, Brasil, jaime@pcs.usp.br NOTIFICATION of acceptance of papers: MAY 15, 1998 NOTIFICATION of acceptance of tutorials, working groups, and workshops: JUNE 1, 1998 DEADLINE for receipt of paper's final version: JUNE 15, 1998 CONFERENCE SITE: The Conference takes place in Lisbon within the installations of Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian. President and Local Chairman: prof. Gabriel Pereira Lopes (P) Departamento de Informatica Faculdade de Ciencias e Tecnologia, Universidade Nova de Lisboa Quinta da Torre 2825 Monte da Caparica, Portugal Phone: (351 1) 294 85 36 Fax: (351 1) 294 85 41 gpl@di.fct.unl.pt Program and Scientific Chairman: prof. Helder Coelho (P) Departamento de Informatica Faculdade de Ciencias, Universidade de Lisboa Bloco C5, Piso 1, Campo Grande 1700 Lisboa, Portugal Phone: (351 1) 7500087 Fax: (351 1) 7500084 hcoelho@di.fc.ul.pt 2nd DAI IBERAMIA Workshop Chair: Dr. Francisco Garijo Telefonica I+D Emilio Vargas 6 28043 Madrid, Spain Phone: +34 1 337 4518 Fax: +34 1 337 4602 fgarijo@tid.es ********** III.B.2. Fr: David Yarowsky Re: Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing The Association for Computational Linguistics and its Special Interest Group SIGDAT announce the Second Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-2) Preliminary Call For Papers WHEN: August 1-2, 1997 (Immediately following AAAI-97) WHERE: Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA CONFERENCE DESCRIPTION: In the spirit of SIGDAT events, this conference will offer a general forum for novel research in corpus-based and statistical natural language processing. Areas of interest include (but are not limited to): * robust parsing, phrase structure analysis * part of speech tagging * term and name identification * word sense disambiguation * morphological analysis * anaphora resolution * event categorization * discourse structure identification * alignment of parallel texts and bilingual terminology * language modelling * lexicography * machine translation * spelling and grammar correction SPECIAL SESSIONS: INFORMATION EXTRACTION and INFORMATION RETRIEVAL: In addition, we encourage submissions that describe and evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, and recent advances in corpus-based NLP as applied to INFORMATION EXTRACTION and INFORMATION RETRIEVAL (IR). In recent years a number of corpus-based techniques for the automatic linguistic annotation of text have been developed. How well do these techniques for lexical tagging, parsing, anaphora resolution, etc., handle the specific problems encountered in practical language processing tasks like information extraction and information retrieval? When and how do current techniques fail? What new methods have been developed to address the deficiencies of existing algorithms for these tasks or to address problems specific to information extraction? What problems still lack an adequate empirical solution? How can data-driven NLP methods be used to improve the performance of IR systems? Conversely, how can feedback from an IR system effectively inform empirical techniques for natural language understanding? PROGRAM CHAIRS: Claire Cardie Cornell University (chair) Ralph Weischedel BBN Systems and Technologies (co-chair) LOCAL ARRANGEMENTS: Eugene Charniak Brown University SPONSOR: SIGDAT (ACL's special interest group for linguistic data and corpus-based approaches to NLP) FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION: Authors should submit a full-length paper (3500-8000 words) either electronically or in hardcopy. Electronic submissions should be mailed to "cardie@cs.cornell.edu" and must either be (a) plain ascii text, (b) a single postscript file (US letter format), or (c) a LaTex file. In the latter case, please use the aclsub style file and include only .EPS (encapsulated postscript) figures. The aclsub style file is available at http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/People/cardie/emnlp/aclsub.sty or via ftp from ftp.cs.cornell.edu/pub/cardie/emnlp/aclsub.sty. Hardcopy submissions should be mailed to Claire Cardie (address below), and should include six (6) copies of the paper. REQUIREMENTS: Papers should describe original work. A paper accepted for presentation cannot be presented or have been presented at any other meeting. Papers submitted to other conferences will be considered, as long as this fact is clearly indicated in the submission. SCHEDULE: Submission deadline: March 3, 1997 Notification date: April 21, 1997 Camera-ready copy due: June 10, 1997 Conference dates: August 1-2, 1997 CONTACTS: Claire Cardie Ralph Weischedel Cornell University BBN Systems and Technologies Department of Computer Science 70 Fawcett Street 4142 Upson Hall Cambridge, MA 02138 Ithaca, NY 14850 USA USA cardie@cs.cornell.edu weischedel@bbn.com (607)255-9206 (617)873-3496 ********** III.B.3. Fr: Doug Oard Re: MULSAIC 97 CFP Call for Participation The 2nd Workshop on "Multilinguality in Software Industry: the AI Contribution (MULSAIC'97)" International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence IJCAI-97 Nagoya, Japan, August 23-29, 1997 WORKSHOP OBJECTIVES: This workshop aims to bring together people from the software industry and the AI research community. It will provide an opportunity for people from the software industry to present particular problems and questions associated with multilinguality as well as an opportunity for AI researchers to show that AI-based methods and tools can help improve the current situation. WORKSHOP BACKGROUND: The ability to develop multilingual products is a prerequisite for software companies wishing to be active internationally. However, multilinguality in software industry imposes problems on processes such as: - exchanging data in different languages, - supporting different languages in the user interface, - processing multilingual documents, - retrieving multilingual information, - ensuring consistency in terminology and in writing and translation style, - reducing the translation and in general the localisation cost. AI provides methods, techniques and tools that can improve these processes. MULSAIC'97, based on the results of the MULSAIC'96 Workshop held in ECAI-96, intends to promote the discussion between people from software industry and AI in issues such as the following: * Multiscript communication through networks * Localisation of user interfaces * Cross-language, language-independent text retrieval * Language identification techniques * Multilingual text generation * Machine Translation (MT) and Machine-Assisted Human Translation (MAHT) * Creation and use of multilingual resources (dictionaries, terminologies, corpora) We would like to receive papers of two kinds. Papers presenting the current situation and the experiences of software industry people concerning multilinguality, as well as papers presenting AI-based methods and techniques in the above issues. We would also encourage the demonstration of AI-based tools as well as the demonstration of off-the-shelf tools used by software companies. ORGANISING COMMITTEE: Dr. Costas Spyropoulos, NCSR "Demokritos", Athens, Greece (costass@iit.nrcps.ariadne-t.gr) Dr. Geni-chiro Kikui, NTT Information and Communication Systems Laboratories, Japan (kikui@nttnly.ntt.jp) Dr. Osamu Furuse, ATR Interpreting Telecommunications Research Laboratories (furuse@itl.atr.co.jp) Dr. Key-Sun Choi, Department of Computer Science, Center for Artificial Intelligence Research, Taejon, Korea (kschoi@cs.kaist.ac.kr) Dr. Douglas Oard, University of Maryland, USA (oard@glue.umd.edu) Mr. Andreas Sch|tz, Software AG, Germany (AS@software- ag.de) Dr. Vangelis Karkaletsis, NCSR "Demokritos", Athens, Greece (vangelis@iit.nrcps.ariadne-t.gr) WORKSHOP FORMAT AND ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENTS: The format of this one-day workshop will encourage interaction and discussion between people from software industry and AI researchers. Invited speakers from the software industry will present particular problems and questions concerning multilinguality. There will be two types of submission for interested participants: papers and statements of interest. The workshop will be kept small, with no more than 40 participants. We intend the workshop sessions to contain discussion periods long enough to allow real exchange of ideas. At the workshop end there will also be a discussion on the major issues addressed, directed by a panel. We hope to foster the workshop atmosphere by having the written versions of the accepted presentations circulated a few weeks in advance of the event, thus enabling the presenters to relate their work as much as possible to that of the others and also allowing non-presenting participants to be prepared for the discussion. Please note that workshop participation is not possible without registration for the IJCAI'97 conference. SUBMISSION FORMAT: Interested authors are requested to submit a two page abstract before 14 February 1997. The abstract should start with the title, authors, full address, telephone, fax and e-mail. The authors are requested to state clearly the problem examined and the AI method used as well as to discuss the costs and benefits of their approach. Performance evaluation results are also encouraged. Authors of accepted abstracts will be asked to provide a camera-ready version of their paper before 18 April 1997. Other potential participants are requested to register, sending a one page summary of their interests and experience on relevant matters, before 18 July 1997. Submission (preferably ASCII, via e-mail) should be sent to: Dr. Costas Spyropoulos, Institute of Informatics & Telecommunications, National Centre for Scientific Research (NCSR) "Demokritos", 15310 Aghia Paraskevi, Athens, Greece Tel: +301-6510310, +301-6513110 ext.520, Fax: +301-6532175 E-mail: costass@iit.nrcps.ariadne-t.gr IMPORTANT DATES: 13 December 1996 Call for Participation issued 14 February 1997 Deadline for two-page abstracts 7 March 1997 Notification of acceptance or rejection 18 April 1997 Deadline for final camera ready versions of papers 18 July 1997 Deadline for registration 21 July 1997 Send workshop material to all participants 23,24,or 25 August 1997 Workshop date (announced later) ********** III.B.4. Fr: Joe F. Zhou Re: WVLC-5 CALL FOR PAPERS The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and its special interest group for linguistic data and corpus-based approaches to NLP (SIGDAT) are organizing the FIFTH WORKSHOP ON VERY LARGE CORPORA (WVLC-5) WHEN: August 18-20, 1997 WHERE: Tsinghua University, Beijing, China (August 18/19, 1997) Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (August 20, 1997) WVLC5 will immediately precede ROCLING '97 (Aug 22-24, Taiwan) and IJCAI '97 (Aug 24-29, Nagoya, Japan). This workshop will take place in two consecutive sessions sharing a common program committee and proceedings. Authors may specify at which session(s) they wish to present their papers. SPONSORED BY: The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) LEXIS-NEXIS, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION: This workshop, like preceding ones in the series, will offer a general international forum for the presentation of new advances and applications in the area of large scale, corpus-based natural language processing. The fifth workshop will focus on the theme of Innovative and practical uses of large corpora in real-world applications Gigabytes and terabytes of on-line unrestricted natural language text have become commonplace today. How are these resources actually being used in commercial as well as research applications? What robust and efficient techniques exist for analyzing and organizing these resources? The workshop encourages contributions that demonstrate innovative applications of corpus-based NLP to problems of practical commercial importance. The theme will provide an organizing structure to the workshop, and offer a focus for discussion and debate between academic researchers and industrial practitioners. We also expect and will welcome a diverse set of submissions in all areas of statistical and corpus-based NLP, including (but not limited to) Text Analysis Techniques: - part of speech tagging - term and name identification - morphological analysis - robust parsing - alignment of parallel texts and bilingual terminology - sense disambiguation - anaphora resolution - event categorization - discourse structure Applications: - information retrieval - information extraction - text categorization and summarization - lexicography - machine translation - spelling and grammar correction - recognition: speech, OCR, handwriting, etc. PROGRAM CHAIRS: Huang Changning - Tsinghua University (Beijing, China) Ken Church - AT&T Laboratories (Murray Hill, NJ, USA) Joe Zhou - LEXIS-NEXIS (Dayton, OH, USA) FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION: Authors should submit a full-length paper (3500-8000 words), either electronically or in hard copy. Electronic submissions should be mailed to "WVLC5@lexis-nexis.com" and must either be (a) plain ascii text, (b) a single postscript file, or (c) a single latex file following the ACL-97 stylesheet (no separate figures or .bib files). Hard copy submissions should be mailed to Ken Church (address below), and should include four (4) copies of the paper. REQUIREMENTS: Papers should describe original work. A paper accepted for presentation cannot be presented or have been presented at any other meeting. Papers submitted to other conferences will be considered, as long as this fact is clearly indicated in the submission. SCHEDULE: Submission Deadline: April 7, 1997 Notification Date: May 20, 1997 Camera ready copy due: July 1, 1997 CONTACT: Ken Church Joe Zhou Room 2B-421 LEXIS-NEXIS, a Division of Reed Elsevier AT&T Laboratories 9555 Springboro Pike Murray Hill, NJ 07974 USA Dayton, OH 45342 USA e-mail: kwc@research.att.com email: joez@lexis-nexis.com ********************************************************** IV. PROJECTS IV.C.1. Fr: Greg Cooper Re: U. Pitt.: Medical Informatics Training Program University of Pittsburgh Medical Informatics Training Program The University of Pittsburgh expects to have openings for up to five funded predoctoral and postdoctoral informatics traineeships beginning in the summer of 1997. The Pittsburgh Training Program has a core and affiliated faculty numbering over 50, with expertise in: * Information science * Decision support and medical artificial intelligence * Computer-based medical records * Computational biology * Clinical multimedia, telemedicine, and medical applications of the Internet * Education, information, and cognition * Health services research and information system evaluation * Dental informatics (in collaboration with Temple University) Trainees may enroll for masters or doctoral degrees in the Intelligent Systems Program, the School of Information Sciences, the School of Public Health, or other degree-granting programs as directed by their individual interests. The program admits individuals with and without health professions training. Research fellowship training experiences that do not lead to academic degrees may also be arranged. The training program has become part of the new Center for Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and is situated in new space dedicated to the program. The target date for receiving applications is February 1, 1997. Interested individuals are invited to visit the program's web site at http://www.cbmi.upmc.edu, send e-mail to training@cbmi.upmc.edu, or call (412) 647-7113 for further information. ********************************************************** 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 The IRLIST Archives is set up for anonymous FTP. 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